One wooden wall of a small bowls pavilion about twenty yards away had been plucked out and thrown across the path. A row of bowls lockers behind it had collapsed, spilling their contents. These lay now among the debris like cannon balls in a stormed gun emplacement.
Kebble, who had removed his outsize hat not in awe but to facilitate his squeezing his head between the chief inspector and a particularly stubborn bystander, gave a soft whistle. “An outrage if ever I saw one,” he remarked appreciatively.
The policeman grunted and gazed around over heads for someone who might profitably be questioned. At that moment Harding, the keeper, appeared through the park gates accompanied by a little man carrying a tool bag. Larch disengaged himself from the water-watchers and walked rapidly to meet them, followed by Kebble.
Harding halted before Larch and stared bitterly at the crowd. “A fine to-do-ment, this little old lot,” he observed. His companion set down his bag, wiped his nose with the back of his hand and nodded agreement. Harding indicated him and explained: “From the water department. He’s come to turn it off.”
Larch ignored the introduction and the plumber, after grinning querulously at Kebble and shuffling a bit, picked up the tools and took himself off towards a small brick building on the far side of the park.
“You’re Harding, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” replied the keeper guardedly; the chief inspector, he noticed, was looking airily over his head and he didn’t like it.
“Just what has been going on here?”
Harding glowered. “Well, you can see for yourself. The fountain’s gone. I don’t know anything else about it.”
“What were you doing during the night, Mr Harding?” Larch had the stance of an ascetic headmaster, listening abstractedly to the futile excuses of a boy caught chalking obscenities. But Harding was not to be intimidated. “Parachute jumping,” he retorted.
The corner of Larch’s mouth twitched but he continued to stare into space. “I really don’t think that sort of attitude will get us anywhere, Mr Harding,” he said gently, with his rustling lisp. “Just try and think, will you?”
“I was in bed, of course. What else should I have been doing?”
“You heard nothing?”
“I heard a damn great bang all right. A lot of other people did too, I expect.”
“Did you think it came from the park here?”
“I didn’t think anything. I went back to sleep.”
“But when you arrived here for work...”
“I found this how-d’you-do.” Harding jerked his head towards the outrage. Just then the water jet faltered, sank and disappeared. The plumber had located the stopcock.
“You had the job of maintaining the fountain, I suppose: cleaning it, and so on?”
“That’s right.”
“Bit of a nuisance, was it?”
Harding blew out his cheeks. “Here, what do you think you’re getting at?” He stared,belligerently at Larch, then looked across at Kebble, as if challenging him to translate the innuendo into plainer terms. But Kebble was busy examining a cigarette he had just lighted.
Larch said smoothly: “It’s entirely up to you, Mr Harding, to decide what you think I mean. I don’t think I have said anything to which you should take exception.”
“You as good as said I’d blown the damn thing up myself to save cleaning it.”
For the first time in the interview Larch looked directly at the park keeper. “Really, Mr Harding,” he said reprovingly. Then he turned and regarded the few ancients who still lingered around the site of the explosion. “I’d be obliged if you could find a few stakes and rope that area off. We shall want to take a closer look at it without being trampled to death by the Over-Sixty clubs.”
As they drove back into town, Kebble said: “You don’t really think he did it, do you?”
Larch smiled. “Why not? He’s a cheeky bastard.” With effortless precision he swung the big car out to the crown of the road and overtook a slow procession of vans and lorries. “Unless, of course,” he added, “you know who’s responsible.”
“Me, old chap?” Kebble affected the pained surprise that he knew Larch expected of him.
“Certainly. But I was forgetting—a journalist never gives away the source of his information, does he?”
“Never,” Kebble cheerfully confirmed. He found the strain of playing to Larch’s humour did not diminish with the years.
As the car approached the Borough Bridge he was reminded of the other matter he had intended to mention. “You knew Stan Biggadyke had piled his car up, I suppose?”
“Has he really?” Larch sounded as if he had been told that the Great Lama had hairs in his nostrils.
“Didn’t anyone tell you!”
“Maybe. What special reason have you to be interested?”
God, thought Kebble, here we go again. He said: “I’m interested in everything and everybody. A professional nosey parker. Squalid, isn’t it?”
“You’re a damned interfering old nuisance.” Larch remained silent for a while, as he always did after a vituperative remark so as to give opportunity for it to be wondered at and worried over. Then, quietly and with the
