“My God! He must be the only one.”
Pumphrey gave a slight shake of his head. “There are sixteen, actually. Occupation-wise, the breakdown is interesting. Five of them are tobacconists, like Periam. I think market gardeners come next. The rest are fairly mixed.”
“Any archbishops?”
Pumphrey considered, frowning. “No,” he said at last. “I rather think not.” He looked up. “I can check if you like. It’s hardly relevant, though, is it?”
“Hardly.” Ross stretched his big, action-loving body, savouring the innocent ecstasy of muscular power at full rack until the shabby hotel chair whimpered and there glittered from the gold links on his upthrust wrists the tiny diamonds prised in 1952 (so Ross could have told, had he wished) from the front teeth of the flamboyant inquisitor and tormentor Spuratkin.
Ross let fall his arms, slumped happily for half a minute, then sat up straight and alert. “We’d better make a start. All we can do at this stage is to follow Hopjoy’s lines more or less at random until we get some sort of a picture. I suggest you begin with a haircut, Harry.”
“George Tozer,” Pumphrey responded with unwonted pertness, “thirty-two Spindle Lane. Correct?”
Ross grinned and rose. “Absolutely correct, old son.” He felt touched, as he did whenever Pumphrey allowed pride in his gift of fact-retention to glimmer through an otherwise sombre personality, and did not grudge acknowledgement. Daringly he added: “Just as well the name’s not Todd, eh?”
Pumphrey looked blank. “Todd?” He unfolded a street map of Flaxborough, found Spindle Lane, and committed to memory the names of the intermediate roads. “Todd?” he repeated, looking up.
“Nothing,” said Ross. “Just a joke. A barber joke.” There was something, he reflected, a little Teutonic about Pumphrey.
A solitary fly patrolled the latticed shaft of sunshine that slanted down upon the hair-sprinkled brown linoleum of Mr Tozer’s saloon. Its intermittent hum emphasized that silence, all but absolute, which is peculiar to barbers’ shops on customless afternoons in summer. The air in the small room, low-ceilinged and set three steps below street level, was warm and sleepy with the scent of bay rum. A fresh slip of toilet tissue curled preparatorily across the neck rest of the shaving chair was as motionless as a marble scroll. The scissors, razors and hand clippers set in methodic array at the back of the big oval wash-basin seemed as unlikely to be put ever again to use as tools sanguinely sealed into a burial chamber in Luxor.
Even the proprietor appeared to have undergone a necropolitan translation. He was sprawled peacefully across three cane-bottomed chairs beneath a row of hat pegs in an alcove, his head cushioned on a pile of tattered magazines and his hands crossed upon the folds of his white coat.
Pumphrey, having peered down through the window upon Mr Tozer’s tonsorial tomb, was a little surprised to find the door unlocked. But at the instant of his entrance, which set jangling a little bell above the door, Mr Tozer rose stiffly and all of a piece, like a sleep walker, and advanced upon him holding out invitingly what a more fanciful caller might have taken to be a shroud.
The barber side-stepped to allow Pumphrey to subside into the chair, whipped the sheet round his neck and stood for a moment melancholically surveying the irregular vestiges of scrub upon the celery-white scalp.
“Haircut, sir?” The inquiry was tinged with disbelief.
“A light trim.”
Mr Tozer smirked dutifully and tucked a roll of cotton wool between Pumphrey’s neck and collar. “Nice weather you’ve brought, sir.”
Pumphrey slipped the platitude beneath his mental spectroscope. ‘Brought’ lit up on the reading scale. He had been recognized and challenged as a newcomer to the town.
“Yes, isn’t it.”
A gentle touch guided his head slightly to one side. Covertly he held his view of Tozer’s face in the mirror. It was a dark and knobbly face, very long so that the chin rested on the shirt front and was flanked by the lapels of the white coat. The ears were as long as bacon rashers and had pendulous, furry lobes. So deeply had the eyes retired within their sockets that they seemed to belong to a hermit crab peering warily from the refuge of Mr Tozer’s skull.
“Just passing through, sir?” The barber’s hand reached far out over Pumphrey and hovered uncertainly over the range of instruments behind the wash-basin. It seemed about to descend upon a bone-handled razor.
Pumphrey watched the razor. “That is so,” he said. The hand moved on and picked up a pair of clippers.
“A short holiday, perhaps. No, but you’re not a fisherman, I reckon.”
“Not exactly,” said Pumphrey. He realized he was quite without means of determining whether Tozer’s feelers were threatening or conciliatory. The Hopjoy dossier had been indeterminate on all points except the fact that investigation and maintenance of contact with this man (to what end was not stated) had involved expense to date of ?248 15s. Pumphrey thought quickly about this and found it encouraging. Tozer, on whatever side he was ranged, clearly had his price. He was unlikely to be really dangerous while the bidding was open.
“I thought,” said Pumphrey, “that I might run across a friend of mine. I’ve an idea he came here to live a year or two back.”
“Nice to meet old friends. Oh, to meet old friends
