Here, obviously, was a critical point. Tozer’s discharge of windy idealism, tedious and meaningless in itself, had been a calculated prelude to challenge. The name of his friend...the question had been delivered at the tail of a diversionary gust of sentimentality, as a gipsy fiddler might casually drop a vital message with the final flourish of his czardas.
Pumphrey made up his mind. As the barber lightly leaned spread fingers upon his cranium while reaching for a pair of scissors, he gave the only answer that would take the game forward. “Hopjoy,” he murmured.
For a moment Mr Tozer remained quite still. Pumphrey tried to see in the mirror what reaction his face betrayed, but the barber’s fingers had tensed and would allow no upward movement of his customer’s head.
Then Mr Tozer relaxed and wheeled to the side of the chair. He beamed down on Pumphrey and performed a little arabesque of mid-air snipping with the scissors. “Mr Hopjoy!” he repeated, with every appearance of finding the name enormously to his liking. “One of my most regular gentlemen. I know him well. Very well. As a matter of fact, when you came in I was just wondering if he’d turn up this afternoon. It must be several days now since... But fancy you being a friend of Mr Hopjoy!”
Mr Tozer stepped back behind Pumphrey and began making small swoops with the scissors over the unprofitable scalp. He was still smiling. But above the smile, Pumphrey noticed in the mirror, was a frown.
“What I was saying just now about friendship...” Mr Tozer resumed. “Mr Hopjoy’s a great one for friends. He comes in here perhaps three times a week. To be groomed, if I might put it that way. It’s nice to find a man nowadays who’s particular as to grooming. ‘George’, he’ll say, ‘I’m meeting a friend tonight’ and he’ll wink and I’ll spruce him up like a show dog and off he’ll trot with a joke about the account...oh, you might tell him I’ve been asking kindly after him, by the way, sir...and then later on I fall to thinking of him with his friend, and you know it’s rather nice to get that feeling of having played a part and helped things along and made sure there’d be no harm done.”
“No harm done?” echoed Pumphrey. “But how could harm be done between friends?”
Mr Tozer released a jowl-flapping laugh. “Easiest thing in the world, sir. But I see you’ve not quite taken my meaning, not caught on, so to speak...” The sudden opening of the shop door set off the tiny alarum of its bell. Mr Tozer looked over his shoulder, excused himself, and joined the man who had summoned him with a conspiratorial nod from the doorway.
Pumphrey could distinguish no word of the brief, murmured conversation. When next Tozer came into his field of vision it was to stoop before a narrow cupboard. Pumphrey saw him extract a small square envelope, which he concealed in his hand before walking back to the door. There was another subdued exchange, part of which seemed jocular in character, and the door closed.
The whole transaction, whatever it was, had taken no more than a minute.
The barber, awkwardly pulling up his white coat so as to be able to reach his hip pocket, was again at Pumphrey’s side. “Anything on, sir? Spray...cream...?”
“No, nothing.”
Mr Tozer repossessed himself of the scissors, which he poised over Pumphrey’s face. “The nostrils, now?” he inquired eagerly.
“Certainly not.”
“Ah, you’re very wise, sir; clipping does tend to stimulate. I personally find the best answer to what we might vulgarly call the hairy nose-hole is to fire it a couple of times a year.” His eyes wandered to a jar stacked with wax tapers. “Like a railway embankment, you know.”
Pumphrey shook his head vigorously. He had been staring at the cupboard. Was it the curious traffic in envelopes which had first attracted Hopjoy’s attention? Here, no doubt, was some sort of relay station in the complicated intelligence system he had been trying to delineate. Had his too persistent patronage of Mr Tozer’s shop aroused suspicion and ultimately brought to his lodgings the silent, workmanlike attendance of a liquidation cadre?
“Would Mr Hopjoy’s friends be your friends, by any chance, sir?” Mr Tozer was drawing out the cotton wool roll and assiduously brushing his collar.
“I suppose we might have one or two mutual acquaintances. Why?” Pumphrey spoke softly, refusing to be provoked by the calculatedly irritant quality of the barber’s harping on friendship. He thought he recognized one of the newer East European techniques for drawing admission of political affiliations.
Mr Tozer winked. Or rather he drew down the blind at the end of one of his dark occular tunnels. “Ladies, I was thinking of in particular, sir. The best friends of all.”
What a lewd word was ‘ladies’, Pumphrey reflected. Then it dawned on him that the course of this man’s chatter conformed remarkably closely to another, more familiar anti-counter-espionage tactic. Its aim was the discrediting and incapacitation of the investigator by imputation of immoral motives and even actual involvement in compromising situations.
“I cannot imagine,” he said coldly, “that my social life could be of the slightest concern to you.”
Mr Tozer shrugged and tweaked away the sheet. “Just as you like, sir.” He did not sound offended and his smile lingered as he bent to brush the front of Pumphrey’s coat. “I try to be of service in these matters, that’s all, as I’m sure...”—he stood upright and directed upon Pumphrey a full and friendly gaze—“...your old friend Mr Hopjoy will tell you.”
Chapter Seven
“I really can’t see that you have any need to be worried about Bry. He’s a bit of a rolling stone, you know.”
Gordon Periam certainly did not look anxious. His expression, which Purbright felt was probably habitual, was one of bland earnestness. The smooth face, rounded by a well-fleshed chin a couple of sizes too big, betokened placidity born of a sheltered existence. The mouth was calm, but set in the permanent pout of the protractedly unweaned. Even the little lobeless ears were suggestive, somehow, of infancy.
The inspector looked away from Periam’s brown eyes, gentle and unblinking, and watched an arrowhead of duck winging out over the flats. The two men were seated on a bench at the side of the sea bank road that ran between the Neptune and the dunes, Purbright having declined the hotel manager’s offer of his own littered and airless cloister in favour of what the policeman had sanguinely termed “a blow along the front”.
