Purbright drove at once to Brockleston.
Among the cars in the Neptune forecourt was Hopjoy’s Armstrong, which he had ordered to be placed again at the disposal of Mr and Mrs Periam. The honeymooners he found playing clock golf in the hotel grounds. Doreen, her coiled plaits looking like some kind of protective sporting gear, wore a long pink cardigan over a flowered dress. Her husband was in flannel trousers and the dark brown blazer of the Flaxborough Grammar School Old Boys’ Association.
When he saw the inspector, he picked up his ball and led the girl forward. “Has Brian shown up yet?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr Periam.”
“Oh. We thought that’s what you’d come to tell us.” The solemn, femininely smooth face turned to the girl. “Didn’t we, darl?”
Periam grouped three of the bright canvas chairs at the edge of the putting green. They sat.
“No, Mr Hopjoy has not returned. I rather doubt if he will. But I think it’s only right for me to relieve your minds on one point.” Purbright glanced from one to the other. “It now looks as though we were mistaken in assuming that your friend was dead.”
Doreen seized her husband’s hand. “There! What did I say?” At Purbright she pouted in mock indignation. “And fancy chasing us with that ridiculous story when we hadn’t been married five minutes? It wasn’t what I’d call tactful.”
“It wasn’t, Mrs Periam. I’m sorry. But in the circumstances we hadn’t much choice.”
Periam looked at the handle of the putter he had laid across his knee. “That’s all right, inspector. It hasn’t been very nice for us—I mean we should have felt rather responsible if anything awful had happened to Bry—we did let him down, you know, darl—but the police couldn’t be blamed for that.” He raised his head and smiled wryly at Purbright. “Now you know what sort of capers you ask for when you run off with your best friend’s young lady.”
Doreen sighed and pressed Periam’s hand to her stomach. Hastily he withdrew it. “Oh, there’s one thing, inspector...the house. You have finished there, haven’t you? You see, we...”
“If you can wait just a couple of days, sir, everything will be put straight again. We’ll see to that for you, naturally.”
“And thanks for letting us have the car back.”
“Was it covered in blood and fingerprints?”
Periam cast a quick glance of rebuke at his wife. “Doreen, really...”
“I suppose,” Purbright said, “that you’ll settle down in the house when your holiday’s over. Or are you thinking of a change now you’re married?”
“No, we shan’t move. Not yet, anyway. It’s been home for so long, you know, and I am rather a home bird. Anyway, I’m sure mother wouldn’t have wished strangers to take it over.”
“I expect you know there are various odds and ends belonging to Mr Hopjoy. We’d rather like to hang on to them for the time being, but if you do hear from him perhaps you’ll let us have a forwarding address; would you mind doing that, sir?”
“Not at all.”
“There’s one other matter I’m mildly curious about, Mr Periam. A short while ago Mr Hopjoy was in hospital. I believe I know the circumstances in which he was injured—we needn’t go into them now—but I wondered if you could tell me what his injuries actually were.”
Periam ran a finger thoughtfully round his heavy, globular chin. “Well, not in doctor’s parlance, I can’t. But he had what I’d call a gammy foot.”
“How serious was it? I mean was there any permanent effect—scars, disfigurements, anything of that sort?”
“My goodness, no. He came home right as rain. Between you and I, I think old Bry had been coming the old soldier in hospital. He’d probably been giving the glad-eye to some pretty nurse.”
“He wasn’t disabled in any sense, then?”
“Not a bit of it, inspector. It would take more than a tumble to put Bry out of action, wouldn’t it, Darl?”
“Rather,” agreed Doreen. She had coyly abstracted a packet of biscuits from Periam’s pocket and was nibbling one after having prised it open to inspect its filling.
“He’s as strong as a horse,” Periam went on. The theme seemed to intrigue him. “I shouldn’t care to tangle with Bry when he’d got his dander up.” Purbright reflected that Hopjoy must have been sadly off form on the occasion of his tangling with Farmer Croll. Or was it in the matter of danders that Croll had enjoyed a decisive advantage?
Periam grasped his putter and looked inquiringly at the inspector.
Purbright rose. “I don’t think I need interrupt your game any longer. I’m sorry if I’ve been something of a...” He faltered, suddenly averse to making even conventional apology.
“...a skeleton at the feast?” suggested Periam, almost jocularly.
“Oh, but such a nice skeleton!” Purbright had the brief but disconcerting sensation of Doreen’s bosom being nuzzled roguishly against his arm. Then she was walking away and looking back at him over her shoulder as she munched another of Periam’s biscuits.
Sergeant Malley breathed hard but contentedly between puffs at a pipe in which seemed to be smouldering a compound of old cinema carpet and tar. He sat in the windowless little office in the police station basement where witnesses at forthcoming inquests were induced by the huge sergeant’s calm and kindness to give more or less lucid expression to their recollections of tragedy.
Malley, whom even inspectors and superintendents treated as host in his own confined quarters—if only because they could not bear to see him trying to uncork eighteen stone from an inadequate chair—listened without surprise to Purbright’s account of his call at the hospital.
