In an instant the jubilant Mr Capper had produced a pad of cattle cake order forms and a pen. He turned one of the forms over and smoothed it flat.
“It’ll be a nice little change for her,” he said to Purbright. “Take her out of herself.”
“Just put: ‘I hereby authorize my wife’—then her full name—‘to undertake jury service when so required’. And sign it.”
“How do you spell authorize?”
Purbright told him. There were one or two more little difficulties. But the final document was legible and accurate enough.
One thing it most manifestly was not—a product of the same hand that had penned the three letters in Mrs Bannister’s bedroom drawer.
“Mind you,” said Purbright, feeling some qualms as he pocketed the paper, “it’s not certain that your missus will be needed. I shouldn’t say anything to her.”
“Oh, I’d not have done that anyway,” Mr Capper assured him. “It’d spoil the surprise.”
After declining, with every show of regret, a second charge of his host’s Hollyhock Holocaust, the inspector took his leave and departed by the recommended exit. Back doors, he reflected, could all too easily become a way of life.
The Old Rectory at Kirkby Willows was a tall, unattractive, late Victorian pile, set in a dank plantation of laurel and rhododendron. Several of the windows were uncurtained. One, on the upper floor, had been broken and masked with a sheet of hardboard. Purbright’s use of the heavy ring knocker produced a hollow reverberation like an old man’s cough. He had little hope of an answer.
Yet the door opened almost at once. He saw a man of perhaps thirty-five with a beard of that rather indeterminate kind that is generally vouchsafed to those who regard beard growing as a serious matter of policy. Henry Rusk also wore a dressing gown and the querulous expression of a disturbed creator. (Or so Purbright interpreted it.) His hair was light, almost blond.
Purbright announced his identity but not his business. That he had not yet decided himself. But policemen do not need to say why they have called. Nine householders out of ten are concerned at that stage only with getting them off the doorstep; they would be just as hospitable towards a loud-voiced debt collector or a drunken auntie.
“We’re just having tea,” said Henry Rusk, leading the inspector through a doorway on the left of the entrance lobby.
In the centre of an otherwise almost totally unfurnished room was a wooden kitchen table at which a woman was sitting. She was perhaps a little younger than Rusk, at whom she peered devotedly through a pair of black framed spectacles with thick lenses. Her black hair was straight and cut to the same length all the way round her head.
Rusk indicated her to Purbright.
“My mistress,” he said. “She’s called Janice.”
He resumed his seat at the table, leaving Purbright to dispose himself as he thought fit. The only alternative to standing proved to be a tea chest lying on its side in the big bay window.
As Purbright lowered himself on to that, he saw that Janice had before her a large brown loaf. At a nod from Henry she laboriously sawed off a slice which she handed over on the point of the knife. He buttered it while she watched.
“Shrimp,” Henry said, tersely.
Janice leaned forward, short-sightedly scrutinized a row of four or five little jars, then slid one across. Without acknowledgment, Henry picked it up and gouged out some of the contents. Janice neither ate nor drank anything herself.
The room was very cold. A smell of wet plaster pervaded it.
“And what are you after, then?” Henry spoke with his mouth full. He didn’t look up from his plate.
Purbright resolved at that moment to be neither devious nor tactful. The tea chest was exceedingly uncomfortable.
“I understand you are a client of the Handclasp House matrimonial bureau.”
“I was,” replied Henry with neither hesitation nor, apparently, concern. “But I got fixed up.”
Janice blushed happily.
“At first shot?” Purbright did his best to sound rude and was fairly successful
“No.”
“How many?”
“I don’t see what the hell it’s got to do with you, but it so happens there were two others. One had been looking ten years for somebody to put her into a book. I put her on the next bloody bus. Then there was some bint who wanted to bear a beautiful child without taking her knickers off. God, this damn country’s full of walking middle-class fantasies. It’s got no loins any more.”
Henry glared at the loaf and Janice hastily began sawing it.
“Did either of your earlier, er, applicants happen to be called Reckitt?” Purbright asked. “Or Bannister?”
“Tomato and pilchard,” said Henry, after brief consideration. Janice got busy among the jars.
“Names!” cried Henry, as soon as he had recharged his mouth. “Why should I remember names? The only decent book written in the last fifty years hadn’t a single name in it from cover to cover. This labelling obsession is a sign of literary castration. I’m a writer, man! A professional writer, not the compiler of a telephone directory.”
Henry’s pronunciation of the word “writer”, Purbright noted, was the most aggressive instance of his general
