“It’s not time yet,” said the man called Jack.
Miss Teatime smiled mischievously into her tenth glass of whisky. “Old crusty crutch!” she said. Jack laughed and nudged her.
“It’s three o’clock,” affirmed the landlord.
Miss Teatime ostentatiously consulted her dress watch. “Two minutes to,” she corrected.
The man with the odd vision stared at a vase of flowers in the window in order to see the clock on the wall of a building across the street. “That’s right,” he said. “Two minutes to go yet.” He turned and the landlord received, by proxy, as it were, the gaze of admiration intended for Miss Teatime.
“He’s mean with his bloody minutes, is old Fred,” declared the third customer. Jack noisily concurred and nudged Miss Teatime again.
She grinned, then suddenly adopted an expression of prim disapproval.
“My considered opinion of old Fred,” she said carefully, “is that he would twist the skin off a fart.”
In the C.I.D. room at Flaxborough Police Station, Inspector Purbright and his sergeant conferred. Neither felt that he had gathered anything useful, but the fleeting appearance, ten minutes before, of the Chief Constable in the doorway with his “Found those ladies yet?” could not be ignored. He had looked a bit like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
“I’ll bet Spain’s been on to him,” Purbright said. “It’s from Spain that he gets the meat for those tree rats of his.”
Love, who had been twice bitten by Mr Chubb’s Yorkshire terriers, agreed. Any man who would knowingly supply provender for such creatures was quite capable of putting pressure on a chief constable.
Purbright glanced through the file, which now combined what information they had about both Miss Reckitt and Mrs Bannister. There were also five specimens of handwriting, none of which bore close resemblance to the three “Rex” letters, although the experts had expressed tantalizing doubts about Mr Rusk’s O’s and the T-crossing of Mr Rowley of Leicester Avenue.
“I’d like it to be Rusk,” Purbright admitted, “but I’m quite sure he’s in the clear. For one thing, the impersonation of charm is unquestionably beyond him. For another, he’s far too convinced of his literary professionalism to be able to pretend that he is a successful author, as women like Mrs Bannister would understand the term. Mr Rusk might invent a literary luncheon, but he most certainly would not invent the presence at it of J. B. Priestley.”
“You don’t think Rusk is a fraud, then?”
“My dear Sid, of course he’s a fraud. But not the kind we are looking for. It takes more than a fringe of whisker and some bowelly borrowings from D. H. Lawrence to make a real impostor—even if you chuck in the stage Yorkshire as well. There’s a sort of splendour about the phoneyness of a con man. It’s an apparatus that he’s spent years in building up and perfecting—an elaborate fair organ. Mr Rusk couldn’t whittle a wooden flute.”
“When you put it like that,” said Love after an admiring pause, “I’m afraid my two blokes are out, too.”
“Rowley and...” Purbright turned back through his notes.
“And Singleton. The retired waterworks man.”
“That’s right. How did you get on?”
“Well, they didn’t seem very pleased to see me. Singleton wouldn’t come out of the garden. He was going up and down with a lawn mower all the time. I had to ask each question as he went by one way, and try and catch the answer when he passed on the way back.”
“Very trying for you, Sid.”
“Not really. The answers were all very short. And him being so busy made it easier to get the writing samples. I just pinched three or four of the labels off his rose bushes. Of course,” Love added, nodding at the file, I trimmed them down a bit and mounted them properly.”
“So I noticed. Most neat. Now I understand why I couldn’t make much sense out of ‘Peace Mrs Pettifer Brevitt’s Pride Lancashire Ascending’.”
“He denied that he’d met anybody at all up to now through that matrimonial thing. There’s one lady he’s writing to after dark, but he’s not actually fixed anything up yet.”
“After dark?”
“When he can’t see any longer in the garden.”
“Oh.”
“I honestly don’t think Singleton can have done anybody.”
“It doesn’t sound like it. What about Rowley, then? I gather he didn’t strike you as villain material either.”
The sergeant shook his head. “I think he’s a little bit simple. He goes in for competitions. Hundreds of them. There were papers all over his front room with bits cut out. Actually, he thought I’d come to tell him he’d won some tomato soup thing that would give him a holiday for four in the West Indies or somewhere. As soon as he answered the door, he dashed back inside and brought me three empty tins and said ‘Vigo Vegetables for Vigour’. I felt a proper twat.”
“You disabused him, of course?”
“Well, not straight away, actually. I remembered what you’d said about being tactful.”
Purbright regarded him sternly. “Tact should not be confused with mendacity, sergeant.”
“Mendacity?”
“Telling lies.”
