Chapter Ten
The news of Henrietta Palgrove’s untimely end had coursed by mid-day to the furthest tendrils of the Flaxborough social grapevine. And within three hours of Dr Fergusson’s laying down his scalpel, and trotting fussily to the telephone, there had followed along those same mysteriously efficient channels the assertion that she had died of a felonious up-ending.
Not everyone believed it. Such stories had gone the rounds before and had proved to be the sanguine embroideries of a succession of citizens devoted to the dogma of No Smoke Without Fire. Scepticism was greatest in the immediate neighbourhood of Dunroamin. The Palgroves’ fellow residents were not to be deceived by the arrival of the police, an ambulance, nor even a detachment of firemen. They recognized in this latest rumour yet another malicious attempt to depress property values in the area and were ready to combat it.
It was only to be expected, then, that detectives Pooke and Broadleigh should find not a single householder in Brompton Gardens who could recall anything heard or seen during the past twenty-four hours that might have a bearing on what they all persisted in calling ‘poor Mrs Palgrove’s accident’.
Nor was anyone unwary enough to admit knowledge of any aspect of the Palgroves’ private life that did not reflect credit on both partners. They were comfortably off. They were quiet. One or both went, it was thought, to church. Their lawns were kept mown. What more could be desired of neighbours?
“We’re just wasting our time; you know that, don’t you?” Broadleigh said at last to Pooke as he closed behind them the gate of Red Gables.
Pooke said he did know, he’d had experience of this lot before.
“It’s the tradesmen we ought to be talking to,” said Broadleigh. “Especially the ones who haven’t been paid for a bit. They’re the boys for information.”
“Not half,” Pooke said.
They crossed the road and sauntered slowly towards their final call, the house next door to Dunroamin.
A boy with a deep canvas bag of newspapers slung from one shoulder emerged from a drive further back. He hurried after the two men, staring fixedly at their backs. He reached them just as Pooke was stooping to open a gate.
“You policemen?” the boy asked, not disrespectfully.
They viewed him carefully, up and down, keeping their distance. Then, having decided apparently that he was neither wired nor fused, they nodded to signify that he might speak again.
The boy did so. “You asking questions about that lady that got drowned?” He jerked his head. “Next door?”
“We might be,” said Broadleigh, limbering up his jaw muscles a little.
From Pooke: “Why? What can you tell us about it, son?” He made his voice friendly.
The boy swallowed and gave his bag a hitch. “Just that they were having a row last night.”
“Who?”
“Her and her old man.”
“Quarrelling, you mean?”
“Going on at each other. You know—shouting and that.”
Broadleigh beckoned the boy into the shelter of the drive. All three stood under the trailing branches of a laburnum. A notebook appeared. “Now, then, son—what’s your name?”
In the grounds of Dunroamin a pump throbbed. Two firemen wearing shiny black thigh boots stood looking at the rapidly descending surface of the water in the well. One held a stick with a wire mesh hemisphere at its end. Now and again he made a sudden lunge with the stick and brought up glittering in the basket a threshing orange fish which he tipped into a small cistern.
The other fireman held out his hand. “Let’s have a go.”
“Only one left. Fly bugger, an’ all.”
After some ineffectual scooping, the survivor was captured. A minute later the last of the water disappeared with a noise like German political oratory.
Hearing the sharp rise in the tone of the pump, Harper and Fairclough came out of the house, where they had been having a cup of tea in the kitchen, and joined the firemen.
Harper peered down at the weedy mud in the well’s bottom.
“That’ll be a nice job.”
Rubbing his hands down his trouser seams, as if in anticipation, he looked about him and then wandered across to a small wooden shed. When he came back, he was carrying a rake.
Inspector Purbright also had heard the pump motor change its note. There hadn’t been much water in that thing after all, he thought. Enough, though. He looked at Palgrove’s hands while he was speaking. They were podgy, but large—the long thumbs, their ends back-curved, seemed especially powerful. From the wrists black hair sprouted.
“You’ll appreciate what a difference has been made by this report of the doctor’s, Mr Palgrove. I’ve been perfectly frank about it because I want to know if you can suggest an explanation of the bruises on your wife’s legs—an explanation, that is, other than the sinister but obvious one.”
“Hundreds of things can cause bruising.”
“Symmetrical bruises? Five each side? And spaced so?” Purbright held his hands in a posture of grasping two upright poles.
