Charity Ends At Home

The pear-shaped man compressed some of his chins so as to produce a grunt and a nod at the same time.

On the other side of the town, Inspector Purbright was in search of the Secretary of the Flaxborough and Eastern Counties Charities Alliance. He had called at the office in St Anne’s Gate to find it in the charge of a lady wearing rimless spectacles and a blue felt hat of the shape, size and, for all he knew, the durability, of an army field helmet. She had smiled terribly upon him and explained that this was Miss Teatime’s day ‘on’ at Old Hall and that he had better hie him thither at once if he wanted to have a word with her before the arrival of the Hobbies and Needlework Sub-committee.

At the Hall, a big, early Georgian manor house set in parkland on the southern outskirts of Flaxborough, Purbright was directed to the number two recreation room. It was at the end of a long, stone-flagged corridor lined on one side with windows on whose white-painted sills were great quantities of summer flowers in terra-cotta pots and bowls. Mixed with the scent of the flowers were smells of plasticine and paint-boxes and rubber boots and small children’s clothes. Some twenty coats and hats hung on a row of hooks outside the room that had been pointed out to the inspector. Behind its door a lot of noise was being produced. It sounded very happy noise.

The door opened. Purbright stepped quickly into its lee as a wave of children burst through. The hats and coats were tossed and tugged and waved and trampled, but eventually were sorted and appropriated and trotted off in. The corridor emptied.

Purbright peeped through the door. He saw Miss Teatime at once. She was sitting, erect but genial, in a large spindle-back chair. Around the chair were scattered the cushions and stools on which, Purbright supposed, the children had been sitting to hear her tell a story.

There were other people in the room—three plump young women in some kind of nurse’s uniform, two older but jolly-faced women—house-mothers, did they call them?—and a formidable lady in an apron, long skirt and button boots who scratched her bottom a great deal and kept laughing in a bartender’s bass-baritone; it seemed that she was the cook of the establishment.

“What about one for us, duckie?” the cook called out.

“Yes, do!”

“Go on, Miss T!”

Miss Teatime smiled demurely and gazed out of the window for inspiration. Purbright sidled into the room, closing the door quietly behind him. No one noticed his arrival.

“Very well,” said Miss Teatime. She folded her hands in her lap. “This is a story of the mysterious Orient. It was told me by my uncle—the missionary one, you remember—and I venture to think that you will find it as strange a tale as any to have come out of those fascinating lands.

“It concerns a poor Arab by the name of Mahmoud. One day, this Arab was crossing the great Gobi desert. He was too poor to own a camel and so he was making the journey on foot.

“Now perhaps I should explain that the place in the desert where these extraordinary events occurred was many miles from any human settlement, many miles, indeed, from the nearest oasis.

“Anyway, there was Mahmoud, patiently making his way over the endless dunes and thinking perhaps of the cup of refreshing sherbet that awaited him at journey’s end in some shady kasbah, when suddenly his big toe struck against an object in the sand. The Arab stopped and bent down, groping about in the sand where he had last put his foot. He drew something out. And do you know what it was?”

Miss Teatime paused and looked from one to another of her audience. In silence they shook their heads.

“A cricket ball!

“Poor Mahmoud stared in wonder. Allah caravamerie baksheesh! And he went on his way.

“But he had not travelled very much farther when he received in the big toe of his other foot a sensation exactly the same as before. He stopped. He bent down. He groped about. And again he drew something from the sand. Yes...another cricket ball! He stared in even greater wonder. Allah-caravanserie baksheesbbakar! And the Arab continued upon his journey.

“But he had not taken more than another twenty paces when yet again his foot encountered an object hidden in the sand. He stopped. He bent down. He groped about. He drew something from the sand...”

Miss Teatime leaned forward a fraction. She raised her brows questioningly at her audience.

“Another cricket ball?” offered the youngest of the nurses.

“Oh, no...” Miss Teatime sat back again in her chair. “A castrated cricket.”

Purbright waited until the cook, the nurses and the house-mothers had gone about their duties. Then he rose and crossed the room to where Miss Teatime was now seated at a table in the window bay, preparing to stitch a rent in a limp and grubby teddy bear. She looked up.

“Why, inspector! How very nice to see you!”

Purbright took her extended hand and made a short bow. He drew up another chair to the table and sat facing her.

“I’m told you are liable to be swooped upon by some committee or other”—he saw her wince resignedly—“so I’ll be very policemanlike and come straight to the point.”

“By all means.” Miss Teatime drew a length of cotton from a reel, snapped it expertly and at the second attempt piloted its end into her needle.

“Perhaps you have heard already of the death of Mrs Henrietta Palgrove. She was drowned the night before last in the garden of her home.”

“I did know, yes. A shocking affair. It has been quite widely discussed, of course.”

“I imagine so. She would be well known among social workers, committee members—people like that.”

“Certainly.” Miss Teatime pierced the teddy bear’s threadbare hide with the needle. “She was an exceptionally active lady, was Mrs Palgrove.”