Charity Ends At Home

She stared at him.

“Mrs Palgrove wrote a letter two days before she died. She said she knew of a plan to kill her. She said she had actually heard it discussed.”

The woman’s face was taut and ugly with horror, her eyes huge. “No...God, no! She couldn’t...” An attempted smile of disbelief looked more like an agonized leer. “She was just loopy, off her head!”

“We have the letter. It says what I’ve told you.”

“I don’t know anything about it. It’s not about me. I wasn’t anywhere near on Tuesday night. I was in Nottingham. At a hotel. A friend of mine can tell you. She was with me. Betty Foster. Ask her. Twenty-eight Queen’s Road. She’ll tell you. Ask my husband. He saw me off at the station. And I’ve got the hotel bill. Here, wait a minute...No, that’s right, it’s at home. But I’ll let you see it, I’ll bring it. And I’ll see Betty and...”

Purbright, pitying her for the pettiness her fear had brought gushing up, waited for her to finish. Silent at last, she looked shabby and very tired.

He rang the canteen. Two minutes later, one of the cadets entered with a cup of tea. Purbright handed it to Mrs Booker and gave her another cigarette.

“Have you told your husband?” he asked gently.

Fright sprang again upon her. “You don’t have to let him know? Please!”

Purbright shrugged, trying not to regret the question. “You’ll have to be prepared for his finding out. It’s not altogether in my hands now.”

“I see.” Thoughtfully, she sipped her tea. She thrust her head down and forward to drink, instead of raising the cup to the level of her lips. There was something bovine about her awkwardness. Purbright found himself resisting, for the first time, one of the implications of Mrs Palgrove’s letter. Conspiracy? He seriously doubted if this girl was capable of it. If there had been collusion in the murder, she almost certainly would have had a better story ready. He had been prepared for her to swear out an alibi for her lover. Oh, but be was with me all night, Inspector—in our little love nest. That would have made things difficult: English juries were inclined to think that anyone who would go so far as to sacrifice respectability in the witness box was sure to be telling the truth. But Doreen Booker had come up instead with a story—provable, Purbright did not doubt—of an overnight trip to Nottingham. Leonard Palgrove really was out on a limb now. It remained only for the law methodically to saw it through.

Mrs Booker set down her empty cup on the desk.

“Is it all right for me to speak to Len?”

“I can’t prevent your doing so. You are both free agents at the moment.”

“But if you’re going to arrest him...”

“I’ve said nothing about arresting anybody, Mrs Booker.”

She looked at once confused and ashamed of being so. Purbright tried to think of something to say that would make sense to her without destroying the fiction of his own insulation. He hated this game he had to play by rules that insisted on his pretending to be merely an umpire. The rules gave him not only protection but power as well— the power to use every trick of legal casuistry and intimidation from the safe baulk of official propriety. Oh, to hell...

“Look,” he said, “keep this to yourself, but the odds are that we’ll charge him tomorrow. There are a couple of things we still have to look into, although I doubt if they’re going to help Palgrove in any way. That’s the position, Mrs Booker. The only advice I can possibly give you is to keep clear. For the time being, anyway.”

When she had gone, the inspector ordered tea for himself. It came in a pint mug with a promptness that betrayed its origin (“well-urned,” a visiting barrister once had described it.) Purbright set the mug at his elbow and, having spread out Mrs Palgrove’s ‘Dear Friend’ letter, he read through it slowly and carefully:

My Dear Friend:

This is an urgent appeal. I am in great danger. The person whose loyal and faithful companion I have been— and to whom even now my life is dedicated—intends to have me done away with. I can scarcely believe his change of heart, but I have heard the plan discussed and must believe it, however unwillingly. They think I do not understand. Of course I understand! I can sense when I am in the way. And I know that murder is going to be the reward for my uncomplaining loyalty. A poison pellet in my food...a quick injection...perhaps to be held helpless under water by a loved hand until I drown...one or other of these dreadful fates will overtake me if you, dear friend, do not bring aid. Soon I shall send you details of how you can help. I cannot—for reasons you will understand—sign this letter, but I enclose my photograph in the hope your heart may be touched.

The tarry astringency of Purbright’s first few mouthfuls of tea was responsible, perhaps, for his sense that there was something about the letter that he had not noticed during his several previous readings. He tried to decide what it was, to define the reason for his new misgiving. Some phrase out of character? He didn’t know enough about the dead woman’s character to say. It certainly was a womanly letter in as much as its tone was emotional. A tinge, surely, of hysteria—romantic hysteria, if there was such a thing. Nothing to suggest that it was not genuine. Anyway, the forensic boys were quite satisfied that it had been typed on the same machine and by the same person as the other correspondence—indubitably Mrs Palgrove—that the house had yielded.

The letter’s most impressive feature, of course, was the uncanny accuracy of its forecast. To be drowned by a loving hand...Well, the poor bitch had been right there. Had Palgrove actually threatened her in those terms? No, not to her face, apparently...They think I do not understand. Back to the business of complicity. But with whom, if not Doreen Booker? Was the amorous Pally running another lady? Injection...poison pellet...He certainly was being given plenty of credit for enterprise. A fiend in human form, as Sid Love might say (and doubtless would, sooner or later). Imagine living with the fear of...

Suddenly, Purbright realized what was odd.

For all its extravagant phrasing, its sensational accusations, the letter somehow failed to carry conviction of real danger. It was too literary, too carefully composed. Even the punctuation was faultless.

It was not the letter of a frightened woman.

Chapter Fourteen