—not the government, perhaps, but some kind of important consortium (of bishops, was it?) that also ran religion and cemeteries and Armistice Day and double summer time.
No, it was probably the recipients of the charity, or of what was left after expenses, for whom one really ought to feel sympathy, Purbright reflected. All those saved dogs, helpless in their havens, being patted by Mrs Henrietta Palgrove. The poor old horses in the Mill Lane meadow, too decrepit and narrowly penned to escape their weekly ‘cheering up’ by a mass muster of the Flaxborough Equine Rescue Brigade (or FERB). The orphans up at Old Hall...well, no; perhaps not the orphans, he decided. They were well able to stand up for themselves, even against such an inveterate curl-rumpler as Alderman Steven Winge, who had been bitten four times since Christmas. Purbright felt sorriest of all for the pensioners, the Darbys and Joans, the defenceless old men and women who, week after week, were jollied out of their peaceful cottages and trundled away to ‘treats’—usually at places like Brockleston-on-Sea, where they sat on hard benches at long board tables, there to be personally plied with tiny cakes and screamed solicitudes by ladies whom none had ever seen without hats, and by gentlemen who looked as if they had smiled steadily, remorselessly, awake and asleep, since birth...
Purbright gave a little shake of the head and resolutely hitched his chair nearer the desk. He opened a file marked “Charities: Incidents and Complaints” and began to read, not for the first time, the letters and reports it contained.
There was no doubt about it: Flaxborough’s charity war had hotted up alarmingly of late. Hostilities were beginning to bear the marks of professional generalship.
•
•
•
“Flower, sir? Buy a flower. Help the animals, sir.” Mr Mortimer Hive found his progress along the narrow pavement of Market Street barred by a girl of fourteen or fifteen with big, earnest brown eyes and a mouth like pale pink candy. Slung from her neck was a tray of paper emblems. Mr Hive glimpsed words along the front of the tray —KINDLY KENNEL KLAN—before a large slotted can, resoundingly cash-laden, was thrust to the level of his chin.
It was a highly inconvenient encounter for Mr Hive, engaged as he was in following a woman whose native familiarity with Flaxborough streets put him, a London inquiry agent, at disadvantage enough without the intervention of third parties.
However, good breeding made his response automatically chivalrous. He swept off his grey felt hat with one hand and thrust the other into the hip pocket of trousers whose cut, expensive and
Mr Hive selected a half-crown from the withdrawn handful of change. The girl smiled happily at it and made a pick from the emblems on her tray. A plump little forearm nestled for a moment upon the lapel, old-fashionedly broad, of Mr Hive’s jacket. He felt a glow of pleasure, an almost fatherly benignity. He allowed a palmed penny to clink into the collection can and surreptitiously returned the half-crown to his pocket.
“Delighted to be of assistance, my dear!”
The girl popped prettily back into the doorway from which she had accosted him and, with a final flourish of his hat, Mr Hive was on his way.
The woman he had been following was now out of sight. He made what haste he could, consistent with courtesy, and side-stepped from time to time into the roadway to gain an extra yard or two whenever there was a gap in the traffic. This was a fairly perilous manoeuvre because the pedestrians were stubbornly disinclined to break ranks in order to let him rejoin them; it was rather like trying to haul oneself over the gunwales of an over-crowded lifeboat.
At last, anxious, out of breath and smarting from having been grazed by the tailboard of a truck, Mr Hive spotted again the patch of bright lime green that was his quarry’s hat. It was bobbing along in a tide of heads twenty yards away on the opposite side of the road.
Mr Hive pressed forward, but made no attempt to cross the road. By keeping close to the kerb, he was able not only to maintain progress but to preserve an almost uninterrupted diagonal view of the respondent (no, no—the Subject—he’d really have to master this new terminology). And by the time she disappeared through a doorway he had no difficulty in seeing that she had entered the Market Street branch of Flaxborough Public Library.
A minute later, Mr Hive also was in the building. He mounted a short flight of stairs, pushed open a glass door and found himself by a counter. Behind it, perched in a sort of dock, a straight-haired young woman was ready with a quick-freeze stare.
Mr Hive affected not to notice.
There was a hiss. It sounded like “Tickets?”
Mr Hive gave a confident, member-of-the-committee nod and patted his breast pocket.
The young woman raised no further objection but as he walked on into the room he had the impression that his arrival had given her a shock of some kind. Covertly, he glanced down at his trousers. No, nothing amiss there. Anyway, it had been something higher up that disturbed her, he thought. Odd...
There were some dozen people at the shelves, all draped in the attitude of slightly awed self-consciousness characteristic of book borrowers. Silence was almost absolute, and several glances of censure were earned by the sucking noises of satisfaction that emanated from an old man in the Biology Section who had come in for a warm at Havelock Ellis.
Mr Hive made a quick survey. The Subject was not in the room. Then he noticed a second glass door. It was marked REFERENCE. He walked nearer and peered through.
The woman in the green hat was bent, half kneeling, to a shelf close to the floor in which a number of slender but over-size volumes were stacked. She seemed to be replacing one. Mr Hive noted that its binding was pale blue and tooled in gold. He thought it lay about eighth from the end of the row.
The woman got up and straightened her dress. As he had done several times before during the past three days, Mr Hive took stock of her figure. It was plump but certainly not fat, with a lively curvaceousness which, though modified by strictly fashionable clothing, made direct appeal to Mr Hive’s sense of beauty. He much regretted that his calling imposed so tenuous a relationship between him and his Subjects. It was a mean, unnatural way of earning a living. How he longed sometimes to break cover, sweep up to the Subject and grasp her hand, crying: Madame, I am Hive, the detective, at your service! Take supper with me and you shall have my secrets!
She was reaching for the door. He stepped quickly aside and masked himself with a book. She walked past,
