The Flaxborough Crab

SALAD. Smaller print beneath announced: ‘A Product of Moldham Meres Laboratories. Prepared from the Genuine Lucky Fen Wort. The Secret of the Amazing Virility of Boadicea’s Warriors. Dissolves Instantly.’

When the inspector spoke again, his air of polite indifference had changed.

“Tell me, Mrs Grope—in what way has your husband’s behaviour been worrying you?”

“Well, several ways. He’s not really been himself since we moved to Flax when he left the pictures...”

Interpreter Love quickly scotched the image of Walter Grope, film star.

“He was commissionaire at that cinema in Chalmsbury,¹ remember. The Rialto. Retired last year.”

¹ See Bump in the Night.

Purbright did remember. Grope the rhyming doorman. Big, ponderous and harmless—if one expected teetotalism and an inordinate capacity for versifying. Poor old Grope. Bingo had done for him, as for so many of those splendidly apparelled foyer field-marshals, captains of the queues....

“Yes, of course,” Purbright said. “I met your husband a year or two back.”

“He’s not the same man now,” said Mrs Grope. “Oh, I don’t just mean this conjuggling rights business. I can deal with that. But it’s the other things. Just look what I found in the boot cupboard the other morning.”

She pulled from her bag a multi-coloured bundle and thrust it into Purbright’s lap, where it unfurled into a miscellany of pairs of knickers.

“Where did he get them, I’d like to know!”

“Where, indeed,” murmured Purbright, much impressed.

“From clothes lines, I should think,” Love said, after looking critically at some of the garments. He glanced at the inspector and lowered his voice. “There have been reports.”

Purbright put the clothing in a heap on the table.

“You’d better let the policewomen take charge of these for the time being,” he told Mrs Grope. “Now is there anything else you feel you ought to tell us?”

She pondered darkly.

“He stays out very late some nights.”

“How late?”

“Oh, eleven and after. Once it was nearly one in the morning.”

“Doesn’t he tell you where he’s been?”

“Pardon?”

“Where he’s been. Does he tell you?”

“Never ask.”

“I see. All right. Anything else, Mrs Grope?”

“Well, just that business with the woman in the supermarket.”

“Oh?”

“He’s supposed to have interfered with her behind the Shredded Wheat, but there was only her word against his and I’d never known him do that before.”

“Ah, well we mustn’t make too much of it, men, must we?” Purbright, hating himself, gave Mrs Grope a reassuring smile. “I wonder,” he said, “if it might not be a good idea to have a word with his doctor?”

She shook her head. “He’s not a man you can talk to, Dr Meadow isn’t. Very proud. Mr Grope sees him once a week, regular, but I won’t go. Not to him.”

“Never mind—why don’t you talk things over with your husband and persuade him to ask the doctor for advice? You don’t really want him to be in trouble with the law, I’m sure.”

Purbright cast a worried glance at the heap of underclothes and hoped that their assorted owners would not complicate his life further by positively identifying them. Larceny charges were the last things he wanted to be bothered with at the moment.

Love saw Mrs Grope out. He returned to find the inspector with an unwontedly wild look in his eye.

“My God, Sid! The whole bloody town’s infested with sexual maniacs! What the hell are we going to do?”

The sergeant, who could not remember ever before having received so direct a plea for his opinion, did his best to convey an impression of urgent intelligence.

Purbright patted his shoulder.

“Look, before we try and organize anything else, I think we should try and find out all we can about two factors that are common to the only people we’ve so far been able to connect with this business. Meadow’s practice is one factor—both Winge and Grope were his patients. And the second is the stuff in that packet.”

“Did Winge take it as well, then?”

“Meadow said so at the inquest.”

Love held the envelope open and sniffed.

“Smells like lawn clippings.”

“You notice where it’s made.”