“I am glad to hear it. My name, by the way, is Purbright. Detective Inspector.”
“Oh, yes, I know. You are the only policeman who comes into the library. Except for Mr Chubb, of course, but he only collects books for his wife. She seems to have a very lurid taste.”
Purbright loyally refrained from exposing what he knew to be the Chief Constable’s duplicity: Mrs Chubb had not read a book for years.
“What I propose,” he said, “is to send a couple of my men to take a look round the area where you were attacked. It is very unlikely that the man is still there but there is always the chance that he has waited in hope of a less formidable victim. Do you think you can manage a description?”
Miss Butters looked regretful. “The funny thing is that I never got a look at his face. It was fairly dark, of course, in the wood, and he came on me from behind. That’s how I managed to catch his head under my arm. I held it there and gave it one or two whacks against a tree trunk.”
“Did you, indeed?”
“Yes. It was rather vicious of me, I suppose, but I couldn’t think of any other way of calming him down.”
“He was excited, was he?”
“Decidedly.”
“Why did he attack you, do you think, Miss Butters?”
“Well, to get my handbag, naturally. What other reason could he have?”
Purbright forebore from naming the more cogent motive. “Did you get any impression of his age?”
“Certainly not young. Past middle age, I should say. There was a sort of brittle, bony feel about him. And he wheezed.”
“Did you notice his hair?”
“Only that it seemed pretty thin.”
“Height?”
“A bit shorter than me, I think—about five feet six or seven.”
“What about clothing?”
“He was wearing a coat, grey or light brown. It was rather loose and flappy—thin, a sort of raincoat, I should say. No hat.”
Braine entered with short, careful steps. He was carrying a cup of tea as if it were a delicately fused bomb. When he had delivered it into Miss Butters’ lap, Purbright sent him off again to summon the two-man crew of a patrol car that had just driven past the window into the station yard.
Constables Fairclough and Brevitt presented themselves two minutes later. Fairclough was a fat, breezy man who looked capable of giving good account of himself in a chase, provided he did not actually have to get out of the car. That, obviously, would be the role of the correspondingly lean Brevitt, who stood listening to the inspector’s instructions with one eye on the door as if it were a race track starting gate.
“You’ll just have to circle round that area for a while,” Purbright was saying, “and watch out for the sort of fellow I’ve described. If you do spot a likely character—which I might say is highly unlikely—there is probably only one way in which suspicion can be confirmed. The odds are that the man we’re looking for has a lump on the top of his head.”
Fairclough looked cheerful but unenlightened. Brevitt, on the other hand, gave a determined nod of comprehension. If everything depended on a lump, his expression implied, so small a matter could be very easily arranged.
“Of course,” Purbright added, “I don’t need to remind such experienced officers as yourselves that the utmost tact must be employed. People don’t much like being stopped late at night by policemen eager to practise phrenology.”
The two patrolmen smiled, one amiably, the other darkly at his own thoughts.
As the inspector had predicted, exploration of the Gorry Wood neighbourhood was unproductive. A light rain had begun to fall and the lanes were empty and miserable in the slow advance of the headlights. The policemen’s only encounter, other than with an occasional zig-zagging hare, was their discovery of the Vicar of Pitney leaning over the rectory gate and flagging them down with an empty beer bottle. “I’m sorry, I thought you were the butcher,” he had said, before tottering indoors again. Brevitt was at first for pursuit and forcible bump-reading, but he deferred to his colleague’s opinion that such a course would be trespass, if not sacrilege.
Miss Butters remained at the police station long enough to finish her tea and to add to her account a point that she said she was sorry not to have remembered in time for it to serve as further guidance to the officers who had gone in search of her assailant.
“It was the way he ran,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. You know how soldiers shuffle along to one side when they are doing drill—closing ranks, do they call it? Anyway, it was rather like that, only much, much faster and with bigger steps, of course. He was actually running sideways, if you can imagine such a thing.”
“What, like a crab?”
“That’s it exactly. Like a crab. Now isn’t that odd?”
“Most decidedly,” said Purbright.
Chapter Two
Unlike Miss Butters, nineteen years old Brenda Sweeting, shop assistant, considered sexual molestation to be a permanent and universal hazard.
