heading the inquiry, Chief Inspector Sinclair, will shortly be replaced by the man thought best qualified to bring matters to a successful conclusion, Britain's most famous detective, Chief Superintendent Albert Sampson, better known to the public as 'Sampson of the Yard'.
Knowlton was not Biggs's final destination. Mrs Troy lived at a place called Rudd's Cross, which he had been told was in the vicinity. Inquiring at the village pub, where the bus deposited him, he learned that in fact it was more than two miles away and could only be reached by a footpath that ran through the fields.
As he left the outskirts of Knowlton a distant rumble came to his ears. Away to the west the thunderheads of a storm were massing. The air was warm and muggy. Harold took off his glasses and mopped his face with a handkerchief. He'd brought no umbrella with him.
He hurried on through the stubbled fields, keeping an anxious eye on the heavens. Pausing at a stile, he removed his cap and patted dry the two bays of bare scalp on either side of his widow's peak. Thunder boomed again, louder this time. His new shoes were starting to pinch.
The bubble of resentment which had been swelling inside him all morning burst into angry recognition that he had let himself be used. Exploited! He might have minded less if there'd been any mention of compensation when Mr Wolverton gave him his assignment.
His bitterness grew as it fastened on this grievance.
Only last month his request for an increase in salary had been turned down. He'd felt hard done by then.
After years of wartime privation the shops were at last full of goods worth buying. Harold himself had been saving for months to purchase a wireless set — public transmissions by the new British Broadcasting Company were due to start the following year. Further off in his future the mirage of a motor-car shimmered.
Jimmy was right, he thought angrily, as he set off again. It was time he asserted himself.
Biggs was at his wits' end. He could make no sense of the old woman's ramblings. She would start on one thing, skip to another, and then lose the thread of both.
'Edna Babb? She's the girl who 'does' for you?
Have I got that right, Mrs Troy?'
Finding his way to the cottage had proved no problem. It was just as Mr Wolverton had described it, standing on its own, separated by an apple orchard and unploughed fields from the rest of the houses grouped around the crossroads that gave the hamlet its name. But it had taken repeated hammerings on the door with the brass knocker before he heard the shuffle of slow footsteps inside and saw the door handle turn.
'Mr Wolverton?'
The figure peering up at him from the shadowy hallway was old and bent. Her thinning white hair was drawn back in an untidy bun. She wore a thick, knitted shawl wrapped about her shoulders over a long, stained skirt of dark bombazine. Wondering how she could possibly mistake him for his employer, he had given her his name. It was only when he went inside — when she led him into the small parlour and seated herself in a high-backed chair beside the window where a bar of sunlight entering through lace-net curtains illuminated her face — that he noticed the milky, cataract-clouded eyes.
He had pulled up a chair beside hers, and now he sat and listened while she talked of people he had never heard of — of 'Edna' and 'Tom Donkin' and 'Mr Grail' — as though they were old acquaintances of his.
While she spoke her hands moved ceaselessly, fondling a cat that had jumped into her lap as soon as she sat down, a large tortoiseshell beast which regarded Biggs steadily through narrow slitted eyelids. Its rasping purr filled the gaps of silence left by the quavering, breathless voice. Listening with half an ear, Harold thought sourly of the likely drenching he was in for later as the thunder rumbled ever closer. The shaft of light filtering through the lace- net curtains had dulled to a leaden beam.
'Tom Donkin took care of the garden?'
The picture was becoming clearer. Donkin was a local man, someone the Babb woman had found to work as a gardener and handyman. It seemed there was something between them, a relationship, but they had fallen out — had a fight in Mrs Troy's words — and Donkin had gone away. He was no longer living in the district and Edna Babb had been trying to discover his whereabouts.
'Looking all over,' Mrs Troy explained. She turned her face towards Harold, milky blue eyes blinking like some blind underground animal's. 'Poor girl. I think she's expecting.'
This had happened some months ago and since then Edna Babb had ceased to be someone Winifred Troy could count on. She still came in to clean, but only intermittently. Once a week, instead of the three times agreed on. Sometimes not at all.
'Why didn't you find someone else?' Biggs asked, increasingly impatient.
It seemed there was no one else, not in Rudd's Cross. Edna 'did' for two other families and they, too, complained of being let down. Sometimes she disappeared for days.
Unmoved by the old woman's predicament, Biggs was just telling himself he could see no way of dealing with the matter — not if the wretched Babb was the only cleaner available — when he discovered to his amazement that this, after all, wasn't the problem. It was merely the background to it. Mrs Troy had learned to cope with Edna's absences. If the house wasn't properly cleaned — and there was plenty of evidence of this in the layer of dust he could see coating the mantelpiece in front of him and dulling the glass front of the silver cabinet across the room — it didn't seem to bother the old woman. The crisis lay in another quarter. To be precise, in the shape of Mr Grail.
Mr Grail?
Harold had forgotten about him. Now he had to sit and listen again as Mrs Troy explained in her halting, back-and-forth way that he was the man who had looked after the garden since Tom Donkin's departure.
But there was more to it than that.
One of Edna Babb's duties had been to shop for her employer in Knowlton, but since she could no longer be relied on Mrs Troy had been forced to seek an alternative source of supplies.
'I told Mr Grail he could use the garden shed that's what he wanted — but he had to bring me food when he came.'
Why? Biggs wondered. Why on earth not ask one of the village women to shop for her? What was she clinging to so desperately? Was it her independence?
She shouldn't be living here on her own, he thought irritably. Didn't she have someone to care for her? 'What can I do for you, Mrs Troy?'
'I want you to tell him to go.' She spoke for the first time with certainty. 'I don't want him coming back.'
Biggs blinked. 'You've spoken to him, have you? Is he giving trouble?'
She shook her head. 'I can't talk to him,' she said.
'I want you to tell him.'
Now that he understood at last, Harold didn't trust himself to speak. He'd been dragged all the way out here on his afternoon off just to give some fellow his marching orders! As though to underline his sense of outrage, a loud crack of thunder sounded overhead. It was followed by a patter of raindrops on the roof that swiftly became a downpour. My God, he was going to get drenched!
He sought to keep a grip on his temper. 'Where can I find him?' he asked abruptly.
'He usually comes on a Saturday.' She turned her near-sightless eyes on him again. 'Saturday afternoons.
That's why I wanted someone here today.'
Without a word Biggs stood up and went out into the narrow hallway. He found what he was looking for — an umbrella, it was standing in a flowered china vase — and went from there directly through the house to the kitchen at the back. The smell of stale food assailed his nostrils. A pile of unwashed plates and dishes lay on the draining- board of the sink. Through the window he could see the shed, at the bottom, and to one side, of a small square of lawn bordered by flowerbeds.
He flung open the kitchen door. The rain fell like a curtain before his eyes. Fuming, he stepped outside, opening the umbrella as he did so, and splashed across the already sodden patch of grass to the shed. The door was barred by a heavy padlock. He hammered on it.
'Grail!' he called out. 'Grail! Are you there?'
There was no response. He laid his ear to the wooden door, but he could hear nothing above the noise of the rain beating on the corrugated iron above his head and pouring in a stream from the edge of the roof on to his spread umbrella.
