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  Dear Mr 4112,

  I was so pleased to receive your letter this morning. It had been forwarded to me very promptly and it gave me a nice feeling of being less of a stranger in my new surroundings.

  Now what can I tell you about myself?

  I am unmarried (there, that is one thing you can put yourself at ease about!) and—like you, it seems—have no demands on my time. This can be rather a bore, of course, but I manage to keep myself occupied with walking (Nature is a never-failing source of delight, don’t you agree?); also with trying my prentice hand at writing (not much success so far, alas!); and with dull, womanly things like needlework.

  Perhaps I should mention one little weakness as well. I have a passion—quite damaging to my bank account!—for haunting antique shops. Flaxborough has already captured me in this respect.

  Do you like old things? They are a great reassurance, I think, in this world of the tawdry and second-rate.

  And of course, if you will forgive me for sounding terribly unfeminine and practical, antiques are a marvellous investment.

  Anything else? Oh, yes. You may smile, but I love the sea! Of course, I couldn’t help noticing that you are a Navy man. But I must say nothing of my secret ambition or you will think me silly and romantic and quite, quite unrealistic.

  Sincerely yours,

  347

  Miss Teatime folded and put the sheet straight into its envelope. She never re-read her own letters before posting them. Apart from having confidence born of long practice, she knew that the embellishments and addenda that a second reading might inspire would give the thing a calculated look. And that would never do. Spontaneity, she reflected as she daintily tongue-tipped the envelope flap, was everything.

  She stayed in the bedroom long enough to finish the cheroot she had lighted as an encouragement of literary invention. Then she put on her coat and a hat, one of three bought the previous day during what explorers and hunters would call a gear collection and pocketed the letter. It would save time to take it round herself. Anyway, it was a nice day for a walk and she had noticed already how many attractive old inns there were to be examined in Flaxborough.

  An intinerary of a very different kind was being planned at that moment by Inspector Purbright.

  He had on the desk before him the list compiled by Mrs Staunch. It was of five numbers, names and addresses, together with such personal details of each nominee as apparently had been considered relevant to his matrimonial prospects.

  “Know anything about Joseph Capper, Sid?”

  Sergeant Love, who had been standing looking out of the window, suddenly swung round.

  “Joe Capper, out at Borley Cross?”

  “Aye. Home Farm.”

  “Why, the crafty old bugger! He’s got one already.”

  “You mean he’s married?”

  “Has been for years. He lives in the farmhouse and she shacks up in one of the outbuildings.”

  “It sounds an amicable arrangement.”

  “Oh, it’s not arranged,” Love said. “It’s just that Joe happens to be winning at the moment. Six months ago, it was the woman who was in the house while Joe lived in the barn. They think up tricks to get each other out. Sort of ding-dong siege.”

  “Then what the hell is he doing with this marriage bureau lark?”

  Love shrugged. “Trying to get reinforcements, I expect.”

  The inspector read aloud from his list: “ ‘312; Joseph Capper, Home Farm, Borley Cross...a stay-at-home but no stick-in-the-mud, a man with acres and a mind of his own who would share his home with a lady desirous of locking out her worries...’ ”

  “Not half,” said the sergeant.

  “ ‘His hobbies are home-made wine and shooting...’ ”

  “Is that the word it uses—hobbies?” Love looked incredulous.

  “It is,” confirmed Purbright. “Never mind, though; I can’t see him being our man. I’ll pay him a visit, just as a check, but whoever worked over Miss Reckitt and Mrs Bannister must have spent more time on it than Mr Capper is likely to have had to spare.

  “Now then, who’s next...? 316; William C. Singleton, 14 Byron Road...Do you know him?”

  Love shook his head.

  “He’s a retired waterworks engineer, apparently. Good sense of humour...handy about the house...wants sympathetic woman to share beautiful garden...” Purbright looked up. “You can have that one, Sid.”

  The sergeant copied the address.

  “Lot 324,” Purbright resumed. “Plume, George; Prospect House, Beale Street...”

  “You can cross him off.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “That does inhibit us a bit, doesn’t it. How would he have ranked as a suspect, though?”

  “The report of the funeral said he was ninety-four.”

  It was Purbright’s turn to register disbelief. He looked again at the Handclasp House prospectus. “ ‘...widower of three months, an active bee-keeper and tandem enthusiast, would welcome company of lively lady...’ ”

  “That was George, all right,” said Love. “A very well preserved old gentleman.”

  Purbright put a valedictory pencil stroke through Mr Plume’s paragraph, sighed and read on.

  “ ‘362; Leonard Henry Rusk, the Old Rectory, Kirkby Willows...’ Rectory, Sid?”

  The sergeant looked blank.

  “The girl in the tea shop. You said she thought the man with Martha Reckitt looked like a clergyman.”

  “She was a foreigner.”

  “You don’t find a rectory suggestive?”

  “Not these days. All sorts of people live in them.”

  “How about this, then—‘while he awaits literary success he hopes to meet one who will fill a blank page in the book of life...’ ”

  “Is all the stuff written like that?”

  “I’m afraid it is. The standard argot of marriage bureaux, presumably. Mr Rusk is described as ‘reserved but with merry twinkle, owing his remarkable physical condition to a lifetime’s devotion to sport’. You can guess what that means.”

  “Will you see him, or shall I?” Love added with careful gloom: “It’s a rotten bus service to Kirkby Willows.”

  “All right. I’ll go. You’ll have to do this last one, though. Leicester Avenue. A bloke called Rowley, catalogue number 386. By the way, aren’t they council houses in Leicester Avenue?”

  Love confirmed that they were.

  “He’s a doubtful starter, then. Among the many things that con men and company directors have in common is fussiness about address.”

  While Love made a second entry in his notebook, the inspector leaned back and made a final rapid survey of the list.

  “I can’t help feeling,” he said at last, “that as a dispenser of hot tips Mrs Staunch leaves something to be desired. Incidentally, you do know what you’re looking for, I suppose? Apart from samples of their handwriting.”

  Love stood straight, staring a little way to his left. His boyish, bright pink face wore the slightest of frowns, like that of a carefully rehearsed pupil. With one hand he began to switch down the fingers of the other.

  “A clever talker...”

  Purbright nodded.

  “...who looks as if he might have a way with women.”

  Another nod—and a gently lifted eyebrow.

  “He’s possibly got a sort of clergyman look about him... Fair-haired—unless he’s dyed it...”

  The inspector’s lips pouted commendingly.

  “...and having facilities for hiding or geting rid of bodies.” This final qualification was produced with the air of a chairman hoping to surprise with the announcement of a bonus dividend.

  Purbright gratifyingly slapped the edge of his desk. “Bodies,” he repeated. “Yes, indeed. It’s their failure to turn up that’s made this whole affair seem a bit unreal. If only we knew where these women used to meet the fellow, it might help. Our tree...” he added, half to himself.

  Love caugh
t the remark.

  “There are trees in Leicester Avenue,” he announced.

  “Ah!” said the inspector, his eyes rounded.

  He was a kindly man.

  Chapter Seven

  The eye between the window frame and the yellow, fly-mottled muslin was small and red and bright. It had a nervous, precise mobility. It was distrustful—hard as a little gun swivelling behind a fire slit.

  “Anybody at home?” bellowed Purbright, knowing perfectly well that there was (an eye did not roll about a house on its own).

  The muslin curtain was tweaked shut.

  Purbright turned and leaned against the porch. He surveyed the yard, wondering in which of its surrounding buildings lurked the temporarily vanquished Mrs Capper. She could not have had a very wide choice: from one doorway came the booming of bullocks, from another the high argument of thirty or forty pigs, while chickens and turkeys contended for right of way in and out of a third. Perhaps there were upper storeys, though. Very useful to a good tactician...

  He heard bolts being drawn and swung round to face the door again. There was a quickly widening gap. Then an arm shot out. In the next second he was stumbling into a big, dim room that smelled of bacon and paraffin. As the door thumped shut, something crashed against the outer step. It sounded very like a bottle.

  “You should have come round to the other side, mister,” said a slow, faintly reproving voice. Purbright found it difficult to associate the voice with the piston-like arm that had whisked him into sanctuary. He looked at their owner’s face and saw his old friend the eye, now revealed to have an associate.

  “Now then,” said Mr Capper.

  “Now then,” said Purbright amicably. He sat in the chair towards which Mr Capper had nodded and gazed round the room, taking his time. Country visitors, he knew, were fully expected to go through this settling-in process before even announcing their identity. In these more civilized parts, one wasn’t treated to a threshold frisking for information, as for hidden weapons; it was for the caller to offer it when he thought fit.

  “I’ve just come over from Flax,” Purbright said.

  “Oh, aye,” said Mr Capper.

  “I’m a police inspector, actually. Purbright.”

  “How do you do.”

  “How do you do, Mr Capper.”

  “Fair.”

  “Barley looks well. That’ll not leave you with much straw.”

  “It’s a new one, that. Supposed to be all head and no arse.”

  “That’s how you want it.”

  “Aye.”

  Joe Capper might well have been fed on his new barley. He, too, had a large robust head, from which hair grew upwards in spikes. A nicely ripened complexion considerably modified the effect of the redness of his eyes. His body, though scarcely stalk-like, was short and lean. He wore a heavy tweed jacket, ancient, mudstained jodhpurs, and a pair of Wellingtons so many sizes too big that Purbright could have sworn that they sent echoes of his conversation-back up his legs.

  “Like a drink?”

  “I should,” said the inspector.

  Mr Capper went to a wooden cupboard the size of a bus shelter. Within its depths Purbright saw the window light reflected from the glazed bellies of half a dozen of the kind of stone jar that in the country is called a grey hen. Joe carried back to him a tumbler of honey-coloured liquid.

  “Hollyhock,” he announced.

  Purbright accepted the diagnosis without the least sign of alarm. “Cheers!” he said.

  “All the best,” responded Mr Capper, going into a resolute swig.

  Purbright took a sip. A team of horses with white-hot hoofs galloped down his throat.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  For a minute or two, a comfortable silence was maintained. Again Purbright let his gaze wander round the room. He was wondering how Mr Capper managed to go about his tasks on the farm without serious risk of the fortress falling in his absence.

  He looked at the window and saw something he had not noticed before. To its catch was fastened a cord that ran upwards and over a hook in one of the ceiling beams. And suspended from this cord, revolving gently in a draught from the window, was a china vase of great size and tortuous design.

  Mr Capper saw the direction his guest’s interest had taken.

  “Real heirloom, that is,” he said.

  “Ah?”

  “The wife’s very fond of it.”

  “I should think so.”

  There was another pause, by no means uneasy. Purbright boldly tilted his glass and endured a second stampede of infernal stallions past his gullet. This time the after effects were quite pleasant; he felt capable and cunning.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you know anything about jury service?”

  “Not the first thing,” said Mr Capper.

  Good, thought Purbright. “The point is,” he went on, “that you’re down to be called to quarter sessions next week. I suppose that would be a bit awkward for you—as a farmer, I mean.”

  “Bloody awkward.” Mr Capper glanced anxiously at the window and the pendant heirloom.

  “In that case it might not be a bad idea for you to authorize your wife to take your place.”

  “For me to tell her, do you mean?”

  “Oh, no. We’d do the calling. All you need do is to give permission in writing. I’ll take it now, if you like.”

  In an instant the jubilant Mr Capper had produced a pad of cattle cake order forms and a pen. He turned one of the forms over and smoothed it flat.

  “It’ll be a nice little change for her,” he said to Purbright. “Take her out of herself.”

  “Just put: ‘I hereby authorize my wife’—then her full name—‘to undertake jury service when so required’. And sign it.”

  “How do you spell authorize?”

  Purbright told him. There were one or two more little difficulties. But the final document was legible and accurate enough.

  One thing it most manifestly was not—a product of the same hand that had penned the three letters in Mrs Bannister’s bedroom drawer.

  “Mind you,” said Purbright, feeling some qualms as he pocketed the paper, “it’s not certain that your missus will be needed. I shouldn’t say anything to her.”

  “Oh, I’d not have done that anyway,” Mr Capper assured him. “It’d spoil the surprise.”

  After declining, with every show of regret, a second charge of his host’s Hollyhock Holocaust, the inspector took his leave and departed by the recommended exit. Back doors, he reflected, could all too easily become a way of life.

  The Old Rectory at Kirkby Willows was a tall, unattractive, late Victorian pile, set in a dank plantation of laurel and rhododendron. Several of the windows were uncurtained. One, on the upper floor, had been broken and masked with a sheet of hardboard. Purbright’s use of the heavy ring knocker produced a hollow reverberation like an old man’s cough. He had little hope of an answer.

  Yet the door opened almost at once. He saw a man of perhaps thirty-five with a beard of that rather indeterminate kind that is generally vouchsafed to those who regard beard growing as a serious matter of policy. Henry Rusk also wore a dressing gown and the querulous expression of a disturbed creator. (Or so Purbright interpreted it.) His hair was light, almost blond.

  Purbright announced his identity but not his business. That he had not yet decided himself. But policemen do not need to say why they have called. Nine householders out of ten are concerned at that stage only with getting them off the doorstep; they would be just as hospitable towards a loud-voiced debt collector or a drunken auntie.

  “We’re just having tea,” said Henry Rusk, leading the inspector through a doorway on the left of the entrance lobby.

  In the centre of an otherwise almost totally unfurnished room was a wooden kitchen table at which a woman was sitting. She was perhaps a little younger than Rusk, at whom she peered devotedly through a pair of black framed spectacles with thick lenses. Her black hair was straight
and cut to the same length all the way round her head.

  Rusk indicated her to Purbright.

  “My mistress,” he said. “She’s called Janice.”

  He resumed his seat at the table, leaving Purbright to dispose himself as he thought fit. The only alternative to standing proved to be a tea chest lying on its side in the big bay window.

  As Purbright lowered himself on to that, he saw that Janice had before her a large brown loaf. At a nod from Henry she laboriously sawed off a slice which she handed over on the point of the knife. He buttered it while she watched.