Bump in the Night f-2 Page 7

  “Of course not.” Biggadyke rubbed a puce-coloured cheek and pouted virtuously.

  “In the absence of information that might suggest the identity of the culprit,” continued Larch, ponderously, “we are obliged at this stage to pay rather more attention to gossip than we should normally be inclined to do, and to question every person whose name has happened to be mentioned. Of course, you quite understand, Mr Biggadyke, that this implies no actual suspicion on our part. We wish merely to eliminate everyone who can give a reasonable account of himself. Routine, you know, sir.”

  Biggadyke’s expression had turned a little fractious. “What’s this about mentioning names?”

  Larch raised a long, bony hand. “Now, Mr Biggadyke, no particular accusations have been made by anybody. But these explosions were arranged very skilfully. You’ll agree that not many local people have much in the way of technical knowledge. It’s only natural that anyone like yourself, with engineering or electrical qualifications, should come to mind. We should like to eliminate you from our inquiries, that’s all, sir.”

  Worple, who had never seen his chief in so conciliatory a mood, watched him with one eyebrow raised and slightly open mouth.

  “All right,” said Biggadyke, expansively. “Go ahead: eliminate me.”

  Larch smiled and leaned back in his chair. “I imagine I need only ask you to give some brief account of your whereabouts during the three nights in question, sir. I’m not requiring a formal statement. Just tell me confidentially; you’re under no obligation, of course.”

  Worple shut his mouth, swallowed, and looked across at Biggadyke. The dark, blood-laden face was puckered in thought. The powerful shoulders were hunched and one hand was occupied in smoothing expensive suiting over a thigh like a young hog.

  Suddenly, Biggadyke slapped his leg (Worple almost expected a squeal to result) and gave Larch a triumphant leer. “Tuesdays. They were all Tuesdays, weren’t they? Well, I’m out of town every Tuesday night. You can ask the missus. Anyway, you should know that yourself, boy. It’s club night over at Flax. I stay on at a pal’s place afterwards. Bert Smiles. He’ll tell you.”

  At the familiarity of ‘boy’ Larch frowned and glanced to see if Worple had noticed, but the sergeant’s expression remained blank.

  “Oh well, sir,” he said heartily, “that seems absolutely satisfactory. You could hardly be in two places at once, could you?”

  “Hardly,” Biggadyke agreed. His tone conveyed the controlled surprise of a man who learns that he has just said the right thing.

  “And if it should ever be necessary to check your statement, sir,” said Larch, drawing a pad of paper towards him, “the club is...”

  “The Trade and Haulage, St Anne’s Place.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Larch made a note. “And this Mr Smiles?”

  “Herbert Smiles, Derwentvale, Pawley Road. Councillor Smiles, he is.”

  Larch nodded and wrote. “Of course, we shan’t trouble the gentleman unless it really can’t be avoided. You understand that, sir?”

  “Oh, Bert wouldn’t mind. I once stood...” Biggadyke realized just in time that mention of bail would not be apposite in the present circumstances, even though Mr Smiles had, in fact, narrowly escaped conviction. He therefore substituted, with clumsy jocularity, “...stood in for him at a wedding.” The laughter with which he capped this extemporization sounded like an assault on stubborn nasal mucus.

  Worple shivered. But he felt almost sure by now that the large, apoplectic-looking, unlovable Mr Biggadyke was not the malefactor they sought.

  Chapter Seven

  The afternoon sunshine poured into St Luke’s Square and gilded the canvas awnings of the market booths. Buying and selling seemed suspended. Jacketless stallholders stood talking to one another or leaned against the timber uprights and sipped from big mugs of tea. The turmoil of market day had burned itself out. Those who ambled still between the rows of booths glanced without interest at the diminished mounds of fruit, the wilting lettuces, and the few remaining honeycombs, dressed chickens, milk cheeses, saucers of shellfish and other delicacies that once would have been drastically marked down ‘to clear’ at this time of day but which now could be carted off in the backs of shooting brakes to enjoy refrigerated immortality.

  Only one man had refused to succumb to the general apathy.

  He was a giant clad in greasy flannels and sweat-stained singlet who writhed and slithered around the inner circumference of the crowd he had collected with hoarse promises to bend a six-inch nail into an ‘S’ between his teeth. Clasping ham-sized hands, bound with clouts, before his mouth, he reached the climax of his exercise in a series of leaping convulsions that sent such quantities of blood to his upper parts that his great rigid neck looked like an inverted fire bucket. Then, panting hard and licking his thumb a great many times, he unwrapped layer after layer of cloth from his fist and triumphantly held aloft a nail-turned-meat-hook.

  “And would any gentleman,” he challenged his listless spectators, “care to straighten it out again ? Eh ? Eh ? Would you, sir?”

  Leonard Leaper, to his intense embarrassment, found the transformed nail lying heavy in his hand. He smiled weakly, shook his head, and offered it back. But the giant, his breath regained, had jumped three feet out of Leaper’s reach and was now holding up a small box in one hand and with the other was scornfully indicating the unwilling nail-bearer.

  “Shall I tell you something?” he yelled. He tossed his head and hanks of sweaty hair flapped back across his scalp like razor strops. “Shall I?” He gazed slowly round the circle of sulky but expectant faces. He crouched, still pointing at Leaper, and reverently laid the little box on the ground before him. He closed his eyes.

  “This lad,” he whispered throatily, “lacks the greatest gift of providence. Strength. Power.” He flexed his own gnarled oaks and went on: “The Egyptians had the secret. Oh, yes. Yes. They knew about the life-giving fluid that flows down from the cortical thorax, into the spine—here”—he jabbed a finger into the small of his back—“up to the brain and down, down again to the reproductive system.” He looked very satisfied with this itinerary, but did not open his eyes. After a moment’s silence, however, he did open his mouth and expelled the word “DOCTORS!” with a violence that sent the nearest of his audience staggering backward.

  The giant rose to his feet, repeated “Doctors!” in an only slightly less stentorian tone, and went on: “...sit up there in Harley Street, taking hundreds of guineas for telling people just what I tell you now. That fluid from the cortical thorax...”—he spun round and pointed down at the box—“the Egyptians knew, oh, yes...that fluid”—he scanned the crowd until his eyes fell on Leaper again—“is dissipated at your peril! Once the level falls below here”—he snapped a hand round to between his shoulder blades—“the spinal passages begin to dry up, the cerebellum shrinks, the muscles atrophy...” Hunching his shoulders, he began slowly advancing upon the luckless Leaper. “Headaches!” he cried, slapping his own temples. “Liver!” He groped amidst his guts. “Stomach!” Four inches of vermilion tongue lolled out over his chin. “Constipation, backache, bad breath, sleeplessness, dizzy spells, pain behind the eyes, catarrh, bad teeth...” The dreadful recital, illustrated with gestures of increasing ferocity, brought foam welling from the corners of his mouth. Then, with dramatic suddenness, the catalogue ceased. Leaper felt upon his shoulder a fatherly pressure, as if a rhinoceros had leaned upon it. “Give it up, boy!” he heard. “For your own sake. Give it up!”

  Leaper tore himself from the giant’s grasp, ducked and pushed his way out of the crowd. He was too agitated to notice that Cornelius Payne, who had been standing nearby, helped him to escape by opening up a passage.

  “Very humiliating for you,” said Payne when they were clear.

  Leaper looked up at him and blushed. “What did he have to pick on me for?” he murmured.

  “He very unkindly used you as a sort of advertisement, I think. ‘Before Taki
ng’, you know.”

  “I couldn’t see what he was getting at.” Leaper kept his face down as they walked slowly away.

  “Huckster’s cant, Mr Leaper,” Payne assured him. “Don’t take any notice of it.”

  Leaper glanced at him doubtfully. “I do get headaches sometimes,” he confided.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Are they really something to do with that...that fluid stuff he was talking about?”

  Payne grinned. “My dear Mr Leaper, you may take my word that everything uttered by that preposterous acrobat was sheer unadulterated piffle. It was, honestly.”

  Leaper remained silent a while but when again he looked up his pinched features had brightened perceptibly. The novel and gratifying experience of hearing himself addressed, without irony, as ‘Mister’ was beginning to register. Here, he reflected, was someone who would never, never call him ‘Kebble’s boy’.

  “I say, do you know anything about medicine and that?” His uncomfortable enthralment by cortical thoracic fluid was at an end, but he saw that Payne’s face was of the distinguished, handsome, slightly sad sort that he associated with great surgeons. Perhaps he could be persuaded to talk of miracle drugs and wonder treatments (Leaper was currently worrying a good deal about what he fancied to be signs of impending hairiness of the palms).

  Payne’s answer was a disappointment, however. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “Chemistry was about the nearest field to medicine I ever grazed in. And that was quite a while ago.” They were passing a small mock-Tudor doorway bearing the legend ‘Barbara’s Buttery’ and the scrawled, partly erased comment ‘She’s crumby, too.’

  “Would you care for a cup of tea?” Payne inquired graciously. “Thanks very much,” said Leaper. They climbed narrow stairs and entered, diffidently, the hag-ridden chamber above.

  While they sipped from folk pottery and watched fat women demolish, by genteel but rapid nibbling, piles of tiny cakes, Payne asked his companion flattering questions about journalism and mended the ego torn by the pill-peddlar’s insinuations. Then they eavesdropped upon the conversation at the next table, with Payne inserting casual remarks of his own that Leaper found very droll and worldly.

  The three women who provided this entertainment were Mrs Coady, wife of the Vicar of Chalmsbury, Mrs Courtney-Snell and Mrs Amelia Pointer.

  “I’m inclined to think,” Mrs Coady was saying, “that it’s some outsider who is responsible. These perfectly dreadful acts are so out of character with all the people we know here.”

  “Gangsterism!” exclaimed Mrs Courtney-Snell. The red leather upholstery of her face creased with disgust.

  “I wouldn’t say that exactly”—Mrs Coady’s determination to see only the best in people prevented her from saying anything exactly—“but visitors can be very thoughtless at times. They have different standards, you know.”

  “Or none at all,” observed Mrs Courtney-Snell acidly.

  Mrs Coady selected the least attractive of the cakes and sliced it gently. “Some motorists—from the North of England, I understand—quite shocked my husband yesterday. He went into the church and found them trying to break into the font. They said they wanted water for their car.”

  Mrs Pointer broke her silence with a faint tut of incredulity, then lapsed again into mournful contemplation of the vicar’s wife.

  “So you see,” went on Mrs Coady, “that there are people who see nothing wrong in destructive behaviour away from home. Tourists can be terribly heedless of local sensibilities. They have a sense of humour rather like that of the Vikings. We must try and understand them.”

  “All that concerns me,” said Mrs Courtney-Snell, to whom Mrs. Pointer’s gaze had switched expectantly, “is that somebody has smashed poor William’s memorial and that the police have not done a single thing about it. It’s absolutely disgusting.”

  Mrs Pointer sighed and looked back to Mrs Coady. She obliged with: “Perhaps it is better that the culprit should be left alone with his own conscience.”

  “He’s being left alone to make more of his filthy bombs,” retorted Mrs Courtney-Snell.

  “Now, my dear...” Mrs Coady’s smile of patient deprecation reminded Mrs Courtney-Snell that her selection for the chairmanship of the St Luke’s Fete Committee was not yet a certainty; she said no more.

  At that moment, a carefully groomed, self-possessed young woman who had been surveying the room from the doorway walked up and greeted Mrs Coady and her companions. Mrs Pointer she addressed as ‘mother’.

  Leaper looked as if he had just scalded his throat. He slewed round in his chair and hid his face from the new arrival. Payne glanced at him with concern.

  “I’ll have to get back to the office now,” whispered Leaper between gulps of his remaining tea. “Mr Kebble will be waiting for me.”

  “Very well, Mr Leaper. Just as you wish.” Payne rose gravely, picked up the bill and followed the bolting youth.

  Outside the tea shop, Leaper assumed shambling normality once more. “I’m awfully sorry if I rushed you,” he said, “but someone came in I didn’t want to see me. I chased up a story about her,” he added with a touch of pride.

  “Ah!”

  “Something pretty hot.”

  Payne raised his brows.

  “I say, don’t let on about this, will you, but it was the woman in that grey thing, the one who came up to the next table. I suppose you don’t happen to know who she is?”

  “I do, as a matter of fact. Why, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen her before, but last time she looked sort of different and I haven’t been able to think of her name since.”

  “Different?”

  Leaper looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes. She hadn’t...hadn’t any clothes on.”

  Payne blinked and grasped the neatly waxed end of his moustache. “My word, Mr Leaper, you must have a very interesting job.”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Leaper, lamely.

  “If what you say is true—and of course I don’t doubt your word—you have enjoyed the presumably rare privilege of sharing Chief Inspector Larch’s view of matrimony.”

  “Larch? How do you mean?”

  “Simply that it was his wife we saw just now. Hilda Larch. Daughter of Councillor Pointer. Her mother was sitting next to us.”

  “Oh, Lord!” Leaper groaned.

  He told briefly of what he had seen the previous night. Payne listened with polite interest but he asked no questions.

  “I wonder,” said Leaper, “who the bloke was. I only saw his arm.”

  “The owner of the caravan, I expect.”

  “You wouldn’t happen...”

  “No idea. Sorry.”

  Parting from Payne outside the Chronicle office, Leaper thanked him clumsily but warmly—and with absolute sincerity—for his company and for the tea. The angular, morose youth had never before encountered an adult human being willing to bear with him for more than five minutes at a time and the experience had stirred him. Payne accepted his gratitude with neither embarrassment nor condescension, said he hoped he might see him again, and walked off towards the jeweller’s shop which he had left, in confident expectation of no custom, in the charge of an amiable but moronic assistant.

  Leaper did not enter the office immediately. He had noticed a small crowd on the opposite side of the road, so he crossed and joined it. On a pair of steps Sergeant Worple was precariously working with a hacksaw and pliers in order to remove what was left of Barrington Hoole’s shop sign. Below him, Harry the photographer half knelt on the pavement and squinted through the view-finder of his mammoth camera. His object was to frame the sergeant’s head, whether artistically or wantonly he alone knew, within the battered oval of brass that hung from one slowly yielding hinge.

  Worple pretended to be unaware of Harry’s contortions, but he took care not to make any funny faces so long as he felt within range of that lens. At last, the whirring rattle of the old shutter and an assortment of ejaculations from the byst
anders told him that he had been ‘taken’. He gave a business-like sniff and completed his task with a wrench that nearly toppled him from the ladder.

  Mr Hoole received Worple in a friendly enough fashion when the sergeant carried the eye frame into the shop and set it upon the counter. “I’ll just give you a receipt for this article, sir,” said Worple, searching amongst his envelopes. “We shall have to take it away for a little while.”

  “You may keep it for ever, if you wish,” Hoole said pleasantly.

  “If decisions rested with me, sir, I’d have it sent to the forensic laboratory. The chief inspector doesn’t go much for science, though. He says all criminals condemn themselves out of their own mouths.”

  At the end of five minutes Worple carefully put away his pen and handed Hoole his receipt for ‘one optician’s sign, damaged, formerly situate 23 Watergate Street’. Hoole put the slip into a drawer.