“There was absolutely no sign,” the inspector added, “of a disturbance in or near the girl’s car. The clothing was not damaged in any way and it had been left in a neatly folded pile, except for a slip that looked as if it had been dropped on the ground and picked up again.”
Mr Chubb pouted thoughtfully. “All terribly speculative,” he complained. “It seems to me that there is nothing whatever to connect these two people.”
“Other than their simultaneous disappearance, sir.”
“Well, yes; that’s a pretty negative argument, after all.”
Purbright hesitated. The chief constable’s disputatious mood was out of character. Either he was spinning out the interview in order to absent himself from some kind of domestic unpleasantness, or he was genuinely apprehensive lest the Edna Hillyard affair provide the press with even more dastardly material.
“There is,” the inspector said, “one link that I haven’t mentioned yet. It may come under your heading of speculation, but I’ll tell you what it is, if you like.”
“Please do.”
“According to Mrs Persimmon—and I have not yet confirmed what she said—her husband works in some welfare capacity in partnership with three other well-known people. One, as we might expect, is the vicar. Sir Harry Bird is another. And the third is the Medical Officer, Dr Cropper, in whose office Miss Hillyard is employed.”
Mr Chubb wrinkled his nose. “A bit thin, Mr Purbright, isn’t it?”
An incoming call set off the buzzer of the unattended switchboard. Constable Braine clattered into the office and stared vaguely about him. Purbright waited until Braine had picked up the receiver before he spoke again.
“Tenuous perhaps at first sight, yes, sir. But an introduction might easily have resulted. I don’t know yet the nature of what Persimmon’s wife called his ‘samaritan’ activities, but they could be something to do with moral guidance.”
“You mean that is what the girl was in need of?”
“I mean nothing of the kind, sir. But women of generous and uninhibited temperament do have the misfortune to attract the attention of well-meaning people. That could...”
“Excuse me a moment, sir.”
Constable Braine had appeared at Purbright’s elbow.
A dignified nod from Mr Chubb conferred permission to speak. Braine straightened his shoulders.
“That was Henry Cutlock on the phone, sir. The fisherman. He was ringing from the staging at Five Mile Bar to say they’d picked up a body, sir. He thinks they’ll be berthing in just over an hour.”
Purbright looked up at the clock.
“Tell the ambulance station to have someone at the harbour by a quarter to one. You’d better warn them that the body’s been in the sea. Then get on to the hospital. Where’s Bill Malley?”
The Coroner’s Officer was likely, according to Braine, to be either at choir practice or playing darts in the Railway Hotel.
“Leave a message with his wife, then, will you? And I’d be obliged if you’d raise Harper in case we need pictures.”
Mr Chubb witnessed all this ordering of affairs with grave approval. It was not until Constable Braine had completed the commissions so far entrusted to him, however, that Purbright put the question which the chief constable had been waiting to hear answered.
“Did Henry say whether it was a man or a woman?”
“Man, sir.”
“Any hope of its being identifiable, did he think?”
“Oh, but he knows who it is, sir. It’s the manager of that supermarket at the corner of Bride Street. Mr Persimmon.”
Chapter Nine
The mortuary at Flaxborough General Hospital was set distinctly apart from the main group of buildings, as though the relationship was an embarrassment. It probably was, for whereas the hospital presented in 1912 brick baroque the florid and self-confident face of a doer of Good Works, the mean-visaged concrete and asbestos mortuary lurked like some necessary but resented menial, bearing mute witness to the philanthropist’s fallibility.
It was not the failure of hospital treatment, charitable or otherwise, that accounted for the latest occupancy of the mortuary, however. Bertram Persimmon had died either by drowning or—and the police surgeon inclined to this opinion after a preliminary examination of the body—from a deep wound in his neck.
“How long would you say he’d been in the water?”
Purbright was looking down at the white, boneless-seeming body of what the pathologist’s report was to describe as a “well-nourished male, aged 45-50, with some excess of adipose tissue but otherwise generally healthy apart from a degree of arterial deterioration consistent with age and sedentary occupation...” To the flaccid flesh of arms and legs, black hairs, still wet, clung like draggles of weed. The thick patch in the middle of the chest was less dark. Around the head, damp strands of grey were tangled. They, more than anything else about the corpse, suggested defeat and helplessness. Purbright discovered that he had the foolish desire to comb them into order.
“Difficult to tell. Two days. Three days. Ay-ay-ay-ay...”
This last sound was a favourite comment of Doctor Fergusson; it was a kind of brisk keening for human frailty.
Purbright watched the sun-burned poll of the little Scotsman as he short-sightedly peered and probed, turning over folds of skin, exploring bone structure and tracing with delicate fingers the lip of the great wound in the side of the neck.
Fergusson shook his head and tut-tutted.
“And what, my lad, were you doing to get this great hole dug in you?”
He straightened and said, this time to Purbright: “It’s one hell of a jab, is that.”
“Could it have happened while he was in the river? A chop from a propeller—something of that sort?”
“Not in a hundred years, laddie. Dearie me, no.” Fergusson bent again. “I’m not making any bets but I’ll be surprised if we don’t find that this was what put paid to him.”
“Have you any idea how a wound like that might have been caused?”
“I have not.”
“A knife?”
“No, no—not a knife. I’d say not a blade of any kind.”
“A spike, then?”
Fergusson did not refute this suggestion quite so promptly, but on reflection he thought a spike, in the sense of a spiked railing, say, was not the most likely weapon.
“What about a sharpened stake?”