“That, if I may say so, is up to you, sir. The mode of address does sound rather personal.”
“I don’t think you need worry on that score, Inspector. The letter’s here if you want to send a man round for it.”
And with that, Mr Chubb rang off. He felt, not for the first time, that his detective inspector might show more ready appreciation of his responsibilities.
Half an hour later, Constable Pooke arrived by bicycle at the Chief’s home.
He went to the side door by way of a gate bearing a white enamelled plate with the words ‘No Hawkers’. Pooke knew he was not a hawker and the thought that he could pass where a whole profession, however humble and even noxious, was barred, made the now sunny noon-tide all the more pleasing. He glanced approvingly at the hollyhocks and clematis that screened the front of the square, redbrick villa, and admired the authentic striped effect that meticulous mowing had imparted to the small lawn. There was another lawn at the back, bordered by rose beds and a number of rigidly disciplined fruit trees. Between two of these, Pooke glimpsed the tall, silver-haired figure of Mr Chubb. He was walking slowly in traversing movements over the grass and held before him what appeared to be a mine detector. As Pooke approached, he saw that the instrument was actually a long wooden stave with a shovel angled to its end. The chief constable, a breeder of Yorkshire terriers on a scale that even his fellow fanciers considered to verge on the immoral, was engaged on his daily Operation Cleansweep.
As Pooke waited respectfully for Mr Chubb to complete the last three traverses, he wondered where so many dogs could be corralled off. Their barking could be heard at some indeterminable distance. Within the house? Pooke—no hawker, he—paled at the thought.
However, the chief constable did not invite him in. He led him instead to a greenhouse where he retrieved the letter from its place of safety beneath a potted cactus and handed it to Pooke.
“Inspector Purbright asked if you would like a receipt, sir. In view of the letter being your personal property, sir.”
“That will not be necessary,” Mr Chubb said coldly. “My compliments to Mr Purbright, and will you tell him that I have decided the letter was misdirected. He must do with it as he thinks best.”
His grey gaze slid gently past the constable and settled upon a geranium, an errant shoot of which he reached across to pinch off. Pooke, feeling himself not merely dismissed but rendered non-existent, said “Sir”, all by itself, and departed.
It was not until mid-afternoon that a third letter, identical to those that had reached Mr Amblesby and Mr Chubb, arrived in the hands of its addressee, the editor of the Flaxborough Citizen.
George Lintz had been called the previous day to a conference at the London office of the group of newspapers that had bought the Citizen two years before. After sitting silently through the dismal and unintelligible wrangle that the Chairman described, with considerable neck, as ‘an inspirational get-together’, he had missed the last train back to Flaxborough. He had slept badly in an expensive and hostile hotel. Worst of all, his thoughtless use of the expired half of his day return ticket had been triumphantly challenged by the collector at Flaxborough station, a man who remembered well the vain plea he once had made to Lintz for the keeping of his shop-lifting mother-in-law’s name out of the paper.
Not unreasonably, Lintz was in a somewhat sour mood by the time he began to explore the pile of such news copy and correspondence as his editorial staff had felt unable to deal with on its own.
Having reached, read and pondered the ‘Dear Friend’ letter, he went to the door and summoned from an airless cubby-hole across the landing his chief reporter.
“What on earth is this bloody thing supposed to be about?”
The chief reporter, a narrow-faced, regretful-looking man with a probing fingertip permanently in one ear, offered no suggestion.
“What have you done with the photograph?” Lintz made a show of shuffling the papers on his desk top.
“There wasn’t one.”
“But it says here that whoever it is has enclosed a photograph. It’s clear enough. And look, there’s been something pinned to this corner.” Lintz held the letter aloft for two or three seconds, then tossed it down. “God, I don’t know...I’ve only to be out of the office five minutes and people start losing everything. Go and see if it’s got into the reporters’ room.”
“That’s all there was in the envelope. I opened it myself. Nothing but that. Definitely.”
Lintz leaned back, tilting his chair almost to the wall. “Well, it’s not very helpful, then, is it?”
“Definitely not.” The chief reporter now was looking not only sad but bored.
Lintz brought his chair level again with a bang. “Make a copy straight away. Then let me have that back. Don’t write anything yet. If it isn’t one of those bloody hoaxes we ought to get a decent little story out of it.”
“Oh, aye. Definitely.” The chief reporter could as well have been acknowledging the likelihood of string vests being splendid protection against death by lightning.
He returned with a copy forty minutes later.
Lintz put it into the top drawer of his desk and pocketed the original. He locked the desk while the chief reporter was still looking. Then he took his hat from a derelict gas bracket beside the door and went out.
The chief reporter listened to Lintz clatter briskly down the stairs. He again crossed the landing to his own cell and having wedged its broken chair into an angle of the wall he sat in it and went immediately to sleep.
It was four o’clock, that pleasant downward slope of the Flaxborough day from which the prospect of an end to work, one hour distant, was clear and comforting. Lintz emerged from the Citizen building into a street almost devoid of traffic. A couple of cars driven by women on their way to collect children from school went slowly past him and turned off into Park Street. An old man wearing a thick, blue fisherman’s jersey sat on the kerb looking as if he might decide at any moment to set about replacing the slipped chain of his bicycle. From the doorway of a grocery store stepped a bald-headed man in a white coat. He gazed up and down the street, spotted Lintz, and briefly raised his hand. Then he concentrated all his attention upon an empty wooden box that lay at one side of his doorway. After a long while he moved it with his foot three inches farther north and stepped back to review it again. He was still thoughtfully regarding the box when Lintz turned the corner into Fen Street.
The police station was thirty yards along, on the lefthand side. It belonged to the same period as the Municipal Buildings and the town’s wash-house (the latter recently demolished as a gesture of the council’s good faith in private, as distinct from public, hygiene). The style was Edwardian gothic; the material, that peculiarly durable stone which looks like petrified diarrhoea.
Lintz sought the entrance, which was halfway down a narrow passage at the side of the building. The small, rather sneaky doorway led to a dim corridor flagged with stone. On the right was a sliding window, a foot square, beneath a painted ‘Inquiries’ sign.