In the hatch vacated by the landlord suddenly appeared the face of a heavily breathing, youngish woman with lemon-coloured hair. She gazed at them with a mixture of interest and amusement. “Lookin’ for corpsesez?” she asked.
The landlord flapped his hand at her. “Go switch the log on in the Tudor,” he commanded. His wife wrinkled her nose and lumbered off into the interior. “Miss Openshaw Palladium 1946,” he explained, then, half to himself, “That was before wide screens, mind.”
Purbright made formal introductions and began putting his questions.
“We’re interested in a roundabout way,” he said, “in a lady from Flaxborough—you know where that is, I suppose?—called Mrs Joan Carobleat. Has anyone ever stayed here under that name?”
The landlord yelled “Freda!” and added in normal tones, while the glasses still quivered, “Aye, I get you. Wait till she brings the book.”
Once more his wife materialized, Judy-like, in the hatch. “The book, love—fetch it here, will you?” Again she was gone, good-naturedly contemptuous and foot-dragging. Purbright and the local inspector each received the distinct impression that she had winked at him.
The landlord quickly found the signature he was looking for. He held out the book and pointed to it. Purbright saw that it was for the two nights before his encounter with Mrs Carobleat as she was leaving Flaxborough station. It confirmed her own story.
“You’re sure she actually stayed here—slept here, I mean?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, rather do I. I noticed, you know. She’s not exactly a stranger here, if you know what I mean.”
“And there’s no doubt she could have been nowhere else but here in the hotel on that second night?”
“Not unless she climbed out of the window and climbed back again in time for six-thirty tea. Look—it’s marked here—tea, six-thirty. She left to catch the eight-five at Hereford.” The landlord slammed the book shut and jutted his face forward. “What’s up? What’s she done? I’ll not, er...you know. Here, don’t tell me she’s been minced or something?” The last question was delivered with hopeful interest and a manual gesture suggestive of sawing.
Purbright said: “She stayed here fairly regularly, then? How often?”
“Oh, once or twice a month, maybe.”
“As often as that?” Purbright sounded surprised.
“Oh, aye. Recently, anyway. Of course, I’ve not been here all that long.”
“Since when?”
“Early last summer. May or June. She’s been here eight or nine times since then. Just for the odd night or two.”
“And always on her own?”
The landlord hesitated.
“Well?” Purbright’s tone was inoffensive, yet pressing.
The other scratched his ear. “Put it this way,” he said. “She was on her own all right when she was actually here. But she generally pushed off early in the evening and turned up again for breakfast. Oddly enough, though, this last time she did stay the night just as I told you. You needn’t worry about that. But most other times she didn’t.”
“What was the idea? Did she tell you?”
“She didn’t say anything, but I thought the same as anyone else would. She’s no chicken, but goodish looking. Married for a cert. And probably with a husband who’d want to know where she’d been. Well, if ever he came here he could see she’d spent the night very respectably in a single room with none of that Mr and Mrs Smith malarkey.” He shrugged. “I didn’t see any harm in obliging her. There was nothing common about her.”
“Do you know where she went when she left for the night?”
“No idea at all, old man. It wasn’t my business.”
“Come off it.” For the first time, Gibbins, the local inspector, entered the conversation. “This village is no bigger than my backside. Anyone coming here wouldn’t have a dozen houses to choose from to stay the night in. Somebody’s bound to know where the woman went. And I know as well as you do that the gosbip out here is spread in the bars like sawdust. Now just you tell this gentleman what you’ve heard, my lad.”
The landlord glanced resentfully at Inspector Gibbins’s whisky. “I tell you I don’t tittle-tattle with the peasantry,” he said. “They always keep to the Smugglers’ Browserie—what used to be the bar—ever since we did the place out and stopped them trying to bring goats along with them. Percy always serves them, not me.” He trotted to the hatch, evidently a sort of control centre, and shouted “Per-CEEE!”
The summons brought forth, after a minute or so, a huge, droopy-chopped mental deficient who kept wringing an imaginary dish-cloth and shaking his head. Persistent but kindly interrogation by Gibbins won the news that the ‘lady from away’ had been seen more than once bound in the direction of Avery Woodside, but that none knew precisely upon whose bed ‘them pretty ’aunches do ’ave steamed’.
Inspector Gibbins seemed satisfied and dismissed the mountainous haunch-fancier with thanks. He asked Purbright if he wished to know anything further.
“Was Mrs Carobleat never in the company of anyone here? Did you never see her strike up a conversation over a drink, say, or accept a lift in a car?”
The landlord was certain that he had not.
“Did you know her to make a telephone call at any times?”
She made no calls herself, but at her request he had occasionally rung for a taxi or to confirm the time of a train.
When the two policemen left the hotel, Gibbins pointed along the road to their left. “Avery’s that way,” he said. “I didan’ try to drag anything more out of Perce because what he did say leaves us with a very short choice. Come on.”
They soon drew level with a farm entrance. “Nothing there,” said Gibbins. “There’s just the old man and his sister and a stockman who lives in. They don’t know anybody.”
“What’s that place?” Purbright asked, nodding toward a house set in wooded grounds behind a wall that extended along the opposite side of the road.
“Do you have squires in your part of the world?”
Purbright shook his head. “Hardly. Our upper crust sank into the gravy quite a while since. Why, is that a manor? In the feudal sense, I mean?”
“It is. And wheezing in the middle of it somewhere is a real squire.”
“Paralysed with a surfeit of droit de seigneur?”
“Poxed and well-nigh boxed,” confirmed Gibbins. “I doubt if your Mrs Whatsername would have wanted to see him; not unless she had an interest in morbid pathology.”
“We’re not calling, then?”
“Only if we have no luck farther on.”
They reached a road fork, in the centre of which stood a public telephone kiosk.
“That’s just a track,” Gibbins said of the right-hand lane. They entered the other and began to walk more briskly. Neither spoke until they came within sight of a small house of red brick.
Gibbins said: “We’ll have a word with Mrs Battle. Considering the number of kids she has, I wonder she has time to notice anything that’s not on the stove or the clothes line, but it’s amazing how much she finds out. Perhaps Battle tells her. She’s not been this side of her gate since old Kennedy dropped dead from his delivery van in the road here one Thursday morning just after the war and she came out and stepped over him to get the bread she’d been waiting for.”