“I don’t see why not. Away you go. Good. Fox, you might penetrate to the bedchamber. I can’t find her blasted diary anywhere.”
Fox retired to the bedroom. Pender came back and said it was rougher than ever out of doors, and he didn’t see himself getting back to the village. Would it be all right if he spent the rest of the night on Miss Cost’s bed? “When vacant, in a manner of speaking,” he added, being aware of Fox’s activities. Fox emerged from a pitchpine wardrobe, obviously scandalized by Sergeant Pender’s unconventional approach, but Alleyn said he saw nothing against the suggestion and set Pender to tend the switchboard and help Thompson.
He returned to his own job. The parlour was a sort of unfinished echo of the front shop. Rows of plastic ladies, awaiting coats of green, yellow and pink paint, smirked blankly from the shelves. There were stacks of rhyme-sheets and stationery, and piles of jerkins, still to be sewn up the sides. Through the open door he could see the kitchen table with a jug and sugar-basin and a dirty cup with a sodden crust in its saucer. Miss Cost would have washed them up, no doubt, if she had returned from early service and not gone walking through the rain to her death.
In a large envelope he came across a number of photographs. A group of village maidens, Cissy prominent among them, with their arms upraised in what was clearly intended for corybantic ecstasy. Wally, showing his hands. Wally with his mouth open. Miss Cost, herself, in a looking-glass with her thumb on the camera trigger and smiling dreadfully. Several snapshots, obviously taken in the grounds of the nursing home, with Dr. Mayne, caught in moments of reluctance shading into irritation. View of the spring and one of a dark foreign-looking lady with an intense expression.
He heard Fox pull a heavy piece of furniture across the wooden floor and then give an ejaculation.
“Anything?” Alleyn asked.
“Might be. Behind the bed-head. A locked cupboard. Solid, mortise job. Now, where’d she have stowed the key?”
“Not in her bag. Where do spinsters hide keys?”
“I’ll try the chest of drawers for a start,” said Fox.
“You jolly well do. A favourite cache. Association of ideas. Freud would have something to say about it.”
Drawers were wrenched open, one after another.
“By gum!” Fox presently exclaimed. “You’re right, Mr. Alleyn. Two keys. Here we are.”
“Where?”
“Wrapped up in her com’s.”
“In the absence of a chastity belt, no doubt.”
“What’s that, Mr. Alleyn?”
“No matter. Either of them fit?”
“Hold on. The thing’s down by the skirting board. Yes. Yes, I do believe… Here we are.”
A lock clicked.
“Well?”
“Two cash boxes, so far,” Fox said, his voice strangely muffled.
Alleyn walked into the bedroom and was confronted by his colleague’s stern, up-ended beneath an illuminated legend which read:
Jog on, jog on the footpath way
And merrily hent the stile-a.
This was supported by a bookshelf on which the works of Algernon Blackwood and Dennis Wheatley predominated.
Fox was on his knees with his head to the floor and his arm in a cupboard. He extracted two japanned boxes and put them on the unmade bed, across which lay a rumpled nightgown embroidered with lazy-daisies.
“The small key’s the job for both,” he said. “There you are, sir.”
The first box contained rolled bundles of banknotes and a well-filled cashbag; the second, a number of papers. Alleyn began to examine them.
The top sheet was a carbon copy with a perforated edge. It showed, in type, a list of dates and times covering the past twelve months.
The Spring.
August 15th—8:15 p.m.
August 21st—8:30 p.m.
August 29th—8:30 p.m.
There were twenty entries. Two, placed apart from the others, and dated the preceding year, were heavily underlined.
July 22nd—5 p.m. and September 30th—8:45.
“From a duplicating book in her desk,” Alleyn said. “A page has been cut out. It’ll be the top copy of this one.”
“Typewritten,” Fox commented. “There’s a decrepit machine in the parlour. We’ll check, but I think this’ll be it.”
“Do the dates mean anything to you, Mr. Alleyn?”
“The underlined item does. Year before last. July 22nd—5 p.m. That’s the date and time of the Wally’s warts affair. Yesterday was the second anniversary.”
“Would the others be notes of later cures? Was any record kept?”
“Not to begin with. There is, now. The book’s on view at Wally’s cottage. We can check, but I don’t think that’s the answer. The dates are too closely bunched. They give — let’s see; they give three entries for August of last year, one for September, and then nothing until April 27th of this year. Then a regular sequence over the last three months up to — yes, by George! — up to a fortnight ago. What do you make of it, Br’er Fox? Any ideas?”
“Only that they’re all within licensing hours. Very nice bitter they serve up at the Boy-and-Lobster. It wouldn’t go down too badly. Warm in here, isn’t it?”
Alleyn looked thoughtfully at him. “You’re perfectly right,” he said. He went into the shop. “Pender,” he called out, “who’s the bartender in the evenings at the Boy-and-Lobster?”
“In the old days, sir, it were always the Major hisself. Since these yurr princely extensions, however, there be a barmaid in the main premises and the Major serves in a little wee fancy kind of place, behind the lounge.”
“Always?”
“When he’m capable,” said Pender drily, “which is pretty well always. He’m a masterpiece for holding his liquor.”
Pender returned to the shop. “There’s one other thing,” Alleyn said to Fox. “The actual times she’s got here between April and July grow later as the days grow longer.”
“So they do,” Fox said. “That’s right. So they do.”
“Welclass="underline" let it simmer. What’s next? Exhibit Two.”
It was an envelope containing an exposed piece of film and a single print. Alleyn was about to lay the print on Miss Cost’s pillow. This bore the impress of her head and a single gray hair. He looked at it briefly, turned aside, and dropped the print on her dressing-table. Fox joined him.
It was a dull, indifferent snapshot: a tangle of bracken, a downward slope of broken ground and the top of a large boulder. In the foreground, out of focus, was the image of wire netting.
“Above the spring,” Alleyn said. “Taken from the hillside. Look here, Fox.”
Fox adjusted his spectacles. “Feet,” he said. “Two pairs. Courting couple!”
“Very much so. Miss Cost’s anathema. I’m afraid Miss Cost begins to emerge as a progressively unattractive character.”
“Shutter-peeping,” said Fox. “You don’t get it so often among women.”
Alleyn turned it over. Neatly written across the back was the current year, and “June 17th—7:30 p.m.”
“Last month,” Alleyn said. “Bailey!” he called out. “Here a minute, would you?” Bailey came in. “Take a look at this. Use a lens. I want you to tell me if you think the man’s shoes in this shot might tally with anything you saw at the spring. It’s a tall order, I know.”
Bailey put the snapshot under a lamp and bent over it. Presently he said: “Can I have a word with Thompson, sir?” Sergeant Thompson was summoned from outer darkness. “How would this blow up?” Bailey asked him. “Here’s the neg.”