“Naturally.” Her lips closed again primly.
“At the house over the back?”
She nodded. Her expression guided Purbright’s next guess.
“There were...” he paused delicately, “...goings on?”
The woman turned and stared icily at the fire, as though willing it to go out.
Either Periam’s confession of disloyalty, reflected Purbright, had been a masterly understatement or else Miriam Cork possessed sensitivity remarkable even in a middle-aged spinster. He probed further.
“In a bedroom, I presume?”
Like the slow striking of a match came her reply. “On Mrs Periam’s bed.” There was a long pause. “Romping like dogs on a grave.” Another pause. “In the middle of the afternoon.”
“The girl...her name was Doreen: am I right?”
Miss Cork raised her eyes from the obstinately still burning fire and directed them at a big pair of binoculars that kept a Bible text propped against the wall above the mantelpiece. “Doreen Mackenzie,” she said, in a voice deliberately drained of tone.
“I see... Well, we needn’t dwell on that. Now this letter—I suppose you sent it to her fiancé?”
Again Miss Cork offered no immediate reply. Her hand crept once more to the centre of her ordeal by fig roll. “I’ve had this out in prayer,” she announced finally, “and I was told that I had taken the right road. The answer to your question is yes, if you feel it will do you any good. But I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
The inspector, taking her at her word, departed gracefully and not without satisfaction. Something which had puzzled him considerably was now clear.
The decision to encompass a man’s destruction by convincingly attributing a murder to him required very powerful provocation.
And the sort of revelations Miss Cork seemed capable of penning to a betrayed lover would provide, Purbright now felt sure, just that.
Chapter Sixteen
Charles Fawby, chief reporter of the Brockleston Shuttle and district correspondent for evening papers at Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln and of all the national mornings as well, would have been the first to admit that his district was less productive of hard news than most. Its houses never burned down; no gunman had ever sought a share of the small turnover of Brockleston’s two branch banks; the hotel registers remained innocent of the aliases of adulterous celebrities; even the beach was lamentably safe.
And yet Brockleston-rooted stories flowered in the Press as persistently as daisies in a city lawn.
Like daisies, they were small. They appeared always at page bottoms. Fawby did not mind that. A guinea for a three-line drollery represented a much more satisfactory return for labour than ten pounds or so for a page lead that might take the best part of a day to work upon and half the evening to telephone to morose, sceptical and hostile copy-takers.
He knew exactly what would tickle a sub-editor’s fancy and help meet the insatiable demand for short ‘fills’. His remunerative gleanings ranged from scraps of unconscious humour in the officialese of the district council minutes to whimsical remarks by old gentlemen arraigned in the local magistrates’ courts for drunkenness. Quips, parochial paradoxes, providential puns on street names, ironic errors, quaint coincidences: all these fed Fawby’s paragraphs.
What even this perceptive and adroit young man could never have foreseen, though, was that one of his modest guinea-earners was destined to confound an inspector of police, snap a chain of singularly plausible but false evidence, and reveal a murderer.
The piece appeared at the foot of the fourth column on page one of the county evening having the largest sale in Flaxborough. It was headed SALT PORK, and ran, in Mr Fawby’s admirably pithy prose: ‘The season’s oddest catch was landed at Brockleston South jetty this morning by a Sheffield angler. It was half a pig, rather the worse for immersion. And the name of the fisherman? Mr Andrew Hogg.’
Purbright stared at the page as though he had spotted his own obituary. Then he rang for Sergeant Love. There was no reply from the C.I.D. room. Purbright remembered that Love was touting a cigarette lighter round the friends of the late Hopjoy.
The late... He realized with a start that the words had sprung quite spontaneously into his mind. Had he, despite the credit he had so readily accorded Hopjoy as an ingenious schemer, known all along that...
He read the paragraph again, and sighed. Coincidence in the matter of such relative rarities as wandering sides of pork was too much to hope for. And Brockleston, of all places...of course, the sea was precisely the sort of dumping ground that would have occurred to a man returning in a hurry to his seaside hotel and anxious to dispose of a murder prop that had served its turn. Even if the carcass were to wash up again, there was scarcely any possibility of its coming to the notice of a police force twelve miles away.
Purbright rose abruptly from his desk and walked to the window. It was seldom that he felt annoyed with himself—or anyone else, for that matter—but now he experienced a strong temptation to punch a hole in the glass. There was something—some unwarrantable assumption or piece of credulity on his part—which had turned this whole case the wrong way round almost from the beginning. What the hell was it?
Hands in pockets, he prowled to the door, round his desk, again to the window. He thought back over a dozen interviews, peering again at faces and listening to voices in the hope of catching some hint of what had led him so hopelessly astray. The impression grew that a single cardinal error was responsible—his swallowing without question of a whopping lie. He concentrated on recalling the occasion most likely to have produced large lies—his first meeting with Gordon Periam.
And with Mrs Periam. Doreen. Doreen Mackenzie. The erstwhile ‘young lady’ of Brian Hopjoy, the girl whose sportive tendencies in mid-afternoon had so shocked observant Miss Cork...
Suddenly Purbright turned from the window. He snatched from his desk a large envelope that awaited posting to Periam and tore it open. He sought hastily among its contents for a letter in the spidery handwriting of a condoling aunt, glanced through it, and made for the door.
This time, Miss Cork did not ask her visitor in. She remained standing just inside the porch and looked at Purbright as if she had never seen him before. After only the tersest preamble, he launched from the doorstep the one question he had come to ask.
“Miss Cork, when you told me of writing a letter to Miss Mackenzie’s fiancé, did you mean Mr Hopjoy?”
She stared as she might at a detergent promoter who had gabbled an idiotic jingle and awaited some prescribed and equally inane response before handing her a pound.
“This is most important, Miss Cork. Was it Mr Hopjoy to whom you wrote that letter?”
“I don’t know what you mean. No, of course it wasn’t Mr Hopjoy. I wouldn’t”—the thin frame stiffened—“soil paper with that man’s name. It was Mr Periam she was engaged to. And had been for four years.”
“So it was Hopjoy with whom she...whom you saw...”
For a moment the woman’s eyes closed. The big nose twitched in confirmation of the unspeakable.