“Bloodstained?”
“Aye, I reckon it was. Just a bit.”
“Did he have anything to say, Mr Walker?” asked Bradley.
The old man considered. He was fondling the ear of a little grey cat that lay on a shelf beside him, its tail drooping perilously dose to the tea in Mr Walker’s mug.
“No, not really,” decided Mr Walker. The cat half-opened an eye and subjected Purbright to slow, supercilious appraisal. Mr Walker remembered something. “Hang on, though—he did ask me the way somewhere—he asked the way to Mill Lane.”
They thanked the old man, stroked his cat, and left.
“Your Mr O’Dwyer may not have spent very long in this part of the world, but he certainly packed in a lot of social calls,” Purbright said to Bradley, as they drove off.
“His friends on the Finchley Road will be impressed when they hear. Dear me—a shoot with the landed gentry—hobnobbing with consultants...”
“But not,” Purbright observed quickly, “in that order, you’ll notice. Why, when he’d finished knocking respect into old Crutchy Anderson, did he come chasing after Dr Gule, of all people?”
“We don’t know that he did.”
“He didn’t come all this way just to find an all-night garage. Anyway, Mill Lane would be too much of a coincidence: there aren’t above six houses from one end to the other.”
“You remember that when we talked to Anderson, he mentioned having told Frankie of Arnold’s connection with the Moldham family?”
Purbright smiled. “The harristocrofats, yes. Just before he passed out.”
“He made it sound as if the information had been forced out of him. Yet Frankie considered it less important, less urgent, than something he’d learned about Dr Gule. Or so it would seem.”
Purbright agreed.
“Why, then,” Bradley asked, “did that otherwise talkative old sailorman not tell us what it was?”
“Fear of O’Dwyer?”
“I doubt it. Frankie was a man who didn’t linger or return once he’d got what he wanted. And Anderson, I should say, is the sort of old rogue who would be able to size him up pretty quickly. It’s somebody else he’s frightened of.”
They had reached a part of Chalmsbury set well back behind the main road and served by a narrow lane shaded by huge chestnut trees, where a speculative builder had, in the 1960s, created “for the more discriminating home owner” his Villas in the Dell, a scattering of extortionately priced single-storey dwellings that an unimpressed council insisted on defining merely as one-to-seven Mill Lane.
“As a reward for your percipience,” Purbright said to Bradley, as the car turned into the broad gateway of “Sylvanus”, or number six, “I’ll let you have first bite at the gentleman who kept us waiting so long.”
Chapter Fourteen
The house was built on an irregularly-shaped plot of land in such a way that most of what was to spare lay between the front of the house and its flanking double garage. The area was paved but a flagstone had been left out here and there to allow rose bushes to be planted. These now were overgrown and straggled across the concrete like brambles.
A big blue saloon was in the garage, one door of which was still open. Part of the car’s rear bodywork was buckled, an old wound, scabbed with rust.
Purbright took his time walking to the front door. He seemed interested in the flagstones.
Bradley strolled alongside. They approached the big semi-circular arch of dressed stone that served as entrance porch. In its shelter, Purbright pointed back to the patch of oil-soaked concrete he had spotted near one of the bushes. It was a foot across and gleamed thickly in the evening sun.
“He was here for some time, by the look of it,” Purbright said.
There was no audible response to his pressing the bell button. It seemed not to be working. He tapped sharply with a coin. Almost at once, the door opened.
The girl standing there was young. She was pretty, but looked tired. From beneath the long skirt, made of a russet curtain-like material, peeped bare feet. She had enamelled her toe-nails green; the feet, though, were childishly grubby.
“Yer?”
“My colleague and I,” Bradley began, “should be much obliged if...”
“Yer wot?”
For a moment Purbright was beset by the notion that the poor girl’s difficulty in enunciation, together with the seemingly involuntary nodding and shaking of her head and shoulders, were indicative of some palsy-like illness. Then he realized that they were associated in fact with the sound he could hear somewhere inside the house of a radio or record player. He withheld the nudge whereby he was about to warn Bradley not to be unkind to a sick girl.
Bradley tried again, in firmer tones.
“We are police officers and we wish to see Dr Gule. At once. Please tell him so.”
“Wossy dunthen?”
Bradley preserved a stern silence. After a while, the girl shrugged and called back into the house.
“Hey, Dey-do, s’few.”
She waited, half-turned in the doorway, looking upward with her mouth a little open. Into the vacancy of her expression crept a slow smile. “Scuppla dix,” she called, then listened again. She winked mischievously at Purbright before calling once more. “C’mon, s’few. S’fline squod.”
Beyond the girl, Bradley discerned movement. He stepped forward and stood by her side. “Dr Gule, may we come in? I believe you know who we are.”
Without looking at her, Gule took the girl by the wrist and thrust her aside. She stuck out her tongue and ambled away contentedly in the direction of the musical pulsations.
Gule was not wearing his diagnostic half-moons but nevertheless regarded the callers by habit from beneath lowered brows.
“You say you are policemen?”
“We confidently assert it,” replied Bradley.
For several seconds Dr Gule continued to scrutinize his visitors as if hopeful of decrying symptoms of imminent mortification. Purbright gazed back, not defiantly, but with mild curiosity at the patches of hair which survived the doctor’s otherwise fastidious razoring of his grave, slightly eunuch-like face; they grew upon cheekbones and adam’s apple and resembled little rolls of wire.
“You must realize,” said Gule, “that this is my private residence and not an out-patients’ department. Could you not have called at the hospital?”
Bradley looked politely interested. “Which hospital would that be, doctor?”
“Flaxborough General. I was there earlier this evening. I would have had no objection to making myself available, had you asked in a proper manner.”
Bradley, watched by the admiring Purbright, leaned forward and gave Gule’s upper arm a friendly squeeze. “Don’t reproach yourself, doctor. What matters is that you are available now. Shall we go inside?” And he stepped through the doorway, ushering Gule into his own house.