The Naked Nuns
Book 8 in the Flaxborough series with Inspector Purbright
Colin Watson
Chapter One
The cablegram was addressed to Hatch, Floradora, Flaxborough, England. It read:
TWO NAKEDNUNS AVAILABLE PHILADELPHIA STOP PERF NINETEEN FIFTEEN STOP EIGHT DAYS OPTION STOP DOLLARS THREETHOUFIVE STOP INSTRUCT LONDON SOONEST STOP INFORMED FOUR NUNS ON OFFER DALLAS STOP WILL INVESTIGATE
The signature was Pake.
Telegraphic communications were so rare nowadays that no one at Flaxborough Post Office could remember whose job it was supposed to be to ride out on the red motor cycle that was propped gathering dust in a corner of the mail van garage. So telegrams, as a general rule, were treated as letters and delivered on the next regular round, with perhaps an extra knock or ring to signify urgency.
Here, though, was a wire that had come all the way from America and, queer as its phrasing was, implied big business dealing of some kind. The Postmaster, appealed to for a decision, ruled that immediate action was warranted, and one of the counter clerks, who lived not far from the Floradora Country Club, was instructed to deliver the cable when he went home for his tea.
Unfortunately, that happened to be a time of day when neither Mr Hatch nor anyone to whom he had deputed authority was on the club premises. The wire was accepted reluctantly by a Miss Ryland, spinster and temporary telephonist of this parish, who said that she would hand it to Mr Hatch’s secretary the moment he returned at six o’clock.
Gladys Ryland was one of those people for whom any unopened telegram is like an over-term pregnancy: they dread learning of something having gone wrong and at the same time fear the fatal consequence of inaction. At the end of twenty minutes’ increasingly nervous indecision, she resolved upon a caesarian.
She read the wire through three times very slowly. The only sign she gave of any reaction was a slight shiver. And perhaps the line of her lips had tightened a fraction.
She copied the wording carefully upon a leaf torn from the telephone message pad, folded it twice and put it in her purse. The telegram she restored to its envelope. When Mr Amis, Mr. Hatch’s secretary, came in at five minutes past six, she handed it to him and said, “I opened it to see if it was anything urgent, but I couldn’t make much sense of it, I’m afraid, so I left it for you to deal with.” And Miss Ryland favoured Mr Amis with a smile—of sorts—and he said thank you very much, he expected Mr Hatch would know what it was about, and took the telegram off with him.
On the following morning, Miss Ryland went to the police station and presented her copy of the cable to Detective Inspector Purbright. She assured him—and he said he believed her—that she was not the sort of woman to betray an employer’s trust, but she did think that any evidence, however slight, that suggested a white slave traffic ought to be examined and followed up by the authorities.
The inspector, who privately wondered how nuns might be identified as such in the total absence of their habits and what they might be doing in Philadelphia, of all places, in such a condition, promised Miss Ryland that her information would be most carefully borne in mind.
Chapter Two
The Deputy Town Clerk of Flaxborough stared down reflectively upon the satin nightdress case of Mrs Sophie Hatch. Embroidered in black on its pale lemon quilting, her initials—floridly gothic—looked like a request for silence. The Deputy Town Clerk sipped his cocktail, gauged the considerable depth of Mrs Hatch’s bedroom carpet by burrowing into it with the point of his shoe, and wondered whether he had been wise, after all, to accept her invitation.
“It usually happens just about now,” said Mrs Hatch. She looked nervously at the clock of the bedside tea-maker, then glanced out of the huge picture window that ran the whole length of one wall.
“Last night, it was exactly at a quarter to eight. Exactly.” She looked again at the clock. It showed three minutes past the quarter.
“Perhaps it’s gone wrong. These things often do. It could have gone wrong.”
The speaker was a tall, thin woman in a purple velvet dress that hung upon her angular frame like a dust cover. Mrs Vera Scorpe. Wife of a solicitor. On her face was eager condolence.
Mrs Hatch acknowledged with a quavery little laugh Mrs Scorpe’s ingenuousness.
“Gone wrong? Oh, dear, no. It’s got a magic eye. That’s electronics. They don’t go wrong nowadays. Not good ones.”
“Magic eye, for God’s sake,” said Mrs Scorpe to herself. She smiled icily at the ceiling.
“Of course, clouds can have an effect,” said a squat, pink-faced man, the branch manager of the bank patronised by Arnold Hatch and his company, Marshside Developments, and a great pourer of oil upon troubled waters. His wife turned from an examination of the bottles and jars on Mrs Hatch’s dressing-table long enough to nod in vigorous agreement.
“Have some more White Ladies,” Mrs Hatch urged suddenly. She grasped the neck of a square, vivid green bottle, and swung it in a general invitation. The Deputy Town Clerk, whose name was Dampier-Small, said “No—no, really” several times while he held out his glass to be filled. The others made grateful little noises. “Lovely,” said Mrs Beach, the bank manager’s wife, after making sure that her husband was having a second drink.
Only Mrs Scorpe remained aloof. “White Ladies!” she murmured to her friend, the ceiling. “I ask you!”
There were eight people in the room. The three who had contributed least to the conversation so far were a Mr and Mrs Maddox and a stout, leathery lady encased for the most part in wool and carrying on her arm a handbag of great size. This was Miss Cadbury, secretary of a local canine charity. She peered into her refilled glass mistrustfully, as if examining a urine sample from a sickly Great Dane: Mr Maddox, manager of the Roebuck Hotel, also looked perplexed but he was enough of a professional to disguise his dubiety as slowly dawning appreciation.
“Do you happen to know,” Mrs Hatch inquired of Mr Dampier-Small, “if Councillor Crispin and his, ah, his good lady are coming along? I did let them have an invite. That’s to say my husband’s private secretary did. I think.”
The Deputy Town Clerk was sorry, but he had not seen Councillor Crispin since that morning’s sitting of the Highways Committee.
“Never mind,” said Mrs Hatch. “It’s probably her boils again.”
She looked again at the bedside clock. Ten minutes to eight. Mrs Scorpe noticed and smirked.
“Light is a funny thing,” observed Mr Beach, charitably. “It often deceives the eye.”
“Not a magic eye.” Mrs Scorpe was unrelenting in her irony.
“When my husband was manager at the Peterborough Branch,” said Mrs Beach, “they had a burglar alarm system worked by light. Beams of light, you know. And he worked out a way that thieves might use to get past it. Didn’t you, Ted? And they changed the system. Didn’t they, Ted? Change it?”
“Well, actually...”