‘Is that you, Leeming?’ he demanded.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What the devil are you doing here?’
‘Inspector Colbeck sent me to deliver this report,’ said Leeming, stepping forward to put the envelope on the desk then jumping back as if he’d just put food through the bars of a lion’s cage. ‘He sends his regards.’
‘Does he, indeed?’
Tallis opened the letter and read the report with a blend of interest and exasperation. His grunts of disapproval were warning signals. Leeming was about to become the whipping boy yet again.
‘So,’ said Tallis, glaring at him, ‘the Inspector is scouring the Midlands for an unusual top hat and you have been amusing yourself by pushing a wheelbarrow uphill. Is that the sum total of your achievements?’
‘There’s more to it than that, sir.’
‘Then why is there little else in the report?’
‘The missing top hat and the wheel marks of a barrow in the churchyard might turn out to be useful clues.’
‘Then again, they might not.’
‘We shall see, Superintendent. Does the inspector make no mention in his report of Gerard Burns, one of our suspects?’
‘Yes, he does,’ said Tallis, ‘but Colbeck seems more interested in telling me about his ability as a fast bowler than about his potential as a killer. And what’s this nonsense about a search for Miss Lydia Quayle?’
‘The inspector believes that she will give us information that can’t be obtained elsewhere. In the shadow of a murder, you expect a family to retreat into itself but, in this case, they’ve shut us out completely. Inspector Colbeck called at the house and had short shrift from Stanley Quayle. He’s the elder son. You’d have thought he’d have wanted to help those of us who are trying to catch the man who murdered his father but he’s shown no interest. His sister may be able to tell us why.’
‘Lydia Quayle had a disastrous relationship with this fellow, Burns.’
‘That’s why it’s important to find her, sir.’
‘You and Colbeck were sent to Derby to solve a heinous crime. I don’t want the pair of you poking into a misalliance between a gardener and a lady who should have known better. This is work for detectives of another kind,’ said Tallis with utter contempt. ‘I refer to that odious breed of private investigators that enjoy peeping through keyholes and eavesdropping on conversations. We are dealing with murder, Sergeant, not with sexual peccadilloes.’
‘The inspector called it a true romance.’
‘Well, he’d better not do so in my hearing.’
‘They must have loved each other to take such a risk.’
‘Don’t you dare invite me to speculate on the stratagems to which they resorted,’ said Tallis, leaning forward aggressively. ‘This attachment was never going to be sanctified by marriage. All that it did was to estrange a young woman from her family and give a dissolute fast bowler a reason to hate her father.’
‘Oh, he wasn’t dissolute, sir.’
‘Don’t argue with me, you idiot!’
‘Inspector Colbeck described him as a responsible person.’
‘And look at what he was responsible for!’
‘It happened years ago, sir.’
‘He ruined this young lady’s life and drove her apart from her family. And now,’ he continued, glancing at the report, ‘he’s had the gall to get married.’
‘It’s not a crime,’ retorted Leeming, emboldened by the scorn in Tallis’s voice. ‘If it is, you must arrest the inspector and me because we’ve both found someone with whom to share our lives. What happened between Gerard Burns and Lydia Quayle has a direct bearing on this case. One of them has been found,’ he stressed. ‘It’s important that we track down the other.’
Tallis was so stunned by the unaccustomed forthrightness of his visitor that he could find nothing to say. Instead, he scanned the report again so that he could take in the fine detail. When he’d finished, he looked up at Leeming.
‘As you wish, Sergeant,’ he said, chastened. ‘Find the lady.’
Though Ilkeston was in Derbyshire, it was much closer to Nottingham than it was to the county town that Colbeck had just left. It was an archetypal industrial community, owing its wealth to coal, ironworks and textile manufacture. When he got his first look at the place, Colbeck despaired of ever finding a cricket pitch there. It was so defiantly urban that the few trees he could see were like nervous guests afraid to step fully into a room. The ironworks stood at New Stanton to the south of the town and it soon made its presence felt. One of the three blast furnaces on the banks of the Nutbrook Canal suddenly boomed out and made the ground quake. Colbeck mused that even an experienced bowler like Gerard Burns would find it hard to maintain the rhythm of his run-up if disturbed by the deafening noise from the Stanton Ironworks.
The cab driver had a pleasant surprise for him. There was indeed a cricket pitch half a mile out of the town and he spoke fondly of it. Colbeck asked to be taken there. Having watched matches at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, he was bound to compare the Ilkeston equivalent unfavourably with it. Small, oval and encircled by trees, it also served as a park and a few tethered goats were grazing on it. Yet it was relatively flat and had a pavilion of sorts, a long wooden shed with a verandah in front of it. An old man was coming out of the pavilion. When Colbeck approached him, he discovered that he was talking to the groundsman.
‘How often are matches played here?’
‘Not often, sir.’
‘Is there a regular team here?’
‘Not really, sir.’
‘How much money is spent on the upkeep of the ground?’
‘Not much, sir.’
‘I see that you’ve got goats here.’
‘Better’n sheep, sir — far less dung.’
There was an element of pride in the man’s voice. What was a rather sorry pitch in Colbeck’s eyes was a source of pleasure to him. It was he who kept the grass cut and marked everything out. Ramshackle as it was, the pavilion had a fairly recent coat of white paint.
‘You had a match here a few days ago.’
The man chuckled. ‘We beat a team from Matlock, sir.’
‘Why was that?’
‘We ’ad best bowler in’t county.’
‘Gerard Burns?’
‘Aye, thass ’im.’
He went into rhapsodies about the game and described how none of the Matlock team could handle the speed, aggression and accuracy of Burns’s bowling. The Ilkeston team was gathered from the surrounding area. Miners, ironworkers and those employed in textile factories showed little interest in cricket. They saw it as a game for gentlemen and preferred rougher sports. Yet a cluster of spectators had turned out to watch Ilkeston destroy Matlock.
‘It were a treat, sir.’
‘I wish I’d seen Burns in action,’ said Colbeck. ‘I’ve heard a lot about him.’
‘The lad were champion.’
‘What happened after the game?’
‘We drank till we dropp’d.’
The old man’s reminiscences were so filled with excitement and spiced with the local dialect that Colbeck didn’t understand much of what he said but he heard the salient details. Burns had been invited to join the team by someone who’d seen him play for Nottinghamshire and knew of his move to Melbourne. It had taken time to persuade the gardener to represent Ilkeston as a guest player but, once he’d committed himself, he gave of his best. The celebrations went on into the evening and Burns had drunk more than his share of beer.
‘Then he went back to Melbourne, I suppose,’ said Colbeck.
‘No, sir. I were on’t cart wi’ ’m when it took us ter station.’
‘So where did he go?’