Winston Gash had thrust upon her a brimming glass. Some spirit slopped down her thigh, leaving a dark trail on the brown trouser leg. Love immediately handed her his spare, unblown-upon, handkerchief, kept for good causes. “What a sweetie you are!” declared Mrs Whybrow, and he blushed. “Peed yoursen?” inquired Mr Gash.
Mrs Whybrow applied Love’s handkerchief energetically to the gin streaks. “One thing you must be careful of,” she said between rubs. “However familiarly Mr. Bishop may address you, please do not call him Ray. It would upset him absolutely dreadfully.”
Love said he would remember.
Mrs Whybrow nodded and put Love’s handkerchief in her handbag.
“When you’ve been something terrifically important like a surgeon or whatever,” she said, “it simply isn’t bearable to be talked to as if you’re a plumber or a bank clerk...I mean, Mr Bishop used to be...” She stopped, shook her head very decidedly, and tapped the ash from her cigarette on to Love’s knee. “No, you mustn’t ask me—it’s too terribly top secret.”
She looked up, brightening, at the person under discussion, and said, as sweetly as to a child: “Isn’t it, darling? Simply too secret for words?”
Whatever things Mr Bishop had been in the past, tall must have been one of them. Now he stooped, as if he had congealed into that attitude over long years of condescension. The stoop robbed him, as it were, of his neck, and made of his rounded shoulders, head, brow, macaw-like nose and receding chin, one continuous curve, a huge comma. Tucked into the corner of the comma was an affable, rather dreamy smile.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr Bishop,” said Love, reading the smile as readiness to be friendly.
Bishop turned to Mrs Whybrow and weakly jabbed a finger in Love’s direction.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s Mr Love, darling.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Mr Bishop smiled on, but the finger movement now was dismissive.
“I am not being ridiculous, sweetheart. Mr Love and I are good friends.” She grabbed the sergeant’s hand and grinned at him, showing all her teeth.
“I don’t want anything in the newspapers. The chap understands, does he? Nothing in the papers, tell him.”
Love, as he was to explain to Purbright, had come to the conclusion by now that the Barleybird Inn was the resort not of talkative menials but of that particular section of the upper class that delights in the discomfiture of police officers. He stared at Bishop with cherubic concern and asked firmly: “What is it that you wish to be kept out of newspapers, sir?”
The ensuing silence told the sergeant that he had won a wider audience than he had intended.
The gravelly voice of Mrs Whybrow was first to be heard again.
“But Raymond, darling, the gentleman isn’t a reporter or anything dreadful like that. As far as anything’s ever clear to poor little me, I gather he’s come to the village to look for lost property. He’s a sort of detective.”
“Special Branch, is he?” Mr Bishop appeared to find this possibility very much to his taste, but still not attractive enough to entitle Love to direct address.
“I am not from the Special Branch, sir, but if you wish to confide in one of their officers, I feel sure that arrangements could be made.”
Someone had handed Mr Bishop a drink. He paid it prompt and concentrated attention, leaning forward to the glass while his elbow jutted out like a boxer’s guard. When he had finished, he handed the empty glass to Mrs Whybrow, who put it on the bar. She seemed used to doing him these small services.
“Tell him not to bother me about it, Booboo, will you? If the Special Branch require my services, they’ll be in touch, I doubt not.”
Another drink was coming Mr Bishop’s way, borne by Spencer Gash. Love reflected that there was a fair old turnover of larrup in Mumblesby on a weekday morning. He covertly surveyed Spen and other new arrivals.
Farmer Spencer was not so bulky a man as his brother, but had a powerful build, set off by hacking jacket and fawn cavalry twill trousers of better quality than the occasion would have seemed to warrant. His head was narrow, his nose long and lean, and the moustache traversing the full line of his upper lip had been shaved in a meticulously straight line. He wore a formal shirt and tie and a fox head tiepin in gold enamel. His voice was high, a little adenoidal. The drink he ordered for himself was a strong bottled lager with brandy chaser. Mr Gash Mark II addressed no word of impropriety to the woman behind the bar, but his look lingered long after each unexceptionable remark. The look, Sadie once had told a friend, was like hot gravy spilling slowly down the front of her dress.
By now, Mrs Whybrow was ready with more introductions.
One was to a man in his sixties. Curly grey hair, much receded, a face taking on fleshiness despite a determinedly energetic expression, good suit, immediate attentiveness. Love knew him. At one time head of a Flaxborough canning firm, he was the latter-day proprietor of the Old Mill Restaurant.
“Leonard, dearest boy, you must meet my amorous policeman—Love—amorous—No? Oh, dear, perhaps rather not...anyway, Mr Love, this luscious gentleman is Mr Palgrove and he and his charming wife serve the most wonderful food.”
“How do you do, Mr Palgrove,” said Love.
A large hand, white but with black hairs at the wrist, shot forward. “Len,” commanded its owner.
Love offered a weak smile of recognition, but it was not enough. His own hand was seized and held hostage while Mr Palgrove peered closely into his face.
“It’s Sidney, isn’t it? Lovely to see you again.”
Palgrove turned away, looking for other important engagements.
Mr Bishop giggled.
From the direction of Winston Gash: “Hey—when diddy last gittis legower?”
Mrs Whybrow smirked. “I rather think he means you,” she confided to Love.
The sergeant was frowning. “Who does?”