I need hardly say how quickly I detected the weakness of the scheme. The woman in the church had kept her face turned away. She could have been anybody. I now believe that it was, in fact, Mrs Cynthia Palgrove, impersonating Bernadette Croll. As for the scream—it is obvious enough that Cork-Bradden diverted my attention to the window business in order to slip out unnoticed to an open window in another room and scream out of it himself.
Given these subterfuges, it follows that the murder could have been committed at any time between Mrs Croll’s departure from home and my encountering her body.
It will be for the police to establish, perhaps by elimination, the identity of the actual murderer. My long experience of the law leaves me in no doubt but that his confederates will, when questioned along lines indicated by this statement, incriminate both him and themselves.
Chapter Seventeen
When Inspector Purbright drove into Home Farm, he found the approach road to be an almost exact replica of the entrance to Mr Pritty’s property. An identical concrete runway was bordered by the same open sheds, sheltering stocks of the same blue and yellow plastic bags of fertilizer, the same brands of insecticide and herbicide in their enigmatically coded canisters. What machines there were, though, looked older, more ill-used, than Pritty’s. Purbright identified two spray tenders and a crawler tractor, thickly encrusted with mud. From behind the tractor, Benjamin Croll emerged, carrying two five-gallon cans.
When he saw Purbright’s car, he stood still stockily, not setting down the cans, and stared. Purbright braked and got out. “Mr Croll?”
The farmer did not deny it. Purbright showed him a card and told him his name and rank. Croll betrayed no excitement. He was a dark-faced man with a tiny, sucked-in mouth. From the exact centre of the mouth hung a pipe. The inspector found himself looking at the ring of whitish deposit, rather like lime scale, that had been formed round the black vulcanite mouthpiece by the constant pursing and relaxing of the man’s lips.
“I want to talk about religion, Mr Croll,” said Purbright, pleasantly. “Is there somewhere more comfortable we might go?”
Croll’s expression did not alter. He seemed in no hurry to be relieved of his double burden. On the contrary, when at last he raised one hand to remove the pipe from his mouth as a prelude to speech, the can was elevated with it, borne on a single finger as effortlessly as a teacup.
Croll held the pipe, stem down, and watched it exude a black, tarry tear very, very slowly.
“What did you say your name was?”
Purbright gazed past him at the charred furrows that stretched into the far distance like a vast oven floor. Croll, like most of the farmers round about, no longer baled and stacked his straw after harvest but took the simpler, if more noxious, course of setting fire to it.
“I’ve been looking at the statements of witnesses at the inquest on your wife, sir. They contain one or two errors—misunderstandings, no doubt, but it would be better if they could be cleared up.” He added, quietly: “I’m sorry if this is reopening old wounds.”
Pensively, Croll spat. “I said nowt but what the lawyer telled me to say.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and moved away. Purbright followed at a companionable distance.
Croll slung the two cans into the back of a pickup truck. He trudged round towards the front, stopping twice to look at his boots and kick one against the other to loosen lumps of clay.
When he reached the drivers door, he found the inspector already leaning against it, looking thoughtful.
The farmer jerked his head. “Come on, shift yer arse or the bloody wind’ll change.” There was, seemingly, a further acreage of straw and stubble to be burned off.
Purbright stayed put. “Mr Croll,” he said, “you look to be a very busy man. I may not look it, but I am busy also. Suppose we agree to deal in a businesslike way with two perfectly simple questions? Then you may set fire to the whole county so far as I am concerned.”
Croll had begun to scowl more darkly, but he made no attempt to push past the inspector. The pipe was removed again.
“Religion? What d’you mean, religion?”
“No, sir; what do you mean by religion? In particular, what did you mean by it twelve months ago when you told the coroner that your wife was religious?”
“Eh?” said Mr Croll.
Purbright waited placidly. He watched a great blue-grey cloud that was rolling up out of the east. A neighbouring farmer had begun his straw burning.
“No wife o’ mine, that’n wasn’t,” declared Mr Croll.
Purbright affected surprise. “Oh? She sounded from your own account of her to be a very devout lady.”
“Very what?”
“Devout. Caring a lot for God.”
“All Detty cared about,” averred Mr Croll, “was dick.”
The inspector did his best to sound stern. “Then why did you tell the coroner that Mrs Croll was religious?”
Croll regarded Purbright reproachfully. “Are you saying now’s I ought’ve spoke ill of the dead?”
“You didn’t need to make things up, Mr Croll.”
“I did ’s the lawyer said, and that’s all.”
“By lawyer, I take it you mean Mr Loughbury?”
“Ar.”
“Why did you think Mr Loughbury wanted you to say that your wife was in the habit of staying out at night in order to pray?”
The smoke cloud from the adjoining farm was now overhead, darkening the sky. Black motes drifted down. The air had become blue and strongly acrid. Croll’s eyes were half closed and the scowl more intense in consequence.
“Best f’r everybody, mester.”
“Not to speak ill of the dead.”
“Bloody right.”
The inspector nodded, commendingly. “Just one more thing, Mr Croll.” He moved a little away from the truck door. “If you were so considerate of your wife’s reputation, why did you tell Mr Loughbury last July that she was pregnant as the result of her promiscuous behaviour?”
To Purbright’s surprise, his question provoked no anger but derision.
“And where,” Croll demanded, “did you get hold o’ that bloody tale?”
Purbright watched him yank open the door of the pickup, pause, then turn, his face crumpled with genuine bewilderment.
“Pregnant? How th’ell could Det be bloody pregnant? We ’ad ’er spayed ten years back ’n’ more.”
“Do you not think, Mr Purbright, that this man Croll was lying? From what you tell me, he would seem to be as unsavoury as some of the expressions he uses.”
Mr Chubb had had a heavy day. It began with the discovery that his detective inspector was determined to apply for a warrant, with quite appalling implications. The rest had followed inescapably: the re-reading of the Croll inquest depositions; a study of the wordy and painfully self-congratulatory testament of the late Richard Loughbury; then a hearing, during the warmest part of an afternoon rendered mortiferous by countless straw fires up-wind, of Purbright’s account of his own researches at Mumblesby.