Mrs Claypole nodded. She was looking much more cheerful. Better for her than funerals, Purbright thought. He wandered off, looking at keyholes.
No other doors were locked, it seemed. Few, though, were without keys. Purbright began collecting them, after first lightly pencilling matching numbers on keys and door posts.
Several rooms were empty or occupied only by pieces of furniture obviously intended for deployment elsewhere. Some of Loughbury’s acquisitions in the antique market, assumed Purbright. Most were clearly of fine workmanship and authentic styling. They included a richly carved wooden chair with a very long back, a grandfather clock, the face of which was full of suns and moons, and a curious little lidded table with what looked like tea caddies suspended beneath.
Three bedrooms were furnished for use, expensively but not unconventionally. The largest, containing a double bed, unmade, and a dressing table covered with bottles and part-packets of chocolate and sweets, smelled of scent.
Scent. Purbright sniffed. Scent and...not kippers surely? He extracted the key from the door and made his pencil marks. Amblesby, the old Flaxborough coroner, he mused, used to nibble kippers in bed. But they hardly qualified, even by Mrs Claypole’s homely standards, as funeral meats. Smoked salmon, now...
He swung about, suddenly alarmed, and saw it almost at once. A thin feather of smoke, curling from the edge of a door in the opposite wall of the bedroom.
Purbright strode past the bed, reached for the door’s polished brass handle, then paused. He touched the metal. It was cool. So was the door itself. Guardedly, he opened it a few inches.
There was a fair amount of smoke in the room beyond but it was by no means impenetrable. Purbright saw no sign of flame. The room was much smaller than the bedroom; he supposed it to be a dressing room. Clothing certainly it contained—a pile of dresses and underwear in the further corner, smouldering steadily. He pulled the door shut.
Purbright hurried back to a second bathroom which he had noted a few minutes earlier. He set the bath taps running and soaked the largest towel he could see.
When he returned to the dressing room, the first flames were emerging sulkily from the clothing. He cast the wet towel over the pile, and gathered as much as he could in a tight mass within it, then ran to the bath.
After two more trips, nothing remained in the dressing room but a scattering of blackened scraps of cloth and some fragments melted upon the casing of a small electric heater. Over this somebody must have draped the clothes in ignorance of its being switched on.
The smell of burning accompanied Purbright when, at last, he presented himself at the side of Mrs Claypole and prepared to work through his key collection. She broke off the conversation she had been holding with her daughter, stared at Purbright and sniffed accusingly. “There’s something on fire.”
He introduced the first key, and wriggled it about with great concentration, his eye level with it. “On fire? No, no, nothing’s on fire. Look, hold these, do you mind?” He selected a second key from the bundle and handed her the rest. “Bit of cloth smouldering. Out now. Nothing to get worried about.” He squinted along the barrel of the next key.
“Cloth?” echoed Mrs Claypole. “What cloth? Smouldering? Where?”
“Out now,” muttered Purbright. Without looking at her, he held up his hand for another key.
It fitted and, with some resistance, turned.
For the first time since getting involved in the business, Purbright found himself wondering what would confront him when the door opened. He heard, as if it were an old recording, the never-believed claim of Detective Constable Harper: And there she was, Sarge, absolutely starkers!
“I think you’ll find you can get in now, Mrs Claypole.” He turned and stood gazing back along the passage.
Zoe was greeted by her mother as if she had just been winched down from the top of the Empire State Building.
“Oh, mum, shut up for Christ’s sake.” She pulled straight her modest black frock (DC Harper would have been much disappointed) and grimaced at the bathroom mirror.
“Who was it, then?” inquired her mother. “Who locked that door, Zoe? Who was it locked that door, that’s what I want to know.”
Zoe spotted Purbright’s modestly withdrawn figure; he had moved to the corner of the main corridor. She pointed and made a Who’s-that? face.
“You know who it is,” whispered her mother. “You saw him that day our Douglas was up in court. He was the one with those papers.”
“Oh, shit, not a policeman?”
“Listen, my girl, you’d be in a bad way if it wasn’t for him, whether he’s a policeman or not. As a matter of fact”—a note of self-congratulation—“he’s an inspector.” Mrs Claypole turned and raised her voice to normaclass="underline" “Excuse me, er... Mr...”
Purbright walked back. He made a small bow to Zoe. “Are you all right, Mrs Loughbury?” There had been no equivocation in his choice of phrase. Zoe smiled her gratitude.
The mother produced a smile also, but it was a proprietory one. “Mrs Claypole-Loughbury, actually,” she explained to Purbright, and looked as if she were going to say some more.
The younger woman took her arm brusquely. “Come on, mum; I’ve been perched on the edge of that bloody bath so long that I’ve got a crease in my arse.”
They moved off towards the stairs.
Purbright spoke, levelly but earnestly, about his discovery in the dressing room. Zoe agreed that, now that he’d mentioned it, there certainly was a bloody pong in the air. Mrs Claypole, at full throttle of alarm once more, repeatedly demanded who had been so wicked as to set fire to the house.
Purbright showed them the ruined but now harmless tangle of charred clothes in the bath. The sight moved Mrs Claypole to new transports of indignation. Then he led them to the bedroom and its annexe.
“The heater is off now, of course,” he said, “but I don’t doubt that it was the cause of the trouble. It—and a certain degree of carelessness, I’m afraid.” He really did sound regretful; there was nothing admonitory in his tone.
Mrs Claypole exercised no such restraint. “Zoe, you little idiot! What on earth were you thinking about? All those lovely things. And the whole house could have gone up. Then what would you have done?”
“Gone up with it, I suppose.” The retort lacked spike; Zoe had only half-listened to her mother. She stood regarding the heater, its bronze enamel streaked and crusted with black, rather as if her mind were elsewhere.
Purbright put no questions. But while Mrs Claypole peered, clucking, at evidence of near-disaster, he watched the younger woman.
After a few moments, she looked up. The inspector followed her gaze.
He saw, set high into the wall, what appeared to be a stoutly constructed bird cage.
Almost at once, her regard moved, met his own, then fell. “You must be thinking I’m a pretty stupid cluck.”