Purbright shrugged. “We all do silly things at times. When we’re under stress, especially.” He looked at his watch. “You’d better get back to the church. I’ll just hang on here a minute to make sure everything’s safe.” He glanced from mother to daughter. “Provided you don’t have any objection, of course.”
Mrs Claypole said: “It’s very kind of you, inspector.” She shuddered at the heater. “Even the thought of fire scares me to death. Just the thought.” She pulled Zoe’s arm through her own. “Come on, then: I don’t know what they’ll be thinking in church.”
“Getting out for a drink, I should think. What else?” Zoe allowed Mrs Claypole to lead her from the room. But in the instant of passing through the door she glanced once again at the cage on the wall.
Chapter Four
As soon as Zoe and her mother arrived at the church, Mr Bradlaw took them into his personal custody and conducted them slowly and with dignity up the central aisle. The Rev. Alan Kiverton, noticing the new procession, stopped praying. He took delivery of the two ladies and shepherded them to the front pew where he proceeded to signify by gestures regretful but mandatory that the three gentlemen already installed should yield their places.
Mr Stan Loughbury, wholesale ironmonger, and his two sons remained motionless. They stared stonily ahead. The rest of the congregation, sensing a more than ordinary case of bloodymindedness, craned and rustled.
Five seconds went by. Mr Kiverton, in truth, dismayed but committed now to relegation, summoned facial expressions in pairs: anger and conciliation, blame and forgiveness, exasperation and patience—rather like a machine designed to consume its own smoke.
All this Anglican diplomacy had no effect. The situation, it seemed to the now thoroughly intrigued onlookers, was one of siege.
Then, so suddenly that no one afterwards could quite recall the course of events, the two younger recalcitrants were rising painfully to their feet. At a list suggestive of a strong side wind, they quit the pew. Behind them, gripping an ear of each, was Zoe.
Mr Loughbury, senior, seemed to be considering a reprisal of some kind; then he, too, abandoned the pew. Zoe immediately pushed her mother into one of the vacated places and sat down herself, as bland of feature as a nun.
Mr Kiverton remained standing where he was just long enough to feel assured that the Loughburys would not regroup for a counter attack, then went back to the altar steps and got a hymn started with his confident, declamatory tenor.
During the singing, the displaced mourners briefly conferred and then marched out in line, angrily brushing black hats on black sleeves. Mr Bradlaw, who hated the slightest disruption of his arrangements, gloomily watched their departure in the direction of the car park and the Barleybird Inn.
He spoke to his son.
“That’s that, then. Now there’s no family at all. None of the other lot came, you know.”
“Did you find out why?”
“Oh, I knew why, son. Didn’t have to ask.”
“Because of her, was it?”
“Course it was.”
“I don’t see that it matters. His wife was dead. He could please himself.”
Mr Bradlaw snorted mirthlessly at this display of simple-mindedness. “Oh, dear, oh, dear.”
His son flushed. “Well, why not? What have his relations to get worked up about?”
A deep sigh. Words squeezed painfully past Mr Bradlaws exasperation. “Money, boy...mon-ey!”
The departure of Richard Loughbury’s brother and nephews was noticed by Inspector Purbright as he looked out of one of the windows of the Manor House, but he did not interpret it in terms of family disagreement. It was, he supposed, simply a sign that the service was at an end. The cortege would soon be leaving for the crematorium at Flaxborough. There was not much time left in which he could convincingly claim to be taking precautions against fire breaking out again.
He already had searched thoroughly the bathroom in which Zoe had been locked. Its window, an old-fashioned guillotine, was painted shut at the bottom and he doubted if the woman could have reached to slip a key out of the narrow gap near the ceiling. Of course, she might have hidden it beneath her own clothing.
Or was her mothers suggestion the true one? That someone in the corridor had turned the key while Zoe was washing, pocketed it and quietly rejoined the others down-stairs as they were leaving for the church?
Purbright realized that either supposition could be justified. Here was a man’s mistress who might well be deemed an upstart and an interloper by his family and friends. Rather than facing out their hostility at the funeral, she was not to be blamed for dodging the occasion by a small subterfuge.
Conversely, a relative who felt strongly opposed to her preseace certainly could have contrived to forestall it by the same means.
In neither case, Purbright reminded himself, had there been infringement of the law, other than of a pretty footling kind.
So why was he now wasting time wandering from room to room in Mumblesby Manor when he could be on his way to what was left of Saturday afternoon in his own garden in Flaxborough?
It was the thought of the pile of smouldering clothes in the dressing room that disturbed him. Explanations came to mind readily enough, simple and perfectly reasonable explanations. Heaters did get switched on thoughtlessly, even accidentally. And, wrong as it was for clothes to get tossed over them, that did happen—especially when people were worried or in haste.
For the fifth time, Purbright entered the small room where the fire had been. It contained little. Beneath the window was an openwork cane chest, half filled with bed linen. A matching cane chair stood between it and the electric heater. Next to the door leading into the passage was a glazed earthenware jar, two feet tall, from which protruded two very old golf clubs and a shooting stick. The only other portable object was a japanned deed box, much battered and bearing splashes of anciently spilled paint, its lid secured by a small and considerably newer-looking padlock. This box stood just behind the communicating door from the bedroom, as though it had been placed there as a stop.
All these things Purbright gave long, thoughtful scrutiny without disturbing them. Then he went over to the one object in the room for which he felt totally unable to account and began to examine it in detail.
He saw that bird cage was not, after all, a fitting description. A cage, yes—about eight inches square and standing an inch and half out from the wall—but the bars were nearly a quarter of an inch thick, and made, he thought, of stainless steel. Behind this grille was glass, of what thickness Purbright could not judge, and behind the glass a recess had been cut into the wall to the depth of a brick.
The arrangement was of the kind within which a jeweller might display a single piece of such value as to require special precautions against theft or damage. What Purbright saw in the recess, though, was not jewellery. It was a lump of wood.