Colin Watson - Hopjoy Was Here

“I should appreciate a word with him, sir. Perhaps if you can give me the number of his room...”

Frowning, Barraclough reached for the telephone on his desk. “I’d really rather you...Dorabel, has Mr Periam in number eleven gone out yet? All right, dear; hold the line a moment...” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “He’s in his room. You can see him in here if you like—that would be best, wouldn’t it?” Hurriedly he spoke again into the phone. “Ask Mr Periam if he’d be good enough to come down; when he does, show him into my office.”

Barraclough sat back in his chair and flicked at his sleeve. “I’m sorry if I seem a bit formal over this, inspector, but I’m assuming your business is confidential and I shouldn’t like one of my guests to be embarrassed. He might be, you know, if you barged straight up to his room. And then there’s Mrs Periam to be considered, of course.”

Purbright stared at the plump, watchful little man, who now had given his smile a wistful cast to suit the part of tactful paternalism. “ Mrs Periam?”

“Oh, yes; a rather dear little thing. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to spoil her honeymoon.”

Chapter Six

In the privacy of a bedroom in an hotel a great deal less considerately appointed than was the Neptune for honey-mooning or, indeed, any other purpose, Ross and Pumphrey considered a course of inquiry that was to be separate and, for a while at least, divergent from Purbright’s.

Upon the decrepit bamboo table that divided Ross, seated in the only chair, and Pumphrey, perched on the thinly blanketed concrete slab that served as a bed, lay the file on Hopjoy’s operational reports.

Neither man had referred to the Chief Constable’s claim to be made privy to these papers. The well-meaning but gauche presumption of officers in the civil police were too familiar to be resented or even discussed.

Ross did, however, touch conversationally upon the personalities of those whom the disconcerting interruption of Line F.7 had made their temporary and tenuous associates. Mr Chubb he pronounced “an odd old bird: I kept expecting him to ring for a butler to show us out. The Purbright I’m a shade doubtful about. There’s a streak of cleverness there that doesn’t go with a provincial copper, I suppose he’s been cleared?”

“There’s no R-rating compiled, actually, but I can find no minus entry against him later than 1936, so it seems he’d be entitled to a ninety-four or ninety-five. That’s pretty average for police above sergeant.”

“1936...Left Book Club, I suppose?”

Pumphrey shook his head. “Flaxborough Grammar School Debating Society: he did some sort of a skit on Stanley Baldwin, apparently.”

Ross took his pipe from his pocket and leaned forward over the typescript before him. He read in silence for several minutes.

Pumphrey sat immobile. His breathing was regular but each exhalation seemed to encounter some slight adenoidal constriction. In the small, quiet room, the noise was obtrusive. He sounded like a man patiently trying to cool a very hot dinner.

Flicking over a page, Ross increased the pace of his reading. Soon he was glancing from paragraph to paragraph as if refreshing his memory of already digested passages. The last couple of pages he absorbed whole. He leaned back in the angular, threadbare chair and stared thoughtfully into his pipe bowl. When he spoke, it was without looking up.

Pumphrey gave a start. “Sorry, I didn’t...” He perked forward his pallid, sharp face and half-opened his mouth as though it were a third ear.

“I said he’s kept it all pretty carefully wrapped up.”

“Naturally.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t help us a great deal at the moment. He’s been eleven days out of contact now...”

“Twelve,” Pumphrey corrected.

“All right, twelve. That makes a takeover automatic. But we can’t put another fellow in without some clarification. Considering F.7 ran up some of the fattest exes in the sector I think it might have been left a bit tidier.”

Pumphrey eased another inch or two of neck out of his collar and stroked his chin. “You don’t suppose there’s a tactical explanation, I take it? You feel sure he’s been operationally negatived?”

“Oh, they’ve got him, all right. Rough luck on the poor devil, but we’re not here to organise a wake. As long as we do our job of joining up the cut ends as quickly as possible we can leave the bobbies to worry about what they think is the crime angle. Our people will see that nothing’s let out.”

“Suppose there’s an arrest, though. And a trial.”

“Oh, I hope they get the swine; I do, indeed. All I’m saying is that we aren’t primarily concerned with that aspect. And, believe me, if anyone is convicted it will be as plain Henry Jones, burglar, sadist, deceived husband, spurned queer—anything that a supremely efficient organization can pull out of its bag to hide the true identity and motive of one of its operators who was unlucky enough to be caught.”.

Ross carefully pocketed the doeskin pouch from which he had been shredding Latakia (black, he thought, as the gullet of that Transylvanian girl, rigid and love-groaning as his mouth descended upon hers in the Bucharest pullman...) He struck a match and allowed the last vestige of sulphur in its head to be expelled before holding the clear-burning pine a quarter of an inch above the pipe bowl. As he sucked, the high yellow flame curtsied and sent blue tongues stabbing down into the tight stack of tobacco. The dark laminated strands heaved, separated and became fiery filaments, then grey stamens of ash upon a glowing corolla. Finally they were crushed down beneath the curious bimetallic tamping ram. A blue cloud streamed parallel to the long stem, was divided by the bowl, bright as a horsechestnut newly split from its husk, and joined again in lazy assault upon the unappreciative nostrils of Pumphrey, who coughed pointedly and swung his head aside.

Ross regarded the manoeuvre without sympathy. “You’re no sensualist, Harry,” he reproved, mentally picturing Transylvanian frustration in the face of Pumphrey’s aridity.

“The police,” said Pumphrey, sticking to what he conceived to be the point, “are bound to consider that Periam is deeply implicated.”

“Periam?”

“The man Hopjoy lodged with.”

Ross shrugged. “That doesn’t mean a thing. We can be sure that our friends arranged for someone to appear implicated. There’s nothing here to suggest that Periam really had anything to do with it.” He waved towards the file.

“Oh, no; Hopjoy was confident enough in him. M cross-checked, of course. Right up to Blue One.”

Ross raised his brows. “What on earth did they suppose he was a first sec?”

“It was perfectly reasonable, security-wise...” Pumphrey paused to brace himself against another smoke cloud...“to put maximum screen on anyone sharing a house with one of our own operators. Periam cleared remarkably high, as it turned out. Even his relationship record was negative up to second cousin radius. Associative adulteration, nil. After allowance for stability depreciation he rings up a ninety-nine point six.”

“My God! He must be the only one.”

Pumphrey gave a slight shake of his head. “There are sixteen, actually. Occupation-wise, the breakdown is interesting. Five of them are tobacconists, like Periam. I think market gardeners come next. The rest are fairly mixed.”

“Any archbishops?”

Pumphrey considered, frowning. “No,” he said at last. “I rather think not.” He looked up. “I can check if you like. It’s hardly relevant, though, is it?”

“Hardly.” Ross stretched his big, action-loving body, savouring the innocent ecstasy of muscular power at full rack until the shabby hotel chair whimpered and there glittered from the gold links on his upthrust wrists the tiny diamonds prised in 1952 (so Ross could have told, had he wished) from the front teeth of the flamboyant inquisitor and tormentor Spuratkin.