Colin Watson - Hopjoy Was Here

Ross let fall his arms, slumped happily for half a minute, then sat up straight and alert. “We’d better make a start. All we can do at this stage is to follow Hopjoy’s lines more or less at random until we get some sort of a picture. I suggest you begin with a haircut, Harry.”

“George Tozer,” Pumphrey responded with unwonted pertness, “thirty-two Spindle Lane. Correct?”

Ross grinned and rose. “Absolutely correct, old son.” He felt touched, as he did whenever Pumphrey allowed pride in his gift of fact-retention to glimmer through an otherwise sombre personality, and did not grudge acknowledgement. Daringly he added: “Just as well the name’s not Todd, eh?”

Pumphrey looked blank. “Todd?” He unfolded a street map of Flaxborough, found Spindle Lane, and committed to memory the names of the intermediate roads. “Todd?” he repeated, looking up.

“Nothing,” said Ross. “Just a joke. A barber joke.” There was something, he reflected, a little Teutonic about Pumphrey.

A solitary fly patrolled the latticed shaft of sunshine that slanted down upon the hair-sprinkled brown linoleum of Mr Tozer’s saloon. Its intermittent hum emphasized that silence, all but absolute, which is peculiar to barbers’ shops on customless afternoons in summer. The air in the small room, low-ceilinged and set three steps below street level, was warm and sleepy with the scent of bay rum. A fresh slip of toilet tissue curled preparatorily across the neck rest of the shaving chair was as motionless as a marble scroll. The scissors, razors and hand clippers set in methodic array at the back of the big oval wash-basin seemed as unlikely to be put ever again to use as tools sanguinely sealed into a burial chamber in Luxor.

Even the proprietor appeared to have undergone a necropolitan translation. He was sprawled peacefully across three cane-bottomed chairs beneath a row of hat pegs in an alcove, his head cushioned on a pile of tattered magazines and his hands crossed upon the folds of his white coat.

Pumphrey, having peered down through the window upon Mr Tozer’s tonsorial tomb, was a little surprised to find the door unlocked. But at the instant of his entrance, which set jangling a little bell above the door, Mr Tozer rose stiffly and all of a piece, like a sleep walker, and advanced upon him holding out invitingly what a more fanciful caller might have taken to be a shroud.

The barber side-stepped to allow Pumphrey to subside into the chair, whipped the sheet round his neck and stood for a moment melancholically surveying the irregular vestiges of scrub upon the celery-white scalp.

“Haircut, sir?” The inquiry was tinged with disbelief.

“A light trim.”

Mr Tozer smirked dutifully and tucked a roll of cotton wool between Pumphrey’s neck and collar. “Nice weather you’ve brought, sir.”

Pumphrey slipped the platitude beneath his mental spectroscope. ‘Brought’ lit up on the reading scale. He had been recognized and challenged as a newcomer to the town.

“Yes, isn’t it.”

A gentle touch guided his head slightly to one side. Covertly he held his view of Tozer’s face in the mirror. It was a dark and knobbly face, very long so that the chin rested on the shirt front and was flanked by the lapels of the white coat. The ears were as long as bacon rashers and had pendulous, furry lobes. So deeply had the eyes retired within their sockets that they seemed to belong to a hermit crab peering warily from the refuge of Mr Tozer’s skull.

“Just passing through, sir?” The barber’s hand reached far out over Pumphrey and hovered uncertainly over the range of instruments behind the wash-basin. It seemed about to descend upon a bone-handled razor.

Pumphrey watched the razor. “That is so,” he said. The hand moved on and picked up a pair of clippers.

“A short holiday, perhaps. No, but you’re not a fisherman, I reckon.”

“Not exactly,” said Pumphrey. He realized he was quite without means of determining whether Tozer’s feelers were threatening or conciliatory. The Hopjoy dossier had been indeterminate on all points except the fact that investigation and maintenance of contact with this man (to what end was not stated) had involved expense to date of £248 15s. Pumphrey thought quickly about this and found it encouraging. Tozer, on whatever side he was ranged, clearly had his price. He was unlikely to be really dangerous while the bidding was open.

“I thought,” said Pumphrey, “that I might run across a friend of mine. I’ve an idea he came here to live a year or two back.”

“Nice to meet old friends. Oh, to meet old friends is nice.” Mr Tozer, mowing an ice-cold path up Pumphrey’s neck, seemed grateful that an acceptable course of conversation had been signalled. He noisily blew the gathering of black fluff from the clipper blades and readjusted the angle of Pumphrey’s head. “There’s only one thing nicer,” he resumed, “and that’s making new friends. And if there’s one thing nicer than that, why, it’s making friends for your friends. Now me...” he applied to Pumphrey’s neck a cloud of talcum powder from what looked like an old omnibus hooter—“me, I’m what you might call a friend- gatherer . I was born ugly, you see, sir, and I accept it. No use fighting against your own nature. No use expecting other people to love you. Some of us are lovable; some aren’t. It’s like being musical. Put me at the piano and I couldn’t play a note to save my life. Yet I love music; I’ll listen to it for hours. Friendship, now: it’s not for me. I know that. But it’s something I like to know is going on all around. I enjoy it from a distance, like church bells. Funny, that, isn’t it? And so do you know what I do? I foster it, I fertilize it. In any way I can, I help it along. You might say that bringing people together is my little private mission in life. And what, sir”—he turned and blew another fluff crop from the clippers—“did you say the name of this friend of yours is?”

Here, obviously, was a critical point. Tozer’s discharge of windy idealism, tedious and meaningless in itself, had been a calculated prelude to challenge. The name of his friend...the question had been delivered at the tail of a diversionary gust of sentimentality, as a gipsy fiddler might casually drop a vital message with the final flourish of his czardas.

Pumphrey made up his mind. As the barber lightly leaned spread fingers upon his cranium while reaching for a pair of scissors, he gave the only answer that would take the game forward. “Hopjoy,” he murmured.

For a moment Mr Tozer remained quite still. Pumphrey tried to see in the mirror what reaction his face betrayed, but the barber’s fingers had tensed and would allow no upward movement of his customer’s head.

Then Mr Tozer relaxed and wheeled to the side of the chair. He beamed down on Pumphrey and performed a little arabesque of mid-air snipping with the scissors. “Mr Hopjoy!” he repeated, with every appearance of finding the name enormously to his liking. “One of my most regular gentlemen. I know him well. Very well. As a matter of fact, when you came in I was just wondering if he’d turn up this afternoon. It must be several days now since... But fancy you being a friend of Mr Hopjoy!”

Mr Tozer stepped back behind Pumphrey and began making small swoops with the scissors over the unprofitable scalp. He was still smiling. But above the smile, Pumphrey noticed in the mirror, was a frown.

“What I was saying just now about friendship...” Mr Tozer resumed. “Mr Hopjoy’s a great one for friends. He comes in here perhaps three times a week. To be groomed, if I might put it that way. It’s nice to find a man nowadays who’s particular as to grooming. ‘George’, he’ll say, ‘I’m meeting a friend tonight’ and he’ll wink and I’ll spruce him up like a show dog and off he’ll trot with a joke about the account...oh, you might tell him I’ve been asking kindly after him, by the way, sir...and then later on I fall to thinking of him with his friend, and you know it’s rather nice to get that feeling of having played a part and helped things along and made sure there’d be no harm done.”