Colin Watson - Hopjoy Was Here

Periam looked up. “Ah.” He reached out and touched the bottle. “Is it cold?”

The waiter winced. “You did ask for a Beaune, sir. A red wine.” He drew back the basket and stared with pained incredulity at Periam’s finger marks in the dust.

“You would wish me to decant it, sir?”

“You’d better, yes.”

Back in the kitchen, the waiter briskly uncorked the bottle between his knees and tumbled three parts of its contents, merrily gurgling, into a jug. The remainder, thriftily, he swigged.

While the waiter contrived, in comfortable wine-warmed scrutiny of the Daily Mirror , an interval suitable to the delicacy of his supposed task, Inspector Purbright took stock of Mrs Periam.

She would be, he estimated, twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, although an almost offensively inept hair style—plaits coiled into round pads over her ears—gave a first impression of mid-thirties. In the plump white face, brown eyes looked out with an alert directness which might have been adjudged a token of honesty; Purbright was not quite sure, though, whether their frankness was unalloyed with pleading, a hint of nymphomania. He resisted the suspicion partly because he felt it to be unfair at such short acquaintance, partly because of his awareness that the self-flattery of the middle-aged too often takes the form of a fancied discernment of sexual irresponsibility in younger women.

Nevertheless, a certain physical lushness about Doreen Periam was undeniable. It was rendered the more disturbing by the paradoxical prissiness of her dress. The frock she was wearing, for instance, was an outlandish affair in heavy, dark blue silk, that seemed to have been designed to constrict her bust into prudish formlessness. Its actual effect was to squeeze up into provocative cloven prominence at the base of her neck the breasts that a less ‘modest’ garment would have accommodated quite unspectacularly. From the long, tightly cuffed sleeves emerged small hands as white and delicate as potato shoots. Their continual movement might have been merely a symptom of genteel nervousness. But as they strayed over the dark silk, they seemed to be exploring underlying areas of erotic ache.

“I think we can acknowledge quite frankly between the three of us,” Purbright was saying, “that until recently you were a particular friend of Mr Hopjoy, Mrs Periam.”

She glanced apprehensively at Periam, who nodded. “I told the inspector about that, darl. He understands how things were.”

“It’s just that he wasn’t...wasn’t the right one. It does happen, you know.” The bright, brown eyes had widened.

“Of course. I’d like to know, though, whether he accepted that view. Was he reconciled to your preference having changed?”

“Oh, I’m sure he was, really. I mean a boy’s bound to be upset when someone else comes along, but mostly it’s his pride that’s hurt. Don’t you think so?”

Purbright declined to endorse the sentiment. He was wondering whether Doreen were as simple as she sounded. “Jealousy, Mrs Periam, isn’t altogether a matter of hurt pride. From what your husband has told me already, I’d say that Mr Hopjoy took the affair rather badly.”

“Our barney in the bathroom, darl,” interjected Periam. “Remember I told you.”

“Oh, that...” She looked down at the cloth and absently edged a fork from side to side. “I suppose I was a bit of a beast to him, really. Brian was so happy-go-lucky, though; I never thought he’d come the old green-eyed monster.”

Periam took her hand. “It was my fault. We should have broken it to him sooner.”

The waiter, priest-like, was at Periam’s shoulder. He administered a sacramental sample, then straightened to stare gravely into the middle distance. Purbright was reminded of a well-bred dog owner awaiting the conclusion of his animal’s defecation in a neighbour’s gateway.

Periam sipped, assumed for some seconds the wine-man’s look of trying to work out a square root in his head, then nodded reassuringly at his wife. “I think you’ll find it not too bad. Maybe a shade young...” The waiter, who thought he had spotted the arrival of an expense account junta at the far side of his territory, hurriedly filled the three glasses and took himself off.

Doreen pronounced the Beaune “nice but a bit acid”. Purbright glanced at Periam’s face. It betrayed no sign of his having found the remark unfortunate.

The girl resumed her contemplation of the tablecloth. Her hand remained clasped in her husband’s. After a while she disengaged it and, unconsciously, it seemed, allowed it to fall into Periam’s lap. She smiled. “Fancy,” she said, half to herself, “you and old Brian having a set-to over poor little me.”

“Well, not a set-to, exactly,” Periam said. He captured Doreen’s hand, which had been running affectionately up and down his thigh, and returned it to table level. “It was Bry who flew off the handle. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways.”

The soup arrived. Both Periam and his bride hitched forward their chairs and looked pleased. Their honeymoon seemed to have given them an appetite.

“You did a certain amount of housekeeping at Beatrice Avenue, didn’t you, Mrs Periam?”

“I popped in occasionally during the week. Since Gordon lost his mother, you know.”

“You cooked, and so forth?”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me: did you have anything to do with the neighbours? You don’t know of any who were especially inquisitive?”

The girl shook her head without interrupting the spooning of her soup.

“Did any friends of Mr Hopjoy ever visit the house?”

“Not while I was there.” She turned to Periam. “I don’t think he ever brought anyone home, did he, Gordon?”

“No, he was always a bit of a dark horse in that respect. Mind you...”—he carefully piloted an undissolved pellet of soup powder to the rim of his plate—“you have to remember the sort of job he does.”

“Do you know what Mr Hopjoy was doing, Mrs Periam?”

The plump shoulders rose slightly. “I suppose I do really. In a way...” Again her eyes consulted Periam’s. “I don’t want to get him into trouble or anything...”

“I fancy that possibility no longer exists,” Purbright said quietly.

Doreen looked mildly puzzled. “Because you think he’s skipped off, you mean? Oh, but he often does that. That’s why he told me just a little bit about his job; he didn’t want me to imagine The Worst, as they say.” There was a flash of tiny, very white teeth. The smile faded slowly; the girl seemed to sustain it deliberately in order to warm the image her words had created.

“Did he tell you where he went, or anything about the people he met?”

“Well, he didn’t actually mention places or names. He’d just say something about having to meet a contact, or what he called ‘one of our people’. Then at night—all night, quite often—he kept a watch on houses of people he’d been tipped off about...that’s what he said, wasn’t it, Gordon?”

Periam murmured: “That’s right, darl.” He appeared to be more interested in the next course, which was just then arriving. Purbright glanced without elation at the slices of de-natured chicken, awash in suspiciously brown and copious gravy; then involuntarily drew back as the waiter performed manual pirouettes in the process of depositing upon his plate portions of dropsical potato and tinned peas.

“Everything to your satisfaction, madam?” Bending low over Doreen’s shoulder, his face as stiff as a dead deacon’s, the waiter delivered the question into the top of her dress. Echo-sounding, thought Purbright idly.

“I’m afraid,” the inspector said a little later, “that I’m going to have to deprive you of Mr Hopjoy’s car.”