Colin Watson - Hopjoy Was Here

When he saw the inspector, he picked up his ball and led the girl forward. “Has Brian shown up yet?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr Periam.”

“Oh. We thought that’s what you’d come to tell us.” The solemn, femininely smooth face turned to the girl. “Didn’t we, darl?”

Periam grouped three of the bright canvas chairs at the edge of the putting green. They sat.

“No, Mr Hopjoy has not returned. I rather doubt if he will. But I think it’s only right for me to relieve your minds on one point.” Purbright glanced from one to the other. “It now looks as though we were mistaken in assuming that your friend was dead.”

Doreen seized her husband’s hand. “There! What did I say?” At Purbright she pouted in mock indignation. “And fancy chasing us with that ridiculous story when we hadn’t been married five minutes? It wasn’t what I’d call tactful.”

“It wasn’t, Mrs Periam. I’m sorry. But in the circumstances we hadn’t much choice.”

Periam looked at the handle of the putter he had laid across his knee. “That’s all right, inspector. It hasn’t been very nice for us—I mean we should have felt rather responsible if anything awful had happened to Bry—we did let him down, you know, darl—but the police couldn’t be blamed for that.” He raised his head and smiled wryly at Purbright. “Now you know what sort of capers you ask for when you run off with your best friend’s young lady.”

Doreen sighed and pressed Periam’s hand to her stomach. Hastily he withdrew it. “Oh, there’s one thing, inspector...the house. You have finished there, haven’t you? You see, we...”

“If you can wait just a couple of days, sir, everything will be put straight again. We’ll see to that for you, naturally.”

“And thanks for letting us have the car back.”

“Was it covered in blood and fingerprints?”

Periam cast a quick glance of rebuke at his wife. “Doreen, really...”

“I suppose,” Purbright said, “that you’ll settle down in the house when your holiday’s over. Or are you thinking of a change now you’re married?”

“No, we shan’t move. Not yet, anyway. It’s been home for so long, you know, and I am rather a home bird. Anyway, I’m sure mother wouldn’t have wished strangers to take it over.”

“I expect you know there are various odds and ends belonging to Mr Hopjoy. We’d rather like to hang on to them for the time being, but if you do hear from him perhaps you’ll let us have a forwarding address; would you mind doing that, sir?”

“Not at all.”

“There’s one other matter I’m mildly curious about, Mr Periam. A short while ago Mr Hopjoy was in hospital. I believe I know the circumstances in which he was injured—we needn’t go into them now—but I wondered if you could tell me what his injuries actually were.”

Periam ran a finger thoughtfully round his heavy, globular chin. “Well, not in doctor’s parlance, I can’t. But he had what I’d call a gammy foot.”

“How serious was it? I mean was there any permanent effect—scars, disfigurements, anything of that sort?”

“My goodness, no. He came home right as rain. Between you and I, I think old Bry had been coming the old soldier in hospital. He’d probably been giving the glad-eye to some pretty nurse.”

“He wasn’t disabled in any sense, then?”

“Not a bit of it, inspector. It would take more than a tumble to put Bry out of action, wouldn’t it, Darl?”

“Rather,” agreed Doreen. She had coyly abstracted a packet of biscuits from Periam’s pocket and was nibbling one after having prised it open to inspect its filling.

“He’s as strong as a horse,” Periam went on. The theme seemed to intrigue him. “I shouldn’t care to tangle with Bry when he’d got his dander up.” Purbright reflected that Hopjoy must have been sadly off form on the occasion of his tangling with Farmer Croll. Or was it in the matter of danders that Croll had enjoyed a decisive advantage?

Periam grasped his putter and looked inquiringly at the inspector.

Purbright rose. “I don’t think I need interrupt your game any longer. I’m sorry if I’ve been something of a...” He faltered, suddenly averse to making even conventional apology.

“...a skeleton at the feast?” suggested Periam, almost jocularly.

“Oh, but such a nice skeleton!” Purbright had the brief but disconcerting sensation of Doreen’s bosom being nuzzled roguishly against his arm. Then she was walking away and looking back at him over her shoulder as she munched another of Periam’s biscuits.

Sergeant Malley breathed hard but contentedly between puffs at a pipe in which seemed to be smouldering a compound of old cinema carpet and tar. He sat in the windowless little office in the police station basement where witnesses at forthcoming inquests were induced by the huge sergeant’s calm and kindness to give more or less lucid expression to their recollections of tragedy.

Malley, whom even inspectors and superintendents treated as host in his own confined quarters—if only because they could not bear to see him trying to uncork eighteen stone from an inadequate chair—listened without surprise to Purbright’s account of his call at the hospital.

“I could have told you that you’d be wasting your time. Harton’s about as obliging as an empty stamp machine. And those bloody women...” He shook his head.

“Look, Bill, I’ve no objection to these people playing at guess-what-God’s-up-to if that makes them happy. But I’d still like to find the character who started all this phoney M.I. Fivemanship.”

Malley wriggled forward a few inches and folded his arms on the desk. “If you’re really interested in that operation, I think I might be able to find you someone who’ll talk. He’s one of the theatre assistants and a pal of Jack Sykes—the bloke in the lab I was telling you about. Do you want me to have a go?”

“I wish you would. It may not be important, of course; Periam said Hopjoy just hurt his leg slightly and carried no sign, but I suppose he can’t know for certain.”

“Hurt his leg?”

“That’s right.”

“But Harton doesn’t do legs. He’s an innards man.”

“Oh.” Purbright considered. “Yes, you said something about that before. Then perhaps Hopjoy was just spinning Periam one of his celebrated tales.”

“Maybe.”

“I wonder why...Never mind—let me know if you get hold of Mr Sykes’s friend, won’t you.”

A face, thrust inquisitively into the narrow doorway, creased with nausea on encountering Sergeant Malley’s pipe fumes. “Christ!” said Sergeant Love, adding ’sir” when he discerned the inspector through the haze.

Purbright joined him in the corridor.

“I’ve gone right through the people in Pawson’s Lane, sir. And guess what?” Love’s eye glistened with something more than reaction to smoke.

“No, you tell me, Sid.” The inspector put a paternal arm round his shoulder.

“I’ve found the woman who wrote that anonymous letter.”

Purbright stared at him. “What anonymous letter?”

“The one we got about the do at Periam’s place. You know, sir. The thing that started all this.”

Chapter Fifteen

“My Dear Sidney, we know all about that letter. It wasn’t written by a neighbour. Hopjoy wrote it himself.”

Love shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not with you, sir.”

“I said Hopjoy wrote it. He wasn’t terribly subtle; a pad of the same paper was among the stuff in his bedroom.”

Love grudgingly digested the information. “Well, all I can say is that there must have been two, and that the Cork woman’s got lost. It was one of the first things she said. ‘I feel rather bad about sending that letter,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’ I told her not to worry about it because it hadn’t really made any difference and anyway she hadn’t put her name to it, then she cheered up a bit and said something about it being the least she could have done for the poor boy’s mother. I think,” Love added by way of explanation, “that she’s a bit clobby in the cockpit.”