Colin Watson - Bump in the Night

Payne’s answer was a disappointment, however. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “Chemistry was about the nearest field to medicine I ever grazed in. And that was quite a while ago.” They were passing a small mock-Tudor doorway bearing the legend ‘Barbara’s Buttery’ and the scrawled, partly erased comment ‘She’s crumby, too.’

“Would you care for a cup of tea?” Payne inquired graciously. “Thanks very much,” said Leaper. They climbed narrow stairs and entered, diffidently, the hag-ridden chamber above.

While they sipped from folk pottery and watched fat women demolish, by genteel but rapid nibbling, piles of tiny cakes, Payne asked his companion flattering questions about journalism and mended the ego torn by the pill-peddlar’s insinuations. Then they eavesdropped upon the conversation at the next table, with Payne inserting casual remarks of his own that Leaper found very droll and worldly.

The three women who provided this entertainment were Mrs Coady, wife of the Vicar of Chalmsbury, Mrs Courtney-Snell and Mrs Amelia Pointer.

“I’m inclined to think,” Mrs Coady was saying, “that it’s some outsider who is responsible. These perfectly dreadful acts are so out of character with all the people we know here.”

“Gangsterism!” exclaimed Mrs Courtney-Snell. The red leather upholstery of her face creased with disgust.

“I wouldn’t say that exactly”—Mrs Coady’s determination to see only the best in people prevented her from saying anything exactly—“but visitors can be very thoughtless at times. They have different standards, you know.”

“Or none at all,” observed Mrs Courtney-Snell acidly.

Mrs Coady selected the least attractive of the cakes and sliced it gently. “Some motorists—from the North of England, I understand—quite shocked my husband yesterday. He went into the church and found them trying to break into the font. They said they wanted water for their car.”

Mrs Pointer broke her silence with a faint tut of incredulity, then lapsed again into mournful contemplation of the vicar’s wife.

“So you see,” went on Mrs Coady, “that there are people who see nothing wrong in destructive behaviour away from home. Tourists can be terribly heedless of local sensibilities. They have a sense of humour rather like that of the Vikings. We must try and understand them.”

“All that concerns me,” said Mrs Courtney-Snell, to whom Mrs. Pointer’s gaze had switched expectantly, “is that somebody has smashed poor William’s memorial and that the police have not done a single thing about it. It’s absolutely disgusting.”

Mrs Pointer sighed and looked back to Mrs Coady. She obliged with: “Perhaps it is better that the culprit should be left alone with his own conscience.”

“He’s being left alone to make more of his filthy bombs,” retorted Mrs Courtney-Snell.

“Now, my dear...” Mrs Coady’s smile of patient deprecation reminded Mrs Courtney-Snell that her selection for the chairmanship of the St Luke’s Fete Committee was not yet a certainty; she said no more.

At that moment, a carefully groomed, self-possessed young woman who had been surveying the room from the doorway walked up and greeted Mrs Coady and her companions. Mrs Pointer she addressed as ‘mother’.

Leaper looked as if he had just scalded his throat. He slewed round in his chair and hid his face from the new arrival. Payne glanced at him with concern.

“I’ll have to get back to the office now,” whispered Leaper between gulps of his remaining tea. “Mr Kebble will be waiting for me.”

“Very well, Mr Leaper. Just as you wish.” Payne rose gravely, picked up the bill and followed the bolting youth.

Outside the tea shop, Leaper assumed shambling normality once more. “I’m awfully sorry if I rushed you,” he said, “but someone came in I didn’t want to see me. I chased up a story about her,” he added with a touch of pride.

“Ah!”

“Something pretty hot.”

Payne raised his brows.

“I say, don’t let on about this, will you, but it was the woman in that grey thing, the one who came up to the next table. I suppose you don’t happen to know who she is?”

“I do, as a matter of fact. Why, don’t you?”

“Oh, I’ve seen her before, but last time she looked sort of different and I haven’t been able to think of her name since.”

“Different?”

Leaper looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes. She hadn’t...hadn’t any clothes on.”

Payne blinked and grasped the neatly waxed end of his moustache. “My word, Mr Leaper, you must have a very interesting job.”

“Oh, yes,” agreed Leaper, lamely.

“If what you say is true—and of course I don’t doubt your word—you have enjoyed the presumably rare privilege of sharing Chief Inspector Larch’s view of matrimony.”

“Larch? How do you mean?”

“Simply that it was his wife we saw just now. Hilda Larch. Daughter of Councillor Pointer. Her mother was sitting next to us.”

“Oh, Lord!” Leaper groaned.

He told briefly of what he had seen the previous night. Payne listened with polite interest but he asked no questions.

“I wonder,” said Leaper, “who the bloke was. I only saw his arm.”

“The owner of the caravan, I expect.”

“You wouldn’t happen...”

“No idea. Sorry.”

Parting from Payne outside the Chronicle office, Leaper thanked him clumsily but warmly—and with absolute sincerity—for his company and for the tea. The angular, morose youth had never before encountered an adult human being willing to bear with him for more than five minutes at a time and the experience had stirred him. Payne accepted his gratitude with neither embarrassment nor condescension, said he hoped he might see him again, and walked off towards the jeweller’s shop which he had left, in confident expectation of no custom, in the charge of an amiable but moronic assistant.

Leaper did not enter the office immediately. He had noticed a small crowd on the opposite side of the road, so he crossed and joined it. On a pair of steps Sergeant Worple was precariously working with a hacksaw and pliers in order to remove what was left of Barrington Hoole’s shop sign. Below him, Harry the photographer half knelt on the pavement and squinted through the view-finder of his mammoth camera. His object was to frame the sergeant’s head, whether artistically or wantonly he alone knew, within the battered oval of brass that hung from one slowly yielding hinge.

Worple pretended to be unaware of Harry’s contortions, but he took care not to make any funny faces so long as he felt within range of that lens. At last, the whirring rattle of the old shutter and an assortment of ejaculations from the bystanders told him that he had been ‘taken’. He gave a business-like sniff and completed his task with a wrench that nearly toppled him from the ladder.

Mr Hoole received Worple in a friendly enough fashion when the sergeant carried the eye frame into the shop and set it upon the counter. “I’ll just give you a receipt for this article, sir,” said Worple, searching amongst his envelopes. “We shall have to take it away for a little while.”

“You may keep it for ever, if you wish,” Hoole said pleasantly.

“If decisions rested with me, sir, I’d have it sent to the forensic laboratory. The chief inspector doesn’t go much for science, though. He says all criminals condemn themselves out of their own mouths.”

At the end of five minutes Worple carefully put away his pen and handed Hoole his receipt for ‘one optician’s sign, damaged, formerly situate 23 Watergate Street’. Hoole put the slip into a drawer.

“I suppose,” Worple said, “that the chief asked if you knew anything that might be helpful when he came in this morning?”