Colin Watson - Bump in the Night

“Perhaps the best arrangement,” said Purbright, cheerfully ignoring the irony, “would be for me—the interloping damn nuisance—to be hived off where I shan’t be always getting in your hair. The Chiefs idea, apparently, is that my not being a local man might make me useful as a...” He shrugged; the suggestion had come out clumsily.

“As a Special Investigator,” Larch maliciously provided.

“Sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Seriously, though, you don’t want me cluttering up this place, do you. Let me go snooping in the open air.” Purbright stared enviously at the sun-slaked pantiles of an old warehouse opposite the window.

“You are free to do what you please, Mr Purbright. I shouldn’t be so childish as to try and make you feel uncomfortable. You’re only carrying out instructions—however goddam stupid I happen to think them.”

“I was rather afraid that you’d kick me out.”

“So I should if I thought you’d have any success in making me look small. But you’re just wasting your time.”

“Nothing could be a waste of time in weather like this.” Purbright was still looking out of the window.

“All right. Make it a holiday. You might as well. Because this much I will tell you. The town’s chock-a-block with lunatics. They’ll chatter and natter for as long as you’ve a mind to listen. You’ll get your criminal all right—a dozen times over. I only hope you’ve brought a cart.”

Purbright smiled appreciatively. “Tell me, Mr Larch: what would be your own selected cart-load?”

“Oh, no. You’ve copies of the reports up to now. You go and play your own game.”

“As you like. I was just showing a little friendly interest.”

Larch regarded him narrowly, then grinned. “I’m a bit of a bastard, aren’t I ? Don’t take it to heart, Mr Purbright.” He reached for a folder at the side of the desk. “We’ll go through them, shall we?

“My own favourite is a cocky, sarcastic little goggle-hawker called Hoole. You’ll find his shop next to the Rialto. Unmarried; middle-aged but perky; likes taking the mickey—out of local institutions especially. Statues and memorials would be right up his alley. He’s quite clever in his own way—academic honours and all that. Making bombs wouldn’t present any great difficulty to him, I imagine.”

“But hasn’t this man’s own shop been involved?”

“The oldest trick in the world. Self-inflicted injury.” Larch leaned forward. “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t terribly clever in this case. That sign was so high up that no one could have got at it without using a ladder or a chair or something. But it’s quite accessible from Hoole’s own upstairs window.”

“Motive?”

Larch smirked derisively. “You don’t want to worry about motives in this town, old son. There’s just one that goes for the lot. Sheer bloodymindedness. Anyway, I’ve told you—Hoole’s down on monuments.”

“Right; who’s next?”

“Joe Kebble. Editor of the local rag. He finds life a great bloody joke and I wouldn’t put it past him to help the fun along a bit, especially if it provided him with some copy.”

“Whoever’s responsible would need explosive, I suppose. Is it sold hereabouts?”

Sparing this bland inquiry no more than a grunt. Larch went on with his suspect list. Mr Grope was on it. This was because of the opportunities for nocturnal villainy that his hours of employment afforded. Constant film-watching, moreover, might easily have put violent ideas into that great rhyme-rocked noggin.

Somewhat to Purbright’s surprise, Councillor Pointer was included. “My father-in-law, if you must know,” Larch frankly divulged. “I’ve nothing against him otherwise, nothing I can put my finger on, but he’s hard to weigh up.”

Purbright reflected that if everyone of whom this might be said qualified for investigation as a potential dynamiter he was going to need detention camps. Larch, however, had a more specific charge to level.

“Ozzy Pointer takes a long time and goes a long way round when he wants to do anybody but, by God, he does ’em in the end all right. Now for some reason or other he’s taken a dislike to a chap in the town, a haulage contractor. I know him pretty well myself, as a matter of fact. He’s settled down now but he used to be a bit on the wild side and the name’s stuck. Pointer knows that and he’s doing his damnedest to get the fellow knocked off for this bomb nonsense. I might add that Ozzy’s word carries quite a bit of weight in this town.”

“You mean you think that Mr Pointer has set the things himself?”

“To frame Stan. Yes, he could have done.”

“Far-fetched, surely?”

“Far-fetched as hell, I know. But you see I also know that father-in-law of mine.”

Larch remained silent while he picked a spot on the back of his neck. Then he slammed the file shut and growled: “Well, there you have it. Enjoy yourself. And if one of our home-smoked maniacs blows your own bloody head off, don’t blame me.”

Chapter Ten

On the First of July a bloody head was blown off. But it was not Inspector Purbright’s.

The day began inauspiciously enough with his removal from the White Hind Hotel, where he had been ill-fed and insulted by a staff who behaved like emigre dukes, to the boarding house of Mrs Crispin.

It was one of the suspects who had recommended the move. Treated to Purbright’s account of his discomfiture at the hands of autocratic porters, waiters and chambermaids at the White Hind, Kebble had shaken his head and exclaimed: “Good God! You don’t want to stay there, old chap. Whoever put you on to that four-star pest house?”

Purbright loyally forbore from mentioning the advocacy of Chief Inspector Larch and said he had just happened to pick it because it was central.

“Get out,” said Kebble, “quick. Now let me see...you want to stay clear of all the hotels: there’s not one I’d quarantine a sick dog in. I’d put you up myself, but the wife’s got the loom working...” He thought for a minute. “Ah, I know. The chap’s just left who was in with old Payne. You’ll be alright there, if she’ll have you. Leonard...take this gentleman round to Mrs Crispin’s.”

And Mrs Crispin, to whom Purbright presented himself as plain Mister, did have him and gave every indication of being delighted.

She was a woman of incredible girth, but the legs beneath her capacious skirts must have been very short, for she travelled as if on rails, with no vertical movement whatever. Her face, which registered constant ecstasy in the presence of her ‘gentlemen’, was red and round under a black Japanese fringe. It was like the face of a rubber doll, enormously inflated.

Mrs Crispin having taken Purbright (metaphorically, he thanked God) to her gasometer-sized bosom, she detailed her help, Phyllis to escort him to his room and glided kitchen-wards.

Purbright clambered breathlessly up three flights of stairs, marvelling at the ease with which the fine, farm-bred back and thighs of the girl with whom he tried to keep pace conquered the steep and angular ascent.

“Here you are, sir,” she said at last, preceding him into a bedroom lined with varnished match-boarding and containing various tall, dark pieces of furniture that he was too exhausted to bother about identifying but which seemed to be awaiting him like chapel deacons, stiff with disapproval of a new communicant.

Phyllis set his heavy case on the bed with finger and thumb, gave him a quick but deeply dimpled smile, and departed.

Purbright sat and recovered his wind. Then he went to the narrow dormer window and, leaning on its sill, stared down at the little town where things had taken so unaccountably to going bump in the night.