Colin Watson - Bump in the Night

Purbright saw that Pointer was trembling. He sat down on the grass and motioned the wine merchant to join him.

Pointer squatted, wiping his brow and staring gloomily across the valley. “I know this much,” he said. “If Hector does find out about Hilda—and it must be common knowledge when you managed to pick it up so soon—if that happens, I wouldn’t give much for my girl’s chances.” Pointer clutched the policeman’s arm. “Suppose she’d been with Biggadyke that night in the caravan. It could have been meant for her, too.”

“Look, sir,” said Purbright, “I think we’d be wise at the moment not to envisage too many possibilities. The chances are that your son-in-law is a perfectly decent and harmless fellow and that your daughter’s in no danger whatever. They’ll probably get over their troubles like any other married couple who hit a bad patch.”

He hoped that these shameless platitudes would have sedative effect upon poor Pointer. The last thing he wanted was for the man to panic; he had underestimated his vulnerability to suggestion.

But Pointer showed an entirely unexpected reaction. Mottled with sudden anger, he stared savagely at Purbright. “What the hell do you think you are? A marriage counsellor?”

“I’m sorry; I don’t quite...”

“You don’t quite,” Pointer mimicked bitterly. “Oh, but you do quite. You must have got something for your rooting and grubbing. They’ll have been ready enough to tell you.”

Purbright watched the inflamed, protuberant little eyes. To his embarrassment, they were beginning to flood with tears of self-pity.

He shrugged gently. “Unless I know what you’re talking about, sir...”

“Lovers, Mr Purbright.” He forced out the word like a distraught shop girl pronouncing some indelicate medical term for the first time. “They run in families, you know. But of course you must know. A busy-bodying detective inspector. My God, man, they even told me! The very day I got back.”

Purbright divined that he was expected to help the man play out some familiar rite of self-abasement. “I see,” he murmured.

Down the wine merchant’s memory-puckered cheek a tear rolled. “I was away in France all that fortnight. In the Rhone Valley. An extraordinary summer. Marvellous.” He looked woodenly at Purbright. “But you’ll remember it yourself, I expect?”

Purbright glanced warily at his watch. “Hadn’t we better be getting back now, sir?”

“I asked you,” said Pointer in the tone of a moneyed diner putting a waiter in his place, “if you remembered the summer we had in 1937.”

The inspector gave a controlled sigh. “Not very clearly, sir. It...was a long time ago, wasn’t it.” He got up and stood by the car.

Pointer remained sitting in silence for a few seconds more, then rose and climbed in behind the wheel. When next he spoke it was to draw Purbright’s attention to some village church.

Chapter Fourteen

Mrs Crispin fully realized that gentlemen boarders needed an adequate substitute for the ministrations of absent or non-existent mothers and wives. They were deprived creatures, leading an unnatural life from the moment when they returned from business (she used the term with flattering lack of distinction, whatever their employment) until they retired to that good-night-sleep-tight whither they were consigned some five hours later by their guardian, still beamingly solicitous as she stood holding ajar the door of the staircase cupboard and beginning silently to count up to the hundred at which she would switch off the electricity and glide to her own chaste and immensely strong couch in the kitchen.

But how could the gentlemen’s exile from homes proper and complete be rendered less arid? She had given the question much thought and it was in accordance with her conclusions that the appointment, furnishing and tending of the gentlemen’s sitting room had evolved.

Cosiness, Mrs Crispin had mused, was what the domestic male valued above all else. She therefore sank some of her capital in a hook and stable wherby the door connecting the sitting room and kitchen could be held open on winter evenings, thus allowing air warmed by the kitchen stove to circulate freely through both apartments.

Mrs Crispin considered next the frequent use, in magazine stories about happily integrated husbands, of such adjectives as old, battered, well-thumbed, chewed, shapeless . These, she noticed approvingly, nearly always appeared in conjunction with favourite (his favourite old pipe/hat/old easy chair, moulded into comfortable contours by his grateful frame, etc .) Such guidance to masculine predilections in the furnishing line was perfectly clear, and Mrs Crispin followed it faithfully.

She showed consideration for eyes tired after a day at business by making the room lighting as discreet and restful as a single forty-watt bulb could render it.

The same motive partly dictated her decision not to install a television set, but in this case, too, she was influenced by her gleaned knowledge of male psychology. In the comfort of their well-moulded old easy chairs, their favourite pipes drawing well, men wished to chew the fat and swap yarns, not to gaze dumbly at a little screen.

Unfortunately for Mrs Crispin’s careful designs, neither Cornelius Payne nor Inspector Purbright shared her idealist conception of manly leisure. After the celebration of high tea, they would retreat, a trifle furtively, to one or other of their bedrooms and there play chess.

On the evening after Purbright’s excursion with Councillor Pointer, it happened to be Payne’s turn to provide hospitality. This meant that he sat on his bed while his guest occupied a small cane-seated chair by the window. The chess board was set between them on a pile of three suitcases.

Purbright was by far the inferior player and Payne had handicapped himself by a bishop, a rook and two pawns. His victory would thereby be postponed long enough for the game to last until dusk when Phyllis, prompted by a mistress who associated lodgers’ silence with suicidal intentions and a possible sudden rise in the gas bill, would burst in and ask if they were ready for supper.

“How did the inquest go?” asked Payne, opening the game with one of his depleted pawns.

Purbright surveyed the board while he reached for cigarettes. “Misadventure,” he said. “All it could be really.”

“Wouldn’t an open verdict have suited?”

“Too, vague. All right for drownings. Explosions, no.”

“There couldn’t have been much evidence, though.” Payne accepted a cigarette and struck a match for them both.

“Nothing direct. It really boiled down to the rejection of coincidences. One, two, three explosions in a small town. Then another. How could they be dissociated? Then there was Biggadyke’s reputation, of course.” Purbright leaned forward and moved a pawn.

Payne placed a finger lightly on one of his knights and considered. “His reputation, yes...” He moved the knight to threaten Purbright’s advancing pawn. “But what evidence could be brought to prove reputation?”

“None, now that you mention it. It seemed taken for granted.”

“Not very legal. Did no one suggest why he had been doing those curious things?”

“Motives weren’t questioned. It might have been interesting if they had been.”

Payne smiled. “You haven’t been making guesses, then?”

“The coroner seemed to assume that the man was simply an exhibitionist. I never met him, but from what others have said about him I should think that explanation is the most logical, bald as it is. Did you know him, by the way?”

“Slightly.”

Purbright catalogued. “Arrested development; pot-pinching sense of humour; technical expertize of sorts, combined with irresponsibility and a touch of dipsomania. How’s that?”