‘Mrs Curtin?’ said the taller of the two, pleasantly.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Curtin.
‘May I come in a moment? I’m Detective Inspector Hardcastle.’
Mrs Curtin drew back rather unwillingly. She threw open a door and motioned the inspector inside. It was a very neat, clean little room and gave the impression of seldom being entered, which impression was entirely correct.
Ernie, drawn by curiosity, came down the passage from the kitchen and sidled inside the door.
‘Your son?’ said Detective Inspector Hardcastle.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Curtin, and added belligerently, ‘he’s a good boy, no matter what you say.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ said Detective Inspector Hardcastle, politely.
Some of the defiance in Mrs Curtin’s face relaxed.
‘I’ve come to ask you a few questions about 19, Wilbraham Crescent. You work there, I understand.’
‘Never said I didn’t,’ said Mrs Curtin, unable yet to shake off her previous mood.
‘For a Miss Millicent Pebmarsh.’
‘Yes, I work for Miss Pebmarsh. A very nice lady.’
‘Blind,’ said Detective Inspector Hardcastle.
‘Yes, poor soul. But you’d never know it. Wonderful the way she can put her hand on anything and find her way about. Goes out in the street, too, and over the crossings. She’s not one to make a fuss about things, not like some people I know.’
‘You work there in the mornings?’
‘That’s right. I come about half past nine to ten, and leave at twelve o’clock or when I’m finished.’ Then sharply, ‘You’re not saying as anything ’as been stolen, are you?’
‘Quite the reverse,’ said the inspector, thinking of four clocks.
Mrs Curtin looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘What’s the trouble?’ she asked.
‘A man was found dead in the sitting-room at 19, Wilbraham Crescent this afternoon.’
Mrs Curtin stared. Ernie Curtin wriggled in ecstasy, opened his mouth to say ‘Coo’, thought it unwise to draw attention to his presence, and shut it again.
‘Dead?’ said Mrs Curtin unbelievingly. And with even more unbelief, ‘In the sitting-room?’
‘Yes. He’d been stabbed.’
‘You mean it’s murder?’
‘Yes, murder.’
‘Oo murdered ’im?’ demanded Mrs Curtin.
‘I’m afraid we haven’t got quite so far as that yet,’ said Inspector Hardcastle. ‘We thought perhaps you may be able to help us.’
‘I don’t know anything about murder,’ said Mrs Curtin positively.
‘No, but there are one or two points that have arisen. This morning, for instance, did any man call at the house?’
‘Not that I can remember. Not today. What sort of man was he?’
‘An elderly man about sixty, respectably dressed in a dark suit. He may have represented himself as an insurance agent.’
‘I wouldn’t have let him in,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘No insurance agents and nobody selling vacuum cleaners or editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nothing of that sort. Miss Pebmarsh doesn’t hold with selling at the door and neither do I.’
‘The man’s name, according to a card that was on him, was Mr Curry. Have you ever heard that name?’
‘Curry? Curry?’ Mrs Curtin shook her head. ‘Sounds Indian to me,’ she said, suspiciously.
‘Oh, no,’ said Inspector Hardcastle, ‘he wasn’t an Indian.’
‘Who found him–Miss Pebmarsh?’
‘A young lady, a shorthand typist, had arrived because, owing to a misunderstanding, she thought she’d been sent for to do some work for Miss Pebmarsh. It was she who discovered the body. Miss Pebmarsh returned almost at the same moment.’
Mrs Curtin uttered a deep sigh.
‘What a to-do,’ she said, ‘what a to-do!’
‘We may ask you at some time,’ said Inspector Hardcastle, ‘to look at this man’s body and tell us if he is a man you have ever seen in Wilbraham Crescent or calling at the house before. Miss Pebmarsh is quite positive he has never been there. Now there are various small points I would like to know. Can you recall off-hand how many clocks there are in the sitting-room?’
Mrs Curtin did not even pause.
‘There’s that big clock in the corner, grandfather they call it, and there’s the cuckoo clock on the wall. It springs out and says “cuckoo”. Doesn’t half make you jump sometimes.’ She added hastily, ‘I didn’t touch neither of them. I never do. Miss Pebmarsh likes to wind them herself.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ the inspector assured her. ‘You’re sure these were the only two clocks in the room this morning?’
‘Of course. What others should there be?’
‘There was not, for instance, a small square silver clock, what they call a carriage clock, or a little gilt clock–on the mantelpiece that was, or a china clock with flowers on it–or a leather clock with the name Rosemary written across the corner?’
‘Of course there wasn’t. No such thing.’
‘You would have noticed them if they had been there?’
‘Of course I should.’
‘Each of these four clocks represented a time about an hour later than the cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock.’
‘Must have been foreign,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘Me and my old man went on a coach trip to Switzerland and Italy once and it was a whole hour further on there. Must be something to do with this Common Market. I don’t hold with the Common Market and nor does Mr Curtin. England’s good enough for me.’
Inspector Hardcastle declined to be drawn into politics.
‘Can you tell me exactly when you left Miss Pebmarsh’s house this morning?’
‘Quarter past twelve, near as nothing,’ said Mrs Curtin.
‘Was Miss Pebmarsh in the house then?’
‘No, she hadn’t come back. She usually comes back some time between twelve and half past, but it varies.’
‘And she had left the house–when?’
‘Before I got there. Ten o’clock’s my time.’
‘Well, thank you, Mrs Curtin.’
‘Seems queer about these clocks,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘Perhaps Miss Pebmarsh had been to a sale. Antiques, were they? They sound like it by what you say.’
‘Does Miss Pebmarsh often go to sales?’
‘Got a roll of hair carpet about four months ago at a sale. Quite good condition. Very cheap, she told me. Got some velour curtains too. They needed cutting down, but they were really as good as new.’
‘But she doesn’t usually buy bric-brac or things like pictures or china or that kind of thing at sales?’
Mrs Curtin shook her head.
‘Not that I’ve ever known her, but of course, there’s no saying in sales, is there? I mean, you get carried away. When you get home you say to yourself “whatever did I want with that?” Bought six pots of jam once. When I thought about it I could have made it cheaper myself. Cups and saucers, too. Them I could have got better in the market on a Wednesday.’
She shook her head darkly. Feeling that he had no more to learn for the moment, Inspector Hardcastle departed. Ernie then made his contribution to the subject that had been under discussion.
‘Murder! Coo!’ said Ernie.
Momentarily the conquest of outer space was displaced in his mind by a present-day subject of really thrilling appeal.
‘Miss Pebmarsh couldn’t have done ’im in, could she?’ he suggested yearningly.
‘Don’t talk so silly,’ said his mother. A thought crossed her mind. ‘I wonder if I ought to have told him–’
‘Told him what, Mom?’
‘Never you mind,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘It was nothing, really.’
CHAPTER 6
Colin Lamb’s Narrative
I
When we had put ourselves outside two good underdone steaks, washed down with draught beer, Dick Hardcastle gave a sigh of comfortable repletion, announced that he felt better and said:
‘To hell with dead insurance agents, fancy clocks and screaming girls! Let’s hear about you, Colin. I thought you’d finished with this part of the world. And here you are wandering about the back streets of Crowdean. No scope for a marine biologist at Crowdean, I can assure you.’
‘Don’t you sneer at marine biology, Dick. It’s a very useful subject. The mere mention of it so bores people and they’re so afraid you’re going to talk about it, that you never have to explain yourself further.’
‘No chance of giving yourself away, eh?’
‘You forget,’ I said coldly, ‘that I am a marine biologist. I took a degree in it at Cambridge. Not a very good degree, but a degree. It’s a very interesting subject, and one day I’m going back to it.’
‘I know what you’ve been working on, of course,’ said Hardcastle. ‘And congratulations to you. Larkin’s trial comes on next month, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Amazing the way he managed to carry on passing stuff out for so long. You’d think somebody would have suspected.’
‘They didn’t, you know. When you’ve got it into your head that a fellow is a thoroughly good chap, it doesn’t occur to you that he mightn’t be.’
‘He must have been clever,’ Dick commented.
I shook my head.
‘No, I don’t think he was, really. I think he just did as he was told. He had access to very important documents. He walked out with them, they were photographed and returned to him, and they were back again where they belonged the same day. Good organization there. He made a habit of lunching at different places every day. We think that he hung up his overcoat where there was always an overcoat exactly like it–though the man who wore the other overcoat wasn’t always the same man. The overcoats were switched, but the man who switched them never spoke to Larkin, and Larkin never spoke to him. We’d like to know a good deal more about the mechanics of it. It was all very well planned with perfect timing. Somebody had brains.’
‘And that’s why you’re still hanging round the Naval Station at Portlebury?’
‘Yes, we know the Naval end of it and we know the London end. We know just when and where Larkin got his pay and how. But there’s a gap. In between the two there’s a very pretty little bit of organization. That’s the part we’d like to know more about, because that’s the part where the brains are. Somewhere there’s a very good headquarters, with excellent planning, which leaves a trail that is confused not once but probably seven or eight times.’
‘What did Larkin do it for?’ asked Hardcastle, curiously. ‘Political idealist? Boosting his ego? Or plain money?’
‘He was no idealist,’ I said. ‘Just money, I’d say.’
‘Couldn’t you have got on to him sooner that way? He spent the money, didn’t he? He didn’t salt it away.’
‘Oh, no, he splashed it about all right. Actually, we got on to him a little sooner than we’re admitting.’
Hardcastle nodded his head understandingly.
‘I see. You tumbled and then you used him for a bit. Is that it?’
‘More or less. He had passed out some quite valuable information before we got on to him, so we let him pass out more information, also apparently valuable. In the Service I belong to, we have to resign ourselves to looking fools now and again.’
‘I don’t think I’d care for your job, Colin,’ said Hardcastle thoughtfully.
‘It’s not the exciting job that people think it is,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, it’s usually remarkably tedious. But there’s something beyond that. Nowadays one gets to feeling that nothing really is secret. We know Their secrets and They know our secrets. Our agents are often Their agents, too, and Their agents are very often our agents. And in the end who is double-crossing who becomes a kind of nightmare! Sometimes I think that everybody knows everybody else’s secrets and that they enter into a kind of conspiracy to pretend that they don’t.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Dick said thoughtfully.
Then he looked at me curiously.
‘I can see why you should still be hanging around Portlebury. But Crowdean’s a good ten miles from Portlebury.’
‘What I’m really after,’ I said, ‘are Crescents.’
‘Crescents?’ Hardcastle looked puzzled.
‘Yes. Or alternatively, moons. New moons, rising moons and so on. I started my quest in Portlebury itself. There’s a pub there called The Crescent Moon. I wasted a long time over that. It sounded ideal. Then there’s The Moon and Stars. The Rising Moon, The Jolly Sickle, The Cross and the Crescent–that was in a little place called Seamede. Nothing doing. Then I abandoned moons and started on Crescents. Several Crescents in Portlebury. Lansbury Crescent, Aldridge Crescent, Livermead Crescent, Victoria Crescent.’
I caught sight of Dick’s bewildered face and began to laugh.
‘Don’t look so much at sea, Dick. I had something tangible to start me off.’
I took out my wallet, extracted a sheet of paper and passed it over to him. It was a single sheet of hotel writing paper on which a rough sketch had been drawn.
‘A chap called Hanbury had this in his wallet. Hanbury did a lot of work in the Larkin case. He was good–very good. He was run over by a hit and run car in London. Nobody got its number. I don’t know what this means, but it’s something that Hanbury jotted down, or copied, because he thought it was important. Some idea that he had? Or something that he’d seen or heard? Something to do with a moon or crescent, the number 61 and the initial M. I took over after his death. I don’t know what I’m looking for yet, but I’m pretty sure there’s something to find. I don’t know what 61 means. I don’t know what M means. I’ve been working in a radius from Portlebury outwards. Three weeks of unremitting and unrewarding toil. Crowdean is on my route. That’s all there is to it. Frankly, Dick, I didn’t expect very much of Crowdean. There’s only one Crescent here. That’s Wilbraham Crescent. I was going to have a walk along Wilbraham Crescent and see what I thought of Number 61 before asking you if you’d got any dope that could help me. That’s what I was doing this afternoon–but I couldn’t find Number 61.’
‘As I told you, 61 is occupied by a local builder.’
‘And that’s not what I’m after. Have they got a foreign help of any kind?’
‘Could be. A good many people do nowadays. If so, she’ll be registered. I’ll look it up for you by tomorrow.’
‘Thanks, Dick.’
‘I’ll be making routine inquiries tomorrow at the two houses on either side of 19. Whether they saw anyone come to the house, et cetera. I might include the houses directly behind 19, the ones whose gardens adjoin it. I rather think that 61 is almost directly behind 19. I could take you along with me if you liked.’
I closed with the offer greedily.
‘I’ll be your Sergeant Lamb and take shorthand notes.’
We agreed that I should come to the police station at nine thirty the following morning.
II
I arrived the next morning promptly at the agreed hour and found my friend literally fuming with rage.
When he had dismissed an unhappy subordinate, I inquired delicately what had happened.
For a moment Hardcastle seemed unable to speak. Then he spluttered out: ‘Those damned clocks!’
‘The clocks again? What’s happened now?’
‘One of them is missing.’
‘Missing? Which one?’
‘The leather travelling clock. The one with “Rosemary” across the corner.’
I whistled.
‘That seems very extraordinary. How did it come about?’
‘The damned fools–I’m one of them really, I suppose–’ (Dick was a very honest man) ‘–One’s got to remember to cross every t and dot every i or things go wrong. Well, the clocks were there all right yesterday in the sitting-room. I got Miss Pebmarsh to feel them all to see if they felt familiar. She couldn’t help. Then they came to remove the body.’
