The Tiger In the Smoke (16 page)

Canon Avril had either never heard of the Judges' Rules or considered that in his own family they did not count. Impractical he might be, but as an extractor of the truth he was, as Picot was forced to admit, remarkably efficient.

They were getting on like a house on fire. He had begun with his nearest and dearest, and Meg Elginbrodde had been subjected to a catechism which had not only satisfied but scandalized the sergeant. Sam Drummock and his dear worried wife had received the same treatment. Miss Warburton, fetched in from her cottage next door, had been shaken up, shocked, and subjected. And now, after William Talisman, the verger, had exhibited a somewhat spineless innocence, his wife Mary stood before the Canon's desk and at last they were getting somewhere.

Uncle Hubert had cleared the desk by sweeping its entire contents into a large dog basket which he kept beneath it, doubtless for just such an emergency. The sports coat in which Duds had died, folded lightly to hide the worst of the blood stains, lay upon its shabby leather top. The Canon's spectacles were pushed up high on his broad forehead, and his eyes, naked and inexorable, looked out sternly from his kindly face.

‘This is what your husband has already told me,' he was explaining, most improperly if the laws of evidence had carried any weight. ‘Will says that he's fairly sure that he saw you wrapping up this jacket in a piece of brown paper on the kitchen table about a month ago. Don't cry. How can I hear what you're saying? And don't lie any more. Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world. Think what bores the Nazis were.'

Mrs Talisman was plump, carefully girt and coiffured, and she possessed a little foolish pride which showed in her face. Her life was spent in waiting on the Canon, her husband, and her granddaughter, and because she had that privilege she thought herself a little better than other people. She had nursed the old man before her like a sick baby a score of times, and an ill-ironed wrinkle in his shirt stung her like the evidence of personal sin. A dirty back step or a wilting curtain in the basement window could worry her for a week, and she had once boxed the ears of a van-man from the stores who had observed in all innocence that times were changing and the clergy becoming of less and less account.

‘Oh, I did!' she exclaimed at last, giving up in a flood of wretchedness. ‘I did. I took the old coat and I gave it away.'

‘Well, then.' He sighed with exasperation. ‘Why couldn't you say so before, you silly girl, instead of insisting you knew nothing about it? Did you ask me or Meg before you gave it away? I don't remember being asked.'

It was perfectly clear to Sergeant Picot that no one would dream of asking the Canon before giving away any garment in the house.

He felt quite sympathetic towards the respectable old girl. She made no answer save to gulp, and Avril continued:

‘It's so silly to give away something that is not your own,' he said. ‘There seems to be a mania for it nowadays. But I should have thought it was obvious that the good you do on the one hand must be offset by the irritation you cause on the other. It's woolly-minded, Mary, woolly-minded and short-sighted and gets none of us anywhere. Work for it first. Then give it away. To whom did you give it? Some poor fellow at the door?'

She hesitated and a flicker of temptation appeared in her red eyes. The Canon was on to it like a flash. Picot had to hand it to him, the old fellow seemed to spot deceit as if it reeked like a goat.

‘Ah, I see. It was someone you knew. Now who was that?'

Mrs Talisman made a helpless gesture with the palms of her hands.

‘I gave it to Mrs Cash.'

‘Mrs
Cash
?' The listening Picot understood that this was a revelation. Avril was leaning back in his chair, his lips parted, his eyes comprehending, and also, unless the Sergeant was very much mistaken, dismayed.

Presently the old man rose and put his head out of the door.

‘Dot!' he shouted.

‘Yes, Canon.' Miss Warburton's high, cheerful voice floated down the stairs from Meg's room. ‘Coming.'

Picot waited her arrival with embarrassment. They had already had one session with her and she was not his kind of woman. It appeared that the Canon did not need her either, however, for he continued to shout instructions.

‘Please fetch Mrs Cash.'

‘She'll be in bed, Hubert.'

A fresh outburst of weeping from poor Mrs Talisman distracted Uncle Hubert's attention and he waved at her to be silent.

‘What was that, Dot.'

‘She'll be in bed, dear.' She was coming nearer and they could hear her shoes on the stairs.

‘Then fetch her out of it.' He seemed astonished that she should not have thought of that way out herself. ‘Tell her to wrap up and not to stop to do her hair. She can put a cap on. Thank you very much, Dot.'

Having settled the matter with kindness and politeness, he shut the door firmly just as the lady reached the hall.

‘Now, Mary,' he said as he reseated himself, ‘think this out very carefully and don't upset yourself more than necessary. Do be quiet, my poor girl. Moderation. Moderation in all things. Did you offer this coat to Mrs Cash or did she ask for it?'

‘I – oh, I don't know, sir.'

To the Sergeant's astonishment, the old man seemed prepared to accept this statement literally.

‘A,' he said, ‘yes, I see that. Did she say why she wanted it? No. No, she wouldn't. Forget that. That was foolish of me. But listen, did Mrs Elginbrodde show you any of the photographs which she has been getting through the post?'

‘Of the Major? Yes, she did, sir. I told her I didn't see how anybody could be quite sure.'

‘Didn't you recognize this sports coat on the man in the photograph?'

‘I never thought. Oh, is that how it was done? Oh dear, it never came into my mind.'

‘Why didn't it, Mary? It didn't come into mine.'

‘I don't know, unless it was the colour not being there, sir. It's the colour that makes this jacket outstanding, and of course it wasn't in the photo.'

‘I see. Now you go and make yourself a cup of tea and sit in the kitchen and drink it, and don't move until I call you. Understand?'

‘Yes, sir. Yes I do. But oh, Canon Avril, if Mrs Cash – '

‘Be off,' commanded Uncle Hubert sternly, and he took a piece of sermon paper from the dog basket and began to write upon it in his fine neat hand.

Clearly this was the one signal of dismissal from which there was no appeal. Mrs Talisman made a gesture of resignation and, taking out her handkerchief once more, wept herself out of the room.

‘I don't suppose you'd ever get another housekeeper like that these days, sir.' The remark was wrung out of Picot. This selfless omnipotence was getting on his nerves. He felt someone ought to tell the old boy. It wasn't fair, somehow. It wasn't fair on the police.

‘Of course I shouldn't. I've often thought that. How odd that it should strike you, my dear fellow. I should die in six months without that woman. She saves my life every January when I have bronchitis.' Uncle Hubert was frank and even cheerful about it. ‘The girl is a snob,' he went on, ‘quite a dreadful snob. What an astonishing number of pitfalls there are, aren't there? Have you noticed? We seem to be like those contortionists at fairs, boneless wonders they call them, able to fall down in absolutely every way conceivable. It's very wonderful.'

Picot did not reply. His fresh-complexioned face was perfectly blank. He could not believe the old man was genuine, because people, especially of ‘that class', never were. Every copper on the beat knew that. All the same, the old boy was unusual. Psychological, perhaps. A kink somewhere, that was about it. This Mrs Cash, now, he hadn't wanted to discuss her with his housekeeper, and he had been taken aback when her name was mentioned. He wondered what there was between the two. He'd like to see the lady.

The desire was granted almost immediately. The front door opened with a squeak and a burst of Miss Warburton's cheerful noise.

‘
Come
along, Mrs Cash,
come
along.
In
you go. There's a nice fat policeman in there – oh dear, I hope he can't hear me – so the Canon can't eat you. How lucky you were up. I should have had to have fetched you, you know, whatever you were wearing, or weren't.
Come
along.'

The study door shattered open and she came in. Miss Warburton was a middle-aged English gentlewoman who had had the misfortune to mould her social personality at a period when gay and feckless madcaps of the Paddy-the-next-best-thing variety were much in vogue. Her moulding had been slapdash and her basic type pronounced, so that the effect thirty years later was mildly embarrassing, as if a maiden aunt from the Edwardian stage had elected for a day to be untidy, offhand, and bright. However, the woman herself remained what she was bred to be, very feminine, very honest, very obstinate, innocent to the point of being uninstructable, and nearly always right.

‘Here she is, Canon,' she said, ‘dr-r-ragged from her couch. Beauty sleep ruined. Do you want me to stay?'

Her nice eyes in her plain face were merry and her form, on which every garment always looked as if it was still on its hanger, was arch.

The other woman was still invisible behind her.

‘No, Dot, no.' Avril nodded and smiled at her. ‘That was very kind of you. Thank you very much. Now go back upstairs.'

‘I shall expect to hear all about it, I warn you.' She was actually swinging on the door handle, Picot noticed with disgust. Fifty if she was a day, and how the old fellow ever brought himself to call her by such an unlikely diminutive he could not imagine.

The explanation might have puzzled him even more. Canon Avril had bestowed the name on her not because her name was Dorothy. It was not. He called her Dot because he pretended she was a mathematician, and as he said, he could hardly call her Decimal Point. Avril saw her for what she was, a gift of God in his life, and if he often found her trying he was far too humble, and indeed too experienced, to expect that the Almighty's more quixotic benefits should ever prove to be unadulterated jam.

‘I dare say you will, Dot,' he said mildly on this occasion. ‘I dare say you will. Come in, Mrs Cash.'

Miss Warburton gave way with the carefree crow of her chosen rôle and withdrew, dropping a hairpin and a handkerchief behind her.

Mrs Cash came in. At the first sight of her every experience-sharpened wit which Picot possessed came smartly into play, yet at first sight there was nothing outstandingly peculiar about her. She was a sturdy little person, nearer sixty than fifty, very solid on her feet, very tidy. Her very good black coat was buttoned up to her throat and finished with a tippet of very good brown fur. Her massive face, and the thick coils of wonderfully arranged iron-grey hair, together with the sleek flat hat which sat upon it, seemed so much all of one piece that the notion of them ever coming apart was slightly shocking. She carried a large black bag, holding it squarely on her stomach with both neatly gloved hands, and her eyes were round and bright and knowing.

She studied Picot, made a note of him as openly and casually as if he were a door marked Exit, and walked steadily over to Avril.

‘Good evening, Canon. You wanted to see me about the jacket?' Her voice was like the rest of her, bright and bold and not very nice. It contained a jar in it, as if a comb and paper somewhere entered into its production, and her teeth, which looked as if they were made of china, shone in false bonhomie. ‘I'll sit down here, shall I?'

She moved the small armchair before the desk so that it was directly in Picot's light, and sank into it. Her feet only just touched the ground, but she kept her shoulders straight and the sergeant could see her hat, steady as a rock, above the low back.

The Canon was on his feet, looking at her gravely across the desk.

‘Yes,' he said. He made no apology for summoning her so late, and the watching Picot realized with a shock that these were not so much old friends as old enemies. There was the familiarity there which belongs only to the years and is almost a cosiness, but they were not on the same side.

‘Mary tells me she gave it to you some weeks ago. Is that true?'

‘Well no, Canon. I don't want to get anybody into trouble, as you know, but Mary's not telling the truth. I bought it. Three pound ten of good money. You can see I didn't make much on it, although it was for charity.' She was brisk, straightforward, apparently as open as the day, and neither man believed a word she said.

‘So you bought it from Mary.'

‘That's what I've told you. I've told you straight, haven't I? Of course, I felt sure she'd had it given to her. You know me well enough for that after six-and-twenty years. I've been in the second glebe cottage twenty-six years last month.'

The old man did not move. Picot could see his fine face, grave and regretful and also withdrawn, as if in some strange manner he were keeping right away from her. He did not query her statement at all but pressed on with the main inquiry.

‘And when you had bought it from Mary, what did you do with it?'

‘That's my business, Canon.' She was reproving but still affable. Picot guessed that her round eyes were laughing.

‘Of course it is,' Avril agreed. ‘Your business entirely. You will recognize it, though, and that will be a great help. Won't you come over here and look at it?'

Picot was surprised. He had not expected a parson to get so tough. He moved so that he could see her face when she first caught sight of the terrible stains. She was unprepared, he noticed, for she bent forward casually and drew the bundle towards her. As she shook it open the appalling lapels curled stickily before her and her busy hands in their tight gloves hesitated, but so momentarily that the check was scarcely perceptible. Her face did not change at all. It remained bland and bright and good-tempered, no way, in Picot's opinion, for any disinterested female face to remain when confronted by such a sight.