‘’E must ’a’ bin a exhibitor,’ someone volunteered. ‘People as goes about showing thesselves in the altogether is called exhibitors.’
But this information, savouring as it did of intellectual snobbery, failed to provoke much interest. A middle-aged, bovine, nervous-looking man in the uniform of a police constable, who was standing by with a note-book in his hand, said:
‘Well, us all knows what ’tis, I s’pose. ’Tis one o’ they loonies escaped from up at ’all.’
‘These ten years,’ said a gloomy-looking old man, ‘I’ve known that’d ’appen. ’Aven’t I said it, time and time again?’
The disgusted silence with which this rhetorical question was received indicated forcibly that he had; with just such repugnance must Cassandra have been regarded at the fall of Troy, for there is something distinctly irritating about a person with an obsession who turns out in the face of all reason to have been right.
The adept in psychological terminology said: ‘Us ought to organize a search-party, that’s what us ought to do. ’E’m likely dangerous.’
But the constable shook his head. ‘Dr Boysenberry’ll be seeing to that, I reckon. I’ll telephone ’im now, though I’ve no doubt ’e knows all about it already.’ He cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. ‘There is no cause for alarm,’ he announced. ‘No cause for alarm at all.’
The inn’s clients, who had shown not the smallest evidence of such an emotion, received this statement apathetically, with the single exception of the elderly lady in the wig, who by now was slightly contumelious from brandy.
‘Tcha!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s just like ’ee, Will Sly. An ostrich, that’s what you are, with your ’ead buried in sand. “No cause for alarm,” indeed! If it’d bin you ’e’d jumped out at, you’d not go about saying there was “no cause for alarm”. There ’e were, white and nekked like an evil sperrit…’
Her audience, however, was clearly not anxious for a repetition of the history; it began to disperse, resuming abandoned glasses and tankards. The gloomy-looking old man buttonholed people with complacent iterations of his own foresight. The psychologist embarked on a detailed and scabrous account, in low tones, and to an exclusively male circle, of the habits of exhibitors. And Constable Sly, on the point of commandeering the inn’s telephone, caught the eye of the girl from the taxi for the first time since she and Fen had entered the bar.
‘’Ullo, Miss Diana,’ he said, grinning awkwardly. ‘You’ve ’eard what’s ’appened, I s’pose?’
‘I have, Will,’ said Diana, ‘and I think I may be able to help you a bit.’ She related their encounter with the lunatic.
‘Ah,’ said Sly. ‘That may be very useful, Miss Diana. ’E were making for Sanford Condover, you say?’
‘As far as I could tell, yes.’
‘I will inform Dr Boysenberry of that fact,’ said Sly laboriously. He turned to the woman who was serving behind the bar. ‘All right for I to use phone, Myra?’
‘You can use the phone, my dear,’ Myra Herbert said, ‘if you put tuppence in the box.’ She was a vivacious and attractive Cockney woman in the middle thirties, with black hair, a shrewd but slightly sensual mouth, and green eyes, unusually but beautifully shaped.
‘Official call,’ Sly explained with hauteur.
Myra registered disgust. ‘You and your official ruddy calls,’ she said. ‘My God!’
Sly ignored this and turned away; at which the lunatic’s first victim, becoming suddenly aware of his impending departure, roused herself from an access of lethargy to say:
‘And what about me, Will Sly?’
Sly grew harassed. ‘Well, Mrs ’Ennessy, what about you?’
‘You’re not going to leave me to walk ’ome by meself, I should ’ope.’
‘I’ve already explained to you, Mrs ’Ennessy,’ said Sly with painful dignity, ‘that there is no cause for alarm.’
Mrs Hennessy emitted a shriek of stage laughter.
‘Listen to ’im,’ she adjured Fen, who was contemplating his potential constituents with a hypnotized air: ‘Listen to Mr Knowall Sly!’ Her manner changed abruptly to one of menace. ‘For all you knows, Will Sly, I might be murdered on me own doorstep, and then where’d you be? Eh? Tell me that. And what’s me ’usband pay ’is rates for, that’s what I asks. I got a right to pertection, ’aven’t I? I got—’
‘Now, look ’ere, Mrs ’Ennessy, I’ve me duty to do.’
‘Duty!’ Mrs Hennessy repeated with scorn. ‘’E says’ – and here she again addressed Fen, this time with the air of one imparting a valuable confidence – ‘’e says ’e’s got ’is duty to do … Fat lot of duty you do, Will Sly. What about the time Alf Braddock’s apples was stolen? Eh? What about that? Duty!’
‘Yes, duty,’ said Sly, much aggrieved at this unsportsmanlike allusion. ‘And what’s more, the next time I catch you trying to buy Guinness ’ere out of hours—’
Diana interrupted these indiscretions.
‘It’s all right, Will,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Mrs Hennessy home. It’s not far out of my way.’
The offer restored peace and a semblance of amity. Sly went to the telephone. Fen paid Diana and retrieved his luggage from the taxi. Myra called time. The company grudgingly finished its drinks and departed, Diana enduring with angelic patience a new and more highly-coloured account of Mrs Hennessy’s adventure.
Fen introduced himself to Myra, signed a register, and was shown to his room, which was comfortable and scrupulously clean. He ordered, obtained, and consumed beer, coffee, and sandwiches.
‘And I should like,’ he told Myra, ‘to be allowed to sleep on till ten tomorrow morning.’
At this, to his mystification, Myra laughed very happily, and, controlling herself at length, said: ‘Very well, my dear: good night,’ and tripped gracefully from the room, leaving him theorizing gloomily about what her unexpected reaction might mean.
There remained, for that evening, only one further incident which interested him. His visit to the bathroom gave him a glimpse of someone who was vaguely familiar – a thin, auburn-haired man of about his own age whom he saw vanishing in a dressing-gown into one of the other bedrooms. But the association which was so certainly in his mind refused to reveal itself, and though he pondered the problem while getting into bed, he soon abandoned it for lack of inspiration, and by the time the church clock struck midnight was sound asleep.
He was horribly awakened, in what seemed about ten minutes, by an outbreak of intensive hammering somewhere in the regions below.
He groped for his watch, focused his eyes with difficulty on its dial, and perceived that the time was only seven. Outside the bedroom windows the sun was shining brilliantly. Fen eyed it with displeasure. He was temperamentally a late riser, and the panache of virgin daylight made little appeal to him.
Meanwhile, the noise below was increasing in volume and variety, as if fresh recruits were arriving momently. And now it became clear to Fen’s fuddled mind that in this lay probably the reason both for Diana’s gnomic warning and for Myra’s irrepressible hilarity of the previous evening, when he had said he wished to sleep late. He uttered a groan of dismay.
It acted like a signal.