‘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-a-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.’

Colin Lamb’s Narrative

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 Iam 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.