CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Alleyn Plots a Dénouement

BUT THERE WAS NOT much more to tell. Apparently Violet Harris had bicycled off with Paddy O’Brien’s letter and had returned to say she had given it to the gentleman who had brought the lady in the motor-car. The gentleman had been sitting in the motor-car outside the hospital. As far as Mrs Harris could state, and she and her husband went into a mazed avuncular family history to prove their point, little Violet had been fifteen years old at the time. Alleyn wrote out her statement, shorn of its interminable parentheses, and she signed it. Throughout the interview neither she nor her husband gave the faintest sign of any form of curiosity. Apparently it did not strike either of them as singular that the interest in a letter lost eighteen years ago should suddenly be excited to such a pitch that CID officers thought it necessary to seek for signed statements in the heart of Buckinghamshire.

They insisted on taking Alleyn and Fox round their garden. Alleyn hadn’t the heart to refuse and besides he had a liking for gardens. Mrs Harris gave them each a bunch of lavender and rosemary, which flowers, she said, were less conspicuous for gentlemen to carry than the gayer blossoms of summer. The sight of Fox solemnly grasping a posy in his enormous fist and examining a border of transplanted pansies was almost too much for his superior officer. It was two o’clock when the tour of the garden was completed.

‘You must come in whenever you are passing,’ said Mrs Harris, blinking cordially at Alleyn, ‘and I shall remember what you say about your mother’s herb garden.’

‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Mr Harris. ‘Whenever you are passing. Of course. Anybody from dear old Falconbridge is doubly welcome.’

They stood side by side at the gate and waved, rather in the manner of children, as Alleyn turned the car and drove away down Oakapple Lane.

‘Well!’ ejaculated Fox. ‘Well!’

‘Not another word,’ said Alleyn, ‘until we get to that pub outside Barbicon-Bramley. Do you realize we’ve had no lunch? I refuse to utter another word until I’ve drunk a pint of bitter.’

‘And some bread and cheese and pickles,’ said Fox. ‘Pickles with plenty of onions in them.’

‘Lord! Lord! Fox, what a choice! Now I come to think of it, though, it sounds damn good. “Bread and cheese and pickles,” Fox, it’s what we need. New white bread, mouse-trap cheese, home-made pickles and bitter.’

‘That’s the idea, Mr Alleyn. You’re a great gourmet,’ said Fox who had taught himself French, ‘and don’t think I haven’t enjoyed some of those dinners you’ve given me when everything seemed to sort of slide into something else. I have. But when you’re famished and in the English countryside you can’t beat bread and cheese and pickles.’

The pub provided them with these delicacies. They took about a quarter of an hour over their meal and then set out again.