"And someone doesn"t want Henrietta to know who she is?" responded Crosby brightly.
"Don"t strain yourself thinking too hard, Constable, will you?"
"No, sir."
"She tells us she is going to be twenty-one in April," con-tinued Sloan, "and I think she has been correctly informed on this point, but April would be too late for the killing of Grace Jenkins for two reasons..." He waited hopefully for Crosby to enumerate them.
Crosby said nothing.
"Two reasons," went on Sloan in a resigned way. When he got back to Berebury he would look up the leave schedules to see when Sergeant Gelven was coming back. They weren"t going to solve anything at all at this rate. "One of them is that the girl would have been back from college by then."
Crosby nodded in agreement.
"The other is..."
"Daylight," said Crosby unexpectedly.
"Exactly. By April the last bus would be getting to Larking in the twilight rather than the sort of darkness you can easily run someone down in. There"s another thing..."
Crosby c.o.c.ked his head like a spaniel.
"This wedding..."
"She wouldn"t let them get married," said Crosby. "That chap Hibbs told us that."
"Have you thought why not? Thorpe"s a nice enough lad by all accounts..."
They were right in the centre of the village now and he and Crosby knocked on the door of the house of the last perknown to have seen the late Grace Edith Jenkins alive.
"That"s right," said Mrs. Martha Callows, not without relish. "I reckon me and Mrs. Perkins was the last to see her. On the last bus, she was, same as we were."
She admitted the policemen into an untidy house, knocked a cat off one chair, scooped a child out of another and inthem to sit down.
"The last bus from Berebury?" asked Sloan with the air of one anxious to get everything clear.
"There aren"t any other buses from anywhere else," Mrs. Callows said, "and there aren"t all that many from Berebury. If you miss the seven five you walk."
"Quite so. Was it crowded?"
"Not after Cullingoak. Most people get out there. Get down, you." This last was said to the cat, which, thwarted of the chair, was settling on the table.
"Where did you get out?"
"The Post Office. That"s the only stop in Larking. We all got out there. Me and Mrs. Perkins and her."
"About what time would that have been?"
"Something short of eight o"clock."
The cat had not, in fact, troubled to get down and was now investigating some dirty plates which were still on the table.
"You"d been shopping?" said Sloan generally.
"Sort of. Mrs. Perkins-that"s who I was with-her husband"s in hospital. That"s why we was on the late bus. Visiting hours. "Course, we"d been round the shops first... Berebury"s a long way to go for nothing."
"Quite so. Had Mrs. Jenkins got a shopping basket?"
"Now I come to think of it," said Mrs. Callows, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her face in recollection, "I don"t know she had." Her face cleared suddenly. "But then she wouldn"t have, would she?"
"Why not?" enquired Sloan with interest.
"Friday"s her day for Berebury. Not Toosday. She goes in Fridays, regular as clockwork. Always has done."
"Not Tuesdays?"
Mrs. Callows shook her head. "Not shopping."
"I see. Tell me"-Sloan was at his most confidential- "tell me, was she her usual self otherwise?"
A wary look came into Mrs. Callows"s eye. "Yes, I suppose you could say she was."
Sloan tried another tack. "Cheerful?"
"I wouldn"t say cheerful meself. Polite, of course, hoh yes, always very polite was Mrs. Jenkins, but not what you"d call cheerful."
"Talkative sort?"
Mrs. Callows shook her head. "Not her. Never much to say for herself at the best of times but take Toosday f"r"instance. "Good evening," she says. "We could do with a bit better weather than this, couldn"t we? Too windy." And pa.s.ses right down the bus to the front and sits there by herself."
"Kept herself to herself?"
"That"s right. She did." Mrs. Callows reached out absently and gave the cat a cuff. It retreated but only momentarily.
"She didn"t tell you how she"d spent the day?" asked Sloan.
Mrs. Callows sniffed. "She wouldn"t tell us a thing like that. She wasn"t the sort."
"I see." Sloan reverted to officialese. "We are naturally anxious to trace Mrs. Jenkins"s movements on Tuesday..."
"There I cannot help," said Mrs. Callows frankly. "Neither of us set eyes on her until we got to the bus station."
"What about afterwards?"
"When we got back to Larking, you mean?"
"That"s right." Sloan waved an arm. "Other people, for instance. Was there anyone about?"
She shook her head. "We didn"t see anybody else, but then we wouldn"t, would we?"
"Why not?"
"Because it was Toosday, like I said."
"Tuesday?"
"The first Toosday," amplified Mrs. Callows. "Inst.i.toot night."
"I see. So what happened when you all got off the bus?"
"She turned down the lane towards her house. Mrs. Perkins and me-we went the other way. That was the last we saw of her."
"I see," said Sloan. "Thank you."
"It"s a nasty bend," volunteered Mrs. Callows suddenly.
"Indeed, yes. By the way, did you see any vehicular traffic?"
Mrs. Callows looked blank. "Oh, you mean cars? No, none at all."
Sloan and Crosby rose to go.
"Except," she added, "the ones parked outside the King"s Head."
Sloan and Crosby took a look at the King"s Head car park on their way from Mrs. Callows"s house to the Post Office.
It was an asphalt affair and disappointing.
"We won"t get a tyre print on this." Crosby stood in the middle of it and stamped his foot. "Hard as iron."
Inspector Sloan didn"t appear to be interested in the surface of the car park. He was moving about and looking down the road to his right.
"Anyway," went on Crosby, "she was killed on Tuesday. Today"s Friday. Other vehicles would have come in here since then and rubbed them out."
"What exactly can you see from here, constable?"
Crosby looked down the road. "The Post Office, sir, and a telephone kiosk, the fork in the road to Belling St. Peter, the signpost and so forth." He paused, then, "A woman pushing a pram, a delivery van, a row of horse chestnuts..."
"This is not a nature ramble, Crosby."
"No, sir."
"Anything else?"
"There"s the church, sir, beyond the bus stop."
"Precisely."
Crosby looked puzzled. "Is the church important, sir?"
"No."
"The bus stop?"
"Don"t overdo it, Crosby, will you?"
"No, sir." He turned back to Sloan. "Where to, now, sir?"
"The Post Office. To see a Mrs. Ricks. The admirable Hepple says she knows everything."
But this was not quite true.
While confirming that the late Grace Jenkins always went into Berebury on Fridays, and seldom, if ever, on Tuesdays, Mrs. Ricks was unable to say why she had left on the early bus and come back on the late one. Sloan squeezed alongside a sack of corn while the tall Crosby ducked out of the way of a vicious-looking billhook which was suspended from the ceiling. It was above his head-but only just.
"I don"t know," she wheezed regretfully. It was an admission she rarely had to make. "She wouldn"t have said. She wasn"t a talker."
"So I heard," said Sloan.
"I saw her leave in the morning," offered Mrs. Ricks. "In her best, she was."
"Was she?" said Sloan, interested.
"And she was gone all day. At least I never saw her get off a bus before I closed." Mrs. Ricks apparently monitored the bus stop outside the Post Office window as a matter of course.
"Nasty things, car accidents," observed Sloan to n.o.body in particular.
"You needn"t think, officer," said Mrs. Ricks, divining his intentions with uncanny accuracy, "that you"ll find anyone to say a word against Mrs. Jenkins, because you won"t."
"Madam, I a.s.sure you..."
"She didn"t," went on Mrs. Ricks with the insight born of years of small shopkeeping, "mix with people enough to upset them, if you see what I mean."
Sloan saw what she meant.
"Difficult job, all the same," he said diffidently, "bringing up a child without a father."
Mrs. Ricks gave a crowing laugh. "She brought her up all right. She never did anything else all day but look after that child. And that house of hers."
"Devoted?" suggested Sloan.
Mrs. Ricks gave a powerful nod. "It was always "Henrietta this" and "Henrietta that" with Mrs. Jenkins," she said a trifle spitefully. "A rare old job it was to get her to take an interest in anything else."
"I see."
Mrs. Ricks gave a sigh and said sententiously, "Here today, gone tomorrow. We none of us know, do we, when we shall be called..."
Sloan got her back to the point with an effort. "Do you happen to know which is her pension day?"
"That I do not," declared Mrs. Ricks. "But I can tell you one thing..."