The Clocks

‘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.’

Chapter 6

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.