Close Quarters by Michael Gilbert Read Free Book Online

could not have explained in so many words why he was certain of this; he had a feeling about the matter which depended little on facts like high walls and locked gates, and a good deal on mere intuition.
    He also felt that it was a one-man (or one-woman?) show. Here the balance of his experience was in favour of the proposition. It had been his melancholy duty during his short term of service in the police to investigate a number of anonymous slanderings and “poison-pen” cases, and he could not call to mind a single example of complicity in such affairs. They were, by their very nature, a product of “a mind diseased.” People with obsessions – often, he had found, rather lonely and pathetic people.
    He considered the letters themselves. An obvious point was the difference between the last letter – the Dean’s – and the others. Why should it be in handwriting, where the others were of the cut-out-and-paste-on variety? And what was the point of the initials? Was it a piece of stupid bravado, or something more subtle? The Dean, assisted by an adult voters’ register had already ascertained that there was no J. B. living in the Close. Brumfit was Sergeant Albert Alfred Kitchener Brumfit, whilst his wife, to complete a patriotic household, bore the name of Elizabeth Florence Nightingale Brumfit. Canon Bloss, the other possible candidate, was Herbert Patrick, and his as yet unmarried daughter was Monica Berwyn.
    Pollock felt most strangely that he was, in nursery parlance, “getting warm,” that these startling discrepancies in the last letter contained a real key to the business, a key which he had not yet the skill or the knowledge to manipulate. Still, the thumbprint might be helpful.
    Granting the truth of his own hunch that the culprit had no accomplices, and the soundness of the Dean’s contentions as to the inviolability of the Close after seven o’clock in the evening, it became obvious that the vital incidents were the writing on the Dean’s wall and the letter which an unknown hand had thrust into the Dean’s letter-box at some time after seven on that Monday evening. It seemed strongly probable that anyone who was out of the Close on Sunday night, or who could produce an alibi (why, he wondered, did it seem slightly incongruous to him to think of clergymen with alibis?) for the period of seven to eight-fifteen on Monday evening could be eliminated.
    â€˜Sound elimination,’ as his old Chief Inspector used to say, ‘is the basis of all detection.’ Good. He would start by eliminating as many people as possible. According to the Dean, the entire Beech-Thompson, Halliday, and Scrimgeour ménages had been away on holiday, whilst Vicar Choral (and minor canon) Malthus had departed at tea time on Sunday to visit a sick relative. Pollock placed a neatly pencilled cross against each of them in his note-book and registered the determination that his first port of call should be the South Canonry East. He would see Beech-Thompson and Halliday, and ask them a few tactful questions about their holidays.
    Under the normal headings of motive and method Pollock could find little to help him. He supposed that it might be to the advantage of either the second or the junior verger to get Appledown removed from office in order to step into his place and superior emoluments. But he could not help reflecting that if Parvin or Morgan had instituted the persecution with such an object, they were likely to achieve very little by it.
    Anyway, motive was likely to prove a broken reed in a case like this. Obsession, mania – complexes of all sorts. One talked glibly of them, especially if one had read the latest popular approach to psychology. But they were difficult to diagnose in practice, more difficult still to detect. The most saintly countenance might mask a seething fury of inhibitions. The most ordinary-looking breast-pocket might contain a poison pen.
    As