The Star (13 page)

That should hold them for a while, thought Harry. He was right. It was a good couple of minutes before the second question. Then the prosecution’s spokeman waved one of the pieces of copper tubing in the air.

‘What function did these carry out?’ he said, in as nasty a tone of voice as he could manage. Harry affected not to notice the sneer.

‘Manometer tubing for the pressure gauges,’ he replied promptly.

The Bench, it was clear, was already far out of its depth. This was just where Harry wanted it to be. But the prosecution still had one card up its sleeve. There was a furtive whispering between the excisemen and his legal eagle. Harry looked nervously at Uncle Homer, who shrugged his shoulders with a ‘Don’t ask
me
!’ gesture.

‘I have some additional evidence I wish to present to the Court,’ said the Customs lawyer briskly, as a bulky brown paper parcel was hoisted onto the table.

‘Is this in order, your Honour?’ protested Harry. ‘All evidence against my—ah—colleague should already have been presented.’

‘I withdraw my statement,’ the lawyer interjected swiftly. ‘Let us say that this is not evidence for
this
case, but material for later proceedings.’ He paused ominously to let that sink in. ‘Nevertheless, if Mr Ferguson can give a satisfactory answer to our question now, this whole business can be cleared up right away.’ It was obvious that the last thing the speaker expected—or hoped for—was such a satisfactory explanation.

He unwrapped the brown paper, and there were three bottles of a famous brand of whisky.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Uncle Homer. ‘I was wondering—’

‘Mr Ferguson,’ said the Chairman of the Bench. ‘There is no need for you to make any statement unless you wish.’

Harry Purvis shot Major Fotheringham a grateful glance. He guessed what had happened. The prosecution had, when prowling through the ruins of Uncle’s laboratory, acquired some bottles of his home-brew. Their action was probably illegal, since they would not have had a search warrant—hence the reluctance in producing the evidence. The case had seemed sufficiently clear-cut without it.

It certainly appeared pretty clear-cut now….

‘These bottles,’ said the representative of the Crown, ‘do not contain the brand advertised on the label. They have obviously been used as convenient receptacles for the defendant’s—shall we say—chemical solutions.’ He gave Harry Purvis an unsympathetic glance. ‘We have had these solutions analysed, with most interesting results. Apart from an abnormally high alcohol concentration, the contents of these bottles are virtually indistinguishable from—’

He never had time to finish his unsolicited and certainly unwanted testimonial to Uncle Homer’s skill. For at that moment, Harry Purvis became aware of an ominous whistling sound. At first he thought it was a falling bomb—but that seemed unlikely, as there had been no air-raid warning. Then he realised that the whistling came from close at hand; from the courtroom table, in fact….

‘Take cover!’ he yelled.

The Court went into recess with a speed never matched in the annals of British law. The three justices disappeared behind the dais; those in the body of the room burrowed into the floor or sheltered under desks. For a protracted, anguished moment nothing happened, and Harry wondered if he had given a false alarm. Then there was a dull, peculiarly muffled explosion, a great tinkling of glass—and a smell like a blitzed brewery. Slowly, the court emerged from shelter.

The Osmotic Bomb had proved its power. More important still, it had destroyed the evidence for the prosecution.

The Bench was none too happy about dismissing the case; it felt, with good reason, that its dignity had been assailed. Moreover, each one of the justices would have to do some fast talking when he got home: the mist of alcohol had penetrated everything. Though the Clerk of the Court rushed round opening windows (none of which, oddly enough, had been broken) the fumes seemed reluctant to disperse. Harry Purvis, as he removed pieces of bottle glass from his hair, wondered if there would be some intoxicated pupils in class tomorrow.

Major Fotheringham, however, was undoubtedly a real sport, and as they filed out of the devastated courtroom, Harry heard him say to his uncle: ‘Look here, Ferguson—it’ll be ages before we can get those Molotov cocktails we’ve been promised by the War Office. What about making some of these bombs of yours for the Home Guard? If they don’t knock out a tank, at least they’ll make the crew drunk and incapable.’

‘I’ll certainly think about it, Major,’ replied Uncle Homer, who still seemed a little dazed by the turn of events.

He recovered somewhat as they drove back to the Vicarage along the narrow, winding lanes with their high walls of unmortared stone.

‘I hope, Uncle,’ remarked Harry, when they had reached a relatively straight stretch and it seemed safe to talk to the driver, ‘That you don’t intend to rebuild that still. They’ll be watching you like hawks and you won’t get away with it again.’

‘Very well,’ said Uncle, a little sulkily. ‘Confound these brakes! I had them fixed only just before the war!’

‘Hey!’ cried Harry. ‘Watch out!’

It was too late. They had come to a crossroads at which a brand new HALT sign had been erected. Uncle braked hard, but for a moment nothing happened. Then the wheels on the left seized up, while those on the right continued gaily spinning. The car did a hairpin bend, luckily without turning over, and ended in the ditch pointing in the direction from which it had come.

Harry looked reproachfully at his uncle. He was about to frame a suitable reprimand when a motorcycle came out of the side-turning and drew up to them.

It was not going to be their lucky day, after all. The village police sergeant had been lurking in ambush, waiting to catch motorists at the new sign. He parked his machine by the roadside and leaned in through the window of the Austin.

‘You all right, Mr Ferguson?’ he said. Then his nose wrinkled up, and he looked like Jove about to deliver a thunderbolt. ‘This won’t do,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to put you on a charge. Driving under the influence is a
very
serious business.’

‘But I’ve not touched a drop all day!’ protested Uncle, waving an alcohol-sodden sleeve under the sergeant’s twitching nose.

‘Do you expect me to believe
that
?’ snorted the irate policeman, pulling out his notebook. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to come to the station with me. Is your friend sober enough to drive?’

Harry Purvis didn’t answer for a moment. He was too busy beating his head against the dashboard.

‘Well,’ we asked Harry. ‘What did they do to your uncle?’

‘Oh, he got fined five pounds and had his licence endorsed for drunken driving. Major Fotheringham wasn’t in the Chair, unfortunately, when the case came up, but the other two justices were still on the Bench. I guess they felt that even if he was innocent this time, there was a limit to everything.’

‘And did you ever get any of his money?’

‘No fear! He was very grateful, of course, and he’s told me that I’m mentioned in his will. But when I saw him last, what do you think he was doing? He was searching for the Elixir of Life.’

Harry sighed at the overwhelming injustice of things.

‘Sometimes,’ he said gloomily, ‘I’m afraid he’s found it. The doctors say he’s the healthiest seventy-year-old they’ve ever seen. So all I got out of the whole affair was some interesting memories and a hang-over.’

‘A hang-over?’ asked Charlie Willis.

‘Yes,’ replied Harry, a faraway look in his eye. ‘You see, the excisemen hadn’t seized
all
the evidence. We had to—ah—destroy the rest. It took us the best part of a week. We invented all sorts of things during that time—but we never discovered what they were.’

The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch

First published in
Tales from the White Hart

An unusual story from the White Hart, in which Harry Purvis seemingly meets his match when his wife discovers the location of his ‘quantum mechanics lectures’. It also chronicles the move from the ‘White Hart’ to the ‘Sphere’, matching the move from the White Horse to the Globe, following the landlord, Lew Mordecai.

And now I have a short, sad duty to perform. One of the many mysteries about Harry Purvis—who was so informative in every other direction—was the existence or otherwise of a Mrs Purvis. It was true that he wore no wedding ring, but that means little nowadays. Almost as little, as an hotel proprietor will tell you, as does the reverse.

In a number of his tales, Harry had shown distinct evidence of some hostility towards what a Polish friend of mine, whose command of English did not match his gallantry, always referred to as ladies of the female sex. And it was by a curious coincidence that the very last story he ever told us first indicated, and then proved conclusively, Harry’s marital status.

I do not know who brought up the word ‘defenestration,’ which is not, after all, one of the most commonly used abstractions in the language. It was probably one of the alarmingly erudite younger members of the ‘White Hart’ clientele; some of them are just out of college, and so make us old-timers feel very callow and ignorant. But from the word, the discussion naturally passed to the deed. Had any of us ever been defenestrated? Did we know anyone who had?

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘It happened to a verbose lady I once knew. She was called Ermintrude, and was married to Osbert Inch, a sound engineer at the BBC.

‘Osbert spent all his working hours listening to other people talking, and most of his free time listening to Ermintrude. Unfortunately, he couldn’t switch
her
off at the turn of a knob, and so he very seldom had a chance of getting a word in edgeways.

‘There are some women who appear sincerely unaware of the fact that they cannot stop talking, and are most surprised when anyone accuses them of monopolising the conversation. Ermintrude would start as soon as she woke up, change gear so that she could hear herself speak above the eight o’clock news, and continue unabated until Osbert thankfully left for work. A couple of years of this had almost reduced him to a nervous wreck, but one morning when his wife was handicapped by a long overdue attack of laryngitis he made a spirited protest against her vocal monopoly.

‘To his incredulous disbelief, she flatly refused to accept the charge. It appeared that to Ermintrude, time ceased to exist when
she
was talking—but she became extremely restive when anyone else held the stage. As soon as she had recovered her voice, she told Osbert how unfair it was of him to make such an unfounded accusation, and the argument would have been very acrimonious—if it had been possible to have an argument with Ermintrude at all.

‘This made Osbert an angry and also a desperate man. But he was an ingenious one, too, and it occurred to him that he could produce irrefutable evidence that Ermintrude talked a hundred words for every syllable he was able to utter. I mentioned that he was a sound engineer, and his room was fitted up with hi-fi set, tape recorder, and the usual electronic tools of his trade, some of which the BBC had unwittingly supplied.

‘It did not take him very long to construct a piece of equipment which one might call a Selective Word Counter. If you know anything about audio engineering you’ll appreciate how it could be done with suitable filters and dividing circuits—and if you don’t, you’ll have to take it for granted. What the apparatus did was simply this: a microphone picked up every word spoken in the Inch apartment. Osbert’s deeper tones went one way and registered on a counter marked ‘His,’ and Ermintrude’s higher frequencies went the other direction and ended up on the counter marked ‘Hers’.

‘Within an hour of switching on, the score was as follows:

‘As the numbers flicked across the counter dials, Ermintrude became more and more thoughtful and at the same time more and more silent. Osbert, on the other hand, drinking the heady wine of victory (though to anyone else it would have looked like his morning cup of tea) began to make the most of his advantage and became quite talkative. By the time he had left for work, the counters had reflected the changing status in the household: