Coffin Scarcely Used

Coffin, Scarely Used

Colin Watson

Chapter One

Considering that Mr Harold Carobleat had been in his time a town councillor of Flaxborough, a justice of the peace, a committeeman of the Unionist Club, and, reputedly, the owner of the towns’ first television aerial, his funeral was an uninspiring affair.

And considering the undoubted prosperity of Mr Carobleat’s business establishment, the ship brokerage firm of Carobleat and Spades, its closing almost simultaneously with the descent of its owner’s coffin into a hole in Heston Lane Cemetery was but another sign that gloria mundi transits as hastily in Flaxborough as anywhere else.

There were those, of course, who were pleased to interpret both circumstances otherwise than philosophically. They hoped for scandal, even posthumous scandal, to compensate for what had been, by their standards, a singularly uneventful burying and the tantalizingly straightforward eclipse of a well-known local business. They were in no mood to accept the explanation that a firm with only one principal (Mr Spades was a fiction that derived from some good-will arrangement made by Mr Carobleat when he took over the concern in 1935) could reasonably be expected to share his demise.

But, then, uncharitable speculation was no novelty in Flaxborough. It flecked the canvas of community life and, like the blemish that invites anxious examination of an old master, made it the more interesting.

What was wrong with the funeral?

Well, for one thing, there were only three cars. Not that there really needed to be any at all. The tall, sombre-faced house, standing behind its looming hedges at the far end of the built-up portion of Heston Lane, was little more than fifty yards from the cemetery entrance. But that wasn’t the point. Even had the grave yawned in the middle of Mr Carobleat’s own front lawn, propriety would have demanded a cortege of Daimlers to go once round the drive before unloading at the point from which it had set out.

No, three cars meant that the austerity suggested in the Flaxborough Citizen announcement of “funeral private; friends meet at cemetery” had been deliberately put into effect. The town, conscious of its entitlement to make the best of the only genuine “engagement elsewhere” that had ever kept Mr Carobleat from serving its interests, felt snubbed. It resented such flagrant unostentation.

There was no service at either church or chapel. Nor was there held that funeral equivalent to a wedding reception, the nameless function designed to thaw out the feet of mourning and to enable grief to be beguiled with a few preliminary guesses about the will.

At the end of what brief, colourless ceremony there had been at the graveside, the few representatives of the council and one or two other organizations with which Harold Carobleat had been associated each solemnly grasped the black-gloved hand of Joan Carobleat, relict, murmured a kindly encouragement and departed. Mrs Carobleat’s face remained expressionless but she thanked them quietly one by one. When all had passed, she turned and awaited Mr Jonas Bradlaw, undertaker, who personally drove her home in the second car.

The subsequent cold meal was served only to a few of the former broker’s closest friends. There was his medical adviser (if ‘adviser’ remains an appropriate term on such an occasion), Dr Rupert Hillyard; Mr Rodney Gloss, his solicitor; Mr Marcus Gwill, proprietor of the Flaxborough Citizen and the Carobleats’ next-door neighbour; and Mr Bradlaw—for even amongst one’s friends one may number those of whose professional services one does not wish to take immediate advantage, at whatever discount.

No relatives arrived to sour the occasion, for the Carobleat family tree had been so effectively pruned by childless marriage, chronic spinsterism, ill choice of occupation in two wars, and an hereditary susceptibility to heart disease that Harold had been for some time the last twig on the dead trunk of his ancestry.

The only outsider to be entertained was a young reporter from the Citizen, and he was quietly taken into an alcove by Mr Gwill and given by him a succinct biography and a list of mourners. There had been, by request, no flowers.

So passed from Flaxborough a man who, in Mr Gwill’s carefully chosen phrases, had been ‘a respected citizen of the town since he took up residence twenty-two years ago and applied himself to the expansion of a long-established local business; a notable social worker, particularly in the sphere of moral welfare as it affected the good name of our small maritime community; and an administrator who will long be remembered for his contribution to the organizing of the war effort in this area.’

As the blinds of the tall, withdrawn Edwardian villas on Heston Lane were released from the tension of indicating begrudged respect for Three-Car Carobleat, a police inspector strolled, apparently aimlessly, past the gates of Karachi, the homestead so lately vacated by Harold. Having noticed that Mr Bradlaw’s second Daimler was still on the drive, he sauntered on a little way and eventually took a bus back to the town. The following day, he reasoned, would be a more seemly occasion for a tactful, informal talk with Mrs Carobleat. And, indeed, the inspector did call the next day. But he learned nothing to his purpose.

It was a little more than six months later that the good residents of Heston Lane found themselves constrained to darken their front rooms once again.

This time, however, the occasion was one of much more intriguing possibilities. Who would have thought that one of the mourners at Mr Carobleat’s funeral in May would take a December journey in the same direction—and from the very next house, too? And what was one to make of the curious circumstances of this new death?

The same question was occupying the mind of the reporter who had stood respectfully in the big, expensively furnished drawing-room of Karachi, matching his shorthand against Mr Gwill’s recital of Harold Carobleat’s civic career.

This reporter now sat at his desk in the barn-like office above the clattering case-room, and wondered what sort of an obituary one composed in respect of one’s own employer. Judging from the lavish record of every public word and act of Mr Gwill that the Citizen had been obliged to print in his lifetime, it seemed that the announcement of the catastrophe of his death called for the efforts of Aeschylus, Jonson, Wordsworth and Barnum and Bailey, all rolled into one.

Yet how could heroic prose (‘...the entire community, deeply shocked and tragically aware of the loss it has sustained...’) be bent to make room for factual details so bizarre as those of the accident in Calendar’s Field?

He stared impotently at the blank copy paper before him and received only the mental image of Mr Marcus Gwill, his pale blue eyes like ice fragments beneath the unsympathetic cliff of his forehead, gazing coldly across Flaxborough from the extraordinary vantage point of the crossbar of an electricity pylon.

Across the narrow corridor from the general editorial office where inspiration eluded the epitaph-writer was a smaller, warmer and much, much more comfortable room. Behind its heavy mahogany table sat a sharply featured man with busy, distrustful eyes and a wide slit of a mouth, designed, one would have thought, for the dual purpose of loud talk and voracious feeding.

In fact, however, Mr George Lintz, editor of the Flaxborough Citizen, made miserly use of his most extravagant feature, for he ate little and spoke only one-sidedly, as though half his lips had been sewn up to prevent waste of words and body heat.

On this misty, yellowish winter morning, Lintz was staring fixedly ahead through one of the three tall windows that faced him. He lightly held the telephone with the mouthpiece down under his chin in the manner of the newspaper man. He remained silently attentive for a full minute, then, in sudden exasperation, barked “Nonsense!” and shifted forward in his chair.

“You can get that idea out of your head straight away,” he said, speaking now directly into the receiver. “There’s nothing in or near the house that can possibly hurt you. You can’t simply...” He paused and listened impatiently to some further objection, interrupting with “No, of course, I don’t know why he went out. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. If you listen to every silly tale from weak-witted farm labourers, you’ll end up by seeing a vampire or something every time you look out of a window. All we know is that my uncle did a damn silly trick at a damn silly time and got himself killed. People do get taken that way, God knows why. They go running under buses or fall off towers or jump into rivers. But that doesn’t mean they’ve been chased or pushed by the supernatural. The best thing you can do, Mrs Poole, is to make yourself a strong cup of tea and forget all about it until I get over this evening.”

“Heaven save me,” said Lintz, leaning forward and replacing the telephone, “from housekeepers who have horrid presentiments.”

“They can be rather trying, sir.”

This expression of sympathy came from a dark corner of the room where a large, but unassuming-looking man in neutral shaded clothes had been keeping quite still during the editor’s telephone conversation. He now turned into the light and revealed a bland, pleasant face beneath springy, corn-coloured hair that not even relentless cropping could bring to conformity.

“I once had a landlady,” he remarked, “who tried to stop me going on duty because she’d dreamed of a policeman lying in a pool of blood at the end of Coronation Street. She was always having this damned dream, d’you know, and it wasn’t until a bus conductor cut his throat somewhere round that district that she stopped pestering me and admitted she might have been mistaken about the uniform.”

Detective Inspector Purbright regarded Lintz affably. “I gather,” he said, “that you discount the idea of the lady you were speaking to just now that your uncle was—how did she put it?—lured or chased out of his house?”

“I think she was just being stupid. Or hysterical.”

“Yes. Now that’s very probable. A highly strung lady, perhaps?”

“Imaginative, but not very intelligent. I believe she dabbles in spiritualism.” Lintz, a lay preacher among other things, evidently considered Mrs Poole’s interest in the occult a grave detraction from her reliability as a witness to anything but trumpets and cheesecloth.

“Tell me, Mr Lintz, Mr Gwill didn’t happen to have any ideas of that kind himself, did he?”

“Lord, no. He was very down to earth. If you see what I mean,” added Lintz hastily.

“I see, sir. A level-headed man. But maybe he was not so materialistically minded, you understand, that he would do nothing out of the normal run occasionally?”

The editor looked puzzled. Purbright made a little gesture of good-natured humility and smiled. “I put things rather awkwardly, don’t I? What I am looking for, d’you know, is an explanation of why your uncle went out last night. He fancied a little walk, do you imagine?”

“What, in his slippers?”

“Yes, that is curious, isn’t it? If I had occasion to walk down the drive of that house and cross the road and then climb a railing and go twenty yards over a field before clambering up an electricity pylon, I really believe I’d put my boots on first.” Purbright stared at his toe-caps.

Lintz offered no comment. He looked round at the clock on the wall to his left. “Coffee?” he asked. Assured that that would be most kind of him, he gave an order to the girl on the switchboard, then pushed a box of cigarettes across the table to the inspector.

Until the girl’s arrival with a tray, Purbright said no more about Uncle Marcus but kept the conversation offshore, as it were. Then, apologetically, he veered back to the subject of electrocution.

“Do you know, sir, that your uncle’s is the first case of an accident with those cables since the power was brought over in the twenties? Or so the Board tells me. He’s been a singularly unfortunate gentleman.”

Lintz shrugged and spooned sugar into his coffee. “Have you any ideas about it, inspector?”

“I really don’t think I have, sir. As time goes on, things may become a little clearer, but I wouldn’t presume to speculate before hearing more about Mr Gwill from people who knew him. Mrs Poole, now. Do you think she might help me to get a better picture?”

“Mrs Poole would waste your time,” said the editor, decisively. “Wouldn’t it be better if we faced at once the probability of my uncle having chosen an odd but effective way of committing suicide?”

Purbright raised an eyebrow. “You think that, sir?”

“My dear chap, what else is there to think? He wasn’t a child or an idiot. And a grown man in his right mind doesn’t climb pylons in the middle of the night just to feel if the current’s still on.”

“I have known gentlemen do rather eccentric things when the mood took them.”

“My uncle was not an eccentric. He managed to make too much money for that.”

“I suppose you’ll have no cause to regret his good business sense.” Purbright caught Lintz’s quick glance and added, “A newspaper is like any other concern, I expect—easier to take over when it’s running well.”

“That seems logical.”

There was a short pause.

“Talking of businesses,” said Purbright, “I seem to remember that that man with the unlikely name used to live near Mr Gwill. The broker chap...”

“Carobleat?”

“That’s the one. He died not so long ago.”

“Carobleat lived next door to my uncle. His wife’s still there...widow, rather.”

“Is she really? You’d think a big house like that would be rather overwhelming. I must call and see how she’s coping when I go over later on.”

“You’re going to my uncle’s place?”

“Oh, yes. I think I ought to take a quick look, don’t you? The people round there are mostly timid old souls. An unhappy affair like this tends to prey on their minds a little, and they feel better when they see a policeman turn up. I find they regard me as a sort of exorcist.”

“Mrs Poole won’t, I warn you. Not unless you take a stake with you and promise you’re looking for a likely corpse to immobilize with it.”

Purbright beamed and rose. “You’re a sensible man, Mr Lintz. I’m glad to see you taking this unfortunate affair so well.”

He shook hands and was almost out of the door when he turned. “Oh, by the way, sir, my Sergeant Malley—an awfully nice chap, you’ll like him—asked me to remind you about the inquest. Do you think you could find time to pop in and have a word with him?”

“I suppose so. When?”

“It’s stupid of me not to have mentioned it earlier, but I believe he hoped you would call this morning. Look, if you’ve nothing urgent on hand you can come over with me now.”

Lintz shrugged and reached down his hat and coat.

As he followed the inspector down the narrow, uncarpeted stairs, he asked: “Who’s this Sergeant Malley, anyway?”

“He’s the Coroner’s Officer,” replied Purbright, “and the best baritone in the county, they tell me. You don’t happen to be a singer, do you, sir?”

“No,” said Lintz, “I don’t.”

Chapter Two

Limtz found Sergeant Malley awaiting him in the dark, file-cluttered little office that served as a clearing house for Flaxborough’s uncertificated deaths.

The Coroner’s Officer was florid, fat, catarrhal and kindly. He greeted the editor rather in the manner of a butcher anxious to placate a good customer for whom he had forgotten to reserve some kidneys.

“A bit of a nuisance, but there it is,” he said comfortingly as he turned a sheet of fresh paper into the typewriter before him. “Now, sir, this is what the Coroner will have to refer to when you give your evidence tomorrow. What he’ll do is just to ask the questions to guide you into saying the same as you’re going to say now. Compree?”

Lintz replied somewhat coolly that he knew the procedure at inquests and was ready to help the sergeant prepare his deposition.

Malley began to type the formal introduction to the statement, muttering as he jabbed the keys and backspacing now and then to correct an error with vicious superimposition. The machine seemed to have the durability of a pile-driver.

“First he’ll want you to say when you last saw your uncle alive. When will that have been, sir?”

“About six o’clock yesterday evening. I drove him back from the office in my car and left him at his home soon afterwards.”

Malley attacked the typewriter again. “I drove...deceased...”

Lintz gazed round the tiny office and nibbled, quite fastidiously, the corner of a finger nail.

“And how did Mr Gwill strike you then, sir? In what sort of health, would you say?”

“The same as usual. I didn’t notice anything wrong with him.”

Malley thought about this and fed his own version into the machine. “...usual good health...” he murmured. Then: “I suppose he’d never given you cause to expect he might do anything a bit rash?”

“That he might commit suicide, you mean?”

“Well, you could put it that way. Had he been depressed? Worried?”

“If he had, he didn’t confide in me.”

“Perhaps not, sir. But you could have formed an opinion of your own about his general mood.”

Malley, Lintz realized, was neither as simple as he looked nor likely to leave questions half answered for the sake of peace. “My uncle was never particularly cheerful,” he conceded. “He was an easily irritated man.”

“And had he been more touchy in recent weeks, or months?”

“For the last half year or so, yes, I think he had.”

“But you know of no special reason for that?”

“None. I didn’t share his life at all outside the office and things have run perfectly smoothly there.”

“No bereavements of any kind, sir? Relatives? Friends?”

Lintz shook his head.

“Neighbours?” the sergeant persisted.

Lintz frowned, then gave one of his lop-sided smiles. “Certainly a neighbour of his died a few months ago. It would be remarkable if one hadn’t. They’re nearly all over seventy round there.”

“Mr Carobleat wasn’t very old, sir?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Were they friendly, he and your uncle?”

“They were next-door neighbours.”

“Nothing beyond that?”

“I don’t know.” Lintz knew the effectiveness of an unqualified negative.

“What it all amounts to, then, is that Mr Gwill appeared rather moodier than usual over the past six months but that he didn’t tell you what was on his mind. Can I put it like that, sir?”

“For what it’s worth, yes.”

Malley nodded and began to type again. At the end of a few more lines he read back to himself all he had put down so far. He looked up at Lintz. “I’m not sure there’s much more you can say that would help.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Of course, there’s the identification. We might as well add that now.” The onslaught on the typewriter was resumed. “...a body...been shown...now identify...”

Lintz felt he might be permitted a question for a change. “What sort of a verdict is possible in a case like this?”

Malley shrugged. “I can’t say what view the Coroner will take, of course, sir,” he replied guardedly. “He’ll sit without a jury, otherwise heaven knows what the verdict would be. Last week, a bunch wanted to return ‘found drowned’ on a bloke who propped himself up against the harbour wall with half a pint of disinfectant inside him.”

“And the Coroner?”

“Oh, Mr Amblesby, you know, sir. Quite a character.” Malley left Lintz to interpret that for himself.

“The inspector came round to see me this morning. That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?”

“Bless you, no, sir.” Malley seemed amused. “Mr Purbright’s a conscientious gentleman. But you mustn’t go thinking he’s Scotland Yard or something. It’s just that we have to look into these things, that’s all.”

Lintz did not pursue the point. “Anything more you want to ask me, sergeant?” He offered a cigarette.

“I don’t think so, sir.” Malley accepted a light and pushed across the paper he had pulled from the typewriter. “Read it over and see if you can think of anything we ought to add.”

Both men smoked in silence a while. Then Lintz drew out a fountain pen and signed the statement without further comment.

“Oh, there’s one other thing while you’re here, sir.” Malley was heaving himself from his chair. “You’d better take these now and sign for them.”

He groped along a shelf high on the wall and reached down a canvas bag. Carefully he shook its contents on to the desk. “We took these from his pockets,” he explained.

Lintz saw two or three envelopes, a little money, keys and a few other oddments. The sergeant gave the canvas a final shake. Unexpectedly, a paper bag hit the desk and burst, scattering several white, round objects soundlessly over its surface. Lintz picked one up, felt and sniffed at it. “Marshmallow,” he said, lamely.

“Oh, that’s what they are.” Malley peered at the sweets and took an envelope from a drawer. “I’d better put them in this.” He sat down and gathered the marshmallows into a pile.

When Lintz had pushed the filled envelope with the other things into his overcoat pocket he wrote his name quickly on the slip the sergeant had handed him and stood up.

“Half-past ten in the morning, sir,” said Malley. “And don’t worry. It’ll all be very straightforward, I’m sure.”

Inspector Purbright stood at the entrance to The Aspens and looked with distaste at the large, naked house. Its brick face was a raw red, as if it blushed still for the intrusion into a secluded outskirt by its first owner, a successful bootlace manufacturer. Behind the tall, symmetrical windows, green curtains had been drawn. The semicircular lawn, lightly frosted now, its flanking gravel drive and the laurel-planted beds beyond, all looked sour and sullen. They wore the depressing neatness of ground laid out expressly to save the bother of gardening.

Purbright entered the drive past a high, wrought iron gate that had been swung back against the hedge and latched to a concrete stop. He walked up to the porched, dun-coloured front door and knocked. Almost immediately, he was looking into the red-rimmed, frightened eyes of a woman of about fifty, whose face hung in grey folds around an incongruously full-blooded and pert little mouth.

Mrs Poole led him through a lofty corridor to her own sitting room at the back of the house. It smelled of damp laundry and biscuits. Purbright accepted a seat and watched the late owner’s housekeeper subside nervously into an armchair that looked more like a pile of old covers. She took the cigarette he offered, lit it with a paper spill and drew in the smoke like religion.

“An unpleasant experience for you, ma’am,” said the inspector.

“Shocking. Oh, shocking!” rustled the voice of Mrs Poole. She looked straight at him and twitched her sagging cheeks. “I shouldn’t have left him, you know.”

“You think not?”

“Oh, no. He should never have been on his own. I know that now. But I wasn’t to be sure before. Mind you, he didn’t ask me to stay. He’d never have done that. But now...” She went on staring at the mild, benign, yellow-haired man, apparently content that he had taken her meaning.

Purbright tried to do so. “He wasn’t too well; was that it?” he asked.

“He was well enough,” retorted Mrs Poole, “but health never would have saved him. What was waiting for him didn’t take account of whether he came running or wheeled in a chair.”

Purbright remembered Lintz’s estimate of the housekeeper. “Just you tell me what you think happened to him, then,” he invited.

The woman frowned and carefully tapped the ash from her cigarette into an empty tea cup by her chair.

“I don’t know whether you believe in phenomenons,” she began, pausing to sharpen her regard of the inspector, “but it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t. There are such things, though they take a bit of understanding. Some spiritualists—and I don’t call myself that, mind—some say there’s nothing but good in what comes to us in that way. But never you believe them. It stands to sense that if the living’s good and bad mixed, then those who’ve passed over are two sorts as well. Only even more so, if you see what I mean.”

She left off to poke the small, smouldering fire, but seemed to expect no comment. “What we call possession,” she resumed, “is just the bad kind getting hold of someone here to be spiteful with. That’s all in books, so there’s no call for Mr Clever-pants Lintz to be so certain of himself. Not that he ever worried about his uncle’s troubles. There’s none so blind as those who won’t see. Mr Lintz never even noticed when it started in the summer. His uncle wasn’t as scared then as he got afterwards, of course, but I could have told you to the day when he first knew—Mr Gwill, I mean.”

Purbright found the flow of urgent, husky speech fascinating in spite of his sense of time being wasted on a woman half frightened, half hypnotized by her own fancies. He listened in silence, gazing first at one piece of furniture, then another, but avoiding now the eyes which had brightened with the fever-fire of psychic exposition.

“It all started a month to the day after that one”—she jabbed with her cigarette towards the wall beside her—“was put in his grave. He’d always been a quiet sort, had Mr Gwill, but dignified, you know. He didn’t show his feelings as a rule. But four weeks after the funeral from next door, I saw him trembling and clenching in the big room as if he’d got pneumonia. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, ‘but are you feeling all right?’ He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before and shot straight out of the house. And he was never the same after that. Sometimes he was better, sometimes worse, but he couldn’t really settle.”

“I thought this man, Mr Carobleat, was a friend of his,” Purbright observed.

“A friend, sir?” Mrs Poole’s chubby mouth twisted in derision. “Him?”

“That’s only what I’ve been told.”

“Oh, they were thick enough at one time. That Mr Carobleat was always in and out. But he wasn’t Mr Gwill’s kind. I couldn’t stand him, he was that sly and for ever m’dear-ing me as if I was a barmaid or something. And he hung about so...”

Purbright looked back from contemplation of the dresser to catch Mrs Poole staring at the window behind him. “Yes,” he prompted, “go on.”

Mrs Poole straightened. She shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t think I should say any more, sir.”

Purbright waited but she remained silent.

At last he said, “You weren’t in the house last night, I understand.”

“No, sir. I’d gone over to my sister’s. I got the eight o’clock train back this morning.”

“Yes, I’m only sorry you could have had no warning. It must have been a shock.”

“Oh, the policeman here was very kind. He told me what...what had happened.” Mrs Poole delved into the bundle-like chair and drew out a small handkerchief, with which she nervously dabbed the end of her nose.

“Do you happen to know if Mr Gwill was worried about business affairs?”

Mrs Poole looked blank. “You’d have to ask Mr Lintz about that, sir.”

“He didn’t appear to think there was anything wrong.”

“Then there can’t have been, I suppose. Mr Gwill wouldn’t have said anything to me, in any case.”

“But he was upset about something?”

Again the woman’s eyes flickered towards the window. In a suddenly decisive tone she declared: “He was being pestered, sir, and that’s the top and bottom of it.”

The inspector leaned forward slightly. “By whom?”

“No one you could lay your hands on, sir.”

Back to where we started, Purbright told himself. “Would you say...” he said slowly, “...would you say that Mr Gwill knew precisely what he was doing when the accident happened?”

“Ac-cident?” The scornfully stressed first syllable expressed Mrs Poole’s opinion of people who supposed her late employer might ever have done anything save with reason and intention.

“You think,” suggested Purbright, “that he could have done what he did deliberately?”

Mrs Poole ground out her cigarette stub—it was surprisingly short, the inspector noticed—against the fire back, and flicked her fingers over her pinafore. “Not that, either,” she said. “He was trying to get away, that’s all. Poor soul,” she added, almost to herself.

Back again.

“Tell me, Mrs Poole, did Mr Gwill have any regular visitors?”

“Well, only the people you’d expect. Mr Lintz came sometimes, of course. He’d never stay for long, though. Not for meals. Then Mr Gloss came over occasionally, and...”

“Mr Gloss?”

“Yes, sir. The solicitor. He’d sometimes bring Dr Hillyard with him, but just as often the doctor came on his own.”

“Mr Gwill wasn’t having treatment, though?”

“Oh, no—at least, not as far as I know. The doctor came in the evenings. He’d usually stay for dinner. There were times when I served for him and Mr Gwill and Mr Gloss and Mr Bradlaw as well. The...the builder.”

Purbright noticed her reluctance to name Mr Bradlaw’s main occupation. “Those three gentlemen were personal friends of Mr Gwill, I take it.”

“They were, sir.”

“And no one else called here regularly?”

Mrs Poole did not reply for a few moments. Then she nodded towards the wall beyond which she had previously indicated “That one”, and said coldly: “Only her.”

“Mrs Carobleat?”

“Now and again. Once a week, maybe.”

“Another personal friend?” Purbright avoided putting the slightest emphasis on any of the three words.

“Not of mine,” Mrs Poole hastily asserted, “and more than that I can’t say.”

Purbright stood up. “I wonder,” he said gently, “if you’d mind very much my taking a quick look round the house? You don’t have to say yes if you’d rather Mr Lintz were here to give permission.”

Mrs Poole sniffed. “I’m not employed by Mr Lintz, sir, and I’m sure his permission doesn’t matter much in this house.”

“You are agreeable, then?”

“You’re the police, sir. You’re welcome to see what you’ve a mind to.”

She carefully placed four lumps of coal on the fire and rose. “Which rooms were you wanting to look at?”

“Where did he do most of his work, Mrs Poole? Assuming that he did work at home.”

The housekeeper led the way along the corridor and opened a door. “This was where he spent quite a lot of his time.”

Purbright entered a small room that contained an elderly roll-top desk, a big table faced with leather, and two office chairs. Brown velvet curtains hung at the single window. Over the desk was a bare light bulb, its flex anchored to the picture rail by a length of twine. The room looked like the office of a not very successful suburban lawyer or a part-time registrar.

Purbright padded round the table and glanced into a wall cupboard. It was empty except for a thick file of newspapers. Near the window, he bent down and picked from the floor a piece of silky material, a headsquare or small scarf. He handed it to Mrs Poole.

She shook it out with faint distaste. “Something of hers, I suppose,” she said, folding it quickly and putting it on a dusty, black-painted mantelpiece beside a stone ink bottle and a spike of faded cuttings.

“Not what you might call a cosy room,” Purbright remarked.

“Mr Gwill didn’t like to use anywhere else when he had business to attend to. He used to say no one could work properly if they were comfortable.”

“Then it seems Mrs Carobleat called partly, if not altogether, for business reasons?”

Mrs Poole stared at him, then glanced at the folded scarf. “I don’t know why she came. She used to push her own way around and I always kept clear until I heard her leave.”

Purbright gave the desk cover a casual trial with one finger. It was unlocked and slid back easily. The compartments inside contained a few tidily stacked papers. He did not disturb them. Instead, he flicked through several of the books that lay there. The first two were ledgers. The third contained newspaper clippings. They had been taken from classified advertisement columns and pasted into the book, a couple of dozen or so to each page.

The inspector read quickly through a few of them. “Was Mr Gwill interested in buying and selling furniture, d’you know?” he asked.

Mrs Poole shook her head. “Not specially. He bought a sideboard about a year ago. A bit before that we had the dining-room chairs re-seated.” She looked doubtfully at the book. “That’s all office stuff. He kept some of it here and worked on it in the evenings sometimes.”

Purbright showed her the open pages. “You wouldn’t know why he kept these, I suppose?”

She peered at the cuttings. “They’re adverts,” she said unhelpfully, “from the paper.”

“Oh,” said Purbright. He closed the book, put it back with the others and drew down the desk top.

Mrs Poole stood aside as he left the room. She closed the door behind them and asked if he wished to see anything else. Purbright hesitated. “There’s the bedroom,” prompted Mrs Poole.

“I’m a terrible old nuisance, aren’t I?” he said brightly, as they moved towards the staircase.

“That’s all right, sir. I only want it all to be settled and no more harm done to anyone.” She reached the landing and turned off towards a second, shorter flight.

Purbright silently kept pace with the housekeeper along a passage that he judged to correspond with the corridor below.

She stopped before a door almost at the end. They were at the back of the house. The air was cold and damp.

Mrs Poole looked at him earnestly. “Do you know when they’ll be bringing him home?” she asked. “I thought I’d better keep this room ready.”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you definitely, but it shouldn’t be later than tomorrow. You understand that what we call a post-mortem examination has had to be made?”

“I see.” She opened the door quietly and motioned him in. The room was dim but the outlines of its few pieces of furniture showed it to be spacious and arranged with austere practicality. Purbright walked slowly across to the window, pulled the curtain slightly aside, and looked out.

Below was the large back garden, dank and shrubby. A line of poplars screened its end like huge brooms stuck handles down in the earth. Weak winter sunshine fell aslant one of the two flanking walls. The bushes were motionless and dark against the frost-whitened soil.

Purbright let the curtain fall and re-crossed the room. The woman said nothing. He went past her and waited for her to close the door. Her eyes, he saw, had become slow and devoid of expression, like raisins in the dough of her face.

He put his hand on her arm. “What has been frightening you, Mrs Poole?”

She looked up and caught her breath. Then she gave a jerky little smile and replied: “Nothing frightens me, sir. Not now. I think it’s over.”

She began to lead the way back along the passage.

Chapter Three

Inspector Purbright did not pay his promised call on the lonely widow of Mr Carobleat. As he walked out through the open gate of The Aspens, he noticed activity in the field beyond the fence on the opposite side of the road and crossed over.

Detective Sergeant Sidney Love was gloomily trudging around in the grass, followed closely by a confused-looking uniformed constable. As Purbright joined them, he saw a small wooden stake driven into the ground a few feet from the base of the power supply mast.

Love eyed him without enthusiasm. “We’ve taken measurements, sir.”

Purbright gazed up at the pylon. “What an odd perch for a newspaper proprietor,” he murmured. “Power without responsibility, I suppose.”

“Is there anything else we can do?” Love asked. “It’s jolly cold here.”

“Have you measured the height of the cable arm?”

“What, climbed up, do you mean, sir?” The sergeant looked incredulously at the steel network.

“Maybe it’s pointless,” Purbright conceded. “Call it twenty-five feet, shall we? No, twenty-seven—that’ll sound as if we really know.” He walked slowly round the stake, scuffing the grass here and there with his shoe. “Nothing round here, Sid?”

“What had you in mind, sir?”

Purbright looked at Love from under his brows. “Clues,” he said. “Cloth fibres. Nail parings. Dust from a hunch-backed grocer’s shop. You know.”

“Wilkinson here found a mushroom.”

“In December?”

“It wasn’t up to much. I advised him to throw it away.”

“In that case we might as well get back into town. I’ve already spent a useless half hour in that mausoleum over there. Mrs what’s-her-name should flee to relatives before she works herself into a state of demoniac possession.”

Love glanced at him. “She gave you that sort of tale, did she?”

“She did indeed. It was rather like the ‘Cat and the Canary’. Come on; you’re right, it is cold.”

“Mrs Poole isn’t the only one with queer ideas about this business.” Love kicked the stake from side to side, drew it out and handed it to the constable. “There’s talk at some of the farms about hauntings and what have you. That’s right, isn’t it, Wilk?”

Wilkinson frowned as he waited for the others to climb over the fence. “Mind you, sir,” he said to Purbright, “it wouldn’t do to believe everything they say down this end. They think telling lies is a great joke down here—more especially if it’s likely to give us fellows a job to do for nothing.”

“Yes, but you told me you’d heard this latest tale direct from a cousin or something,” Love put in.

“That’s right, sir,”

“Go on then, man,” urged the sergeant.

Wilkinson looked a little resentful. He had not intended a piece of country gossip, passed on in an effort to cheer a chilled and chilly C.I.D. man, to be officially reported to the bland and (he had heard) “sarky” inspector. But Purbright, walking now almost paternally between them, turned upon the constable a look of kindly encouragement.

“Well, sir,” said Wilkinson, “I’ve no reason to believe this nor to expect you to, but according to this relative of mine—he has a garage a bit along the road there—some of the country people have had the notion for a while now that some sort of a ghost was trying to get into Mr Gwill’s house. It sounds daft, put like that”—the constable reddened—“and I wouldn’t think of repeating such nonsense except for something this chap says he saw himself latish on last night. He was cycling home from town when he saw Mr Gwill just behind that gate of his and splashing water about on the ground from a big jar or a can. It was pretty dark, but Maurice was sure about the water. He could hear it slosh as he went by.”

Purbright had listened carefully; now he asked: “And what did your cousin think was significant about that?”

The constable flushed more deeply still. “The tale goes that it was holy water in that pot...But it doesn’t seem to make much sense. I only mentioned it, like, to the sergeant here...” He broke off.

“Jolly interesting little story, anyway,” said Purbright, rescuing Wilkinson from his embarrassment. “It helps to give us a picture of the fellow, which is more than I can get from the people who are supposed to have known him. You were quite right to tell us, constable.”

The trio made its way through the streets of the town without further conversation. Purbright liked staring about him when he was out and silently guessing the errands of such inhabitants as were not leaning against something. Love watched presentable young females from behind his disguise of pink-faced single-mindedness. As for Wilkinson, he ruminated on the inspector’s lack of ‘side’ and thought up ways of proclaiming it, with some small credit to himself, in the parade room later on.

One of the first things Purbright saw when he entered the police station was the unmistakable rear of Sergeant Malley, who was leaning over the reception counter to talk to the duty officer. In the centre of the serge acreage of his trousers seat was a round, white blemish. Purbright stopped and tapped his shoulder. “You seem to have sat on something,” he confided.

Malley’s hand stole searchingly down. Having peeled off what he could of the white substance, he stared at his fingers. “It’s one of those bloody marshmallows,” he announced.

“What bloody marshmallows?”

“The one’s from old Gwill’s pocket. It must have fallen on my chair when I was collecting his stuff together for Lintz to take away.”

“Oh,” said Purbright. He walked off to his own office.

Sergeant Love joined him. As there were now no girls to be regarded, he had allowed his face to resume its expression of slightly petulent innocence. Purbright looked upon it thoughtfully; he could never quite decide whether that cleanly shining feature properly belonged to a cherub or an idiot.

“Please give me”—the inspector had lifted the telephone—“the pathology block at the General. Doctor Heineman.” He leaned back against his desk and waited.

A mittel-European voice chimed brightly over the wire. “Mornink, inspector!”

“Good morning, doctor. Finished with that gentleman we asked you to look at?”

“But yes. You are requirink him back again?”

“What killed him?”

“Failure of heart, naturally. But before that there was asphyxia and before that shock from the electrics and nothing before that except joys and sorrows and delusions, dear chappie. A report I’m sendink you any minute. You must think I’ve somethink worse to do. I don’t play golf all day, you guess. How’s that funny little fellow that scrubs the face with carbolic or what? When’s he come and see us cuttink-up merchants again; that’s how he calls us, I know that. No, but I’m so busy now. Got what you wanted?”

“Stomach contents?”

“Ha, all sorts. Very jolly. Why?”

“Anything unusual?”

“Nothink corrodink, I should say. Want them done?”

“Not if you’re happy about the cause of death.”

“He was not poisoned. That I tell you. Shock and everything; that was it.”

“Very well, doctor. Oh, by the way...”

“Yes?”

“Did you notice anything about the mouth? Any trace of recent food?”

“But yes, yes...both teeth pieces, top and bottom, they are sticky—gummy, how is it? He would be eatink sweets, that fellow.”

“Soft, white sweets?”

“Exactly so.”

“Thank you, doctor. You’ll let me have the full report as soon as you can. The inquest will be adjourned, by the look of things; you needn’t bother to turn up tomorrow unless you hear.”

As Purbright put down the telephone, Love gave him a questioning look. “Why the morbid interest in diet?”

“Because,” said Purbright, “I have yet to find a man of Gwill’s age who can clamber up towers in the middle of the night with his mouth full of marshmallows. Because I have never encountered a suicide who has been in the mood for confectionery at the last moment. And because I cannot believe that any newspaper owner would be anxious, even in sudden insanity, to court the kind of publicity he has caused to be inflicted on others.”

“You don’t think he was electrocuted, then?”

“Oh, yes, he was. Heineman may imagine you wash your face in carbolic, but he doesn’t make mistakes with corpses. Anyway, there were signs of burning, I believe; we’ll know for sure when the P.M. report comes in.” He paused. “Have you ever had anything to do with the nephew?”

“George Lintz? I’ve run across him occasionally.”

“A close gentleman.”

Love shrugged. “Careful, certainly. Do you think he knows anything?”

“Hard to say. You might have a go at him. He resists the suave approach. Try your bike-without-lights manner.”

“What times do you want him to account for?”

“Last night from sixish until whatever time he says he went to bed. He is married, isn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“In that case, try her as well. See if she has the Lady Macbeth touch. Cocktail cabinet catalogues on the kitchen table: that sort of thing. Before you go, you might take a look at his statement to Malley. There are one or two other things I’d better tell you, although they amount to very little so far.” He described the interview with Lintz and his visit to The Aspens.

“Don’t you think there might be something behind the ghoulies and ghosties business?” Love suggested.

“I wouldn’t write it off,” Purbright replied. “Mrs Poole obviously believes in ‘the withering touch of tomb-escaped avenger’. She’s been frightened, undoubtedly, but she’ll not say by what or whom.”

“She may be a bit touched, of course.”

“Yes, but there are other tales than hers, apparently.”

Love pouted. “Will you get an adjournment tomorrow?”

“Oh, certainly. Not for long, though. Gwill was a fairly important fellow. There’ll be some pressure to have him put under without any unseemly inquiries. We shall have to produce a convincing argument within the next week or so.”

“There’s the point about the marshmallow, or whatever it was.”

Purbright waved his hand contemptuously. “I can just hear old Albert on that...‘Eatin’ sweets, was he, eh? And why not, eh? Better than drinkin’ himself silly.’ ”

The inspector’s opinion of Mr Albert Amblesby was well founded. Flaxborough’s coroner was an ancient of such obtuseness that the inquiries over which he presided were liable to deteriorate into ill-tempered games, with Mr Amblesby inventing new rules and breaking old ones, deriding what he couldn’t understand and generally playing hell until he could glare around his court and judge from the silence of the other angry, unhappy or bewildered contestants that he had won.

“You’d better ask Malley to come in. He might know something that will give us a lead.”

Love returned with the outsize Coroner’s Officer, breathing hard.

Sergeant Malley seemed pleased rather than surprised by Purbright’s suspicion. “Murder,” he observed, “wouldn’t half be a nice change.”

“What do you know about Gwill’s affairs?” Purbright asked him.

“Not a deal. He kept very much to himself. Rather a gloomy chap, I always thought. He was supposed to be carrying on with that Carobleat woman, you know. Not that that would have set anyone on fire, I expect. Anyway, not once her old man had upped and died. He had plenty of money, of course—Gwill, I mean. Or so they say.”

“But he didn’t collect jealous husbands?”

“Not as you’d notice.”

“Did he have any other kind of enemies, do you know?”

Malley pursed his lips. “Well...put it this way. Nobody liked him. Does that help?”

“Enormously,” said Purbright. “I do like a big field.”

Love spoke. “But he had a circle of friends, surely?”

“Oh, yes,” said Malley. “Circle is the word.”

“Exclusive?”

“Like the reptile house.”

“Come now,” protested Purbright, “we must try to be objective about this. The list the wild-eyed housekeeper gave me was respectable enough. Wait a minute...” He took an envelope from his pocket. “Yes, there’s a doctor for a start. Hillyard—you know him?”

“Dipsomaniac,” retorted the unrepentant Malley.

“Medical Officer of Health-elect,” said Purbright, comfortingly. “Then there’s Bradlaw the burier. Blameless, surely. We’ve nothing on Nab Bradlaw, have we?”

Love shook his head. Malley grunted.

Again Purbright glanced at the list. “Rodney Gloss, man of law.”

“Straight as an acrobat’s intestines.” This from the stout sergeant.

Purbright sighed. “I think,” he said, “that we can start from the sound assumption that people seldom get themselves murdered by complete strangers. At the same time, we shall need to begin inquiring into what, if any, were Gwill’s departures from the normal and legitimate. Also, I propose to have a word with the Chief Constable and try and persuade him—God give me strength—that there is good reason to suspect that Gwill was done.

“And we needn’t hope to be spared trouble by old Chubb deciding to ‘call in the Yard’, as I believe the phrase goes. For one thing, he likes to keep misfortune in the family. For another, he’d probably be hesitant to bother such a busy man as Sir Robert Peel.”

Chapter Four

While Purbright was fortifying himself with food against the approaching ordeal by Chief Constable, Mr Harcourt Chubb, himself—a slow thinker and late eater—listened to a lawyer’s tale.

It was Mr Rodney Gloss who had called upon him.

The Chief Constable, silver-haired, composed and misleadingly aesthetic-looking, regarded his visitor with polite attention and a perpetual half-smile.

Gloss had put himself at a disadvantage by accepting a seat before he remembered that the Chief Constable habitually remained standing, even in his own drawing room. He was, therefore, obliged to crane a bull-like neck in order to keep Chubb in the focus of his little fierce eyes.

The solicitor spoke quietly and carefully.

“I need scarcely point out,” he began, “that what I am about to say is in the strictest confidence. It may be impossible of confirmation. I certainly wish, at this stage, to accept no personal part in the matter and to bear no responsibility for the veracity of anything I now mention.”

Mr Chubb nodded graciously. The solicitor turned further round in his chair and rested his folded arms along the back of it.

“You may be aware that I am—or was, rather—an acquaintance of Marcus Gwill, of whose shocking death I was apprised a short while ago. Indeed, he was my client. Naturally, I am unaware of the details of how he is supposed to have died, but I have heard the rumours that follow upon an incident of this kind. You will perhaps tell me if I am correct in believing the circumstances to have pointed to electrocution.”

Again Mr Chubb nodded.

“I see,” said Gloss. “My further information is that there were no witnesses of this unfortunate occurrence and that its nature is surmised on the strength of Marcus having been found beneath the electricity pylon opposite his house.”

“The police have no reason to suspect anything but an accident, if that is what you mean,” observed the Chief Constable. “A peculiar accident, certainly, but one that is not inconceivable.”

“Were I to say my conviction—my purely instinctive conviction, if you like—is that Gwill’s death was not accidental, would you be prepared to be guided by that without my providing evidence to support it?”

Chubb raised an eyebrow. “Might you explain what you have in mind, Mr Gloss?”

“That is just the point, my dear sir. The situation is such that I can give precious little explanation. I am, in a sense, a materialization of an anonymous letter writer. The anonymous letter, as we both know well, is given no less consideration by the police than a signed one, providing its contents promise to be useful. I could have gone to the rather absurd and distasteful length of pasting clipped-out words to a sheet of paper and sending you that, but I prefer to act straightforwardly and logically. In so doing, however, I think I am entitled to claim immunity from involvement.”

“Your duty, Mr Gloss, is to help the police in whatever way you can especially if you have reason to suspect a crime has been committed.”

“I am a solicitor, Mr Chubb, and well aware of what citizens are supposed to do. I am also aware of how seldom they do what they should, and of how little the police can do to make them. That is why I am here now instead of concocting a mysterious message from newspaper clippings. You and I are civilized, sophisticated and, let us admit it, privileged persons, who can afford to be advised by each other without going through all the wasteful, compromising nonsense of ‘official procedure’.”

Chubb paced slowly across the carpet and back. Standing before the fire, he regarded his fingernails thoughtfully. “I think you’re quite wrong, you know,” he said.

“In what respect?”

“In supposing Gwill to have been murdered. That is what you mean to imply, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Gloss looked at him steadily.

“But that’s absurd. The man wasn’t robbed. No one stuck a knife into him. He hadn’t run off with someone’s wife; I’d have heard soon enough at the club if he had. No, it’s not nice to say of a chap who always seemed absolutely sensible and level-headed, but it’s perfectly obvious that he must have gone off his chump all of a sudden in the night. You and I can see that, but there’ll be no need for the town to make a song and dance of it. The local paper can hardly do anything else but soft pedal. You know he owned it, I suppose?”

“Of course. I was his solicitor and I presume I shall continue to handle the legal affairs of the company. But we are straying a little from the point. The very fact that I stood in a professional relationship to Gwill surely should carry weight when I tell you that he was not without enemies.”

“Few of us are, Mr Gloss.”

“I might also add...” Gloss hesitated.

“Yes?”

“It should be understood, perhaps, that my motives for approaching you on this matter are not entirely altruistic. You see, I am not confident that my own safety is henceforth assured.”

Chubb blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Simply that I am extremely apprehensive. For what other reason do you suppose I might have come to see you? To put it absolutely baldly, I am asking you to provide—unobtrusively and unofficially—what I suppose we must call police protection.”

“But protection against what, man?” The slightest suggestion of fluster had crept into the Chief Constable’s voice.

“I cannot tell you. You will just have to trust me when I say that I have ample cause to be alarmed and to urge you to regard the death of Marcus Gwill as deliberately contrived—and perhaps the prelude to further crimes. Believe me, Mr Chubb, I have no desire to seem guilty of sensationalism, but when the alternative is to await in silence another curious accident of which I may be the victim, I am prepared to shed a little dignity.”

The precise phraseology was maintained, but upon the solicitor’s brow and neck had appeared a gleaming dew.

Chubb, too, looked uncomfortable. He shook his head. “I’m afraid any special arrangements by us would be out of the question. We haven’t the men available, and even if we had I couldn’t authorize the individual protection of someone who won’t say what he wants to be protected against.”

Gloss compressed his lips and stared at the thin, rather loose figure of the Chief Constable leaning lightly against the fireplace. He decided to make one more attempt.

“Naturally,” he said, “I do not ask for the attendance of a...a bodyguard, in what I conceive to be the American sense. The contingency I envisage is not likely to arise during daylight. Would it be out of the question to augment your normal night patrol in the St Anne’s Place area with an officer charged simply with keeping my house under observation?”

Chubb sighed. “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about? Surely you see how difficult you make it for me to help. Let us be frank, Mr Gloss. Who is threatening you?”

“Please believe me when I say it is no one against whom you could possibly take action.”

“Yet you imply that whoever it is has already committed murder.”

“All I wish you to realize is that someone of homicidal intentions is at large, someone clever enough to have misled your men on one occasion and capable of doing so again.”

Chubb put his hand in his pocket and jingled change. Patiently, he asked: “How, do you suggest, was Gwill killed?”

“I have no idea. That, surely, is for your officers to discover from the evidence. The crime must have been carefully and perhaps elaborately planned.”

“And with what motive was he killed?”

“In revenge, perhaps...or to gratify sheer evil-mindedness. But again, we digress. May I have your answer to the question I put a few moments ago?”

“I have already given it, Mr Gloss. I’m sorry.”

Whatever the solicitor felt, he showed nothing. Briskly he rose and brushed his stiff black hat with the sleeve of his overcoat.

At the front door, the Chief Constable gave parting advice. It was a brief homily about the inadvisability of withholding information from the police. He had no confidence that it would do any good. And, indeed, it didn’t.

Some twenty minutes later, Chubb’s enjoyment of a delayed lunch was modified by his wife’s announcement that Inspector Purbright had called and was awaiting him in the front room. He immediately concluded that the damnable affair of the electrocuted newspaper proprietor had taken a turn for the worse and that Purbright bore confirmation of the forebodings of his earlier visitor. He champed his apple tart mournfully and wandered, still nibbling a clove, into the drawing-room.

He found the inspector examining the plaster statuette of a yellow-haired Venus, petrified into Art while apparently picking a corn.

“I suppose,” said Chubb without preamble, “that you’ve come about Gwill.”

Purbright nodded. “I’m afraid I have, sir,” he said, as though breaking the news of the running over of one of Chubb’s Yorkshire terriers—in other words, with just enough pretence of regret to hide a real inward satisfaction.

The Chief Constable motioned him to a chair and took up his own position of command and disparagement by the fireplace. “Carry on, my boy,” he said.

Purbright carried on. He described the finding of the body that morning by a farm labourer on his way to work. Gwill had been wearing an overcoat, unbuttoned, over his suit, and a pair of slippers—sturdy leather ones, certainly, but slippers. He had lain, apparently since late the previous night, in the grass beneath the power pylon from which he was assumed at first to have fallen; at least, that theory had been adopted as soon as burns were seen on both his hands by the policeman who removed the body.

The front door of Gwill’s house had been found closed but not latched. The drive gate was open. Gwill had been alone, probably, at the time he left his house, for the woman who looked after him had been staying elsewhere overnight.

Purbright gave the gist of what Lintz and Mrs Poole had said and wound up with something about marshmallows that sounded sinister and, thought the Chief Constable, a bit psychological as well, which was worse.

“Are you quite sure,” he asked when the inspector had done, “that you aren’t making too much of this?”

“Quite sure, sir,” said Purbright simply.

“Ah...” Chubb considered a moment. “So we’d better take a closer look into things, then; that’s what you think?”

“It does seem indicated.”

“Mmm...” Another pause. Then, “It’s rather odd,” said Chubb, “and I’d better mention this while I remember, but you’re the second chap to come along here today with doubts of this business having been quite above board.”

“Really, sir?”

“Yes. That solicitor with the thick neck and the bow tie—Humpty, I always call him—was here just before you called. Gloss. You know him?”

“I’ve met him in court.”

“Ah, well, he was being very mysterious, and frightened, too, I should say. He seemed quite convinced that poor old Gwill had been murdered. I thought he was just being morbid, but there you are.”

“That’s interesting, sir. Did he say how he’d come to that conclusion?”

“He didn’t. He was very cagey. He asked if I could put a man on his house at night. I turned that down, of course. He wouldn’t give a reason, you see.”

“I’ll have a word with him later on, sir. If he’s really nervous, he’ll probably be more forthcoming after a night or two of listening to creaking floorboards. In the meantime, there’ll be other people to question. I’ve no notion at the moment of where to bore into this case, as it were. The little sounding I’ve been able to do so far hasn’t produced any helpful echoes. You follow me, sir.”

“Yes, oh certainly,” responded Chubb with haste. “I mean old Gwill wasn’t the sort of fellow you’d expect to get murdered. Except by an employee, perhaps. They tell me that newspaper of his is a bit of a sweat shop.”

“We’ll look into that side of it, of course, sir. At first sight, though, one would think George Lintz had most to gain. I believe the control of the business will go to him. On the other hand, there’s the rather curious relationship that seems to have existed between Gwill and the Carobleat woman. You remember the Carobleat affair, I suppose, sir?”

The Chief Constable frowned. “It’s a bit late in the day to drag that up again, isn’t it? After all, you didn’t manage to find much at the time.”

“I wasn’t likely to, considering all the books had disappeared,” said Purbright drily. “What with the firm having evaporated overnight, the owner dead and the widow paralysed with ignorance, it was hardly to be expected that we’d fasten anything on anyone.”

“Just as well, perhaps. It wouldn’t have done the town much good, you know. Anyway, it’s done with now. By the way, would you like me to have a word with Amblesby? You’ll want the inquest holding over a while, I expect.”

“If you wouldn’t mind, sir. He’ll probably take the suggestion more kindly from one of his own—” Purbright nearly said ‘generation’ but substituted ‘neighbours’ on remembering that the desiccated solicitor lived amidst dust and despotism in a mansion on the older side of Chubb’s road.

“Very well. I’ll ask him to adjourn it sine die or pending inquiries or something so that you can all get your heads down for a bit. Bad business...” The Chief Constable shook his head and devoutly wished the world were a great dog show with policemen having nothing to do but guard the trophies and hold leads.

Purbright made his way back towards the police station. As he was walking past the railway station, he noticed a woman in tweeds and flower-pot hat among a small crowd emerging from its portico. He crossed over and greeted her. “I nearly called in to see you this morning, Mrs Carobleat.”

Joan Carobleat, a matron competently parcelled and attractive in a mature, leathery way, raised rather over-made-up brows and returned Purbright’s smile. “It’s just as well you didn’t then, inspector, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been away?”

“I’ve just got back from Shropshire, as a matter of fact. Did you want to see me particularly? Oh, it’s not”—she frowned mockingly—“not that business about the shop again, surely?”

“Your husband’s firm. No, not that,” Purbright glanced around. “I hoped you might let me know when it would be convenient for me to have a word with you.”

“Urgent?”

“Moderately.”

“Look, then: I’m dying for a cup of tea after that appalling journey. Why not come into Harlow’s here? It won’t be too hectic at this time of day.”

They took refuge in one of the inglenooky seats and Mrs Carobleat gave her order to a girl exhausted with the effort of carrying countless roast-lamb-onces to relays of predatory female shoppers.

When the crockery had ceased to vibrate from its percussive assembly before them, Purbright looked at his companion and said: “I only hope this will be construed as proper. I don’t normally interrogate in teashops.”

“You’re surely not afraid of being unfrocked or disbarred or something,” said Mrs Carobleat, warily testing the almost red-hot handle of a teapot that contained, paradoxically, lukewarm tea.

“We coppers never quite reconcile ourselves to living in a perpetual draught of uncharitable thoughts.”

“That’s what comes of being such a suspicious lot yourselves.” She spooned sugar evenly into both cups without asking if Purbright took it, added milk and poured the tea. She took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her suit, lit one, and pushed the packet across the table. “Now then, what are you after?” she asked, as if Purbright were a small boy suspiciously anxious to wash up.

“Where did you spend last night, Mrs Carobleat?” The question was mildly put, yet it sounded incisive.

“Oho, something new, not the silly old shop business again, after all.”

“That, as village constables are supposed to say, is as maybe.”

She stirred her tea reflectively. “May I ask why you want to know?”

“You tell me first. Then I’ll let you have a question.”

“All right, then. Where did I spend last night? Most of it, I should say, at The Brink of Discovery.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m sorry; it’s a geographical joke, but perhaps you don’t know Shropshire. The Brink of Discovery is a pub, a small hotel rather, on the far side of Shrewsbury.”

“Rather remote from Flaxborough?”

“I think it’s my turn, isn’t it, inspector? The reason for you asking, please.”

“Your next-door neighbour was murdered last night.” Purbright’s expression remained pleasant but his eyes were intent.

Mrs Carobleat took the cigarette quickly from her lips. “Not Marcus?”

“Mr Gwill, yes.”

She stared at him for a few seconds, then looked into her cup. “But that’s extraordinary. Are you sure?” She brought her gaze to him again, not, he thought, without an effort.

“If I weren’t sure, I’d scarcely be chasing around asking questions.”

“No; of course. That was silly of me. But it came as rather a surprise.”

“I fancy Mr Gwill was surprised, too.”

“You mean somebody actually killed him? Deliberately, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

He waited for her to say more, but she continued to stare at him, blankly now but with self-control.

“I was wondering,” said Purbright, “if you might have anything helpful to tell me?”

She gravely tapped the ash from her cigarette. “I really can’t see you think I might know about it.”

“When did you leave home, Mrs Carobleat?”

“Fairly early yesterday morning.”

“You went straight over to Shropshire?”

She nodded.

“Would you care to tell me why?”

“Heavens, I often go down there. I need a change occasionally from this bleak marsh of a place. The Westcountry used to be my home.”

“I see.”

“And since my husband died, there’s been nothing to stop me going where and when I like.”

“Except the expense, perhaps.”

“He provided for me.”

“Yes,” said Purbright, “I suppose he did.”

The waitress drifted near, eyed them with sad disapproval, and retired to lean against the further wall like a martyr turned down by fastidious lions. Outside, a clock struck three. A yellowish darkness had begun to press up against the misted windows.

“What purpose did you have in visiting Mr Gwill, Mrs Carobleat?”

She raised her brows. “Why should you think I did? Oh”—she smiled—“you’ve been talking to old Prowler Poole.”

“Well?”

“I don’t see it can have anything to do with what you say happened last night, but I did pop in occasionally to keep him company. I’m often at a loose end. I think he welcomed seeing a new face now and then after that death’s head of a housekeeper.”

“The two of you didn’t happen to share an interest in furniture, by any chance?”

“Furniture?” She frowned, then laughed. “Do you mean did we do carpentry together?”

Purbright grinned back. “Never mind.”

He was framing his next question when he saw Mrs Carobleat’s face grow suddenly hard and alert. She watched the approach of someone whose footsteps Purbright could now hear behind him.

“Good afternoon to you.” A deep voice. Clipped Glaswegian accent and slightly sardonic tone.

Purbright half turned. Smiling down on him was an unusually tall man with splayed teeth and inflamed, protuberant eyes. His head was perched on the great promontory of his chest as though it had separate existence and might tumble off if it strained forward any further.

Mrs Carobleat spoke quietly. “Inspector, this is Doctor Rupert Hillyard. Inspector Purbright. But you possibly know each other already.”

Dr Hillyard folded himself into a chair next to Purbright, who noticed the instinctive professionalism of his gesture of throwing, flap, flap, his gloves into his upturned hat, and then massaging the palm of one hand with the fingertips of the other. “A shocking day, Inspector,” he observed portentously.

The doctor glared round the room over his shoulder, muttered “Shocking” again, and transferred his attention back to Mrs Carobleat.

Hillyard’s teeth fascinated Purbright. They were like bruised almonds that had been hastily stuck into his mouth at an angle and left to be supported on his lower lip. The effect was an impression of idiotic good nature that was not quite nullified by the calculation in the red-rimmed eyes. Sometimes he managed to hide his teeth; the effort produced a preposterous pout and high-hoisted eyebrows.

“You are being kept busy and out of mischief, lady, I trust?” he inquired of Mrs Carobleat.

“I am at present being tactfully helpful to the police,” she replied.

“Excellent. Though tact is not always what helps policemen, surely?” He turned inquiringly to Purbright. “Discretion, however, can actually become obtrusive if pursued too far. Then it betrays. Is that not so, inspector?”

“I’m sure your patient would not take anything too far, doctor, not even discretion.”

“My patient?”

“I’m sorry. It was Mr Carobleat you attended, was it not?”

“Aye, that’s so. God rest his soul.” This piety was delivered with a gentle shake of the head.

Mrs Carobleat eyed him coldly. “It’s God rest Marcus Gwill’s soul as well, now, doctor.”

“As to that, lady, the sentiment does you credit. It does indeed.”

“I gather you were a friend of Mr Gwill,” Purbright put in. “Is that so, doctor?”

“He was a patient of mine, inspector, and a very careful man.”

“He’d need to be.”

At this remark from Mrs Carobleat, Hillyard grinned and nudged Purbright. “Ye hear tha’ frae the wee body!” he chortled with grotesque bonhomie.

“For heaven’s sake, drop that phoney Scottishry, Rupert,” Mrs Carobleat’s voice had hardened, in spite of the familiarity.

Purbright looked at her for a moment, then rose from the table.

“I must be getting along,” he said. “I’ll come and see you at home some time, Mrs Carobleat, if I may.” He smiled at Hillyard. “Goodbye for now, doctor.”

Hillyard, who had suddenly relapsed into mournful thoughtfulness, suspired a soft ‘Aye’. Then he scowled and repeated the ‘Aye’ with dark, whiskilated ferocity.

Chapter Five

Seated in his own office again, Purbright was assailed by a sense not of the difficulty of his present task but of its remoteness from the orbit of his normal employment. The two were monstrously at odds. The routine whereby a small town was kept, as far as ordinary citizens could tell, a safe and well-ordered place had not been designed to cope with the ultimate in human desperation, any more than the Municipal Buildings had been designed to survive earthquakes. Purbright supposed that a murder could be solved by the same procedure as was used to detect a bicycle thief or the perpetrator of a charabanc outing swindle, and he was probably right. But what was missing was the comfort of precedent, the reassuring pattern of likelihood.

This crime was out of context. For one thing, its cleverness was uncharacteristic of Flaxborough, a town of earthy misdemeanours. He did not even know how Gwill had been killed. His seeing through the arrangement of apparent accident or suicide had pleased him at first. But he now realized he had merely chopped down a tree to disclose a forest.

The post mortem report, now lying before him, confirmed Dr Heineman’s earlier judgment. It added little of any significance. Yet there was one odd point. Purbright glanced down the closely typed lines until he reached it again:

“Burns. The palms of both hands bore marks of recent superficial burning, suggestive of manual contact with a source of electric current. The left palm exhibited a transverse burn, three-quarters of an inch wide and three inches long. Ball of thumb on this side also slightly burned. On palm of right hand was a burn mark, star or flower shaped, clearly defined, approximately two and a half inches in diameter.”

Star or flower shaped...Purbright knew little about electricity, but he was sure pylons bore no decorations of this kind. Where else were lethally charged stars or flowers to be found? He underlined the passage in the report and put it aside.

However Gwill had been killed, it could not have been done far from his own house. The slippers, the dumping of the body in the nearby field, the evidence of his having been seen late that night in the drive...

With a bucket of water, though: what explanation could there be for that piece of eccentricity?

Perhaps he had been as scared of ghosts as country neighbours—and Mrs Poole—supposed. She had said nothing specific, but there was no doubting the sort of fears she entertained. Yet that line of delusion was common enough. The police station complaint’s book was crammed with the fancies of supersensitive menopause subjects, ears alert for sounds from the spirit world.

Another thing. Heineman had found no injury or mark on the body apart from the burns. Gwill had needed no forcible inducement to grasp his death. He must have suspected nothing. Had his murderer been a friend? A relation?

Gain...Lintz seemed the only candidate there, at least until all the ramifications of his uncle’s financial position could be revealed. That might take time. Gloss, as his solicitor, should be the best source of information.

But how helpful would he be? By the Chief’s account, Gloss was touchy, odd, full of dark hints. Beneath his armour of professional canniness, he felt the sharp itch of fright. Police protection, indeed. Purbright could not remember such a request having been made in all his years with the Flaxborough force—not even when Alderman Hockley’s perpetration of the first-night drugging of the Amateur Operatic Society cast of Rose Marie (four of the Mounties had actually marched comatosely into the orchestra pit) was unmasked.

Gloss had been Gwill’s solicitor. But solicitors were not nowadays entertained to dinner by clients save in token of some more intimate relationship—or hold. Gwill seemed to have had an almost Edwardian penchant for entertaining professional men. The client of one guest. The patient of another. The potential subject (was that the word?) of a third.

The undertaker, Bradlaw.

A curious coterie, on the face of it. And, yet there need have been nothing sinister in the association. Perhaps Gwill and his three friends (who had been four in Carobleat’s day, the inspector reminded himself) had owed their affinity to nothing but a consciousness of being well-off by local standards.

Where did Mrs Carobleat come into things? The housekeeper obviously disliked her. But servants were notoriously sensitive to suggestions of immorality in their employers.

In turn, Mrs Carobleat seemed to have no love for Hillyard. Social jealousy? Or did she resent being the widow of a man whom Hillyard had failed to doctor successfully? Personal grievances against the medical faculty were not rare in Flaxborough. One’s doctor was something one boasted about to friends, like a cake recipe or a central heating system. It was hard to have to admit a let-down.

Could Hillyard, Purbright wondered, have had a hand in the snuffing of Gwill? It was conceivable that Gwill had received, amongst the gossip that accompanies the stream of news into a paper, knowledge of some hideous professional blunder by Hillyard; that he had threatened the doctor...

The thread of Purbright’s speculation was broken at this point by the entry of Sergeant Love.

Love unbuckled his raincoat and lit a cigarette. He flicked through a few pages of his notebook, put it back in his pocket and recited: “I, Gladys Lintz, am a married woman and forty-one years of age. I reside with my husband, George, in a nice house and already have a cocktail cabinet, a free pass to the Odeon, two beautiful children and the Telly. What, kill dear old Uncle Marcus? Why ever should I?”

“Quite,” said Purbright. “Now tell me what she said without really meaning to.”

“One, that husband George’s cold feet woke her up round about two o’clock this morning. Two, that she had a vague idea that Uncle’s affairs weren’t all on the up and up. Three, that she thinks the undertaker did it. Four, that she takes that back on second thoughts because Bradlaw’s elder sister has had a lot of trouble lately and she doesn’t want to add to it.”

“You do invite confidences, don’t you, Sid?”

“I’m every mother’s bloody son,” replied Love, without rancour.

“But can we sort out anything useful?”

“Well, she made no secret of Lintz having been out until the early hours. She thought he’d probably been to the Cons Club.”

“We can ask him about that. In fact we’ll have to, now. Poor George is the best prospect we have at the moment. But what was that she said about Gwill?”

Love took out his notes again. “According to Gladys, her uncle had dealings with several people outside the newspaper buisness, and kept George in the dark about them. She doesn’t know who they were and she’s sure her husband was never able to find out. But the pair of them suspected the old man of making money on the side.”

“What sort of dealings? Buying and selling?”

“She hadn’t a clue.”

Purbright considered a while. “Look,” he said, “I think we’ll pull in a little of Gwill’s homework. There’s a cuttings book over at his house that keeps popping into my head for some reason or other. I’d like to see what you make of it.”

“Do you want us to go over there now?”

“Have something to eat first. Oh, and tell me about Mrs Lintz and Nab Bradlaw.”

“She said Gwill knew Bradlaw pretty well...”

“So I’ve heard.”

“...and had said on one occasion something about ‘fixing him if he’d a mind to’. She thought it sounded like a threat and suggested Bradlaw had done the fixing first.”

“Did she say when this threat was made?”

“Several months ago, apparently. At one time every undertaker used to get a free mention in the paper’s report of any funeral he’d handled. Then the system was dropped. Nab was the only one to make a fuss and Lintz asked his uncle what he should do. Gwill told him to let Bradlaw go to hell and dropped that hint that Nab was in no position to be awkward.”

“Hardly an incident pregnant with murderous possibilities.”

“Not on the face of it. But Gwill wasn’t in the habit of saying much, least of all in Gladys’s hearing. The remark stuck in her mind. It’s a very narrow mind,” Love explained.

An hour later, the inspector and the sergeant drove to The Aspens. Mrs Poole, compliant, but looking more than ever like an evicted cemetery-sitter, showed them straight to the room with the desk. Purbright explained to her that they were going to take away some books, but that everything would be reported to Mr Lintz and that she need not worry. She refuted the suggestion that anything Mr Lintz might think could worry her and gave them to understand that they would be welcome to take away Mr Lintz as well.

“No one,” observed Purbright as he accompanied a book-laden Love down the drive to their car, “in this case seems to like anyone else.”

Love grunted. “That woman had a dreadfully haunted look. What do you think is wrong with her?”

“Just frightened.”

“Why?”

Purbright opened the car door. “There’s no knowing at the moment. Probably imaginative and overwrought. On the other hand, she may actually have seen something that scared her. You’ll not get her to talk until she wants to, though. There are women who cling to fear just as some cling to illness. They become quite attached to it.”

Love laid the books on the back seat. “We’d better make a quick call at the Citizen office in case Lintz is still there,” said Purbright. “We can’t very well loot the old man’s house without telling his legatee.”

The street door of the Citizen was locked, but the office within was brightly lit. Purbright peered through the glass. Behind the advertisement counter—an affair of polished maple and redwood strikingly different from the furnishings of the editorial rooms above—a thin, sandy-haired man sat making entries in a ledger. Hearing the policeman’s knock, he raised his head and made helpless gestures meant to convey that the paper’s dealings with its public were suspended for the night. Purbright waved back. At last the thin man grudgingly unlocked the door. Yes, Mr Lintz might be upstairs still, but didn’t anyone know that newspaper offices had works entrances at the bottoms of alleyways for after-hours contingencies?

Purbright, who did know but had no intention of imperilling his limbs by groping in the dark past bicycles, empty crates and spent paper reels, soothed the man and led Love to the editor’s room.

Lintz no longer sat at his desk as though driving an infinitely costly and responsive car. He sat athwart it, surrounded untidily by galley and page proofs.

Love stared at him with innocent admiration. This, he divined, was journalism.

It was, after a fashion, and Lintz was rather tired. Unsmilingly he greeted the two policemen and scrambled down from the sea of council deliberations, smart fines, organs presided at, lucky horseshoes handed, and Dear Sir I hope this catches the eye of...

“My, you are busy,” Purbright superfluously informed him. “You must think it terribly ungracious of us to come worrying you in the middle of all this. Perhaps you’d prefer us to go away until tomorrow?”

“Heavens, no!” said Lintz. “Let’s get it over with now.” He sat down.

“The fact is, there’s something here you might be able to help us with.” Purbright beckoned Love, who handed him one of the books. “It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

The editor turned over a couple of pages and looked up quickly. “This is my uncle’s, isn’t it?”

“It is, yes. You recognize it?”

“I’ve seen it in his office at the house. Why have you taken it?”

Purbright gave him a pained look. “Things have turned out rather unpleasantly, sir; not at all as I would have wished myself. You’ll be sorry to learn that we now think Mr Gwill met his death by violence. It will have to be looked into. Probed, you know.”

“Probe” was a word never employed in the generously explicit headlines of the Citizen. Lintz suspected Purbright of being sardonic. Be careful, he thought. What he said was: “You’re not serious, surely, inspector?”

Purbright gazed gravely down. “Oh, yes, I am, Mr Lintz. Very!”

“This is rather dreadful.” There was silence except for the distant clacking of a solitary linotype machine. Lintz turned over the pages of the book of cuttings. “Why do you think this might have any bearing on what you say has happened?” Caution controlled Lintz’s manner like hair oil.

“It may not. I’m only asking your opinion, sir.”

Lintz put on his unilateral smile. “It so happens that I’ve been rather puzzled about these myself. I came across them some months ago.”

“Didn’t you ask your uncle at the time what they meant?”

“Gracious, no. I knew better than to ask him outright about anything. It’s obvious what they are, of course. They’re small ads from my own paper” (‘my own’ already, thought Purbright), “but why he’d collected them is another matter. By the way, does the list of names and addresses at the back of the book mean anything to you?”

“At the back? I saw no list.”

“Yes, here...” Lintz shut the book and turned over the back coverboard. The page beneath was blank. “My mistake. He must have torn it out. That’s where it was.”

“You can’t remember any of the names, I suppose?”

“No, I only glanced at them once when I was waiting for the old man. I vaguely remember noticing that several of the addresses were down in the Sharms and Haven area.”

“And the advertisements themselves: is there anything peculiar about them?”

Lintz turned back to the clippings. “They’re not exactly common or garden offers. Antiques aren’t in my line, though.”

“Were they in Mr Gwill’s?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“But they might have been?”

“Look,” said Lintz. “I think we’d better have House up here. He handles the advertising. Perhaps he knows something about these.”

He left the room and the others heard him call down the staircase. A few moments later he returned with the thin man from the front office.

House scrutinized the cuttings.

“These are all ‘for sales’ that Mr Gwill brought in himself,” he announced. He pointed to the final line of one advertisement. “You see that box number. It has the letters C.S. in front of it. You’ll notice the others have as well. None of the ordinary ads have anything but figures as box references. We used to sort out the replies with C.S. numbers and put them through directly to the boss.”

“Were those his instructions?” Lintz asked.

“They were,” affirmed House, with the air of having settled the matter once and for all.

But Lintz remained inquisitive. “Where did the copy come from?” he asked.

“From Mr Gwill.”

“Had he prepared it himself, do you know?”

“It was in his writing. Lately it was, anyway.”

“What do you mean by lately?”

“Oh, the past half year or more.”

“But before that it wasn’t in his writing?”

“It used to be typed mostly, as far as I remember.”

Lintz looked at Purbright, inviting him to take over the questioning.

“Now then, Mr House,” the inspector began genially, “what do you suppose Mr Gwill was putting these advertisements in the paper for? Did you never wonder what they were all about?”

“I thought perhaps he had a friend in the second-hand trade, as you might say.”

“But the friend could have put them in himself, surely. Mr Gwill was a busy man. He wouldn’t be likely to go on acting as somebody else’s messenger week after week.”

“You’d hardly think so,” House agreed.

“I presume you never saw any of the replies?”

“Me? No, I didn’t.”

“Were there many? Incidentally, how often were the adverts put in?”

“Four or five went in at a time most weeks. Sometimes there’d be one or two extra. Each ad brought up to half a dozen replies.”

“The usual number for that kind of advertisement; for antiques, I mean?”

“Well, I can’t really say. They were the only ones.”

“You’ve no idea, Mr House, of who might have been associated with Mr Gwill in placing these advertisements?”

The thin man shook his head.

“When,” asked Purbright, “was the last batch published?”

House thought for a moment before replying. “Not last week; we published Tuesday because of Christmas and the ads being light. No, it was the Wednesday before.”

“And there are no replies still in the office?”

“Not now. The boss collected them all on the Thursday and Friday. They always came in very promptly and he never let them be left lying.”

When House had descended to his ledgers once more, Purbright looked thoughtfully at the cuttings. “When’s the latest you can take an advertisement for this week’s paper?”

“We print tomorrow. Five o’clock today would have been the deadline in the ordinary way, but I could get something in tomorrow morning, if you like.”

Purbright nodded. “Good. Now what would you recommend? Sideboards...washstands...commodes? No, not commodes; we’d better stick to what seem to have been the rules. Let’s try some that have been in already. These, eh?” He marked little crosses in pencil against three of the cuttings. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind making copies, though, Mr Lintz; I’d like to hang on to the book just for the time being.”

Lintz drew over a pad of copy paper and began writing. When he had finished, he placed the three sheets on a clear corner of the desk. “Whom shall I charge them to?” he asked.

“Oh, the poor old police, I suppose.” Purbright smiled thoughtfully at Lintz. Then he sighed. “You’ll have gathered,” he said, “that detection is very much in the air just now, sir. It’s rather a novelty, but we’ll have to get used to it.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning in the first place that everyone at all closely connected with your late uncle is going to have to answer some questions—or have them asked, rather. I can see I’m likely to be unpopular, but there it is.”

“You’ve more questions for me, I presume?” Lintz seemed almost indifferent.

“I’m afraid I have, sir. Would you mind?”

As answer, Lintz opened a drawer of his desk and took out a foolscap sheet. “You don’t need to flannel, inspector. My wife has told me over the phone of your colleague’s—your assistant’s—call this afternoon. I imagine you want to know where I was until this morning?”

“It would be helpful, sir.”

Lintz handed him the typescript. “That statement should save time for both of us. You will see from it that after leaving my uncle at his home until getting to bed in my own house beside my own wife, I managed to spend every minute in the company of witnesses.”

Purbright read rapidly through the paper. “How very thoughtful of you,” he murmured appreciatively. “I must say I like the last touch, sir.”

Lintz looked at him sharply. “Oh?”

“Yes, sir. I can’t imagine any more respectable midnight occupation than playing chess. And”—Purbright raised one eyebrow—“with an undertaker, of all people.”

Chapter Six

Mr Jonas Bradlaw was, when off duty, as amiable a representative of his craft as you could wish to meet. Undertakers, by and large, are brisk, sanguine, workman-like fellows, and not at all the miserable ghouls mistakenly imagined by those unable to dissociate what they believe to be a dreadful conclusion from the agents charged with its expeditious arrangement. Mr Bradlaw gave such slanderers the lie. He was not gloomy, for he conceived his task to be a useful and rewarding one. He was not cadaverous; half a lifetime of knocking oak and elm into elongated hexagons had given him a solid physique that even now, in the comparative idleness of proprietorial supervision, lent nearly as much dignity to a funeral as had any pair of his late father’s black horses. Nor was he a hand-rubbing necrophile; he regretted death in a general way as much as anyone and was sorry when old friends came under his roof in attitudes of stiff formality and desirous no longer of taking a part in the conversation.

Conversation—of a lightish kind—he valued, for he was a divorced man (on account of overmuch and carelessly directed amiability, it was said), and led a home life practically devoid of the spoken word. This was because his young housekeepers came and went at such frequent intervals that not one had had time to tire of her employer’s television set sufficiently to find anything to say before bed-time. He had once toyed with the idea of getting rid of the set, but had baulked at putting his personal attractions, unaugmented, to the test. Could it be, he had sometimes secretly wondered, that his housekeepers regarded him as a price, not a prize?

On the morning following that on which an unexpected commission for Mr Bradlaw had been found in the field opposite The Aspens, the undertaker moved busily around his yard and workshop, hiding an inner unease with a more than usually jocose encouragement of his three joiners. “A good board, that, Ben.” “How’s the missus, Charlie?...Aye, take the beading over that knot, lad.” “God, this’n’ll twist right off the bloody rollers if there’s a ha’porth of damp on Thursday!”

He bustled from bench to trestle in his waistcoat and pin-stripes. A wing collar, ready for rapid attachment, hung on a nail above the glue-pot. At the far end of the shop, safe from sawdust and pitch-splashing, was suspended his morning coat. Bradlaw, like a fireman, could be presentable for duty within seconds of a call. Rather pointless, really, he sometimes reflected, was this constant readiness to dash off somewhere. His were the most patient customers in the world. Yet it paid to give the impression of efficiency, concern, dispatch.

He had returned a short time previously from the hospital where, in consideration of Mrs Poole’s solitude and nervousness and at the suggestion of Inspector Purbright, the remains of Mr Gwill had been given refrigerated accommodation until the funeral. The coffin was almost ready. It was a nice job. Bradlaw hoped it might be taken into the hospital during visiting hours. One on-the-spot demonstration was worth a whole printing of calendars.

Yet even this prospect did not much lighten Bradlaw’s thoughts. The police, he had been told on his return from the hospital, had called in his absence and would come back later. And that, he reflected, could mean only one thing. He looked at his watch. The inquest would be nearly over. He listened as he dodged around among the elm shavings for Betty—no, it was Eileen now—to ring the bell summoning him to the office.

Eventually the bell did sound. Bradlaw hastily harnessed himself in the wing collar, hooked around it the ready-knotted black tie, and wriggled into his coat as he crossed the yard and entered the house.

Closing the door behind him, he eyed the two waiting men.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Bradlaw gravely, tucking his chin well down and doing his best to convey the impression that he, death’s ferryman, had touched shore for five minutes only, but would consider accepting a message for the other side provided it was brief, and addressed to the highest authority.

“Hello, there!” responded Purbright. Love winked cheerfully and perched himself on a chair arm. Bradlaw, who knew and was known by both men perfectly well, realized that the presumably solemn nature of their inquiries was not going to prevent them from treating him with familiarity. Which was a pity, for his nervousness would have been better concealed if professional gloom could have been assumed on both sides.

“Well, here’s a fine how-d’ye-do,” began Purbright, offering cigarettes. “What do you know about it, Nab?”

Hearing his nickname, Bradlaw abandoned hope of being able to remain stuffy and safe. But he wasn’t going to be backslapped into parting with anything compromising. He rolled his head, glanced at the shut door and hoarsely confided: “They tell me he went and got himself knocked off: is that right?”

Purbright unexpectedly jabbed Bradlaw’s paunch. “Dead right.” he whispered. “Point is...who? Eh?”

“Poor old Gwill.” Bradlaw relaxed. Purbright seemed inclined to be bar-parlourish about the affair, a good sign. “You’d never have thought he was the sort to end up like that. Here, it wasn’t women, was it?” He pronounced “women” like a medical term.

“Dunno,” Purbright said. “Might it have been?”

Bradlaw pretended to consider. Then he shook his head. “I never heard of anything. Mind you, there’s often a woman in these things. They’re queer creatures. Damn me, they are, you know.”

“There’s the woman next door, of course. Had he anything to do with her, would you say?”

Bradlaw looked momentarily shaken. “Why, have you seen her?”

Watching him, Purbright replied: “I happened to run into her yesterday. She said she’d been away.”

“Ah!” Bradlaw paused, and added: “No, she’s got her head screwed on. Widows are safe enough as a rule. She’d been away, you said?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“You mean, she can’t have done it?”

“We haven’t decided yet who could and who couldn’t. We’re at the damn-fool question stage. Let’s see”—Purbright eyed Bradlaw with faint amusement—“what we can find in that line for you, shall we? What, for instance, were you doing on the night before last? And don’t say laying in business in Heston Lane.”

“Laying out, sir.”

“You shut up, Sid; I’m waiting for Nab to incriminate himself.”

Bradlaw chuckled and smoothed the few remaining parallel lines of hair across his pinkly shining head. “Night before last...” He massaged the putty of his mouth and frowned. “Night before last...” He removed his hand and his mouth returned to its own devices, the first of which was to ejaculate: “Buffs!”

“Pardon?” said Purbright.

“Buffs. There was a lodge meeting. Then I popped in at the club. That chap Lintz from the paper—know him?—he was there. I brought him back with me as a matter of fact. Ethel—no, Eileen—made us some supper and he stayed until...Oh, I don’t know, half-past one or two.”

“Doing what?”

“Heaven knows. Talking. Having a couple of beers. I really can’t remember.”

“You wouldn’t be playing chess by any chance?”

“Chess? I wouldn’t be surprised. Is that what he said?”

“You seem rather vague about it.”

“Not a bit of it. We played chess.” Bradlaw turned to Love and explained: “It’s a sort of complicated draughts, you know.”

“Anyway,” said Purbright, “you were definitely with Lintz all the time from, say, eleven until two?”

“Oh, yes. Except when he was out in the yard, of course.”

“In the yard?”

“He wanted some fresh air, he said. I remember that because he let the door catch and had to wake me up to get in again. Chess,” added Bradlaw feelingly, “can be bloody tiring.”

“So you don’t know how long he was out?”

“Not really. Can’t have been long, though. Too cold.”

“Could he have got out of the yard into the street?”

“Into the lane, yes; but why should he?”

“Was his car in the lane?”

“I think so...No, we’d come back in the Bedford—my van, you know.” Bradlaw frowned. “Here, but you’re not trying to make out that George nipped out for a jimmy riddle, and then took a fancy to slap down Uncle and got back here before I knew he’d gone?”

Purbright looked at him in silence for several seconds, then smiled. “Now you see what nasty people your policemen pals can be when they want.”

Bradlaw puffed out his cheeks indignantly.

“What did you know about Gwill?” Purbright resumed.

“Not much. Why?”

“You saw him at his house pretty regularly, didn’t you?”

“Now and again.”

“He didn’t play chess, I suppose?”

“Gawd, you are in a griping mood. Anyone would think you suspected me.”

“Perish the thought. Why did you go to see him?”

“Just to be sociable. I’m a steady advertiser, too.”

“He didn’t give dinner parties for all his advertisers, surely. Who else went with you?”

“Rodney Gloss was there sometimes—his solicitor. Doc Hillyard, too, occasionally. That’s all, as far as I remember.”

“What about Harold Carobleat?”

“Well, what about him? He’s dead.”

“That’s all right. I just wanted a general picture of social life at the Gwill’s. We have to start with something, you know.”

Bradlaw shrugged and began tracing numeral outlines on the desk calendar with one finger. “I’ll tell you this much,” he said slowly, “you needn’t waste time looking at Gwill’s friends for whoever killed him. I’ve known him, and them, for a good few years. Look, doctors and lawyers in a place like this don’t go round murdering people.”

“Nor undertakers?” murmured Purbright.

“No, not undertakers, either. Why the hell should they?” Bradlaw seemed to feel a sudden surge of resentment. “You flounder about and make all sorts of wild insinuations against people just because they knew somebody who’s been found dead. Damn it, I don’t think you even know yet how the fellow was killed.”

Purbright said patiently: “No, I don’t think we do,” and waited.

“Right; then why go casting around for suspects like...like a quizz-master or something?” (Bradlaw went to television for most of his derogatory similes.)

“He’s the one,” said Purbright to Love, jerking his thumb at Bradlaw. “Got the bracelets, Sid? Bracelets,” he explained to the now peeved undertaker, “are what we call handcuffs. Very slangy.”

Bradlaw grunted, looked at his watch and scowled. “Come on,” he pleaded. “I’ve people coming at twelve. What else do you want to know?”

“Just three more things, Nab, I think. Firstly, what business was Gwill mixed up in apart from his paper?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Very well. Secondly, if none of his friends had any reason to kill him, who else did?”

Bradlaw shook his head. “That’s your job to find out. I’d be inclined to ask who got anything out of it. But maybe nobody did. I don’t know.”

“Lastly, what was Gwill’s relationship with Mrs Carobleat?”

“You asked me that before.”

“Not in so many words.”

“I still can’t tell you. I only know what people have said, but that doesn’t signify. You should hear what some of them have hinted about my housekeeper. A lot of damned spiteful old cows. In this town you even need a chaperone when you go to measure a stiff.”

“How trying for you, Nab.” Purbright picked up his hat and motioned Love to leave with him. “You must bear up, my friend. Don’t give way like poor old Gloss.”

Bradlaw froze in the action of opening the door. He turned. “What the hell are you getting at?”

Purbright smiled and pushed past him into the street. “Gloss,” he said, “is scared—something horrid.” The two policemen moved off in what seemed to Bradlaw slow and ominous companionship.

At the end of the street, Purbright turned the corner and drew Love into a shop doorway some yards further on. “I’m going back to the station to see what the fellows have picked up from Heston Lane,” he said. “You hang on here and watch for Nab Bradlaw. I’ve an idea he’ll want to go visiting. If he takes that van of his, it’s too bad. He might feel like exercise, though.”

“How long do you want me to stick to him?”

“Only until he goes home again. It’s just on twelve now. He said he had some callers, so he’ll probably see them first. Don’t catch cold.”

Love remained a few minutes looking into the shop window. Then he walked back to the corner. He glanced down Bride Street towards Bradlaw’s house, saw no one, and crossed over. For the next quarter of an hour he did his best to make hanging around a deserted road junction on a winter morning look a reasonable occupation.

Eventually he saw a small group leave what he judged to be the undertaker’s office and walk away in the opposite direction. Shortly afterwards, a single figure emerged at the same point. As it approached, he recognized Bradlaw and sought another doorway. He gave Bradlaw time to reach the corner. Then carefully he looked out.

Bradlaw, whose walk was distinguished by a slight roll to the left like the motion of a top-laden boat, had turned off into St Anne’s Place and was now going away from Love. The sergeant gave him fifty yards’ lead and followed, keeping close to the shops on his left.

Several people were now between them, but Love had no difficulty in keeping the rhythmically listing figure of the undertaker in sight until, quite suddenly, it peeled off, mounted a short flight of railed steps, and disappeared.

Love slowed his pace and crossed the road. From the other side he could see only two doorways with steps. He strolled slowly until he was opposite the first. The door was closed. The second entrance was not. He concluded that it must have been through there that Bradlaw had passed.

He crossed over again and continued in the same direction, noting the names on the brass plates outside the second door. Then he became interested in shop windows once more and tried to forget how cold his feet were getting.

Nearly half an hour went by.

At last Bradlaw emerged. Love, at that moment twenty yards away, prepared to follow him again. He came nearer and tried to see which direction the undertaker had chosen. But there was no sign of him.

Love crossed the road carefully, craning his neck and rising on tip-toe to see over the intervening citizenry. It was only when a second man appeared at the top of the steps and hurried down to the kerb that Love realized what had happened.

He ran forward in time to see the car draw away and accelerate towards the town centre. The passenger was Bradlaw. The driver, whom Love recognized when he glanced swiftly behind him before letting out the clutch, was Mr Rodney Gloss.

Chapter Seven

Detective Constables Harper and Pook had spent the morning calling from door to door in Heston Lane, an occupation only a little less dispiriting than Love’s patrol of the chilling flagstones of St Anne’s Place. Every now and then, Harper (even numbers) would meet or be met by Pook (odd numbers) and compare notes on the remarkable blindness and defective hearing of the residents.

“Dead stupid, these people,” opined Harper, with dismal regularity.

“God, what a lot!” responded Pook.

It did not strike them as at all reasonable that a murder could have been committed so privately as to have escaped entirely the notice of upwards of sixty householders, most of them patently inquisitive insomniacs with a keen sense of the significance of every passing footstep and every distantly slammed door.

“They must know something,” Harper declared.

“Scared we’ll ask for their dog licence,” theorized Pook.

They parted once more for odd and even investigation, like vacuum cleaner salesmen doggedly canvassing a community served by gas.

About half-way through the morning, Pook discovered he was far ahead of the last point at which he had seen Harper march up a driveway. Perhaps the lucky devil had found a house where hot coffee and reminiscences of a son’s career in the North-West Frontier Police were waiting. Pook noted the number of his next call and strolled back. Harper, he saw, was just coming out of the house, looking at his notebook and apparently confirming something with a tubby, beady-eyed and garrulous woman who nodded energetically and pointed occasionally in the direction of The Aspens, whence the detective had been working their hitherto unproductive way.

“That one was a bit more useful,” said Harper as he rejoined his colleague.

“Coffee?” asked Pook, enviously.”

“Tea,” absently replied Harper, “I think.” He gave a final glance at his notebook and slipped it in his pocket.

Pook grunted and looked back sadly at the long line of odd and tea-less residences at whose doors he had knocked or rung in vain. “We’d better do the rest,” he said. “By the way, did you get anything out of her—apart from a cuppa?”

“Three, actually,” Harper corrected. “And a list of people who could have been at Gwill’s place after midnight.”

Worse and worse. Pook stared at him. “Don’t talk wet. These people all sink into a coma round about eight. She probably made something up because she was sorry for you.”

“On, no.” Harper was pleased and brisk. “It so happens her daughter was out at a dance or something and the old woman was so scared she’d come back ruined that every time she heard anyone coming from town she popped down to the gate to see if it was girlie. Hence the who’s who. She didn’t know them all, but I’ve four names and a few descriptions.”

The inquisition was resumed. But the houses here were much nearer the town. The detectives’ automatic catechism drew no more information that seemed to have any bearing on what had happened at or near The Aspens. Pook was reduced to putting down in his notebook an account of the narrow escape of one old woman’s cat from death beneath the wheels of a black van driven “furiously and without the slightest regard for animals” from the direction of Flaxborough at half an hour past midnight. “I noticed specially because it came back again later, officer, and poor Winston called out from the kitchen—well, they know, don’t they?”

It was at Winston’s home that Pook’s fast was ended. But his benefactor was still so upset that she very nearly poured him a saucer of milk before it occurred to her that he might prefer tea.

Love found Purbright digesting, like a sleepy boa constrictor, the offerings of Harper and Pook. He added his own news that Bradlaw had called upon lawyer Gloss and been driven off by him in his car. This was accepted by the inspector with a mild “Did he now?”

“Anything new?” asked Love.

“Oh, bits and pieces. They may make sense eventually. Unfortunately we’re still at the stage of not knowing what to throw away. Harper’s just unloaded this lot, for instance. ‘Middle-aged man with stick, carrying case and looking at numbers on gates...girl in hurry wearing dark fur-trimmed coat and high-heeled shoes...Maurice Hoylake, garage proprietor, on bicycle...man, fairly well-off looking, with trilby hat and small feet...Dr Hillyard, general practitioner, of Flaxborough...Mr William Semple...man in raincoat, rather drunk...Miss Peabody, millinery assistant and amateur dramatics secretary...’ And from Pook, with apologies and stiff-lipped readiness for further foolish errands, ‘One black van, driven to the danger of cats up and down Heston Lane all of a Monday midnight-O’.”

“And what are they supposed to mean?”

“They are the fruits of inquiries by Messrs Harper and Pook of the residents of Heston Lane. A list of everyone seen in those parts around the time that Gwill was likely to have been murdered. They’ll all need to be questioned when we can get round to it, but at the moment, it’s the last name that rings the loudest bell, isn’t it?”

“Hillyard?”

“Yes. Do you know him, by the way?”

“I’ve never actually met him. He’s a bottle-hitter, from what I hear.”

“It seems so. He turned up while I was talking to the Carobleat woman yesterday afternoon. She knew him well enough to dislike him, and I’d say he’s not over fond of her. Wherever he was going on Monday night, I doubt if it was to an assignation with Mrs Carobleat.”

“You’ll tackle him about Monday?”

“Naturally. It might not be easy, though. When he’s sober, which may not be very often, he’s probably well fortified with professional dignity and Gaelic awkwardness. And when he’s drunk, I expect he becomes a mystic, which will be a damn sight worse.”

Purbright looked again at his notes. “What do you make of the ‘well-off looking man with trilby hat and small feet’? Small feet...what a curious thing for anyone to notice at that time of night.”

“Not necessarily. When I used to be on nights I could tell some people by their feet. It’s the way they walk and the amount of noise they make. Those with little feet look rather like those prancy characters of Edward Lear—you know, walking on points.”

Purbright regarded him with admiration. “Sid, you read books!”

Love beamed. “I’m jolly well educated,” he retorted cheerfully. “I can detect, too. Roddy Gloss walks like one of Mr Lear’s Old Men Of.”

The telephone forestalled Purbright’s reply. It was Lintz. He had just realized, apparently, that his uncle’s end was the beginning of a news story that was likely to run a course quite independent of his own feelings in the matter. He had toyed with, but finally abandoned, the idea of announcing the death in simple ‘We regret...’ terms designed to give the impression that Gwill had expired unaided and in an orthodox manner, and now wished to know if he could give instructions for the local account of the affair to include an official statement from the police.

Purbright pondered. He had quickly learned to meet the bright, hungry questions of men who called him ‘Old Boy’ and seemed passionately interested in irrelevancies, with a non-committal geniality that they were pleased to take as confirmation of everything they asked. But the Citizen might prove useful. Unlike the Nationals, whose touching faith in their readers’ readiness to believe absolutely anything was so misplaced, a local weekly commanded credence.

“Look, Mr Lintz,” said Purbright, “you can use all the facts as I believe you know them already. I’d like you to add this, though. Say the police are anxious to hear from anyone who was out in the Heston Lane area on Monday night from eleven-thirty onwards. Oh, and you might add a mention of a plain, black van. We’d like a word with the driver...Yes, same place, Heston Lane; it went up from town just before twelve and returned about half an hour later. Pardon? Yes, black...That’s very good of you, sir.”

He grinned as he replaced the phone. “I was wondering how to put the wind up Lintz. That might have done it.”

“The bit about the van?”

“Yes. How many plain black vans would you say there are in Flaxborough?”

“There’s ours.”

“Don’t be fatuous.”

Love thought a moment. “There can’t be more than a couple of others. Bradlaw’s is black, isn’t it?”

“It is. Now what did you make of his story this morning?”

“Thin.”

“Very. I rather fancy, d’you know, that Bradlaw and Lintz cooked it up beforehand at Nab’s instigation. He certainly took Lintz home with him—I’ve checked on that. Since the murder, he could have rubbed it into Lintz that as Gwill’s heir he was bound to be suspected, and given him to believe that he, Bradlaw, would provide his alibi. But Nab was smart enough this morning to leave a hole in his story—the part about Lintz going out into the yard. It was deliberately added for our benefit. And for Bradlaw’s. It was the surest way of putting Lintz under suspicion. You noticed how Nab implied that he’d had a good deal to drink? The air of uncertainty about the game of chess...the suggestion that he had dropped off to sleep and wouldn’t have known how long Lintz was away...he did it all very nicely.”

“Don’t you think you’re giving him too much credit for cunning? We don’t know for certain that either of them left the house.”

“There’s the report of the van.”

“Just passing through from some other town, perhaps.”

“Don’t forget it came back again.”

“True.”

“Incidentally,” Purbright went on, “just before you came in I rang the Unionist Club and had a word with Hubbard, the steward. He confirmed what I’d suspected. Nab can drink all night and still see the sixteenths on that foot rule of his. Lintz pewks on a pint. On Monday night he picked his way out like a deep sea diver. Nab was cold sober and steering him.”

Love looked impressed. “In that case, it’s possible that it was Bradlaw who knew what was going to happen and who felt in need of an alibi.”

“Quite possible. But suppose we can prove that Nab took his van and drove to Heston Lane end and back. We still have no notion of why he should have wanted to murder Gwill. He can’t be so short of work that he has to provide it for himself. We still don’t know how it was done. And we don’t know who else might have been involved; heaving the body around was too much for one, surely.”

“Hillyard was seen going that way. But I suppose he could have been visiting a patient.”

“What, on foot?”

“No, perhaps not.”

Purbright rubbed his cheek. “We can’t stretch coincidence three ways. Hillyard was identified. Someone resembling the nimble Mr Gloss was described. And a van very like Nab Bradlaw’s was spotted. All around the same time and bound in the same direction. All three were friends of the murderee. One is now frightened and a second produces a leaky alibi, while the third breathes whisky fumes and gives portentous Caledonian grunts. Pray heaven we’re not faced with a conspiracy, Sid. Conspiracies are the most dreadful things to sort out. Oh, God, they’re maddening, believe me...”

The telephone rang. Again it was Lintz. The inspector would remember the instruction to insert three advertisements in that week’s issue on the lines of he knew what? Yes, well, it had turned out that four insertions had been ordered by Gwill himself the previous Saturday. Mr House had just seen them in proof. He hadn’t known about them before because the girl had taken them while he was out of the office. What did the inspector want done now?

“Oh,” said Purbright, “cancel mine and let the original ones go in. So much the better, sir. And thanks for letting me know. While we’re on the subject, I’d be obliged if you would make certain of being given all the replies yourself as they come in. Don’t allow them out of your hands, sir. I think that may be important. You what?...Yes, telephone my office here as soon as anything arrives—the very first one—and I’ll come over.”

Love watched him replace the receiver and said: “It could be, couldn’t it, that you’re taking a risk with that chap. How do you know he won’t grab the replies and hand you some he’s concocted himself?”

“I don’t. But I can hardly impound the whole newspaper and staff it with our lads, can I? This is just one of those occasions when we have to take a chance on somebody.”

“There may be nothing in this advertisement business.”

“Quite. We shall probably know by the week-end. Incidentally, I thought the inquest went reasonably well, didn’t you?”

Love agreed that it had. Whatever Mr Chubb had done to prime Flaxborough’s irascible and senile Coroner, it had achieved remarkable results. Not only had Mr Amblesby forborne from interrupting the medical evidence of Dr Heineman with malicious cross-questioning about his origins, but he had made no attempt to introduce homilies on drink, gadgets, Edwardian levees, or the monstrous prodigality of the working class, all subjects which Mr Amblesby considered very proper to inquests.

The only dangerous moment had been when Lintz, giving evidence of identification, touched upon his having left Gwill alone at his house on the evening before the discovery of the body. The Coroner, malevolently clicking his dentures and fixing Lintz with an eye like an agate dipped in sputum, accused: “Do you mean to tell me you left an old gentleman of his age on his own and with no one to look after him?” Lintz sullenly retorted that his uncle had been perfectly capable, by no means elderly, and strongly opposed to being looked after by anybody. “But he must be over ninety,” persisted Mr Amblesby. “He was on the association committee with me when Sir Philip trounced that radical chap...Malley, what was the fellow’s name? Pro-Boer, he was...” The sergeant had thereupon nursed him back into the present with an explanation that Marcus Gwill’s father was not the gentleman with whom they were now concerned. The rest of the proceedings had gone smoothly enough, with Mr Amblesby harmlessly slumped in a reminiscent coma.

After lunch, Purbright took himself off through the fog that was spreading inland from the already obscured harbour district and sought the offices of Possett, Gloss and Weatherby.

Mr Gloss, who privately regarded inspectors of police much as the managing director of a public transport company might regard inspectors of tickets, was careful nevertheless to give his welcome that air of unpatronizing amiability that so effectively discourages subordinates from putting demands or awkward questions. He waved Purbright to a chair, then took a seat—a smaller, harder one than his visitor’s—beside, but not at, his desk. He offered him a cigarette, a Woodbine, lit it for him with a match and said melifluously and invitingly: “Now, Inspector.”

“Now, sir,” responded Purbright, with a smile of such friendliness that if he had said outright that here was a game two could play Gloss could not have taken his meaning more clearly. “You’ll have some idea of what I’m after, I expect?”

Gloss also smiled. “Your intention, doubtless, is to grill me, inspector,” he said good-humouredly. “That is, assuming that you are investigating the lamentable death of my client, Mr Gwill.”

“You were his legal adviser, I understand, sir?”

“I was, indeed. And am still, so far as the posthumous disposition of his affairs is concerned.”

“He made a will, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes. A straightforward document. Everything goes to his nephew, Mr Lintz, including the controlling interest in the Flaxborough Citizen Printing and Publishing Company. I believe the arrangement was fairly widely understood, so there can be no harm in my revealing the terms of the will. The fact is that Mr Gwill had no one else to whom he could leave his possessions: no one of blood relationship, that is.”

Gloss looked at Purbright intently, as if daring him to cross-examine. But the will seemed to have lost significance already. The inspector went straight on to other matters.

“How long had you known Mr Gwill, sir?”

“A fair number of years, I should say. Almost a life-time, in fact. The professional relationship dates back to, oh, the early ’thirties.”

“You had always been on good terms with him?”

“Come, inspector; you do not, surely, expect me to make any such claim?” Gloss was the bluff and open advocate now. “We had differences of opinion on many occasions. Marcus was not of an altogether amenable disposition. One made allowances...” he shrugged. “One got on, notwithstanding. I wonder your inquiries, even at their present presumably undeveloped stage, have not adduced evidence of a certain coolness in my client’s attitude to others.

“But”—Gloss bulged his eyes—“do not misunderstand me. At no time, no time, was there any serious likelihood of a breach between us. Men of business never allow temporary emotional discord to blind them to the mutual advantages of association. Please do not regard that as cynical, inspector; it is plain truth.”

“It sounds logical, sir. May I ask if you had any business interest in common with Mr Gwill beyond the...the normal client-solicitor relationship?”

“Pray amplify that question, inspector. I am not altogether with you.”

“Perhaps I had better put it another way. Are you aware of any occupation, any source of income, of Mr Gwill’s, apart from his ownership of the newspaper?”

“Ah, now you are framing the question very differently. In its original form, it almost implied suspicion that Gwill and I might have shared in some pecuniary enterprise on the side, as it were. I do hope you entertain no thought of the possibility of anything so improper?”

“I’m sure you would be guilty of nothing the Law Society might frown on, Mr Gloss.”

“No, indeed. That would be quite unrealistic. As to your amended question, now...” Gloss puckered his brow and was silent a while. Then he shook his head. “The answer must be no, inspector. Not that the bare negative is incapable of qualification, you understand; but I think it will serve in the context of police investigation.”

“If I were of an uncharitable disposition,” Purbright said quietly, “I might almost take that to be a roundabout way of saying that your client’s sudden departure has left some money lying around that isn’t strictly accounted for.”

Gloss looked at the policeman with undisguised admiration. “Upon my soul, but you’re a perceptive fellow, inspector. And you’re absolutely right. The trouble is, you know”—he leaned forward—“that my client suffered a disadvantage common to many gentlemen in a commercial way of occupation. They are naturally concerned to order their affairs to meet the contingencies of our times. Taxation and so forth, you understand. But such arrangements demand supervision by a live principal—a man who can sign his name—perhaps several names, alas. Manipulation is called for, inspector. Manipulation. And a corpse, God bless us, cannot manipulate.”

“I see what you mean, sir.”

The solicitor crossed one leg over the other and examined a carefully polished shoe cap. “You must not conclude, of course, that any substantial proportion of Mr Gwill’s assets is, how shall we say, frozen. His less orthodox accounts and holdings may need to remain outside the scope of the will for the time being, but they represent no part of the money that has accrued from his publishing business.”

“Can you tell me what they do represent?”

After the briefest of pauses, Gloss shook his head. “No, inspector, I’m afraid I cannot help you there.”

“You appreciate, I expect, sir, that the fact of Mr Gwill having been murdered obliges us to examine everything about his affairs that might show a motive.”

“Do I take it that you infer from the existence of an unofficial source of income that he might have been obtaining money by exerting pressure on some person?”

“I infer the possibility of blackmail.”

Gloss pursed his lips. “That is what I imagined might be your line of reasoning. But do you think that if that had been the case my client would have acquainted me with the extent of his investments? He need not have done so.”

“Nor need you have said anything about them to me, sir.”

“No, but I think it safer that I should.”

“Safer? Safer for whom, Mr Gloss?”

“For myself, inspector. I shall be entirely frank with you. It is my private belief that this money was obtained not by blackmail but by other means of questionable legality. What they were I do not know and I do not wish to know. But some months ago I noticed a change in the man’s manner. He became more excited, yet there was an element of fear in his excitement. He boasted of the supplements to his means and hinted at his having to be clever to obtain them. The sums themselves, as far as I have been able to check, were not spectacular. I think it was the method of coming by them that gave him some sort of stimulus. I further received the impression that some third person was being deprived of a share in the gains and that his discomfiture was contributing to my client’s sense of elation.”

“You felt Gwill was doing something dangerous, you mean? For the thrill of it?”

“Exactly. These little extras had been coming his way for a fairly considerable time, but he had said nothing about them to me, apart from asking advice on investment occasionally.”

“Which you gave?” Purbright interjected.

“Oh, yes. Why not? I had no proof of my client’s transactions being in any way improper.”

“Please go on, sir.”

“Well, during recent months he grew more loquacious. Not factually informative, you understand, but full of little hints and boasts of a slightly provocative character. He seemed anxious that I should feel involved in some way. I remember he said once that I should need to be careful for my own skin—that was how he put it—for my own skin, if ever anything happened to him. I asked him what he meant and he said something to the effect that he had made an enemy ‘good enough for us both’. To be quite honest, I had come by that time to suspect my client of being considerably overwrought and perhaps lacking balance.”

“You think now there may have been something in what he said?”

Gloss got up and walked to the window. With his back to Purbright, he went on talking as he stared out at the passing traffic.

“I am inclined to the view,” he said, “that Gwill said what he did after having conveyed for reasons best known to himself a false impression of our relationship to some other person. This hypothetical third party, it may be, was fobbed off with the story that I had been given custody of monies of which he had been deprived, in order that he would make no direct or violent attempt to recover them from Gwill himself. As things have turned out, it appears that the ruse did not save Gwill from the revenge of the person he had provoked. But what very naturally concerns me, inspector, is that someone who has shown himself capable of murder is now at large and possibly obsessed with the notion that only I now stand between him and what he considers his due.”

At the end of this speech, Gloss turned slowly from the window and stood facing Purbright. “I trust,” he said, “you will now appreciate why I made the request—of which your Chief Constable has doubtless acquainted you—for police protection; and why I have disclosed to you what would normally be regarded as professionally confidential matters.”

Purbright rubbed his chin and sighed. He found the ponderous rectitude of Gloss’s recital tiring and an obstacle to his selection of suggestive facts.

“I wonder,” he said at last, “if you would care to tell me where you were on Monday night, Mr Gloss?”

The sudden change of subject seemed to set the solicitor thumbing hastily through some mental brief. “Monday night...Monday...”

“Yes. The night Gwill was killed.”

“Ah...” The court manner was returning. Some surprising revelation, clinching a case, confounding a prosecutor, vindicating a wronged client, was about to be tossed, with studied carelessness, before the bench. “Curiously enough, inspector”—Gloss slowly lowered himself back into his chair and gazed earnestly over interlaced fingers held just above his chin—“I spent Monday evening at the home of Marcus Gwill and stayed until after he was dead.”

Chapter Eight

“I suppose you would think me facetious if I were to ask if you killed him,” Purbright said.

“Not at all: the question is a proper one in the circumstances,” Gloss conceded. “But I’m afraid my answer will not help you very much. It is no.”

Purbright took out a notebook. “I’m my own secretary today,” he remarked wryly. “I hope you won’t be put off by feeling sorry for me, but I really must take a statement after what you’ve just said.”

“Naturally. I have given the matter some thought and I feel that to give a frank account of what I know of the events of the other evening is the least I can do for the sake of my late client and”—Purbright looked up in time to see a man-of-the-world shrug—“of others.”

“Yourself included, sir?”

“Of course.”

“And Jonas Bradlaw?”

Gloss held up his hand. “You must not anticipate my statement, inspector.” He looked at his watch and listened. Above the muffled sounds of traffic, a horn sounded briefly. A ship’s siren moaned in the estuary beyond Flaxborough dock. There was a light step to the door, a knock, and a plump, spotty girl edged her way in with a tray. Gloss put away his watch and beamed a quick, unmeant smile at her. “Promptitude,” he said to Purbright when she had gone, “is one of the qualities most difficult to inculcate into one’s office staff today.”

Purbright grunted and put his cup on the desk beside him. He opened the notebook and looked expectantly at the solicitor, who took a sip of his tea and began slowly to dictate.

“Rather late on Monday night—it must have been approximately eleven-thirty—I left my home and walked to the house of Mr Marcus Gwill. I do not normally retire to bed early and a stroll about midnight is not an uncommon exercise for me, so you must not imagine that there was anything extraordinary in my being abroad on that particular night. I do not pretend, however, that the visit to Gwill was in response to a mere whim. He had telephoned me a short time previously and intimated that there was a matter of some urgency he wished to discuss.

“I recall nothing noteworthy about my walk along Heston Lane. I met no one I recognized, although there were several people about who might conceivably have recognized me. It would be about a quarter to twelve when I arrived.

“Another acquaintance of Gwill’s was already there. I say acquaintance; actually it was his doctor, the Scotsman Hillyard, whom you probably know. Like myself, he stood in a somewhat closer relationship to Gwill than a purely professional one. When I found him in the drawing-room, I concluded that some sort of a conference was intended, although Gwill had not explained over the telephone what he had in mind. I did not suppose the occasion to be of a purely social nature.”

Gloss paused to look at Purbright’s lightly pencilled shorthand worming between the lines. “Please tell me,” he said, “if I am forging too far ahead of that admirable squiggle.”

“Not at all, sir,” said Purbright, evenly. “My squiggle likes a fleet quarry. But I should like my cup of tea now, if you don’t mind.” And he drank it. “Will you go on from ‘social nature’, sir?”

Gloss frowned, then smoothly resumed.

“Hillyard was seated by the fire and drinking a glass of whisky. He appeared contemplative. Gwill fetched a glass for me and invited me to help myself from the decanter. He took nothing to drink himself; he was an abstainer, you know. I noticed he was chewing, however, and I remember feeling a little irritated at the sight of his jaws working away. Adult sweet-eaters invariably annoy me. They seem furtively self-indulgent and sensual in a horrid, immature way. I mention the fact of Gwill’s chewing because it explains why I can tell you very little of something that occurred almost immediately after my arrival, something which I think now may have been of significance.

“The telephone rang, and Gwill took the call in the room where we were sitting. As he listened, he put another loathsome sweet-meat into his mouth, and I was so preoccupied with the way his mastication moved the telephone earpiece up and down that I failed to take any notice of the conversation. There was no doubt of its outcome, though, for Gwill put the instrument down and hastened out of the house with no more than a mumble about being back in a few minutes.”

Gloss paused, then looked very solemnly at Purbright. “He did not come back and I never saw him again. Hillyard and I waited for perhaps half an hour. Then I went upstairs to ask Mrs Poole if she had any idea of where he might have gone and to request her to remain awake until his return. She was not there, of course. Hillyard and I could think of nothing practical to do in the circumstances and so we left the house and walked to our respective homes.”

Purbright glanced up. “Did you lock the door of the house, sir?”

“We decided it would be better to leave it insecure than to risk his having taken no key and being obliged to break a window or something of that kind.”

“You felt no anxiety on his behalf other than being worried about locking him out?”

“None. Why should we? As a matter of fact, we both took it for granted that he was visiting some house fairly close at hand. It was only later that I realized the unlikelihood of that having been the case.”

“What led you to realize that?”

“I remembered two things about the telephone call that did not register on my mind at the time but which must have made a subconscious impression.”

“Yes, Mr Gloss?”

“Perhaps a minute before the telephone bell rang, I heard a vehicle draw up in the road outside. It has occurred to me since that a public telephone kiosk stands on Heston Lane some little way nearer the town and on the opposite side of the road. I incline to the belief that the call to Gwill’s house came from that kiosk and was made by the driver of the vehicle I heard.”

“Can you say what sort of a vehicle it sounded to be, sir?”

“I’m afraid I cannot. It made a noticeable noise, so it is likely to have been a moderately large car or a small lorry.”

“Might it have been a van?”

Gloss considered. “Conceivably,” he said.

“And now, sir, perhaps you’ll tell me the second thing about the telephone call that has come back to you since Monday night.”

“Oh, yes; the second thing.” Gloss’s gaze fell; he drummed fingers on his knee and gave, Purbright thought, a fair impersonation of reluctant prosecutor. “I am almost certain,” he said, “that Gwill addressed the maker of the telephone call as George.”

“George?”

“That is my recollection, inspector. But I wish to be perfectly fair. My attention, as I have said, was distracted. It is just possible that the name was something similar.”

“Surely there aren’t many names that sound similar to George, Mr Gloss?”

“No? No, perhaps not. I have not given the matter much thought. I wished only to be frank and to impart impressions as they have come to me, quite undisturbed by conjecture.”

“Ah, very proper, sir.” The inspector’s face was blank. So was the other’s. They remained a while looking at each other in querulous politeness. Purbright broke the silence.

“Why did Mr Bradlaw come to see you this morning?”

“Bradlaw...” Gloss smiled. “You had made him nervous, I think. He came here to seek reassurance.”

“Why should he have been nervous?”

“He is inclined to be more sensitive to questioning than you might imagine, inspector. He has a rough manner, but that is deceptive. The troubles of others upset him to a greater extent than is healthy, perhaps, for one in his profession.”

“I have known Mr Bradlaw for quite a few years, sir.”

“Then you will be acquainted with his, ah, idiosyncracies.”

“Yes, I am.”

Gloss nodded and stared up at the ceiling.

“Tell me,” said Purbright in a brisker tone, “was Bradlaw at Mr Gwill’s house at any time on Monday night?”

Without lowering his eyes, Gloss said gently: “He may have been. But of course he was not present while I was there—as you must have judged from the fact that I made no mention of him in my account of what transpired.”

Purbright gave a little bow of acknowledgement. Then he asked: “Did you notice if Mr Gwill took a bucket or a can of water down the drive that night?”

For the first time in the interview the solicitor looked surprised. “Water? What on earth would he have been doing with buckets of water?”

“What, indeed,” said Purbright, watching him. The bewilderment seemed genuine. Then Gloss’s expression changed. “Wait a moment,” he said, “I still fail to see the significance of your allusion to water-cans, but I do remember now something that struck me as slightly out of the ordinary when I arrived at Gwill’s house. On opening the gate, I noticed the gravel felt sodden underfoot as though heavy rain had fallen. But there had been no rain, of course. And the ground was wet only at that one point.”

“Near the gate?”

“Yes. Just inside, I should say.”

Purbright looked at his watch, stood up, and began buttoning his coat. “I’m most obliged to you, Mr Gloss; you’ve been very patient. I do believe I’ve run out of questions.”

“And I’m not at all sure,” replied Gloss with a court-room smile, “but that I have run out of answers.”

While Gloss was carefully contributing to Purbright’s mounting collection of enigmas, contradictions, deductions and doubts, two other professional men of Flaxborough were discoursing.

Said Mr Bradlaw to Dr Hillyard (with whom he had lately lunched and who now sat regarding him mournfully in his spacious but musty drawing-room): “The whole damned thing will have to be dropped for the time being. We can build it up later when the fuss about poor old Marcus has died down.”

Said Dr Hillyard, self-consciously sober and liverishly emphatic: “It cannot and it needn’t. Get that into your head, man. Marcus asked for what he got, by God he did, but it can’t be left at that. What’s running smoothly now will have to keep on running or else be abandoned altogether. And I’ll not see that happen after what we’ve put into it.”

“But the police...”

“The police! Aye, and what will they do? Run round in ever-decreasing circles until they become their own colonic stoppages.” Hillyard stretched out a lanky leg and kicked at coal at the fire edge. He scowled at the upsurge of flame.

“Listen,” said Bradlaw, “I know the man Purbright. He may not be brilliant but he perseveres. He makes himself a thorough nuisance and rubs it in by constantly apologizing. I had him to put up with this morning. I tell you he’ll be on our backs until kingdom come, with his ‘I hate to trouble you’ and ‘Mightn’t it be so’ and ‘Perhaps you’d care to tell me’.”

“Nonsense. He’s just a provincial copper, dig-digging into what he doesn’t understand and hoping for good luck to save his reputation in the eyes of that timid old goat of a Chief Constable. He knows nothing and he’ll find nothing. Always provided”—Hillyard’s cheek twitched in the firelight—“that you and I and friend Gloss remain helpfully obscure and unproductively cooperative.”

Bradlaw grunted. “Roddy Gloss is just a shade too clever sometimes. Keeping up with him can be dodgy.”

“Never mind that. He’ll not take any risks. And he’ll have the sense not to lead you into any.”

“I don’t know what you mean by risk if you think he’s not asking for trouble by the line he’s given old Chubb. You realize what he’s going to tell Purbright as soon as he’s questioned? Which he will be. Even if it hasn’t happened already.”

“Stop talking in bursts, and stop frightening yourself like an old woman. Damn me if you thrombosis fatties aren’t all the same.”

Bradlaw, peeved, sat up in his chair. Hillyard took no notice of him but glowered at his own outstretched feet and said slowly: “We seem to have got away from the main point again, don’t we?”

“Eh?”

Hillyard felt in his pocket and drew out a battered cigarette. This he lit with a strip of paper that he tore methodically from the margin of one of the medical journals scattered on the floor by his chair. Quietly, almost sadly, he said: “There’s only one way we can find him.”

“You’ll not get it out of her.”

“I don’t propose to try any more.”

“Well, then...”

“Listen. A patient of mine—one of the more grateful ones—works at the telephone exchange...”

Hillyard spoke gently and without banter now. Bradlaw, nervous and doubtful, tried to look intelligent.

Behind the change in the manner of each lay common recognition of the need to be serious and to waste no time. Fear perched in the room.

Chapter Nine

The photograph that Purbright pushed across his desk to Love was an enlargement of a hand. The sergeant gave an involuntary jump. A hand, disconnected and twice life-size, can be a startling exhibit when unexpectedly revealed to a man preoccupied with nothing more sinister than desire for an early tea.

Love stared obligingly at the picture.

“Well?” asked Purbright.

Love turned the photograph sideways, then upside down. “Fine prints old Hastings gets,” he remarked.

Purbright was patient. “What do you make of the flower? There, look.” He leaned over and traced faint lines, broken but forming part of a general symmetry over the main area of the open palm. They were suggestive of a formalized daffodil.

“The burns?” said Love.

“Yes.”

“They show the shape of what he must have grabbed, I suppose.”

“Correct.”

“So when we find a metal object of the same shape and size that could have been connected to the mains or a cable last Monday night, we’ll be a fair way towards knowing how and where old Gwill was done.”

Purbright beamed as if upon a favourite pupil. “You are sharp today, Sid. I think we might make the best of it and go detecting, don’t you?”

The lugubrious Mrs Poole admitted them to The Aspens with the air of a landlady opening the door for lodgers who had forgotten their keys. She seemed resigned to the prospect of the police popping in and out for the rest of her life, which, judging from her aspect, she had no desire to be prolonged.

Purbright showed her a sketch of the marks on the photographed hand. He did not say what they were, but asked if she could think of any metal object about the house of which the sketch reminded her.

She stared at the drawing, moving her head to one side, then the other. “I’ve seen something like it,” she murmured, “but where, I can’t think.”

“Outside, perhaps?” Purbright prompted.

She shook her head. “You see carvings like that on church pews sometimes. But you said metal, didn’t you? Brass or iron, that would be. What about bedsteads, then?”

“Bedsteads?”

“Yes. The old-fashioned ones, you know. There are things like that on some of those I’ve seen. Like flowers between the rails at the head and foot.” She handed back the piece of paper.

Purbright asked her: “Is there a bedstead of that kind here?”

“Only mine, sir,” said Mrs Poole, “but truth to tell I can’t remember offhand what the metal parts of it are like, except for the knobs, of course, and not all of them are still there. You’d better come and see.”

But upon Mrs Poole’s gaunt bed rails there was no decoration at all, save one large and tarnished brass ball. “It’s funny how you can sleep on something for years and not really notice what it looks like,” she said, modestly thrusting a forgotten corset out of sight.

Purbright stared carefully round the room. It contained no daffodils of iron or of anything else. “Perhaps we’d better take a quick look into the other rooms, now that we’re here—if that wouldn’t inconvenience you, Mrs Poole.”

That was all right, she assured him. Having seen to her own little night-box of privacy being closed up snug and naphthascented once again, she left them and descended to whatever forlorn tasks she still found to do in the deserted house.

The two policemen looked into all the other upstairs rooms. Only the two largest bedrooms were furnished. Both their beds were of wood. Of metal-work there was no trace, except for one gas bracket that had been left for some obscure reason sprouting from a landing wall like a dead and dusty plant.

Purbright watched for power points. There was one in each of the large bedrooms and three more along the corridor and landings. He examined each carefully. All had a thick film of dust around the sockets.

They continued the search downstairs. It revealed nothing suggestive apart from four more power points, three of them dusty, and a roll of wire in the meter cupboard. Love tugged at this expertly and shook his head. “Bell wire—no use for mains,” he said.

They halted in the study-like room and stared out into the garden, with its dripping laurels. The house around them seemed damp and secretive and sorry for itself. “We’ll get nothing more here, I doubt,” said Purbright.

“Do you believe Gloss’s story?” Love asked him.

“Up to a point. I think they were all here that night. Gwill and Gloss and Hillyard and Bradlaw.”

“Bradlaw, too?”

“I’d be much surprised if he wasn’t. They were in something or other together and on Monday night there must have been a development of such importance to all of them that a conference of some kind became necessary. Either that, or else the other three came here by arrangement among themselves to put Gwill out of the way.”

“Electrocution seems an uncertain way of going about it.”

“Not at all. If only you can make sure your victim is nicely earthed—in a bath is the classic position—a shot of ordinary mains current is just as effective as a cannon ball.”

“You think he was actually killed here, then?”

“It’s the most likely place if there was a conspiracy.”

“If he was murdered here,” said Love, “they all must have been concerned to some extent. One of them could hardly have knocked him off without the others being aware of it. And it would have taken more than one man to carry the body over to the field afterwards.”

Purbright frowned. “There’s something queer about the story of the man Gloss. He mentioned Gwill’s having been eating up to the time of leaving the house. We know that to be correct. It lends strength to his tale, great strength. Had Gwill been murdered here by Gloss and Bradlaw and Hillyard, or any one or two of them, that particular twist in the account would never have been included.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is one of those simple and rather pathetic circumstances that a murderer prefers to forget when thinking about his victim. He or his accomplice—and Gloss must have been one or the other if Gwill met his end this side of the front door—would only mention the sweet-eating if it were an essential part of his alibi or self-justification. And we haven’t the slightest reason to suppose that it was either.”

Purbright patted Love’s shoulder. “Cheer up,” he said. “What do you say we go next door and bully the poor widow-woman for a while?”

The widow-woman they found tweedy, business-like and very self-possessed. She seemed, moreover, pleased to see them—a bad sign in a witness, as Purbright knew; for policemen, like illnesses, are best held at bay by determined cheerfulness.

“How nice of you to come round,” she said. “Yes, I know you promised, but promises are made so often in an attempt to be kind on the spur of the moment and broken afterwards when sympathy has had time to cool off.”

She led them into the large room facing Heston Lane. It was, tastefully and expensively furnished and was far more attractive than its gloomy counterpart at The Aspens.

“Do sit down,” said Mrs Carobleat. “I’ve had not a soul to talk to since the man came to read the meter last week, and his conversation was limited, to put it mildly. He has to save his breath to stoop into all those little cupboards, I suppose.” She offered cigarettes and lit one herself with a large table lighter. “You’ll have some tea, won’t you?”

Not waiting for a reply, she darted to the door and disappeared. They heard her giving brief instructions at the rear of the house. Then, almost immediately, she was back again. Whatever her age, Purbright reflected, she had a fitful energy and suppleness that betokened a woman with plenty of money and no lack of ideas of what to do with it. He realized that the Joan Carobleat he had seen on two previous occasions had been an understatement of her proper self. Six months ago, it was a newly bereaved wife with whom he had dealt. Then, this past Tuesday in the teashop, it was...well, what? A newly bereaved mistress? Or just a woman wearied by a long rail journey? In any case, here she was now, impressively alert and sure of herself.

“It’s only fair,” he told her,” that you should know straight away that this is not a social call.”

She widened her eyes but continued to smile. “Oh, come, inspector; all calls are social if those who make them have the grace to keep their real purpose to themselves until the kettle boils.”

Purbright decided to qualify for the compliment. He and his hostess shuttled small-talk for a while, watched politely by Love in the manner of a tennis spectator. Soon tea was brought on a large lacquered tray by a deferential, tight-lipped woman whom the policemen assumed to be a maid. They looked at her surreptitiously and with curiosity, for servants were not common in Flaxborough households. It was a bit like the pictures, Love told himself, adding the sour qualification that in real life the circumstance suggested ill-gotten gains.

Perhaps Purbright thought the same. He said: “You seem to be managing fairly smoothly, Mrs Carobleat. On your own, that is. I admire you for it.”

“That is gallant of you, inspector. But you should reserve your admiration for my late husband’s insurance company. I take no credit.”

“Financial independence doesn’t always make widowhood easier to bear.”

“Doesn’t it?” She explored a plate of biscuits and picked out a chocolate one.

“I should have thought the lack of companionship was the hardest part.”

“You are being very Godfrey Winney today, inspector. What are you after? A confession of my awful goings on with the gentleman next door?”

“I wouldn’t dream of being so impertinent as to ask any such thing,” said Purbright. He turned to Love. “You ask the lady, sergeant.”

Love’s mouth fell open. Then he swallowed and grinned doubtfully. He was rescued by Joan Carobleat. She laughed and said: “Never you mind, sergeant—Mr Purbright is just pulling our legs. Now, then”—she faced Purbright again—“what is it you are really after?”

“The murderer of the gentleman next door.”

“Yes, I suppose you are...” Her voice was suddenly grave. After a long pause she began stirring her tea. As she watched a floating leaf whirl round the rim, she said: “You know I can’t help don’t you? I know nothing that could have the slightest bearing. I wasn’t even here.” She tried to capture the leaf on the tip of her spoon, but it went by, revolved once more, and sank.

“You saw a good deal of Gwill, didn’t you?” Purbright asked.

“I seem to remember your putting that question before—in the teashop, wasn’t it?”

“You said then that you had merely called occasionally as a neighbour. To cheer him up, or something.”

“That still expresses it adequately.”

“You were being facetious just now about some ‘awful goings on’.”

“I can be as facetious as I like about matters of which you are now unlikely ever to be the wiser.”

“Mrs Poole might have given me a fairly clear idea of your relationship.”

Mrs Carobleat smiled. “A half-witted old servant?”

“You don’t wish to confide in me any further, then? I assure you I am the soul of tact and broad-mindedness. Come, now—you and Gwill were more than pally neighbours, weren’t you, Mrs Carobleat?”

She frowned, but not with annoyance. “Look here, inspector: suppose just for the hell of it I admitted what Mrs Poole would call The Worst...just what would be its bearing on your inquiries?”

“I might be a little nearer to discovering a motive for what seems at the moment a singularly pointless crime.”

“Come, widows don’t provide motives—except sometimes for other men’s wives.”

“They occasionally have motives of their own. I don’t suppose they are proof against being discarded, scorned, dishonoured—all that sort of thing, you know.”

She broke into a little clatter of laughter. Purbright, too, was smiling. But his eyes were alert.

“And how do you suggest this poor widow avenged her dishonour, inspector? When she wasn’t even in the same town at the time?”

“You were in Hereford, you said?”

“Shropshire. The Lad’s county, you know.”

“Ah, yes. You spent Monday night in a pub with a peculiar name. The Brink of Discovery.”

“I fancy its proprietor would prefer you to call it an inn. But at least you have the name right.”

“Was anyone else staying in this house while you were away? Your...the young woman who brought the tea?”

“Anna? Oh, no. She goes to some friends on a farm when I take a holiday. You were going to call her a maid, weren’t you? She isn’t quite that, actually. You could say companion if that doesn’t make me sound terribly Bayswater. And old,” she added.

“You had no idea of what had happened here until you returned from Shropshire and heard of Mr Gwill’s death from me?”

“None whatever. It was hardly likely that the news would have reached me the same morning, even if anyone had thought I would wish to be told.”

“Hardly.” Purbright considered a moment. “Did Mr Gwill have any...any presentiment of harm coming his way? Did he mention to you the possibility of his having an enemy?”

She pouted and shook her head.

“How did he get on with the men I presume to have been his friends—those who visited him regularly? Mr Gloss, for instance?”

“Gloss was his solicitor. He had quite a high opinion of him, I believe.”

“Dr Hillyard?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Mr Bradlaw?”

“The undertaker, you mean? They were on good terms. They could do each other a certain amount of mutual good through the newspaper, of course. Advertising on one side, and help with lists of mourners and so forth on the other. It’s a common enough arrangement, I believe.”

“Was there anyone apart from those three with whom Gwill was on intimate terms?”

“Not since my husband died. And always excepting his guilty association with me, of course.” Mrs Carobleat sipped her tea and eyed Purbright over the top of the cup.

After another quarter of an hour of being stolidly inquisitive to no perceptible effect, Purbright rose and said: “You understand that I have no right at the moment to ask you this, but would you be willing just the same to let me have a look round your house?”

This, at any rate, seemed to find Mrs Carobleat unprepared. She looked at him doubtfully and said she couldn’t quite see why, but he could if he really wanted to. He smiled apologetically and motioned her to lead the way.

The rest of the house proved to be as tidy, expensively furnished and well tended as the room they had left. Purbright and Love silently followed Mrs Carobleat, who only once turned in time to catch the inspector closely examining a power point.

He also showed interest in a small leather travelling case containing brushes and shaving equipment that lay on the dressing table of one of the only two bedrooms that showed signs of regular occupation.

“Those were Harold’s,” she said expressionlessly. Purbright nodded and turned away.

Chapter Ten

On the morning following the publication day of the Flaxborough Citizen, an early telephone call was put through to the police station by George Lintz. Purbright had been in his office since the time he judged the first postal delivery would be made at the newspaper. He now hurried over to Market Street.

Lintz let him in and handed him fourteen letters addressed to the box numbers specified in the advertisements that had been inserted on his uncle’s directions. An hour remained before members of the staff would begin to arrive. Purbright and Lintz settled into chairs in a small office on the first floor and waited for a kettle to boil on a gas ring in the fireplace.

The first envelope from which the flap curled back at the persuasion of steam and the somewhat self-conscious inspector, contained a typewritten sheet and eight one-pound notes. The letter read:

Dear Sir,

In response to your ad. I shall be pleased to call Tuesday at 7.45 p.m. to see goods as specified (Japanese antique newel, ebony) and enclose cash entitling me to first refusal of same. If inconvenient, kindly send card.

Yours faithfully,

H. L. BIRD

The address at the top was 14, Burtley Avenue, Flaxborough. Purbright read the letter through twice and handed it to Lintz. “Bird...isn’t that the agricultural machinery fellow?” Lintz looked at the address and nodded.

“What do you make of it?” Purbright had selected another letter from the pile and was carefully passing it to and fro across the gently steaming spout.

Lintz shrugged. “He must be interested in antiques, I suppose. Not that I would have suspected Harry Bird of tastes in that direction. The money side of it is rather odd, isn’t it?”

For answer, Purbright held up another bundle of notes that he had extracted from the second envelope. He counted them. There were eight. “Standard rate, apparently,” he remarked and smoothed out the accompanying letter.

Dear Sir (it ran),

Re your advert, in this week’s issue, I wish to inspect goods on Thursday evening at 8 sharp. For preference Superior Antique Lampstand but would consider Jap Oak Antique Newel. Deposit herewith.

Yours truly,

N. SMITH

The address was Derwentvale, Pawley Road, Flaxborough.

“Who’s N. Smith?” Purbright asked, showing Lintz the letter.

“If he lives at that address, he’s Councillor Herbert Smiles.”

“A doubly cautious buyer of antiques. Deals with box numbers, and even then gives a false name. The cunning old councillor.” Purbright sounded far away. He was steaming another envelope with tender concentration as if it were a trout.

Once more he drew out notes—again eight. The letter followed the pattern of the first two, except that it contained a number of spelling mistakes. The signature, as far as Purbright could decipher it, was R. Ocklom. The address was that of a shop in Harbour Road. Lintz said he thought it was a newsagent’s and that it was an accommodation address. Purbright set to work on a fourth letter.

At the end of half an hour, the whole batch had been carefully disembowelled. Purbright took a large sheet of paper and began making a table of the various features of the correspondence. In the first column he set the name and address of each writer. In the second he put the date and time of the projected interview or appointment. The third received a description of the article that appeared to have been offered for sale.

Having completed this list, he restored the contents of all the envelopes, re-gummed the flaps and sealed them. Lintz took the bundle and returned the letters to the post box in the downstairs office.

A few minutes later, the first members of the newspaper staff came in. Avoiding them, Purbright and Lintz crossed the landing and went into the editor’s own room. Somebody found the abandoned kettle, shook it and gratefully made some lumpy cocoa with its contents as a prelude to a dreary morning of preparing in advance the following week’s ‘What’s On in Flaxborough’.

Purbright did not stay longer than was demanded by courtesy to one who now seemed less a suspect than a fellow conspirator. He enjoined Lintz, a little guiltily, to keep the oddities of Boxes CS.441/4 to himself and to place no obstacle in the way of the letters themselves being collected by anyone who might call for them. “But ask your people to make sure and remember who it is,” he added.

Back at the police station, Sergeant Love wanted to know if the inspector thought it wise to have allowed Lintz to be a spectator of the letter opening.

“I don’t see why not,” Purbright replied. “After all, if he is involved, and if this antique business has a bearing on his uncle’s death, it would be absurd for Lintz not to have used his position as editor to squash the whole thing. He had the opportunity to swipe Gwill’s ledgers. He could have cooked up some simple explanation of the advertisements even after we had become suspicious. And there was nothing to stop him pretending that there had been no replies. Lintz might be fly, but I should be very surprised if he has a clue as to what old uncle was up to.”

“Yet even so, that wouldn’t rule him out as the fellow we’re looking for. The box reply racket may have nothing to do with the murder.”

Purbright smiled. “In those letters that I’ve just steamed open there was money totalling a hundred and twelve pounds. When cash of that amount comes floating down into a murder case, you don’t need to do much cherching of femmes or looking into family cupboards. Now then, let’s see what we can make of all this.”

He spread out his tabulated digest of the box replies.

“Quite a social register,” Love remarked as he glanced down the first column. “Are they genuine, do you think?”

“I’m sure they are. One or two are hiding behind false names, but they’re pretty half-hearted deceptions. The addresses are real enough. Can you think why? That’s the first point to consider.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, the natural assumption is that the business, whatever it is, is shady. These respectable citizens must know it. Yet they pass cash over mostly genuine signatures and under entirely genuine addresses. That isn’t quite what one would expect.”

Love tried hard. “It suggests confidence, doesn’t it?”

“Ah,” responded Purbright, “you’re right. These people are confident. We can be fairly sure, then,” he went on, “that this means of communication, or doing business, or buying something—whatever it is—has been used by them over a long period. They trust it. Perhaps it’s a game they enjoy for the sake of some little element of risk or thrill, as well. Another possibility, of course, is that the writer must identify himself properly, or substantially so, in case a reply or a cancellation needs to be sent. One letter actually said ‘if inconvenient, kindly send card’. That was Harry Bird.”

“He makes reapers,” said Love, helpfully. The inspector considered this information for a moment but apparently found it irrelevant, as indeed it was. He waved his pencil over the second column of his table. “Dates and times,” he murmured. “What stands out here?”

Love read dutifully down the list, checking entries with the names and addresses beside them in the first column. “All the times are in the evening,” he announced.

“They are, aren’t they?”

“And on days during this next week.”

“Yes.”

“Well?” Love looked up.

“Nothing. I just wondered if a fresh young mind might spot something significant.”

The sergeant sniffed and glanced again through the list of times. “Seven to nine—they all fall between seven and nine.”

“So they do. Perhaps those are recognized antique viewing hours.”

The pencil hovered now over column three. “What,” asked Purbright, “is an antique Japanese newel, for pity’s sake?”

“A newel is a post. Something to do with a staircase.”

Purbright said, “Well, well,” and looked further down the inventory. “Quite a number of them, aren’t there? An old flourishing industry, do you think? In Japan, at any rate...Ah, no, here is an Egyptian newel, inlaid dodecahedronic.”

“Bloody hell!” exclaimed Love.

Purbright reached down a dictionary from the shelf above his head and plunged after dodecahedronic. “Something solid, with twelve equal sides,” he announced without enthusiasm. “Where does that take us?”

“A robbery split twelve ways?” suggested Love recklessly. “A fence’s code, you know.”

“How ingenious. And Superior Antique Lampstand? What nefarious coup would you say that concealed?”

Love scowled and began to pick his teeth with a match. “I know...” he said. “Try other words with the same initials. S, A, L...smash and, smash and...”

“Languish? What about Swipe Auntie’s Laundry?” Both stared a little longer at the table. Then Love shrugged impatiently. “There’s only one thing to do. Pull in a couple of these characters and drag out of them what it’s all about.”

Purbright pondered. He shook his head. “No, not just yet. There may be a better way. Look—is there anyone in this lot who doesn’t know you, who you can be sure wouldn’t recognize you as a heavy-footed copper?”

Love looked over the names. “There’s Leadbitter here. He lives nearly opposite a sister of mine and I’ve seen him sometimes from her place when I’ve been there for tea. But I don’t think he has any idea of who I am.”

“He’s never been in court, has he?”

“Not to my knowledge. Certainly never when I’ve been there.”

“Good. Then tail him, Sid. His appointment is for the day after tomorrow at a quarter-past eight. You’d best make a day of it.”

“Follow him all day long?” Love, with memories of frozen feet in St Anne’s Place, looked pained.

“Certainly. He’s not likely to call and tell you when he’s ready to go newel-viewing. If you try and pick him up in the evening, the odds are that you’ll lose him. You’ll have to keep him more or less in sight from when he leaves his house in the morning. Can that sister of yours put you up tomorrow night, do you think?”

“I imagine so.”

“That’s all right, then. Has this fellow a car?”

“He ought to. He’s the biggest meat wholesaler in Flaxborough.”

“In that case, Sid, we might stretch a point and let you borrow an o-fficial ve-hicle. Take the Hillman, and for heaven’s sake don’t scratch it or park it without lights or anything; the police are bastards in this town. Now let’s see what our butcher friend is after in the antique line.” He traced Leadbitter on the list. “Pewter Antique Tankard, indeed. And eight pounds. Always eight pounds. Why?”

“Probably as you said—a standard deposit.”

“Don’t talk wet. No one puts deposits on things they haven’t even seen. And these boys aren’t after antiques anyway, Japanese or any other kind. From what I know of most of them, they couldn’t tell a Queen Anne leg from a barmaid’s elbow. Unless I’m mistaken, though, they have one thing in common.”

“Money,” said Love without hesitation.

“Exactly. And respectability. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“Four of them are on the Council, if that counts for anything.”

“We’ll allow that.”

“And eight...no, nine, belong to the County Club.”

“So does the Chief Constable. That should make them unimpeachable.”

Love opened his mouth, shut it, and then blurted: “Look—I know it sounds corney, but what about blackmail?”

“Oh, Sid!” Purbright gave him an upward glance of sad remonstrance.

“Yes, but why not? These adverts, could be a sort of reminder that another instalment of hush money is due. Look at the sort of people who reply—or pretend to be replying. They’re all well known and well off, too. Gwill owned a newspaper. He could easily have found out things about them that they would be scared of seeing in print. We know that Gwill was careful to handle the adverts, and the box replies himself. It could be that the people paying him had been told to enclose a letter explaining the money in case an envelope went astray or got opened by one of the office staff by mistake.”

Purbright had listened attentively. “Attractive,” he conceded. “A neat idea. But it doesn’t tie up with certain facts. In the first place, Gwill had been dead a couple of days, and known by the whole town to be dead, when these letters were sent off. Instead of posting their eight quidses, these people would have been celebrating the closing of the account.”

“Only if they knew who was blackmailing them,” said Love. “We can’t be sure that they did. In fact the whole beauty of the box reply system would have been the concealment of the black-mailer’s identity.”

Purbright rubbed his cheek. “That’s perfectly true,” he said; then, with a frown, “But why all this appointment nonsense? There could be no point in it once the money had passed over. Even as a blind for anyone who might open the letter by mistake it’s unnecessarily elaborate.”

Dampened by this objection, Love decided against putting forward his final and most entrancing theory. Drugs, he calculated, was not the suggestion the inspector was waiting to hear.

Chapter Eleven

The account of the curious end of the proprietor of the Flaxborough Citizen that had been allowed to appear in his own publication was presented with none of the air of repressed delirium that had characterized earlier revelations in the national Press. But it was fulsome enough in its own way.

Once the Citizen had made it clear that the occasion was one it ‘regretted to announce’ and that the victim was the ‘well-known public figure’ who had enjoyed the privilege of being a ‘principal in the town’s leading printing and publishing concern’, it treated his corpse pretty well like that of anyone else.

The inquest was reported in detail and, as if to compensate for the dullness of its formalities and its inconclusiveness, followed up by Inspector Purbright’s intriguing request for information. This was enough to have most readers speculating happily on what had been going on and, indeed, on what was Up.

Purbright, for lack of anything better to do, took a copy of the paper along to the office of the Chief Constable. Mr Chubb had, as it turned out, read it already, and was now interested to know if some obliging witness had come forward to prove that the whole affair was just an unfortunate misunderstanding.

“You do see, don’t you, my boy,” he explained in his thin, cultured voice, dried up with calming important citizens and lecturing Flaxborough Historical Association on Bronze Age burial, “that the sooner this business is cleared up the better. There is doubtless some quite simple explanation which eludes us. On reflection, I find it incredible that poor old Gwill would have been mixed up in anything, well, untoward.”

“I fully appreciate that, sir,” said Purbright. “None of us cares for discredit to be hanging over the town.” Chubb nodded his approval of this sentiment. “On the other hand, sir, it is my duty to advise you that the inquiries we have made into the matter so far have all tended to strengthen the case for supposing Mr Gwill to have been murdered.”

The Chief Constable looked pained, then raised his brows in invitation to Purbright to elaborate this distasteful theme.

Purbright spread out a couple of sheets of paper on which he had jotted notes. Unhurriedly, he glanced over the main headings, read some of the paragraphs to himself, and then looked up to Chubb, who, on the inspector’s entry, had levitated as usual while inviting his visitor to a chair and now leaned gracefully athwart a tall filing cabinet in one corner.

“It appears,” Purbright began, “that contrary to our earlier supposition, Gwill was not alone in his house on the night of his death. Mr Gloss has since admitted that he was actually in the company of Mr Gwill until quite late. He has further alleged that Doctor Rupert Hillyard was with him also.

“His story was that while he and Doctor Hillyard were talking to Gwill, the telephone rang and Gwill answered it. In response to the call—and Mr Gloss says he couldn’t gather who made it or what was said—Gwill is supposed to have hurried out of the house and not returned. If all this is true, the likelihood of a calculated attack on Gwill, or rather of some sort of trap laid for him, becomes very strong.”

Chubb shifted his position slightly to stare out of the window. “Mr Gloss has acted rather foolishly in not coming forward at once with these facts. And I must say I’m surprised at Hillyard’s reticence. He’s said nothing to you, has he?”

“I haven’t questioned him yet, sir.”

“All the same, the man surely must have realized something was wrong and that it was his duty to come along and give us what information he could. Of course”—Chubb turned to Purbright and smiled gently—“Hillyard’s rather an odd chap in some ways. He’s not always quite himself.” And with this indulgent interpretation, the Chief Constable’s gaze went back to the sycamore against the further wall of the station courtyard.

Purbright continued. “A witness has also been found who saw a van being driven out along Heston Lane late on Monday night and watched it return. Her description suggests that it was Mr Jonas Bradlaw’s van. It seems very likely, in my opinion, that all three of them were there that night, and not just two.”

“Why should Mr Gloss not have mentioned Mr Bradlaw’s presence, in that case?”

“I don’t know, sir. One explanation could be that Mr Bradlaw and the doctor knew that they had been seen on their way to the house on foot but relied on no one having noticed Mr Bradlaw, who would have been pretty well concealed inside his van. It also happens that Mr Bradlaw went to some pains to establish an alibi for that time.”

“A false one, you mean?”

“It could very well be false.”

“Is there anyone else concerned, do you think?”

“I thought at first that the nephew was probably implicated.”

“The newspaper fellow?”

“Lintz, yes. But as time goes on he seems to slip further away as a possibility. For one thing, he was deliberately made part of Bradlaw’s alibi, and nothing we’ve been able to find out suggests collusion between him and the other three. Still, we can’t forget that he benefits materially from Gwill’s death more obviously than anyone else.

“There is one other person,” went on Purbright, “who I can’t help feeling fits into the business in some way or other. Mrs Carobleat.”

Chubb gave him an inquiring glance. “But she was miles away, surely?”

“So she says. I propose to have a word with the Shropshire people about that and perhaps take a trip over there myself. If you’re agreeable, of course, sir.”

The Chief Constable looked doubtful. “That’s a bit out of the way, isn’t it?”

“I shouldn’t like to rely on another force making the sort of inquiries I have in mind, or I shouldn’t hesitate to pass them on, sir. I’ve an idea that a close check on Mrs Carobleat’s movements might be rewarding. It’s almost certain that she was Gwill’s mistress, and...”

“Oh, come; are you sure of that?” broke in Chubb, frowning.

“That’s the consensus of opinion, I’m afraid, sir.”

“You don’t suggest the woman might have had a hand in the fellow’s murder?”

“I shall be in a better position to say when we know what she was doing at the operative time, sir. And before, of course. The fact that she was away at all may have significance.”

Chubb sighed. “These affairs are damnably unpleasant. All this questioning and poking into other people’s business. I don’t know how you bring yourself to do it, Purbright, I don’t, really. The only other murder in Flaxborough I can remember was quite different. It was the shooting of old Mrs Donovan by Hargreaves, the pet-shop man. He was the perfect gentleman, poor Hargreaves. Came along here straight away afterwards and stood waiting at the counter downstairs until someone had time to attend to him. Then he handed over the revolver—he’d put it in a clean paper bag, I remember—and put eightpence in the Boot and Shoe Fund box, then confessed as nicely as you like. He used to keep that shop a perfect picture.”

Purbright bore with this reminiscence and then told Chubb about his arrangements for investigating the matter of the advertisements in the Citizen.

The Chief Constable listened. “My, but you’re being kept busy,” he said. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, how many odd little things go on under the surface of a place like this?”

“Yes, isn’t it, sir,” agreed Purbright. “Takes all sorts to make a world.” Not for the first time, he was visited with the suspicion that Chubb had donned the uniform of head of the Borough police force in a moment of municipal confusion when someone had overlooked the fact that he was really a candidate for the curatorship of the Fish Street Museum.

“When do you think we can expect an arrest, my boy?” asked Chubb. “Or would that,” he added in bloodless parody of jocularity, “be telling?”

Purbright clenched his teeth.

Mr P. F. F. Smith, manager of the Flaxborough branch of the Eastern Provinces and Bartonshire Consolidated Bank, rose and greeted his visitor with almost explosive affability. He had made sure, when the appointment was being fixed, that none of the bank’s much advertised services and favours would be invoked.

“Grand day,” beamed Mr Smith, motioning Purbright to The Customer’s chair.

“Well, it’s cold and rather foggy outside, actually,” Purbright corrected him.

“Yes, how miserable,” agreed Mr Smith. “Seasonable for the time of year, though.” He grinned over the gleaming nakedness of his desk top, on the very edge of which his aseptically manicured fingers beat a refined tattoo.