Coffin Scarcely Used

“We should be glad to have your help, sir...”

Mr Smith inclined his head and continued to register delight. “Anything we can do, we shall be only too pleased.”

“...in a somewhat delicate matter,” Purbright added, and the tiniest flake of frost settled upon Mr Smith’s manner.

“You will have heard of the death last Monday night of Mr Marcus Gwill?”

“Indeed, yes. A shocking affair. A gentleman and a most charming man.”

“You found him so, sir?”

“Oh, yes.” A slight pause. “Within the limits of our professional relationship, of course. What was, er, your impression, inspector?”

“If I had formed one, it would scarcely be relevant to my present inquiries, sir.”

“Quite so.” Mr Smith nodded and gave the first of the tiny, flicked glances at the clock above Purbright’s head that were to accompany his every second remark throughout the interview.

“But the general impression conveyed to me by others is that Mr Gwill was not outstandingly easy to get along with.”

“I can quite understand that, inspector, now that you mention it. He was reserved, you know, and perhaps just the least bit forbidding. Charm was not his strong suit.”

“What I have to ask you, Mr Smith, is not so much concerned with the gentleman’s character as with his cash. He dealt predominantly with this bank, I understand.”

“I see no harm in confirming that he did have a private account with us.” Mr Smith’s eye was now more watchful within its smiling socket.

“Small or large?”

“Of late, quite substantial. And it was about to become much more substantial, as you no doubt know already.”

“I don’t, as it happens, sir. I wonder if you’d care to tell me about that?”

“Ah...” Mr Smith had realized his indiscretion. “I think perhaps you should not press me in these somewhat confidential matters, inspector. A client’s affairs are with us—what shall I say?—like the secrets of the confessional.”

“But not, surely, after he’s been murdered, Mr Smith?”

“Murdered?” The manager succeeded in looking as if Purbright had suddenly asked for an overdraft.

“Oh, yes. So now he’s my client as well, in a sense.”

“I see...But how dreadful.”

“This is news to you?”

“But decidedly. I had no idea.”

“Except for rumours, perhaps?”

Mr Smith shrugged delicately. “We make it our business not to pay too much attention to rumour, inspector. The bank likes to be absolutely sure of everything.”

“So do the police, sir. That is why I have presumed to trespass upon your time.”

Mr Smith nodded sagaciously and joined his fingertips. “Please ask me anything you like, inspector. It is the duty of us all to cooperate in the solution of crime, especially”—his smile returned and resumed its seat, as it were, upon the smooth cushions of his face—“especially when the victim is a person of integrity.”

“And recently augmented substance,” Purbright put in, suggestively.

“Ah, yes. I was about to elaborate on that theme, was I not? Well, the addition to Mr Gwill’s fortunes, such as they were, was to have been brought about under the terms of the will, of course.”

“The will?”

“Yes. The late Councillor Carobleat’s bequest. A matter of”—Mr Smith rolled his eyes upward for a moment—“oh, some eighteen thousand pounds.”

Purbright frowned. “But surely he left a widow?”

“Ah, the widow. Yes.” Mr Smith picked an invisible thread from his cuff. “A peculiar circumstance, that. But the will was quite explicitly in Mr Gwill’s favour—and in that of certain other beneficiaries. Mrs Carobleat has not suffered as much as you might think, however.”

“Insurance?”

“Er, so I am led to understand. A substantial sum. Then there was the house, and so forth. She is well provided for.”

“That was my impression,” said Purbright. “Even so, it isn’t customary to will away all one’s money over a wife’s head, so to speak.”

“Quite so. It came as a surprise to me, I admit. I had expected Carobleat to be found to have died intestate, as a matter of fact. It was only a short time before his illness that the question of wills cropped up in conversation between us. He gave me to understand that he had taken no steps in that direction. Naturally, I urged upon him the desirability of making proper provision, but he gave no sign of taking me seriously. Yet the will must already have been in existence at that very time, although it didn’t actually come to light for some little while after his death.”

“And how was that?”

“I’m not sure that I ought to tell you, inspector.” Mr Smith regarded his finger-ends as though his professional conscience pulsed there, just below the skin that had flicked back without temptation the corners of untold thousands of banknotes. “You might think that someone had been a little remiss, although I’m sure it was simply a matter of a slight lapse in office routine. Not all firms are run as punctilliously as banks, you know.”

“The will was mislaid?”

Mr Smith leaned forward. “Strictly between ourselves,” he said, “it was. Gloss explained afterwards how it had happened. Well, of course, he had to be absolutely frank about it, because of the possibility of its being challenged by the widow. She didn’t, as it happens, but never mind.”

He remained silent for some time.

“Well?” Purbright prompted.

“Well what?” countered Mr Smith.

“The will,” said Purbright. “You were saying how it came to be mislaid.”

“Ah...I can’t say that I remember precisely. It was quite a silly, simple sort of reason—put in the wrong deed box, or something like that. But it came to light eventually. The money hasn’t been turned over yet, by the way. Executing a will takes quite a while. But it was definitely on the turn, if you follow me. How galling it must be to die just too soon to enjoy a legacy that you know is practically in your hand—in your account, rather.” Mr Smith shook his head and closed his eyes in brief mourning for Mr Gwill’s ravished opportunities.

“Gwill’s account was separate, I suppose, from the finances of his newspaper company?”

“Oh, yes, naturally.”

“And would you say that his income as shown by the private account was consistent with the earnings he received from the company?”

Mr Smith looked sharply at the inspector. “No,” he replied simply, “I should not.”

“He was receiving money from another source?”

“Almost certainly he was. Not that it was any concern of mine, of course, but these little impressions register, you know, in spite of ourselves.”

“Yes, don’t they. Incidentally, have you retained any impression of what that source was, sir?”

“None whatever.”

“Because the money was deposited in cash?”

Mr Smith flexed his facial muscles in a smile. “There are, as they say, no flies on you, inspector.”

Purbright acknowledged the compliment with a grunt. He had concluded by now that Mr Smith was not merely fly-proof but probably impervious to attack and courtship alike by all creatures whatsoever.

“You have been most helpful, sir,” he said, rising.

The manager, though not appearing to move, was suddenly transposed to the door of his office, which he flung open while extending his free hand in an ushering gesture of brotherly dismissal. “Not at all, inspector. Delighted.” In the instant before turning back to his desk, he darted a glance at the three counter clerks and gave an inward click of satisfaction on noting that the entire trio was immersed in work.

Chapter Twelve

If Alderman Leadbitter had been less preoccupied with wholesale meat deals, bottles of pale ale, and a certain matter that had filled him with secret excitement since his rising that morning shortly before eight o’clock, he could not have failed to be conscious of a radiant pink orb that had hung in the background all that day. As it was, Sergeant Love’s face had been a mere blurred iridescence amongst the other unnoticed details of his surroundings.

Which was fortunate, for the sergeant was no adept at self-effacing observation. When he wished to see without being seen, he adopted an air of nonchalance so extravagant that people followed him in expectation of his throwing handfuls of pound notes in the air.

He had got up much earlier than his quarry, and by six o’clock was posted, already shaved, washed and hastily fed, behind his sister’s lace curtains, staring at the dark shape opposite, within which still slumbered the alderman and his family. It was not until nearly four hours later that signs of activity prompted him to go out into the cold and pretend to tinker under the bonnet of the police car, which he had left ready to drive out of the gate.

Alderman Leadbitter’s car appeared at half-past ten and was driven slowly by its owner to his office in Pipeclay Lane, near the slaughterhouses. After some twenty minutes, he walked out of the office and passed Love, seated in his car which he had parked very wrongfully opposite a cattle unloading bay.

The sergeant followed him on foot and was led to the Golden Keys Hotel. There, he drank slowly and without much enjoyment two half pints of mild while the alderman swallowed six glasses of bottled beer at the opposite end of the long saloon bar in the company of several other civic luminaries before returning to his counting house at nearly one o’clock.

Leadbitter went home for his lunch, so Love’s sister served her brother with a meal on the bamboo table in the front room. He ate speedily and with a constant eye on the opposite door, so that when he resumed the trail he was suffering the handicap of hic-cups.

The afternoon proved no more eventful than the morning. By the time the alderman’s car drew up at his home for the second time that day, Love was wondering why he had wasted so many hours in dull and fruitless surveillance instead of relying on Leadbitter being a man of regular and proper habits that included taking five-o’clock tea in the bosom of his family.

Later still, when it was quite dark and he sat in the cold car, drawing what comfort he could from a cigarette, he was gradually overtaken by a sense of anticlimax.

Suppose the alderman and the other people who had replied to the advertisements really were buyers of old odds and ends? The things might be genuine and a seemingly eccentric way of disposing of them might be the method of doing business chosen by some exclusive private dealer. Yet surely that standardized eight pounds deposit was too fantastic a condition of sale to be acceptable even to someone mad enough to want a—what was it again?—a Japanese newel post.

A tankard it was for Leadbitter. A pewter antique tankard, he’d said.

Love repeated the phrase to himself several times. Then he realized why it had struck him as odd from the first. The order of words was queer.

Any normal person surely would have written antique pewter tankard. Or, in catalogue and army style, Tankard, antique pewter. But never pewter antique tankard. Why had the words been put in that sequence?”

Again Love allowed his fancy to stray outside the local probabilities. He considered codes. Pewter...Antique...Tankard... It couldn’t be a letter by letter code. That kind did not form actual words. In any case, it would be expecting far too much of people like Flaxborough’s successful business men to grasp anything so complicated.

Could each word have some prearranged significance, then? That was more probably the explanation. If it were, there was no hope of finding the meaning of the advertisements by ordinary systems of de-coding—even if he knew what these were, which he didn’t, except for a vague idea that the most frequently recurring symbol would represent E, and what was the use of a string of E’s, anyway?

Right, then, ruminated Love, each of the three words meant something quite different. Pewter?—cocaine, perhaps. Antique? The quantity, say. And tankard? There was only one factor left for that to represent—the price asked. “Please have ready for me at 8.15 p.m. two pounds of your best cocaine at...at...fifteen and six an ounce.” How cold and cramped he was growing. Damn Purbright and Leadbitter and tankards and codes and...He sat up and peered through the windscreen. At last, the alderman’s door was opening.

Five minutes later, Love drew up at a discreet distance from Leadbitter’s car in the forecourt of the Golden Keys. Leadbitter was not in search of the saloon company this time. He hurried into a small room on the other side of the corridor.

Love lingered near the entrance. It was not yet eight o’clock, and although he felt confident that Leadbitter had not noticed his pursuit up to now, he did not want to commit himself to an encounter at close quarters until the last possible moment. Regretfully he watched a waitress carry what appeared to be a whisky into the room Leadbitter had entered, then he retraced his steps to the car.

To the policeman’s considerable relief, Leadbitter soon reappeared. Instead of getting into the car again, however, he set off along Hooper Rise and turned right into Spoongate. Love followed, keeping to the opposite pavement. For the first time that day, the alderman appeared slightly apprehensive. He even glanced back on several occasions, but saw nothing to make him reduce his pace.

Suddenly, Love realized that the other was no longer in front. He halted, momentarily panic-stricken, and stared over the road at the point where Leadbitter had vanished.

Dark, pillared doorways faced him, all much alike in the gloom. There was no sound but that of a wireless on one of the upper floors. He remained motionless, straining eye and ear.

Then from one of the porches came a shaft of yellow light. Love mentally fixed its position and was already walking diagonally across the road towards it when it narrowed to a slit and was eclipsed altogether. A gentle thud and the reappearance of the light, widening and narrowing by turn, told Love that the door which almost certainly had admitted Leadbitter had been left on the latch and was swinging in the light wind.

Love walked cautiously up the four steps that led to the doorway. On one side he saw the gleam of metal. It was a name plate. He stooped and tried to read it, but the nearest street lamp was thirty yards away. Just as he was fumbling for matches, the door swung back and a woman stepped out into the porch. Love straightened up guiltily and looked at her. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’ve started.” “Oh,” said Love, “thank you.” The woman wished him good night and descended the steps. Now that the door was wide open, the name on the plate was perfectly clear. It was R. Hillyard, M.D.

The panelled hallway into which Love stepped, closing the door gently behind him, had once been warmly luxurious, but the constant passage of patients had given it a shabby, polish-starved look. The elegance of its proportions still made immediate impression, however, and Love glanced admiringly at the slim-bannistered staircase and the lofty window at its head. The house was a much larger one than the narrow façade suggested.

The nearest door on the right was ajar. Love heard from the room beyond an occasional sniff, a cough or two and an assortment of shuffles and creaks. It was without doubt the doctor’s waiting-room. He entered, sat down as near the door as he could manage, and after the preliminary devotions usual in such places—brief contemplation of his knees and a slow search round the walls for a non-existent clock—he surreptitiously looked over the eight or nine people present.

They were a typical surgery selection. A young woman who met his glance with a resentful stare, signifying that she held the male species malignantly responsible for all abdominal irregularities whatsoever. A sunken-cheeked man with scrubby grey hair and an internal whistle. A middle-aged matron with Bad Leg. A nervous young man who had been reading too many truss advertisements.

But of Alderman Leadbitter there was no sign. Wherever pewter antique tankards were being displayed that evening, it was not in the company of these unexceptional specimens of ailing humanity.

Love pondered what he should do next. Obviously he would be wasting his time and ruining a whole day’s tedious work by staying where he was.

He got up and went out into the hallway, watched with mournful contempt by the waiting patients. The rest of the house was silent. It might, he guessed, be largely unoccupied. There were five other doors on this floor and he walked quickly from one to another. At each he listened briefly. Behind only one was there a sound. It was a mumbled conversation between a woman and a man with a Scots accent. Love decided that this must be Hillyard’s consulting room. He heard nothing of the boomingly hearty voice of Alderman Leadbitter, with which he was by now only too familiar.

On tiptoe he climbed rapidly to the first turn of the staircase, paused to listen again, then ascended more slowly to the floor above.

Fixed to the wall opposite the head of the stairs was a small green baize notice board, to which a typed sheet was pinned.

The paper bore the day’s date and was marked off into three columns.

In the first was what seemed to be a series of times, varying between 7.30 and 8.30. The second column contained numbers—either 1, 2, 3 or 4. In the third were sets of initials.

At the head of the sheet were the words ‘Treatment Schedule’.

Love, wary by now of code theories, contented himself with rapidly jotting a copy of the table into his notebook. He had barely finished when a door shut loudly somewhere on his left. He darted instinctively in the opposite direction and drew himself into the deeply shadowed corner of the landing farthest from the staircase wall.

A man emerged from an opening in the wall about ten feet beyond the notice board. He was wearing an overcoat and carried a hat. At the top of the stairs he halted and stood looking down into the hall for several seconds. Then he began to descend. A minute later Love heard the gentle thud of the front door.

This was interesting. The man was Herbert Stamper, who farmed on the west side of Flaxborough Fen: a prosperous and venal gentleman, much troubled by the stubborn survival of an ailing and intolerant wife. Love recalled that his name had appeared on Purbright’s list of antique fanciers.

From below came the noise of voices. Love peered cautiously over the rail and saw a woman coming out of what he had assumed to be the surgery door. Some sort of cheery farewell was being wished her from within the room. As finally she turned and crossed the hall, a buzzer sounded and the chesty man, with wheeze at full cock, slouched from the waiting-room to the doctor’s door.

Love turned back and sought the point at which Mr Stamper had made his appearance. It proved to be the entrance to a corridor that ran at right angles to the landing wall. An arrowed card, bearing the direction ‘Treatment cubicles (Male Patients)’, hung from a nail. Four doors, at intervals of several feet, were set along the left wall of this passage. The end appeared to be blank.

Exploring further along the landing, Love discovered another corridor, running parallel to the first. In this case, however, its four doors were on the right. The card at the corner announced ‘Treatment cubicles (Female Patients)’. Love turned back and re-entered the male corridor, feeling that at this stage the proprieties ought to be observed.

He put his ear to the door marked ‘1’. There was silence inside. Slowly he turned the handle and pressed against the panels. The door would not move. Then he pulled and found the door had been made to open outwards. The space within was little bigger than a cupboard. It was fitted with a mirror and clothing hooks and seemed intended to serve as a small dressing-room. There was another door immediately opposite. Love tried it, but it had been locked or bolted from the other side. No sound came from whatever lay beyond.

Love stood wondering how much longer he would be able to poke his way around the private house of a doctor against whom he had no evidence or even what a magistrate would deem reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, and how he would explain his presence there if challenged. Both questions defeated him, so he put them resolutely from his mind and puzzled instead over a noise that reached him faintly from a direction he could not fix.

He went back into the corridor and tried the door numbered ‘2’. As he opened it, the sound he wanted to identify grew louder. He listened. There was no doubt about it. Leadbitter had been run to earth.

The noises that came through the inner door of the closet were those of the alderman repressing his normal boom to a confidential growl, interspersed with asinine chuckles. The general effect was curious. Love thought it suggested mild delirium under anaesthetic.

Was Leadbitter undergoing a minor operation of some kind? It was possible. The clothing he had been wearing during the day was hung untidily on the hooks at the side of the cupboard-like compartment and tossed on the narrow bench below them. Love checked them over. Only socks and shirt appeared to be missing.

He pressed his ear to the inner door. The alderman’s noises were now faint and intermittent. A sigh...a groan...a contented gasp...The anesthetic must have taken effect. Very gently, Love tried the door. It would not yield.

As he stood looking at it, he heard footsteps approaching fairly rapidly along the corridor. He turned to close the cubicle door but realized that this would entail reaching out of his present comparatively secure shelter.

Before he could make up his mind what to do, a shadow fell across the entrance. He did his best to defend his position by staring boldly straight into the face of the large man who now peered in at him.

Surprisingly enough, the new arrival did no more than pause, deliver a friendly wink, and pass on along the corridor. A door opened and closed—Love judged it to be the last in the row—and there was silence once more. Not even an aldermanic grunt broke the stillness.

Going out into the corridor again, Love reflected on the stranger’s amiability. He supposed the wink to have been a natural gesture for one patient to make to another. The camaraderie of hospitals, he had heard, was a jolly business, maintained by fellow sufferers to minimize their apprehension of knives, needles and other surgical terrors.

He eased open the door of the third cubicle. There was no clothing in this one. Automatically, he tried the farther door. To his surprise, it moved freely, and he was just in time to tighten his grip on the handle to prevent the door swinging open away from him. With his free hand he pulled the outer door closed at his back and stood for some seconds in the resultant darkness before beginning to edge his way slowly into the space ahead.

The room, if that was what it was, was comfortably warm, but absolutely dark. Love took tiny, silent steps forward, feeling tensely for obstacles with feet and outstretched hands. It was not his sense of touch, though, but his ears that warned him to pause.

Somewhere in front of him, quite near, was being made a soft rhythmical sound. It was, he thought, a sort of gentle brushing, regular and mechanical. Brushing—or dragging, perhaps. As he listened, an earlier speculation returned to mind and was instantly mated to the new problem. Of course—anaesthesia. It was a pump or respirator of some kind that he now could hear. He recalled an operation scene in a film, where bladders softly inflated and deflated as the surgeons bent over their task.

But why no lights?

Slowly and with infinite caution, Love slithered first one foot, then the other, over the carpet. Carpet? He frowned. Hospitals never had carpets. But that wasn’t to say private clinics did not. Never mind, he was nearing whatever was making the soft exhalations. He felt in his overcoat pocket for the torch he carried. The time had come for a showdown, whatever the consequences. He could always plead lost directions. He levelled the torch and slid his thumb to its button...

For years afterwards, Love was to question his ridiculous, his lunatic failure to identify the simple sound that had guided him across the floor that night. As the light beam leaped alarmingly ahead, Love jumped as if he held a recoiling cannon in his hand.

From a couch five feet distant was rearing up in fright and indignation the lady whose measured breathing in a contemplative doze he had so fantastically misinterpreted.

In the fraction of time before he turned and rushed with mumbled apologies in the direction whence he had come, the policeman noticed two things.

One was the identity of the outraged female.

The second was the lady’s bizarre choice of costume: a heavy glass necklace and a pair of stockings, one slightly laddered.

It was not until later that a third, no less curious, circumstance registered. He recalled that she had flung after his retreating figure the epithet ‘bloody old devil!’, together with several kinds of threat of what would happen if he ‘tried a trick like that again’.

What did she mean by ‘old’, Love asked himself with some annoyance as he tramped back to where he had left the car.

Chapter Thirteen

Purbright was still in his office when Love drove the car into the police garage and walked past the night sergeant, who had begun his mysterious routine of entering things laboriously in books and juggling with plugs and cords on the switch-board.

The inspector listened attentively to the story of the shadowing of Alderman Leadbitter. He drew towards him a pad of paper, an ashtray and a cup half-full of cold, grey coffee.

“Now, Sid; let’s have that list you copied from the board on the landing.”

At Love’s direction, he marked out three columns and began filling them with the members and letters in the sergeant’s notebook. Then he pulled from a file the table he had compiled earlier of names, specifications and times coined in the answers to the advertisements in the Citizen.

“By the way,” said Love, “did you find who collected those box replies?”

Purbright nodded. “A young fellow from Gloss’s office. Lintz told me. I cornered the lad this afternoon, as a matter of fact, and he said his boss had sent him with the ticket—the counterfoil that’s issued when anyone places an advert—to pick up any letters under that number.”

“That would leave Gloss with something to explain, then.”

“He made no bones about it. He said the ticket had been amongst Gwill’s papers that he, as his solicitor, had been sorting out, and that he thought he’d better see if there was anything urgent about the business.”

“Had he the letters there?”

“Oh yes. All opened. He was most obliging. Showed them to me and asked me what I thought they could mean. The money was there, too.”

“Could he explain that?”

Purbright sighed. “My dear Sid, you should know by now that we’ve got everything out of that gentleman that he’ll part with until we can use the rack.”

He put the two lists side by side and began comparing them. His pencil point wavered from one column to another, pounced on a number or a set of initials, then moved beneath a name an address, a date. Twenty minutes went by. Love got up looked disconsolately out of the uncurtaind window at the blackness bloomed with a dim rejection of the room’s lamp-light upon rags of mist, and walked to the door. “I’ll see if Charlie can fix up a mug of something,” he said, and departed

Purbright’s manner of scrutinizig the pages before him became gradually more alert. Several details were now underlined. He passed his tongue over his dry upper lip and reached for the coffee cup. Absentmindedly he sipped its chilled, forbidding residue.

When Love came back with two steaming mugs, he motioned him to his side and pointed to one of the entries he had marked.

“This is interesting. Edward Leadbitter, you notice, wrote asking to see an antique pewter tankard...”

“A pewter antique tankard.”

“Eh? All right, then, a pewter antique tankard; and he specified eight-fifteen this evening. Now then”—Purbright moved his pencil over to the second sheet—“here’s the entry on that upstairs board of Hillyard’s. First of all, the time. Eight-fifteen. That checks. Next, the figure two. You said it was the second cubicle from which you heard his voice. Now in the last column on the notice board are these five initials: E.L.P.A.T.”

Love scratched his chin.

“Edward...” Purbright prompted.

“Edward Leadbitter...Pewter...Of course, it’s that bloody tankard again.”

“Exactly.”

“But I still can’t see any sense in it,” protested Love. “The place hadn’t an antique in sight. No pewter, no furniture, nothing like that at all. It was like a clinic or part of a hospital, except that it was more comfortable. It was certainly no antique that jumped up at me when I switched the torch on.” Love looked more gleeful than dismayed at the memory of the moment of revelation before his flight.

“Never mind the Venusberg aspect. Who was the fellow you said you saw on the landing?”

“Stamper. Bert Stamper.”

“The farmer?”

“That’s the one, yes.”

Purbright looked down the names on his letter digest. “Here we are—he just put initials to his reply. H.S. And over here”—he waved his pencil over to the ‘Treatment Schedule’—“they appear against seven-thirty and cubicle three.”

“Three was the cubicle where I found the door unlocked.”

“And looked at what the policeman saw.”

Love blushed happily.

“You say you know the girl?”

“Professionally, yes. Mrs Shooter—Margaret Shooter, I believe it was. I was beat-bashing in those days and she was listed with a few others for entertaining sailors in the place in Broad Street.”

“Over by the harbour?”

“Yes. There used to be more knocking shops than telegraph poles down there at one time. That was before Holy Harry blew out all the red lamps and set the girls to sew surplices.”

Purbright looked pained. “Don’t come that hell’s kitchen stuff to me, Sid. You know perfectly well that the Flaxborough brand of vice was never anything but shabby amateurism. The house you’re talking about closed down weeks before we could get any real evidence. By Holy Harry, I suppose you mean the late and questionable Mr Carobleat?”

“That’s the boy.”

“I'd never heard the soul-saving line before. What we suspected was that he got hold of a list of the ladies we were interested in when he was chairman of the Watch Committee and went round tipping them off.”

“They stopped operating, anyway,” said Love defensively.

“So far as we could prove, they did. But don’t delude yourself that they took to good works. However”—Purbright looked at his watch—“that’s neither here nor there. Let’s finish with Stamper, the honest hayseed.”

He sipped from the mug Love had brought in and found his place again in the letters summary. “It was the heavy stuff he was after, apparently. A mahogany and beech sideboard, of all things. Did you happen to trip over any sideboards in your flight from Mrs Shooter?”

Love looked at the second sheet. “There you are.” He pointed to a group of initials, six this time. “That’s clear enough—Herbert Stamper, Mahogany And Beech Sideboard.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Maybe the place is a private asylum.”

Purbright leaned back in his chair and stared into space. “You say you don’t know the big man who looked in at you while you were in Leadbitter’s cubicle. And yet he winked at you?”

“Oh, yes. Quite friendly, he seemed.”

“A wink,” Purbright went on, talking half to himself, “suggests sharing a joke, a lark, as you might say. Something private and perhaps risky or pleasantly scandalous. But not”—he joined his fingers—“desperately conspiratorial. No murders or burglaries. And no drugs, I fancy: that’s commonly a gloomy or else a hysterical business. Could that wink, though, have been one purely of medical commiseration between fellow candidates for boil lancing or colonic irrigation?”

“What’s that?” asked Love.

“Enemas.”

“He didn’t look as if there was anything wrong with him. And I’m sure he couldn’t have thought I wanted an enema.”

Purbright glanced at him briefly and again addressed the ceiling. “No, I’m sure he couldn’t. So there must be some other reason for the recognition of one man of the world by another.”

Love lifted one eyebrow, but said nothing.

“These cubicle things,” said Purbright. “Would you say they’d been there long? Were they an original part of the house?”

“I don’t think so. They looked like conversions. Not brand new, but recent.”

“Solid?”

“Well...” Love considered. “I don’t know much about building, but they looked a pretty sound job of carpentry. Sort of semi-permanent.”

“You didn’t go down the second corridor?”

“No, there was a sign up...”

“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten.” Purbright was silent. Then he looked again at his watch and yawned. “We do see life, don’t we?” He began tidying up his desk.

Before Love could ask what he was supposed to deduce from the evening’s events, he heard footsteps approaching from the main office. Purbright listened. “The Chief Constable,” he said, “is upon us.”

Mr Chubb knocked punctiliously before entering. He wore a grey overcoat of remarkable rigidity and carried a bowler hat and what he himself would have termed a gamp. He looked as if he might have been attending a public meeting of the better, quieter sort; of the Friends of Flaxborough Cathedral, say.

“Ah, Purbright,” he said, with “Evening, sergeant,” in kindly parenthesis, “I’ve just come from having a word or two with the Coroner. No, sit down, sit down.” He propped himself against a cupboard in his customary attitude of elegant detachment and gave the impression of being ready to hear petitioners. After some seconds he said: “He wants to get this Gwill business cleared up, you know. Amblesby’s rather old for adjournments. He can’t always remember what he’s adjourned or why.” Mr Chubb permitted himself a weak smile, then extinguished it and added: “A perfectly sound old fellow, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” Purbright agreed, with a shade of querulousness.

“You’re still confident poor Gwill was deliberately, er...”

“Quite, sir.”

“Mmm...” Mr Chubb regarded his yellow knitted gloves. “Anything turned up since last we talked about it?”

Purbright salvaged his file from the drawer into which he had pushed it a few moments before and turned over a few pages of notes. “I had quite an interesting conversation with Mr Smith, of the Eastern Provinces,” he announced.

“Percy Smith. Oh, yes; I know him very well. Extremely sound on coarse fishing. Not terribly forthcoming, though, as a rule.”

“No, sir,” Purbright agreed, drily. “But he did confide that Gwill was a beneficiary under the will of the late Mr Harold Carobleat—they were next door neighbours, if you remember, sir—in spite of the widow having been left nothing. And he also admitted that Gwill received and deposited sums of money in cash that appeared to have had nothing to do with his newspaper business.”

“Goodness me,” said the Chief Constable, tonelessly. He looked at Love, then back to Purbright. “Do you suppose that what Smith told you—the money side of it, one might say—had anything to do with the poor fellow coming to a sticky end? Of course,” he added hastily, “that will business sounds absolutely incredible. It does, really.”

Purbright replied that it was beginning to appear, in his opinion, that Gwill’s mysterious source of income might have had a great deal to do with his death and, further, that the arranging and accomplishment of his murder could no longer be assumed to have been the work of a specific individual.

“You think several people might have been in it?”

“Three, sir. Probably four. Perhaps even five.”

“Not Flaxborough people, surely?” There was a note of pleading in Mr Chubb’s voice.

“Those I have in mind are no strangers to the town, sir.”

The Chief Constable compressed his thin mouth, walked slowly across to Purbright’s desk and actually drew up a chair for himself. Then he sighed and said: “You’d better give me the names, my boy. Might as well know where we are. You could be wrong, of course.”

“Oh, certainly,” Purbright agreed. “I hope I am. But if it turns out that only one person did it, after all, it will be rather nice to feel that four citizens have been restored, as you might say.”

He went on, briskly: “As a matter of fact, you have the names already. I ran over them when I saw you after the inquest opening. They are all the obvious ones, of course, but I see no reason for discarding them on that account. Gloss presents an interesting study. He is a man whom professional training should have taught to leave no part of his dealings with the dead man capable of being interpreted unfavourably. Yet scarcely is the crime discovered before he is round to see you, sir, with hints of secret knowledge and personal danger. He admits to me his presence in Gwill’s house on the night of the murder. He is surprisingly frank about certain financial aspects of his client’s affairs. He gives all sorts of unexpected replies to questions. In short, he asks so persistently to be suspected that we can be quite sure he is trying to lead us along a blank alley, at the end of which he will have no difficulty in refuting any specific charge we might feel constrained to level against him.”

Love looked on in undisguised admiration of Purbright’s dialectic. Then he glanced to see how Mr Chubb was taking it.

The Chief Constable roused himself to ask: “But what hard evidence have you to support all this? It sounds—if you’ll forgive me saying so—just a fraction theoretical. I must admit,” he added almost with warmth, “that I never suspected you of applying such...such a wealth of psychology, as you might say. I’d always thought traffic was your forte. But it’s the unexpected that really puts us all to the test. Pity, in one sense, that we’re rather badly off for crime round here. Nastiness is as much as most of them can rise to.”

“Then there is Doctor Hillyard,” Purbright went on, keeping to his own track. “Hillyard was Gwill’s doctor and on fairly close social terms with him. He also was present at his home on the night of the murder. It may or may not be significant that Hillyard was the doctor in attendance upon Harold Carobleat at the time of his death six months ago.”

Mr Chubb started and puffed out his cheeks. “Oh, look here,” he said, then subsided and murmured, “Good Lord,” with great restraint.

“Yes, sir?” Purbright inquired respectfully.

“Well,” said the Chief Constable, “it’s only that you’ve mentioned this chap Carobleat several times before. If you’re going to bring him up again, at least you might explain what he has to do with all this. I really don’t see the connection, except through the widow woman, so to speak.”

“That is one connection, certainly,” Purbright agreed. “But I think I also mentioned Carobleat’s will, didn’t I, sir?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Which only turned up fairly recently.”

“I don’t remember your saying that.”

“No, sir. But that is what happened. And in view of the fact that Mr Gloss proves to have been Carobleat’s solicitor as well as Gwill’s, we might be forgiven for finding the unorthodoxy of the chain of events that began with Carobleat’s death somewhat disquieting. Particularly”—he forestalled another interruption—“as it is fairly clear that Carobleat, Gwill, Gloss, Hillyard and the undertaker Bradlaw were originally concerned together in some enterprise that they succeeded in keeping remarkably private, but which, if I am not mistaken, was illegal.” Purbright paused, then added with the air of having given the point some consideration, “And immoral, to boot.”

Mr Chubb looked shocked. Love, too, seemed taken aback—but rather in the manner of a schoolboy who succeeds in getting two packets of cigarettes from a kicked slot machine instead of one.

“Well, you know best what lines to work along, Purbright,” said Mr Chubb, “but do try and keep a charitable view of these people. Until you know the worst, of course. I don’t believe in sentiment where criminals are concerned. But background counts for a lot with me. Chaps don’t usually go off the rails overnight after years and years of being useful and respectable citizens.”

Purbright looked up from his papers and smiled. “No, sir,” he said. “Some of them are off the rails all the time but manage to keep the fact to themselves.”

The telephone on the desk rang. “Take it at the switch, will you, sergeant,” Purbright said to Love, “and tell whoever it is I’m engaged.”

“Don’t mind me, my boy,” Mr Chubb protested, but Love was already through the door and the bell did not ring again.

A few moments later, the sergeant came hurrying back into the office. His cherubic composure looked strained. “Excuse me—sir.” he said carefully to Purbright, “but perhaps you ought to know straight away. That was Mrs Gloss on the phone. The solicitor’s wife. She says Mr Gloss is dead. Someone took a stab at him as he was coming into his house a little while ago. That is what she alleges—sir.”

Purbright looked at the Chief Constable. “It shortens the list of suspects, anyway,” he said.

Chapter Fourteen

“But look here, doctor, surely you have some inkling? How big was the fellow? Which way did he go?”

Mr Chubb, interrogator, was finding Dr Hillyard’s granite imperturbability very difficult to scratch.

“I tell you I didn’t even see him. There was just a”—he carved the air with one of his long, oar-like hands—“a dark shape right under our noses, then Gloss seemed to lift. He gave a sort of squeak, that’s all, and went down outside the gate, there. Plonk. And I knelt down to see what was wrong. Aye.”

The sitting-room of the house in St Anne’s Place gave the impression of being somewhat crowded, as rooms do when they contain men wearing overcoats. Actually there was no lack of space for the five people who occupied it, although one of them, the so lately late Mr Rodney Gloss, silently monopolized the whole of the large chesterfield in its centre.

Dr Hillyard sat forward in an armchair, staring morosely at the sheet that covered the solicitor’s body. He stressed bony fingers in a consultative pyramid. The presence of three policemen appeared to distress him not at all.

Love was busy folding a jacket and a dark overcoat, the darker stain on which he carefully left uppermost when he placed it with other clothing on a stool.

Purbright sat on a chair arm near the window. His mop of yellow hair glinted against the background of grey velvet curtains. He watched Hillyard’s face with an expression that suggested kindly absent-mindedness.

From his instinctively adopted post near the fireplace, the Chief Constable threw out another question. He sounded a fraction peeved and incredulous.

“You say this assailant made no sound whatever, doctor? Said nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Not a word to either of you?”

“He didn’t ask to be introduced, if that’s what you mean.”

“That is not what I mean, doctor,” said Mr Chubb coldly. “It simply seems extremely odd that murder is committed in a residential area of Flaxborough with the technique, as it were, of an oriental assassin.”

Hillyard made no reply.

Purbright asked him gently: “How do you account for the blood on your own clothing, sir?”

“See if you can turn over a man with a heart wound and stay clean,” retorted the doctor.

The inspector nodded as if satisfied. “What sort of a blow would you say had been used? Powerful, of course?”

“Quite powerful. A deal of cloth had to be penetrated.”

“And a body.”

“Aye—that too.”

Purbright stood up and stepped over to the walnut table near the Chief Constable. He bent and examined, without touching, the long knife that lay there on a sheet of brown paper.

“It would be no use asking if you had seen this before?”

“No use whatever,” confirmed Hillyard.

Purbright went back to his perch. “When and where did you meet Mr Gloss this evening, doctor?”

“He called shortly after surgery. About nine, I should guess. We talked awhile over a whisky or two.”

“It wasn’t a professional call?” put in the Chief Constable.

“From what aspect, may I ask? Medical or legal?”

“Either.”

“No.”

“Would you care to tell us what object Mr Gloss had in calling to see you, sir?” Purbright sounded less insistent than Mr Chubb.

“His objects, I suppose, were exercise, liquor and conversation, in that order. He achieved all three in moderation. I might add—in case misleading theories are burgeoning in your mind, inspector—that our talk was innocent, trivial and unsuggestive of violence.”

“How long did he remain at your home?”

“An hour, maybe. We left say twenty minutes before his wife called you on the telephone.”

“And walked directly here?”

“Directly. But in no haste.”

“Why did you accompany him, sir? It’s not a particularly pleasant night for walking.”

“Is it not? I hadn’t noticed.”

“By the way, doctor, did you have a fairly busy surgery this evening?”

Love looked quickly at Hillyard, who replied: “My surgery is always busy. Disease is like crime, inspector: there is a constant concentration of it in society everywhere.”

“Both will respond to treatment, though?”

“Aye—to a strictly limited degree.”

“Yet perseverance is still worth while. Is that why you provide special clinical facilities at your house, Dr Hillyard?” Purbright’s expression was one of earnest encouragement.

“Is that point...ah”—Hillyard grappled for a word—“germaine—aye, germaine—to your inquiries, inspector? Tell me that, will ye?” The emergence of the accent put sardonic challenge into the words. He held his head forward and askew, like a bird’s.

Purbright let the retort go by. “You were acquainted, I believe, doctor, with the late Mr Gwill?”

“I was.”

“And with the late Mr Carobleat, who lived next door to him?”

“I have been acquainted in my time with many citizens now deceased, inspector. As a doctor, I doubt if I am unique in that respect.”

“I don’t suppose you are. But it is possible that your special knowledge might help us to dispose of some rather odd coincidences and the sort of rumours that always follow them and hamper us in our work.”

Dr Hillyard spread out his hands and smiled wryly.

“You attended Mr Carobleat—we might as well proceed in chronological order—and signed a death certificate in respect of pneumonia and heart failure. That is so, doctor?”

“To the best of my recollection.”

“The illness was quite short?”

“Short—but conclusive.”

“And you have no reason, looking back now, to doubt the accuracy of your findings?”

“None whatever. Why should I?”

“What is your opinion, doctor, concerning the death of Mr Gwill?”

Hillyard shook his head. “I have no knowledge of that. I’m sure your own police surgeon could give you more help than I can.”

“I wouldn’t say that, sir. After all, you were in Mr Gwill’s company until very shortly before he died.”

Hillyard regarded Purbright narrowly for a few seconds. Then he said: “I suppose you are indebted—posthumously”—he glanced at the sheeted form in the centre of the room—“to Gloss for that information?”

“You were present that night, then?”

“It was a social occasion, simply. Of the sequel, if whatever happened to Gwill can be called a sequel to a little informal conversation and a drink or two, I know nothing. Gloss will have told you that Gwill received a telephone call from someone or other and left the house. We did not see him again.”

“You did not gather who made the call?”

“No.”

“What did you and Gloss do when Gwill failed to return, doctor?”

“We waited perhaps half an hour and then went home.”

“Was no one else there at the house?”

“No, I think not. The housekeeper was away for the night.”

“But, doctor”—Purbright leaned forward—“Gloss told me that Mr Bradlaw was there also. He arrived in his van, surely. And all three of you came back to town in it together. That is so, isn’t it?” He watched for the effect of the guess.

“Of course,” said Hillyard, blandly. “That’s what I told you myself not half a minute ago.”

The inspector stared at him. “I beg your pardon, sir. Bradlaw wasn’t mentioned until...”

“Nonsense, man; ye’re bletherin’.”

Mr Chubb had been watching the interchange between Purbright and the doctor in a dumbly pivotal manner. He found the drift of question and answer to be going further and further, in his opinion, from the immediate problem of the solicitor’s killing, and decided to bring the inquisition back firmly to the here and now.

“Had Mr Gloss any enemies, doctor?” he asked.

“He may well have had.”

“Really?” Mr Chubb was temporarily disconcerted. “Why do you say that?”

“He was a solicitor. The profession does not attract draughts of the milk of human kindness.”

“I see. But do you know of anyone specifically who wished him harm?”

“I can think of no one in particular.”

The Chief Constable was about to put another question when there was the sound of a vehicle drawing to a stop outside the house. Love hurried to the door and returned to announce the arrival of an ambulance, Dr Hooper, the police surgeon, and a photographer. Soon the room seemed more indecently over-crowded than ever. The Chief Constable managed to draw Purbright aside, asked him somewhat superfluously if he could ‘manage’, and escaped.

Half an hour later, Dr Hillyard having been dismissed with a polite injunction to be ready for further unavoidable demands upon his patience, Purbright and his sergeant were left in an empty house by the departure of corpse, police surgeon and photographer. Mrs Gloss had been collected much earlier by a shocked but comforting brother-in-law with a car.

Purbright, deservedly resting in the depths of an armchair, looked at Love and sighed. “The doctor?” he asked.

Love gave the slight grunt that he used to acknowledge axiomatic situations. “No one’s going to tell me,” he said, “that he wouldn’t know what his own pal’s assailant looked like—if there really was an assailant. There’s a street lamp almost directly outside, and that’s where Gloss was knifed. Incidentally, you’d think that whoever stabbed him must have got his sleeve pretty wet.”

“As Hillyard did,” Purbright put in.

“That’s what I mean. The bloke’s a villain; it stands out a mile.” Love was pinkly indignant. “I’d like to bet you anything you like he did Gloss and Gwill.”

“In that case,” Purbright said thoughtfully, “we might not be very far wrong in wondering if he had a hand in another little matter much earlier on.” He put one leg over the chair arm and lit a cigarette. “You know, Sid, the death that we ought to have looked into before now is one that passed off nicely with a respectable certificate, a quiet funeral and not a single question.”

“Carobleat’s, you mean?”

“Of course. Carobleat’s. As you’ll have gathered by now, Carobleat’s activities were almost certainly crooked; some of them, anyway. Behind that brokerage firm of his were several lines of business that we were trying to put a finger on at about the time he was taken ill. The excise people were convinced that smuggling was one. He had all the contacts he could want on the shipping side, and as long as he wasn’t too ambitious he would have had no difficulty in disposing of what was brought in. He had the sense to keep it manageably modest.

“Inevitably,” continued Purbright, “that sort of game would begin to include the more risky but much more profitable handling of drugs. That sounds a bit far-fetched, perhaps, but I’m told the odd packet finds its way into little ports like this fairly regularly. And there’s the hell of a lot of money to be made out of even one small parcel.”

“Do you know that he was handling drugs?” Love asked.

“Not for certain. But it would help to explain Carobleat’s connection with Hillyard. As a doctor, Hillyard would have been exceedingly useful in providing cover.”

Love sat upright suddenly. “The antiques!” he exclaimed. “I nearly suggested it earlier.”

Purbright shook his head. “No, the antiques are something else altogether. Another Carobleat legacy, I fancy, but nothing to do with drugs. What is interesting about the antiques, though, is that they are the only obvious link between the late Mr Carobleat and the late Mr Gwill.”

“Except Mrs Carobleat.”

“Ah...” Purbright reflected. Then he asked: “Do you happen to know Shropshire at all, Sid?”

The sergeant frowned. “I once went through that way on a trip to Colwyn Bay or somewhere. When I was a kid, that was.”

“Never mind. No, as I was saying, the antiques’ do suggest connexions. A councillor’s crusading zeal; the advertising columns of a newspaper; a doctor’s house; and an undertaker who does building jobs with promptitude and tact. What a pity so few good syndicates can hang together for very long.”

Reluctantly pulling himself out of his chair, Purbright walked to the window and peered between the curtains. “Manning ought to be here before long. I think he might as well come inside for the night. There’s no point in playing sentries in weather like this.” He turned. “By the way, did you see a phone anywhere about?”

“Just outside this room, on a table.”

When Purbright returned five minutes later, he announced that he had rung the Chief Constable, that Dr Hillyard would be arrested the next day, and that they both might as well go home to bed as soon as the tardy Constable Manning made an appearance.

“Incidentally,” he added, “I only hope he lasts the night.”

Love looked blank. “Who? Manning?”

“No, Hillyard. He’ll be safe once we can get him into a cell tomorrow, of course, but passions seem to be running high.” Purbright examined his knuckles, then looked up at the sergeant. “What do you suggest we charge him with?”

“What, as well as doing Gloss?”

Purbright shook his head. “We haven’t enough to charge Hillyard with that. Not at the moment. But we’ll have to get him into custody somehow.” He slowly paced the length of the room and stood looking at a large, slightly fly-blown engraving of a barrister ancestor of Rodney Gloss. He turned. “I know—living on immoral earnings. How’s that?”

The bewildered sergeant regarded Purbright with something like alarm.

“You do see what we’re after?” Purbright asked him gently.

Love made no reply. Footsteps halted outside and there was a heavy knock on the front door. Purbright lifted a curtain aside. “Ah, our Mr Manning,” he announced gratefully. “Let’s go home.”

As they turned out of the gate a few minutes later, Purbright said with a tinge of repentance in his voice: “You didn’t think I was pulling your leg about the immoral earnings charge, did you? It will stick, all right.”

Love grunted, and Purbright went on: “As you’ll have realized, the antiques lark, or clinic, or whatever you like to call what you very commendably uncovered this evening, is nothing but a nicely camouflaged...er...what should we say...?”

Comprehension suddenly came upon the sergeant like the smell from a Sunday oven.

“A love nest!”

“Exactly!” said Purbright, admiringly.

Chapter Fifteen

The Flaxborough Sharms were a group of narrow and shabby streets lying between the harbour and the goods station. At one time they had enjoyed a reputation attributable to the appetites and intransigence of foreign seamen, but Continental boats seldom docked at Flaxborough now and the men from the coasters and fishing vessels that did use the port were mostly either natives of the town or regular and inoffensive lodgers in it.

Since the war, the excitements of the place had dwindled to routine drunkenness at the week-end, the odd fight or two, and a little listless wife-beating in such households where that indulgence could be enjoyed without endangering a television set.

Broad Street was in fact not a street but a quadrangle on the northern side of the Sharms. There were a few trees in the centre, a statue of a man in old-fashioned clothes who seemed stricken with impetigo (it was a cheap statue and the material ‘wept’ in damp weather), and a ruined horse trough. The houses on the perimeter were larger than most others in the district, for they had been built to the fancy of the retired master mariners and ship owners of a century and more ago; men who had liked to strut gravely round the little central green and sniff with proprietorial satisfaction the smells of tar, hemp and weed-slimed breakwaters. Their homes now were not so much dignified as gaunt. In their façades of faded stone, streaked brown where guttering had split, were front doors battered and scarred by the impatient passage of sub-tenants and the imprecations of overlooked and locked-out children. The imitation columns that flanked the doors had long since lost their flutings beneath an encrustment of brown paint and grease-bound dust.

Detective Constable Harper discovered with annoyance that the houses of Broad Street were numbered more or less at random. Only after he had trudged along three sides of the quadrangle, peering into dim hallways and cross-examining truculent infants, did he succeed in tracing the entrance of number sixteen to the bottom of a narrow court between numbers twenty-five and twenty-seven.

On the directions of a wall-eyed man in shirt-sleeves who answered his knock, Harper climbed three flights of coco-matted stairs and tapped on a door that boasted a huge white porcelain handle. After a few seconds, the door opened sufficiently to reveal a tired but suspicious eye beneath two hair curlers that bobbed at him like wary antennae.

“Mrs Margaret Shooter?”

“You from the electricity?”

“No, madame. I am a police officer and I have reason to believe you can help us in a matter we are making inquiries into.”

The curlers shook vigorously. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve not got mixed up in anything.”

“There’s no suggestion that you have, madame”—Harker remembered the inspector’s tactical briefing—“but there are just a couple of questions I should like to ask you if you’d be so good as to co-operate. There’s no need for you to be apprehensive, as you might say.” He gave what he hoped was a disarming smile.

“It’s a bit of a liberty, but you’d better come in, I suppose,” said Mrs Shooter, opening the door to display more hair curlers and an expanse of blue dressing-gown.

“If I’ve come at an inconvenient time...” began Harper, resolutely looking away from the garment’s inadequacies.

Mrs Shooter sighed impatiently, grasped his arm and propelled him with some firmness into the room behind her. She closed the door, flopped into an armchair and lit a cigarette. “Now, busy boy, what’s it all about?” She looked bored as well as tired.

Harper sat carefully on the edge of a chair at the farther side of the room.

“We are making inquiries,” he said, “into the visits of certain people to premises at number one hundred and twenty, Spoongate, above a doctor’s surgery. Information has reached us that you were present at that address last evening. Would you mind confirming that, Mrs Shooter?”

She scratched her thigh and regarded him lazily. “You’re making heavy weather of something, son, but I don’t quite catch on to what it is.”

Harper sighed. He was used to extrovert females. “Were you there last night?” he asked baldly.

“Was I where?”

“At Dr Hillyard’s surgery.”

Mrs Shooter hesitated, then said: “Yes, if you say so. He happens to be my doctor. Any objections?”

“You are undergoing some sort of special treatment, aren’t you, Mrs Shooter? In those cubicles upstairs, I mean.”

“Just what exactly are you getting at, copper?” Her tiredness had evaporated. “It’s the first time I ever heard of a busy sticking his snout into a...a...doctor-patient relationship!”

“A doctor-patient relationship,” Harper repeated. He gave a thin, slow smile. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t think of prying into anything like that, madame.”

She scowled and drew angrily on her cigarette. “I don’t have to answer these damn silly questions,” she reminded him.

“That’s so,” he agreed, adding immediately: “What do your friends call you, Mrs Shooter? Would it be Mabs?”

“It might be. What’s that to you?”

“M. A. B. S.?”

“Of course. How would you spell it—with an X?”

Harper smiled again. Half to himself, he murmured: “Mahogany and beech sideboard.”

This earned a look of hostile incomprehension. “Are you all right, copper?”

He went on: “Do you know a Mr Herbert Stamper?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You didn’t meet him last night? By appointment?”

“I’ve told you once, I went to the doctor’s last night. Then came back home. I don’t know anyone called Stamper.”

Harper realized that, in spite of her denials, Mrs Shooter was not going to block his questioning altogether. He saw that she was interested. She was also apprehensive. She wanted to learn how much he knew and what use might, if the police had their way, be made of it. Yet part of her attitude, he told himself, was genuine bewilderment.

“Do you,” he asked her, “know a girl or a woman called Jane?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Maybe.”

He glanced quickly at a list given him earlier that morning by Inspector Purbright. “Japanese Antique Newel, Ebony,” he intoned softly. Mabs Shooter looked in mock despair at the ceiling.

“And what about Joan and Sal? How are they getting along these days?”

The woman said nothing.

“Superior Antique Lampstand,” murmured Harper dreamily. He put the list back in his pocket.

“How long have you and your friends been patients of Dr Hillyard’s?”

“Quite a while. I have, at any rate. I don’t know what friends you’re talking about.”

“I think you do, you know, Mrs Shooter. In fact, I think you know perfectly well what this is all about. You do, don’t you?” Harper’s tone was that mixture of It’s-All-Up and No-One-Will-Hurt-You-If-You-Tell that policemen use when hard evidence seems to have run out and they would give a day’s pay for a nice straight confession.

“Look,” he said, leaning towards her and extending the fingers of his left hand as if in readiness to mark off five irrefutable and urgent reasons for her co-operation, “I’m going to be absolutely frank with you, Mrs Shooter. And what’s more”—he raised his eyebrows—“I’ll tell you right at the start, and with no ifs and buts, that whatever you care to tell me you’ll be in the clear all the way. We’ll hang nothing whatever on you personally so long as you play the game with us.”

“You’d have your work cut out,” she retorted softly. “I know the law.”

“Of course you do. And you know we’re only interested in the people who run these things. The tight lads who draw their eight quid a customer and sit back nice and safe and respectable while...”

“Eight quid!” He had struck fire. “Eight quid! Don’t give me that, son!” She laughed stridently, her eyes questioning and angry.

Harper glanced round the tidy, austerely furnished room. “I don’t suppose you’re making a fortune, me duck,” he said.

The colloquialism pleased her, though she didn’t know why. “Not exactly,” she said.

“I’m not kidding you about the eight quid,” said the detective. “We stopped some letters. Not that you need let that go any further.”

“Letters to the doctor, you mean?”

“He’d get his share. They took a long way round, though. All very hush-hush. You’d be surprised. But there’s not much we don’t know now.” Harper leaned back and searched for a cigarette. “One thing’s definite. You’re going to need to change your doctor.”

“You aren’t really going to knock old Hilly-billy off, are you?” she asked earnestly.

“Hilly-billy?”

“Hillyard.”

He paused in bringing up the match he had just struck. “You should know better than to ask that,” he reproved. Then he lit the cigarette and added: “As it happens, the warrant’s out now.”

The woman digested this information. She looked straight at Harper. “Who the hell tipped you off about me? That’s what I want to know. We never even used the front door—me and the girls, I mean. And there wasn’t any names mentioned. Not ever.”

“You were unlucky. Somebody recognized you. A policeman, believe it or not.”

Mrs Shooter swallowed, as though trying to push down the tide of colour that had risen round her plump throat. “Not...not a bloke with a torch? Do you mean that wasn’t old Bert? Oh, for crying out...” She jumped to her feet and glared down at Harper.

“Bert?” repeated Harper, unruffled.

She tossed her head. “Yes, a pot-bellied old bastard. A regular. One of the life-of-the-party ones. I don’t know his proper name. There was never no names. Just appointments, and initials, sort of.”

Harper sighed and handed her his cigarette case. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

She accepted a light and blew smoke to the yellowed ceiling of the little room. After a few moments’ silence, she shrugged and pulled the dressing-gown more closely around her.

“That would be”—she picked a shred of tobacco from the tip of her tongue and regarded it vacantly—“about three—no, four—years ago, I suppose. One afternoon a fellow walked in here and said wouldn’t I like a decent regular job instead of what I was doing and how he could fix it because he was on the council and thought it wasn’t really my fault but the district I lived in. You know the gaff. I was green, considering, mind. And could he gab? Well, you must have known him yourself, I expect. Carobleat. You did? Yes...Councillor Godalmighty Harry Carobleat. That’s who it was. Anyway, the next thing...”

Mrs Popplewell, the only Flaxborough magistrate who could be found willing that morning to preside over the brief formalities of a special court, sat in Purbright’s office and looked with secret excitement at the charge sheet. The prisoner, she had been told by the station sergeant, would be brought in very shortly: at eleven, the inspector had said. It was now nearly five minutes past, but Mrs Popplewell had nothing in particular to do before a luncheon of business and professional women two hours hence, so she remained contentedly fingering her big green beads and easing her shoes half off under the inspector’s desk, which served as a bench of justice on these occasions.

‘The prisoner,’ she repeated to herself in a flutter of anticipation. Dr Hillyard a prisoner. One could hardly believe it. He was such a masterful man. With iron-grey hair—yes, that was the word, iron-grey—and penetrating eyes. Dour, perhaps, but that was because he was Scotch. Scottish, rather; they preferred being called that. And if it hadn’t been for the drink, they said, he’d be in Harley Street today. But what a shocking thing he was supposed to have done. A disorderly house. It sounded comic in a way. People went to Dr Hillyard with disorders and now his house had caught one. No, it wouldn’t do for her to giggle while she was asking him if he had any objection to being remanded in custody. It was a serious business, all right—and wouldn’t it lay her lunch companions by their ears. Half of them were probably his patients. They’d be absolutely green...

The station sergeant knocked and entered the room. “I’m very sorry you’re being kept waiting, ma’am, but from what we hear there’s been some difficulty in apprehending the defendant.”

“That’s all right, constable. I’m quite comfortable,” Mrs Popplewell assured him with a dignified smile.

The sergeant glanced meaningfully at his striped sleeve and inquired: “Would you happen to care for a cup of coffee, ma’am? I can easily send one of the constables out for one.”

Mrs Popplewell reddened slightly and said it was most kind of him but she would rather not. Was there, by the way, any suggestion of the, er, defendant being out of town or anything?

The sergeant said he could not speak as to that, but no doubt the inspector would soon be back, with or without the prisoner, and she could then ask him the reason for the delay.

Purbright in fact appeared a few minutes later. He wished Mrs Popplewell good morning, ran his fingers through his hair and rubbed his chin. “We seem,” he told her, “to have been a little premature in asking you to come along. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Not at all,” she said, hiding her disappointment in an unnecessary search for her handbag which lay just at her elbow. “You cannot help it if people beat you to the draw, as it were.” She laughed and added as casually as she could contrive: “Where’s he off to, do you think?”

“That’s rather hard to say. All we know is that he is not at his home and, according to his receptionist, not on his rounds, either. But he’ll turn up, Mrs Popplewell; don’t you worry.”

It was, of course, Purbright who was doing the worrying. He reproached himself for not having gathered up the doctor the night before. There was enough trouble afoot without having to use his limited resources on one of those sordid and time-wasting searches of empty buildings, hedges and ditches, harbour, river and canals. Dragging...he shuddered at the thought. Reluctantly, Mrs Popplewell took her leave. Purbright made one or two telephone calls, then went outside again and started the car. He was driving off when he caught sight of Love, crossing the road towards the police station. “No luck?” Purbright asked.

Love shook his head and climbed into the passenger seat.

“Not only that,” he said, “but another one’s gone as well. Bradlaw isn’t there. His housekeeper or whoever she is told me he went out early in the van. He didn’t say where or why.”

“Had Hillyard been there, did she know?”

“She said she didn’t hear anyone else.”

“Never mind. Stay with me now and we’ll go over to Gwill’s place and the wily widow woman’s. I’ve asked for a watch to be kept for Hillyard’s car. Oh...” He paused in the act of releasing the hand-brake and opened the car door. “Hang on a minute; I’d better tell them to look out for Bradlaw’s wagon as well, now.”

When he returned, Love asked: “Why should the pair of them be making a break—if that’s what they are doing? Hillyard can’t know about that warrant and we’ve nothing on Bradlaw.”

The inspector shrugged. “The more the corpses, the closer the survivors will stick together. That particular board of directors has narrowed considerably of late.”

The car turned into Heston Lane and sped past the tall villas behind their hedges of evergreen and the mournful laurels. As it slowed just before the last two houses, Purbright said: “You’d better see if you can root any sense out of the Poole woman, Sid. I’ll try next door.” They got out. Purbright left Love regarding the now closed gates of The Aspens.

A moment later he stopped in his tracks to Mrs Carobleat’s porch. Love had called out loudly and excitedly. Purbright frowned and walked back to the road. He was met by the sergeant, glowing and gesticulating. “Don’t froth,” said Purbright testily. He found demonstrative policemen as embarrassing as sentimental lawyers, or muscular clergymen.

Love led him back to the entrance to The Aspens. They entered the drive and turned. Love pointed to the handle that lifted the latch securing one wrought-iron gate to the other.

“Where have you seen that before?” he asked in cryptic triumph.

Purbright grunted and bent down to look more closely at the handle.

The iron had new, bright rust upon it where it had been scraped or rubbed clean fairly recently. It was wheel-shaped and about three inches in diameter. The spokes were decorative and formed a flower pattern, rather like a daffodil.

“Yes,” said Purbright, standing up. “Yes, indeed.” He began examining the rest of the iron-work from the central leaf to the heavy timber pillars that supported the gates.

At the top of the right-hand gate, near the wooden post and on a level with his head, he found another scarlet patch of recent rust. He pointed it out to Love and said: “Here’s where Gwill’s volts were introduced, Sid. And here”—he made as if to grasp the iron daffodil with his other hand—“is where they were delivered.”

“Just what I thought,” said Love. “That’s why I...”

“Of course,” said Purbright. “You were quite right to mention it.” He gazed at the hedge that divided the front garden of The Aspens from its neighbour. “A cable run along that and clipped to the top of the gate. It couldn’t have been spotted in the dark. Probably not in daylight, for that matter. The question is, Which house was it led from? Gwill’s or Mrs Carobleat’s?”

Followed by Love, he moved slowly along the side of the hedge, scrutinizing the frost-hardened earth beneath it. About half-way along, he saw a glint of bright yellow among the dead twigs and leaves. He picked up a short length of adhesive wrapping tape and carefully removed the fragments that were sticking to it. He pressed the adhesive side down on a page of his notebook and showed it to Love.

The piece of tape had been cut off through three lines of printing, leaving —NWELL LTD. at the top, —IO AND TV below it, and —DLOW at the bottom.

As they were looking at it, a voice just behind them croaked with querulous sadness: “Have you come to stake him down? Have you, sir?”

The policemen wheeled round and stared into the grey, unhappy face of Mrs Poole.

“Good morning,” said Purbright with automatic courtesy. Then, realizing the oddity of her question, “Have we come to what?”

She looked at him for several seconds and shook her head doubtfully. “No,” she murmured, “no, I suppose that’s not your job. But somebody ought to. You’d never have thought their hair would keep growing, would you? But it’s natural enough, really, I expect.”

“Yes,” said Purbright, uncomfortably, “I suppose it is.” He noticed the woman looked much older out of doors. Her features seemed far more ravaged than when he had last spoken to her.

Mrs Poole passed a trembling, skinny hand over her little pursed mouth. “It wasn’t here, you know,” she said. Tilting her head, she added: “Round the back, as a rule. Except when he fixed up the wireless just before I went to Libbie’s.” She giggled weakly and a tear started to slide down the grey curtain of her cheek.

Purbright gave Love the flicker of a glance, then took Mrs Poole by the arm and led her back towards the front door. He held his head low and spoke to the ground. “Libbie’s your sister, is she?” he asked. She nodded emphatically.

“So the wireless was fixed that morning—was that it?”

“Early on. Only just light. Only...” She spoke dreamily, groping for words.

“You saw something, then, did you, Mrs Poole? Something out here?”

“I was getting up, you know. You look out of a window and there you are. You’re never the first. Not in winter, even. Mind you”—she suddenly looked at him sternly and spoke low and fast—“mind you, it’s my opinion he was never far away all night, so it was small credit to him to be there, already up and whiskery and busy with his aerial over the hedge to get the eight o’clock news.” She snorted and rubbed her hands on her pinafore.

Purbright stopped in front of the porch and faced the house-keeper. “Who, Mrs Poole?” he asked. “Who was it fixing the wireless that morning?”

She slowly drew up a hand and began fingering her chin with little fluttery movements. She made no answer, but moved back to the door, staring at Purbright as she retreated. Just before she disappeared, she announced with dignified lucidity and a fleeting smile: “Mr Gwill keeps rather to himself these days, but I shall tell him you called.”

Chapter Sixteen

The man behind the wheel of the squat black van was not fond of driving for its own sake, even in the rolling dairy-lands of the Westcountry that contrasted so strongly with the utilitarian, arable flatness that surrounded Flaxborough. He glared despondently through the windscreen at the unpredictable road ahead, snaking between high banks bearing their rain-heavy tangle of dead cow-parsley, vetch and spear grass. To his companion he said not a word.

It was still light enough to see Glee Hill crouching like a lonely old sheep dog in the mist away to the left. On the near side of it, a small forest of skeletal trees held tapering, motionless fingers against the slate-coloured sky. The occasional road-side cottage, withdrawn against a leafless, dripping orchard or standing amidst a forlorn garden of soured, broken potato plants and stripped orussel stalks, showed no sign of occupancy. Here was a landscape gone to seed and bedded down to rot quietly until spring.

At the next cross-roads, Dr Hillyard steered the van carefully to a stop against the verge and studied a map. He also drank gratefully from a silver flask and lit a cigarette. Then he checked the map with the signpost and drove off into the right-hand turn.

The road descended steeply through a dank plantation and drew level beside a stream. This was crossed by a humped bridge that carried the road to the beginnings of a village. Before entering its main street, flanked by a hall, some stone-built houses and a couple of shops with lighted windows, Dr Hillyard chose a sharp left turn and drove slowly past an inn, a farm entrance and a long, low wall that appeared to enclose the grounds of a manor house, the chimneys of which topped a huge yew hedge at the end of some rough pasture.

About half a mile farther on, the road forked. At the junction was a triangular patch of asphalt and on it a telephone kiosk. Again Dr Hillyard pulled up. This time he got out of the van, crossed to the kiosk and entered it. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and compared what was written on it with the dial of the telephone.

Mr Bradlaw watched from his van’s passenger seat. He shivered in the chill dampness that crept through the floorboards and slid round the cab’s windows and doors. His legs tingled and ached. Disentangling them from the rug he had wrapped around him, he opened the door and climbed heavily to the road as Hillyard shouldered his way out of the kiosk.

“Well?” said Bradlaw, stamping his feet.

“That’s the number, all right,” Hillyard said. He stared up one of the roads. “It’ll not be far from here. A cottage is the best bet. Not in the village, though.”

Bradlaw looked unhappily at the sky. “We’ll have to be starting back inside another couple of hours, whether we find anything or not. We should have waited for her coming again and one of us followed her.”

Hillyard ignored this observation. Puckering his face so that his splayed teeth stood out from his mouth like a bundle of piano keys, he goggled searchingly along the left-hand fork. “Not too promising,” he said at last. “We’ll take a look at the other one first. You’d better drive from now.”

They had not gone far, however, before the road narrowed into a lane. Becoming progressively rougher, it eventually petered out into a track, deeply rutted by cart wheels. The only habitation in sight was a group of farm buildings, about a quarter of a mile away. Bradlaw pulled up. “They look a dead loss.” He nodded towards the huddle of barns and outhouses.

“Aye. Well try the other.”

Bradlaw backed the van off the track into the furrowed but firm earth alongside and, with some lurching and several stalls, managed to turn it back towards the junction. “How anyone could live in a bloody wilderness like this...”

“It has its advantages,” observed Hillyard, a trifle bitterly.

The other fork obligingly remained metalled for the first half mile or so and seemed likely to continue. At the first sight of a dwelling, a small two-storey brick house on the left, Bradlaw slowed down almost to a halt. “What do we do? Look in?”

“No. Pull up at the gate and sound the horn. Be ready to drive off as soon as we see who comes out.”

The sudden blare of the hooter rent the silent, moisture-laden air like the cry of an impaled bull. There was an almost immediate scampering and scraping and five children appeared round the side of the house. At the same time, a curtain was drawn back at one of the upper windows and a fat, wild-eyed woman stared out. Bradlaw precipitately let in the clutch and the van shot forward.

“Heaven preserve us!” murmured Hillyard, devoutly.

They had gone nearly as far again before another house came into view. It was a low-built cottage, thatched and ivied to such a degree that its windows were like the eyes of a castaway, peering through hair. The place was only noticeable at all because of the double gates that stood across the path turning in from the road. These were of a sickly sienna, highly varnished.

The cottage, or what could be discerned of it under the multitude of ivy ropes, was of plastered brick. The front door had a porch and a flagged path led through the undergrowth of the neglected garden and round the side of the building. Rank elder bushes, trees almost, crowded to the thatch on the right-hand side. Behind was the dark tracery of a group of tall oaks.

Bradlaw, who had stopped the van level with the incongruous gateway, pointed to a broad, low shed some twenty yards to the left of the cottage. “Garage,” he said.

Both men surveyed the scene from where they sat. Although the light was fading fast, no lamp had been lit in the cottage. Nor was there any smoke from the great ivy-strangled stack.

“Try the horn,” commanded Hillyard tersely.

The bellow echoed from the steep hillside beyond the cottage. There was no response, from children or anyone else.

Hillyard stared intently at the gates, then at the shed. He wound down the window on his side, stuck out his head and looked back along the road, then forward in the direction the van faced.

He opened the door and jumped down. “I’ll take a chance and look inside. You can see far enough both ways to give me a pip if anything comes along.”

Bradlaw looked at him anxiously. “I'd not do that—not just walk up to it. You can’t be sure that nobody’s there.”

Hillyard seemed not to hear. Before opening the gate, he turned and said: “You’d better stand in the road. And for God’s sake don’t forget to sound that blasted hooter if you see a car turn down this road.”

Bradlaw obediently left his seat. Glancing at the tall, lank figure of the doctor already advancing in a sort of athletic creep towards one of the cottage windows, he took up sentry-go for the length of his van. At last, made nervous by the crunch of his own footsteps, he halted and continued the vigil by turning his head this way and that and listening.

Hillyard reached the cottage and peered cautiously over the nearest window-sill. The room within was dark and at first he could distinguish only the pieces of furniture immediately in front of him. There was a console radio and a cabinet on which stood a decanter and glasses. A chair, a small table...As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he picked out a broad maplewood couch, another cabinet of some kind and two pullman armchairs facing the fireplace. The fitted carpet of pale coffee colour was relieved by a single heavy rug in black and turquoise.

The room on the other side of the front door proved to be a bedroom, apparently furnished no less expensively, although the nearly drawn curtains limited the view from the window to about a third of its area. The bed covers, Hillyard noticed, lay as they had been turned back, although a suit of pyjamas had been folded and placed on a nearby chair.

Observing, as he passed, that both front and back doors were secured not by country latches but with Yale locks, Hillyard walked silently round the cottage. On all sides, decaying vegetation straggled almost to the wall. There was the smell of perpetually wet stone, of leaves and fungus.

The two windows at the back both gave into the same room, a fairly narrow one that extended the breadth of the cottage. It contained modern kitchen fittings, except that the sink had no taps. At one end was a small dining table and chairs. Beside the gas stove stood a large cylinder. There were a few dishes on the table, and also a jug and a packet of cornflakes.

Hillyard gave the back door a perfunctory shake. It was locked. He returned to the van.

“That’s it, all right,” he said to Bradlaw, who had got back into the driving seat and was rubbing the chill out of his plump knees. “And very nicely set up. Damn me! Very nicely. Aye!” He gave the cottage a baleful look as Bradlaw started the engine and the van jerked away.

“How do you know?” asked Bradlaw, switching on the side lamps and leaning nearer the windscreen. This was the worst time for driving, neither light nor dark. “How do you know it’s the one?”

Hillyard lit a cigarette and ignored the question. He was thinking. Suddenly he nudged his companion’s arm. “Quick, into there.” He pointed to a clearing by the road’s edge almost immediately ahead. Bradlaw braked and swung the van sharply round to the right. A tree loomed up. He stopped just short of it and swore.

“Fine,” said Hillyard. He turned and groped behind him in the dark interior of the van. The small leather case that he found there he thrust into his overcoat pocket. Then he opened the door.

Bradlaw seized his arm. “What are you going to do?” he asked, nervousness thinning his voice.

Hillyard looked over his shoulder as he stepped down. “Do?” he echoed. “I’m coming with you, friend. You didn’t think we could leave the van outside the gate, did you? It will be safe enough here until we want it.”

“Look here,” said Bradlaw, opening the door on his side and clambering out clumsily, “I thought that as...” He came round the front of the van, breathing quickly. “I thought there wouldn’t be anything for us to do now. With there being no one there, I mean.” He stared hopefully at the other’s slightly contemptuous smile. “Well, there isn’t, is there?” His arms flapped for a moment, then he pushed both hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. Still Hillyard said nothing. Bradlaw glanced round at the stockade of leafless trees within whose damp gloom they stood concealed from the highway.

The doctor took his arm, not ungently, and said, as if speaking to himself: “The time is past for pretence. That’s too dangerous now. We need to make the legend a reality, or God knows when we’ll sleep again.” Then he grinned in the dusk and added sharply: “And so, my tubby little meat packer, let us go to redress an ancient wrong.”

Together they regained the road and began walking back the way their van had come. The figures in the thickening dark were like those of Don Quixote and his fearful squire.

Chapter Seventeen

The landlord of the Brink of Discovery was not a local man but a former singer from the North of England who had saved the proceeds of brief but phenomenally profitable popularity and invested them in what he called ‘the mine host racket’.

“You see how it is,” he said to Purbright and his companion. “The locals haven’t enough honest thirst to keep the flippin’ beer engine from rusting. Do you know what they do? They brew some filthy liver-lifter of their own and guzzle it in bed until they’re in the mood to get up and fire a few ricks. What? You’d never believe. Honest, you wouldn’t. And they’re all related, this lot are. Here, even when they bother to get married there’s no call for half of ’em to change their names. My Freda says: ‘There’s another three village idiots going to church’ every time the wedding bells ring. They’re a bright lot round here, I’ll tell you.”

“We were hoping...” Purbright put in.

The landlord poddled him in the shoulder with one finger. “So you see,” he went on relentlessly, “there’s nothing round here to keep a pub’s brass polished. They’re not civilized. Arson and incest, them’s their hobbies, my Freda says, and that’s just about it. Well, if I had my way I wouldn’t have ’em in the place. They just sit round and keep spitting in their beer to make it last out and gouging holes in the bar floor with their ugly great boots. Look, now—look over there at that trestle—one of ’em’s been hacking at it with a bloody scythe. I tell you they bring scythes in here. They do—no, really.”

Seizing the opportunity for speech that seemed to be presented by the landlord’s brows rising so high that his eye-pouches were pulled taut like grey elastic, Purbright tried again.

“We’re...” was all he managed.

“You’re dicks—yes, I know.” The landlord beamed upon them like a school matron. “It’s those raincoats. Here, I expect you’re after one of these straw-chewing zombies for slipping a hunk of rat poison into his auntie. That’s a favourite of theirs, rat poison is. Some of ’em get used to it. No, you’d not believe that, would you? But it’s right. They eat it like bloody sandwich spread. Never mind”—he tossed his head—“we’ll not waste time talking about that lot, shall we. I was telling you how I came to make this place pay. D’you know where the real trade comes from? The real money? Do you?” He leaned nearer, filling the little service hatch with his affable moon-face. “From the city. Brum. And over from Shrewsbury, some of ’em. And Stafford an’ all. Even Liverpool in the summer. You know why, don’t you? Listen. It’s what we call a gimmick in show business. A gimmick, that’s what. Like echo chambers and crimpy hair and walloping great fat chests and that. You see, I got my old agent to come and give the place the once over when I took it on. First thing he did was change the name. The Bull, it used to be. We’ll give ’em Bull, he says. You want something classy and half-sloshed like, that’ll go down with the intelligentsia out with one another’s missuses. Mind you, it’s all above board. No Mr and Mrs Smith or any of that lark. Proper names and all different. Aye, anyway...But look here, you’re the pollis, aren’t you? You’ll be wanting to know something, I suppose. Come on, don’t be bashful. Hey, Freda! Freda, love!” He disappeared.

Purbright’s companion blew out his cheeks and softly suspired an appropriate obscenity. “Sorry about him, old chap, but he’s not one of our home-reared, believe me. My chief just asked me to help you with the geography and the language; we didn’t bargain for a blasted walking public address system.”

A door opened behind them and they were joined by the landlord, bearing a tray set with three glasses. “Here,” he said. Purbright and the other policeman each took a whisky. “Right,” said the landlord. He sat down and regarded them with the air of a grocer ready to take a list. His furious loquacity seemed to have burned itself out.

In the hatch vacated by the landlord suddenly appeared the face of a heavily breathing, youngish woman with lemon-coloured hair. She gazed at them with a mixture of interest and amusement. “Lookin’ for corpsesez?” she asked.

The landlord flapped his hand at her. “Go switch the log on in the Tudor,” he commanded. His wife wrinkled her nose and lumbered off into the interior. “Miss Openshaw Palladium 1946,” he explained, then, half to himself, “That was before wide screens, mind.”

Purbright made formal introductions and began putting his questions.

“We’re interested in a roundabout way,” he said, “in a lady from Flaxborough—you know where that is, I suppose?—called Mrs Joan Carobleat. Has anyone ever stayed here under that name?”

The landlord yelled “Freda!” and added in normal tones, while the glasses still quivered, “Aye, I get you. Wait till she brings the book.”

Once more his wife materialized, Judy-like, in the hatch. “The book, love—fetch it here, will you?” Again she was gone, good-naturedly contemptuous and foot-dragging. Purbright and the local inspector each received the distinct impression that she had winked at him.

The landlord quickly found the signature he was looking for. He held out the book and pointed to it. Purbright saw that it was for the two nights before his encounter with Mrs Carobleat as she was leaving Flaxborough station. It confirmed her own story.

“You’re sure she actually stayed here—slept here, I mean?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, rather do I. I noticed, you know. She’s not exactly a stranger here, if you know what I mean.”

“And there’s no doubt she could have been nowhere else but here in the hotel on that second night?”

“Not unless she climbed out of the window and climbed back again in time for six-thirty tea. Look—it’s marked here—tea, six-thirty. She left to catch the eight-five at Hereford.” The landlord slammed the book shut and jutted his face forward. “What’s up? What’s she done? I’ll not, er...you know. Here, don’t tell me she’s been minced or something?” The last question was delivered with hopeful interest and a manual gesture suggestive of sawing.

Purbright said: “She stayed here fairly regularly, then? How often?”

“Oh, once or twice a month, maybe.”

“As often as that?” Purbright sounded surprised.

“Oh, aye. Recently, anyway. Of course, I’ve not been here all that long.”

“Since when?”

“Early last summer. May or June. She’s been here eight or nine times since then. Just for the odd night or two.”

“And always on her own?”

The landlord hesitated.

“Well?” Purbright’s tone was inoffensive, yet pressing.

The other scratched his ear. “Put it this way,” he said. “She was on her own all right when she was actually here. But she generally pushed off early in the evening and turned up again for breakfast. Oddly enough, though, this last time she did stay the night just as I told you. You needn’t worry about that. But most other times she didn’t.”

“What was the idea? Did she tell you?”

“She didn’t say anything, but I thought the same as anyone else would. She’s no chicken, but goodish looking. Married for a cert. And probably with a husband who’d want to know where she’d been. Well, if ever he came here he could see she’d spent the night very respectably in a single room with none of that Mr and Mrs Smith malarkey.” He shrugged. “I didn’t see any harm in obliging her. There was nothing common about her.”

“Do you know where she went when she left for the night?”

“No idea at all, old man. It wasn’t my business.”

“Come off it.” For the first time, Gibbins, the local inspector, entered the conversation. “This village is no bigger than my backside. Anyone coming here wouldn’t have a dozen houses to choose from to stay the night in. Somebody’s bound to know where the woman went. And I know as well as you do that the gosbip out here is spread in the bars like sawdust. Now just you tell this gentleman what you’ve heard, my lad.”

The landlord glanced resentfully at Inspector Gibbins’s whisky. “I tell you I don’t tittle-tattle with the peasantry,” he said. “They always keep to the Smugglers’ Browserie—what used to be the bar—ever since we did the place out and stopped them trying to bring goats along with them. Percy always serves them, not me.” He trotted to the hatch, evidently a sort of control centre, and shouted “Per-CEEE!”

The summons brought forth, after a minute or so, a huge, droopy-chopped mental deficient who kept wringing an imaginary dish-cloth and shaking his head. Persistent but kindly interrogation by Gibbins won the news that the ‘lady from away’ had been seen more than once bound in the direction of Avery Woodside, but that none knew precisely upon whose bed ‘them pretty ’aunches do ’ave steamed’.

Inspector Gibbins seemed satisfied and dismissed the mountainous haunch-fancier with thanks. He asked Purbright if he wished to know anything further.

“Was Mrs Carobleat never in the company of anyone here? Did you never see her strike up a conversation over a drink, say, or accept a lift in a car?”

The landlord was certain that he had not.

“Did you know her to make a telephone call at any times?”

She made no calls herself, but at her request he had occasionally rung for a taxi or to confirm the time of a train.

When the two policemen left the hotel, Gibbins pointed along the road to their left. “Avery’s that way,” he said. “I didan’ try to drag anything more out of Perce because what he did say leaves us with a very short choice. Come on.”

They soon drew level with a farm entrance. “Nothing there,” said Gibbins. “There’s just the old man and his sister and a stockman who lives in. They don’t know anybody.”

“What’s that place?” Purbright asked, nodding toward a house set in wooded grounds behind a wall that extended along the opposite side of the road.

“Do you have squires in your part of the world?”

Purbright shook his head. “Hardly. Our upper crust sank into the gravy quite a while since. Why, is that a manor? In the feudal sense, I mean?”

“It is. And wheezing in the middle of it somewhere is a real squire.”

“Paralysed with a surfeit of droit de seigneur?”

“Poxed and well-nigh boxed,” confirmed Gibbins. “I doubt if your Mrs Whatsername would have wanted to see him; not unless she had an interest in morbid pathology.”

“We’re not calling, then?”

“Only if we have no luck farther on.”

They reached a road fork, in the centre of which stood a public telephone kiosk.

“That’s just a track,” Gibbins said of the right-hand lane. They entered the other and began to walk more briskly. Neither spoke until they came within sight of a small house of red brick.

Gibbins said: “We’ll have a word with Mrs Battle. Considering the number of kids she has, I wonder she has time to notice anything that’s not on the stove or the clothes line, but it’s amazing how much she finds out. Perhaps Battle tells her. She’s not been this side of her gate since old Kennedy dropped dead from his delivery van in the road here one Thursday morning just after the war and she came out and stepped over him to get the bread she’d been waiting for.”

Walking round the side of the house, they encountered Mrs Battle picking one of the yougest of her children out of the hen run. Purbright thought she looked hostile and excitable, but Gibbins greeted her familiarly and she waddled ahead of them into the house.

After some small-talk in a dialect that Purbright found difficult to follow but which was obviously zestfully indelicate, Mrs Battle began to give answers to Gibbins’s inquiries into the passage of strangers thereabouts.

Her replies, translated one by one to Purbright by his colleague, were to the effect that a woman answering Joan Carobleat’s description had indeed walked by the house on several occasions. She was a visitor, according to Mrs Battle’s observations from her bedroom window, to the house of Mr Barnaby, the gentleman from London way who had bought the next cottage down the road—the last habitation before Avery Woodside—and who enjoyed such other advantages as a morning help from Polstead, a motorcar, fishing rights in the meadowlands of poor palsied Squire, and the nocturnal companionship of various anonymous but drattedly giggly young women.

Was Mr Barnaby likely to be at home now? She thought it highly probable, for she had seen the headlamp beams of his big motor-car flash across her bedroom ceiling late last night and had heard his garage door roll shut. Since then, no traffic had passed but a van or two. Mr Barnaby’s big motor-car certainly had not emerged again. It made a sinful noise, as though bound for race tracks and hotels, and she would not have missed it, even in her sleep.

Had the morning help called that day, as usual? No, she hadn’t, now that it came to be mentioned, not that she came absolutely every day because her husband sometimes got took extra bad.

What sort of a man to look at was Mr Barnaby? She had never looked, save at his lordly passing awheel when she had got no more than a fleet glance at his face, which was dark, she thought, and whiskered, and proud.

Whiskered? Purbright reminded Gibbins that the man who had bought electric cable from Barr and Cranwell, Ltd., Radio and TV, Ludlow, to which a fragment of yellow adhesive tape had led them earlier that day, had also been described as bearded.

How did Mr Barnaby earn a living and pass his time? She had heard nothing of his employment, but Battle thought (for what his opinion was worth) that their neighbour was like to be a gentleman just out of either Parliament or prison and writing a book about it.

After some further conversation in the steamy gloom of Mrs Battle’s nappie-festooned kitchen, the two policemen took their leave.

When they arrived at Mr Barnaby’s unexpectedly ostentatious gateway, Gibbins asked Purbright: “Do you want to see this character on your own? He’s not one of my parishioners; I might just be in the way.”

“No, you come along in,” said Purbright. “I’m not at all sure what I’m going to say to him, anyway. At least you can fill awkward pauses by asking to see his licence, or soliciting for the Boot and Shoe Fund or something. Damn it, you can’t loiter at gates in this weather.”

They made their way through the dead, tangled garden and Gibbins knocked on the front door. “The back would be more to the point as a rule,” he observed, “but this chap’s a foreigner; he probably hasn’t bothered to nail up the front door yet awhile.”

There was no sound within the cottage. Purbright knocked, again without result.

“You go round and try the back,” suggested Gibbins. “I’ll see if his car is still in the garage. It’s not often old Mother Battle’s espionage is at fault.” He strode off towards the shed.

Purbright knocked with his knuckles on the back door and tried the handle. Then he moved to one of the two flanking windows. Inside was a long, clean kitchen.

A few moments later, Gibbins reappeared. “Wherever he is, he hasn’t taken the car,” he announced. “It’s still in the garage.”

Purbright stared round the garden and ranged the fields on the other side of the bordering hedge. “Curious,” he muttered.

“What is?”

Purbright nodded towards the window. “Take a look at how neat the place is. Yet his woman didn’t come today. He must be an unusually tidy fellow.”

“You’d not say that if you saw the garage. You can hardly move for odds and ends and a great tangle of electric flex and stuff. I’d a job getting the door shut again.”

“Electric flex?” Purbright looked at him sharply.

“Yes, yards and...Oh...”

“Oh, indeed,” said Purbright. “Getting warmer, aren’t we?” He turned again to the window. “I suggest, you know, that ‘having reason to suspect’ and all that, we now take a closer look into things.”

He examined the window frame. “Ah, a precedent. How lucky for the Law.” Where recently made indentations appeared in the paint, he thrust upward a penknife blade and eased away the old-fashioned catch. Then he opened the window, climbed on the kitchen bench and jumped down. The slightly apprehensive Gibbins was admitted through the door.

They began to search, ascending first to an attic compartment that had been converted into the nearest approximation to a bath-room that a pumped water supply allowed.

Of the occupant of the cottage there was no sign. “One thing to be thankful for,” confessed Gibbins, “is that we haven’t found him strung up or simmering in chunks in the copper. That’s what I’m always afraid of in these out-of-the-way places. They’ve a nasty sense of humour in the country.” He mooched back into the kitchen and began peeping cautiously into drawers and cupboards.

A little later, Purbright called from the bedroom. “What do you make of this?” he asked, pointing to a jacket and waistcoat that hung behind the door, and then to an open drawer of the dressing table in which had been folded the matching pair of trousers.

Gibbins moved the trousers aside. Braces were attached to them. Beneath the trousers were some underclothes and a shirt. He looked at the cuffs; the links were there. Studs had not been removed from the collar-band.

“It seems,” said Gibbins, after considering these things, “that Mr Barnaby is abroad with precious little clothing on. People don’t put on clean shirts without changing the studs over. And they don’t have separate braces for every pair of trousers.”

“They don’t lay trousers in drawers, either,” Purbright observed. “Unless,” he added, “they happen to be someone else’s that they’ve decided to tidy away quickly. Can you see any shoes and socks over on that side?”

A pair of slightly muddied brogues was discovered in a corner. Further search revealed socks under one of the pillows. Gibbins held them up. “Inside out—like the shirt and vest. That suggests something.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Purbright agreed, pleased that Gibbins seemed to have entered so well into the spirit of things, in spite of the case having been, as it were, imported. “The gentleman was either an exceedingly careless dresser—which would be odd in anyone with such a passion for tidying things away—or else somebody took his clothes off for him.”

Purbright watched Gibbins going through pockets. “Any name tags?” he asked.

“Not one. No letters, no papers. Plenty of money and some odds and ends.” Gibbins laid on the dressing table a bundle of notes, cigarette case and lighter, keys, a pen and two handkerchiefs.

“No driving licence?” Purbright inquired. Gibbins shook his head.

Purbright moved about the room, unhurriedly peering, probing, picking up and setting down. He glanced into ashtrays and at the titles of a couple of books. His manner was inconsequential, like that of a bored man in a waiting-room. On the bedside table was a small china ornament. In passing, he lifted it and shook it gently, then tipped its mouth to the palm of his other hand. Out rolled a tiny, pear-shaped bead of glass. Purbright stared at it thoughtfully for a moment and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

Both men returned together to the kitchen.

Purbright stopped at the door and looked carefully round the room. Then he walked slowly from one end to the other, methodically examining the floor. Suddenly he stooped down and peered closely at the boards. Another piece of glass glittered in a crevice. Purbright prised it free with his fingernail, compared it with the first fragment, and held out both to Gibbins who mmm-ed politely but without comprehension.

“They’re off little glass phials,” explained Purbright. “You know—medical phials.” He stepped to the sink and surveyed the things that stood in it or on the draining bench close by; he did not touch them. They comprised a small saucepan that seemed to have contained milk; a deep plate with a few cereal fragments on its rim; a large china beaker; and an empty jug. All had been rinsed—apparently with water from a ewer that stood on the floor.

“I’d dearly like a sample of the milk that was in that jug,” Purbright said.

Gibbins stood disconsolately at the sink. “Do you think it was poured away? It could have been used up.”

“It could; but most people remember to leave a drop of milk in reserve, and there isn’t any other in the house. In any case, it stands out a mile that somebody’s...”

“Wait a minute,” Gibbins broke in. He bobbed down and thrust his head into the small cupboard beneath the sink. “See if you can get hold of a clean jar or bottle. A jar would be best.”

As Purbright searched shelves on the opposite wall, he heard Gibbins tapping in his retreat. He picked out a clean jam jar and handed it down. A moment later there was the sound of running liquid.

Gibbins emerged, red but triumphant, from the cupboard. He help up the jar, half filled with a whitish fluid. “Waste pipe,” he explained. “Now then, what do you reckon we’ve got here?”

“Something,” Purbright replied, “of which I fear Mr Barnaby has caught his death.”

Chapter Eighteen

When the Chief Constable opened the door of Purbright’s office shortly after eight o’clock the following morning, something more chilly than the draught from the corridor entered the room. His terse “Good morning” had an edge of irritation, and he said nothing further while he slowly and deliberately peeled off his gloves and laid them neatly side by side on the desk.

Purbright knew better than to waste time on mollifying preliminaries. “I understand, sir,” he said, “that Dr Hillyard is now at his home. I wish to execute the warrant at”—he glanced at the clock and considered—“at half-past nine. A special court has been fixed for ten. Formal remand, sir. In custody, of course.”

“Well?” Chubb had no intention of forgiving lightly the telephone call that had precipitated an early and unsatisfactory breakfast.

“Well, sir, the whole case may conceivably come to the boil, as it were, at any time now. I thought it desirable that you should be on hand. We may need your support in several ways that I cannot predict at the moment.”

Chubb regarded Purbright thoughtfully and with slightly less obvious disfavour. Then he pulled a chair to the middle of the room and sat down. “Go on, Mr Purbright.”

“In the first place,” said the inspector, manfully coping with the novelty of addressing Chubb from above, “I’d better give you a few more of the background facts we’ve been able to discover. We arrest Hillyard. Right: now there is plenty of evidence of his having allowed and, for that matter, actively helped to organize, the running of a...an immoral enterprise in a part of his house not accessible to his genuine patients.”

Chubb raised an eyebrow.

“The original idea was Carobleat’s. He had a flair for that kind of thing—as we suspected, but couldn’t prove before his death. As you know, sir, a town like this has hardly any open prostitution. Members of a small community daren’t risk their reputations.

“Not so long ago, of course, the shipping trade brought seamen here who had no reason to be scrupulous, so some prostitution did exist in the harbour district. But since the war most of the ships using Flaxborough have been small coasters manned by pretty stolid types who are a poor proposition for the ladies of Broad Street. Then there was all the cleaning up agitation in the council and the local paper. Mr Carobleat was largely responsible for that, you’ll remember, sir.”

“And a damned nuisance he made of himself,” confirmed the Chief Constable bitterly. “Oddly enough, the wife tumbled to him straight away.”

“Really, sir?”

“Rather. She used to tell me many a time about his having had his ‘hot little eyes’—that’s what she called them—all over the women on that moral welfare committee he started.”

Purbright tried briefly to visualize this mass flirtation. He failed and went on: “What Carobleat had seen, of course, was his opportunity to reorganize the declining and amateurish vice trade on a novel, very profitable basis. He used his spurious moral welfare approach to recruit a dozen or so of the more presentable women and promised them a regular living on good-class clients. But he made it clear that he was to manage the financial side himself and pay them commission. They must have found the proposition fairly attractive—especially as he undertook to arrange the ticklish question of premises.”

Chubb was looking doubtful. “Just how do we come to know all this, Mr Purbright?”

“Quite simply, sir. One of the women was interviewed by our persuasive Mr Harper. She told him a great deal. The system was rather ingenious. She used to receive by post at regular intervals a list of appointments, so called, together with a sum of money in notes at the rate of a pound for each appointment.”

“In advance?”

“That’s so,” Purbright agreed. “All she had to do then was to arrive at Dr Hillyard’s surgery by the back door just before the stated time and go straight upstairs to what were ostensibly women’s treatment cubicles. The actual...er...assignations took place in small rooms connecting the male and female cubicles.”

“How abominable,” murmured the Chief Constable.

“You’ll not wish me to elaborate on that particular aspect, sir?”

“No, no. Certainly not. I’d like to know how the others came into it, though.”

“Yes, sir. Bradlaw, now. My guess at the moment is that he did the conversion work on the first floor of Hillyard’s house. He’s a builder as well as an undertaker. We know him to have been fairly thick with Carobleat and Hillyard, and they’d naturally want someone who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Another point. The job seems to have been done without a licence, which would have been needed at that time if an ordinary firm had been called in. We can assume that Bradlaw was promised a cut from the proceeds, and got it.

“As you know now, I think, sir, the fourth member of what might be called the syndicate—or the fifth, if we count Mrs Carobleat, as we must—was Gwill. Less imaginative organizers would have been content to run their business as a camouflaged brothel with nothing really elaborate about it. But these people were inspired as well as thorough.

“They knew that the best customer would be the well-off married tradesman or farmer or business man who would be only too ready to make a fool of himself as long as he could insist on the most stringent and even melodramatic safeguards. Actually, it’s often the trimmings—you know, the peephole and the password and that sort of thing—that are half the attraction for middle-aged men who dabble in vice.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Chubb remarked.

Purbright gave a little bow. “Anyway, sir, that’s where Gwill was valuable. The complicated system of coded advertisements and box replies for which his newspaper was used may seem absurd to us; after all, arrangements could have been made quite easily over the phone or through a reliable go-between. But that wouldn’t have been so exciting.”

Chubb gave one of his gentle, thin smiles. “You really are far too sophisticated for a policeman, Mr Purbright. Never mind; go on.”

“So here in Flaxborough was a flourishing and excellently organized traffic in comforts for gentlemen,” continued the inspector. “Carobleat was the managing genius—up to last summer, that is. His next door neighbour was what you might call the public relations expert. Bradlaw won his directorship with an astute piece of construction work. Hillyard was all-important as provider of accommodation and camouflage. He might also have been useful as the M.O. of the concern—the woman we interviewed was a trifle coy on that point. And Mrs Carobleat looked after the secretarial side.”

“What about the solicitor?” asked Chubb.

Purbright thought a moment. “Well, he certainly knew what was going on. It was he who collected that last lot of box replies, presumably to pass them on—a businesslike touch, that. I doubt if he was a regularly active partner, though. There doesn’t seem to have been much he could do to help—unless we can imagine one of the ladies suing the firm for breach of contract.”

“Then why do you suppose the fellow was murdered? You don’t suggest he intended to give the show away? He told me precious little, scared as he was.”

“That is one of the questions we can’t answer yet, sir. My belief is that Gloss was killed for the same reason as Gwill, and by the same person.”

“Hillyard?”

Purbright shook his head. “Hillyard was lucky that night. The blood that soaked his sleeve came from a wound in his own arm; he was holding it tightly all the time we were talking to him. That knife had been meant for him as well.”

“He might have gashed himself to give that impression.”

“In that case, he would have made no secret of the wound.”

Chubb grunted. After a pause he said: “That leaves only Bradlaw, then?”

“On the face of it, yes. Yet I can’t see him as a footpath assassin. Whoever attacked a relatively powerful pair like Gloss and Hillyard must have been exceptionally confident and tough. It’s the audacity of the thing that sounds so unlike Bradlaw.”

“And unlike Mrs Carobleat too, I suppose?”

Purbright smiled. “Oh, yes...Mrs Carobleat. As it happens, she’s the only one with an alibi for the night Gwill was murdered.”

“You’ve checked that?” A gleam of recollection showed suddenly in Chubb’s face. “Of course...your little trip to Shropshire. How did you get on?”

“It should prove useful, sir. For one thing, we found where Mrs Carobleat was in the habit of staying. And we learned of the existence of a gentleman called Barnaby.”

“Barnaby?”

“Yes, sir. The local people are looking for him now.”

“You mean he’ll be able to help?”

“I doubt it, sir. We can but try.”

The Chief Constable looked fixedly at Purbright for several moments. “You know,” he said slowly, “you’re hedging to a perfectly scandalous degree. No”—he raised his hand—“don’t spoil it, my dear fellow; I’m sure you know what you’re doing.” He rose, walked to the desk and picked up his gloves. “There’s just one little thing I must ask of you, though.”

“Yes, sir?” Purbright also was standing. He met Chubb’s gaze with a politely solicitous eye.

“Arrest your murderer or murderers within the next twenty-four hours, or I shall ask Scotland Yard to give me assistance.” He reached for the door. “I thought you should know how I’m placed. I’m the last to want some outsider to scoop the credit for what you and your chaps have done. But you do see that I cannot possibly delay any longer.”

Chubb put on his bowler with the air of an overdrawn patron of the arts and stepped into the corridor, which was darkened at that moment by the approach of the enormous Sergeant Malley.

The Coroner’s Officer squeezed his bulk respectfully to one side and allowed the Chief Constable to pass. Then he lumbered up to Purbright’s door, knocked and went in.

“Ah, sergeant,” Purbright greeted him, “I have a little commission for you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“The day before yesterday we were anxious to have a word with Nab Bradlaw. He couldn’t be found. I rather think he was out of town. Now, then, you’re persona grata with the undertaking trade, I take it—in the way of business, so to speak?”

“Bradlaw’s fellows know me.”

“Fine. Well, I’d like you to try and tap somebody at his place now. See if you can find out where he went the other day. Don’t scare them, though—Nab least of all.”

Malley grinned. “You don’t have to worry about that, sir. I’m pretty unobtrusive. If Ben or Charlie know anything, I’ll worm it out of them.”

On his way out, Malley turned. “By the way, inspector, do you reckon this little lot is nearly tidied up? Old Amblesby’s in a terrible state. I can’t do anything with him. He’s like a kid who’s lost his hoop.”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“Well, he’s never had two inquests hanging fire at one and the same time before. There’s Gwill, of course. He would have forgotten about that but for the adjournment on Gloss the other day. That reminded him. Now he’s going around muttering that half the town’s been murdered and his books are cluttered up with corpses.”

“Would that Her Majesty’s Coroner were among them,” piously declared Purbright, closing his door.

At half-past nine exactly, the inspector and Sergeant Love presented themselves at Dr Hillyard’s surgery. Purbright informed him with the greatest respect that he was being arrested and explained some of the implications of that surprising circumstance.

Dr Hillyard glowered a good deal but made no comment.

Shortly before ten o’clock, the three men entered the police station and, on a cue from the assistant clerk to the magistrates, walked into Purbright’s office where Mrs Popplewell, J.P., was waiting to make the best of a redeemed opportunity. She was accompanied by a Mr Peters, a comatose draper whose shop was so near the police station that the kindness of leading him off for an airing whenever a little uncomplicated justice needed doing had become traditional.

Dr Hillyard regarded Mrs Popplewell with acid amusement throughout the brief formalities of the assistant clerk stumbling through the charge, Purbright giving evidence of arrest, and Mrs Popplewell herself announcing lamely and with every sign of nervousness that he, the defendant, would be remanded in custody for a week. Then he drew back his lips from the dog daisy of his splayed teeth and grinned a contemptuous and malevolent farewell before turning to accompany the station sergeant to the cells next to the table tennis room.

“Dear me!” said Mrs Popplewell to Mr Peters. “And to think that his late wife was once chosen by the Association to entertain Mr Baldwin to supper.”

Chapter Nineteen

“How did you make out?” Purbright asked Malley, whom he found awaiting him.

“I kept clear of Nab Bradlaw. He was busy in that chapel-cum-fridge of his. But I had a word with Ben and Charlie, and they said he’d been out with the van all that day and most of the night. Charlie lives nearly opposite the yard and he heard him coming back about five yesterday morning.”

“Did they know where he’d been?”

“No, sir; but Ben thought the van’s mileage gauge had clocked on nearly four hundred.”

“He couldn’t give an exact figure?”

“No, they’re none too fussy about log books, it seems.”

“Will Bradlaw be there now, do you think?”

“Should be, sir. He has a job at the Crem. at twelve, though.”

“Only the one?”

“Aye, that’s all. Ben was rather taken up with it, as a matter of fact. Said he’d never known things so slack in what he calls good felling weather like this. And even the one they have got was only staying here temporary, he said.”

“That applies to all of us by Nab’s reckoning.”

Malley grunted.

“A visitor, was he?” asked Purbright.

“Seems he was an uncle of that housekeeper, or whatever you’d call her.”

“Bradlaw’s housekeeper?”

“Yes, sir. I spoke to her, as well. She told me the same as Ben. Only the one funeral—her uncle’s. He must have been ill here for a bit and under a local doctor, else they’d never have got a certificate straight off like that.”

“Was the girl upset about her uncle?”

Malley scratched his chin. “Well, not as you might say prostrate with grief.”

“She didn’t mention the man’s name, by any chance?”

The sergeant shook his head, then looked thoughtful. “Wait a bit...Charlie was the one who called him something. He’s a bit disrespectful, is Charlie. Now what was it he said?” Malley gazed at the ceiling and made little popping sounds as if expelling invisible smoke rings.

Purbright watched him patiently for a while, then glanced at the clock. It was a little after half-past ten. He suppressed a yawn and rubbed his face.

Distracted by the movement. Malley looked down again. Suddenly he chuckled. “That’s it. Of course. Fuzzy-chops!”

“I beg your pardon?”

Malley waved a plump hand. “No, sir. Not you. The uncle bloke. Charlie called him that. Fuzzy-chops. He must have...”

The inspector, uttering something between a neigh and a groan, pushed past him, seized hat and coat from the peg, and disappeared through the door.

Ten minutes later, Purbright, Love and a couple of uniformed constables descended by car upon the place of business of Mr Bradlaw.

They entered by the side gate, and Purbright and Love left the constables in the yard staring around at the stacks of elm and oak, while they went into the workshop.

At first it appeared to be empty. Then the joiner, Ben, who had been nodding in a corner until the sound of footsteps penetrated his doze, rose suddenly and bade them a challenging “Good morning”.

“We are looking for Mr Bradlaw,” announced Purbright sternly.

Ben blinked. “Ain’t ’ere,” he retorted unhelpfully.

“Where is he, then?”

“Down at Crem., ’less he’s back.”

Purbright gave Love a quick, anxious glance, then to Ben: “Are you sure of that?”

“Course. Why not?”

“I thought he had only one funeral today.”

“S’right.”

“At eleven o’clock.”

“Was to ha’ been. The missus was that upset though, they put it forrard a bit. The boss said grief like ’ers ’d take the nature out of ’er and oughter be got over quick. So that’s...” He stopped. His audience had gone.

Those of Mr Bradlaw’s near neighbours who happened to be watching the street were intrigued to see two purposeful-looking men in raincoats shoot out of the undertaker’s yard, followed, but not pursued, by a pair of policemen. All four piled into the car that had brought them two or three minutes earlier, and drove away, the men in uniform crouching like big blue frogs in order to keep their helmets from penetrating the roof.

As he urged the suffering vehicle forward at what speed it would make, Purbright said to Love: “I am a thickheaded, complacent fool.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” replied Love, a little doubtfully.

“Yes, I am. If what I think has happened—and I could have prevented it easily enough—we might as well drive straight over that parapet.”

Love stared apprehensively at the river wall on their right. “We can only hope for the best,” he said, adding, “whatever that may be.”

“Do you know anything about the crematorium?” Purbright asked him.

“I know what it’s for.”

“I didn’t suppose you imagined it was an ice-cream factory. I mean, do you know anything about the works—the procedure? Furnaces, and that sort of thing?”

“No, nothing.”

“Never mind.” Purbright stared out at the road ahead. Soon he steered the car into a broad avenue and drove between two small brick lodges. “Here we are,” he said. “I can get the car practically up to the door. I’ll go in. There’ll be a clergyman in charge, I suppose. He’ll know all about what happens, if it hasn’t already. You wait outside and make sure of Nab. But try not to let it look like a raid on a club—keep the gendarmerie out of sight unless there’s any chasing. Which”—he heaved on the handbrake and drew the car to a halt on the gravel—“God forbid!”

Within the small chapel that Purbright entered with an urgent and hasty tip-toeing movement—a sort of reverent prance—were four people.

A curate from the Parish Church was murmuring a prayer with bowed head. He was being watched nervously by a young woman wearing a dark coat and a black, ill-fitting hat that she fingered from time to time as if feeling a bruise. Mr Bradlaw stood just behind her, clasping and unclasping his hands upon the tail of his coat and glancing occasionally with professional concern at the apparel and bearing of his man Charlie, whose first ‘outside’ assignment this was.

As Purbright looked feverishly around and tried to judge whether he had arrived in time, there swelled from the air above his head the sounds of music of a Grand Hotel celestialism. It seemed to signal the end of whatever religious rites had been in progress, for the heads of the three people other than the curate now swivelled all in one direction. Purbright was aware of slow, smooth motion somewhere, yet could not exactly place it. He studied Charlie’s face, which happened to be presented to him in profile, and followed the line of his fixed stare. He was just in time for his eye to catch the final phase of the movement that the others had been watching. A coffin was descending with dignified gradualness through the floor, rather, Purbright afterwards found himself recalling, in the manner of a cinema organ.

He strode forward. Mr Bradlaw and his housekeeper turned and stared at him. The undertaker was very pale. The girl clutched at her hat and glanced back towards the door. But Purbright took no notice of either. He hurried up to the curate and touched his arm.

“Excuse me, sir, but I am a police officer and I have reason to...” He halted breathlessly and asked, with a note of despair: “That coffin—is it...I mean, you can’t fetch it up again, I suppose?”

The curate was a very young man, but he had acquired a sense of occasion. Reddening furiously, he retorted in a stage whisper: “Really! Your suggestion is infamous. You must leave this place immediately!”

Purbright felt completely at a loss, but he battled on. “Look, sir,” he appealed, “I quite see your point. All this must seem terribly improper, but it is most important in the interests of justice that the...the gentleman in that coffin should be held for examination.”

The curate stared. Then he acidly inquired: “And what, my man, do you propose to ask him?”

The inspector thrust his fingers through his hair. “The man’s dead, sir.”

“So I had presumed.”

“And the Coroner has authorized a post-mortem,” he lied. “But that will be out of the question if this cremation is allowed to proceed. Now do you appreciate the position, sir?”

The clergyman looked thoughtful. Then he nodded, as if to signify a sudden decision, and led Purbright to a little robing room at the side of the chapel. The inspector noticed that no one else now remained in the building.

“Bit of a stunner, this, isn’t it?” the curate pleasantly remarked as soon as the door had closed behind them. He groped beneath yards of cassock and offered Purbright a cigarette. The inspector, still looking very anxious, at first refused. “Oh, don’t panic,” said the curate. “Your fellow won’t be...these things aren’t quite so immediate as people imagine. Various preliminaries, you know. But I’ll go down in half a tick and make sure. I say,” he added, “this is all in order, I suppose?”

“Perfectly,” Purbright assured him thankfully. “Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

The curate put his cigarette, still unlit, on a shelf and opened the door. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll just pop down for a word with Pluto.”

He returned after two or three minutes to report that the coffin and contents were intact and awaited the dispositions of Her Majesty’s Coroner. “You really must forgive my being a little gauche in these matters, but there’s something terribly Sunday paperish about all this. Of course,” he added ruefully, “I suppose you’re too fearfully secret-bound to satisfy my fiendish curiosity?”

Purbright skirted the hint by asking: “May I ask under what name the funeral was being conducted, sir?”

“The, er, deceased, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I didn’t know him personally, you know, but I believe he was the uncle of that lady you saw just now—Mr Bradlaw’s housekeeper. A Mr...” He fished a piece of paper from a remote pocket and looked at it. “A Mr Barnaby.”

Chapter Twenty

Flaxborough’s mortuary was a detached brick building, not much bigger than a garage, at the end of the yard behind the police station. It contained two slabs, a much battered corner cupboard raised a couple of feet from the terra-cotta tiled floor, and a shallow sink immediately beneath the single window. A coil of black hosepipe, slung from a staple, looked like a hastily scrawled charcoal circle on the flat whiteness of the wall.

Upon the slab farther from the door, a coffin rested. It’s lid had been removed and now stood upright, propped against the cupboard.

An ancient portable gas fire coughed blue flames from its shattered elements. The dim daylight was augmented by an electric bulb set within a mesh sphere in the centre of the ceiling.

Into this aseptic chamber, Purbright gently ushered an exceedingly apprehensive-looking Bradlaw. Love followed, and a constable, bringing up the rear, shut the door and remained standing impassively before it. Bradlaw glanced at the inspector, then regarded the coffin as if searching for constructional flaws.

“Who is it, Nab?” Purbright asked quietly.

Continuing to trace with his gaze the outlines of the box, Bradlaw avoided looking directly at the bearded face within. “A fellow called John Barnaby. No one you know. He died here while he was visiting my housekeeper. His niece. Bit of a nuisance, but there you are.” He swallowed and looked up at Purbright. “Why? What’s all this about?”

“Who gave the certificate?”

“Hillyard. He’d been attending him.”

“Referees?”

Bradlaw shrugged. “Scott, I think. And that other chap in Duke Street. Rawlings.”

“They made no formal examination, I suppose? The usual dotted line stuff?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Never mind.” Purbright’s voice was friendly. “By the way, did I tell you that Hillyard’s under arrest?”

Bradlaw stared at him, slowly drawing both hands from his overcoat pockets. “Has he...” he began, then was silent.

“I rather think,” said Purbright, “that I’d better caution you before we talk any more, Nab.”

Bradlaw looked down at his hands and began to rub the knuckles of one in the other palm. He appeared to be cold.

“You are not obliged to say anything in reply to my questions, but what you do say may be taken down and given in evidence.” Purbright nodded to Love, who drew a notebook from his pocket. To Bradlaw, the inspector added: “You can have your solicitor here if you’d rather, you know.”

Bradlaw glanced at the unoccupied slab. “He’s been here already—or had you forgotten?”

“Oh, yes. Gloss. I’m sorry.”

Purbright said nothing more for a while, but stood watching the slow, tense rubbing motion of the other man’s hands. They unclasped at last and spread in acknowledgment of surrender.

“All right. I’ll tell you what happened.” Bradlaw looked behind him, as if in hope of some charitable policeman having silently placed a chair there. Seeing nothing but the coldly gleaming wall, he hunched his shoulders, sighed deeply, and began.

“You may know, or you may not—I don’t suppose it matters much now—that Rupert Hillyard and a few others of us were running a sort of business side-line in the town. It wasn’t quite above board, if you follow me, and there were women mixed up in it. You see what...” He raised his eyes to Purbright. “Perhaps you’ve heard already, though?”

“Yes. We know.”

Bradlaw nodded and sniffed. “Yes, well there you are. It wasn’t a thing it would have done to let out. We all had a lot to lose. Except maybe that Carobleat woman. She was quite capable of doing the stupidest things just for spite. She hated Rupert and poor old Gwill, although I always got on fairly well with her.”

“She hated Gwill? Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. That story of her being stuck on him was just to put you off something else. Roddy Gloss thought that one up.”

“To put us off what?”

“I’ll come to that in a minute. The point is that Joan was in the...the business along with the rest of us. As a matter of fact, it was her old man who’d started it some time before he died. You didn’t know that, did you? Anyway, there she was and we had to lump it. Everything would have gone nicely, even so, if only she’d kept her mouth shut. God, what a bitch!” Bradlaw grew rigid momentarily in his indignation, then drooped once more.

“You see,” he went on, “she took up with a certain bright character in that country village of hers over in Shropshire. That’s where she came from in the first place, and when her old man died she started going back for week-ends. And that”—Bradlaw jerked his head in contemptuous indication of the coffin’s occupant—“is what she found for herself.”

“You mean Barnaby became her lover?”

“Lover and father bloody confessor. She told him all about what was going on here in Flax. Names and everything.”

“How did you get to know that?”

“How did we get to know! We soon knew all right when we started getting letters from the blackmailing bastard.”

Purbright raised his brows. “He began threatening you, did he? You’d not feel too pleased about that, I expect.”

“Not as you’d notice. We tried to buy him off. Soon he was bleeding the whole thing white. You know what blackmailers are. They’re worse than murderers. Even the police say that. Judges, too.” Bradlaw was gesticulating eagerly. “One said something just last week about it being understandable that a chap had gone for the fellow who’d been screwing money out of him.”

“Cambridge Assizes,” Purbright murmured.

“Yes, that’s right. Cambridge.” Bradlaw seized on the confirmation as though it were a long lost wallet. “Well, then: you see how we were fixed. This fellow Barnaby sucking us dry from all that distance away. Poor old Hillyard nearly going off his rocker with worry. A doctor—I ask you. As for me, I didn’t know what I was doing half the time.”

“And Gwill?” said Purbright, casually. “Was Gwill worried?”

“Of course he was. Not as much as me, perhaps. I take these things very badly. But he was very upset, all the same.” Bradlaw brightened suddenly. “That’s why he did away with himself. Don’t you see now? He was driven to it.”

“Was Gloss driven to it, as well?”

Bradlaw frowned. “How do you mean? Roddy didn’t commit suicide. He was killed.”

“By whom?”

“By that devil, of course.” He stretched his arm towards the coffin. “In cold blood. That’s the sort he was.”

Purbright seemed suddenly to have remembered something. “Excuse me a minute,” he said to Bradlaw; then, beckoning to Love to follow, he walked to the door. The constable opened it. Inspector and sergeant stepped out into the yard.

A few moments later, Purbright returned alone. Facing Bradlaw once more, he produced his own notebook. “We work on a shift system, you see.” Bradlaw, bolder now, managed to smile for a second.

Purbright unscrewed his pen. “Right. Will you go on from what you were saying?”

“I suppose,” said Bradlaw in a lowered voice, “you’d like me to get round to the other business now?” He glanced at the coffin.

“It’s up to you.”

“Has Hillyard...?”

Purbright said nothing. Bradlaw stared at him doubtfully. Then, “Of course, he’s a sick man,” he said, with the air of breaking bad news. “You understand that. I could do nothing with him once he’d started.

“It was when Roddy was killed that he seemed to make up his mind. Up to then, we’d never even seen Barnaby. We didn’t know where to find him. The money had had to be addressed post-what-do-you-call-it at Shrewsbury. But Rupert managed to pump a girl he knows at the telephone exchange here. She found out where Barnaby had made some calls to Joan Carobleat. It was a public kiosk and we guessed he must live nearby.

“Rupert got hold of a map and I agreed to take him over in the van. I thought the idea was to find Barnaby and to frighten him into letting us alone. I was in such a state I was ready to try anything.”

Bradlaw paused and shivered. “Look, can’t we go somewhere else? This place is freezing.”

Purbright stretched the arm with which he had been writing. “It is on the bleak side,” he conceded. “Try and hang on until the sergeant gets back, though, can you? He’ll not be long.”

“It’s hard to think in here, that’s all,” Bradlaw grumbled. “Still, if you say so...”

“Did you find Barnaby’s place?”

“Oh, we found it all right. But he wasn’t there. I tried to persuade Rupert to leave well alone. Instead of that, he started prowling round the place and found a window that was open a bit. He climbed in and let me in through the back door. It was then that I realized what he was up to. As I passed him, I spotted that drug case of his sticking out of his pocket. It gave me a shock, I can tell you.”

“You both went into the cottage, then?”

Bradlaw nodded. Then he looked sharply at the inspector. “I haven’t said it was a cottage, have I?”

“No; that’s true,” said Purbright quietly.

Bradlaw let this pass, but his manner became perceptibly more careful. “Rupert put the case down on a bench in the kitchen and took a syringe out of it. There were some tiny bottles there as well and he broke the top off one of them. Then he filled the syringe from it and went stalking round the place, looking into cupboards. After a bit, he came back to the kitchen table and squirted what was in the syringe into some milk that was standing there ‘That’ll have to do,’ he said, and I said, ‘You’re not trying to poison him, are you?’ and he said no, it was a drug to make Barnaby sleepy and less likely to go for us. I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth, but I didn’t argue.

“We went out through the front door and walked back to where we’d left the van under some trees. It was dark by then and we knew we’d be able to tell when Barnaby turned up because we’d see the lights of his car. I don’t know how long we were sitting there. It was bloody cold and I tried two or three times to get Rupert to give up, but he wouldn’t take any notice.

“I was just about asleep when a car passed us and drew up lower down. We waited until he’d driven in and then we followed. There was a light in the cottage and we crept round the back. Through the window we saw Barnaby walking about the kitchen and doing something with the stove. There was a saucepan on it. That seemed to make Rupert quite excited and several times he said: ‘He’s bitten; the bastard’s bitten!‘ After a while, we saw Barnaby pour some of what was in the saucepan into a plate and the rest into a beaker. He sat at the table with his back to us.

“About ten minutes later, he got up and went out of the kitchen. He came and went once or twice after that, but the last time he walked in he was looking queer. He kept feeling out for things and rocked about a bit. Rupert laughed when he saw, and I was afraid Barnaby would hear, but he didn’t. He tried to sit down at the table again, but he seemed to miss the chair and flopped down out of sight. We went right up to the window and looked through, and he was there on the floor, flat out.”

Purbright licked his finger and flicked back another leaf of his notebook. At that moment, there was a knock at the mortuary door and the constable opened it to admit Love.

The inspector turned to him. “You managed?” Love nodded. To Bradlaw, Purbright said: “We might as well get this finished now, don’t you think? Tell me if you’d rather carry on over at the office, though.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bradlaw. “There’s not much more to tell. I just want you to know I wasn’t to blame for what happened next. Honest to God, I wasn’t.” He spoke pleadingly, but with an undertone of weariness.

“All right, Nab. Take your time.”

“We got back into the cottage the same way as before. Barnaby was lying fast asleep half under the table. The two of us picked him up and managed to carry him into the bedroom. He was a hell of a weight. We dropped him on the bed, and he opened his eyes and started grunting something at us. Then he went bang off again and began to snore.

“By that time, I was sick of the whole business. I went back into the kitchen to see if there were any things for making tea. Rupert stayed behind. He was standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at Barnaby with a sort of sideways grin. He hadn’t said a word since we’d gone back inside.

“I couldn’t find any tea things, so I went to the bedroom door to see what Rupert was up to. He was by the side of the bed and bending over it. He heard me and sort of half turned round. Then I saw he was holding that syringe again and I knew what he’d done.”

Bradlaw stopped. Looking up, Purbright saw him pass a hand round the back of his neck. He was staring at the coffin and breathing quickly through half-open lips. The inspector waited, saying nothing. It seemed to him that the barking of the consumptive old gas fire was growing louder, until the dismal little building could be fancied to shake in response to it.

When Bradlaw began speaking again, the words emerged tonelessly, like the recital of a medium. “I fetched the van and Rupert and me carried him out to it and put him in the back. We drove off straight away and kept going. As soon as we got into Flax, we took the van into the yard at my place. When I opened it up, he was dead. That’s all.”

The silence that followed was broken by Purbright suddenly slapping shut his notebook. He paced a few steps up and down, then wheeled on Bradlaw.

“Tell me, Nab—why was it necessary for Barnaby to be stripped before you brought him back that night?”

Bradlaw gave no sign of having heard. He walked to the gas fire and stooped to hold both hands before it.

Quite gently came Purbright’s voice again. “It was because he was going to travel back in style, wasn’t it? In the coffin you’d remembered to take with you in that van of yours?”

Bradlaw remained crouched and silent, staring at the trembling cones of flame.

Once more Purbright addressed him. “When Barnaby arrived at the cottage, how did you recognize him? How were you sure he was the man you were after and nobody else? You said you had never met him before.”

This time Bradlaw gave an answer, but sullenly and without turning his head. “Rupert had seen him. You don’t forget someone who’s tried to stick a knife in your belly.”

“You remember what he looks like, maybe,” said Purbright. “But it’s easy to get a name wrong sometimes. I think we’d better have a second opinion, Nab.” He nodded to Love, and again the placid doorkeeper sprang to his task.

The sergeant returned almost immediately. He entered and stepped to one side of the door while the woman who had followed him stood hesitantly for a moment on the threshold. It was Joan Carobleat.

She looked from the constable to Purbright, glanced at the squatting figure of Bradlaw, and then stiffened as her eyes fell on the coffin. She turned to throw a half-smoked cigarette into the yard before coming far enough into the room for the constable to close the door behind her.

“A little party, inspector?”

She gave Purbright, who had placed himself between her and the occupied slab, a nervous, derisory smile.

“I took the liberty of asking you to come here, Mrs Carobleat, in the hope that you would be able to help us in a formal matter of identification. These things are always a little disturbing, but I promise there’s nothing here to frighten or revolt you.” He took her arm and drew her gently forward.

Tense now, pale and wide-eyed, the woman allowed herself to be led towards the long, darkly gleaming box that seemed to hover monstrously, unsupported, amidst the insubstantial whiteness of the place.

They were within five or six feet of it when she suddenly stopped. Purbright felt through her arm a great rising shudder. Then another. He looked at her face. The jaw hung open and a deep rasping sigh seemed to be held there in her throat. Seconds passed. Then the sound escaped like a frothing rush of blood. It formed a single, agonizingly expelled word.

Love jumped forward to help Purbright hold the woman as she collapsed. They lowered her gently to the floor.

When she had been carried from the mortuary by Love and the constable, Purbright turned to Bradlaw.

“I thought you might have been wrong about the name,” he said. “If this is John Barnaby, why should Mrs Carobleat have called him Harold?”

Chapter Twenty-One

“So the late Harold Carobleat was much later than we thought,” said Mr Chubb. He permitted himself a wisp of a smile in celebration of the jest.

“He was a very astute gentleman, sir.” Purbright, from an armchair in the Chief Constable’s drawing-room, stared absently at the yellow-haired Venus and listened to the faint music of crockery that came from whatever domestic retreat Mrs Chubb enjoyed.

He had just related how, six months before, increasingly importunate police inquiries into the affairs of Carobleat and Spades had driven the broker and his friends to devise evasive action. Of how, according to a second long statement by Bradlaw, this had taken the ingenious form of the supposed illness and sudden death of the principal, his secret removal to a rural retreat in Shropshire, and the burial of his firm’s books and other incriminating trifles within the coffin that Bradlaw caused to be carried, in ballast, from the house of mourning. And of how Carobleat had lain low while growing the beard that was later to persuade Mrs Poole that the dead not only walk but lack razors beyond the grave.

At this point, there was a gentle tap on the door and Mrs Chubb, a fluffy, solicitous woman whom childlessness had rendered super-motherly towards all her husband’s ‘young men’, entered with two cups of tea. She beamed at Purbright, fleetingly surveyed the windows to ensure that he was not being exposed to a draught, and departed.

The inspector sipped his tea. “Carobleat must have fancied his position to be extremely strong,” he resumed. “He’d avoided certain ruin and a likely spell of imprisonment. His wife went on supplying him with his share of the proceeds from the one branch of his enterprise that continued to flourish, posthumously, as it were. And he had a firm hold—or so he thought—over the associates he’d left behind, none of whom would be likely to risk exposure. He could rely on his wife watching them and also conducting a rearguard action against the inquisitive police while she wore black for the man with whom she spent every other weekend over in Shropshire.

“Incidentally, Carobleat must have been highly amused by the falling into his wife’s lap of the sizeable lump of insurance he’d had the foresight to provide for when the idea of ‘dying’ first occurred to him.

“Then something happened that he hadn’t bargained for.

“He had quite a lot of money standing to his credit, and he’d naturally made arrangements to recover as much of it as he could. He had probably lodged with Gloss a simple will whereby the poor little widow would inherit the lot—less duty, that couldn’t be helped—and hang on to it, together with the insurance, until it it was safe for the pair to re-unite in Bermuda or somewhere.

“But up turns a will of a very different kind. To everyone’s surprise, the late Mr Carobleat proves to have made over all his possessions to his good friend and neighbour, Mr Gwill. Never mind if the will is a forgery. Carobleat’s wife can’t do anything. And Carobleat himself is scarcely the best person to contest it. So Gwill cleans him out, doubtless having agreed to split with the others later on.”

Chubb shook his head gravely. “It’s a damnably unethical business, Mr Purbright. I find it almost incredible that professional men could have taken part in a conspiracy of that kind.”

“Anyway,” Purbright went on, “it proved a more dangerous adventure than they’d imagined. They’d underestimated Carobleat hopelessly. He was an exceedingly resourceful man and an unforgiving one. And he had that enormous advantage of being officially non-existent. It was as good as a cloak of invisibility.

“I think we can take it that he’d been back to Flaxborough at odd times during the past six months. He’d bought himself a new car, probably through his wife, and although an accident involving a request for his licence would have been awkward, there wouldn’t have been much risk provided he came and went during darkness. It seems he even got in touch with Gwill once or twice by going between the two back gardens. That would account for poor old Mrs Poole’s obsession with walking corpses. What he would really be after, I fancy, was assurance that no double-crossing was being contemplated.

“Eventually, he must have learned the truth. The others couldn’t stall for ever. Once he knew what was going on, he wasted no time.

“He first avoided the danger of his wife being suspected later on by getting her to spend the week-end at the inn near his cottage. He drove overnight to Flaxborough, let himself into his old house, and fixed up the cable he’d brought with him. It so happened that Mrs Poole actually saw him running the wire along the hedge, but luckily for him her wits were in no fit state to grasp what it meant.

“While he was biding his time in the house, he rang round to Hillyard, Gwill, Bradlaw and Gloss and asked them to meet him in Gwill’s house late that night. According to Bradlaw’s statement, Carobleat asked for what he called a ‘friendly settlement’ that would include his getting out of the country. They talked it over among themselves and agreed to meet him. Bradlaw says that Hillyard was then in favour of killing Carobleat quietly and burying him in the garden, but the others shied at the idea because the ground would be hard.

“Bradlaw deliberately arrived late for the meeting. He hoped that if there were trouble he would be in nice time to miss it. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to stay away altogether”—Purbright consulted one of the sheets he had taken from his case—“and ‘risk being let down by those twisters’ as he put it. Bradlaw is something of a self-made man, sir; not very articulate, but shrewd,” explained the inspector.

“I’m interested to know how Gwill was lured out on his own,” said the Chief Constable. “He also was a shrewd fellow, as I remember.”

“He wasn’t lured out on his own, sir. The other three were with him. All Carobleat had needed to do after sluicing his neighbour’s drive to earth the victim nicely (it wasn’t Gwill at the gate when Wilkinson’s witness cycled by—he just assumed it was) was to switch on the power and make a phone call to next door.

“He said he’d hurt his leg and would be obliged if his friends would come round. They had no reason to refuse, so off they went. It was pure chance that Gwill reached the gate first. According to Bradlaw, he ‘jumped like a rabbit full of buckshot and went slap down on the gravel’. He goes on: ‘We all thought he’d been shot, although we had heard nothing. I opened the gate and there was nobody there...’ ”

“He opened the gate!” exclaimed Chubb. “Bradlaw, you mean?”

“Yes, sir. The discharge through Gwill must have blown the fuses in Carobleat’s house. Anyway, this is how Bradlaw’s statement goes on:

“ ‘The three of us picked Marcus up and carried him back into the house. Rupert Hillyard took a good look at him and said he was dead. He said he thought he had been electrocuted. We agreed it might look bad for us, so we decided to put the body over in the field opposite. Roddy Gloss pulled the gate open with a walking stick in case it was still alive. We put the body in the field. I think it was Roddy’s idea to lay it under the pylon to make it look like an accident. While we were still in the field, a car came out of Carobleat’s place and shot off up the road. It must have been him.’ ”

“Upon my soul!” said Chubb.

He stared for a while into his empty cup. “Tell me, though—why did Bradlaw tell you that rigmarole about Barnum—Barnaby—whatever his name was?”

Purbright shrugged and smiled. “A forlorn effort to save what was left of his professional reputation, I believe, sir. Always at the back of poor old Bradlaw’s mind was the thought of that fearfully unethical funeral trick; he’d played last summer. Keeping that quiet seemed more important to him than anything else. It even blinded him to the absurdity of his story about a blackmailer who tried to kill off his benefactors.”

“Yes,” said Chubb, “that would have been rather foolish, wouldn’t it?”

Purbright levered himself out of his chair. “It there’s nothing else, sir...”

The door opened a little way and Mrs Chubb’s rubicund face appeared. “I think,” said directly to Purbright, “that there may be one cup left in the pot, Mr er...”

The inspector raised his hand with the polite dignity of a man declining an earldom, “No, ma’am, really. But thank you all the same.” He began puling papers into his briefcase.

Mrs Chubb’s smile faded. “It’s very cold outside,” she said.

Purbright felt vaguely that he had failed to discharge some sort of obligation. He sallowed and sought a suitable platitude with which Mrs Chubb might be recompensed.

Seizing on the first that came to mind, “A very nice old table,” he murmured, appreciatively stroking the elaborate and hideous graving of its brass top.

Reaction was unexpected. “You shall have it, Mr er...” Mrs Chubb instantly and warmly proclaimed.

“Oh, no...really...”

“We insist.” She looked imperiously at her husband. “Don’t we, Harcourt?”

Mr Chubb made a vague noise suggestive of assent.

“As a matter of fact,” his wife continued pleasantly, “we aren’t all that fond of it ourselves—polishing brass isn’t my idea of pleasure—so Mr Chubb has been after a replacement. There was one he went to see the other week, but he left it until rather late in the evening and it had gone. It sounded awfully attractive in the advert.—Japanese ebony, or something, I think it was—do you remember, Harcourt?”

Mr Chubb stared gravely at his nails, then at the ceiling. “Sorry, my dear...it’s gone clean out of my head.”