Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  Coffin Scarcely Used

  ( Flaxborough - 1 )

  Colin Watson

  Described by Cecil Day-Lewis as 'a great lark, full of preposterous situations and pokerfaced wit' Coffin Scarcely Used is Colin Watson's first Flaxborough novel and was originally published in 1958. The small town of Flaxborough is taken aback when one of the mourners at Councillor Carobelat's funeral dies just six months later. Not only was he Councillor Carobelat's neighbour but the circumstances of his death are rather unusual, even for Flaxborough standards. Marcus Gwill, proprietor of the Flaxborough Citizen has been found electrocuted at the foot of an electricity pylon with a mouth full of marshmallows. Local gossip rules it as either an accident or a suicide but Inspector Purbright remains unconvinced. After all he's never encountered a suicide who has been in the mood for confectionery at the last moment ...

  Coffin, Scarely Used

  Colin Watson

  Chapter One

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

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

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

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

  What was wrong with the funeral?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “They can be rather trying, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What, in his slippers?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That seems logical.”

  There was a short pause.

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

  “Carobleat?”

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

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

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

  “You’re going to my uncle’s place?”

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

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

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

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

  “I suppose so. When?”

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

  Lintz shrugged and reached down his hat and coat.

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

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

  “No,” said Lintz, “I d
on’t.”

  Chapter Two

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

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

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

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

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