Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That he might commit suicide, you mean?”

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

  “If he had, he didn’t confide in me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Lintz shook his head.

  “Neighbours?” the sergeant persisted.

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

  “Mr Carobleat wasn’t very old, sir?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “Were they friendly, he and your uncle?”

  “They were next-door neighbours.”

  “Nothing beyond that?”

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

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

  “For what it’s worth, yes.”

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

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

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

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

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

  “And the Coroner?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You think not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s only what I’ve been told.”

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

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

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

  Purbright waited but she remained silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But he was upset about something?”

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

  The inspector leaned forward slightly. “By whom?”

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

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

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

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

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

  Back again.

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

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

  “Mr Gloss?”

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

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

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

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

  “They were, sir.”

  “And no one else called here regularly?”

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

  “Mrs Carobleat?”

  “Now and again. Once a week, maybe.”

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

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

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

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

  “You are agreeable, then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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