by Colin Watson
Mrs Poole shook her head. “Not specially. He bought a sideboard about a year ago. A bit before that we had the dining-room chairs re-seated.” She looked doubtfully at the book. “That’s all office stuff. He kept some of it here and worked on it in the evenings sometimes.”
Purbright showed her the open pages. “You wouldn’t know why he kept these, I suppose?”
She peered at the cuttings. “They’re adverts,” she said unhelpfully, “from the paper.”
“Oh,” said Purbright. He closed the book, put it back with the others and drew down the desk top.
Mrs Poole stood aside as he left the room. She closed the door behind them and asked if he wished to see anything else. Purbright hesitated. “There’s the bedroom,” prompted Mrs Poole.
“I’m a terrible old nuisance, aren’t I?” he said brightly, as they moved towards the staircase.
“That’s all right, sir. I only want it all to be settled and no more harm done to anyone.” She reached the landing and turned off towards a second, shorter flight.
Purbright silently kept pace with the housekeeper along a passage that he judged to correspond with the corridor below.
She stopped before a door almost at the end. They were at the back of the house. The air was cold and damp.
Mrs Poole looked at him earnestly. “Do you know when they’ll be bringing him home?” she asked. “I thought I’d better keep this room ready.”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you definitely, but it shouldn’t be later than tomorrow. You understand that what we call a post-mortem examination has had to be made?”
“I see.” She opened the door quietly and motioned him in. The room was dim but the outlines of its few pieces of furniture showed it to be spacious and arranged with austere practicality. Purbright walked slowly across to the window, pulled the curtain slightly aside, and looked out.
Below was the large back garden, dank and shrubby. A line of poplars screened its end like huge brooms stuck handles down in the earth. Weak winter sunshine fell aslant one of the two flanking walls. The bushes were motionless and dark against the frost-whitened soil.
Purbright let the curtain fall and re-crossed the room. The woman said nothing. He went past her and waited for her to close the door. Her eyes, he saw, had become slow and devoid of expression, like raisins in the dough of her face.
He put his hand on her arm. “What has been frightening you, Mrs Poole?”
She looked up and caught her breath. Then she gave a jerky little smile and replied: “Nothing frightens me, sir. Not now. I think it’s over.”
She began to lead the way back along the passage.
Chapter Three
Inspector Purbright did not pay his promised call on the lonely widow of Mr Carobleat. As he walked out through the open gate of The Aspens, he noticed activity in the field beyond the fence on the opposite side of the road and crossed over.
Detective Sergeant Sidney Love was gloomily trudging around in the grass, followed closely by a confused-looking uniformed constable. As Purbright joined them, he saw a small wooden stake driven into the ground a few feet from the base of the power supply mast.
Love eyed him without enthusiasm. “We’ve taken measurements, sir.”
Purbright gazed up at the pylon. “What an odd perch for a newspaper proprietor,” he murmured. “Power without responsibility, I suppose.”
“Is there anything else we can do?” Love asked. “It’s jolly cold here.”
“Have you measured the height of the cable arm?”
“What, climbed up, do you mean, sir?” The sergeant looked incredulously at the steel network.
“Maybe it’s pointless,” Purbright conceded. “Call it twenty-five feet, shall we? No, twenty-seven—that’ll sound as if we really know.” He walked slowly round the stake, scuffing the grass here and there with his shoe. “Nothing round here, Sid?”
“What had you in mind, sir?”
Purbright looked at Love from under his brows. “Clues,” he said. “Cloth fibres. Nail parings. Dust from a hunch-backed grocer’s shop. You know.”
“Wilkinson here found a mushroom.”
“In December?”
“It wasn’t up to much. I advised him to throw it away.”
“In that case we might as well get back into town. I’ve already spent a useless half hour in that mausoleum over there. Mrs what’s-her-name should flee to relatives before she works herself into a state of demoniac possession.”
Love glanced at him. “She gave you that sort of tale, did she?”
“She did indeed. It was rather like the ‘Cat and the Canary’. Come on; you’re right, it is cold.”
“Mrs Poole isn’t the only one with queer ideas about this business.” Love kicked the stake from side to side, drew it out and handed it to the constable. “There’s talk at some of the farms about hauntings and what have you. That’s right, isn’t it, Wilk?”
Wilkinson frowned as he waited for the others to climb over the fence. “Mind you, sir,” he said to Purbright, “it wouldn’t do to believe everything they say down this end. They think telling lies is a great joke down here—more especially if it’s likely to give us fellows a job to do for nothing.”
“Yes, but you told me you’d heard this latest tale direct from a cousin or something,” Love put in.
“That’s right, sir,”
“Go on then, man,” urged the sergeant.
Wilkinson looked a little resentful. He had not intended a piece of country gossip, passed on in an effort to cheer a chilled and chilly C.I.D. man, to be officially reported to the bland and (he had heard) “sarky” inspector. But Purbright, walking now almost paternally between them, turned upon the constable a look of kindly encouragement.
“Well, sir,” said Wilkinson, “I’ve no reason to believe this nor to expect you to, but according to this relative of mine—he has a garage a bit along the road there—some of the country people have had the notion for a while now that some sort of a ghost was trying to get into Mr Gwill’s house. It sounds daft, put like that”—the constable reddened—“and I wouldn’t think of repeating such nonsense except for something this chap says he saw himself latish on last night. He was cycling home from town when he saw Mr Gwill just behind that gate of his and splashing water about on the ground from a big jar or a can. It was pretty dark, but Maurice was sure about the water. He could hear it slosh as he went by.”
Purbright had listened carefully; now he asked: “And what did your cousin think was significant about that?”
The constable flushed more deeply still. “The tale goes that it was holy water in that pot...But it doesn’t seem to make much sense. I only mentioned it, like, to the sergeant here...” He broke off.
“Jolly interesting little story, anyway,” said Purbright, rescuing Wilkinson from his embarrassment. “It helps to give us a picture of the fellow, which is more than I can get from the people who are supposed to have known him. You were quite right to tell us, constable.”
The trio made its way through the streets of the town without further conversation. Purbright liked staring about him when he was out and silently guessing the errands of such inhabitants as were not leaning against something. Love watched presentable young females from behind his disguise of pink-faced single-mindedness. As for Wilkinson, he ruminated on the inspector’s lack of ‘side’ and thought up ways of proclaiming it, with some small credit to himself, in the parade room later on.
One of the first things Purbright saw when he entered the police station was the unmistakable rear of Sergeant Malley, who was leaning over the reception counter to talk to the duty officer. In the centre of the serge acreage of his trousers seat was a round, white blemish. Purbright stopped and tapped his shoulder. “You seem to have sat on something,” he confided.
Malley’s hand stole searchingly down. Having peeled off what he could of the white substance, he stared at his fingers. “It’s one of those bloody marshmallows,” he announced.
“What bloody marshmallows?”
“The one’s from old Gwill’s pocket. It must have fallen on my chair when I was collecting his stuff together for Lintz to take away.”
“Oh,” said Purbright. He walked off to his own office.
Sergeant Love joined him. As there were now no girls to be regarded, he had allowed his face to resume its expression of slightly petulent innocence. Purbright looked upon it thoughtfully; he could never quite decide whether that cleanly shining feature properly belonged to a cherub or an idiot.
“Please give me”—the inspector had lifted the telephone—“the pathology block at the General. Doctor Heineman.” He leaned back against his desk and waited.
A mittel-European voice chimed brightly over the wire. “Mornink, inspector!”
“Good morning, doctor. Finished with that gentleman we asked you to look at?”
“But yes. You are requirink him back again?”
“What killed him?”
“Failure of heart, naturally. But before that there was asphyxia and before that shock from the electrics and nothing before that except joys and sorrows and delusions, dear chappie. A report I’m sendink you any minute. You must think I’ve somethink worse to do. I don’t play golf all day, you guess. How’s that funny little fellow that scrubs the face with carbolic or what? When’s he come and see us cuttink-up merchants again; that’s how he calls us, I know that. No, but I’m so busy now. Got what you wanted?”
“Stomach contents?”
“Ha, all sorts. Very jolly. Why?”
“Anything unusual?”
“Nothink corrodink, I should say. Want them done?”
“Not if you’re happy about the cause of death.”
“He was not poisoned. That I tell you. Shock and everything; that was it.”
“Very well, doctor. Oh, by the way...”
“Yes?”
“Did you notice anything about the mouth? Any trace of recent food?”
“But yes, yes...both teeth pieces, top and bottom, they are sticky—gummy, how is it? He would be eatink sweets, that fellow.”
“Soft, white sweets?”
“Exactly so.”
“Thank you, doctor. You’ll let me have the full report as soon as you can. The inquest will be adjourned, by the look of things; you needn’t bother to turn up tomorrow unless you hear.”
As Purbright put down the telephone, Love gave him a questioning look. “Why the morbid interest in diet?”
“Because,” said Purbright, “I have yet to find a man of Gwill’s age who can clamber up towers in the middle of the night with his mouth full of marshmallows. Because I have never encountered a suicide who has been in the mood for confectionery at the last moment. And because I cannot believe that any newspaper owner would be anxious, even in sudden insanity, to court the kind of publicity he has caused to be inflicted on others.”
“You don’t think he was electrocuted, then?”
“Oh, yes, he was. Heineman may imagine you wash your face in carbolic, but he doesn’t make mistakes with corpses. Anyway, there were signs of burning, I believe; we’ll know for sure when the P.M. report comes in.” He paused. “Have you ever had anything to do with the nephew?”
“George Lintz? I’ve run across him occasionally.”
“A close gentleman.”
Love shrugged. “Careful, certainly. Do you think he knows anything?”
“Hard to say. You might have a go at him. He resists the suave approach. Try your bike-without-lights manner.”
“What times do you want him to account for?”
“Last night from sixish until whatever time he says he went to bed. He is married, isn’t he?”
“That’s right.”
“In that case, try her as well. See if she has the Lady Macbeth touch. Cocktail cabinet catalogues on the kitchen table: that sort of thing. Before you go, you might take a look at his statement to Malley. There are one or two other things I’d better tell you, although they amount to very little so far.” He described the interview with Lintz and his visit to The Aspens.
“Don’t you think there might be something behind the ghoulies and ghosties business?” Love suggested.
“I wouldn’t write it off,” Purbright replied. “Mrs Poole obviously believes in ‘the withering touch of tomb-escaped avenger’. She’s been frightened, undoubtedly, but she’ll not say by what or whom.”
“She may be a bit touched, of course.”
“Yes, but there are other tales than hers, apparently.”
Love pouted. “Will you get an adjournment tomorrow?”
“Oh, certainly. Not for long, though. Gwill was a fairly important fellow. There’ll be some pressure to have him put under without any unseemly inquiries. We shall have to produce a convincing argument within the next week or so.”
“There’s the point about the marshmallow, or whatever it was.”
Purbright waved his hand contemptuously. “I can just hear old Albert on that...‘Eatin’ sweets, was he, eh? And why not, eh? Better than drinkin’ himself silly.’ ”
The inspector’s opinion of Mr Albert Amblesby was well founded. Flaxborough’s coroner was an ancient of such obtuseness that the inquiries over which he presided were liable to deteriorate into ill-tempered games, with Mr Amblesby inventing new rules and breaking old ones, deriding what he couldn’t understand and generally playing hell until he could glare around his court and judge from the silence of the other angry, unhappy or bewildered contestants that he had won.
“You’d better ask Malley to come in. He might know something that will give us a lead.”
Love returned with the outsize Coroner’s Officer, breathing hard.
Sergeant Malley seemed pleased rather than surprised by Purbright’s suspicion. “Murder,” he observed, “wouldn’t half be a nice change.”
“What do you know about Gwill’s affairs?” Purbright asked him.
“Not a deal. He kept very much to himself. Rather a gloomy chap, I always thought. He was supposed to be carrying on with that Carobleat woman, you know. Not that that would have set anyone on fire, I expect. Anyway, not once her old man had upped and died. He had plenty of money, of course—Gwill, I mean. Or so they say.”
“But he didn’t collect jealous husbands?”
“Not as you’d notice.”
“Did he have any other kind of enemies, do you know?”
Malley pursed his lips. “Well...put it this way. Nobody liked him. Does that help?”
“Enormously,” said Purbright. “I do like a big field.”
Love spoke. “But he had a circle of friends, surely?”
“Oh, yes,” said Malley. “Circle is the word.”
“Exclusive?”
“Like the reptile house.”
“Come now,” protested Purbright, “we must try to be objective about this. The list the wild-eyed housekeeper gave me was respectable enough. Wait a minute...” He took an envelope from his pocket. “Yes, there’s a doctor for a start. Hillyard—you know him?”
“Dipsomaniac,” retorted the unrepentant Malley.
“Medical Officer of Health-elect,” said Purbright, comfortingly. “Then there’s Bradlaw the burier. Blameless, surely. We’ve nothing on Nab Bradlaw, have we?”
Love shook his head. Malley grunted.
Again Purbright glanced at the list. “Rodney Gloss, man of law.”
“Straight as an acrobat’s intestines.” This from the stout sergeant.
Purbright sighed. “I think,” he said, “that we can start from the sound assumption that people seldom get themselves murdered by complete strangers. At the same time, we shall need to begin inquiring into what, if any, were Gwill’s departures from the normal and legitimate. Also, I propose to have a word with the Chief Constable and try and persuade him—God give me strength—that there is good reason to suspect that Gwill was done.
“And we needn’t hope to be spared trouble by old Chubb deciding to ‘cal
l in the Yard’, as I believe the phrase goes. For one thing, he likes to keep misfortune in the family. For another, he’d probably be hesitant to bother such a busy man as Sir Robert Peel.”
Chapter Four
While Purbright was fortifying himself with food against the approaching ordeal by Chief Constable, Mr Harcourt Chubb, himself—a slow thinker and late eater—listened to a lawyer’s tale.
It was Mr Rodney Gloss who had called upon him.
The Chief Constable, silver-haired, composed and misleadingly aesthetic-looking, regarded his visitor with polite attention and a perpetual half-smile.