Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  “I fancy Mr Gwill was surprised, too.”

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

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

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

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

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

  “When did you leave home, Mrs Carobleat?”

  “Fairly early yesterday morning.”

  “You went straight over to Shropshire?”

  She nodded.

  “Would you care to tell me why?”

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

  “I see.”

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

  “Except the expense, perhaps.”

  “He provided for me.”

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

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

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

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

  “Well?”

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

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

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

  Purbright grinned back. “Never mind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “My patient?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He’d need to be.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The undertaker, Bradlaw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But can we sort out anything useful?”

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

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

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

  “What sort of dealings? Buying and selling?”

  “She hadn’t a clue.”

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

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

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

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

  “So I’ve heard.”

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

  “Did she say when this threat was made?”

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

  “Hardly an incident pregnant with murderous possibilities.”

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

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

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

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

  “Just frightened.”

  “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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