Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  Purbright rubbed his cheek. “We can’t stretch coincidence three ways. Hillyard was identified. Someone resembling the nimble Mr Gloss was described. And a van very like Nab Bradlaw’s was spotted. All around the same time and bound in the same direction. All three were friends of the murderee. One is now frightened and a second produces a leaky alibi, while the third breathes whisky fumes and gives portentous Caledonian grunts. Pray heaven we’re not faced with a conspiracy, Sid. Conspiracies are the most dreadful things to sort out. Oh, God, they’re maddening, believe me...”

  The telephone rang. Again it was Lintz. The inspector would remember the instruction to insert three advertisements in that week’s issue on the lines of he knew what? Yes, well, it had turned out that four insertions had been ordered by Gwill himself the previous Saturday. Mr House had just seen them in proof. He hadn’t known about them before because the girl had taken them while he was out of the office. What did the inspector want done now?

  “Oh,” said Purbright, “cancel mine and let the original ones go in. So much the better, sir. And thanks for letting me know. While we’re on the subject, I’d be obliged if you would make certain of being given all the replies yourself as they come in. Don’t allow them out of your hands, sir. I think that may be important. You what?...Yes, telephone my office here as soon as anything arrives—the very first one—and I’ll come over.”

  Love watched him replace the receiver and said: “It could be, couldn’t it, that you’re taking a risk with that chap. How do you know he won’t grab the replies and hand you some he’s concocted himself?”

  “I don’t. But I can hardly impound the whole newspaper and staff it with our lads, can I? This is just one of those occasions when we have to take a chance on somebody.”

  “There may be nothing in this advertisement business.”

  “Quite. We shall probably know by the week-end. Incidentally, I thought the inquest went reasonably well, didn’t you?”

  Love agreed that it had. Whatever Mr Chubb had done to prime Flaxborough’s irascible and senile Coroner, it had achieved remarkable results. Not only had Mr Amblesby forborne from interrupting the medical evidence of Dr Heineman with malicious cross-questioning about his origins, but he had made no attempt to introduce homilies on drink, gadgets, Edwardian levees, or the monstrous prodigality of the working class, all subjects which Mr Amblesby considered very proper to inquests.

  The only dangerous moment had been when Lintz, giving evidence of identification, touched upon his having left Gwill alone at his house on the evening before the discovery of the body. The Coroner, malevolently clicking his dentures and fixing Lintz with an eye like an agate dipped in sputum, accused: “Do you mean to tell me you left an old gentleman of his age on his own and with no one to look after him?” Lintz sullenly retorted that his uncle had been perfectly capable, by no means elderly, and strongly opposed to being looked after by anybody. “But he must be over ninety,” persisted Mr Amblesby. “He was on the association committee with me when Sir Philip trounced that radical chap...Malley, what was the fellow’s name? Pro-Boer, he was...” The sergeant had thereupon nursed him back into the present with an explanation that Marcus Gwill’s father was not the gentleman with whom they were now concerned. The rest of the proceedings had gone smoothly enough, with Mr Amblesby harmlessly slumped in a reminiscent coma.

  After lunch, Purbright took himself off through the fog that was spreading inland from the already obscured harbour district and sought the offices of Possett, Gloss and Weatherby.

  Mr Gloss, who privately regarded inspectors of police much as the managing director of a public transport company might regard inspectors of tickets, was careful nevertheless to give his welcome that air of unpatronizing amiability that so effectively discourages subordinates from putting demands or awkward questions. He waved Purbright to a chair, then took a seat—a smaller, harder one than his visitor’s—beside, but not at, his desk. He offered him a cigarette, a Woodbine, lit it for him with a match and said melifluously and invitingly: “Now, Inspector.”

  “Now, sir,” responded Purbright, with a smile of such friendliness that if he had said outright that here was a game two could play Gloss could not have taken his meaning more clearly. “You’ll have some idea of what I’m after, I expect?”

  Gloss also smiled. “Your intention, doubtless, is to grill me, inspector,” he said good-humouredly. “That is, assuming that you are investigating the lamentable death of my client, Mr Gwill.”

  “You were his legal adviser, I understand, sir?”

  “I was, indeed. And am still, so far as the posthumous disposition of his affairs is concerned.”

  “He made a will, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yes. A straightforward document. Everything goes to his nephew, Mr Lintz, including the controlling interest in the Flaxborough Citizen Printing and Publishing Company. I believe the arrangement was fairly widely understood, so there can be no harm in my revealing the terms of the will. The fact is that Mr Gwill had no one else to whom he could leave his possessions: no one of blood relationship, that is.”

  Gloss looked at Purbright intently, as if daring him to cross-examine. But the will seemed to have lost significance already. The inspector went straight on to other matters.

  “How long had you known Mr Gwill, sir?”

  “A fair number of years, I should say. Almost a life-time, in fact. The professional relationship dates back to, oh, the early ’thirties.”

  “You had always been on good terms with him?”

  “Come, inspector; you do not, surely, expect me to make any such claim?” Gloss was the bluff and open advocate now. “We had differences of opinion on many occasions. Marcus was not of an altogether amenable disposition. One made allowances...” he shrugged. “One got on, notwithstanding. I wonder your inquiries, even at their present presumably undeveloped stage, have not adduced evidence of a certain coolness in my client’s attitude to others.

  “But”—Gloss bulged his eyes—“do not misunderstand me. At no time, no time, was there any serious likelihood of a breach between us. Men of business never allow temporary emotional discord to blind them to the mutual advantages of association. Please do not regard that as cynical, inspector; it is plain truth.”

  “It sounds logical, sir. May I ask if you had any business interest in common with Mr Gwill beyond the...the normal client-solicitor relationship?”

  “Pray amplify that question, inspector. I am not altogether with you.”

  “Perhaps I had better put it another way. Are you aware of any occupation, any source of income, of Mr Gwill’s, apart from his ownership of the newspaper?”

  “Ah, now you are framing the question very differently. In its original form, it almost implied suspicion that Gwill and I might have shared in some pecuniary enterprise on the side, as it were. I do hope you entertain no thought of the possibility of anything so improper?”

  “I’m sure you would be guilty of nothing the Law Society might frown on, Mr Gloss.”

  “No, indeed. That would be quite unrealistic. As to your amended question, now...” Gloss puckered his brow and was silent a while. Then he shook his head. “The answer must be no, inspector. Not that the bare negative is incapable of qualification, you understand; but I think it will serve in the context of police investigation.”

  “If I were of an uncharitable disposition,” Purbright said quietly, “I might almost take that to be a roundabout way of saying that your client’s sudden departure has left some money lying around that isn’t strictly accounted for.”

  Gloss looked at the policeman with undisguised admiration. “Upon my soul, but you’re a perceptive fellow, inspector. And you’re absolutely right. The trouble is, you know”—he leaned forward—“that my client suffered a disadvantage common to many gentlemen in a commercial way of occupation. They are naturally concerned to order their affairs to meet the contingencies of our times. Taxation and so forth, you understand. But such arrangements
demand supervision by a live principal—a man who can sign his name—perhaps several names, alas. Manipulation is called for, inspector. Manipulation. And a corpse, God bless us, cannot manipulate.”

  “I see what you mean, sir.”

  The solicitor crossed one leg over the other and examined a carefully polished shoe cap. “You must not conclude, of course, that any substantial proportion of Mr Gwill’s assets is, how shall we say, frozen. His less orthodox accounts and holdings may need to remain outside the scope of the will for the time being, but they represent no part of the money that has accrued from his publishing business.”

  “Can you tell me what they do represent?”

  After the briefest of pauses, Gloss shook his head. “No, inspector, I’m afraid I cannot help you there.”

  “You appreciate, I expect, sir, that the fact of Mr Gwill having been murdered obliges us to examine everything about his affairs that might show a motive.”

  “Do I take it that you infer from the existence of an unofficial source of income that he might have been obtaining money by exerting pressure on some person?”

  “I infer the possibility of blackmail.”

  Gloss pursed his lips. “That is what I imagined might be your line of reasoning. But do you think that if that had been the case my client would have acquainted me with the extent of his investments? He need not have done so.”

  “Nor need you have said anything about them to me, sir.”

  “No, but I think it safer that I should.”

  “Safer? Safer for whom, Mr Gloss?”

  “For myself, inspector. I shall be entirely frank with you. It is my private belief that this money was obtained not by blackmail but by other means of questionable legality. What they were I do not know and I do not wish to know. But some months ago I noticed a change in the man’s manner. He became more excited, yet there was an element of fear in his excitement. He boasted of the supplements to his means and hinted at his having to be clever to obtain them. The sums themselves, as far as I have been able to check, were not spectacular. I think it was the method of coming by them that gave him some sort of stimulus. I further received the impression that some third person was being deprived of a share in the gains and that his discomfiture was contributing to my client’s sense of elation.”

  “You felt Gwill was doing something dangerous, you mean? For the thrill of it?”

  “Exactly. These little extras had been coming his way for a fairly considerable time, but he had said nothing about them to me, apart from asking advice on investment occasionally.”

  “Which you gave?” Purbright interjected.

  “Oh, yes. Why not? I had no proof of my client’s transactions being in any way improper.”

  “Please go on, sir.”

  “Well, during recent months he grew more loquacious. Not factually informative, you understand, but full of little hints and boasts of a slightly provocative character. He seemed anxious that I should feel involved in some way. I remember he said once that I should need to be careful for my own skin—that was how he put it—for my own skin, if ever anything happened to him. I asked him what he meant and he said something to the effect that he had made an enemy ‘good enough for us both’. To be quite honest, I had come by that time to suspect my client of being considerably overwrought and perhaps lacking balance.”

  “You think now there may have been something in what he said?”

  Gloss got up and walked to the window. With his back to Purbright, he went on talking as he stared out at the passing traffic.

  “I am inclined to the view,” he said, “that Gwill said what he did after having conveyed for reasons best known to himself a false impression of our relationship to some other person. This hypothetical third party, it may be, was fobbed off with the story that I had been given custody of monies of which he had been deprived, in order that he would make no direct or violent attempt to recover them from Gwill himself. As things have turned out, it appears that the ruse did not save Gwill from the revenge of the person he had provoked. But what very naturally concerns me, inspector, is that someone who has shown himself capable of murder is now at large and possibly obsessed with the notion that only I now stand between him and what he considers his due.”

  At the end of this speech, Gloss turned slowly from the window and stood facing Purbright. “I trust,” he said, “you will now appreciate why I made the request—of which your Chief Constable has doubtless acquainted you—for police protection; and why I have disclosed to you what would normally be regarded as professionally confidential matters.”

  Purbright rubbed his chin and sighed. He found the ponderous rectitude of Gloss’s recital tiring and an obstacle to his selection of suggestive facts.

  “I wonder,” he said at last, “if you would care to tell me where you were on Monday night, Mr Gloss?”

  The sudden change of subject seemed to set the solicitor thumbing hastily through some mental brief. “Monday night...Monday...”

  “Yes. The night Gwill was killed.”

  “Ah...” The court manner was returning. Some surprising revelation, clinching a case, confounding a prosecutor, vindicating a wronged client, was about to be tossed, with studied carelessness, before the bench. “Curiously enough, inspector”—Gloss slowly lowered himself back into his chair and gazed earnestly over interlaced fingers held just above his chin—“I spent Monday evening at the home of Marcus Gwill and stayed until after he was dead.”

  Chapter Eight

  “I suppose you would think me facetious if I were to ask if you killed him,” Purbright said.

  “Not at all: the question is a proper one in the circumstances,” Gloss conceded. “But I’m afraid my answer will not help you very much. It is no.”

  Purbright took out a notebook. “I’m my own secretary today,” he remarked wryly. “I hope you won’t be put off by feeling sorry for me, but I really must take a statement after what you’ve just said.”

  “Naturally. I have given the matter some thought and I feel that to give a frank account of what I know of the events of the other evening is the least I can do for the sake of my late client and”—Purbright looked up in time to see a man-of-the-world shrug—“of others.”

  “Yourself included, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “And Jonas Bradlaw?”

  Gloss held up his hand. “You must not anticipate my statement, inspector.” He looked at his watch and listened. Above the muffled sounds of traffic, a horn sounded briefly. A ship’s siren moaned in the estuary beyond Flaxborough dock. There was a light step to the door, a knock, and a plump, spotty girl edged her way in with a tray. Gloss put away his watch and beamed a quick, unmeant smile at her. “Promptitude,” he said to Purbright when she had gone, “is one of the qualities most difficult to inculcate into one’s office staff today.”

  Purbright grunted and put his cup on the desk beside him. He opened the notebook and looked expectantly at the solicitor, who took a sip of his tea and began slowly to dictate.

  “Rather late on Monday night—it must have been approximately eleven-thirty—I left my home and walked to the house of Mr Marcus Gwill. I do not normally retire to bed early and a stroll about midnight is not an uncommon exercise for me, so you must not imagine that there was anything extraordinary in my being abroad on that particular night. I do not pretend, however, that the visit to Gwill was in response to a mere whim. He had telephoned me a short time previously and intimated that there was a matter of some urgency he wished to discuss.

  “I recall nothing noteworthy about my walk along Heston Lane. I met no one I recognized, although there were several people about who might conceivably have recognized me. It would be about a quarter to twelve when I arrived.

  “Another acquaintance of Gwill’s was already there. I say acquaintance; actually it was his doctor, the Scotsman Hillyard, whom you probably know. Like myself, he stood in a somewhat closer relationship to Gwill than a purely professional
one. When I found him in the drawing-room, I concluded that some sort of a conference was intended, although Gwill had not explained over the telephone what he had in mind. I did not suppose the occasion to be of a purely social nature.”

  Gloss paused to look at Purbright’s lightly pencilled shorthand worming between the lines. “Please tell me,” he said, “if I am forging too far ahead of that admirable squiggle.”

  “Not at all, sir,” said Purbright, evenly. “My squiggle likes a fleet quarry. But I should like my cup of tea now, if you don’t mind.” And he drank it. “Will you go on from ‘social nature’, sir?”

  Gloss frowned, then smoothly resumed.

  “Hillyard was seated by the fire and drinking a glass of whisky. He appeared contemplative. Gwill fetched a glass for me and invited me to help myself from the decanter. He took nothing to drink himself; he was an abstainer, you know. I noticed he was chewing, however, and I remember feeling a little irritated at the sight of his jaws working away. Adult sweet-eaters invariably annoy me. They seem furtively self-indulgent and sensual in a horrid, immature way. I mention the fact of Gwill’s chewing because it explains why I can tell you very little of something that occurred almost immediately after my arrival, something which I think now may have been of significance.