Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  “The telephone rang, and Gwill took the call in the room where we were sitting. As he listened, he put another loathsome sweet-meat into his mouth, and I was so preoccupied with the way his mastication moved the telephone earpiece up and down that I failed to take any notice of the conversation. There was no doubt of its outcome, though, for Gwill put the instrument down and hastened out of the house with no more than a mumble about being back in a few minutes.”

  Gloss paused, then looked very solemnly at Purbright. “He did not come back and I never saw him again. Hillyard and I waited for perhaps half an hour. Then I went upstairs to ask Mrs Poole if she had any idea of where he might have gone and to request her to remain awake until his return. She was not there, of course. Hillyard and I could think of nothing practical to do in the circumstances and so we left the house and walked to our respective homes.”

  Purbright glanced up. “Did you lock the door of the house, sir?”

  “We decided it would be better to leave it insecure than to risk his having taken no key and being obliged to break a window or something of that kind.”

  “You felt no anxiety on his behalf other than being worried about locking him out?”

  “None. Why should we? As a matter of fact, we both took it for granted that he was visiting some house fairly close at hand. It was only later that I realized the unlikelihood of that having been the case.”

  “What led you to realize that?”

  “I remembered two things about the telephone call that did not register on my mind at the time but which must have made a subconscious impression.”

  “Yes, Mr Gloss?”

  “Perhaps a minute before the telephone bell rang, I heard a vehicle draw up in the road outside. It has occurred to me since that a public telephone kiosk stands on Heston Lane some little way nearer the town and on the opposite side of the road. I incline to the belief that the call to Gwill’s house came from that kiosk and was made by the driver of the vehicle I heard.”

  “Can you say what sort of a vehicle it sounded to be, sir?”

  “I’m afraid I cannot. It made a noticeable noise, so it is likely to have been a moderately large car or a small lorry.”

  “Might it have been a van?”

  Gloss considered. “Conceivably,” he said.

  “And now, sir, perhaps you’ll tell me the second thing about the telephone call that has come back to you since Monday night.”

  “Oh, yes; the second thing.” Gloss’s gaze fell; he drummed fingers on his knee and gave, Purbright thought, a fair impersonation of reluctant prosecutor. “I am almost certain,” he said, “that Gwill addressed the maker of the telephone call as George.”

  “George?”

  “That is my recollection, inspector. But I wish to be perfectly fair. My attention, as I have said, was distracted. It is just possible that the name was something similar.”

  “Surely there aren’t many names that sound similar to George, Mr Gloss?”

  “No? No, perhaps not. I have not given the matter much thought. I wished only to be frank and to impart impressions as they have come to me, quite undisturbed by conjecture.”

  “Ah, very proper, sir.” The inspector’s face was blank. So was the other’s. They remained a while looking at each other in querulous politeness. Purbright broke the silence.

  “Why did Mr Bradlaw come to see you this morning?”

  “Bradlaw...” Gloss smiled. “You had made him nervous, I think. He came here to seek reassurance.”

  “Why should he have been nervous?”

  “He is inclined to be more sensitive to questioning than you might imagine, inspector. He has a rough manner, but that is deceptive. The troubles of others upset him to a greater extent than is healthy, perhaps, for one in his profession.”

  “I have known Mr Bradlaw for quite a few years, sir.”

  “Then you will be acquainted with his, ah, idiosyncracies.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Gloss nodded and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Tell me,” said Purbright in a brisker tone, “was Bradlaw at Mr Gwill’s house at any time on Monday night?”

  Without lowering his eyes, Gloss said gently: “He may have been. But of course he was not present while I was there—as you must have judged from the fact that I made no mention of him in my account of what transpired.”

  Purbright gave a little bow of acknowledgement. Then he asked: “Did you notice if Mr Gwill took a bucket or a can of water down the drive that night?”

  For the first time in the interview the solicitor looked surprised. “Water? What on earth would he have been doing with buckets of water?”

  “What, indeed,” said Purbright, watching him. The bewilderment seemed genuine. Then Gloss’s expression changed. “Wait a moment,” he said, “I still fail to see the significance of your allusion to water-cans, but I do remember now something that struck me as slightly out of the ordinary when I arrived at Gwill’s house. On opening the gate, I noticed the gravel felt sodden underfoot as though heavy rain had fallen. But there had been no rain, of course. And the ground was wet only at that one point.”

  “Near the gate?”

  “Yes. Just inside, I should say.”

  Purbright looked at his watch, stood up, and began buttoning his coat. “I’m most obliged to you, Mr Gloss; you’ve been very patient. I do believe I’ve run out of questions.”

  “And I’m not at all sure,” replied Gloss with a court-room smile, “but that I have run out of answers.”

  While Gloss was carefully contributing to Purbright’s mounting collection of enigmas, contradictions, deductions and doubts, two other professional men of Flaxborough were discoursing.

  Said Mr Bradlaw to Dr Hillyard (with whom he had lately lunched and who now sat regarding him mournfully in his spacious but musty drawing-room): “The whole damned thing will have to be dropped for the time being. We can build it up later when the fuss about poor old Marcus has died down.”

  Said Dr Hillyard, self-consciously sober and liverishly emphatic: “It cannot and it needn’t. Get that into your head, man. Marcus asked for what he got, by God he did, but it can’t be left at that. What’s running smoothly now will have to keep on running or else be abandoned altogether. And I’ll not see that happen after what we’ve put into it.”

  “But the police...”

  “The police! Aye, and what will they do? Run round in ever-decreasing circles until they become their own colonic stoppages.” Hillyard stretched out a lanky leg and kicked at coal at the fire edge. He scowled at the upsurge of flame.

  “Listen,” said Bradlaw, “I know the man Purbright. He may not be brilliant but he perseveres. He makes himself a thorough nuisance and rubs it in by constantly apologizing. I had him to put up with this morning. I tell you he’ll be on our backs until kingdom come, with his ‘I hate to trouble you’ and ‘Mightn’t it be so’ and ‘Perhaps you’d care to tell me’.”

  “Nonsense. He’s just a provincial copper, dig-digging into what he doesn’t understand and hoping for good luck to save his reputation in the eyes of that timid old goat of a Chief Constable. He knows nothing and he’ll find nothing. Always provided”—Hillyard’s cheek twitched in the firelight—“that you and I and friend Gloss remain helpfully obscure and unproductively cooperative.”

  Bradlaw grunted. “Roddy Gloss is just a shade too clever sometimes. Keeping up with him can be dodgy.”

  “Never mind that. He’ll not take any risks. And he’ll have the sense not to lead you into any.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by risk if you think he’s not asking for trouble by the line he’s given old Chubb. You realize what he’s going to tell Purbright as soon as he’s questioned? Which he will be. Even if it hasn’t happened already.”

  “Stop talking in bursts, and stop frightening yourself like an old woman. Damn me if you thrombosis fatties aren’t all the same.”

  Bradlaw, peeved, sat up in his chair. Hillyard took no notic
e of him but glowered at his own outstretched feet and said slowly: “We seem to have got away from the main point again, don’t we?”

  “Eh?”

  Hillyard felt in his pocket and drew out a battered cigarette. This he lit with a strip of paper that he tore methodically from the margin of one of the medical journals scattered on the floor by his chair. Quietly, almost sadly, he said: “There’s only one way we can find him.”

  “You’ll not get it out of her.”

  “I don’t propose to try any more.”

  “Well, then...”

  “Listen. A patient of mine—one of the more grateful ones—works at the telephone exchange...”

  Hillyard spoke gently and without banter now. Bradlaw, nervous and doubtful, tried to look intelligent.

  Behind the change in the manner of each lay common recognition of the need to be serious and to waste no time. Fear perched in the room.

  Chapter Nine

  The photograph that Purbright pushed across his desk to Love was an enlargement of a hand. The sergeant gave an involuntary jump. A hand, disconnected and twice life-size, can be a startling exhibit when unexpectedly revealed to a man preoccupied with nothing more sinister than desire for an early tea.

  Love stared obligingly at the picture.

  “Well?” asked Purbright.

  Love turned the photograph sideways, then upside down. “Fine prints old Hastings gets,” he remarked.

  Purbright was patient. “What do you make of the flower? There, look.” He leaned over and traced faint lines, broken but forming part of a general symmetry over the main area of the open palm. They were suggestive of a formalized daffodil.

  “The burns?” said Love.

  “Yes.”

  “They show the shape of what he must have grabbed, I suppose.”

  “Correct.”

  “So when we find a metal object of the same shape and size that could have been connected to the mains or a cable last Monday night, we’ll be a fair way towards knowing how and where old Gwill was done.”

  Purbright beamed as if upon a favourite pupil. “You are sharp today, Sid. I think we might make the best of it and go detecting, don’t you?”

  The lugubrious Mrs Poole admitted them to The Aspens with the air of a landlady opening the door for lodgers who had forgotten their keys. She seemed resigned to the prospect of the police popping in and out for the rest of her life, which, judging from her aspect, she had no desire to be prolonged.

  Purbright showed her a sketch of the marks on the photographed hand. He did not say what they were, but asked if she could think of any metal object about the house of which the sketch reminded her.

  She stared at the drawing, moving her head to one side, then the other. “I’ve seen something like it,” she murmured, “but where, I can’t think.”

  “Outside, perhaps?” Purbright prompted.

  She shook her head. “You see carvings like that on church pews sometimes. But you said metal, didn’t you? Brass or iron, that would be. What about bedsteads, then?”

  “Bedsteads?”

  “Yes. The old-fashioned ones, you know. There are things like that on some of those I’ve seen. Like flowers between the rails at the head and foot.” She handed back the piece of paper.

  Purbright asked her: “Is there a bedstead of that kind here?”

  “Only mine, sir,” said Mrs Poole, “but truth to tell I can’t remember offhand what the metal parts of it are like, except for the knobs, of course, and not all of them are still there. You’d better come and see.”

  But upon Mrs Poole’s gaunt bed rails there was no decoration at all, save one large and tarnished brass ball. “It’s funny how you can sleep on something for years and not really notice what it looks like,” she said, modestly thrusting a forgotten corset out of sight.

  Purbright stared carefully round the room. It contained no daffodils of iron or of anything else. “Perhaps we’d better take a quick look into the other rooms, now that we’re here—if that wouldn’t inconvenience you, Mrs Poole.”

  That was all right, she assured him. Having seen to her own little night-box of privacy being closed up snug and naphthascented once again, she left them and descended to whatever forlorn tasks she still found to do in the deserted house.

  The two policemen looked into all the other upstairs rooms. Only the two largest bedrooms were furnished. Both their beds were of wood. Of metal-work there was no trace, except for one gas bracket that had been left for some obscure reason sprouting from a landing wall like a dead and dusty plant.

  Purbright watched for power points. There was one in each of the large bedrooms and three more along the corridor and landings. He examined each carefully. All had a thick film of dust around the sockets.

  They continued the search downstairs. It revealed nothing suggestive apart from four more power points, three of them dusty, and a roll of wire in the meter cupboard. Love tugged at this expertly and shook his head. “Bell wire—no use for mains,” he said.

  They halted in the study-like room and stared out into the garden, with its dripping laurels. The house around them seemed damp and secretive and sorry for itself. “We’ll get nothing more here, I doubt,” said Purbright.

  “Do you believe Gloss’s story?” Love asked him.

  “Up to a point. I think they were all here that night. Gwill and Gloss and Hillyard and Bradlaw.”

  “Bradlaw, too?”

  “I’d be much surprised if he wasn’t. They were in something or other together and on Monday night there must have been a development of such importance to all of them that a conference of some kind became necessary. Either that, or else the other three came here by arrangement among themselves to put Gwill out of the way.”

  “Electrocution seems an uncertain way of going about it.”

  “Not at all. If only you can make sure your victim is nicely earthed—in a bath is the classic position—a shot of ordinary mains current is just as effective as a cannon ball.”

  “You think he was actually killed here, then?”

  “It’s the most likely place if there was a conspiracy.”

  “If he was murdered here,” said Love, “they all must have been concerned to some extent. One of them could hardly have knocked him off without the others being aware of it. And it would have taken more than one man to carry the body over to the field afterwards.”

  Purbright frowned. “There’s something queer about the story of the man Gloss. He mentioned Gwill’s having been eating up to the time of leaving the house. We know that to be correct. It lends strength to his tale, great strength. Had Gwill been murdered here by Gloss and Bradlaw and Hillyard, or any one or two of them, that particular twist in the account would never have been included.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it is one of those simple and rather pathetic circumstances that a murderer prefers to forget when thinking about his victim. He or his accomplice—and Gloss must have been one or the other if Gwill met his end this side of the front door—would only mention the sweet-eating if it were an essential part of his alibi or self-justification. And we haven’t the slightest reason to suppose that it was either.”

  Purbright patted Love’s shoulder. “Cheer up,” he said. “What do you say we go next door and bully the poor widow-woman for a while?”

  The widow-woman they found tweedy, business-like and very self-possessed. She seemed, moreover, pleased to see them—a bad sign in a witness, as Purbright knew; for policemen, like illnesses, are best held at bay by determined cheerfulness.

  “How nice of you to come round,” she said. “Yes, I know you promised, but promises are made so often in an attempt to be kind on the spur of the moment and broken afterwards when sympathy has had time to cool off.”

  She led them into the large room facing Heston Lane. It was, tastefully and expensively furnished and was far more attractive than its gloomy counterpart at The Aspens.

  “Do sit down,” said Mrs Caroble
at. “I’ve had not a soul to talk to since the man came to read the meter last week, and his conversation was limited, to put it mildly. He has to save his breath to stoop into all those little cupboards, I suppose.” She offered cigarettes and lit one herself with a large table lighter. “You’ll have some tea, won’t you?”

  Not waiting for a reply, she darted to the door and disappeared. They heard her giving brief instructions at the rear of the house. Then, almost immediately, she was back again. Whatever her age, Purbright reflected, she had a fitful energy and suppleness that betokened a woman with plenty of money and no lack of ideas of what to do with it. He realized that the Joan Carobleat he had seen on two previous occasions had been an understatement of her proper self. Six months ago, it was a newly bereaved wife with whom he had dealt. Then, this past Tuesday in the teashop, it was...well, what? A newly bereaved mistress? Or just a woman wearied by a long rail journey? In any case, here she was now, impressively alert and sure of herself.