Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  Before he could make up his mind what to do, a shadow fell across the entrance. He did his best to defend his position by staring boldly straight into the face of the large man who now peered in at him.

  Surprisingly enough, the new arrival did no more than pause, deliver a friendly wink, and pass on along the corridor. A door opened and closed—Love judged it to be the last in the row—and there was silence once more. Not even an aldermanic grunt broke the stillness.

  Going out into the corridor again, Love reflected on the stranger’s amiability. He supposed the wink to have been a natural gesture for one patient to make to another. The camaraderie of hospitals, he had heard, was a jolly business, maintained by fellow sufferers to minimize their apprehension of knives, needles and other surgical terrors.

  He eased open the door of the third cubicle. There was no clothing in this one. Automatically, he tried the farther door. To his surprise, it moved freely, and he was just in time to tighten his grip on the handle to prevent the door swinging open away from him. With his free hand he pulled the outer door closed at his back and stood for some seconds in the resultant darkness before beginning to edge his way slowly into the space ahead.

  The room, if that was what it was, was comfortably warm, but absolutely dark. Love took tiny, silent steps forward, feeling tensely for obstacles with feet and outstretched hands. It was not his sense of touch, though, but his ears that warned him to pause.

  Somewhere in front of him, quite near, was being made a soft rhythmical sound. It was, he thought, a sort of gentle brushing, regular and mechanical. Brushing—or dragging, perhaps. As he listened, an earlier speculation returned to mind and was instantly mated to the new problem. Of course—anaesthesia. It was a pump or respirator of some kind that he now could hear. He recalled an operation scene in a film, where bladders softly inflated and deflated as the surgeons bent over their task.

  But why no lights?

  Slowly and with infinite caution, Love slithered first one foot, then the other, over the carpet. Carpet? He frowned. Hospitals never had carpets. But that wasn’t to say private clinics did not. Never mind, he was nearing whatever was making the soft exhalations. He felt in his overcoat pocket for the torch he carried. The time had come for a showdown, whatever the consequences. He could always plead lost directions. He levelled the torch and slid his thumb to its button...

  For years afterwards, Love was to question his ridiculous, his lunatic failure to identify the simple sound that had guided him across the floor that night. As the light beam leaped alarmingly ahead, Love jumped as if he held a recoiling cannon in his hand.

  From a couch five feet distant was rearing up in fright and indignation the lady whose measured breathing in a contemplative doze he had so fantastically misinterpreted.

  In the fraction of time before he turned and rushed with mumbled apologies in the direction whence he had come, the policeman noticed two things.

  One was the identity of the outraged female.

  The second was the lady’s bizarre choice of costume: a heavy glass necklace and a pair of stockings, one slightly laddered.

  It was not until later that a third, no less curious, circumstance registered. He recalled that she had flung after his retreating figure the epithet ‘bloody old devil!’, together with several kinds of threat of what would happen if he ‘tried a trick like that again’.

  What did she mean by ‘old’, Love asked himself with some annoyance as he tramped back to where he had left the car.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Purbright was still in his office when Love drove the car into the police garage and walked past the night sergeant, who had begun his mysterious routine of entering things laboriously in books and juggling with plugs and cords on the switch-board.

  The inspector listened attentively to the story of the shadowing of Alderman Leadbitter. He drew towards him a pad of paper, an ashtray and a cup half-full of cold, grey coffee.

  “Now, Sid; let’s have that list you copied from the board on the landing.”

  At Love’s direction, he marked out three columns and began filling them with the members and letters in the sergeant’s notebook. Then he pulled from a file the table he had compiled earlier of names, specifications and times coined in the answers to the advertisements in the Citizen.

  “By the way,” said Love, “did you find who collected those box replies?”

  Purbright nodded. “A young fellow from Gloss’s office. Lintz told me. I cornered the lad this afternoon, as a matter of fact, and he said his boss had sent him with the ticket—the counterfoil that’s issued when anyone places an advert—to pick up any letters under that number.”

  “That would leave Gloss with something to explain, then.”

  “He made no bones about it. He said the ticket had been amongst Gwill’s papers that he, as his solicitor, had been sorting out, and that he thought he’d better see if there was anything urgent about the business.”

  “Had he the letters there?”

  “Oh yes. All opened. He was most obliging. Showed them to me and asked me what I thought they could mean. The money was there, too.”

  “Could he explain that?”

  Purbright sighed. “My dear Sid, you should know by now that we’ve got everything out of that gentleman that he’ll part with until we can use the rack.”

  He put the two lists side by side and began comparing them. His pencil point wavered from one column to another, pounced on a number or a set of initials, then moved beneath a name an address, a date. Twenty minutes went by. Love got up looked disconsolately out of the uncurtaind window at the blackness bloomed with a dim rejection of the room’s lamp-light upon rags of mist, and walked to the door. “I’ll see if Charlie can fix up a mug of something,” he said, and departed

  Purbright’s manner of scrutinizig the pages before him became gradually more alert. Several details were now underlined. He passed his tongue over his dry upper lip and reached for the coffee cup. Absentmindedly he sipped its chilled, forbidding residue.

  When Love came back with two steaming mugs, he motioned him to his side and pointed to one of the entries he had marked.

  “This is interesting. Edward Leadbitter, you notice, wrote asking to see an antique pewter tankard...”

  “A pewter antique tankard.”

  “Eh? All right, then, a pewter antique tankard; and he specified eight-fifteen this evening. Now then”—Purbright moved his pencil over to the second sheet—“here’s the entry on that upstairs board of Hillyard’s. First of all, the time. Eight-fifteen. That checks. Next, the figure two. You said it was the second cubicle from which you heard his voice. Now in the last column on the notice board are these five initials: E.L.P.A.T.”

  Love scratched his chin.

  “Edward...” Purbright prompted.

  “Edward Leadbitter...Pewter...Of course, it’s that bloody tankard again.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But I still can’t see any sense in it,” protested Love. “The place hadn’t an antique in sight. No pewter, no furniture, nothing like that at all. It was like a clinic or part of a hospital, except that it was more comfortable. It was certainly no antique that jumped up at me when I switched the torch on.” Love looked more gleeful than dismayed at the memory of the moment of revelation before his flight.

  “Never mind the Venusberg aspect. Who was the fellow you said you saw on the landing?”

  “Stamper. Bert Stamper.”

  “The farmer?”

  “That’s the one, yes.”

  Purbright looked down the names on his letter digest. “Here we are—he just put initials to his reply. H.S. And over here”—he waved his pencil over to the ‘Treatment Schedule’—“they appear against seven-thirty and cubicle three.”

  “Three was the cubicle where I found the door unlocked.”

  “And looked at what the policeman saw.”

  Love blushed happily.

  “You say you know the girl?”
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  “Professionally, yes. Mrs Shooter—Margaret Shooter, I believe it was. I was beat-bashing in those days and she was listed with a few others for entertaining sailors in the place in Broad Street.”

  “Over by the harbour?”

  “Yes. There used to be more knocking shops than telegraph poles down there at one time. That was before Holy Harry blew out all the red lamps and set the girls to sew surplices.”

  Purbright looked pained. “Don’t come that hell’s kitchen stuff to me, Sid. You know perfectly well that the Flaxborough brand of vice was never anything but shabby amateurism. The house you’re talking about closed down weeks before we could get any real evidence. By Holy Harry, I suppose you mean the late and questionable Mr Carobleat?”

  “That’s the boy.”

  “I'd never heard the soul-saving line before. What we suspected was that he got hold of a list of the ladies we were interested in when he was chairman of the Watch Committee and went round tipping them off.”

  “They stopped operating, anyway,” said Love defensively.

  “So far as we could prove, they did. But don’t delude yourself that they took to good works. However”—Purbright looked at his watch—“that’s neither here nor there. Let’s finish with Stamper, the honest hayseed.”

  He sipped from the mug Love had brought in and found his place again in the letters summary. “It was the heavy stuff he was after, apparently. A mahogany and beech sideboard, of all things. Did you happen to trip over any sideboards in your flight from Mrs Shooter?”

  Love looked at the second sheet. “There you are.” He pointed to a group of initials, six this time. “That’s clear enough—Herbert Stamper, Mahogany And Beech Sideboard.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Maybe the place is a private asylum.”

  Purbright leaned back in his chair and stared into space. “You say you don’t know the big man who looked in at you while you were in Leadbitter’s cubicle. And yet he winked at you?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite friendly, he seemed.”

  “A wink,” Purbright went on, talking half to himself, “suggests sharing a joke, a lark, as you might say. Something private and perhaps risky or pleasantly scandalous. But not”—he joined his fingers—“desperately conspiratorial. No murders or burglaries. And no drugs, I fancy: that’s commonly a gloomy or else a hysterical business. Could that wink, though, have been one purely of medical commiseration between fellow candidates for boil lancing or colonic irrigation?”

  “What’s that?” asked Love.

  “Enemas.”

  “He didn’t look as if there was anything wrong with him. And I’m sure he couldn’t have thought I wanted an enema.”

  Purbright glanced at him briefly and again addressed the ceiling. “No, I’m sure he couldn’t. So there must be some other reason for the recognition of one man of the world by another.”

  Love lifted one eyebrow, but said nothing.

  “These cubicle things,” said Purbright. “Would you say they’d been there long? Were they an original part of the house?”

  “I don’t think so. They looked like conversions. Not brand new, but recent.”

  “Solid?”

  “Well...” Love considered. “I don’t know much about building, but they looked a pretty sound job of carpentry. Sort of semi-permanent.”

  “You didn’t go down the second corridor?”

  “No, there was a sign up...”

  “Ah, yes, I’d forgotten.” Purbright was silent. Then he looked again at his watch and yawned. “We do see life, don’t we?” He began tidying up his desk.

  Before Love could ask what he was supposed to deduce from the evening’s events, he heard footsteps approaching from the main office. Purbright listened. “The Chief Constable,” he said, “is upon us.”

  Mr Chubb knocked punctiliously before entering. He wore a grey overcoat of remarkable rigidity and carried a bowler hat and what he himself would have termed a gamp. He looked as if he might have been attending a public meeting of the better, quieter sort; of the Friends of Flaxborough Cathedral, say.

  “Ah, Purbright,” he said, with “Evening, sergeant,” in kindly parenthesis, “I’ve just come from having a word or two with the Coroner. No, sit down, sit down.” He propped himself against a cupboard in his customary attitude of elegant detachment and gave the impression of being ready to hear petitioners. After some seconds he said: “He wants to get this Gwill business cleared up, you know. Amblesby’s rather old for adjournments. He can’t always remember what he’s adjourned or why.” Mr Chubb permitted himself a weak smile, then extinguished it and added: “A perfectly sound old fellow, of course.”

  “Oh, yes,” Purbright agreed, with a shade of querulousness.

  “You’re still confident poor Gwill was deliberately, er...”

  “Quite, sir.”

  “Mmm...” Mr Chubb regarded his yellow knitted gloves. “Anything turned up since last we talked about it?”

  Purbright salvaged his file from the drawer into which he had pushed it a few moments before and turned over a few pages of notes. “I had quite an interesting conversation with Mr Smith, of the Eastern Provinces,” he announced.

  “Percy Smith. Oh, yes; I know him very well. Extremely sound on coarse fishing. Not terribly forthcoming, though, as a rule.”

  “No, sir,” Purbright agreed, drily. “But he did confide that Gwill was a beneficiary under the will of the late Mr Harold Carobleat—they were next door neighbours, if you remember, sir—in spite of the widow having been left nothing. And he also admitted that Gwill received and deposited sums of money in cash that appeared to have had nothing to do with his newspaper business.”

  “Goodness me,” said the Chief Constable, tonelessly. He looked at Love, then back to Purbright. “Do you suppose that what Smith told you—the money side of it, one might say—had anything to do with the poor fellow coming to a sticky end? Of course,” he added hastily, “that will business sounds absolutely incredible. It does, really.”

  Purbright replied that it was beginning to appear, in his opinion, that Gwill’s mysterious source of income might have had a great deal to do with his death and, further, that the arranging and accomplishment of his murder could no longer be assumed to have been the work of a specific individual.

  “You think several people might have been in it?”

  “Three, sir. Probably four. Perhaps even five.”

  “Not Flaxborough people, surely?” There was a note of pleading in Mr Chubb’s voice.

  “Those I have in mind are no strangers to the town, sir.”

  The Chief Constable compressed his thin mouth, walked slowly across to Purbright’s desk and actually drew up a chair for himself. Then he sighed and said: “You’d better give me the names, my boy. Might as well know where we are. You could be wrong, of course.”

  “Oh, certainly,” Purbright agreed. “I hope I am. But if it turns out that only one person did it, after all, it will be rather nice to feel that four citizens have been restored, as you might say.”

  He went on, briskly: “As a matter of fact, you have the names already. I ran over them when I saw you after the inquest opening. They are all the obvious ones, of course, but I see no reason for discarding them on that account. Gloss presents an interesting study. He is a man whom professional training should have taught to leave no part of his dealings with the dead man capable of being interpreted unfavourably. Yet scarcely is the crime discovered before he is round to see you, sir, with hints of secret knowledge and personal danger. He admits to me his presence in Gwill’s house on the night of the murder. He is surprisingly frank about certain financial aspects of his client’s affairs. He gives all sorts of unexpected replies to questions. In short, he asks so persistently to be suspected that we can be quite sure he is trying to lead us along a blank alley, at the end of which he will have no difficulty in refuting any specific charge we might feel constrained to level against him.”

  Love looked on in undisguis
ed admiration of Purbright’s dialectic. Then he glanced to see how Mr Chubb was taking it.

  The Chief Constable roused himself to ask: “But what hard evidence have you to support all this? It sounds—if you’ll forgive me saying so—just a fraction theoretical. I must admit,” he added almost with warmth, “that I never suspected you of applying such...such a wealth of psychology, as you might say. I’d always thought traffic was your forte. But it’s the unexpected that really puts us all to the test. Pity, in one sense, that we’re rather badly off for crime round here. Nastiness is as much as most of them can rise to.”

  “Then there is Doctor Hillyard,” Purbright went on, keeping to his own track. “Hillyard was Gwill’s doctor and on fairly close social terms with him. He also was present at his home on the night of the murder. It may or may not be significant that Hillyard was the doctor in attendance upon Harold Carobleat at the time of his death six months ago.”