Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  The bewildered sergeant regarded Purbright with something like alarm.

  “You do see what we’re after?” Purbright asked him gently.

  Love made no reply. Footsteps halted outside and there was a heavy knock on the front door. Purbright lifted a curtain aside. “Ah, our Mr Manning,” he announced gratefully. “Let’s go home.”

  As they turned out of the gate a few minutes later, Purbright said with a tinge of repentance in his voice: “You didn’t think I was pulling your leg about the immoral earnings charge, did you? It will stick, all right.”

  Love grunted, and Purbright went on: “As you’ll have realized, the antiques lark, or clinic, or whatever you like to call what you very commendably uncovered this evening, is nothing but a nicely camouflaged...er...what should we say...?”

  Comprehension suddenly came upon the sergeant like the smell from a Sunday oven.

  “A love nest!”

  “Exactly!” said Purbright, admiringly.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Flaxborough Sharms were a group of narrow and shabby streets lying between the harbour and the goods station. At one time they had enjoyed a reputation attributable to the appetites and intransigence of foreign seamen, but Continental boats seldom docked at Flaxborough now and the men from the coasters and fishing vessels that did use the port were mostly either natives of the town or regular and inoffensive lodgers in it.

  Since the war, the excitements of the place had dwindled to routine drunkenness at the week-end, the odd fight or two, and a little listless wife-beating in such households where that indulgence could be enjoyed without endangering a television set.

  Broad Street was in fact not a street but a quadrangle on the northern side of the Sharms. There were a few trees in the centre, a statue of a man in old-fashioned clothes who seemed stricken with impetigo (it was a cheap statue and the material ‘wept’ in damp weather), and a ruined horse trough. The houses on the perimeter were larger than most others in the district, for they had been built to the fancy of the retired master mariners and ship owners of a century and more ago; men who had liked to strut gravely round the little central green and sniff with proprietorial satisfaction the smells of tar, hemp and weed-slimed breakwaters. Their homes now were not so much dignified as gaunt. In their façades of faded stone, streaked brown where guttering had split, were front doors battered and scarred by the impatient passage of sub-tenants and the imprecations of overlooked and locked-out children. The imitation columns that flanked the doors had long since lost their flutings beneath an encrustment of brown paint and grease-bound dust.

  Detective Constable Harper discovered with annoyance that the houses of Broad Street were numbered more or less at random. Only after he had trudged along three sides of the quadrangle, peering into dim hallways and cross-examining truculent infants, did he succeed in tracing the entrance of number sixteen to the bottom of a narrow court between numbers twenty-five and twenty-seven.

  On the directions of a wall-eyed man in shirt-sleeves who answered his knock, Harper climbed three flights of coco-matted stairs and tapped on a door that boasted a huge white porcelain handle. After a few seconds, the door opened sufficiently to reveal a tired but suspicious eye beneath two hair curlers that bobbed at him like wary antennae.

  “Mrs Margaret Shooter?”

  “You from the electricity?”

  “No, madame. I am a police officer and I have reason to believe you can help us in a matter we are making inquiries into.”

  The curlers shook vigorously. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve not got mixed up in anything.”

  “There’s no suggestion that you have, madame”—Harker remembered the inspector’s tactical briefing—“but there are just a couple of questions I should like to ask you if you’d be so good as to co-operate. There’s no need for you to be apprehensive, as you might say.” He gave what he hoped was a disarming smile.

  “It’s a bit of a liberty, but you’d better come in, I suppose,” said Mrs Shooter, opening the door to display more hair curlers and an expanse of blue dressing-gown.

  “If I’ve come at an inconvenient time...” began Harper, resolutely looking away from the garment’s inadequacies.

  Mrs Shooter sighed impatiently, grasped his arm and propelled him with some firmness into the room behind her. She closed the door, flopped into an armchair and lit a cigarette. “Now, busy boy, what’s it all about?” She looked bored as well as tired.

  Harper sat carefully on the edge of a chair at the farther side of the room.

  “We are making inquiries,” he said, “into the visits of certain people to premises at number one hundred and twenty, Spoongate, above a doctor’s surgery. Information has reached us that you were present at that address last evening. Would you mind confirming that, Mrs Shooter?”

  She scratched her thigh and regarded him lazily. “You’re making heavy weather of something, son, but I don’t quite catch on to what it is.”

  Harper sighed. He was used to extrovert females. “Were you there last night?” he asked baldly.

  “Was I where?”

  “At Dr Hillyard’s surgery.”

  Mrs Shooter hesitated, then said: “Yes, if you say so. He happens to be my doctor. Any objections?”

  “You are undergoing some sort of special treatment, aren’t you, Mrs Shooter? In those cubicles upstairs, I mean.”

  “Just what exactly are you getting at, copper?” Her tiredness had evaporated. “It’s the first time I ever heard of a busy sticking his snout into a...a...doctor-patient relationship!”

  “A doctor-patient relationship,” Harper repeated. He gave a thin, slow smile. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t think of prying into anything like that, madame.”

  She scowled and drew angrily on her cigarette. “I don’t have to answer these damn silly questions,” she reminded him.

  “That’s so,” he agreed, adding immediately: “What do your friends call you, Mrs Shooter? Would it be Mabs?”

  “It might be. What’s that to you?”

  “M. A. B. S.?”

  “Of course. How would you spell it—with an X?”

  Harper smiled again. Half to himself, he murmured: “Mahogany and beech sideboard.”

  This earned a look of hostile incomprehension. “Are you all right, copper?”

  He went on: “Do you know a Mr Herbert Stamper?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You didn’t meet him last night? By appointment?”

  “I’ve told you once, I went to the doctor’s last night. Then came back home. I don’t know anyone called Stamper.”

  Harper realized that, in spite of her denials, Mrs Shooter was not going to block his questioning altogether. He saw that she was interested. She was also apprehensive. She wanted to learn how much he knew and what use might, if the police had their way, be made of it. Yet part of her attitude, he told himself, was genuine bewilderment.

  “Do you,” he asked her, “know a girl or a woman called Jane?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Maybe.”

  He glanced quickly at a list given him earlier that morning by Inspector Purbright. “Japanese Antique Newel, Ebony,” he intoned softly. Mabs Shooter looked in mock despair at the ceiling.

  “And what about Joan and Sal? How are they getting along these days?”

  The woman said nothing.

  “Superior Antique Lampstand,” murmured Harper dreamily. He put the list back in his pocket.

  “How long have you and your friends been patients of Dr Hillyard’s?”

  “Quite a while. I have, at any rate. I don’t know what friends you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do, you know, Mrs Shooter. In fact, I think you know perfectly well what this is all about. You do, don’t you?” Harper’s tone was that mixture of It’s-All-Up and No-One-Will-Hurt-You-If-You-Tell that policemen use when hard evidence seems to have run out and they would give a day
’s pay for a nice straight confession.

  “Look,” he said, leaning towards her and extending the fingers of his left hand as if in readiness to mark off five irrefutable and urgent reasons for her co-operation, “I’m going to be absolutely frank with you, Mrs Shooter. And what’s more”—he raised his eyebrows—“I’ll tell you right at the start, and with no ifs and buts, that whatever you care to tell me you’ll be in the clear all the way. We’ll hang nothing whatever on you personally so long as you play the game with us.”

  “You’d have your work cut out,” she retorted softly. “I know the law.”

  “Of course you do. And you know we’re only interested in the people who run these things. The tight lads who draw their eight quid a customer and sit back nice and safe and respectable while...”

  “Eight quid!” He had struck fire. “Eight quid! Don’t give me that, son!” She laughed stridently, her eyes questioning and angry.

  Harper glanced round the tidy, austerely furnished room. “I don’t suppose you’re making a fortune, me duck,” he said.

  The colloquialism pleased her, though she didn’t know why. “Not exactly,” she said.

  “I’m not kidding you about the eight quid,” said the detective. “We stopped some letters. Not that you need let that go any further.”

  “Letters to the doctor, you mean?”

  “He’d get his share. They took a long way round, though. All very hush-hush. You’d be surprised. But there’s not much we don’t know now.” Harper leaned back and searched for a cigarette. “One thing’s definite. You’re going to need to change your doctor.”

  “You aren’t really going to knock old Hilly-billy off, are you?” she asked earnestly.

  “Hilly-billy?”

  “Hillyard.”

  He paused in bringing up the match he had just struck. “You should know better than to ask that,” he reproved. Then he lit the cigarette and added: “As it happens, the warrant’s out now.”

  The woman digested this information. She looked straight at Harper. “Who the hell tipped you off about me? That’s what I want to know. We never even used the front door—me and the girls, I mean. And there wasn’t any names mentioned. Not ever.”

  “You were unlucky. Somebody recognized you. A policeman, believe it or not.”

  Mrs Shooter swallowed, as though trying to push down the tide of colour that had risen round her plump throat. “Not...not a bloke with a torch? Do you mean that wasn’t old Bert? Oh, for crying out...” She jumped to her feet and glared down at Harper.

  “Bert?” repeated Harper, unruffled.

  She tossed her head. “Yes, a pot-bellied old bastard. A regular. One of the life-of-the-party ones. I don’t know his proper name. There was never no names. Just appointments, and initials, sort of.”

  Harper sighed and handed her his cigarette case. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

  She accepted a light and blew smoke to the yellowed ceiling of the little room. After a few moments’ silence, she shrugged and pulled the dressing-gown more closely around her.

  “That would be”—she picked a shred of tobacco from the tip of her tongue and regarded it vacantly—“about three—no, four—years ago, I suppose. One afternoon a fellow walked in here and said wouldn’t I like a decent regular job instead of what I was doing and how he could fix it because he was on the council and thought it wasn’t really my fault but the district I lived in. You know the gaff. I was green, considering, mind. And could he gab? Well, you must have known him yourself, I expect. Carobleat. You did? Yes...Councillor Godalmighty Harry Carobleat. That’s who it was. Anyway, the next thing...”

  Mrs Popplewell, the only Flaxborough magistrate who could be found willing that morning to preside over the brief formalities of a special court, sat in Purbright’s office and looked with secret excitement at the charge sheet. The prisoner, she had been told by the station sergeant, would be brought in very shortly: at eleven, the inspector had said. It was now nearly five minutes past, but Mrs Popplewell had nothing in particular to do before a luncheon of business and professional women two hours hence, so she remained contentedly fingering her big green beads and easing her shoes half off under the inspector’s desk, which served as a bench of justice on these occasions.

  ‘The prisoner,’ she repeated to herself in a flutter of anticipation. Dr Hillyard a prisoner. One could hardly believe it. He was such a masterful man. With iron-grey hair—yes, that was the word, iron-grey—and penetrating eyes. Dour, perhaps, but that was because he was Scotch. Scottish, rather; they preferred being called that. And if it hadn’t been for the drink, they said, he’d be in Harley Street today. But what a shocking thing he was supposed to have done. A disorderly house. It sounded comic in a way. People went to Dr Hillyard with disorders and now his house had caught one. No, it wouldn’t do for her to giggle while she was asking him if he had any objection to being remanded in custody. It was a serious business, all right—and wouldn’t it lay her lunch companions by their ears. Half of them were probably his patients. They’d be absolutely green...

  The station sergeant knocked and entered the room. “I’m very sorry you’re being kept waiting, ma’am, but from what we hear there’s been some difficulty in apprehending the defendant.”

  “That’s all right, constable. I’m quite comfortable,” Mrs Popplewell assured him with a dignified smile.

  The sergeant glanced meaningfully at his striped sleeve and inquired: “Would you happen to care for a cup of coffee, ma’am? I can easily send one of the constables out for one.”

  Mrs Popplewell reddened slightly and said it was most kind of him but she would rather not. Was there, by the way, any suggestion of the, er, defendant being out of town or anything?

  The sergeant said he could not speak as to that, but no doubt the inspector would soon be back, with or without the prisoner, and she could then ask him the reason for the delay.

  Purbright in fact appeared a few minutes later. He wished Mrs Popplewell good morning, ran his fingers through his hair and rubbed his chin. “We seem,” he told her, “to have been a little premature in asking you to come along. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Not at all,” she said, hiding her disappointment in an unnecessary search for her handbag which lay just at her elbow. “You cannot help it if people beat you to the draw, as it were.” She laughed and added as casually as she could contrive: “Where’s he off to, do you think?”

  “That’s rather hard to say. All we know is that he is not at his home and, according to his receptionist, not on his rounds, either. But he’ll turn up, Mrs Popplewell; don’t you worry.”

  It was, of course, Purbright who was doing the worrying. He reproached himself for not having gathered up the doctor the night before. There was enough trouble afoot without having to use his limited resources on one of those sordid and time-wasting searches of empty buildings, hedges and ditches, harbour, river and canals. Dragging...he shuddered at the thought. Reluctantly, Mrs Popplewell took her leave. Purbright made one or two telephone calls, then went outside again and started the car. He was driving off when he caught sight of Love, crossing the road towards the police station. “No luck?” Purbright asked.

  Love shook his head and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Not only that,” he said, “but another one’s gone as well. Bradlaw isn’t there. His housekeeper or whoever she is told me he went out early in the van. He didn’t say where or why.”

  “Had Hillyard been there, did she know?”

  “She said she didn’t hear anyone else.”

  “Never mind. Stay with me now and we’ll go over to Gwill’s place and the wily widow woman’s. I’ve asked for a watch to be kept for Hillyard’s car. Oh...” He paused in the act of releasing the hand-brake and opened the car door. “Hang on a minute; I’d better tell them to look out for Bradlaw’s wagon as well, now.”

  When he returned, Love asked: “Why should the pair of them be making a break—if tha
t’s what they are doing? Hillyard can’t know about that warrant and we’ve nothing on Bradlaw.”

  The inspector shrugged. “The more the corpses, the closer the survivors will stick together. That particular board of directors has narrowed considerably of late.”

  The car turned into Heston Lane and sped past the tall villas behind their hedges of evergreen and the mournful laurels. As it slowed just before the last two houses, Purbright said: “You’d better see if you can root any sense out of the Poole woman, Sid. I’ll try next door.” They got out. Purbright left Love regarding the now closed gates of The Aspens.