by Colin Watson
He lurched from the gates and returned at a lumbering, weaving trot to the cobbled yard of the Three Crowns.
For nearly ten minutes, the customers within heard the spasmodic labour of a starter motor gradually become slower and feebler as it vainly contended with the engine of an elderly car from which the distributor had been removed.
Chapter Seven
“Looks like number three. It looks very like number three.”
Such was Sergeant Malley’s comment the following morning—made not gleefully but with a certain sense of relief—when the constable on switchboard duty rang through to tell him that a lady had just been found dead in Brompton Gardens. Fate, the sergeant knew from his long experience, worked in triples. Waiting for the completion of each set always made him fidgetty: it was like straining an ear to catch the note necessary for a perfect cadence.
“Not likely to be a natural causes, is it?”
“I don’t think so, sergeant. The woman who rang in said something about the body being in some water.”
“What, in a bath, you mean?”
“No...” The constable’s voice faltered. “In a well, actually.”
“A well! In Brompton Gardens?”
“That’s what I thought she said. Harper and Fairclough have gone over there. I expect they’ll be able to tell you more about it.”
“Have you got the name?”
“It’s a lady called Mrs Palgrove.”
“Good lord,” said Malley, “it isn’t!”
He went along at once to Inspector Purbright’s office.
“Guess who’s been found down a well.”
Purbright looked up wearily from a file that was beginning to show signs of long and fruitless perusal. “Some bloody charity organizer, I expect. That would be all I needed.”
For a moment Malley gaped, as at a miraculously speaking statue. Then his expression was restored to plump, bland normality, tinged with disappointment. “Oh, so you’ve heard already.”
“Heard? Heard what?”
“This business about a woman in a well. It’s Mrs Palgrove. ‘Pally’ Palgrove’s missus. Brompton Gardens.”
“Good God!”
“Well, when you said...”
“That?—no—I was just being...Here, you’re sure about this?” Purbright was on his feet.
“We’ve only had a phone report up to now. It seems right, though. A couple of the lads have gone to the house.”
The inspector pulled his coat straight and picked up a packet of cigarettes from the desk. “I think we’d better join them. I’ll want Sergeant Love as well. See if he’s in the canteen, will you, Bill?”
Purbright drove the car. It was one of a pair reserved for journeys within the borough boundaries. Both were black, stately, and second-hand. The upholstery was real leather. Grey silk blinds with fringes could be drawn down over the rear windows. The highly burnished radiator of each car was surmounted by a temperature gauge like a little monument. Among the Flaxborough policemen the cars were known as The Widows. Purbright had chosen the one less favoured by the chief constable; its smell of Yorkshire terrier was not so strong.
Sergeant Love occupied the passenger seat next to Purbright. Sergeant Malley filled the back.
The inspector said to Love: “You’d better tell Bill here about the names you got yesterday from Dawsons. He’s already seen the letter that was sent round.”
Love spoke over the back of his seat. “I asked them who’d been buying that kind of writing paper—you know, that grey stuff. They could only think of three people. One was Mrs Palgrove.”
“Oh, aye?” Malley was scraping out the bowl of his pipe with an enormous clasp knife. He blew through the pipe experimentally, then pulled away the stem and held it up to one eye.
“Well, then?” urged Love, a little irritably. He did not like wasting dramatic announcements on people who messed about with pipes all the time.
“Very interesting,” Malley said.
Love faced forward again. For a while he stared through the windscreen without speaking.
“It could be,” Purbright said to him, “that you’ve put us on to something important, Sid.”
Love glowed.
The car pursued its slow, dignified course up Heston Lane. It looked rather like a straggler from a funeral procession that had been cut off at traffic lights. Indeed, as it turned at last into the driveway of Dunroamin, a woman in the house opposite called upstairs to her bed-ridden mother: “It’s right about Mrs Palgrove, then. The undertaker’s just come.”
Purbright parked the car near the main door of the house. He rang the bell. After a fairly long interval it was answered by a squat, middle-aged woman. Although she wore an apron, she had kept on her hat. It gave her the air of a helper prepared for flight at the first sign of fresh disaster. And she clearly regarded the appearance of the three policemen as just that.
“You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got to get along home now.” She began to unfasten the apron.
“You will be Mrs...?”
“George. Mrs George. I help here. But I’ll have to be getting back.”
“I see. We shan’t keep you long, Mrs George. There are just a couple of things I’d like to ask you, though.”
They were now inside the entrance hall. Love looked around approvingly and rocked a little on his heels to test the elasticity of the carpet. Catching Malley’s eye, he raised his brows and pouted; Love was a great fancier of house interiors.
The woman opened a closet door and hung the apron inside.
“Was it you who telephoned us this morning, Mrs George?”
She nodded.
“Then I wonder if you’d mind telling me exactly what you found when you arrived. You’d come to help with the housework, had you?”
“That’s right. I come every day and give a hand. This morning the bus was a bit late but even so I don’t think it was quite nine o’clock when I got here. I went round to the kitchen door expecting it to be open as usual...”
“Open?”
“Well, not open—unlocked, I mean. Anyway, it wasn’t, so I knocked a few times and waited about a while but nobody came so I went to the big door and rang the bell. Still nobody answered. I couldn’t hear a sound inside and I thought, funny, because Mrs Palgrove hadn’t said anything the day before about going away, which she would have done, of course. Well, I thought I’d better give them a few minutes just in case, so I started to walk about a bit outside and look at the flowers. Of course it was then I...I...”
Mrs George felt instinctively for her apron. Tears had started afresh from her already reddened eyes. She rubbed them with the back of her hand which she then pressed to her mouth.
Purbright put an arm round her shoulders and led her to a chair by the foot of the stairs. Love and Malley left, at a sign from the inspector, to join their colleagues in the garden.
“Yes, Mrs George?”
She raised a face lined and puffy with distress. “Yes...well...I mean, there she was. Sort of doubled over the wall of that well thing. Half of her outside, the other half inside. Right in the water. Oh, arms, shoulders, head—right under. And them fishes...swimming about round her hair. In and out...”
Mrs George looked down at her skirt and pressed her knuckles into it. She swayed slightly backward and forward.
“Did you pull her out of the water?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t seem able to manage it. She’s quite a big woman, you know.”
“It was very sensible of you to telephone.”
“I tried to get her out. I tried all ways. It was no good though. I mean, people are a lot heavier than they look, aren’t they, especially when they’re lying awkward. Well, anyway, I just couldn’t. So I ran down to the phone at the corner. It seemed best, I mean...”
“Of course. By the way, how did you get into the house eventually?”
“Get in?”
“You did open the door to us.”
“Yes. One of
the policemen who came found a window open and he got through. He said it would be all right.”
“I suppose Mr Palgrove is away from home, is he?”
“I don’t know. I mean, he’s not here now and it’s not usual for him to leave for business until, oh, an hour or more after I arrive. The other policemen wanted to know and I told them the same. They’d most likely know at his office. I mean, you could try his office.”
“I could, couldn’t I. All right, Mrs George, there’s no reason why you should stay any longer. You’ve been most patient.”
He helped her to her feet, then opened the door. As she trotted dumpily past him, she gave a nervous little smile of farewell followed by a brief, fearful glance towards the distant policemen grouped about a shrouded shape in the grass.
“Dead for hours,” Love announced when Purbright came up. He drew back the blanket that Harper had brought from the house.
The inspector looked down at the big vacuous face in which the eyes were just two dark dots. The wet hair, close-clinging as a cap but with a few unravelled strands wandering down over forehead and cheek, seemed too sparse, too lank, to be a woman’s. This dissolution of sexual identity, furthered by the laxity of the cheeks and the jaw, was made more shocking still by the survival of the woman’s last application of lipstick and eye shadow, now garish daubs amidst the water-bleached flesh.
“How long do you think the doctor will be?”
Harper looked at his watch. “Any time now, sir. It’s Doctor Fergusson from the General. We couldn’t get hold of Reynolds.”
“You’ve tried to contact the husband?”
The uniformed man, Fairclough, coughed and gave Harper a glance before replying.
“We haven’t had much luck, sir. There was only the cleaner here when we arrived and she seemed to think he was away from home. I rang his firm, but...”
“That’s Can-flax, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. I rang them straight away, but he wasn’t there. They said he doesn’t usually turn up before ten. I called a bit later when his secretary had come in and she said he’d arranged to go to Leicester last night.”
“When does she expect him back?”
“Some time this morning, she thinks.”
“All right. Well, at least we know why he isn’t here. Look, Mr Harper, you’d better get over to Can-flax and wait around in case Palgrove goes straight to his office. Break things to him gently and tell him there’ll be somebody here waiting.”
Sergeant Love was going slowly round the well, examining it. He tried to turn the crank. It was fixed, make-believe like the bucket and the few links of chain and all the rest.
“What a swizz!” said Love. Fairclough eyed him with disapproval.
“You didn’t think it was real, did you, Sid?” Purbright perched himself carefully on the edge of the wall and peered into the water. The fish, agitated, crossed and recrossed in sudden darts and swoops.
“How do you think it happened?” Purbright asked.
“She must have leaned too far over, I suppose.” Love was still suffering disenchantment.
Malley, who had been silently filling his pipe, stowed the tobacco pouch into the breast pocket of his already over-occupied tunic and lowered himself to a kneeling position against the wall. He craned forward experimentally.
“She’d have a job,” he said. “Bloody hard on the belly, this edge is.”
“Supposing your hands slipped now, Bill, wouldn’t your head and perhaps your shoulders go under?”
“Aye, they might just for a second. But I could easily enough yank them out again. Look—as long as you’ve the weight of your legs on this side of the wall, you’re anchored: you can get your head up any time you like, then push yourself back—like this.” With a heave, and some very laboured breathing, Malley lumbered to his feet.
The demonstration, though ponderous, seemed reasonable. Purbright nodded. “Then why,” he said a little later, “didn’t Mrs Palgrove push herself back?” He turned to Fairclough. “It was only the upper part of her body that was in the water, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right, sir. The lady was sort of jack-knifed across the wall. One half each side.” He took a step nearer. “I could show you if you like, sir.”
“Oh no, you needn’t do that; I quite see what you mean.” Purbright nearly added a pleasantry about the superfluity of another inquest, Malley having collected his set, but decided not to risk hurting Fairclough’s feelings.
Malley put a match to his pipe. “There’s only one explanation that I can think of...”
“Heart attack,” put in Love, eager to score.
Malley shrugged and puffed smoke. “It does happen. And she looks overweight, poor soul.”
Purbright tried not to look too pointedly at the considerable girth of the coroner’s officer, but Love was less delicate: he stared at Malley’s belly with pretended alarm.
“Don’t worry, son,” Malley told him. “I don’t go out feeding goldfish in the middle of the night.”
The inspector frowned. “Middle of the night?”
“Well, it must have been dark, anyway. The lads saw this at the bottom and raked it out.” Malley pulled away a corner of the blanket to reveal a battery lantern. When Purbright picked it up, water dripped from its casing.
“Was there anything else down there?”
“We only saw that flashlight,” Fairclough said, “but we didn’t make what you might call a proper search, sir.”
“No. Naturally.” Purbright looked back towards the road. He had glimpsed flashes of blue light through the leaves. “Here’s the ambulance now.”
Accompanying the two uniformed ambulance attendants who marched woodenly across the lawn linked by their stretcher was an alert little man with a bronzed bald head. He came tut-tutting up to Purbright and said well, he didn’t know, he was sure. The inspector was put in mind of an electrician impatiently responding to the call of some amateurish fool who’d blown a fuse.
Doctor Fergusson set down his bag, knelt and peeled back the blanket. He tutted a few more times and set fingers lightly exploring. “Dearie me; dearie, dearie me!” Then, over his shoulder to Purbright: “What the dickens had she been up to?”
“I really wouldn’t know, doctor.”
“You wouldn’t. No. Ay-ay-ay-ay... Well, there it is.” He rose, brushing his trousers, and made a sign to the ambulance men.
“Who’ll be doing the P.M., doctor?” Malley asked.
“Oh, Reynolds, probably. If he’s not too tied up. Otherwise...” Fergusson shrugged and picked up his bag. “I’ll be off then, gentlemen.” And he was.
“It’s all right,” Malley confided to Purbright. “Fergie’ll do it the minute they unload the wagon. He’s like a kid in the bath when he gets into that path, lab.” He patted his cap more firmly on his head and turned to follow the retreating stretcher party.
The inspector told Fairclough to remain where he was for the time being. He and Love began to walk back to the house.
They had almost reached the door when something small and hairy rocketted out of the shrubbery, yapped hysterically for several seconds, then attached itself by its teeth to Love’s leg. It was Rodney.
Love hopped, kicked and swore, simultaneously and with a vigour of which Purbright had not suspected him capable, but the dog hung on. The inspector came to his aid. He gripped Rodney’s neck just behind the clamped jaws, prised the animal away, and held it at arm’s length.
“Now what do I do with it for God’s sake?”
Love was too busy massaging his calf to offer suggestions. Purbright looked about him helplessly, a Perseus wondering how to dispose safely of the head of some diminutive Gorgon. He glanced up. Almost immediately overhead was the open casement window of one of the bedrooms. It seemed to offer the only hope. He made two preparatory swings, then immediately sent his arm round again, shutting his eyes and releasing his grip at the same moment. He heard a diminuendo of yapping as Rodney went aloft, succeed
ed by sustained but mercifully muffled sounds of frenzy.
Love, who had not seen the manner of his deliverance, straightened up and stared incredulously at the inspector. “Where the hell has it gone?”