The Flaxborough Crab f-6

by Colin Watson

  In respect for her age, and on the assumption that she would be anxious to get home and rest after the day’s excitement, Mrs Crunkinghorn was interviewed first. Meanwhile, Policewoman Bellweather found a raincoat to cover the deficiencies of Miss Pollock’s clothing and a mug of tea to restore her spirits.

  The inspector soon learned how mistaken had been his expectation of a frail, distressed and inarticulate octagenarian. Mrs Crunkinghorn’s description of what she had seen on the sky-line in Gosby Vale had all the colour and fervour of a racing commentary. Purbright was impressed, if a trifle dazed.

  He asked her to repeat what she had said about the late alderman’s unorthodox manner of pursuit.

  “Sideways,” she declared again. “Sideways wuz ’ow ’e wuz bowlin’ along. Until ’is legs’ got all raffled up. Then over ’e went, arse over tit! I never seen the like, never. Arse over tit, ’ewent! Pwosh!”

  “It is very tempting,” Purbright said to Sergeant Malley when the old woman had departed after laboriously scrawling her name at the bottom of the statement typed by Malley, “to conclude from this that the Flaxborough Crab, so called, is no more.”

  Malley stroked one of his chins and wheezed reflectively.

  “Aye,” he said. “It certainly looks like it.”

  “He’s been a singularly busy man, has our Steve. They tell me he was on fifteen committees.”

  The sergeant inflated plump cheeks and shook his head in wonder.

  “Sunday school superintendent. Old people’s welfare visitor. Magistrate..”

  “Governor of the Grammar School,” Malley supplied.

  “Lifeboat Fund president.”

  “Chairman of that television clean-up thing...”

  For a while, both men sat in awed contemplation of the late alderman’s multiplicity of office and honour.

  “I wonder,” said Purbright at last, “what set the old bugger off on this lark all of a sudden. Surely not Miss Pollock?”

  Malley shuddered. He sighed and went to the door.

  Miss Pollock made her entrance with as much dignity as was possible within the folds of a garment so over-long for her that its hem swept the floor. With her hat still jammed in straight and stern bisection of her forehead, she looked like a helmeted and caped member of a decontamination squad.

  At Purbright’s invitation, she perched herself grimly on the edge of a chair. Invisible behind the spare yards of raincoat, her little pointed feet dangled three inches from the floor.

  The inspector spoke gently.

  “This is a very sad and upsetting affair, Miss Pollock, and I’m sorry that you should be put to the trouble of answering questions so soon afterwards. I am sure you understand, though, that the coroner will have to have a clear picture of what happened, and that it will be best to try and put it together straight away.”

  “Yes, I see that, of course.” Her voice was firmer, and colder, than Purbright had expected.

  “We have heard,” he went on, “something of the events of this afternoon from the old lady who saw your...your predicament from where she was sitting some forty or fifty yards away. She could not tell us, of course, why you appeared to be running away from Mr Winge, nor for what reason he seemed to be chasing you.”

  Ignoring the implicit question, Miss Pollock stared at him blankly.

  “Perhaps,” said Purbright, “you could help us with those points.”

  Her gaze moved to the window.

  “I ran because I was alarmed by Mr Winge’s behaviour. It was quite inexplicable.”

  Malley, who liked his witnesses’ depositions to be chronologically straightforward, put in: “Before you say anything about that, Miss Pollock, I’d just like to be clear as to where you both were and what you were doing.”

  The inspector nodded.

  “We were in a small wood—a spinney, I suppose you might call it—in the far corner of the field.”

  “Close against the reservoir?”

  “Yes. You see, we had set the old folk off on a game of hide-and-seek, and...”

  “Hide-and-seek?” echoed Purbright.

  “That is what I said. They like to be occupied, these old people—organized and occupied. But one or two do tend to be laggards, you know, and so we have to give them a lead. That is why Mr Winge suggested that he and I should pretend to be taking part in the game. I went across to the spinney while Mr Winge waited with the old gentlemen. Then he came looking for me—except that he knew where I was, of course.”

  “So he joined you in the wood, did he?”

  “Yes. We were to wait until all the others were properly on the move and then come back to the coach.”

  “You say this had been his suggestion?” the inspector asked.

  “Certainly,” declared Miss Pollock, tight-faced.

  “You sound as if you had—what shall I say?—misgivings, perhaps?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mr Winge had already given me the impression that he was not quite himself. I had been obliged to change seats on the coach soon after we left town.”

  Purbright did not ask her to elaborate. Malley put the next question.

  “What was the alderman’s behaviour in the wood that alarmed you, Miss Pollock?”

  “He...he made a suggestion.”

  “Yes?”

  They waited. Miss Pollock let them.

  “What was the suggestion?” Purbright prompted. “It is relevant, you know.”

  After further hesitation, she said: “It was an indecent suggestion. It related to something I was wearing.”

  “Was wearing?” Malley’s big, gentle face was absolutely innocent.

  “Was and am!” snapped Miss Pollock.

  “Very well,” Purbright said. “We’ll leave it at that. Mr Winge proposed something that offended your sense of decency. How did you react?”

  “I told him that he must be mad. This, I may say, I regretted at once because I realized that madness was the only possible explanation and I was afraid that what I had said might provoke him to violence.”

  “And did it?”

  “Not immediately. He just laughed and made the same suggestion again. I turned and started to walk away. It was then that he attacked me.”

  “Can you describe the attack? What he actually did, I mean.”

  “I am not altogether certain, but I think he jumped on me from behind. All I remember now is running and feeling something tugging at me. He must have got hold of my dress. It was not until afterwards that I found it was torn.”

  “I understand from the policewoman that you didn’t suffer any harm physically,” Purbright said.

  “Well, no—he didn’t hurt me. He didn’t get the chance.”

  “I am very glad of that, anyway. Now tell me, Miss Pollock, did you at any time while you were running away look back at Mr Winge?”

  “Once, yes. It was just before...just before the accident.”

  “You saw him there behind you—running.”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you notice anything about the way he was running? Was there anything peculiar about it?”

  She looked sharply at the inspector, then at Sergeant Malley. “Should there have been?”

  Malley shrugged. Purbright said: “I was just wondering.”

  “I got no more than a sort of flash of him,” said Miss Pollock, guardedly. “Out of the corner. But it is quite true that he ran in a funny way. I don’t quite know how to describe it. He seemed to have half turned round, if you see what I mean, and to be coming sideways on.”

  After a short pause, the inspector said: “And that was the last you saw of him before the accident?”

  She nodded.

  “Which you heard rather than saw, I presume?”

  “I heard a splash, but somehow I didn’t connect it with what had been happening up to then. It was only when I looked back and saw that Mr Winge was not there behind me any more, that I realized that he had fallen i
n.”

  “Did you see him in the water?” Malley asked.

  “Not at that time. He had disappeared altogether. But I knew what must have happened because the surface was still rocking and swirling about.”

  “You ran for help?”

  “Naturally.”

  Malley turned to the inspector.

  “There’s nothing the lady could have done herself, sir. The reservoir embankment on the water side is very steep just there—more like a wall.”

  “Quite,” said Purbright.

  He gave Miss Pollock a reassuring smile.

  “You’ve been extremely helpful. There is only one more question that I should like to ask—and please don’t take it as reflecting in any way upon yourself. I simply want to know if there was anything you noticed in Mr Winge’s attitude or behaviour before today that suggested his having sexual designs on you or anybody else—on women generally, in fact.”

  A geranium flush spread rapidly from neck to hat brim.

  “Never! Certainly not! I have worked with Mr Winge for many years and known him up to that quite inexplicable affair today as a public-spirited and very religious gentleman!”

  “Thank you, Miss Pollock. We are deeply obliged to you.”

  Purbright rose and walked to the door.

  The raincoat, surmounted by Miss Pollock’s round and indignant little head, glided out.

  As the door closed, Malley suddenly flapped his hand in the air.

  “Hey, hang on a minute...what about her statement?” He wound a sheet of paper into the typewriter.

  Purbright said never mind, the deposition could be signed later; he’d have it sent round to her.

  Thoughtfully, he resumed his seat behind the big, shabby desk.

  “You know, Bill,” he said, “I don’t think she was quite as unprepared for old Steve’s crack at her virtue as she pretends.”

  Malley began jabbing keys with two plump forefingers. “Oh, aye?” He watched the keys closely all the time, as if some might otherwise escape their share of punishment.

  “I reckon she’d seen signs before. Her reaction to my asking her was a little too righteous to be convincing.”

  Malley grunted. He was scraping out a misplaced letter with the tip of what looked like a hunting knife.

  “Mind you,” Purbright went on, “it would be surprising if Winge had managed to gallop round like a rutting stag night after night without somebody noticing something. Even Doctor Jekyll couldn’t stop Mr Hyde peeping out occasionally at an inconveni...”

  “They tell me you’ve got the Crab!”

  In the doorway had appeared the cherubic features of Sergeant Love, bright with good news.

  “So it would seem,” said Purbright. “You can let your young lady out again now, Sid.”

  Love closed the door carefully behind him.

  “My landlady won’t half be disappointed,” he said. “She’s been going up as far as the canal end every night this week, in hopes.”

  “Have you fixed the inquest yet, Bill?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. Old Amblesby’s down in Cornwall, or somewhere, so I’ve had to call out Thompson. He’s not sat as deputy coroner since 1953. He’s bloody terrified.”

  “I don’t know that he need be,” said Purbright, lightly. “It’s a straightforward enough case.”

  Malley stopped typing and looked around.

  “Didn’t I tell you who was doing the P.M., then?”

  “No, you didn’t, as a matter of fact.”

  “Heineman.”

  “Oh,” said Purbright. He looked a fraction less carefree.

  “And perhaps I didn’t mention that Winge’s family are getting both his solicitor and his own doctor to attend the inquest.”

  “Solicitor....” Purbright frowned. “That wouldn’t be Justin Scorpe, would it?”

  “It would.”

  “And who’s the doctor?”

  “Meadow.”

  Love looked blandly from the inspector to the coroner’s officer.

  “What’s the idea, then?”

  “The family”—Malley leaned back in his chair and champed experimentally on the stem of a squat, black pipe—“are not very pleased.”

  He fished a tobacco tin from the distorted breast pocket of his tunic, levered off its lid, and began ramming liquorice-like strands into the pipe bowl.

  “I fancy that what they’ll be putting Meadow up to say is that the old man was suffering from something or other that caused him to be unaware of what he was doing. You know—very sad, but a sight more respectable than jumping on young women just because he felt like it.”

  Love showed by a shrewd pursing of lips that he understood the logic of such strategy. He looked at the inspector.

  Purbright murmured to himself: “Thompson...Heineman...Meadow...”

  “They’re all doctors, you see,” Malley explained to Love.

  “So what?”

  “So,” said Malley, with great cheerfulness, “they all hate one another’s guts.”

  Chapter Seven

  The ignominious but, most citizens agreed, not undeserved end of the Flaxborough Crab was common knowledge long before the inquest was opened in the little dun-coloured courtroom adjoining the police station.

  Alderman Steven Winge had been one of those public figures whose appearance on platforms, at committee tables and in chairs of jurisdiction and debate would seem to be inevitable and of limitless term. No week in the past thirty years had gone by without his having declared something open, or moved a vote of some kind, or given careful consideration to all the facts of a disturbing case.

  Except in his role of magistrate, which entailed nothing but determination and sorrow, if Mr Winge’s court pronouncements were to be believed, his every duty in a lifetime’s service to the Flaxborough community had been prefaced by the assertion: ‘It gives me great pleasure...’

  If bliss be a cumulative emotion, one could only assume that the waters of Gosby Reservoir had closed upon a supremely happy man.

  But it was now plain to all that there had been another field of activity, private as distinct from public, that had engaged the alderman’s energies. It doubtless also had given him great pleasure. Would that day’s official inquiry in Fen Street unearth the regrettable details? Flaxborough devoutly hoped so.

  The deputy coroner, Dr Thompson, took his seat at two o’clock precisely. He had been looking at his watch all morning and had spent the last half-hour lurking nervously in the corridors of the police station. Public office did not give him great pleasure; he cursed the proper holder of this particular one, Mr Albert Amblesby, as an irresponsible, cavorting, brain-softened old absentee. Which was not strictly fair, as the real coroner—admittedly senile, but in general reliably on hand—was at that moment comatose in a Cornish nursing home after falling downstairs during a visit to his married daughter in Truro.

  Sergeant Malley, unhurried, efficient, kindly, stood behind Dr Thompson’s right shoulder. He held a sheaf of depositions ready to be slipped one by one in their right order before the deputy coroner as the witnesses were called.

  Purbright was at the corner of the table farthest from Thompson. Next to him sat Dr Heineman, pathologist at the General Hospital. Also at the table, equidistant from Heineman and the deputy coroner, and carefully refraining from meeting the eye of either, was Dr Meadow.

  The non-medical witnesses—Miss Pollock, Mrs Crunkinghorn, a fireman called Hackett, and the alderman’s widow, Mrs Olivia Winge—occupied a row of chairs beneath the room’s only window.

  In a chair on his own, notebook on knee, was Henry Popplewell, of the Citizen.

  At four minutes past two, a man arrived carrying a briefcase, a pile of books, and a spectacle case that might at a pinch have accommodated a brace of duelling pistols. He glanced mournfully round the court and took a place at the table opposite the deputy coroner by economically combining a deep bow with the motion of sitting down.

  “Good afternoon, Mr
Scorpe,” said the deputy coroner.

  The solicitor gave him a small secondary bow and set about arranging his library. Then he unloaded the contents of the briefcase. Finally, he signified his readiness to allow the inquiry to proceed by donning with a flourish his huge, black-framed spectacles.