The Flaxborough Crab f-6

by Colin Watson

  “Sergeant!” One of the finely shaped hands extended in friendliness. “How delightful to see you again!”

  Love grinned and shuffled his feet.

  “And how is your Mr Purbright?” asked Miss Teatime, cheerfully.

  “He’s very well, thank you, ma’am.”

  “Do give him my regards.”

  She turned to Brother Culpepper, who had been watching the encounter with obvious approval.

  “And have you been showing Sergeant Love our little enterprise?”

  “ ’sright.”

  Miss Teatime smiled again at Love.

  “What monastic modesty doubtless has prevented his telling you is that Brother Culpepper is our guiding genius out here at Moldham. The church’s loss has been our gain. Oh, temporarily, of course—you must not suppose that his Order would part with him for good.”

  “I told ’im that. Abaht bein’ on loan, like.”

  “Would you care for a cup of coffee, sergeant? Then you could tell me the reason for this very welcome visit.”

  She led Love to the cottage and into the room with the addressograph and filing cabinets. They sat on gaunt but quite comfortable steel chairs. Brother Culpepper, whose worldly service apparently extended to the kitchen department, could soon be heard rattling crockery. A couple of minutes later, he brought in a tray and made space for it on the table by elbowing aside some of the packets and labels.

  “Back in ’alf ’nour,” he remarked on his way out. “Be seein’ yer.”

  “His devotions,” Miss Teatime explained softly to the sergeant. “We give him all facilities, naturally.”

  She poured Love a full cup of the strong coffee-and-milk mixture from a jug and passed him a small sugar bowl. Her own cup she less than half filled, then topped it up with a pale amber fluid from a medicine bottle that she took from the white cabinet, painted with a red cross, on the wall behind them.

  “Friar’s Balsam,” she said with a little grimace of resignation, putting back the cork. Then, as if by afterthought, she looked inquiringly at Love and held out the bottle. “But perhaps you, too, are a bronchitis sufferer, sergeant?”

  Love hurriedly shook his head and pulled his coffee to safety. It was only later, when he caught a steam-borne whiff of a surprisingly alcoholic nature, that he regretted his conservatism.

  Miss Teatime sipped her remedy with considerable fortitude.

  “I trust that your call has nothing to do with the more depressing aspect of a policeman’s job, Mr Love. It is difficult in the peaceful atmosphere of the countryside to conceive of lawlessness, you know.”

  “Well, I can’t say that there’s any lawlessness involved, actually. Mr Purbright just wanted me to have a look and see what was here. He doesn’t know it has anything to do with you, I’m sure.”

  “Is he interested in herbal therapy, then?”

  Love hesitated. “Well, no, I shouldn’t have thought so. The fact is, we’ve had a bit of trouble in Flax, and this stuff you make here does happen to have been mentioned.”

  He blushed and stared into his cup, unhappily aware of the difficulty of deceiving a lady so well-bred as Miss Teatime.

  “But surely”—Miss Teatime looked puzzled—“there can be no suggestion of our product having been concerned in this, ah, trouble? It is altogether wholesome, I assure you.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it is. The Reverend seemed to think so, anyway.”

  “Brother Culpepper? Oh, yes, his judgement is very sound where the fruits of the earth are concerned. But perhaps you can tell me a little more about your inspector’s anxieties?”

  Love related the facts of Alderman Winge’s death by drowning following his attempted seduction of Miss Pollock and a subsequent attack of giddiness. He repeated the assertion by Dr Meadow at the inquest that Winge had been dosing himself with Samson’s Salad, which, Love understood, was synonymous with Lucky Fen Wort, as processed and packaged at the Moldham Meres Laboratories. The sergeant forebore from cataloguing the other cases of indecent assault; nor did he mention Mrs Grope’s suspicions concerning association between Fen Wort and the recent disconcerting behaviour of her husband.

  Miss Teatime listened to all this with grave and polite attention. Then she replenished his cup and helped herself to a booster shot of Friar’s Balsam.

  “How very distressing,” she murmured. “But I am certain that Dr Meadow cannot have meant to blame our Samson’s Salad for what happened to his poor patient. Its action is invigorating but not in the least degree harmful. Indeed, I am only surprised—though relieved, naturally—to hear that Mr Winge did not catch the lady he was pursuing.”

  “She was a good runner, by all accounts.”

  “That is as well.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Tell me, though, Mr Love—was the criticism by Dr Meadow voiced publicly at the inquest?”

  “Oh, yes. He’d been rather nettled by the deputy coroner, as a matter of fact. The inspector seems to think he was trying to to put himself in the clear.”

  “I see.”

  The ensuing silence sharpened a feeling in Love that his appearance at Moldham Meres must look odd and even foolish if he could think of no better justification. He had been received very kindly. Everything here seemed to be above board. Surely Purbright would not blame him for being a little more forthcoming.

  He found himself saying: “Strictly between ourselves...”

  Miss Teatime leaned forward. She looked concerned and very sympathetic.

  “...we do have reports of another customer of yours, and it could be that he’s the same way inclined as old Winge.”

  “Dear me!”

  “That’s how it looks. Confidentially, of course.”

  “Naturally.”

  “His wife’s very worried. She says he’s taken to interfering with women in shops and collecting, well—you know—garments.”

  Miss Teatime found the sergeant’s propensity for blushing most endearing. She nodded understandingly.

  “According to her,” Love went on, “all this began when he started taking this herb stuff. That’s according to her,” he added defensively.

  “You are being so agreeably frank, sergeant, that I wonder if you would care to divulge the gentleman’s name. I need hardly say that it would go no further.”

  “Well...” He hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Grope, actually.”

  Miss Teatime pondered, then shook her head.

  “No, I’m afraid the name is not familiar to me.” She smiled. “Perhaps I had best forget it again. Now then, is there any other matter in which you think I might be able to help you?”

  Love thought not, but thanked her for asking.

  When he had gone, Miss Teatime opened a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. After a brief search, she tweaked up a card. It was that of the only Grope on the mailing index. She copied the address into her little memorandum book, resumed her seat at the table, and thoughtfully lighted a slim, black cheroot.

  Chapter Eleven

  Brother Culpepper re-entered the office some twenty minutes later. When he saw that Miss Teatime was alone, he hauled off his habit and hung it on a hook at the back of the door. Then he slumped into the chair vacated by Sergeant Love and felt in his shirt pocket for a cigarette end and a match. The cigarette end was crumpled and very short. He lit it with his lips pouted well forward and his eyes nearly shut.

  “What a nice policeman Sergeant Love is,” remarked Miss Teatime. “Did you not think so, Joe?”

  “Oh, yurs. A right darlin’.” Culpepper hooked his tongue tip round the smouldering butt and shifted it to the opposite corner of his mouth. “Wot was ’e after, anyway?”

  “He was making routine inquiries.”

  “They always are. Lot o’ ponshus pilots.”

  “Now, you must not be unjust, Joe. The sergeant is very helpful. It is not every policeman who gives warning of impending bad publicity.”

  “E
h? ’Ow d’yer mean, Looce?”

  “It seems that a certain Dr Meadow has been making remarks that cast reflection upon our product. As those remarks were made at an inquest, it is very likely that they will be reported in the Press—in the local Press, at all events. We must hope that his calumnies will not spread further afield.”

  “Oo, ’ell!”

  Miss Teatime regarded the remnant of her cheroot, then tamped it out scrupulously in an earthenware ashtray.

  “Of course,” she said, “the effects will not necessarily be disastrous. On the one hand, it would be highly beneficial if the story were to gain ground that Lucky Fen Wort puts lead into the pencils of elderly gentlemen. That, after all, is what we have tried to convey in more delicate terms through the advertisement columns.”

  “Shoor,” agreed Brother Culpepper. Puckering his face, he sucked a final dividend of smoke from the brown pellet in his mouth corner, then extracted it between finger and thumb and flicked it accurately into the fireplace.

  “What would not be beneficial,” resumed Miss Teatime, “is the suggestion by a medical man that our product had contributed not merely to the venal foibles of this Mr Winge but to his death as well. People are very readily swayed by the prejudices of doctors, and they do not like taking things which they fear may kill them.”

  “Yurs, but ahr little old Wort ’d never do that.”

  “Certainly not. You know and I know and all the good country folk around here know how benign are the remedies of nature. Unfortunately, the professional medical mind admits of no such persuasion.”

  “O ye stiff-necked ’ippercrits,” muttered Culpepper. He leaned forward and peered hopefully into the coffee jug, but it was empty.

  Miss Teatime got up and walked once or twice from one end of the room to the other.

  “There is just one thing which I find extremely puzzling,” she said, halting by the window and looking down into the yard at two cats that lay together and snoozed in the sun. “Why did our friend Dr Meadow go out of his way to mention Samson’s Salad in connection with that man’s death? Doctors generally refuse even to acknowledge the existence of what they call quack medicines. His behaviour has been most uncharacteristic. I wonder why.”

  Culpepper shrugged.

  “The sergeant,” said Miss Teatime, “used the phrase ‘trying to put himself in the clear’. Clear of what, though? I should love to know.”

  “Arst ’im,” suggested Culpepper, raspingly humorous.

  Miss Teatime smiled. The smile lingered as she stood in thought.

  “No, I have a better idea, Joe. We shall see what Bernie can find out.”

  “Bernie?”

  “Yes. He is, by the grace of God, still a member of the British Medical Association, is he not?”

  “If they ain’t rumbled that little old puddin’ club clinic of ’is in ’Ampstead, ’e is.”

  “Quite. But I have seen no report of his having fallen from favour. I shall make a few preliminary inquiries locally and then telephone Bernie tonight.”

  “Knock an’ it shall be opened t’yer, me old dear,” quoth Brother Culpepper.

  He looked at the clock.

  “Nah then, wot’s ’appened to that little bugger Florrie this mornin’? We’re bunged up wiv bloody Wort til she gets ’ere.”

  Miss Teatime discovered that Blackfriars’ Court was a sort of nodule on one of the narrow lanes between Flaxborough Market Place and the river. Enclosing a cobbled area about fifty yards square were four rows of Georgian and early Victorian houses. The houses were quite tall but mostly of only one room’s breadth. There was no space between them. They looked like a concourse of widowed sisters, much undernourished and huddled together for comfort.

  Only at one spot had they parted company. This was to make way for a Baptist Chapel, a self-satisfied, brick interloper with two imitation campaniles and a rectangular stained glass window. The colours of the glass were neither sombre nor gay, but curiously and unpleasandy provocative. Miss Teatime decided that they had surgical connotations: she noted iodine (for cuts), picric acid (burns), and gentian violet (athlete’s foot).

  While she was looking, the big imitation gothic doors of the chapel opened and gave birth to a battered sideboard, midwived by two men in white aprons. Miss Teatime recalled that the building was now a second-hand furniture saleroom.

  She mounted three steps to the tall, narrow door of number eighteen Blackfriars’ Court and knocked. Almost immediately the yellowing lace curtain at the window on her right was edged cautiously aside. She stared resolutely at the knocker, pretending not to notice. Slow, ponderous footsteps echoed on a stone floor within. A bolt grated, then slammed back against its stop. The door opened.

  Jumping Christ! said Miss Teatime to herself.

  Looming in the shadowy doorway was a man in the uniform of a lieutenant-general of the late Czar’s Imperial Russian Army.

  For some moments, Miss Teatime’s surprise prevented her remembering the formula by which she had planned to gain entrance. But at last she forced her gaze from the ankle-length greatcoat, from the gold braid and the eagle-crested buttons, from the medals and the epaulettes, up to the great grey mournful moon of a face that hung over them. She said:

  “Good morning. I am from the Regional Health Insurance Board. Are you Mr Walter Grope?”

  The lieutenant-general nodded doubtfully, as if he had not heard the name very often before.

  Miss Teatime beamed.

  “I wonder if I might come in for a few moments, Mr Grope. A small matter of administrational routine has arisen and I believe you could help us to clear it up.”

  “It’s not about the tablets, is it?”

  Grope sounded as vague as he looked. He had made no move to admit her.

  “Tablets?” she repeated, encouragingly.

  “The doctor said he was having to stop them.”

  “Would that be Dr Meadow, by any chance?”

  “He’s been on to you people about it, has he?”

  “Ah, not directly, no...”

  Mr Grope absent-mindedly fingered his Order of Vassily (Second Class).

  “Perhaps you’d better come through into the room.”

  He half-turned, making space for her to pass him, then closed the door.

  Miss Teatime paused by the first doorway she came to.

  “That’s right—in there,” called Mr Grope. She noticed, not unthankfully, that he had neglected to replace the bolt.

  The room contained a great deal of furniture, including two pianos, a carved mahogany cupboard the size of a modest bus shelter, an oval dining table draped in port wine-coloured plush, a pedestal gramophone, and a number of formidable sundries that eluded immediate identification.

  Miss Teatime picked her way between a piano stool and what she suspected to be a commode, and perched as gracefully as she could upon the arm of a bloated, tapestry-covered settee.

  “Yes, these tablets,” she resumed briskly. “What was it that Dr Meadow told you about them? The fact is that some of our prescription records appear to have gone astray. The question of your tablets might well have a bearing.”

  Mr Grope, who had entered the furniture labyrinth by another channel, stared gloomily at her over a bamboo plant stand.

  “Doing without them is very wearing,” he declared.

  “I am sure it must be, Mr Grope. But what did Dr Meadow say?”

  “He didn’t hold out any hope. Not when I called on Wednesday.”

  Miss Teatime was by no means the first person to have discovered that having conversation with Walter Grope produced a curious sense of being bombarded with echoes. Was it the pianos? she wondered. Reverberations, perhaps.

  “Hope of more tablets, do you mean?”

  “Of course. They...” He paused, made several silent lip movements as if trying out words, then brightened and announced in a rush: “They-ran-out-on-Tuesday-at-eleven-fifteen.”

  “That,” observed Miss Teatime, having grasped the
reason for the echo effect, “does not scan.”

  “Not really,” Mr Grope agreed.

  “But it is very stimulating, if I may say so, to meet someone with so natural a flair for poetry.”

  The nearest approximation to a smile of which Mr Grope was capable stirred momentarily in the feather-bed of his cheek.