Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  “Now and again.”

  “He didn’t play chess, I suppose?”

  “Gawd, you are in a griping mood. Anyone would think you suspected me.”

  “Perish the thought. Why did you go to see him?”

  “Just to be sociable. I’m a steady advertiser, too.”

  “He didn’t give dinner parties for all his advertisers, surely. Who else went with you?”

  “Rodney Gloss was there sometimes—his solicitor. Doc Hillyard, too, occasionally. That’s all, as far as I remember.”

  “What about Harold Carobleat?”

  “Well, what about him? He’s dead.”

  “That’s all right. I just wanted a general picture of social life at the Gwill’s. We have to start with something, you know.”

  Bradlaw shrugged and began tracing numeral outlines on the desk calendar with one finger. “I’ll tell you this much,” he said slowly, “you needn’t waste time looking at Gwill’s friends for whoever killed him. I’ve known him, and them, for a good few years. Look, doctors and lawyers in a place like this don’t go round murdering people.”

  “Nor undertakers?” murmured Purbright.

  “No, not undertakers, either. Why the hell should they?” Bradlaw seemed to feel a sudden surge of resentment. “You flounder about and make all sorts of wild insinuations against people just because they knew somebody who’s been found dead. Damn it, I don’t think you even know yet how the fellow was killed.”

  Purbright said patiently: “No, I don’t think we do,” and waited.

  “Right; then why go casting around for suspects like...like a quizz-master or something?” (Bradlaw went to television for most of his derogatory similes.)

  “He’s the one,” said Purbright to Love, jerking his thumb at Bradlaw. “Got the bracelets, Sid? Bracelets,” he explained to the now peeved undertaker, “are what we call handcuffs. Very slangy.”

  Bradlaw grunted, looked at his watch and scowled. “Come on,” he pleaded. “I’ve people coming at twelve. What else do you want to know?”

  “Just three more things, Nab, I think. Firstly, what business was Gwill mixed up in apart from his paper?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Very well. Secondly, if none of his friends had any reason to kill him, who else did?”

  Bradlaw shook his head. “That’s your job to find out. I’d be inclined to ask who got anything out of it. But maybe nobody did. I don’t know.”

  “Lastly, what was Gwill’s relationship with Mrs Carobleat?”

  “You asked me that before.”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “I still can’t tell you. I only know what people have said, but that doesn’t signify. You should hear what some of them have hinted about my housekeeper. A lot of damned spiteful old cows. In this town you even need a chaperone when you go to measure a stiff.”

  “How trying for you, Nab.” Purbright picked up his hat and motioned Love to leave with him. “You must bear up, my friend. Don’t give way like poor old Gloss.”

  Bradlaw froze in the action of opening the door. He turned. “What the hell are you getting at?”

  Purbright smiled and pushed past him into the street. “Gloss,” he said, “is scared—something horrid.” The two policemen moved off in what seemed to Bradlaw slow and ominous companionship.

  At the end of the street, Purbright turned the corner and drew Love into a shop doorway some yards further on. “I’m going back to the station to see what the fellows have picked up from Heston Lane,” he said. “You hang on here and watch for Nab Bradlaw. I’ve an idea he’ll want to go visiting. If he takes that van of his, it’s too bad. He might feel like exercise, though.”

  “How long do you want me to stick to him?”

  “Only until he goes home again. It’s just on twelve now. He said he had some callers, so he’ll probably see them first. Don’t catch cold.”

  Love remained a few minutes looking into the shop window. Then he walked back to the corner. He glanced down Bride Street towards Bradlaw’s house, saw no one, and crossed over. For the next quarter of an hour he did his best to make hanging around a deserted road junction on a winter morning look a reasonable occupation.

  Eventually he saw a small group leave what he judged to be the undertaker’s office and walk away in the opposite direction. Shortly afterwards, a single figure emerged at the same point. As it approached, he recognized Bradlaw and sought another doorway. He gave Bradlaw time to reach the corner. Then carefully he looked out.

  Bradlaw, whose walk was distinguished by a slight roll to the left like the motion of a top-laden boat, had turned off into St Anne’s Place and was now going away from Love. The sergeant gave him fifty yards’ lead and followed, keeping close to the shops on his left.

  Several people were now between them, but Love had no difficulty in keeping the rhythmically listing figure of the undertaker in sight until, quite suddenly, it peeled off, mounted a short flight of railed steps, and disappeared.

  Love slowed his pace and crossed the road. From the other side he could see only two doorways with steps. He strolled slowly until he was opposite the first. The door was closed. The second entrance was not. He concluded that it must have been through there that Bradlaw had passed.

  He crossed over again and continued in the same direction, noting the names on the brass plates outside the second door. Then he became interested in shop windows once more and tried to forget how cold his feet were getting.

  Nearly half an hour went by.

  At last Bradlaw emerged. Love, at that moment twenty yards away, prepared to follow him again. He came nearer and tried to see which direction the undertaker had chosen. But there was no sign of him.

  Love crossed the road carefully, craning his neck and rising on tip-toe to see over the intervening citizenry. It was only when a second man appeared at the top of the steps and hurried down to the kerb that Love realized what had happened.

  He ran forward in time to see the car draw away and accelerate towards the town centre. The passenger was Bradlaw. The driver, whom Love recognized when he glanced swiftly behind him before letting out the clutch, was Mr Rodney Gloss.

  Chapter Seven

  Detective Constables Harper and Pook had spent the morning calling from door to door in Heston Lane, an occupation only a little less dispiriting than Love’s patrol of the chilling flagstones of St Anne’s Place. Every now and then, Harper (even numbers) would meet or be met by Pook (odd numbers) and compare notes on the remarkable blindness and defective hearing of the residents.

  “Dead stupid, these people,” opined Harper, with dismal regularity.

  “God, what a lot!” responded Pook.

  It did not strike them as at all reasonable that a murder could have been committed so privately as to have escaped entirely the notice of upwards of sixty householders, most of them patently inquisitive insomniacs with a keen sense of the significance of every passing footstep and every distantly slammed door.

  “They must know something,” Harper declared.

  “Scared we’ll ask for their dog licence,” theorized Pook.

  They parted once more for odd and even investigation, like vacuum cleaner salesmen doggedly canvassing a community served by gas.

  About half-way through the morning, Pook discovered he was far ahead of the last point at which he had seen Harper march up a driveway. Perhaps the lucky devil had found a house where hot coffee and reminiscences of a son’s career in the North-West Frontier Police were waiting. Pook noted the number of his next call and strolled back. Harper, he saw, was just coming out of the house, looking at his notebook and apparently confirming something with a tubby, beady-eyed and garrulous woman who nodded energetically and pointed occasionally in the direction of The Aspens, whence the detective had been working their hitherto unproductive way.

  “That one was a bit more useful,” said Harper as he rejoined his colleague.

  “Coffee?” asked Pook
, enviously.”

  “Tea,” absently replied Harper, “I think.” He gave a final glance at his notebook and slipped it in his pocket.

  Pook grunted and looked back sadly at the long line of odd and tea-less residences at whose doors he had knocked or rung in vain. “We’d better do the rest,” he said. “By the way, did you get anything out of her—apart from a cuppa?”

  “Three, actually,” Harper corrected. “And a list of people who could have been at Gwill’s place after midnight.”

  Worse and worse. Pook stared at him. “Don’t talk wet. These people all sink into a coma round about eight. She probably made something up because she was sorry for you.”

  “On, no.” Harper was pleased and brisk. “It so happens her daughter was out at a dance or something and the old woman was so scared she’d come back ruined that every time she heard anyone coming from town she popped down to the gate to see if it was girlie. Hence the who’s who. She didn’t know them all, but I’ve four names and a few descriptions.”

  The inquisition was resumed. But the houses here were much nearer the town. The detectives’ automatic catechism drew no more information that seemed to have any bearing on what had happened at or near The Aspens. Pook was reduced to putting down in his notebook an account of the narrow escape of one old woman’s cat from death beneath the wheels of a black van driven “furiously and without the slightest regard for animals” from the direction of Flaxborough at half an hour past midnight. “I noticed specially because it came back again later, officer, and poor Winston called out from the kitchen—well, they know, don’t they?”

  It was at Winston’s home that Pook’s fast was ended. But his benefactor was still so upset that she very nearly poured him a saucer of milk before it occurred to her that he might prefer tea.

  Love found Purbright digesting, like a sleepy boa constrictor, the offerings of Harper and Pook. He added his own news that Bradlaw had called upon lawyer Gloss and been driven off by him in his car. This was accepted by the inspector with a mild “Did he now?”

  “Anything new?” asked Love.

  “Oh, bits and pieces. They may make sense eventually. Unfortunately we’re still at the stage of not knowing what to throw away. Harper’s just unloaded this lot, for instance. ‘Middle-aged man with stick, carrying case and looking at numbers on gates...girl in hurry wearing dark fur-trimmed coat and high-heeled shoes...Maurice Hoylake, garage proprietor, on bicycle...man, fairly well-off looking, with trilby hat and small feet...Dr Hillyard, general practitioner, of Flaxborough...Mr William Semple...man in raincoat, rather drunk...Miss Peabody, millinery assistant and amateur dramatics secretary...’ And from Pook, with apologies and stiff-lipped readiness for further foolish errands, ‘One black van, driven to the danger of cats up and down Heston Lane all of a Monday midnight-O’.”

  “And what are they supposed to mean?”

  “They are the fruits of inquiries by Messrs Harper and Pook of the residents of Heston Lane. A list of everyone seen in those parts around the time that Gwill was likely to have been murdered. They’ll all need to be questioned when we can get round to it, but at the moment, it’s the last name that rings the loudest bell, isn’t it?”

  “Hillyard?”

  “Yes. Do you know him, by the way?”

  “I’ve never actually met him. He’s a bottle-hitter, from what I hear.”

  “It seems so. He turned up while I was talking to the Carobleat woman yesterday afternoon. She knew him well enough to dislike him, and I’d say he’s not over fond of her. Wherever he was going on Monday night, I doubt if it was to an assignation with Mrs Carobleat.”

  “You’ll tackle him about Monday?”

  “Naturally. It might not be easy, though. When he’s sober, which may not be very often, he’s probably well fortified with professional dignity and Gaelic awkwardness. And when he’s drunk, I expect he becomes a mystic, which will be a damn sight worse.”

  Purbright looked again at his notes. “What do you make of the ‘well-off looking man with trilby hat and small feet’? Small feet...what a curious thing for anyone to notice at that time of night.”

  “Not necessarily. When I used to be on nights I could tell some people by their feet. It’s the way they walk and the amount of noise they make. Those with little feet look rather like those prancy characters of Edward Lear—you know, walking on points.”

  Purbright regarded him with admiration. “Sid, you read books!”

  Love beamed. “I’m jolly well educated,” he retorted cheerfully. “I can detect, too. Roddy Gloss walks like one of Mr Lear’s Old Men Of.”

  The telephone forestalled Purbright’s reply. It was Lintz. He had just realized, apparently, that his uncle’s end was the beginning of a news story that was likely to run a course quite independent of his own feelings in the matter. He had toyed with, but finally abandoned, the idea of announcing the death in simple ‘We regret...’ terms designed to give the impression that Gwill had expired unaided and in an orthodox manner, and now wished to know if he could give instructions for the local account of the affair to include an official statement from the police.

  Purbright pondered. He had quickly learned to meet the bright, hungry questions of men who called him ‘Old Boy’ and seemed passionately interested in irrelevancies, with a non-committal geniality that they were pleased to take as confirmation of everything they asked. But the Citizen might prove useful. Unlike the Nationals, whose touching faith in their readers’ readiness to believe absolutely anything was so misplaced, a local weekly commanded credence.

  “Look, Mr Lintz,” said Purbright, “you can use all the facts as I believe you know them already. I’d like you to add this, though. Say the police are anxious to hear from anyone who was out in the Heston Lane area on Monday night from eleven-thirty onwards. Oh, and you might add a mention of a plain, black van. We’d like a word with the driver...Yes, same place, Heston Lane; it went up from town just before twelve and returned about half an hour later. Pardon? Yes, black...That’s very good of you, sir.”

  He grinned as he replaced the phone. “I was wondering how to put the wind up Lintz. That might have done it.”

  “The bit about the van?”

  “Yes. How many plain black vans would you say there are in Flaxborough?”

  “There’s ours.”

  “Don’t be fatuous.”

  Love thought a moment. “There can’t be more than a couple of others. Bradlaw’s is black, isn’t it?”

  “It is. Now what did you make of his story this morning?”

  “Thin.”

  “Very. I rather fancy, d’you know, that Bradlaw and Lintz cooked it up beforehand at Nab’s instigation. He certainly took Lintz home with him—I’ve checked on that. Since the murder, he could have rubbed it into Lintz that as Gwill’s heir he was bound to be suspected, and given him to believe that he, Bradlaw, would provide his alibi. But Nab was smart enough this morning to leave a hole in his story—the part about Lintz going out into the yard. It was deliberately added for our benefit. And for Bradlaw’s. It was the surest way of putting Lintz under suspicion. You noticed how Nab implied that he’d had a good deal to drink? The air of uncertainty about the game of chess...the suggestion that he had dropped off to sleep and wouldn’t have known how long Lintz was away...he did it all very nicely.”

  “Don’t you think you’re giving him too much credit for cunning? We don’t know for certain that either of them left the house.”

  “There’s the report of the van.”

  “Just passing through from some other town, perhaps.”

  “Don’t forget it came back again.”

  “True.”

  “Incidentally,” Purbright went on, “just before you came in I rang the Unionist Club and had a word with Hubbard, the steward. He confirmed what I’d suspected. Nab can drink all night and still see the sixteenths on that foot rule of his. Lintz pewks on a pint. On Monday night he picked his way out like a deep sea diver. Nab wa
s cold sober and steering him.”

  Love looked impressed. “In that case, it’s possible that it was Bradlaw who knew what was going to happen and who felt in need of an alibi.”

  “Quite possible. But suppose we can prove that Nab took his van and drove to Heston Lane end and back. We still have no notion of why he should have wanted to murder Gwill. He can’t be so short of work that he has to provide it for himself. We still don’t know how it was done. And we don’t know who else might have been involved; heaving the body around was too much for one, surely.”

  “Hillyard was seen going that way. But I suppose he could have been visiting a patient.”

  “What, on foot?”

  “No, perhaps not.”