Coffin Scarcely Used f-1

by Colin Watson

  A moment later he stopped in his tracks to Mrs Carobleat’s porch. Love had called out loudly and excitedly. Purbright frowned and walked back to the road. He was met by the sergeant, glowing and gesticulating. “Don’t froth,” said Purbright testily. He found demonstrative policemen as embarrassing as sentimental lawyers, or muscular clergymen.

  Love led him back to the entrance to The Aspens. They entered the drive and turned. Love pointed to the handle that lifted the latch securing one wrought-iron gate to the other.

  “Where have you seen that before?” he asked in cryptic triumph.

  Purbright grunted and bent down to look more closely at the handle.

  The iron had new, bright rust upon it where it had been scraped or rubbed clean fairly recently. It was wheel-shaped and about three inches in diameter. The spokes were decorative and formed a flower pattern, rather like a daffodil.

  “Yes,” said Purbright, standing up. “Yes, indeed.” He began examining the rest of the iron-work from the central leaf to the heavy timber pillars that supported the gates.

  At the top of the right-hand gate, near the wooden post and on a level with his head, he found another scarlet patch of recent rust. He pointed it out to Love and said: “Here’s where Gwill’s volts were introduced, Sid. And here”—he made as if to grasp the iron daffodil with his other hand—“is where they were delivered.”

  “Just what I thought,” said Love. “That’s why I...”

  “Of course,” said Purbright. “You were quite right to mention it.” He gazed at the hedge that divided the front garden of The Aspens from its neighbour. “A cable run along that and clipped to the top of the gate. It couldn’t have been spotted in the dark. Probably not in daylight, for that matter. The question is, Which house was it led from? Gwill’s or Mrs Carobleat’s?”

  Followed by Love, he moved slowly along the side of the hedge, scrutinizing the frost-hardened earth beneath it. About half-way along, he saw a glint of bright yellow among the dead twigs and leaves. He picked up a short length of adhesive wrapping tape and carefully removed the fragments that were sticking to it. He pressed the adhesive side down on a page of his notebook and showed it to Love.

  The piece of tape had been cut off through three lines of printing, leaving —NWELL LTD. at the top, —IO AND TV below it, and —DLOW at the bottom.

  As they were looking at it, a voice just behind them croaked with querulous sadness: “Have you come to stake him down? Have you, sir?”

  The policemen wheeled round and stared into the grey, unhappy face of Mrs Poole.

  “Good morning,” said Purbright with automatic courtesy. Then, realizing the oddity of her question, “Have we come to what?”

  She looked at him for several seconds and shook her head doubtfully. “No,” she murmured, “no, I suppose that’s not your job. But somebody ought to. You’d never have thought their hair would keep growing, would you? But it’s natural enough, really, I expect.”

  “Yes,” said Purbright, uncomfortably, “I suppose it is.” He noticed the woman looked much older out of doors. Her features seemed far more ravaged than when he had last spoken to her.

  Mrs Poole passed a trembling, skinny hand over her little pursed mouth. “It wasn’t here, you know,” she said. Tilting her head, she added: “Round the back, as a rule. Except when he fixed up the wireless just before I went to Libbie’s.” She giggled weakly and a tear started to slide down the grey curtain of her cheek.

  Purbright gave Love the flicker of a glance, then took Mrs Poole by the arm and led her back towards the front door. He held his head low and spoke to the ground. “Libbie’s your sister, is she?” he asked. She nodded emphatically.

  “So the wireless was fixed that morning—was that it?”

  “Early on. Only just light. Only...” She spoke dreamily, groping for words.

  “You saw something, then, did you, Mrs Poole? Something out here?”

  “I was getting up, you know. You look out of a window and there you are. You’re never the first. Not in winter, even. Mind you”—she suddenly looked at him sternly and spoke low and fast—“mind you, it’s my opinion he was never far away all night, so it was small credit to him to be there, already up and whiskery and busy with his aerial over the hedge to get the eight o’clock news.” She snorted and rubbed her hands on her pinafore.

  Purbright stopped in front of the porch and faced the house-keeper. “Who, Mrs Poole?” he asked. “Who was it fixing the wireless that morning?”

  She slowly drew up a hand and began fingering her chin with little fluttery movements. She made no answer, but moved back to the door, staring at Purbright as she retreated. Just before she disappeared, she announced with dignified lucidity and a fleeting smile: “Mr Gwill keeps rather to himself these days, but I shall tell him you called.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The man behind the wheel of the squat black van was not fond of driving for its own sake, even in the rolling dairy-lands of the Westcountry that contrasted so strongly with the utilitarian, arable flatness that surrounded Flaxborough. He glared despondently through the windscreen at the unpredictable road ahead, snaking between high banks bearing their rain-heavy tangle of dead cow-parsley, vetch and spear grass. To his companion he said not a word.

  It was still light enough to see Glee Hill crouching like a lonely old sheep dog in the mist away to the left. On the near side of it, a small forest of skeletal trees held tapering, motionless fingers against the slate-coloured sky. The occasional road-side cottage, withdrawn against a leafless, dripping orchard or standing amidst a forlorn garden of soured, broken potato plants and stripped orussel stalks, showed no sign of occupancy. Here was a landscape gone to seed and bedded down to rot quietly until spring.

  At the next cross-roads, Dr Hillyard steered the van carefully to a stop against the verge and studied a map. He also drank gratefully from a silver flask and lit a cigarette. Then he checked the map with the signpost and drove off into the right-hand turn.

  The road descended steeply through a dank plantation and drew level beside a stream. This was crossed by a humped bridge that carried the road to the beginnings of a village. Before entering its main street, flanked by a hall, some stone-built houses and a couple of shops with lighted windows, Dr Hillyard chose a sharp left turn and drove slowly past an inn, a farm entrance and a long, low wall that appeared to enclose the grounds of a manor house, the chimneys of which topped a huge yew hedge at the end of some rough pasture.

  About half a mile farther on, the road forked. At the junction was a triangular patch of asphalt and on it a telephone kiosk. Again Dr Hillyard pulled up. This time he got out of the van, crossed to the kiosk and entered it. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and compared what was written on it with the dial of the telephone.

  Mr Bradlaw watched from his van’s passenger seat. He shivered in the chill dampness that crept through the floorboards and slid round the cab’s windows and doors. His legs tingled and ached. Disentangling them from the rug he had wrapped around him, he opened the door and climbed heavily to the road as Hillyard shouldered his way out of the kiosk.

  “Well?” said Bradlaw, stamping his feet.

  “That’s the number, all right,” Hillyard said. He stared up one of the roads. “It’ll not be far from here. A cottage is the best bet. Not in the village, though.”

  Bradlaw looked unhappily at the sky. “We’ll have to be starting back inside another couple of hours, whether we find anything or not. We should have waited for her coming again and one of us followed her.”

  Hillyard ignored this observation. Puckering his face so that his splayed teeth stood out from his mouth like a bundle of piano keys, he goggled searchingly along the left-hand fork. “Not too promising,” he said at last. “We’ll take a look at the other one first. You’d better drive from now.”

  They had not gone far, however, before the road narrowed into a lane. Becoming progressively rougher, it eventually petered out into a tr
ack, deeply rutted by cart wheels. The only habitation in sight was a group of farm buildings, about a quarter of a mile away. Bradlaw pulled up. “They look a dead loss.” He nodded towards the huddle of barns and outhouses.

  “Aye. Well try the other.”

  Bradlaw backed the van off the track into the furrowed but firm earth alongside and, with some lurching and several stalls, managed to turn it back towards the junction. “How anyone could live in a bloody wilderness like this...”

  “It has its advantages,” observed Hillyard, a trifle bitterly.

  The other fork obligingly remained metalled for the first half mile or so and seemed likely to continue. At the first sight of a dwelling, a small two-storey brick house on the left, Bradlaw slowed down almost to a halt. “What do we do? Look in?”

  “No. Pull up at the gate and sound the horn. Be ready to drive off as soon as we see who comes out.”

  The sudden blare of the hooter rent the silent, moisture-laden air like the cry of an impaled bull. There was an almost immediate scampering and scraping and five children appeared round the side of the house. At the same time, a curtain was drawn back at one of the upper windows and a fat, wild-eyed woman stared out. Bradlaw precipitately let in the clutch and the van shot forward.

  “Heaven preserve us!” murmured Hillyard, devoutly.

  They had gone nearly as far again before another house came into view. It was a low-built cottage, thatched and ivied to such a degree that its windows were like the eyes of a castaway, peering through hair. The place was only noticeable at all because of the double gates that stood across the path turning in from the road. These were of a sickly sienna, highly varnished.

  The cottage, or what could be discerned of it under the multitude of ivy ropes, was of plastered brick. The front door had a porch and a flagged path led through the undergrowth of the neglected garden and round the side of the building. Rank elder bushes, trees almost, crowded to the thatch on the right-hand side. Behind was the dark tracery of a group of tall oaks.

  Bradlaw, who had stopped the van level with the incongruous gateway, pointed to a broad, low shed some twenty yards to the left of the cottage. “Garage,” he said.

  Both men surveyed the scene from where they sat. Although the light was fading fast, no lamp had been lit in the cottage. Nor was there any smoke from the great ivy-strangled stack.

  “Try the horn,” commanded Hillyard tersely.

  The bellow echoed from the steep hillside beyond the cottage. There was no response, from children or anyone else.

  Hillyard stared intently at the gates, then at the shed. He wound down the window on his side, stuck out his head and looked back along the road, then forward in the direction the van faced.

  He opened the door and jumped down. “I’ll take a chance and look inside. You can see far enough both ways to give me a pip if anything comes along.”

  Bradlaw looked at him anxiously. “I'd not do that—not just walk up to it. You can’t be sure that nobody’s there.”

  Hillyard seemed not to hear. Before opening the gate, he turned and said: “You’d better stand in the road. And for God’s sake don’t forget to sound that blasted hooter if you see a car turn down this road.”

  Bradlaw obediently left his seat. Glancing at the tall, lank figure of the doctor already advancing in a sort of athletic creep towards one of the cottage windows, he took up sentry-go for the length of his van. At last, made nervous by the crunch of his own footsteps, he halted and continued the vigil by turning his head this way and that and listening.

  Hillyard reached the cottage and peered cautiously over the nearest window-sill. The room within was dark and at first he could distinguish only the pieces of furniture immediately in front of him. There was a console radio and a cabinet on which stood a decanter and glasses. A chair, a small table...As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he picked out a broad maplewood couch, another cabinet of some kind and two pullman armchairs facing the fireplace. The fitted carpet of pale coffee colour was relieved by a single heavy rug in black and turquoise.

  The room on the other side of the front door proved to be a bedroom, apparently furnished no less expensively, although the nearly drawn curtains limited the view from the window to about a third of its area. The bed covers, Hillyard noticed, lay as they had been turned back, although a suit of pyjamas had been folded and placed on a nearby chair.

  Observing, as he passed, that both front and back doors were secured not by country latches but with Yale locks, Hillyard walked silently round the cottage. On all sides, decaying vegetation straggled almost to the wall. There was the smell of perpetually wet stone, of leaves and fungus.

  The two windows at the back both gave into the same room, a fairly narrow one that extended the breadth of the cottage. It contained modern kitchen fittings, except that the sink had no taps. At one end was a small dining table and chairs. Beside the gas stove stood a large cylinder. There were a few dishes on the table, and also a jug and a packet of cornflakes.

  Hillyard gave the back door a perfunctory shake. It was locked. He returned to the van.

  “That’s it, all right,” he said to Bradlaw, who had got back into the driving seat and was rubbing the chill out of his plump knees. “And very nicely set up. Damn me! Very nicely. Aye!” He gave the cottage a baleful look as Bradlaw started the engine and the van jerked away.

  “How do you know?” asked Bradlaw, switching on the side lamps and leaning nearer the windscreen. This was the worst time for driving, neither light nor dark. “How do you know it’s the one?”

  Hillyard lit a cigarette and ignored the question. He was thinking. Suddenly he nudged his companion’s arm. “Quick, into there.” He pointed to a clearing by the road’s edge almost immediately ahead. Bradlaw braked and swung the van sharply round to the right. A tree loomed up. He stopped just short of it and swore.

  “Fine,” said Hillyard. He turned and groped behind him in the dark interior of the van. The small leather case that he found there he thrust into his overcoat pocket. Then he opened the door.

  Bradlaw seized his arm. “What are you going to do?” he asked, nervousness thinning his voice.

  Hillyard looked over his shoulder as he stepped down. “Do?” he echoed. “I’m coming with you, friend. You didn’t think we could leave the van outside the gate, did you? It will be safe enough here until we want it.”

  “Look here,” said Bradlaw, opening the door on his side and clambering out clumsily, “I thought that as...” He came round the front of the van, breathing quickly. “I thought there wouldn’t be anything for us to do now. With there being no one there, I mean.” He stared hopefully at the other’s slightly contemptuous smile. “Well, there isn’t, is there?” His arms flapped for a moment, then he pushed both hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. Still Hillyard said nothing. Bradlaw glanced round at the stockade of leafless trees within whose damp gloom they stood concealed from the highway.

  The doctor took his arm, not ungently, and said, as if speaking to himself: “The time is past for pretence. That’s too dangerous now. We need to make the legend a reality, or God knows when we’ll sleep again.” Then he grinned in the dusk and added sharply: “And so, my tubby little meat packer, let us go to redress an ancient wrong.”

  Together they regained the road and began walking back the way their van had come. The figures in the thickening dark were like those of Don Quixote and his fearful squire.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The landlord of the Brink of Discovery was not a local man but a former singer from the North of England who had saved the proceeds of brief but phenomenally profitable popularity and invested them in what he called ‘the mine host racket’.

  “You see how it is,” he said to Purbright and his companion. “The locals haven’t enough honest thirst to keep the flippin’ beer engine from rusting. Do you know what they do? They brew some filthy liver-lifter of their own and guzzle it in bed until they’re in the mood to
get up and fire a few ricks. What? You’d never believe. Honest, you wouldn’t. And they’re all related, this lot are. Here, even when they bother to get married there’s no call for half of ’em to change their names. My Freda says: ‘There’s another three village idiots going to church’ every time the wedding bells ring. They’re a bright lot round here, I’ll tell you.”

  “We were hoping...” Purbright put in.

  The landlord poddled him in the shoulder with one finger. “So you see,” he went on relentlessly, “there’s nothing round here to keep a pub’s brass polished. They’re not civilized. Arson and incest, them’s their hobbies, my Freda says, and that’s just about it. Well, if I had my way I wouldn’t have ’em in the place. They just sit round and keep spitting in their beer to make it last out and gouging holes in the bar floor with their ugly great boots. Look, now—look over there at that trestle—one of ’em’s been hacking at it with a bloody scythe. I tell you they bring scythes in here. They do—no, really.”