The Flaxborough Crab f-6

by Colin Watson

  “About half-past four this afternoon.”

  “As long ago as that?”

  “Yes, I’d been typing an article for him. That and a few letters. He went back to the house at half-past four to get his tea.”

  “What about your tea?”

  “I made a cup here. He didn’t tell me until I’d finished typing his article that he wanted a copy made, so I stayed on.”

  “At what time did surgery begin?

  “Six o’clock.”

  “And didn’t you see him then?”

  “No, he always came into his consulting room by its own side door and rang for the first patient when he was ready.”

  “I see. He seemed fit, did he, when he left you at four-thirty?”

  “Perfectly. I’ve never known him to be anything else, as a matter of fact.”

  “Perhaps I should say,” interjected Dr Bruce, “that my partner was, in fact, suffering a certain degree of hypertension. Miss Sutton here wouldn’t have known that, of course, but I think you’ll find that Dr James, in Priorgate, will confirm what I say.”

  “Dr James was treating him, was he?”

  “Well, he was certainly advising him. That I do know.”

  Purbright again faced the receptionist.

  “I presume that someone was with Dr Meadow when he collapsed. A patient.”

  “Yes. Mrs McCreavy. She’s been taken home.”

  “I’ll have her address, if I may.”

  The girl went to the hatch and returned with the bunch of record cards. Purbright looked at them.

  “Are these all patients who were seen by Dr Meadow this evening?”

  “Not all.. These three. Mr Leadbetter was first in. Then Mrs Grope...”

  “Mrs Grope? Mr Walter Grope’s wife?”

  “That’s right. And Mrs McCreavy was the last. A girl called Hewson was waiting and so was the lady you met when you came in—Miss...Teatime, is it?”

  “Miss Teatime,” the inspector confirmed ruminatively. “Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime.”

  He wrote down the names and addresses of Mrs McCreavy and Leadbetter.

  “Oh, and I’d better have yours, Pauline, while I’m at it.”

  She told him.

  “What was Mrs McCreavy’s reaction, by the way?”

  “Oh, she screamed blue murder and came rushing out with half her clothes off.” The girl seemed to repent of the note of contempt in her voice; she added quickly, “Well, it must have given her a nasty fright, I expect.”

  “Did you go in to see what had happened?”

  “No, I ran to try and find Dr Bruce. It was Mr Brennan who went into Dr Meadow’s room. Him and Miss Teatime.”

  “Mr Brennan is the gentleman who was here a little while ago?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But he’s not a patient, I gather.”

  Bruce shook his head. “He’s the new rep for Elixon. One of the drug houses.”

  “Where should I be able to get in touch with him? If it proves necessary—I don’t say that it will.”

  Bruce looked blank, but the girl replied: “The Elixon man stays at the Roebuck as a rule, I believe. They’d tell you how long he’s booked in for.”

  “But might it not be just overnight?”

  “Oh, no. Reps are usually here for at least a week. They work the whole area from Flax and then go on to Norwich or over to Leicester. I should think Mr Brennan will be around for another three or four days.”

  “I see. Well, you might as well get along home now, Pauline. Thank you for being so helpful.”

  When the girl had gone, Purbright turned to meet the speculative eye of Dr Bruce. For a while he said nothing. Then he smiled.

  “Yes?” Bruce prompted.

  The inspector produced cigarettes. He lit one after Bruce had waved back the proffered packet.

  “You are thinking,” said Purbright, “this... Why has an inspector, of all people, trotted along here so promptly on hearing of the regrettable, but perfectly natural, collapse and death of a respected general practitioner? Am I right?”

  “You are,” said Bruce, drily.

  “Ah, well you must not read too much into my apparent enthusiasm. For one thing. Sergeant Malley—whose province this sort of thing is—had gone home to enjoy a well-earned meal and it seemed rather heartless to drag him back again.”

  “That was not your only reason.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I admit to a degree of personal curiosity. You see, there’s a strong element of coincidence. You probably are not aware of it, doctor.”

  “I am not.”

  “Let me explain. Some rather odd things have been going on in Flaxborough lately. As you must know, if only by reading the local paper, a number of women have been assaulted. I don’t need to go into details, but the nature and the unusual frequency of these attacks have suggested that the persons responsible—and I use the plural advisedly—constitute a medical rather than a criminal problem.

  “One of them, and only one, is known. Unfortunately, he is now dead...”

  “Old Winge, you mean?”

  “Yes. Alderman Winge. As I say, he is dead. But he was a patient of your late partner. Coincidence? All right. Now then, a girl was attacked just outside this surgery—out there on Heston Lane. Who came to her rescue? Dr Meadow, as you probably have heard. And there is no doubt in my mind but that he saw and recognized the man responsible—whom he let go, incidentally.

  “Again, observation is being kept at this moment on a man whose wife is convinced that he goes out at night to seek some sort of erotic satisfaction. I know this sounds questionable as evidence, but I do happen to know that this particular man showed no such tendencies until recently, when he moved to Flaxborough and became a patient of Dr Meadow.

  “You may say that these links, if I might call them that, are few and extremely tenuous. But I’m sure you will understand my curiosity—to put it no higher—on hearing that the man I believed to know a lot more than he had divulged about the business had suddenly dropped dead.”

  For a long time, Dr Bruce gazed mournfully out of the window. When he spoke, it was with slow, rather weary deliberation.

  “Whatever you say now, inspector, is scarcely likely to remove the implication you’ve already succeeded in making.”

  “Which is?”

  “That my partner’s death was connected in some way with what you’ve been talking about. That it wasn’t natural, in other words.”

  “I’m a long way from saying that, doctor. I am not even going to speculate at this stage. After all, the cause of death has not been established. When it is—and I don’t suppose there’ll be any difficulty there—I shall accept the findings of the experts, as will the coroner. In the meantime, though, coincidence does exist. Judgment must be suspended, but investigation must not. Hence”—the inspector smiled—“the snooping. You do understand?”

  Bruce resignedly lifted and let fall his hand.

  “Very well. Is there anything you want to ask me now? I don’t want to be much longer getting over to the hospital, and I’ve some home visits I shall have to fit in.”

  “I’ll be as brief as I can. Firstly, the cause of death. Do you want to say what you think it was?”

  “Oh, a coronary. I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. He died extremely quickly, you know.”

  “Obviously you wouldn’t have had time to make a detailed examination, but did you notice anything—anything at all—that seemed odd at the time, or has since struck you as being odd?”

  Bruce pondered.

  “Not a thing. The whole scene was exactly as one would have expected. He must have blacked out and gone full length.”

  “But wouldn’t he have been sitting in his chair? Doctors never seem to get up when they’re being consulted by me.”

  Bruce’s manner eased a fraction. “Perhaps you consult them about the wrong things. No, I imagine my partner was standing up in order to examine the McCreavy woman’s
chest. She was half undressed when she ran out, you know.”

  “According to Miss Sutton, he saw only three patients this evening. Yet she had quite a pile of cards. You must have dealt with far more than three in the same period.”

  “Yes, that was the usual pattern.”

  “You mean he was—what?—more leisurely in his dealings with patients?”

  “If you like. Look—I’m the junior partner, he was the senior. Every practice works on the sound old principle that the junior’s share of the work shall equal the senior’s share of the income. What could be fairer?”

  “What, indeed.” Purbright walked to the door and threw out the end of his cigarette. “In that case, I assume Dr Meadow tended to be selective. Did he deal primarily with those we might call his regulars?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Could you list them? In categories, I mean, not as individuals.”

  “No difficulty about that. The paying patients. The socially desirable. And a few of the interestingly elderly.”

  “Ah,” said Purbright, “it’s the old ones that I’ve been finding interesting lately. When I retire from the police force, perhaps I’ll take up geriatrics. Incidentally...”

  Bruce watched Purbright search through a collection of pieces of paper he had taken from his pocket, select one, and thrust the rest back.

  “Do you happen to know,” the inspector asked, “anything about a substance called”—he frowned at his note—“beta-aminotetrylglutarimide, God forgive us?”

  “Where on earth did you get that one from?”

  “It was mentioned during the inquest on Winge. I can’t vouch for my pronunciation. Nor for lawyer Scorpe’s.”

  “Scorpe—he asked about it, did he?”

  “Yes. He put it to Meadow.”

  After a pause, Bruce said: “No, I don’t know what it is, but I suppose the old man’s family must have nosed around and found that Meadow had been prescribing it for Winge.”

  “That was my impression.”

  “I know those vultures. I smell a lawsuit.”

  “So did Meadow, I think. He dragged in a red herring right away. He told Scorpe that Winge had been going against his advice and dosing himself with a herbal remedy called Samson’s Salad. You haven’t heard of that, I suppose?”

  “Good God, no. What’s it supposed to do?”

  “Impart the sexual virility of the Ancient Britons.”

  Bruce took a little time to digest this promising specification. Then he said, half in wonder, half in pride:

  “We don’t half have some goings-on in this little old town.”

  “Don’t we?”

  The inspector stood and buttoned his raincoat. At the door, he raised his hand.

  “Ring me if you get any ideas.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Miss Teatime paused at the little Georgian doorway that led to her rooms in the Church Close, and, while feeling for her key, looked up at the gothic wedding cake tiers of the great tower of St Laurence’s. That miraculous stone confection never failed to please her. She loved in particular its ever-changing response to weather and time of day. In the first light of morning, its buttresses, lancets and galleries had a metallic sharpness; they looked to be fashioned in pewter. Then, as the sky brightened, silver facets appeared. Summer noons turned the traceries to honeycomb. In storm, the tower was a monochrome of granite; in mist, a long brown sail, becalmed. As Miss Teatime gazed at it now, an hour after sunset on a damp, still evening, the soaring stone was tinged with green, as if it had caught and thrown down to her a reflection of the fields and woods beyond the town.

  She sighed and faced about to open the door.

  In her sitting-room at the head of the first flight of narrow, sharply twisting stairs, she switched on the light and enjoyed for a moment its revelation of pale lavender colour-washed walls and the gleam of fresh grey paint from deep, classically simple window frames. She had decorated the room herself, transforming it from the dinginess of long neglect (which had made it a gratifyingly cheap buy) into what she imagined—probably rightly—would have pleased those Flaxborough contemporaries of Jane Austen who had been its first occupants.

  She took off her hat and coat, made tea in the tiny adjoining kitchen, and drew up a chair to the slender-legged table beneath one of the wall lamps. Among the contents of the tea tray, which she had set down at the end of the table away from typewriter and stationery, was a small whiskey bottle, half full.

  When she judged the tea to be properly infused, she poured some out and added a little sugar, a very little milk, and as much whiskey as would still allow the mixture to be stirred without slopping over into the saucer. She took a sip, then, with an increasing approval, another, and a third. She did not care for over-hot tea: blowing it was vulgar—it also wastefully evaporated the whiskey.

  Not until she had finished her first cup and poured and laced her second, did Miss Teatime turn her attention to a clip of correspondence which she had laid ready beside the typewriter.

  There were nearly a dozen letters, all addressed to Moldham Meres Laboratories. Although most were from individual customers, four had been written by the managers of health food stores in various parts of the country.

  They related to Press reports of the Winge inquest. Some enclosed newspaper cuttings. Drowned Alderman was Herb Eater...Reservoir Death after “Salad”, Court Told...Doctor Blames Nature Cure.

  Every writer declared, in terms ranging from the abrupt and offensive to the politically ingenious (a customer in Leamington Spa suggesting that Samson’s Salad was a paralysing nerve weed cultivated on Siberian state farms), that no further supplies were required. Some of the shopkeepers demanded a refund on current stocks.

  It was this last category of complaint that Miss Teatime considered particularly wounding, indicative as it was of a degree of cupidity that she had scarcely expected to find in the protagonists of Natural Goodness.

  She lit a cheroot and considered how best a reply could be framed. It would have to be in the nature of a duplicated circular, she feared: these letters were doubtless but harbingers of flocks to come.

  After a while, she began to type. Her typing, though punctuated by periods of thought, had the grace, speed and accurary typical of an old and hard school of secretarial training. Ah, yes, the Bishop (she would have explained to an admiring onlooker) had always insisted upon his pastoral letters being absolutely clean.

  Friend, (her manifesto ran)

  I am extremely sorry that you have been disturbed by certain newspaper references to Our Product. Our legal advisers, needless to say, are already taking certain action, in the outcome of which we have complete confidence; but I am writing to you in the meantime to point out certain facts which you, as an intelligent person, are fully entitled to interpret for yourself.

  Firstly, I must reveal to you that the medical practitioner who saw fit to make the disparaging remarks in question has since died suddenly. We do not, of course, claim this ununfortunate occurrence to have been divinely engineered in vindication of Nature’s Way. You might well wonder, however, whether a man so signally unsuccessful in maintaining his own life span was qualified to throw doubt upon the health-winning methods of others.

  Secondly, I would point out that Moldham Meres Laboratories have never pretended that Our Product is incapable of being misused. There is no Gift of Nature which cannot be turned to a wrongful purpose. Our Product is a natural concentrate of the Life Force. Therefore it cannot fail to increase the Vitality of the user and thus greatly to improve the performance of all Natural Functions.

  You will readily appreciate, of course, that only those who temper their enjoyment of life with Self Control and respect the confines of Matrimony are suitable candidates for the advantages offered by Our Product.

  If, for any reason, you feel that your own Personal Standards do not meet this condition, we shall be happy to refund your money on receipt of Proof of Purchase.

  Miss Teatime
withdrew the sheet from the machine and carefully read it through. From time to time she nodded to herself. Plenty of capital letters. Excellent. Devotion to upper case, she had noticed, was one of the more consistent characteristics of Life Force enthusiasts.

  She put the letter aside. She would make the stencil later, then Florrie could start running off some copies.

  It was now quite dark outside in the Close. There stood out from the blackness opposite an arched multi-coloured glow. It was the stained glass window of the chapel where choir practice was usually held. Miss Teatime gazed fondly at the night-framed mosaic of indigo, ruby and saffron. How timelessly dependable it looked, this lovely survival of mediaeval self-confidence.