by Colin Watson
“It’s as well, then,” Purbright said to Warlock, “that I had that drain emptied. A heavy shower would have flushed it.” He stepped into the narrow, carpeted passage and walked to the foot of the stairs near the front door.
“Drain?”
“Yes. It’s all nicely bottled for you. The stuff from the bathroom, you know.”
“Bathwater, do you mean?”
Purbright winced. “Good Lord, no. I mean Mr Periam—or Mr Hopjoy. In solution.”
Chapter Two
Warlock surveyed the bathroom with the tense incredulity of a curator viewing empty picture frames after a burglary.
“I’m sorry if we’ve been a bit impetuous,” said Purbright, just behind him. “The Chief Constable was anxious to have the prize exhibit kept somewhere safe. It’s over at our place; you can see it whenever you like.”
“Yes, but prints...”
“Oh, don’t worry, we collected what there were of those before the plumber was set loose. In any case, he was told to touch nothing but the pipes.”
Warlock looked far from reassured but he stepped forward into the centre of the floor to make room for the inspector to stand beside him.
Purbright pointed to the wall opposite the dusty, water-stained rectangle from which the bath had been taken. It bore a number of tiny splashes, dark brown against the green distemper which ran from the white half-tiling to the ceiling. The group of marks was at Warlock’s head level. He gave it close, rapidly ranging scrutiny, like a short-sighted man reading a telegram, then briskly he turned to Purbright. “And the next, squire?”
“Down here...and here...” With his foot Purbright indicated two points at which the grey linoleum was just perceptibly stained. Immediately, Warlock was down on his knees. “Could be,” he said. “There’s been some wiping up, though.”
By what seemed effortless levitation Warlock stood up and looked expectantly at Purbright once more.
Purbright resisted the temptation to confess aloud that he was beginning to feel like the feed man in some bizarre variety turn. Quietly he went to the small mirror-fronted cabinet above the wash-basin and opened its door. “We found this tucked away in the corner under the bath. It’s all right; nobody’s handled it.”
Warlock leaned over the wash-basin and stared at the hammer lying on a sheet of stiff card in the lower compartment of the cabinet. It was an ordinary household hammer, weighing perhaps a little over a pound. He withdrew it carefully, using the cardboard as a tray.
In the light from the window the fore part of the hammer head looked brownly varnished. A few hairs clung to it.
Warlock drew in his lips and released them with a popping noise. “So much for the do-it-yourself kit”—he replaced the hammer in the cabinet—“but what about the job it was used for?” He glanced again at the wall splashes and turned to Purbright.
“I’m afraid that’s not going to be so easy to answer just at the moment. Come here a minute.”
The inspector stepped to the space where the bath had stood. He bent down and pointed to a black circle, about half an inch across. Joining him, Warlock saw that the mark was actually a shallow depression, charred but sticky. The linoleum and part of the board beneath had been burned away.
“He was certainly tidy. That’s the only drop he spilled.” Purbright rubbed his chin gloomily. “I wonder what he felt like when he pulled the plug and heard his pal going down the pipe with that awful ghwelphing noise.”
Undaunted by this speculation, Warlock touched the blackened indentation daintily with his little finger, which he then sniffed at and promptly rinsed under the wash-basin tap.
“Sulphuric, I imagine,” said Warlock, connoisseur-like. “He’d have needed a fairish drop. Have you any hopes of tracing where he got it from?”
“We can but try. It seems rather much to hope that he collected it pint by pint from a local chemist’s, though. How would one go about laying in, what—several gallons?—of concentrated sulphuric acid? It’s not a problem I’m familiar with.”
“The commercial stuff’s what you’d want,” Warlock explained. “There’s tons of it going out every day to manufacturers, processing plants, garages, that sort of thing. Industrial chemists are the people: they’d fix you up.”
“But surely they don’t run a home delivery service, like paraffin or soft drinks.”
Warlock made one of his impatient, energetic arm gestures. “What did you say this fellow did for a living—Perry, was it?”
“Periam. He’s a tobacconist.”
“No, the other one, then.”
“Hopjoy?”
“The traveller, yes. What was it you said his line was?”
“Pharmaceuticals...” Purbright nodded thoughtfully. “I see what you mean.” With something less than enthusiasm, he added: “We’ll go into that, of course.”
Warlock sensed that he had wandered again a little too close to some preserve of which the inspector had been appointed an unwilling custodian. The man Hopjoy, it was clear, had a special and secret status. A by-blow of royalty? A relative of the Chief Constable? Warlock was not seriously bothered. Outside the world of fingerprints and fibre strands, which absorbed his considerable dynamism, he was incurious.
He switched back to his own field. “You’ve seen the bath?”
“I have, yes.”
“So must I. There would have been problems. I’ll be interested to find out how he managed them.”
“Because of the acid, you mean.”
“Certainly. It takes some withstanding. Heavy enamel might do it, but there’d need to be no scratches or chips. A rubber plug would serve. What about the plug seating, though? That’s always metal; it would go in no time. Chain, too...” Warlock enumerated the snags zestfully, like a surgeon counting tumours.
“All that,” Purbright interrupted, “was taken care of. I’ll show you when we go downstairs. Is there anything else you want to see here?”
Warlock gave a final deprecatory glance at the twisted, sealed-off plumbing, peered briefly into an empty airing cupboard, then went again to the cabinet. He looked at the jars and packets on the single shelf above the hammer. They included one of the less inhibited after-shave lotions, a box labelled ‘Friar Martin’s Herbal Blood-purifying Lozenges’, a lid-less tin of rather dusty first-aid dressings, a jar of Riding Master Hand Salve (Cherrywood) and another of anti-scurf ointment, two boxes of laxative pills and a plastic dispenser of Man-about-Town Body Acid Neutralizer (Apple Loft).
“An essay in divergent personalities,” murmured the inspector over Warlock’s shoulder.
Warlock gingerly shifted one or two of the jars aside. He craned to see the back of the shelf. “No sign of shaving kit. Did those boys have beards?”
“There’s an electric razor in the bureau thing downstairs. I imagine that would go with Riding Master and Man-about-Town. The herbal lozenge addict would be a soaper and scraper.”
“In that case I’d say he was the survivor, then. Took his stuff with him. Hello...”
Warlock reached into the cabinet with a pair of tweezers and withdrew from among the dressings a small rectangle of metal. It was a single-edged razor blade. “What’s he been doing with this, I wonder.”
He pointed to where the brightness of the steel had been dulled across one corner by a brown deposit.
“Odd,” said Purbright, feeling somewhat lightly armed in the matter of forensic speculation. Warlock carefully propped the razor blade against the hammer shaft. Then he turned and motioned the inspector to lead the way downstairs.
A few steps from the bottom Purbright paused, eyeing the looming obstruction of Constable Donaldson who stood by the front door and darkened the diminutive hallway. “Bring a chair out and sit down,” Purbright said. “You make the place look like Downing Street.”
Re-entering the dining-room, they found Sergeant Love had cleared the contents of the bureau out upon the table and was now glancing through the pile of papers he had collected from the
drawers and pigeon-holes. Through the half-open window came the sound of an exploratory spade being thrust at fairly long intervals into the dusty soil of the flower beds. The threatened shower had held off. Both men in the garden had removed their jackets. One absent-mindedly swung the trowel he was holding—he had succeeded in being unable to find a spade—and gazed at the earth his colleague had disturbed.
Purbright opened the door of the sideboard and pointed out to Warlock the basin and paint brush.
“I was just looking at this when you arrived. I think it’s the answer to some of the questions you were asking upstairs.”
Warlock squatted and examined the basin closely, not touching it. He lowered his head farther and sniffed.
“Wax, isn’t it?” Purbright asked.
“Paraffin wax. Melted candles, probably; there’s a piece of wick in it.” Warlock rocked gently on his heels and looked up. There was simple pleasure on his face. “Brushed hot over the plug seating and any breaks in the enamel—just the job, squire. And the chain—that could have been dipped through it.”
Love scowled at the papers that he was now sorting into three heaps which he mentally classified as letters, bills and odds-and-sods. His resentment of the cheerful Warlock was sharpened by the laboratory man’s anticipation of the very theory he had been nurturing in his own mind with the intention of producing it, like a prize marrow, at the opportune moment. He salvaged what, credit he could by breaking into the conversation with an announcement.
“That’s quite likely to be right, about the bath, inspector. I noticed when I was going over it for prints that there were traces of grease on the bottom.”
“Ah,” said Purbright, nodding sagaciously at Warlock.
“It looked,” added Love, “rather as if an attempt had been made to rinse it clean with hot water. But whoever did that forgot about the plug chain. It was slung over one of the taps and still quite thickly covered.”
He returned to his sorting.
Warlock regarded the basin with possessive joy. “One decent dab on you, sweetheart, and...”—he made the cork-drawing sound that seemed, for him, to symbolize the ultimate in desirable achievement. Love winced.
“It would be very helpful,” Purbright conceded. “Provided, of course, that we can establish whose print it is. I suppose the presumption must be strong that it belongs to whichever of the two gentlemen is still alive.”
“Bound to, squire.” Warlock glanced round at the inspector as if in wonderment that a man could view a certainty with such caution. “Mind you,” he added, “I’m not promising that anything will show up. It’s the sort of job for which anyone with sense would wear rubber gloves. Sloshing acid about, and so on. Don’t you think so?”
Purbright let the point pass. It seemed unfruitful. “The hairs on that hammer, now,” he went on. “How far are they going to be helpful?”
“That’s hard to say.” Warlock rose and slipped his restless hands into his trouser pockets, where they continued to rummage like inquisitive mice. “It’s identification you’re after again, I suppose. Yes, well, in itself a hair doesn’t tell a great deal. It’s comparative tests that are significant. Give me hair A and hair B and I’ll tell you if they’re from the same head—with a reasonable degree of certainty, anyway.”
The inspector considered this offer. Then he addressed Love. “Sid, I want you to chase some hairs for this gentleman. We’ll need to have a pretty fair idea of whom they belong to, though. Periam’s shop is one possibility: he may have kept a jacket or something there. We don’t know that the other fellow—Hopjoy—had a place of his own, an office or anything. See if there’s marked clothing of his among the stuff here.”
“What about initialled hairbrushes, sir?” Love was young in heart.
“Oh yes, rather. Initialled hairbrushes by all means.”
There was a gentle knock on the door and one of the plain-clothes men thrust his head round. “Excuse me, sir, but we’ve turned something up.”
“Have you, Mr Boggan?” Purbright sounded pleased.
“Yes, sir. I thought perhaps you’d like to have a look.”
Purbright and Warlock followed him into the garden. It was a neat, uninspiring arrangement of lawn bordered on three sides with flower bed and enclosed by a shoulder-high fence of creosoted boarding. The grass was not rank, but it obviously had not been mown for several weeks. The few plants regularly spaced along the surrounding strip of soil looked like old hotel residents: deep-rooted, uncompromising and reluctant to bloom. A sterile plum tree stood primly in the far corner, its trunk collared with a blackened remnant of clothes line.
Detective Boggan’s colleague was on one knee at the edge of the lawn, near a shallow pit in the flower bed. He was brushing soil from a sack that now lay on the grass. Suddenly he snatched away his hand, swore, examined a finger and pressed it to his handkerchief. When he withdrew it there was a glint of scarlet.
“You’d better go in and wash it,” Purbright said. He leaned over the sack. From a small rent protruded a fin of pale green glass; There were several other tiny holes in the sack. They looked like burns.
Purbright gingerly pulled back the neck of the sack. It was full of broken glass, some pieces as much as six or seven inches long. All were slightly concave as if they had formed a huge bottle.
“There’s your carboy,” said Warlock. He looked a little longer at the spilling fragments. “I wonder where he put the basket.”
“Basket?”
“Yes, these acid containers are usually set in iron lattice things like big fire baskets. They’re to protect them while they’re being shifted about.”
“Buried too, I suppose,” said Purbright. Boggan looked without favour at the stretch of flower bed that remained to be explored.
The detective who had cut his hand came out of the house and walked up to the group on the lawn. “I think,” he said to the inspector, “that I know where that thing was smashed up.”
He led Purbright and Warlock back into the kitchen and through a side door that opened into the garage. He pointed to a corner of the floor. “There’s a whole lot of little splinters round there, sir. I noticed them earlier on when I was looking for a spade.”
The others examined the floor, nodded acknowledgement of their guide’s perspicacity, and turned their attention to the rest of the garage.
Along one wall, lit now by the sun rays that filtered through a long, grimy skylight, there hung from hooks and nails a rusted saw, an oil-stained pictorial calendar for 1956, a cylinder head gasket, a tyre worn to the canvas, an old scouting haversack and something discernible as porcelain under its covering of dust. Purbright identified it, with some surprise, as a bed pan.
Tools, most of which looked long disused, lay neatly on a workbench supported by brackets at the end of the garage. There were several tins of oil and polish and paint on the shelf above the bench; among the miscellany stacked below it Purbright noticed the incongruous presence of playroom relics—a bagatelle board, a tied bundle of toy rails, a battered magic lantern.
He looked up from these to see Warlock stooped in one of his now familiar sinuous postures and to hear: “This household certainly seems well stocked with hammers. One for each job.”
Purbright peered over Warlock’s shoulder. Lying in shadow along a wall beam about a foot from the floor was a hammer almost identical with the one found in the bathroom. Warlock pointed to faintly glistening fragments on its head. “This is what must have been used to bust up the carboy, squire.” He turned upon the inspector a look compounded of satisfaction and expectancy; Purbright, surfeited with clues for one day, had the odd fancy that if he grasped and threw the hammer Warlock would leap, snap unerringly upon it in mid air, and with canine idiocy lay it again before him.
“Looks like it,” Purbright said, flatly.
Warlock whipped out a very clean handkerchief and picked up the hammer by the end of its haft. Holding it suspended before him, he slowly stood up and regarded it, f
rowning.
“I wonder why he didn’t bring the other one down and use that. I’d have thought it was a pretty natural thing to do.”
“Squeamishness?” suggested Purbright.
“On his showing up to now you could hardly put him down as a sensitive type. Another thing—why should he have left these things about, anyway? He went to the trouble of smashing the carboy and burying it. Me, I’d have chucked the hammer in as well. Every time.”
Purbright smiled, a little wearily. “Murdering people, Mr Warlock, must be a somewhat distracting business. Even the most conscientious practitioner probably tends to overlook things,”
