by Colin Watson
“Drains,” announced Warlock after a brief pause. “We didn’t do too badly with drains.” While still keeping his eyes on the report, he felt for the black box and slipped its catch. “Analysis of contents of drain trap established presence of unusual quantities of fat and carbon compounds, possibly of animal derivation, also distinct calcium traces...you’re with me there, I suppose, squire?”
Purbright nodded. “The late Mr Hopjoy, I presume.” He received an approving beam from the expert.
“Mind you, you mustn’t get the idea that anything like actual identification is possible from this sort of thing. It’s all a bit tentative.”
“Oh, quite.”
“But circumstantially impressive, all the same.” Warlock sounded eager to please. “Naturally, there’d been some dilution of what went into the drain trap. Fat and acid tests were absolutely conclusive, though. I’m only sorry there wasn’t anything exciting in the solid line—plastic buttons, gold teeth fillings—you know.”
“Pity.”
Warlock lifted back the lid of his box. He drew a test tube from a small rack at the back of it. “This has flummoxed us, I admit. It had caught in that little grill thing under the plug.”
Purbright turned the tube round in his hand. Within it he saw a knotted loop of whitish, translucent fibre. He held it to the light. “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”
“Oh, mineral,” said Warlock. “Almost certainly nylon.”
“Out of a nailbrush, perhaps?”
“Too long. Anyway, it wouldn’t be joined up like that. It’s not out of a brush of any kind. Nobody at the lab. had a clue.”
“Are you worried about it?”
Warlock scowled indignantly and whisked the tube out of Purbright’s grasp. “Of course I’m worried about it. We haven’t been foxed by anything in this line since the Retford fly-paper case. Do you know, we spent two months making inquiries at jewellers about that cuff-link in old Mrs Hargreaves’s duodenum. In the end we traced it to the bloody surgeon who did the autopsy.”
He put the test tube back in its rack. “Oh, we’ll get some joy out of this, don’t you worry. I’m sending it off to the top bods in the artificial fibre industry. I expect they’ll check it with their gauge records or something.”
“It may be quite unconnected with the case, of course,” ventured Purbright, who was beginning to find Warlock’s forensic rhapsody a trifle wearing.
“Five pounds to a gnat’s navel it has absolutely nothing to do with it, squire. Elimination, though...that’s what counts with us, elimination.” He looked again at his report. “Now then; where were we? Ah, bloodstains...”
There were six sites of staining. The bathroom floor had been spotted. The wall splashes had proved, as expected, positive. Blood accounted for the mark on the razor blade found in the bathroom cabinet. Then there was the hammer head. Finally, careful search had disclosed a few smears on the stair carpet and on the concrete floor of the garage.
The last two had lent themselves admirably to the process of elimination. They were not of human origin. All the others were, and they belonged to the same common ‘O’ group.
“I don’t quite see how the razor blade fits in,” said Purbright. “It’s hardly likely to have been used as a weapon. I mean you don’t fell a bloke with a hammer and then cut his throat: that would be sheer ostentation. Anyway, we should have found more mess, surely?”
Warlock watched him with the secretly gleeful air of a conjuror whose audience falls for diversion while the best part of his trick is in preparation.
“I told you, didn’t I, that this case is absolutely marvellous?” His eyes gleamed. “Now then; what do you think of this?”
Purbright picked up the large photograph that had been slid triumphantly before him.
It appeared to be of a huge, round butcher’s block on to which a handful of canes had been carelessly tossed. The canes were partly embedded in a thick, tarry substance, spread irregularly over the surface of the block. They stuck out, some straight, some curving, at varying angles.
“This one’s been pulled up even farther.” Warlock tossed down a second photograph. The canes had become long, segmented stovepipes, jutting from some sort of dune, coarsely granular in texture. Purbright was reminded of surrealist seashore paintings.
“The hammer head,” announced Warlock.
“Ah, yes.”
Warlock waited. “Of course, you see what’s wrong.”
The inspector held the second enlargement at arm’s length and squinted judiciously. “To be perfectly honest...”
Impatiently, scornfully almost, Warlock leaned over and jabbed his finger at the stovepipes. “No crushing. No skin. No follicles.”
The triple negation sounded like a maximum sentence without possibility of appeal. Purbright nodded meekly. “You’re perfectly right, of course. Not a follicle in sight.”
Warlock sighed and took up a relatively relaxed pose behind Purbright’s chair. He pointed, more gently this time, at the prints.
“You see, squire, it’s reasonable to expect that hairs are going to stick to a hammer when it’s used to bash somebody’s head in. But they get squeezed between two hard surfaces—steel and bone—for a fraction of a second before the skull gives way. So naturally they ought to show damage. These don’t.
“Another thing: the hairs, or some of them, are bound to come out, roots and all. Plus the odd bit of skin, of course. But in this case...well, you can see for yourself.”
Purbright studied the photographs a little longer and said: “Obviously, we’ll have to come back to these. But perhaps you’d like to run over what’s left of the other things first.”
The remainder of the report was straightforward enough. The broken glass unearthed from the garden included large fragments easily identifiable as portions of a commercial acid carboy, whose protective basket of iron strapping had been found in a wardrobe (Purbright loyally forbore from mentioning Love’s encounter with that article). Glass splinters on the second hammer, that left in the garage, clearly indicated its having been used to smash the carboy.
Two sets of fingerprints were recurrent throughout the house. One set corresponded with prints at Periam’s shop. The other, presumably, was Hopjoy’s. There had been found no print belonging to either man which could be considered of special significance in relation to whatever had happened in the bathroom. The surfaces of the hammer shafts, the razor blade, and the pieces of carboy had yielded nothing.
Microscopic examination of hairs taken from combs in Periam’s bedroom and shop and from clothing in a cupboard in his lodger’s room had virtually settled the origin of those on the hammer. They were almost certainly Hopjoy’s.
“There you are, squire. Make what you like of that lot.”
Purbright rubbed his chin reflectively. “You’ve certainly been thorough.”
Warlock beamed. He tossed up an imaginary tennis ball and thwacked it through the window.
“It’s just as well,” said Purbright, “that I didn’t clap Periam in irons this morning. I suppose I couldn’t have been blamed if I had. Yet there was something rather pat about the set-up at that house. It was too much to expect a nice conclusive lab. report...” he tapped the photographs—“...with follicles.”
“Sorry.”
“Those hairs, then, were...”
Warlock winked, turned two fingers into a pair of scissors and snipped off an invisible forelock.
Purbright carried Warlock’s report to the Chief Constable not in confidence that Mr Chubb possessed a superiority of intellect consonant with his rank but rather as a man with a problem will seek out some simple natural scene, the contemplation of which seems to set free part of his mind to delve more effectually towards a solution.
Thus, while he gazed at the gentle, dignified vacuity of Mr Chubb’s face, the inspector mentally weighed and dissected each fact as he passed it on.
Mr Chubb, as usual, was leaning elegantly against his fireplace. He seemed
never to sit down except at home, and then almost exclusively at meal times. “Harcourt,” his wife once averred, “even watches television standing up; I think his mother must have been frightened by Edward the Seventh.”
The Chief Constable gave a delicate, dry cough. “Do I understand, Mr Purbright, that you feel an arrest would be unwise at this stage?”
“Ah, I thought that might be your reaction, sir. It’s this queer business of the hammer that’s spoiling everything.”
“It strikes me,” said Mr Chubb, “as a singularly unnecessary complication. Do we really have to take Warlock’s word that the thing was deliberately contrived?”
“I’m afraid we do. And the case won’t hang together until we can explain why the murderer went to that particular piece of trouble. He’d prepared to dispose of the corpse; the logical thing was to erase all other signs of the crime—wash away bloodstains, burn the ligature or bury the knife or get rid of the gun, wipe off fingerprints, and so on. But no, he actually manufactured some evidence of violence by cutting off a few of the victim’s hairs and sticking them on a hammer head with a dab of his blood. You notice the choice of hiding place, incidentally—under the bath—accessible to methodical searchers, yet just not obvious enough to arouse suspicion of a deliberate plant.”
“I hate to see subtlety showing through these affairs, Mr Purbright. Murder is such a beastly business in the first place. It becomes positively crawly when you have to strain a decent intelligence to sort it out. And nowadays, I’m afraid, the better the address the more distasteful the crime turns out to be. Odd, that, isn’t it?”
“You’re thinking of Beatrice Avenue, of course...”
“Well, it is quite a nice road. I remember old Abbott and his sister used to live in that place with a yellow gate, up at the park end.” He paused, frowning. “You know, this is going to drop the values a bit.”
Purbright observed a short, respectful silence. He resumed: “One thing is abundantly clear: the murder wasn’t done on the spur of the moment. If Periam had killed Hopjoy during that quarrel and without premeditation, how could he have set about getting rid of the body so efficiently? A carboy of acid isn’t something you keep handy around the house, and you’d hardly be able to nip out and buy one at that time of night.”
“One might steal it,” suggested the Chief Constable. “It would be a good time for that.”
Purbright acknowledged the possibility, but thought that burglary on top of murder was cramming rather a lot into one night.
“The acid must have been obtained beforehand and hidden in readiness—not necessarily at the house, although there’s an inspection pit in the garage that would have served very well.”
Mr Chubb nodded sagely. “I grant premeditation.”
“Which leads us,” Purbright said, “to two further points of some importance. Firstly, the chances of Hopjoy’s having been killed and, shall we say, liquidated by anyone not actually living in the same house must be considered very remote indeed. The whole situation, before and after the crime, demanded what might be termed residential qualifications—privacy, time, freedom from the curiosity of neighbours, knowledge of the house itself. Periam really is the only candidate, you know, sir.”
The Chief Constable thoughtfully inspected the lapel of his jacket. “Put like that...I suppose there wouldn’t be much point in propounding the roving maniac, much as one would like to. I can’t say I know this Periam myself, but he’s a decent type by all accounts. Why on earth should he want to do such a frightful thing?”
“Precisely, sir. That’s the second point I wanted to bring out. His motive must have been of pathological intensity.”
“Any money involved?”
“Far from it. Hopjoy seems to have left nothing but debts. Even the car was going to be snatched back by the hire purchase people.”
“Debts?” Mr Chubb stared. “But what about the work he was supposed to be doing? I mean, a man in his position would never risk...”
“Oh, but he did, sir. You haven’t forgotten the Arliss business, surely.”
“Arliss?”
“The tailor. He wanted us to do Hopjoy for false pretences. We’d quite a job cooling him down.”
Mr Chubb made show of searching his memory. “Ah...that was Hopjoy, was it?”
“It was. He told Arliss that the suit had been impounded by M.I.5 because one of his machinists was suspected of passing micro-film in hollow fly buttons.”
“And did they get the fellow?”
“Hopjoy, you mean, sir?”
“No, the fellow who was doing that button trick. Nobody thought to tell me afterwards what happened.”
It dawned on Purbright that the point of the affair had eluded Mr Chubb completely. “I suppose,” he said, “that he was investigated. Probably put on less sensitive work—cuffs, maybe.”
When the Chief Constable spoke again, it was with the careful tone of a man aware of his own inadequate sense of the ridiculous and determined not to betray it by rebuking flippancy. Mr Chubb did not so much mind his subordinates being impertinent—that was, after all, a form of acknowledging inferiority; what he dreaded was that any of them might say something really funny without his recognizing it.
“Be that as it may,” said Mr Chubb. “I agree that robbery seems out. Do you suppose Periam was being threatened, then? Paying the other chap money, I mean?”
“That’s unlikely, sir. We’ve checked Periam’s accounts; there’s no indication of extortion.”
Mr Chubb gazed upwards. There came to him a thought he found difficult to express. “One doesn’t like to be uncharitable,” he began, “but perhaps we shouldn’t ignore... Well, two fellows on their own in the same house...”
Purbright rescued him. “The record leaves no doubt of Hopjoy’s having been almost aggressively heterosexual, sir.”
“Oh, was he? I’m glad to hear it. One knows that sort of thing goes on, of course...Still, I wouldn’t like to think of you having to fish in those waters.”
The inspector was glancing through his notebook record of the conversations at Brockleston. “Do you know the Neptune Hotel, sir?” he asked, without looking up.
“I think I went into the place once,” said Mr Chubb, guardedly. “A bit on the flashy side.”
“Decidedly,” Purbright agreed. “It struck me as a slightly off-key choice for a honeymoon. Periam was mother-ridden, though; perhaps the Neptune appealed as a symbol of emancipation. Also it could have been in line with his role as seducer; that was Hopjoy’s girl he married, you know.”
“Really?”
“Which is another curious feature. One would have thought that it was Hopjoy who had cause to kill Periam, not the other way round. Husbands are sometimes eliminated from triangles, but I don’t think I can recall a case of fiancécide. Anyway, it’s the rejected suitor who is apt to be violent, not his successor.”
“Do you think the girl knows what’s been going on?”
Purbright considered. “I’m not at all sure. There’s a certain ruthlessness about her. I wonder if you can imagine a bed-hopping Sunday school teacher...”
It was evident from Mr Chubb’s expression that he couldn’t.
“What I mean is that she looks almost frumpish—unfashionable clothes, no make-up, dreadful hair style—yet underneath she seems to be continually flexing and shuffling. She gives a most disconcerting impression of...well, appetite.”
“She doesn’t sound a very nice young woman. She is young, I presume?”
“Younger than her husband, certainly. I find it hard to understand why she dropped Hopjoy—very much the .accomplished buck, by all accounts—in favour of a man like Periam.”
“Women,” stated Mr Chubb, “are unpredictable.”
Purbright recognized that the Chief Constable had received as much confusing information as he could stomach at one session. He picked up the report and photographs. “Is there anything more at the moment, sir?”
“I don’t think so
. We shall just have to carry on ploughing our furrow, you know. See what turns up.”
“Very well, sir.” Purbright walked to the door.
“Oh, by the way, Mr Purbright...” Mr Chubb disengaged himself from the mantelpiece and meticulously slipped his finger-ends into his jacket pockets. “I had a chat with Major Ross this morning. I suppose he and Mr Pumphrey are trained to take a rather less mundane view of these affairs. Of course, they do operate in a wider sphere than ours. I have the impression that they readily conceive of possibilities which you and I might dismiss as excessively dramatic...”
