by Colin Watson
He knew exactly what would tickle a sub-editor’s fancy and help meet the insatiable demand for short ‘fills’. His remunerative gleanings ranged from scraps of unconscious humour in the officialese of the district council minutes to whimsical remarks by old gentlemen arraigned in the local magistrates’ courts for drunkenness. Quips, parochial paradoxes, providential puns on street names, ironic errors, quaint coincidences: all these fed Fawby’s paragraphs.
What even this perceptive and adroit young man could never have foreseen, though, was that one of his modest guinea-earners was destined to confound an inspector of police, snap a chain of singularly plausible but false evidence, and reveal a murderer.
The piece appeared at the foot of the fourth column on page one of the county evening having the largest sale in Flaxborough. It was headed SALT PORK, and ran, in Mr Fawby’s admirably pithy prose: ‘The season’s oddest catch was landed at Brockleston South jetty this morning by a Sheffield angler. It was half a pig, rather the worse for immersion. And the name of the fisherman? Mr Andrew Hogg.’
Purbright stared at the page as though he had spotted his own obituary. Then he rang for Sergeant Love. There was no reply from the C.I.D. room. Purbright remembered that Love was touting a cigarette lighter round the friends of the late Hopjoy.
The late... He realized with a start that the words had sprung quite spontaneously into his mind. Had he, despite the credit he had so readily accorded Hopjoy as an ingenious schemer, known all along that...
He read the paragraph again, and sighed. Coincidence in the matter of such relative rarities as wandering sides of pork was too much to hope for. And Brockleston, of all places...of course, the sea was precisely the sort of dumping ground that would have occurred to a man returning in a hurry to his seaside hotel and anxious to dispose of a murder prop that had served its turn. Even if the carcass were to wash up again, there was scarcely any possibility of its coming to the notice of a police force twelve miles away.
Purbright rose abruptly from his desk and walked to the window. It was seldom that he felt annoyed with himself—or anyone else, for that matter—but now he experienced a strong temptation to punch a hole in the glass. There was something—some unwarrantable assumption or piece of credulity on his part—which had turned this whole case the wrong way round almost from the beginning. What the hell was it?
Hands in pockets, he prowled to the door, round his desk, again to the window. He thought back over a dozen interviews, peering again at faces and listening to voices in the hope of catching some hint of what had led him so hopelessly astray. The impression grew that a single cardinal error was responsible—his swallowing without question of a whopping lie. He concentrated on recalling the occasion most likely to have produced large lies—his first meeting with Gordon Periam.
And with Mrs Periam. Doreen. Doreen Mackenzie. The erstwhile ‘young lady’ of Brian Hopjoy, the girl whose sportive tendencies in mid-afternoon had so shocked observant Miss Cork...
Suddenly Purbright turned from the window. He snatched from his desk a large envelope that awaited posting to Periam and tore it open. He sought hastily among its contents for a letter in the spidery handwriting of a condoling aunt, glanced through it, and made for the door.
This time, Miss Cork did not ask her visitor in. She remained standing just inside the porch and looked at Purbright as if she had never seen him before. After only the tersest preamble, he launched from the doorstep the one question he had come to ask.
“Miss Cork, when you told me of writing a letter to Miss Mackenzie’s fiancé, did you mean Mr Hopjoy?”
She stared as she might at a detergent promoter who had gabbled an idiotic jingle and awaited some prescribed and equally inane response before handing her a pound.
“This is most important, Miss Cork. Was it Mr Hopjoy to whom you wrote that letter?”
“I don’t know what you mean. No, of course it wasn’t Mr Hopjoy. I wouldn’t”—the thin frame stiffened—“soil paper with that man’s name. It was Mr Periam she was engaged to. And had been for four years.”
“So it was Hopjoy with whom she...whom you saw...”
For a moment the woman’s eyes closed. The big nose twitched in confirmation of the unspeakable.
Purbright half turned, ready to leave. “I’m sorry if I’ve seemed rather stupid about this; I just wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding.”
Miss Cork breathed with the slow self-control of the determinedly delicate. “But I really don’t see what there can have been to misunderstand. I told you that...that girl”—a twisted mouthing of the one word tumbled Miss Mackenzie into a broth pot of precocious lust—“had been after poor Gordon practically since they were children.”
Purbright fingered the letter in his pocket. “As a point of interest, do you happen to know if Doreen Mackenzie ever had a nickname?”
“I know what they called her at the Sunday school. Probably other people called her it, too. Mackie. Sometimes just Mack.”
Once all the little elements of truth began, as it seemed, to surrender themselves, Purbright found their marshalling together into a whole and obvious exposition of what really had happened at Beatrice Avenue quite exhilarating.
Sensing the inspector’s mood, Sergeant Malley beamed avuncularly as he ushered in his hospital informant, friend of a friend, and as anxious to meet the obligations implied by that compelling relationship as he was, in his own phrase, “to do that supercilious bastard Harton one in the eye”.
Male nurse Peter Tewkes was a curly-haired, florid and robust young man whom impudent good nature had made popular with patients and, in axiomatic consequence, the despair of his superiors. He eyed Purbright approvingly, as if cataloguing him as an ambulent case, no bed pans or blanket baths, maybe beer in locker and good for a fourth at solo after night sister’s round. “Fire away, sir,” he invited.
“It was very good of you, Mr Tewkes, to come along and help us. I need hardly tell you that we are not seeking this information out of idle curiosity.”
Mr Tewkes raised his brow. What better motive, he seemed to ask, could there possibly be?
“You’ll remember a patient being admitted under the name of Trevelyan—Howard Trevelyan, I believe.”
“I remember him,” said Tewkes, “but I don’t think that was his real name.”
“Nor do I, but never mind. He’d had a fall, hadn’t he?”
“So we were told. That fitted his injuries anyway.”
“Ah,” Purbright said, “now those are what we should like to hear about. Can you oblige, Mr Tewkes?”
Tewkes gave a wide, easy shrug. “Why not? He had a ruptured liver, that’s what.”
“I see. And that made an operation necessary?”
“Oh, rather. Straight away. It’s a rather nasty thing, you know.”
“I imagine it is. And the operation itself—is it very drastic?”
“I don’t know that I’d call it that, exactly. The idea is simply to mend the thing, as you would a...well, a torn cushion, say. Sew it up.” Tewkes paused. “Mind you, I don’t mean to suggest the business is particulatly easy or straightforward. The biggest snag...I say, you don’t want a lot of technical stuff, do you?”
“Not if you can avoid it.”
“Right you are. I’m not awfully strong on jargon, anyway. The point is that livers don’t mend themselves like most other bits of insides, so the artificial repairs have to be permanent—that’s why they use non-soluble sutures—and they’ve got to be treated with a good deal of respect ever after.”
“I follow. Now I’ve been told that this man came out of hospital in reasonably frisky condition. Is that likely, in your opinion? Would he have been able to...well, to lift heavy weights, for instance?”
Tewkes grinned. “The only thing he’ll be lifting for a bit will be a glass, and he’d better not make too regular a habit of that, either.”
“I don’t fancy he will,” said Purbright soberly. He remained thinking aw
hile, then pulled open a drawer of the desk.
“You mentioned just now something you called non-soluble sutures. Would they be made of nylon?”
“I believe they are, as a rule, yes.”
“Have a look at that, will you?” The inspector placed before Tewkes the small glass tube bequeathed by Sergeant Warlock.
Tewkes held the tube to the light and squinted at the fine, yellowish-white strand it contained. “Could be, certainly. Where did you get it?”
Purbright was so pleased with Mr Tewkes that he nearly rewarded him there and then with a true and full answer. Deciding after all that really wouldn’t do, he said simply: “It was stuck in a drainpipe.”
Tewkes wrinkled up one eye. “Stuck in a...”
Purbright nodded.
“But how bloody queer!” Tewkes gazed again at the tube, turning it this way and that in his big hands. He looked up and smiled. “Go on—I’ll buy it.”
Purbright returned his grin, a little apologetically, and reached for the tube. “Sorry. The price is too high, Mr Tewkes. Far too high.”
Chapter Seventeen
“But the lounge, sergeant...the lounge! He can’t be left in the lounge!”
Sergeant Love, who was feeling by no means happy himself, found the distraught manager of the Neptune increasingly hard to bear.
“Now look, Mr Barraclough, I regret this as much as you do—perhaps more, because I feel a bit to blame—but what’s done is done. The inspector will be here very soon and he’ll make all the decisions. In the meantime everything must be left exactly as it is.”
“But it’s nearly six o’clock.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
Mr Barraclough, in his agitation, nearly retorted: “Opening time, of course,” but he just managed a more seemly formula. “Six is the licensed hour for non-residents.”
Love was unmoved. “That doesn’t matter. I’ve locked the door. Nobody’s going to get a fright.”
He sat down in a chair near the lift. From it he commanded views both of the receptionist—of her upper parts, anyway; for the moment Love found sufficient the mere memory of his earlier glimpse of those portions he had appraised, after his first surprise, as ‘snazzy’—and of the main hotel entrance.
Through that entrance at exactly a quarter past six walked Inspector Purbright, Major Ross, Pumphrey, and the county police surgeon. Behind them, an ambulance drew across the forecourt in a half circle and backed somewhere out of Love’s line of vision.
The sergeant rose and hurried up to Purbright. His face had lost a good deal of its usual expression of luminous equanimity. Purbright gave him a concerned glance. “Don’t look so woebegone, Sid; they don’t charge you just for being here.”
“I’m ever so sorry, sir, honestly...”
“Nonsense. You had nothing whatever to do with it. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. Now then...” Purbright looked about him—“I suppose we’d better view the remains. Where’d you put them?”
“I didn’t put them anywhere. They’re...he’s just sitting there in the lounge.”
Purbright took the key Love offered. He paused. “By the way, where’s the girl?”:
“She’s up in their room.”
“Upset?”
Love looked uncertain. “Well, shocked of course; she was there when it happened. But not hysterical or anything.”
Purbright beckoned the others. He unlocked the door.
On the far side of the long room, with its indigo ceiling, pearl-grey walls and scallop-backed armchairs panelled with alternate plum and yellow, sat a solitary figure. It seemed to have been waiting for them there a long, long time. Slumped a little sideways in the big, embracing chair, it stared stupidly as if just awakened from a doze.
In front of the chair was a low, kidney-shaped table bearing a tray set with a teapot, milk, sugar and two cups and saucers. One eye of the corpse seemed directed at the pot; the other fixed upon the advancing party, defying them to ask for a share in the refreshment.
The police surgeon bent over the body, lightly touched eyelids, wrist and neck, and stood back. With a pencil he pointed to a spot just above the dead man’s collar, an inch or so to the left of his windpipe. “There’s the puncture,” he said to Purbright. “That little bluish mark.” They all drew close and peered, heads together, at the throat of the dead Mr Periam.
Purbright made a rapid survey of the table top. “Where’s the lighter, sergeant?”
“On the floor, sir. There, by his left foot.”
Very cautiously, Purbright picked it up and held it in his open palm. “You’d better tell us just what happened. From the beginning.”
Love gave a frown of concentration. “Well, I’d taken the thing round to everyone I could think of who knew Mr Hopjoy—George Tozer first, then one or two of the people in Beatrice Avenue. They didn’t recognize it, so I tried a few licensees in town. I hadn’t much luck with them, either. Then I thought that Mr Periam would be the best bet, even though it meant coming right out here. Well, they’d lived in the same house, after all. He recognized it at once. ‘That’s old Brian’s,’ he said. ‘Where did you get hold of it?’ ”
“They were sitting here, were they—Mr and Mrs Periam?”
“That’s right, sir. The girl at the desk told me to come through. They were quite friendly. Asked me to sit down—I sat in that chair over there—and I took the thing out of the envelope. I hadn’t let any of the other people actually handle it—well, I understood it was evidence, in a way—but Mr Periam leaned across and took it before I could stop him. He said, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve seen this lots of times’ and started to try to get it to light—you know, as anyone might out of curiosity. He kept on pressing the top. It didn’t even spark, though. Then he spotted that little trigger thing on the side and pushed it with his thumb nail. There was a sort of hiss—very sudden, with a bit of a pop about it—and he dropped the lighter and felt the front of his neck as if he’d been stung. He said, ‘That’s a queer do’—oh, three or four times; he kept on saying it and rubbing his neck. Then after a bit he couldn’t seem to get his breath and just sat there staring and choking. Mrs Periam ran out for help while I held him. But within a minute or two he’d had it.”
Purbright turned to Ross. Gingerly, but knowledgeably, Ross took the lighter between thumb and forefinger and examined it. “Very neat. Czechoslovakian, probably. I need hardly say that our people aren’t issued with quite this sort of thing.”
“Naturally not. How did Hopjoy get hold of it, though?”
“Won it from one of their people’s baggage, perhaps. Or he could have bought it. As a souvenir, you know. Some of their chaps are hopelessly mercenary.” He dismissed the point with a shrug. “See that little hole? The thing’s a sort of airgun, really. Primed with the plunger and set off with this catch. Tiny cyanide pellets, I expect. That’s the usual drill.”
Pumphrey heard the exposition with marked disapproval. He put his hand on Purbright’s sleeve. “You’ll see that this contrivance doesn’t get bandied around, won’t you, inspector? It would be most undesirable, security-wise, if...” He broke off, looking worried.
Purbright appeared not to have been listening. He gazed thoughtfully at the dead man’s face. It looked puffy, stupid, impotent. Purbright felt constrained, as he often did, to attempt the loan of some little dignity to one who had lost all his own. “You know,” he said quietly to Ross, “be would have done awfully well in your line.”
“He’d have needed a course in booby-traps first.”
“No doubt. But that”—Purbright weighed the lighter in his hand—“was just bad luck. Booby-traps, in a much more subtle sense, were his forte. The criminal who proves too clever is common enough; but I must say I’m enormously impressed with a criminal who is able to calculate exactly to what degree the police will prove too clever, and who arranges his crime accordingly.”
Two ambulance men and a constable had entered and were standing hesitantly near the door.
Purbright motioned them over. Like tactful, proficient club stewards called to remove a member regrettably immobilized by port, they advanced noiselessly upon the corpse, tweaking up their sleeves. The doctor nodded and departed.
The others moved to a table farther away. Over his shoulder, Love stole a last glance at Periam before a sheet rendered him mere freight.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but he doesn’t look the type to smash a bloke’s head in with a hammer.”
“He didn’t,” said Purbright. “I think we’ll find that strangling was the method, actually. Warlock should enjoy himself looking for skin fragments on Periam’s chest expander. ‘Doing his exercises’ was how Miss Cork put it. Now we can add it to our collection of wisdom after the event.”
