Coffin Scarcely Used f-1 Page 17

  Seizing the opportunity for speech that seemed to be presented by the landlord’s brows rising so high that his eye-pouches were pulled taut like grey elastic, Purbright tried again.

  “We’re...” was all he managed.

  “You’re dicks—yes, I know.” The landlord beamed upon them like a school matron. “It’s those raincoats. Here, I expect you’re after one of these straw-chewing zombies for slipping a hunk of rat poison into his auntie. That’s a favourite of theirs, rat poison is. Some of ’em get used to it. No, you’d not believe that, would you? But it’s right. They eat it like bloody sandwich spread. Never mind”—he tossed his head—“we’ll not waste time talking about that lot, shall we. I was telling you how I came to make this place pay. D’you know where the real trade comes from? The real money? Do you?” He leaned nearer, filling the little service hatch with his affable moon-face. “From the city. Brum. And over from Shrewsbury, some of ’em. And Stafford an’ all. Even Liverpool in the summer. You know why, don’t you? Listen. It’s what we call a gimmick in show business. A gimmick, that’s what. Like echo chambers and crimpy hair and walloping great fat chests and that. You see, I got my old agent to come and give the place the once over when I took it on. First thing he did was change the name. The Bull, it used to be. We’ll give ’em Bull, he says. You want something classy and half-sloshed like, that’ll go down with the intelligentsia out with one another’s missuses. Mind you, it’s all above board. No Mr and Mrs Smith or any of that lark. Proper names and all different. Aye, anyway...But look here, you’re the pollis, aren’t you? You’ll be wanting to know something, I suppose. Come on, don’t be bashful. Hey, Freda! Freda, love!” He disappeared.

  Purbright’s companion blew out his cheeks and softly suspired an appropriate obscenity. “Sorry about him, old chap, but he’s not one of our home-reared, believe me. My chief just asked me to help you with the geography and the language; we didn’t bargain for a blasted walking public address system.”

  A door opened behind them and they were joined by the landlord, bearing a tray set with three glasses. “Here,” he said. Purbright and the other policeman each took a whisky. “Right,” said the landlord. He sat down and regarded them with the air of a grocer ready to take a list. His furious loquacity seemed to have burned itself out.

  In the hatch vacated by the landlord suddenly appeared the face of a heavily breathing, youngish woman with lemon-coloured hair. She gazed at them with a mixture of interest and amusement. “Lookin’ for corpsesez?” she asked.

  The landlord flapped his hand at her. “Go switch the log on in the Tudor,” he commanded. His wife wrinkled her nose and lumbered off into the interior. “Miss Openshaw Palladium 1946,” he explained, then, half to himself, “That was before wide screens, mind.”

  Purbright made formal introductions and began putting his questions.

  “We’re interested in a roundabout way,” he said, “in a lady from Flaxborough—you know where that is, I suppose?—called Mrs Joan Carobleat. Has anyone ever stayed here under that name?”

  The landlord yelled “Freda!” and added in normal tones, while the glasses still quivered, “Aye, I get you. Wait till she brings the book.”

  Once more his wife materialized, Judy-like, in the hatch. “The book, love—fetch it here, will you?” Again she was gone, good-naturedly contemptuous and foot-dragging. Purbright and the local inspector each received the distinct impression that she had winked at him.

  The landlord quickly found the signature he was looking for. He held out the book and pointed to it. Purbright saw that it was for the two nights before his encounter with Mrs Carobleat as she was leaving Flaxborough station. It confirmed her own story.

  “You’re sure she actually stayed here—slept here, I mean?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, rather do I. I noticed, you know. She’s not exactly a stranger here, if you know what I mean.”

  “And there’s no doubt she could have been nowhere else but here in the hotel on that second night?”

  “Not unless she climbed out of the window and climbed back again in time for six-thirty tea. Look—it’s marked here—tea, six-thirty. She left to catch the eight-five at Hereford.” The landlord slammed the book shut and jutted his face forward. “What’s up? What’s she done? I’ll not, er...you know. Here, don’t tell me she’s been minced or something?” The last question was delivered with hopeful interest and a manual gesture suggestive of sawing.

  Purbright said: “She stayed here fairly regularly, then? How often?”

  “Oh, once or twice a month, maybe.”

  “As often as that?” Purbright sounded surprised.

  “Oh, aye. Recently, anyway. Of course, I’ve not been here all that long.”

  “Since when?”

  “Early last summer. May or June. She’s been here eight or nine times since then. Just for the odd night or two.”

  “And always on her own?”

  The landlord hesitated.

  “Well?” Purbright’s tone was inoffensive, yet pressing.

  The other scratched his ear. “Put it this way,” he said. “She was on her own all right when she was actually here. But she generally pushed off early in the evening and turned up again for breakfast. Oddly enough, though, this last time she did stay the night just as I told you. You needn’t worry about that. But most other times she didn’t.”

  “What was the idea? Did she tell you?”

  “She didn’t say anything, but I thought the same as anyone else would. She’s no chicken, but goodish looking. Married for a cert. And probably with a husband who’d want to know where she’d been. Well, if ever he came here he could see she’d spent the night very respectably in a single room with none of that Mr and Mrs Smith malarkey.” He shrugged. “I didn’t see any harm in obliging her. There was nothing common about her.”

  “Do you know where she went when she left for the night?”

  “No idea at all, old man. It wasn’t my business.”

  “Come off it.” For the first time, Gibbins, the local inspector, entered the conversation. “This village is no bigger than my backside. Anyone coming here wouldn’t have a dozen houses to choose from to stay the night in. Somebody’s bound to know where the woman went. And I know as well as you do that the gosbip out here is spread in the bars like sawdust. Now just you tell this gentleman what you’ve heard, my lad.”

  The landlord glanced resentfully at Inspector Gibbins’s whisky. “I tell you I don’t tittle-tattle with the peasantry,” he said. “They always keep to the Smugglers’ Browserie—what used to be the bar—ever since we did the place out and stopped them trying to bring goats along with them. Percy always serves them, not me.” He trotted to the hatch, evidently a sort of control centre, and shouted “Per-CEEE!”

  The summons brought forth, after a minute or so, a huge, droopy-chopped mental deficient who kept wringing an imaginary dish-cloth and shaking his head. Persistent but kindly interrogation by Gibbins won the news that the ‘lady from away’ had been seen more than once bound in the direction of Avery Woodside, but that none knew precisely upon whose bed ‘them pretty ’aunches do ’ave steamed’.

  Inspector Gibbins seemed satisfied and dismissed the mountainous haunch-fancier with thanks. He asked Purbright if he wished to know anything further.

  “Was Mrs Carobleat never in the company of anyone here? Did you never see her strike up a conversation over a drink, say, or accept a lift in a car?”

  The landlord was certain that he had not.

  “Did you know her to make a telephone call at any times?”

  She made no calls herself, but at her request he had occasionally rung for a taxi or to confirm the time of a train.

  When the two policemen left the hotel, Gibbins pointed along the road to their left. “Avery’s that way,” he said. “I didan’ try to drag anything more out of Perce because what he did say leaves us with a very short choice. Come on.”

  They soon drew level with a farm e
ntrance. “Nothing there,” said Gibbins. “There’s just the old man and his sister and a stockman who lives in. They don’t know anybody.”

  “What’s that place?” Purbright asked, nodding toward a house set in wooded grounds behind a wall that extended along the opposite side of the road.

  “Do you have squires in your part of the world?”

  Purbright shook his head. “Hardly. Our upper crust sank into the gravy quite a while since. Why, is that a manor? In the feudal sense, I mean?”

  “It is. And wheezing in the middle of it somewhere is a real squire.”

  “Paralysed with a surfeit of droit de seigneur?”

  “Poxed and well-nigh boxed,” confirmed Gibbins. “I doubt if your Mrs Whatsername would have wanted to see him; not unless she had an interest in morbid pathology.”

  “We’re not calling, then?”

  “Only if we have no luck farther on.”

  They reached a road fork, in the centre of which stood a public telephone kiosk.

  “That’s just a track,” Gibbins said of the right-hand lane. They entered the other and began to walk more briskly. Neither spoke until they came within sight of a small house of red brick.

  Gibbins said: “We’ll have a word with Mrs Battle. Considering the number of kids she has, I wonder she has time to notice anything that’s not on the stove or the clothes line, but it’s amazing how much she finds out. Perhaps Battle tells her. She’s not been this side of her gate since old Kennedy dropped dead from his delivery van in the road here one Thursday morning just after the war and she came out and stepped over him to get the bread she’d been waiting for.”

  Walking round the side of the house, they encountered Mrs Battle picking one of the yougest of her children out of the hen run. Purbright thought she looked hostile and excitable, but Gibbins greeted her familiarly and she waddled ahead of them into the house.

  After some small-talk in a dialect that Purbright found difficult to follow but which was obviously zestfully indelicate, Mrs Battle began to give answers to Gibbins’s inquiries into the passage of strangers thereabouts.

  Her replies, translated one by one to Purbright by his colleague, were to the effect that a woman answering Joan Carobleat’s description had indeed walked by the house on several occasions. She was a visitor, according to Mrs Battle’s observations from her bedroom window, to the house of Mr Barnaby, the gentleman from London way who had bought the next cottage down the road—the last habitation before Avery Woodside—and who enjoyed such other advantages as a morning help from Polstead, a motorcar, fishing rights in the meadowlands of poor palsied Squire, and the nocturnal companionship of various anonymous but drattedly giggly young women.

  Was Mr Barnaby likely to be at home now? She thought it highly probable, for she had seen the headlamp beams of his big motor-car flash across her bedroom ceiling late last night and had heard his garage door roll shut. Since then, no traffic had passed but a van or two. Mr Barnaby’s big motor-car certainly had not emerged again. It made a sinful noise, as though bound for race tracks and hotels, and she would not have missed it, even in her sleep.

  Had the morning help called that day, as usual? No, she hadn’t, now that it came to be mentioned, not that she came absolutely every day because her husband sometimes got took extra bad.

  What sort of a man to look at was Mr Barnaby? She had never looked, save at his lordly passing awheel when she had got no more than a fleet glance at his face, which was dark, she thought, and whiskered, and proud.

  Whiskered? Purbright reminded Gibbins that the man who had bought electric cable from Barr and Cranwell, Ltd., Radio and TV, Ludlow, to which a fragment of yellow adhesive tape had led them earlier that day, had also been described as bearded.

  How did Mr Barnaby earn a living and pass his time? She had heard nothing of his employment, but Battle thought (for what his opinion was worth) that their neighbour was like to be a gentleman just out of either Parliament or prison and writing a book about it.

  After some further conversation in the steamy gloom of Mrs Battle’s nappie-festooned kitchen, the two policemen took their leave.

  When they arrived at Mr Barnaby’s unexpectedly ostentatious gateway, Gibbins asked Purbright: “Do you want to see this character on your own? He’s not one of my parishioners; I might just be in the way.”

  “No, you come along in,” said Purbright. “I’m not at all sure what I’m going to say to him, anyway. At least you can fill awkward pauses by asking to see his licence, or soliciting for the Boot and Shoe Fund or something. Damn it, you can’t loiter at gates in this weather.”

  They made their way through the dead, tangled garden and Gibbins knocked on the front door. “The back would be more to the point as a rule,” he observed, “but this chap’s a foreigner; he probably hasn’t bothered to nail up the front door yet awhile.”

  There was no sound within the cottage. Purbright knocked, again without result.

  “You go round and try the back,” suggested Gibbins. “I’ll see if his car is still in the garage. It’s not often old Mother Battle’s espionage is at fault.” He strode off towards the shed.

  Purbright knocked with his knuckles on the back door and tried the handle. Then he moved to one of the two flanking windows. Inside was a long, clean kitchen.

  A few moments later, Gibbins reappeared. “Wherever he is, he hasn’t taken the car,” he announced. “It’s still in the garage.”

  Purbright stared round the garden and ranged the fields on the other side of the bordering hedge. “Curious,” he muttered.

  “What is?”

  Purbright nodded towards the window. “Take a look at how neat the place is. Yet his woman didn’t come today. He must be an unusually tidy fellow.”

  “You’d not say that if you saw the garage. You can hardly move for odds and ends and a great tangle of electric flex and stuff. I’d a job getting the door shut again.”

  “Electric flex?” Purbright looked at him sharply.

  “Yes, yards and...Oh...”

  “Oh, indeed,” said Purbright. “Getting warmer, aren’t we?” He turned again to the window. “I suggest, you know, that ‘having reason to suspect’ and all that, we now take a closer look into things.”

  He examined the window frame. “Ah, a precedent. How lucky for the Law.” Where recently made indentations appeared in the paint, he thrust upward a penknife blade and eased away the old-fashioned catch. Then he opened the window, climbed on the kitchen bench and jumped down. The slightly apprehensive Gibbins was admitted through the door.

  They began to search, ascending first to an attic compartment that had been converted into the nearest approximation to a bath-room that a pumped water supply allowed.

  Of the occupant of the cottage there was no sign. “One thing to be thankful for,” confessed Gibbins, “is that we haven’t found him strung up or simmering in chunks in the copper. That’s what I’m always afraid of in these out-of-the-way places. They’ve a nasty sense of humour in the country.” He mooched back into the kitchen and began peeping cautiously into drawers and cupboards.

  A little later, Purbright called from the bedroom. “What do you make of this?” he asked, pointing to a jacket and waistcoat that hung behind the door, and then to an open drawer of the dressing table in which had been folded the matching pair of trousers.

  Gibbins moved the trousers aside. Braces were attached to them. Beneath the trousers were some underclothes and a shirt. He looked at the cuffs; the links were there. Studs had not been removed from the collar-band.

  “It seems,” said Gibbins, after considering these things, “that Mr Barnaby is abroad with precious little clothing on. People don’t put on clean shirts without changing the studs over. And they don’t have separate braces for every pair of trousers.”

  “They don’t lay trousers in drawers, either,” Purbright observed. “Unless,” he added, “they happen to be someone else’s that they’ve decided to tidy away quickly. Can you
see any shoes and socks over on that side?”

  A pair of slightly muddied brogues was discovered in a corner. Further search revealed socks under one of the pillows. Gibbins held them up. “Inside out—like the shirt and vest. That suggests something.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Purbright agreed, pleased that Gibbins seemed to have entered so well into the spirit of things, in spite of the case having been, as it were, imported. “The gentleman was either an exceedingly careless dresser—which would be odd in anyone with such a passion for tidying things away—or else somebody took his clothes off for him.”

  Purbright watched Gibbins going through pockets. “Any name tags?” he asked.

  “Not one. No letters, no papers. Plenty of money and some odds and ends.” Gibbins laid on the dressing table a bundle of notes, cigarette case and lighter, keys, a pen and two handkerchiefs.