Coffin Scarcely Used f-1 Page 18

  “No driving licence?” Purbright inquired. Gibbins shook his head.

  Purbright moved about the room, unhurriedly peering, probing, picking up and setting down. He glanced into ashtrays and at the titles of a couple of books. His manner was inconsequential, like that of a bored man in a waiting-room. On the bedside table was a small china ornament. In passing, he lifted it and shook it gently, then tipped its mouth to the palm of his other hand. Out rolled a tiny, pear-shaped bead of glass. Purbright stared at it thoughtfully for a moment and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

  Both men returned together to the kitchen.

  Purbright stopped at the door and looked carefully round the room. Then he walked slowly from one end to the other, methodically examining the floor. Suddenly he stooped down and peered closely at the boards. Another piece of glass glittered in a crevice. Purbright prised it free with his fingernail, compared it with the first fragment, and held out both to Gibbins who mmm-ed politely but without comprehension.

  “They’re off little glass phials,” explained Purbright. “You know—medical phials.” He stepped to the sink and surveyed the things that stood in it or on the draining bench close by; he did not touch them. They comprised a small saucepan that seemed to have contained milk; a deep plate with a few cereal fragments on its rim; a large china beaker; and an empty jug. All had been rinsed—apparently with water from a ewer that stood on the floor.

  “I’d dearly like a sample of the milk that was in that jug,” Purbright said.

  Gibbins stood disconsolately at the sink. “Do you think it was poured away? It could have been used up.”

  “It could; but most people remember to leave a drop of milk in reserve, and there isn’t any other in the house. In any case, it stands out a mile that somebody’s...”

  “Wait a minute,” Gibbins broke in. He bobbed down and thrust his head into the small cupboard beneath the sink. “See if you can get hold of a clean jar or bottle. A jar would be best.”

  As Purbright searched shelves on the opposite wall, he heard Gibbins tapping in his retreat. He picked out a clean jam jar and handed it down. A moment later there was the sound of running liquid.

  Gibbins emerged, red but triumphant, from the cupboard. He help up the jar, half filled with a whitish fluid. “Waste pipe,” he explained. “Now then, what do you reckon we’ve got here?”

  “Something,” Purbright replied, “of which I fear Mr Barnaby has caught his death.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  When the Chief Constable opened the door of Purbright’s office shortly after eight o’clock the following morning, something more chilly than the draught from the corridor entered the room. His terse “Good morning” had an edge of irritation, and he said nothing further while he slowly and deliberately peeled off his gloves and laid them neatly side by side on the desk.

  Purbright knew better than to waste time on mollifying preliminaries. “I understand, sir,” he said, “that Dr Hillyard is now at his home. I wish to execute the warrant at”—he glanced at the clock and considered—“at half-past nine. A special court has been fixed for ten. Formal remand, sir. In custody, of course.”

  “Well?” Chubb had no intention of forgiving lightly the telephone call that had precipitated an early and unsatisfactory breakfast.

  “Well, sir, the whole case may conceivably come to the boil, as it were, at any time now. I thought it desirable that you should be on hand. We may need your support in several ways that I cannot predict at the moment.”

  Chubb regarded Purbright thoughtfully and with slightly less obvious disfavour. Then he pulled a chair to the middle of the room and sat down. “Go on, Mr Purbright.”

  “In the first place,” said the inspector, manfully coping with the novelty of addressing Chubb from above, “I’d better give you a few more of the background facts we’ve been able to discover. We arrest Hillyard. Right: now there is plenty of evidence of his having allowed and, for that matter, actively helped to organize, the running of a...an immoral enterprise in a part of his house not accessible to his genuine patients.”

  Chubb raised an eyebrow.

  “The original idea was Carobleat’s. He had a flair for that kind of thing—as we suspected, but couldn’t prove before his death. As you know, sir, a town like this has hardly any open prostitution. Members of a small community daren’t risk their reputations.

  “Not so long ago, of course, the shipping trade brought seamen here who had no reason to be scrupulous, so some prostitution did exist in the harbour district. But since the war most of the ships using Flaxborough have been small coasters manned by pretty stolid types who are a poor proposition for the ladies of Broad Street. Then there was all the cleaning up agitation in the council and the local paper. Mr Carobleat was largely responsible for that, you’ll remember, sir.”

  “And a damned nuisance he made of himself,” confirmed the Chief Constable bitterly. “Oddly enough, the wife tumbled to him straight away.”

  “Really, sir?”

  “Rather. She used to tell me many a time about his having had his ‘hot little eyes’—that’s what she called them—all over the women on that moral welfare committee he started.”

  Purbright tried briefly to visualize this mass flirtation. He failed and went on: “What Carobleat had seen, of course, was his opportunity to reorganize the declining and amateurish vice trade on a novel, very profitable basis. He used his spurious moral welfare approach to recruit a dozen or so of the more presentable women and promised them a regular living on good-class clients. But he made it clear that he was to manage the financial side himself and pay them commission. They must have found the proposition fairly attractive—especially as he undertook to arrange the ticklish question of premises.”

  Chubb was looking doubtful. “Just how do we come to know all this, Mr Purbright?”

  “Quite simply, sir. One of the women was interviewed by our persuasive Mr Harper. She told him a great deal. The system was rather ingenious. She used to receive by post at regular intervals a list of appointments, so called, together with a sum of money in notes at the rate of a pound for each appointment.”

  “In advance?”

  “That’s so,” Purbright agreed. “All she had to do then was to arrive at Dr Hillyard’s surgery by the back door just before the stated time and go straight upstairs to what were ostensibly women’s treatment cubicles. The actual...er...assignations took place in small rooms connecting the male and female cubicles.”

  “How abominable,” murmured the Chief Constable.

  “You’ll not wish me to elaborate on that particular aspect, sir?”

  “No, no. Certainly not. I’d like to know how the others came into it, though.”

  “Yes, sir. Bradlaw, now. My guess at the moment is that he did the conversion work on the first floor of Hillyard’s house. He’s a builder as well as an undertaker. We know him to have been fairly thick with Carobleat and Hillyard, and they’d naturally want someone who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Another point. The job seems to have been done without a licence, which would have been needed at that time if an ordinary firm had been called in. We can assume that Bradlaw was promised a cut from the proceeds, and got it.

  “As you know now, I think, sir, the fourth member of what might be called the syndicate—or the fifth, if we count Mrs Carobleat, as we must—was Gwill. Less imaginative organizers would have been content to run their business as a camouflaged brothel with nothing really elaborate about it. But these people were inspired as well as thorough.

  “They knew that the best customer would be the well-off married tradesman or farmer or business man who would be only too ready to make a fool of himself as long as he could insist on the most stringent and even melodramatic safeguards. Actually, it’s often the trimmings—you know, the peephole and the password and that sort of thing—that are half the attraction for middle-aged men who dabble in vice.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Chubb
remarked.

  Purbright gave a little bow. “Anyway, sir, that’s where Gwill was valuable. The complicated system of coded advertisements and box replies for which his newspaper was used may seem absurd to us; after all, arrangements could have been made quite easily over the phone or through a reliable go-between. But that wouldn’t have been so exciting.”

  Chubb gave one of his gentle, thin smiles. “You really are far too sophisticated for a policeman, Mr Purbright. Never mind; go on.”

  “So here in Flaxborough was a flourishing and excellently organized traffic in comforts for gentlemen,” continued the inspector. “Carobleat was the managing genius—up to last summer, that is. His next door neighbour was what you might call the public relations expert. Bradlaw won his directorship with an astute piece of construction work. Hillyard was all-important as provider of accommodation and camouflage. He might also have been useful as the M.O. of the concern—the woman we interviewed was a trifle coy on that point. And Mrs Carobleat looked after the secretarial side.”

  “What about the solicitor?” asked Chubb.

  Purbright thought a moment. “Well, he certainly knew what was going on. It was he who collected that last lot of box replies, presumably to pass them on—a businesslike touch, that. I doubt if he was a regularly active partner, though. There doesn’t seem to have been much he could do to help—unless we can imagine one of the ladies suing the firm for breach of contract.”

  “Then why do you suppose the fellow was murdered? You don’t suggest he intended to give the show away? He told me precious little, scared as he was.”

  “That is one of the questions we can’t answer yet, sir. My belief is that Gloss was killed for the same reason as Gwill, and by the same person.”

  “Hillyard?”

  Purbright shook his head. “Hillyard was lucky that night. The blood that soaked his sleeve came from a wound in his own arm; he was holding it tightly all the time we were talking to him. That knife had been meant for him as well.”

  “He might have gashed himself to give that impression.”

  “In that case, he would have made no secret of the wound.”

  Chubb grunted. After a pause he said: “That leaves only Bradlaw, then?”

  “On the face of it, yes. Yet I can’t see him as a footpath assassin. Whoever attacked a relatively powerful pair like Gloss and Hillyard must have been exceptionally confident and tough. It’s the audacity of the thing that sounds so unlike Bradlaw.”

  “And unlike Mrs Carobleat too, I suppose?”

  Purbright smiled. “Oh, yes...Mrs Carobleat. As it happens, she’s the only one with an alibi for the night Gwill was murdered.”

  “You’ve checked that?” A gleam of recollection showed suddenly in Chubb’s face. “Of course...your little trip to Shropshire. How did you get on?”

  “It should prove useful, sir. For one thing, we found where Mrs Carobleat was in the habit of staying. And we learned of the existence of a gentleman called Barnaby.”

  “Barnaby?”

  “Yes, sir. The local people are looking for him now.”

  “You mean he’ll be able to help?”

  “I doubt it, sir. We can but try.”

  The Chief Constable looked fixedly at Purbright for several moments. “You know,” he said slowly, “you’re hedging to a perfectly scandalous degree. No”—he raised his hand—“don’t spoil it, my dear fellow; I’m sure you know what you’re doing.” He rose, walked to the desk and picked up his gloves. “There’s just one little thing I must ask of you, though.”

  “Yes, sir?” Purbright also was standing. He met Chubb’s gaze with a politely solicitous eye.

  “Arrest your murderer or murderers within the next twenty-four hours, or I shall ask Scotland Yard to give me assistance.” He reached for the door. “I thought you should know how I’m placed. I’m the last to want some outsider to scoop the credit for what you and your chaps have done. But you do see that I cannot possibly delay any longer.”

  Chubb put on his bowler with the air of an overdrawn patron of the arts and stepped into the corridor, which was darkened at that moment by the approach of the enormous Sergeant Malley.

  The Coroner’s Officer squeezed his bulk respectfully to one side and allowed the Chief Constable to pass. Then he lumbered up to Purbright’s door, knocked and went in.

  “Ah, sergeant,” Purbright greeted him, “I have a little commission for you.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “The day before yesterday we were anxious to have a word with Nab Bradlaw. He couldn’t be found. I rather think he was out of town. Now, then, you’re persona grata with the undertaking trade, I take it—in the way of business, so to speak?”

  “Bradlaw’s fellows know me.”

  “Fine. Well, I’d like you to try and tap somebody at his place now. See if you can find out where he went the other day. Don’t scare them, though—Nab least of all.”

  Malley grinned. “You don’t have to worry about that, sir. I’m pretty unobtrusive. If Ben or Charlie know anything, I’ll worm it out of them.”

  On his way out, Malley turned. “By the way, inspector, do you reckon this little lot is nearly tidied up? Old Amblesby’s in a terrible state. I can’t do anything with him. He’s like a kid who’s lost his hoop.”

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Well, he’s never had two inquests hanging fire at one and the same time before. There’s Gwill, of course. He would have forgotten about that but for the adjournment on Gloss the other day. That reminded him. Now he’s going around muttering that half the town’s been murdered and his books are cluttered up with corpses.”

  “Would that Her Majesty’s Coroner were among them,” piously declared Purbright, closing his door.

  At half-past nine exactly, the inspector and Sergeant Love presented themselves at Dr Hillyard’s surgery. Purbright informed him with the greatest respect that he was being arrested and explained some of the implications of that surprising circumstance.

  Dr Hillyard glowered a good deal but made no comment.

  Shortly before ten o’clock, the three men entered the police station and, on a cue from the assistant clerk to the magistrates, walked into Purbright’s office where Mrs Popplewell, J.P., was waiting to make the best of a redeemed opportunity. She was accompanied by a Mr Peters, a comatose draper whose shop was so near the police station that the kindness of leading him off for an airing whenever a little uncomplicated justice needed doing had become traditional.

  Dr Hillyard regarded Mrs Popplewell with acid amusement throughout the brief formalities of the assistant clerk stumbling through the charge, Purbright giving evidence of arrest, and Mrs Popplewell herself announcing lamely and with every sign of nervousness that he, the defendant, would be remanded in custody for a week. Then he drew back his lips from the dog daisy of his splayed teeth and grinned a contemptuous and malevolent farewell before turning to accompany the station sergeant to the cells next to the table tennis room.

  “Dear me!” said Mrs Popplewell to Mr Peters. “And to think that his late wife was once chosen by the Association to entertain Mr Baldwin to supper.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “How did you make out?” Purbright asked Malley, whom he found awaiting him.

  “I kept clear of Nab Bradlaw. He was busy in that chapel-cum-fridge of his. But I had a word with Ben and Charlie, and they said he’d been out with the van all that day and most of the night. Charlie lives nearly opposite the yard and he heard him coming back about five yesterday morning.”

  “Did they know where he’d been?”

  “No, sir; but Ben thought the van’s mileage gauge had clocked on nearly four hundred.”

  “He couldn’t give an exact figure?”

  “No, they’re none too fussy about log books, it seems.”

  “Will Bradlaw be there now, do you think?”

  “Should be, sir. He has a job at the Crem. at twelve, though.”

  “Only the one?
”

  “Aye, that’s all. Ben was rather taken up with it, as a matter of fact. Said he’d never known things so slack in what he calls good felling weather like this. And even the one they have got was only staying here temporary, he said.”

  “That applies to all of us by Nab’s reckoning.”

  Malley grunted.

  “A visitor, was he?” asked Purbright.

  “Seems he was an uncle of that housekeeper, or whatever you’d call her.”

  “Bradlaw’s housekeeper?”

  “Yes, sir. I spoke to her, as well. She told me the same as Ben. Only the one funeral—her uncle’s. He must have been ill here for a bit and under a local doctor, else they’d never have got a certificate straight off like that.”