Coffin Scarcely Used f-1 Page 19

  “Was the girl upset about her uncle?”

  Malley scratched his chin. “Well, not as you might say prostrate with grief.”

  “She didn’t mention the man’s name, by any chance?”

  The sergeant shook his head, then looked thoughtful. “Wait a bit...Charlie was the one who called him something. He’s a bit disrespectful, is Charlie. Now what was it he said?” Malley gazed at the ceiling and made little popping sounds as if expelling invisible smoke rings.

  Purbright watched him patiently for a while, then glanced at the clock. It was a little after half-past ten. He suppressed a yawn and rubbed his face.

  Distracted by the movement. Malley looked down again. Suddenly he chuckled. “That’s it. Of course. Fuzzy-chops!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Malley waved a plump hand. “No, sir. Not you. The uncle bloke. Charlie called him that. Fuzzy-chops. He must have...”

  The inspector, uttering something between a neigh and a groan, pushed past him, seized hat and coat from the peg, and disappeared through the door.

  Ten minutes later, Purbright, Love and a couple of uniformed constables descended by car upon the place of business of Mr Bradlaw.

  They entered by the side gate, and Purbright and Love left the constables in the yard staring around at the stacks of elm and oak, while they went into the workshop.

  At first it appeared to be empty. Then the joiner, Ben, who had been nodding in a corner until the sound of footsteps penetrated his doze, rose suddenly and bade them a challenging “Good morning”.

  “We are looking for Mr Bradlaw,” announced Purbright sternly.

  Ben blinked. “Ain’t ’ere,” he retorted unhelpfully.

  “Where is he, then?”

  “Down at Crem., ’less he’s back.”

  Purbright gave Love a quick, anxious glance, then to Ben: “Are you sure of that?”

  “Course. Why not?”

  “I thought he had only one funeral today.”

  “S’right.”

  “At eleven o’clock.”

  “Was to ha’ been. The missus was that upset though, they put it forrard a bit. The boss said grief like ’ers ’d take the nature out of ’er and oughter be got over quick. So that’s...” He stopped. His audience had gone.

  Those of Mr Bradlaw’s near neighbours who happened to be watching the street were intrigued to see two purposeful-looking men in raincoats shoot out of the undertaker’s yard, followed, but not pursued, by a pair of policemen. All four piled into the car that had brought them two or three minutes earlier, and drove away, the men in uniform crouching like big blue frogs in order to keep their helmets from penetrating the roof.

  As he urged the suffering vehicle forward at what speed it would make, Purbright said to Love: “I am a thickheaded, complacent fool.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” replied Love, a little doubtfully.

  “Yes, I am. If what I think has happened—and I could have prevented it easily enough—we might as well drive straight over that parapet.”

  Love stared apprehensively at the river wall on their right. “We can only hope for the best,” he said, adding, “whatever that may be.”

  “Do you know anything about the crematorium?” Purbright asked him.

  “I know what it’s for.”

  “I didn’t suppose you imagined it was an ice-cream factory. I mean, do you know anything about the works—the procedure? Furnaces, and that sort of thing?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Never mind.” Purbright stared out at the road ahead. Soon he steered the car into a broad avenue and drove between two small brick lodges. “Here we are,” he said. “I can get the car practically up to the door. I’ll go in. There’ll be a clergyman in charge, I suppose. He’ll know all about what happens, if it hasn’t already. You wait outside and make sure of Nab. But try not to let it look like a raid on a club—keep the gendarmerie out of sight unless there’s any chasing. Which”—he heaved on the handbrake and drew the car to a halt on the gravel—“God forbid!”

  Within the small chapel that Purbright entered with an urgent and hasty tip-toeing movement—a sort of reverent prance—were four people.

  A curate from the Parish Church was murmuring a prayer with bowed head. He was being watched nervously by a young woman wearing a dark coat and a black, ill-fitting hat that she fingered from time to time as if feeling a bruise. Mr Bradlaw stood just behind her, clasping and unclasping his hands upon the tail of his coat and glancing occasionally with professional concern at the apparel and bearing of his man Charlie, whose first ‘outside’ assignment this was.

  As Purbright looked feverishly around and tried to judge whether he had arrived in time, there swelled from the air above his head the sounds of music of a Grand Hotel celestialism. It seemed to signal the end of whatever religious rites had been in progress, for the heads of the three people other than the curate now swivelled all in one direction. Purbright was aware of slow, smooth motion somewhere, yet could not exactly place it. He studied Charlie’s face, which happened to be presented to him in profile, and followed the line of his fixed stare. He was just in time for his eye to catch the final phase of the movement that the others had been watching. A coffin was descending with dignified gradualness through the floor, rather, Purbright afterwards found himself recalling, in the manner of a cinema organ.

  He strode forward. Mr Bradlaw and his housekeeper turned and stared at him. The undertaker was very pale. The girl clutched at her hat and glanced back towards the door. But Purbright took no notice of either. He hurried up to the curate and touched his arm.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I am a police officer and I have reason to...” He halted breathlessly and asked, with a note of despair: “That coffin—is it...I mean, you can’t fetch it up again, I suppose?”

  The curate was a very young man, but he had acquired a sense of occasion. Reddening furiously, he retorted in a stage whisper: “Really! Your suggestion is infamous. You must leave this place immediately!”

  Purbright felt completely at a loss, but he battled on. “Look, sir,” he appealed, “I quite see your point. All this must seem terribly improper, but it is most important in the interests of justice that the...the gentleman in that coffin should be held for examination.”

  The curate stared. Then he acidly inquired: “And what, my man, do you propose to ask him?”

  The inspector thrust his fingers through his hair. “The man’s dead, sir.”

  “So I had presumed.”

  “And the Coroner has authorized a post-mortem,” he lied. “But that will be out of the question if this cremation is allowed to proceed. Now do you appreciate the position, sir?”

  The clergyman looked thoughtful. Then he nodded, as if to signify a sudden decision, and led Purbright to a little robing room at the side of the chapel. The inspector noticed that no one else now remained in the building.

  “Bit of a stunner, this, isn’t it?” the curate pleasantly remarked as soon as the door had closed behind them. He groped beneath yards of cassock and offered Purbright a cigarette. The inspector, still looking very anxious, at first refused. “Oh, don’t panic,” said the curate. “Your fellow won’t be...these things aren’t quite so immediate as people imagine. Various preliminaries, you know. But I’ll go down in half a tick and make sure. I say,” he added, “this is all in order, I suppose?”

  “Perfectly,” Purbright assured him thankfully. “Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

  The curate put his cigarette, still unlit, on a shelf and opened the door. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll just pop down for a word with Pluto.”

  He returned after two or three minutes to report that the coffin and contents were intact and awaited the dispositions of Her Majesty’s Coroner. “You really must forgive my being a little gauche in these matters, but there’s something terribly Sunday paperish about all this. Of course,” he added ruefully, “I suppose you’re too fearfully secret-bound to satisfy my fiendish
curiosity?”

  Purbright skirted the hint by asking: “May I ask under what name the funeral was being conducted, sir?”

  “The, er, deceased, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I didn’t know him personally, you know, but I believe he was the uncle of that lady you saw just now—Mr Bradlaw’s housekeeper. A Mr...” He fished a piece of paper from a remote pocket and looked at it. “A Mr Barnaby.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Flaxborough’s mortuary was a detached brick building, not much bigger than a garage, at the end of the yard behind the police station. It contained two slabs, a much battered corner cupboard raised a couple of feet from the terra-cotta tiled floor, and a shallow sink immediately beneath the single window. A coil of black hosepipe, slung from a staple, looked like a hastily scrawled charcoal circle on the flat whiteness of the wall.

  Upon the slab farther from the door, a coffin rested. It’s lid had been removed and now stood upright, propped against the cupboard.

  An ancient portable gas fire coughed blue flames from its shattered elements. The dim daylight was augmented by an electric bulb set within a mesh sphere in the centre of the ceiling.

  Into this aseptic chamber, Purbright gently ushered an exceedingly apprehensive-looking Bradlaw. Love followed, and a constable, bringing up the rear, shut the door and remained standing impassively before it. Bradlaw glanced at the inspector, then regarded the coffin as if searching for constructional flaws.

  “Who is it, Nab?” Purbright asked quietly.

  Continuing to trace with his gaze the outlines of the box, Bradlaw avoided looking directly at the bearded face within. “A fellow called John Barnaby. No one you know. He died here while he was visiting my housekeeper. His niece. Bit of a nuisance, but there you are.” He swallowed and looked up at Purbright. “Why? What’s all this about?”

  “Who gave the certificate?”

  “Hillyard. He’d been attending him.”

  “Referees?”

  Bradlaw shrugged. “Scott, I think. And that other chap in Duke Street. Rawlings.”

  “They made no formal examination, I suppose? The usual dotted line stuff?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Never mind.” Purbright’s voice was friendly. “By the way, did I tell you that Hillyard’s under arrest?”

  Bradlaw stared at him, slowly drawing both hands from his overcoat pockets. “Has he...” he began, then was silent.

  “I rather think,” said Purbright, “that I’d better caution you before we talk any more, Nab.”

  Bradlaw looked down at his hands and began to rub the knuckles of one in the other palm. He appeared to be cold.

  “You are not obliged to say anything in reply to my questions, but what you do say may be taken down and given in evidence.” Purbright nodded to Love, who drew a notebook from his pocket. To Bradlaw, the inspector added: “You can have your solicitor here if you’d rather, you know.”

  Bradlaw glanced at the unoccupied slab. “He’s been here already—or had you forgotten?”

  “Oh, yes. Gloss. I’m sorry.”

  Purbright said nothing more for a while, but stood watching the slow, tense rubbing motion of the other man’s hands. They unclasped at last and spread in acknowledgment of surrender.

  “All right. I’ll tell you what happened.” Bradlaw looked behind him, as if in hope of some charitable policeman having silently placed a chair there. Seeing nothing but the coldly gleaming wall, he hunched his shoulders, sighed deeply, and began.

  “You may know, or you may not—I don’t suppose it matters much now—that Rupert Hillyard and a few others of us were running a sort of business side-line in the town. It wasn’t quite above board, if you follow me, and there were women mixed up in it. You see what...” He raised his eyes to Purbright. “Perhaps you’ve heard already, though?”

  “Yes. We know.”

  Bradlaw nodded and sniffed. “Yes, well there you are. It wasn’t a thing it would have done to let out. We all had a lot to lose. Except maybe that Carobleat woman. She was quite capable of doing the stupidest things just for spite. She hated Rupert and poor old Gwill, although I always got on fairly well with her.”

  “She hated Gwill? Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes. That story of her being stuck on him was just to put you off something else. Roddy Gloss thought that one up.”

  “To put us off what?”

  “I’ll come to that in a minute. The point is that Joan was in the...the business along with the rest of us. As a matter of fact, it was her old man who’d started it some time before he died. You didn’t know that, did you? Anyway, there she was and we had to lump it. Everything would have gone nicely, even so, if only she’d kept her mouth shut. God, what a bitch!” Bradlaw grew rigid momentarily in his indignation, then drooped once more.

  “You see,” he went on, “she took up with a certain bright character in that country village of hers over in Shropshire. That’s where she came from in the first place, and when her old man died she started going back for week-ends. And that”—Bradlaw jerked his head in contemptuous indication of the coffin’s occupant—“is what she found for herself.”

  “You mean Barnaby became her lover?”

  “Lover and father bloody confessor. She told him all about what was going on here in Flax. Names and everything.”

  “How did you get to know that?”

  “How did we get to know! We soon knew all right when we started getting letters from the blackmailing bastard.”

  Purbright raised his brows. “He began threatening you, did he? You’d not feel too pleased about that, I expect.”

  “Not as you’d notice. We tried to buy him off. Soon he was bleeding the whole thing white. You know what blackmailers are. They’re worse than murderers. Even the police say that. Judges, too.” Bradlaw was gesticulating eagerly. “One said something just last week about it being understandable that a chap had gone for the fellow who’d been screwing money out of him.”

  “Cambridge Assizes,” Purbright murmured.

  “Yes, that’s right. Cambridge.” Bradlaw seized on the confirmation as though it were a long lost wallet. “Well, then: you see how we were fixed. This fellow Barnaby sucking us dry from all that distance away. Poor old Hillyard nearly going off his rocker with worry. A doctor—I ask you. As for me, I didn’t know what I was doing half the time.”

  “And Gwill?” said Purbright, casually. “Was Gwill worried?”

  “Of course he was. Not as much as me, perhaps. I take these things very badly. But he was very upset, all the same.” Bradlaw brightened suddenly. “That’s why he did away with himself. Don’t you see now? He was driven to it.”

  “Was Gloss driven to it, as well?”

  Bradlaw frowned. “How do you mean? Roddy didn’t commit suicide. He was killed.”

  “By whom?”

  “By that devil, of course.” He stretched his arm towards the coffin. “In cold blood. That’s the sort he was.”

  Purbright seemed suddenly to have remembered something. “Excuse me a minute,” he said to Bradlaw; then, beckoning to Love to follow, he walked to the door. The constable opened it. Inspector and sergeant stepped out into the yard.

  A few moments later, Purbright returned alone. Facing Bradlaw once more, he produced his own notebook. “We work on a shift system, you see.” Bradlaw, bolder now, managed to smile for a second.

  Purbright unscrewed his pen. “Right. Will you go on from what you were saying?”

  “I suppose,” said Bradlaw in a lowered voice, “you’d like me to get round to the other business now?” He glanced at the coffin.

  “It’s up to you.”

  “Has Hillyard...?”

  Purbright said nothing. Bradlaw stared at him doubtfully. Then, “Of course, he’s a sick man,” he said, with the air of breaking bad news. “You understand that. I could do nothing with him once he’d started.

  “It was when Roddy was killed t
hat he seemed to make up his mind. Up to then, we’d never even seen Barnaby. We didn’t know where to find him. The money had had to be addressed post-what-do-you-call-it at Shrewsbury. But Rupert managed to pump a girl he knows at the telephone exchange here. She found out where Barnaby had made some calls to Joan Carobleat. It was a public kiosk and we guessed he must live nearby.

  “Rupert got hold of a map and I agreed to take him over in the van. I thought the idea was to find Barnaby and to frighten him into letting us alone. I was in such a state I was ready to try anything.”

  Bradlaw paused and shivered. “Look, can’t we go somewhere else? This place is freezing.”