Coffin Scarcely Used f-1 Read online

  Purbright stretched the arm with which he had been writing. “It is on the bleak side,” he conceded. “Try and hang on until the sergeant gets back, though, can you? He’ll not be long.”

  “It’s hard to think in here, that’s all,” Bradlaw grumbled. “Still, if you say so...”

  “Did you find Barnaby’s place?”

  “Oh, we found it all right. But he wasn’t there. I tried to persuade Rupert to leave well alone. Instead of that, he started prowling round the place and found a window that was open a bit. He climbed in and let me in through the back door. It was then that I realized what he was up to. As I passed him, I spotted that drug case of his sticking out of his pocket. It gave me a shock, I can tell you.”

  “You both went into the cottage, then?”

  Bradlaw nodded. Then he looked sharply at the inspector. “I haven’t said it was a cottage, have I?”

  “No; that’s true,” said Purbright quietly.

  Bradlaw let this pass, but his manner became perceptibly more careful. “Rupert put the case down on a bench in the kitchen and took a syringe out of it. There were some tiny bottles there as well and he broke the top off one of them. Then he filled the syringe from it and went stalking round the place, looking into cupboards. After a bit, he came back to the kitchen table and squirted what was in the syringe into some milk that was standing there ‘That’ll have to do,’ he said, and I said, ‘You’re not trying to poison him, are you?’ and he said no, it was a drug to make Barnaby sleepy and less likely to go for us. I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth, but I didn’t argue.

  “We went out through the front door and walked back to where we’d left the van under some trees. It was dark by then and we knew we’d be able to tell when Barnaby turned up because we’d see the lights of his car. I don’t know how long we were sitting there. It was bloody cold and I tried two or three times to get Rupert to give up, but he wouldn’t take any notice.

  “I was just about asleep when a car passed us and drew up lower down. We waited until he’d driven in and then we followed. There was a light in the cottage and we crept round the back. Through the window we saw Barnaby walking about the kitchen and doing something with the stove. There was a saucepan on it. That seemed to make Rupert quite excited and several times he said: ‘He’s bitten; the bastard’s bitten!‘ After a while, we saw Barnaby pour some of what was in the saucepan into a plate and the rest into a beaker. He sat at the table with his back to us.

  “About ten minutes later, he got up and went out of the kitchen. He came and went once or twice after that, but the last time he walked in he was looking queer. He kept feeling out for things and rocked about a bit. Rupert laughed when he saw, and I was afraid Barnaby would hear, but he didn’t. He tried to sit down at the table again, but he seemed to miss the chair and flopped down out of sight. We went right up to the window and looked through, and he was there on the floor, flat out.”

  Purbright licked his finger and flicked back another leaf of his notebook. At that moment, there was a knock at the mortuary door and the constable opened it to admit Love.

  The inspector turned to him. “You managed?” Love nodded. To Bradlaw, Purbright said: “We might as well get this finished now, don’t you think? Tell me if you’d rather carry on over at the office, though.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Bradlaw. “There’s not much more to tell. I just want you to know I wasn’t to blame for what happened next. Honest to God, I wasn’t.” He spoke pleadingly, but with an undertone of weariness.

  “All right, Nab. Take your time.”

  “We got back into the cottage the same way as before. Barnaby was lying fast asleep half under the table. The two of us picked him up and managed to carry him into the bedroom. He was a hell of a weight. We dropped him on the bed, and he opened his eyes and started grunting something at us. Then he went bang off again and began to snore.

  “By that time, I was sick of the whole business. I went back into the kitchen to see if there were any things for making tea. Rupert stayed behind. He was standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at Barnaby with a sort of sideways grin. He hadn’t said a word since we’d gone back inside.

  “I couldn’t find any tea things, so I went to the bedroom door to see what Rupert was up to. He was by the side of the bed and bending over it. He heard me and sort of half turned round. Then I saw he was holding that syringe again and I knew what he’d done.”

  Bradlaw stopped. Looking up, Purbright saw him pass a hand round the back of his neck. He was staring at the coffin and breathing quickly through half-open lips. The inspector waited, saying nothing. It seemed to him that the barking of the consumptive old gas fire was growing louder, until the dismal little building could be fancied to shake in response to it.

  When Bradlaw began speaking again, the words emerged tonelessly, like the recital of a medium. “I fetched the van and Rupert and me carried him out to it and put him in the back. We drove off straight away and kept going. As soon as we got into Flax, we took the van into the yard at my place. When I opened it up, he was dead. That’s all.”

  The silence that followed was broken by Purbright suddenly slapping shut his notebook. He paced a few steps up and down, then wheeled on Bradlaw.

  “Tell me, Nab—why was it necessary for Barnaby to be stripped before you brought him back that night?”

  Bradlaw gave no sign of having heard. He walked to the gas fire and stooped to hold both hands before it.

  Quite gently came Purbright’s voice again. “It was because he was going to travel back in style, wasn’t it? In the coffin you’d remembered to take with you in that van of yours?”

  Bradlaw remained crouched and silent, staring at the trembling cones of flame.

  Once more Purbright addressed him. “When Barnaby arrived at the cottage, how did you recognize him? How were you sure he was the man you were after and nobody else? You said you had never met him before.”

  This time Bradlaw gave an answer, but sullenly and without turning his head. “Rupert had seen him. You don’t forget someone who’s tried to stick a knife in your belly.”

  “You remember what he looks like, maybe,” said Purbright. “But it’s easy to get a name wrong sometimes. I think we’d better have a second opinion, Nab.” He nodded to Love, and again the placid doorkeeper sprang to his task.

  The sergeant returned almost immediately. He entered and stepped to one side of the door while the woman who had followed him stood hesitantly for a moment on the threshold. It was Joan Carobleat.

  She looked from the constable to Purbright, glanced at the squatting figure of Bradlaw, and then stiffened as her eyes fell on the coffin. She turned to throw a half-smoked cigarette into the yard before coming far enough into the room for the constable to close the door behind her.

  “A little party, inspector?”

  She gave Purbright, who had placed himself between her and the occupied slab, a nervous, derisory smile.

  “I took the liberty of asking you to come here, Mrs Carobleat, in the hope that you would be able to help us in a formal matter of identification. These things are always a little disturbing, but I promise there’s nothing here to frighten or revolt you.” He took her arm and drew her gently forward.

  Tense now, pale and wide-eyed, the woman allowed herself to be led towards the long, darkly gleaming box that seemed to hover monstrously, unsupported, amidst the insubstantial whiteness of the place.

  They were within five or six feet of it when she suddenly stopped. Purbright felt through her arm a great rising shudder. Then another. He looked at her face. The jaw hung open and a deep rasping sigh seemed to be held there in her throat. Seconds passed. Then the sound escaped like a frothing rush of blood. It formed a single, agonizingly expelled word.

  Love jumped forward to help Purbright hold the woman as she collapsed. They lowered her gently to the floor.

  When she had been carried from the mortuary by Love and the constable, Purbright tu
rned to Bradlaw.

  “I thought you might have been wrong about the name,” he said. “If this is John Barnaby, why should Mrs Carobleat have called him Harold?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “So the late Harold Carobleat was much later than we thought,” said Mr Chubb. He permitted himself a wisp of a smile in celebration of the jest.

  “He was a very astute gentleman, sir.” Purbright, from an armchair in the Chief Constable’s drawing-room, stared absently at the yellow-haired Venus and listened to the faint music of crockery that came from whatever domestic retreat Mrs Chubb enjoyed.

  He had just related how, six months before, increasingly importunate police inquiries into the affairs of Carobleat and Spades had driven the broker and his friends to devise evasive action. Of how, according to a second long statement by Bradlaw, this had taken the ingenious form of the supposed illness and sudden death of the principal, his secret removal to a rural retreat in Shropshire, and the burial of his firm’s books and other incriminating trifles within the coffin that Bradlaw caused to be carried, in ballast, from the house of mourning. And of how Carobleat had lain low while growing the beard that was later to persuade Mrs Poole that the dead not only walk but lack razors beyond the grave.

  At this point, there was a gentle tap on the door and Mrs Chubb, a fluffy, solicitous woman whom childlessness had rendered super-motherly towards all her husband’s ‘young men’, entered with two cups of tea. She beamed at Purbright, fleetingly surveyed the windows to ensure that he was not being exposed to a draught, and departed.

  The inspector sipped his tea. “Carobleat must have fancied his position to be extremely strong,” he resumed. “He’d avoided certain ruin and a likely spell of imprisonment. His wife went on supplying him with his share of the proceeds from the one branch of his enterprise that continued to flourish, posthumously, as it were. And he had a firm hold—or so he thought—over the associates he’d left behind, none of whom would be likely to risk exposure. He could rely on his wife watching them and also conducting a rearguard action against the inquisitive police while she wore black for the man with whom she spent every other weekend over in Shropshire.

  “Incidentally, Carobleat must have been highly amused by the falling into his wife’s lap of the sizeable lump of insurance he’d had the foresight to provide for when the idea of ‘dying’ first occurred to him.

  “Then something happened that he hadn’t bargained for.

  “He had quite a lot of money standing to his credit, and he’d naturally made arrangements to recover as much of it as he could. He had probably lodged with Gloss a simple will whereby the poor little widow would inherit the lot—less duty, that couldn’t be helped—and hang on to it, together with the insurance, until it it was safe for the pair to re-unite in Bermuda or somewhere.

  “But up turns a will of a very different kind. To everyone’s surprise, the late Mr Carobleat proves to have made over all his possessions to his good friend and neighbour, Mr Gwill. Never mind if the will is a forgery. Carobleat’s wife can’t do anything. And Carobleat himself is scarcely the best person to contest it. So Gwill cleans him out, doubtless having agreed to split with the others later on.”

  Chubb shook his head gravely. “It’s a damnably unethical business, Mr Purbright. I find it almost incredible that professional men could have taken part in a conspiracy of that kind.”

  “Anyway,” Purbright went on, “it proved a more dangerous adventure than they’d imagined. They’d underestimated Carobleat hopelessly. He was an exceedingly resourceful man and an unforgiving one. And he had that enormous advantage of being officially non-existent. It was as good as a cloak of invisibility.

  “I think we can take it that he’d been back to Flaxborough at odd times during the past six months. He’d bought himself a new car, probably through his wife, and although an accident involving a request for his licence would have been awkward, there wouldn’t have been much risk provided he came and went during darkness. It seems he even got in touch with Gwill once or twice by going between the two back gardens. That would account for poor old Mrs Poole’s obsession with walking corpses. What he would really be after, I fancy, was assurance that no double-crossing was being contemplated.

  “Eventually, he must have learned the truth. The others couldn’t stall for ever. Once he knew what was going on, he wasted no time.

  “He first avoided the danger of his wife being suspected later on by getting her to spend the week-end at the inn near his cottage. He drove overnight to Flaxborough, let himself into his old house, and fixed up the cable he’d brought with him. It so happened that Mrs Poole actually saw him running the wire along the hedge, but luckily for him her wits were in no fit state to grasp what it meant.

  “While he was biding his time in the house, he rang round to Hillyard, Gwill, Bradlaw and Gloss and asked them to meet him in Gwill’s house late that night. According to Bradlaw’s statement, Carobleat asked for what he called a ‘friendly settlement’ that would include his getting out of the country. They talked it over among themselves and agreed to meet him. Bradlaw says that Hillyard was then in favour of killing Carobleat quietly and burying him in the garden, but the others shied at the idea because the ground would be hard.

  “Bradlaw deliberately arrived late for the meeting. He hoped that if there were trouble he would be in nice time to miss it. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to stay away altogether”—Purbright consulted one of the sheets he had taken from his case—“and ‘risk being let down by those twisters’ as he put it. Bradlaw is something of a self-made man, sir; not very articulate, but shrewd,” explained the inspector.

  “I’m interested to know how Gwill was lured out on his own,” said the Chief Constable. “He also was a shrewd fellow, as I remember.”

  “He wasn’t lured out on his own, sir. The other three were with him. All Carobleat had needed to do after sluicing his neighbour’s drive to earth the victim nicely (it wasn’t Gwill at the gate when Wilkinson’s witness cycled by—he just assumed it was) was to switch on the power and make a phone call to next door.

  “He said he’d hurt his leg and would be obliged if his friends would come round. They had no reason to refuse, so off they went. It was pure chance that Gwill reached the gate first. According to Bradlaw, he ‘jumped like a rabbit full of buckshot and went slap down on the gravel’. He goes on: ‘We all thought he’d been shot, although we had heard nothing. I opened the gate and there was nobody there...’ ”

  “He opened the gate!” exclaimed Chubb. “Bradlaw, you mean?”

  “Yes, sir. The discharge through Gwill must have blown the fuses in Carobleat’s house. Anyway, this is how Bradlaw’s statement goes on:

  “ ‘The three of us picked Marcus up and carried him back into the house. Rupert Hillyard took a good look at him and said he was dead. He said he thought he had been electrocuted. We agreed it might look bad for us, so we decided to put the body over in the field opposite. Roddy Gloss pulled the gate open with a walking stick in case it was still alive. We put the body in the field. I think it was Roddy’s idea to lay it under the pylon to make it look like an accident. While we were still in the field, a car came out of Carobleat’s place and shot off up the road. It must have been him.’ ”

  “Upon my soul!” said Chubb.

  He stared for a while into his empty cup. “Tell me, though—why did Bradlaw tell you that rigmarole about Barnum—Barnaby—whatever his name was?”

  Purbright shrugged and smiled. “A forlorn effort to save what was left of his professional reputation, I believe, sir. Always at the back of poor old Bradlaw’s mind was the thought of that fearfully unethical funeral trick; he’d played last summer. Keeping that quiet seemed more important to him than anything else. It even blinded him to the absurdity of his story about a blackmailer who tried to kill off his benefactors.”

  “Yes,” said Chubb, “that would have been rather foolish, wouldn’t it?”

  Purbright l
evered himself out of his chair. “It there’s nothing else, sir...”

  The door opened a little way and Mrs Chubb’s rubicund face appeared. “I think,” said directly to Purbright, “that there may be one cup left in the pot, Mr er...”

  The inspector raised his hand with the polite dignity of a man declining an earldom, “No, ma’am, really. But thank you all the same.” He began puling papers into his briefcase.

  Mrs Chubb’s smile faded. “It’s very cold outside,” she said.

  Purbright felt vaguely that he had failed to discharge some sort of obligation. He sallowed and sought a suitable platitude with which Mrs Chubb might be recompensed.

  Seizing on the first that came to mind, “A very nice old table,” he murmured, appreciatively stroking the elaborate and hideous graving of its brass top.

  Reaction was unexpected. “You shall have it, Mr er...” Mrs Chubb instantly and warmly proclaimed.

  “Oh, no...really...”

  “We insist.” She looked imperiously at her husband. “Don’t we, Harcourt?”