The Flaxborough Crab f-6 Read online

  “They blamed water fluoridization last time.”

  Love thought some more, then said: “It’s a pity the doctor didn’t get a look at the bloke’s face.”

  “It’s an even greater pity that he didn’t hang on to him. If we are to believe the girl, he actually had hold of his arm when she saw them together under the lamp.”

  Love looked at his notes. “That’s right,” he said. “He did.”

  “Meadow strikes me as being a reasonably fit man. I gather he goes in for winter sports. He used to row, too. I should have thought he’d have enough muscle to stop that old goat getting away, particularly when he was already winded through struggling with the girl.”

  The sergeant was not so sure in his own mind of the validity of this argument. He had been brought up to hold the medical profession in awe, with the possible exception of pathologists (a queer, jokey lot) and police surgeons, who tended to be shabby and remote. A family practitioner, of all people, could not fairly be expected to put his dignity at hazard by tussling with felons.

  “And why,” persisted Purbright, “did Meadow claim not to have seen the man’s face? The girl said he must have done. They were close together, directly under a lamp.”

  “She couldn’t have been certain that the doctor actually looked at him.”

  “I’m inclined to think that he simply didn’t want to become involved. That’s why he let the fellow go, and that’s why he now says he can’t identify him. Another thing...”

  Love waited stiffly to hear what new heresy had occurred to the inspector.

  “Why did he wait so long before ringing us up? He let ten minutes or quarter of an hour go by. To say, as he did, that his first concern was for his patient just isn’t good enough. Anyway, it was only on her insistence that he telephoned in the end.”

  There was a pause. Then the sergeant inquired what was proposed to be done next. He sounded sulky. Late nights did not suit him, especially when his being summoned to an extra turn of duty conflicted with his landlady’s almost religious observance of the household bath rota.

  “Nothing we can do,” said Purbright. “Our only hope is that next time this character performs there’ll be on hand some less circumspect citizen than Dr Meadow.”

  Three days went by before this hope was put to the test.

  The victim, a Mrs Pasquith, was more fortunate than the previous two in as much as the assault was vocal and not physical. She was sufficiently distressed by it, however, to call at the police station twelve hours later and volunteer an account—on condition that the listener was a woman.

  Mrs Pasquith was thereupon closeted with a brawny but soft-hearted policewoman called Sadie Bellweather.

  “Well, you see, love,” Mrs Pasquith cozily began, “I’m on vases and brasses this week at St Hilda’s and last night I thought, well, I’ve got time before Harry comes back for his supper to go down and see to the flowers and bring the altar cloth home ready for taking to the launderette, well, I’d made a nice show of the gladioli on that side near the vestry door and I was just getting some fern together to go with the carnations from Harry’s allotment when I hear this voice from somewhere at the back, well, I nearly jumped out of my skin but then straight away I thought it must be the vicar or Mr Hardy perhaps and I said hello, you know, without turning round, well...and then in a little while the voice came again, and this time I knew it wasn’t the vicar because he said, ‘I’m a bee’. Yes, that’s what he said—‘I’m a bee’—quite loud, well...I turned round and looked but I couldn’t see anybody, of course it’s very dark at the back there, well, I called out ‘Who’s there?’ and whoever it was called back, ‘I want to pollinate you’. Well, what a funny thing to say. I didn’t know what to make of it—well, you wouldn’t, would you?—but then he made his voice go quite nasty and he said, ‘I’d like to lift your petals’. Well! I knew then the sort of thing he was hinting at—wouldn’t you have done?—and I thought, right, don’t you come any nearer...”

  “Could you,” interposed Policewoman Bellweather, “see nothing at all of this man?”

  Mrs Pasquith tightened her motherly, quilt-like features and leaned nearer. “Not his face, I couldn’t. He was just a sort of dark shadow, but I think”—her voice switched dramatically to a whisper—“that he was playing with himself!”

  The big, sympathetic face of Policewoman Bellweather bobbed slightly in acknowledgement of this not unexpected circumstance. Most of the cases that came her way seemed to be concerned with the more bizarre manifestations of male vanity.

  “Anyway,” continued Mrs Pasquith in her normal tone, “I pretended not to have heard—that’s usually the best way to deal with people like that—but I picked up a vase just in case and began moving nearer the vestry door, well, there’s a telephone in there and you can lock the door if the worst comes to the worst, well...up he pipes again. Funny excited sort of voice he had. ‘Lily,’ he shouts. ‘That’s what I’m going to call you—Lily—because you’ve got a lovely white bottom!’ I’m telling you no lies, those were his very words. I could have died with shame. ‘Are you aware,’ I said, ‘that this is a church and that Someone (I said it just like that—Some-one) is listening to what you’re saying?’ ‘Of course she is,’ he shouts, making out he hasn’t understood what I meant, ‘and she’s got a lovely white bottom and I’m going to FERtilize her!’ Well, I saw him start to...”

  “Just a minute,” said Policewoman Bellweather, her note-taking defeated by the increased pace of the narrative. “He said he was going to what?”

  “FER-tilize me. That’s how he said it, oh, really horribly.” She thrust forward her ordinary demure-looking chin to aid the impression. “FU-U-UR-tilize!”

  The policewoman clicked her tongue. “Right, go on, Mrs Pasquith.”

  “Well, I was telling you that I saw him start to move. That was enough for me. Right, I thought, this is where I make myself scarce. And I just ran for that vestry door. Oh dear, I can laugh about it now, but I was really frightened. I mean, when somebody says things like that in a church and then starts coming for you, well... So through that door I went double quick and slam! I’d got it locked. And only just in time, I should say.”

  “He chased you?”

  “He kept banging on the door and shouting, ‘Look—no hands!’ The filthy beast.”

  “So then you telephoned for help, did you, Mrs Pasquith?”

  “Well, no, I didn’t, actually. I thought I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction—you know, to think that he’d scared me into calling for help. I was scared, oh yes, but after all I knew I was safe where I was. You see? I thought, you won’t want to hang about there much longer and risk getting caught. You’ll get tired of it before I do, I thought. And so he did. I heard him walk away up the aisle and out the back, and soon afterwards the vicar came in and everything was all right. But I thought I ought to report him because you never know what someone like that might do next. Well...”

  Policewoman Bellweather frowned. “Don’t you think it would have been wiser to telephone straight away, Mrs Pasquith? It’s rather late for us to do anything about the man now.”

  “Yes, but you see I didn’t really like to. I didn’t know, what people might think. I mean, he’d said all those horrible things and I couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t tell lies if somebody came and caught him. Lies about me, I mean. Well, they do, don’t they? And I’m on the flower committee and everything, you see.”

  The policewoman did not see. “But if he had told lies, it’s most unlikely that they would have been believed surely?”

  Mrs Pasquith puckered her flower committee lips in a smile of forgiveness for Miss Bellweather’s näivete.

  “When you were making for the vestry door...”

  “Yes, love?”

  “Did you get a better view of what the man looked like? He must have been nearer by then.”

  “Well, he was, of course, but I didn’t stop to stare, I can tell you. I just sort of caught a gli
mpse of him out of the corner of my eye, if you see what I mean.”

  “You can’t give me a description, then? Not even a rough impression?”

  Mrs Pasquith shook her head regretfully, but continued to give the matter thought.

  “He certainly wasn’t a young man, that’s all I can tell you.”

  “How did he speak?”

  “Oh, very impudent, very bold. Well, I told you...”

  “No, I mean was he an educated sort of man?”

  “You might call him that, yes. Well, ‘pollinate’—I mean that’s not a word that somebody ignorant would think of using, is it?”

  “I suppose not,” said the policewoman.

  There did not seem to be any other question she might usefully ask. The interview had been a waste of time. It had not produced a single clue to the man’s identity. So far as she could see, he hadn’t even committed a crime. Threatening words and behaviour? Possibly. Conduct likely to lead to a breach of the peace? Well, at a pinch...

  “There is just one thing,” Mrs Pasquith said suddenly.

  “Yes?”

  “I told you I saw the man out of the corner of my eye, well, that’s right, he was just a sort of shape coming nearer, but there was something about him that I must have noticed because I thought about it later and wondered if I couldn’t have been mistaken. You see, he seemed to be coming towards me, well, sideways on, as if he didn’t have proper control over his legs.”

  The policewoman took conscientious note.

  “I suppose,” Mrs Pasquith concluded regretfully, as if admitting the unlikelihood of her own attractions having sparked off the drama, “that he must have been drinking.”

  This explanation did not commend itself to Inspector Purbright. He sat regarding Policewoman Bellweather’s typed report with considerable gloom. A mere drunk might have got away with such behaviour once, or even twice, but it was inconceivable that his luck would have held for three forays against the modesty of Flaxborough womankind. Whoever was responsible had reserves of cunning and energy that were not provided by alcohol.

  The most depressing aspect of the business was the probability that the man would continue his exploits until gossip about them induced a public scare out of all proportion to the harm of which he was actually capable.

  And yet, who could say what that was? The experience of the Sweeting girl had been a good deal more serious than a brush with a randy old eccentric. And a weaker, less determined woman than Brangwyn Butters could have suffered badly in the isolation of Gorry Wood.

  No, it was natural enough for people to get frightened while this sort of thing was going on in the town. It was also reasonable—and proper—for them to demand what their police force was doing about it.

  The trouble was, as Purbright well knew from past experience of Flaxborough’s endemic sexual impetiuosity, that the offender invariably was unpredictable as well as wily. He also seemed to have a complacent wife, acquaintances who had the greatest difficulty in recognizing him at a distance of more than three feet, and a genius for picking victims with delayed reactions and bad memories.

  The inspector’s mood was not lightened when his telephone rang and he heard the eagerly inquisitive voice of young Henry Popplewell.

  “Now then, chiefy, what’s all this about the Flaxborough Crab?”

  Henry, the son of Mrs Popplewell, Justice of the Peace, was the Flaxborough Citizen’s most recently acquired and already regretted junior reporter.

  “Crab?” echoed Purbright, in genuine bewilderment.

  “That’s right. The whole town’s talking about him. You know—all this peeping through curtains and chasing women. We’ve got no end of stories. I’m just tying them up.”

  Henry delivered this final information with the pride of some embryo Northcliffe packed umbilically with newspaper jargon.

  “I think,” Purbright said, “that you’d better come along and see me, Mr Popplewell.”

  “Will do,” chimed Henry.

  Purbright replaced the receiver. He looked pained. He was very much afraid that Henry’s “Will do” was but a foretaste of even heartier abbreviations to come. He waited, nerves tingling, for the door to open and admit Mr Popplewell and his “Long time no see!”

  At last there was a knock and Henry’s head appeared.

  “Chow!”

  The inspector winced.

  Henry came in. Purbright pointed invitingly to a chair. Instead of sitting, Henry twirled the chair round behind him and leaned against its back in the manner of a sportsman resting on his shooting stick. He gazed jauntily round the shabby little office.

  “And how’s tricks?” he asked.

  It’s coming, thought Purbright, it MUST be coming.

  Henry stared with open curiosity towards the papers on the inspector’s desk. He scratched under his left armpit, yawned, glanced out of the window, then fished a cigarette from the breast pocket of his jacket and lit it, frowning. He expelled smoke as if trying to blow out a candle from ten feet. This seemed to do him a lot of good. He smiled.

  “Well, well—long time no see!”

  Purbright swallowed and visibly relaxed.

  “Mr Popplewell, you mentioned on the telephone someone or something called the Flaxborough Crab.”

  “Right.”

  “Who calls him that?”

  “Everybody. Either that, or the Flaxborough Strangler.”

  The inspector raised his brows.

  “I don’t recall any reports of stranglings, Mr Popplewell.”

  “Ah, you’ve not heard from that woman in Windsor Close, then? Half a tick...” Henry consulted the back of an empty cigarette packet. “Mrs Cowper, husband on the buses. No joy?”

  “She’s not complained to us.”

  “That figures,” said Henry cheerfully. Purbright had no idea what he meant.

  “Or Mavis what’s-her-name, the waitress at the Roebuck?”

  “Another strangling?”

  “Do me a favour! No—knicker-snatching, that one.”

  Purbright tried to resist the growing sense of confusion that was imparted by the substance and, more particularly, the manner of Henry’s conversation. He lit himself a cigarette, examined it carefully, and began:

  “I gather that what you are...”

  “Look,” Henry interrupted, “can you give me the dope on this peeping angle?”

  “Peeping?”

  “Natch. All over the place. Women daren’t go to bed.”

  “Somebody looks through their windows?”

  “That’s the drill. No one’s slept for a fortnight down Edward Crescent or Abdication Avenue. Hey, but you know all this! You have to know. Come on—impart!”

  Henry had unpropped himself and was now pacing restlessly up and down, immediately in front of Purbright’s desk.

  “I’m very much afraid that there is nothing that I can impart. It is you who seem to have all the information. There have been two assaults recently. The sergeant downstairs will give you the details of those. But as far as the other things are concerned, it seems that you have a—what should I say?—a scoop. Congratulations.”

  Henry stopped pacing and eyed Purbright speculatively. Then he nodded.

  “Fair enough. Sergeant downstairs? Will do.”

  He made for the door.

  “Oh, by the way, Mr Popplewell...”

  Henry turned.

  “This soubriquet you say everybody is using. The Flaxborough Crab. I don’t quite get the significance.”

  For answer, Henry took three or four lurching steps sideways, as if the floor had suddenly become the deck of a ship in heavy seas.

  “Runs away like that. So they say.”

  “Oh, I see. Thank you very much.”

  “Don’t mensh.” Henry opened the door and gave a sprightly salute of farewell. “Chow!”

  “Good morning,” said Purbright.

  Chapter Four

  Mr Harcourt Chubb, the chief constable, listened courteously to his
inspector’s summary of the activities to date of the Flaxborough Crab.

  He had adopted his inevitable audience-giving stance of leaning elegantly against the corner of the fireplace in his office while Purbright sat (at Mr Chubb’s insistence) on a rather low chair six feet away.

  Purbright outlined the experiences of Miss Butters and Brenda Sweeting; then added the gleanings of the Flaxborough Citizen from the troubled fields of Edward Crescent, Windsor Close and Abdication Avenue.

  “I’ve sent two men over to make inquiries in the area, sir. They have a few addresses. Mr Lintz, the editor of the Citizen, was kind enough to let me have a proof of the story that they’re running on Friday.”