Colin Watson - The Flaxborough Crab

It did not occur to Miss Butters, as it might have done to a more timid or a more devious woman, to avoid by silence the inconvenience and distress of involvement in a criminal inquiry. Assailants in woods were, to her mind, in exactly the same category as gas leaks and unfenced pits and maltreated horses. Dealing with them was what Authority existed for.

She tapped firmly on the ‘Inquiries’ window just inside the entrance to the Fen Street police station.

The window was slid up noisily by a rather surprised-looking young constable. The top four of his uniform buttons were undone. He gave the impression of a householder getting ready for bed.

“I wish to report having been accosted by a footpad,” Miss Butters announced.

The policeman wrinkled his nose—not very attractively, thought Miss Butters—and said: “You what?”

“I have been accosted. I wish to report it.”

The constable stared at her dubiously for some seconds, then rubbed his jaw with one hand and with the other dragged nearer an enormous ledger on the shelf beneath the window.

“Name?”

“Butters. Miss Brangwyn Butters.”

She spelled this out for him while he wrote it in one of the columns of the ledger. He had all the dash of a monumental mason with arthritis.

“Age?”

She told him. He began the task of recording her address. The night was young.

“Now then,” he said at last, “what’s this you said happened?”

Miss Butters sighed. “I told you I’d been accosted. In Gorry Wood. By a footpad.”

The constable stared at her. “A what?”

“A footpad. I can’t think of any other way to describe him. A footpad is somebody who lies in wait to rob people.”

“Never heard of it.”

“In that case, you are very ignorant. It is a perfectly ordinary dictionary word.” The constable looked a little hurt. She relented. “Like highwayman, you know. Only without a horse.”

“Ah, he hadn’t a horse, this...what was it you called him?”

Miss Butters was very nearly at the end of her patience. “We’ll just call him a man, shall we? Then perhaps we shall waste no more time. I am late home already and my mother will be getting anxious. All I ask is...”

A shadow fell across the open pages of the report book.

“Is there anything I could do to help this lady, Mr Braine?”

A tall, very fair-haired man in civilian clothes had arrived to tower (rather god-like, Miss Butters thought) over the constable’s shoulder. She gave him a small, grateful smile.

The uniformed man moved respectfully aside and indicated what he had written so far. “She says she’s been having some trouble with”—his glance flickered disbelievingly to Miss Butters—“what she calls a footpad. Is that right, madam?”

Miss Butters nodded. (Braine, she was thinking—no, surely too good to be true.)

Into the tall man’s benignly watchful eye came sudden concern. “You’ve been attacked?”

“Yes, I suppose I have.”

At once he was at the door of the office, beckoning her in, taking her arm. He gave her Constable Braine’s chair and sent its late occupant to fetch her a cup of tea from the canteen.

“You’re not hurt?”

“No, oh no, he didn’t actually hurt me. Rather the other way round.” She permitted herself a tiny nibble at the sin of pride.

“I am glad to hear it. My name, by the way, is Purbright. Detective Inspector.”

“Oh, yes, I know. You are the only policeman who comes into the library. Except for Mr Chubb, of course, but he only collects books for his wife. She seems to have a very lurid taste.”

Purbright loyally refrained from exposing what he knew to be the Chief Constable’s duplicity: Mrs Chubb had not read a book for years.

“What I propose,” he said, “is to send a couple of my men to take a look round the area where you were attacked. It is very unlikely that the man is still there but there is always the chance that he has waited in hope of a less formidable victim. Do you think you can manage a description?”

Miss Butters looked regretful. “The funny thing is that I never got a look at his face. It was fairly dark, of course, in the wood, and he came on me from behind. That’s how I managed to catch his head under my arm. I held it there and gave it one or two whacks against a tree trunk.”

“Did you, indeed?”

“Yes. It was rather vicious of me, I suppose, but I couldn’t think of any other way of calming him down.”

“He was excited, was he?”

“Decidedly.”

“Why did he attack you, do you think, Miss Butters?”

“Well, to get my handbag, naturally. What other reason could he have?”

Purbright forebore from naming the more cogent motive. “Did you get any impression of his age?”

“Certainly not young. Past middle age, I should say. There was a sort of brittle, bony feel about him. And he wheezed.”

“Did you notice his hair?”

“Only that it seemed pretty thin.”

“Height?”

“A bit shorter than me, I think—about five feet six or seven.”

“What about clothing?”

“He was wearing a coat, grey or light brown. It was rather loose and flappy—thin, a sort of raincoat, I should say. No hat.”

Braine entered with short, careful steps. He was carrying a cup of tea as if it were a delicately fused bomb. When he had delivered it into Miss Butters’ lap, Purbright sent him off again to summon the two-man crew of a patrol car that had just driven past the window into the station yard.

Constables Fairclough and Brevitt presented themselves two minutes later. Fairclough was a fat, breezy man who looked capable of giving good account of himself in a chase, provided he did not actually have to get out of the car. That, obviously, would be the role of the correspondingly lean Brevitt, who stood listening to the inspector’s instructions with one eye on the door as if it were a race track starting gate.

“You’ll just have to circle round that area for a while,” Purbright was saying, “and watch out for the sort of fellow I’ve described. If you do spot a likely character—which I might say is highly unlikely—there is probably only one way in which suspicion can be confirmed. The odds are that the man we’re looking for has a lump on the top of his head.”

Fairclough looked cheerful but unenlightened. Brevitt, on the other hand, gave a determined nod of comprehension. If everything depended on a lump, his expression implied, so small a matter could be very easily arranged.

“Of course,” Purbright added, “I don’t need to remind such experienced officers as yourselves that the utmost tact must be employed. People don’t much like being stopped late at night by policemen eager to practise phrenology.”

The two patrolmen smiled, one amiably, the other darkly at his own thoughts.

As the inspector had predicted, exploration of the Gorry Wood neighbourhood was unproductive. A light rain had begun to fall and the lanes were empty and miserable in the slow advance of the headlights. The policemen’s only encounter, other than with an occasional zig-zagging hare, was their discovery of the Vicar of Pitney leaning over the rectory gate and flagging them down with an empty beer bottle. “I’m sorry, I thought you were the butcher,” he had said, before tottering indoors again. Brevitt was at first for pursuit and forcible bump-reading, but he deferred to his colleague’s opinion that such a course would be trespass, if not sacrilege.

Miss Butters remained at the police station long enough to finish her tea and to add to her account a point that she said she was sorry not to have remembered in time for it to serve as further guidance to the officers who had gone in search of her assailant.