Colin Watson - The Flaxborough Crab

“No—just too poor.”

As Purbright walked away from the closing front door, he realized that the doctor had considered his final remark to be simply a smart riposte, a piece of policemanlike repartee. Meadow clearly was well-off to that degree at which shortness of cash is an abstraction as imponderable as death.

Chapter Ten

Sergeant Love’s auntie at Strawbridge was very pleased to see him. She straightened his tie, asked him if he thought his jacket would be warm enough should the weather change, announced that it was a bad year for plums, put her hands over his ears (“My, you are cold!”) in order to haul his forehead down to kissing distance, and said she thought he ought to eat more.

Having submitted to these affectionate preliminaries and drunk a cup of milky coffee totted up with his aunt’s rhubarb brandy, Love asked what she knew of what went on at Moldham Meres these days, particularly in the matter of laboratories.

“Laboratories?”

“That’s right. The Moldham Meres Laboratories. That’s what they call themselves.”

“You don’t mean the old herb farm, do you?”

Love looked doubtful. Despite Purbright’s caution, he had hoped for white-coated scientists, toting test tubes against a background of retorts and spiralling lights. The old herb farm, as he recalled it, was an overgrown field containing a decrepit cottage and a couple of sheds.

“There is somebody there now,” his aunt persisted. “The house was done up about a year ago and there’s a board outside. I haven’t looked close to see what’s on it.” She waited a moment. “Well, there’s nothing else at the Meres.”

This, as Love well knew, was no overstatement. It was the herb farm or nothing.

He set off on the two miles walk across country after promising his aunt that he would be back in time to have what she called ‘a proper meal’ before returning to Flaxborough on the afternoon train from Strawbridge.

He enjoyed the walk. By keeping to remembered bridle paths and rights of way around the fields of late, reddish-brown corn, he was able to avoid metalled road altogether until he emerged on the lane leading to Moldham Halt.

On the way, he provided himself with a switch of elder and light-heartedly slashed the tops of nettle and cow parsley as he strode. Have-at-you Love, with all-conquering blade. Zounds... At intervals, he plucked and munched a blackberry.

His aunt had been right. He was still a hundred yards from the cottage when he saw the patches of bright new tile with which the roof had been repaired. From a chimney rose a thin plume of smoke. Some of the creeper on the side facing the road had been cut away to leave the windows clear. The panes were picked out with fresh paint.

Love halted at the new tubular steel gate and looked through.

The field looked unchanged from when he had last seen it. There were no signs of cultivation. The once neat herb beds had long since ceased to be distinguishable. They were overrun with weeds and rank grass, although here and there a great bolted bush of sage or thyme survived as testimony to the place’s original use.

Fixed to the cottage wall, at one side of an uncurtained but clean window, was a board with an announcement in slim, pale green lettering on a chocolate ground.

MOLDHAM MERES LABORATORIES : Registered Office.

Love opened the gate and walked down the path to the cottage. There was a door in the gable end. He let fall its horseshoe knocker. It produced an echoing sound suggestive of the house being sparsely furnished. He waited. Nothing happened. He knocked again. No result.

He noticed a little text, lettered in a style and colour-scheme similar to those of the signboard, set in the top panel of the door.

‘NATURE—O TRUE APOTHECARY!’

Dinky, Love reflected.

He walked round to the back of the cottage and looked through a window. He saw a big office table on which stood an addressograph, a typewriter and several piles of leaflets, stationery and packets. Two filing cabinets stood against the farther wall.

The next window was that of a small kitchen containing sink, stove and refrigerator. On the table were the remains of a meal.

In the room beyond—the last on this side of the house—the sergeant saw a low divan bed, unmade, a couple of chairs, a gate-leg table and a television set. The floor was carpeted and there were curtains at the window.

Love was still peering into this room when he heard the sudden rising whine of an electric motor, followed by a chattering, grating sound. He turned.

The noise seemed to come from one of three adjoining sheds at the farther side of the paved yard in which he stood. It was a vaguely familiar sound. After a few moments he placed it. An electric food blender, running on dry ingredients.

The door of the right-hand shed opened and the noise became louder. There emerged a short, thin, wiry, baldheaded man in shirt and trousers. Love saw sunlight flash from a pair of rimless spectacles. The man stood outside the door. He blinked, scratched an ear, yawned, then bent down to stroke a ginger cat that had appeared from round the corner of the shed.

As the man straightened again, he spotted the sergeant. Hastily he stepped back through the doorway.

Half a minute passed. Then he came once more into the sunlit yard, this time with slow dignity. Love was surprised to see that he was now wearing a kind of voluminious brown dressing gown, corded round the waist.

Love stepped to meet the thin man, who nodded gravely and raised two fingers in greeting. (Scoutmaster? wondered the sergeant—no, surely not.)

“Good morning, sir. I am Detective Sergeant Love, from Flaxborough, and I should like to speak to the manager.”

Love believed that straightforward declarations of this kind were more productive in the long run than the clever, pussy-footed approach.

“’Ow do?” responded the man. He held out his hand. “Brother Culpepper’s the name.”

As he shook hands, Love tried not to show the apprehension that always rose within him whenever involvement with religion threatened. A bloody monk! Surreptitiously, he glanced across the other’s shoulder for the sure sign of monkhood, a cowl. Yes, there it was.

“Pleased to meet you, Your, er...” (Reverence, was it? Grace?)

“The boss ain’t ’ere yet,” said Brother Culpepper. “I’m on me tod, ’smatterfact. Anyfink I can do for you?”

“Well, I don’t quite know. I’m just making some routine inquiries.”

Brother Culpepper looked up at him in friendly wonderment.

“Wot, somebody lost somefink, you mean?”

The chirpy Cockney accent increased rather than diminished Love’s respect. A man who could achieve holy orders despite such a social disadvantage must clearly be of the strongest character.

“No, nothing special, really. I just want to check on various things. Food and Drugs Act. You know.”

“Like to see rahnd? I’m the ’erbmaster. Or if you’d rather come back abaht eleven... Christ! I’ve left them choppers runnin’...”

He darted back into the shed. A few seconds later, the electric blender noise died.

“Sorry abaht that, but they run ’ot if they’re left. Nah then, wot was I sayin’?—yeah, if you like to give it an hour, the boss orter be in then. Wotcher fink?”

Love deliberated.

“Well, actually... Beg pardon, what was it you said you did here?”

“I’m ’erbmaster.”

“You look after the, er...” Love jerked his head towards the sheds.

“Thasright. The ’ole caboodle—’erbs, driers, choppers—the lot.”

“But isn’t there anyone else here? Working, I mean.”

“Only young Florrie.”

Brother Culpepper looked at his hands, then gave them a vigorous wipe on a square yard of his robe.