Colin Watson - The Flaxborough Crab

“What a nice policeman Sergeant Love is,” remarked Miss Teatime. “Did you not think so, Joe?”

“Oh, yurs. A right darlin’.” Culpepper hooked his tongue tip round the smouldering butt and shifted it to the opposite corner of his mouth. “Wot was ’e after, anyway?”

“He was making routine inquiries.”

“They always are. Lot o’ ponshus pilots.”

“Now, you must not be unjust, Joe. The sergeant is very helpful. It is not every policeman who gives warning of impending bad publicity.”

“Eh? ’Ow d’yer mean, Looce?”

“It seems that a certain Dr Meadow has been making remarks that cast reflection upon our product. As those remarks were made at an inquest, it is very likely that they will be reported in the Press—in the local Press, at all events. We must hope that his calumnies will not spread further afield.”

“Oo, ’ell!”

Miss Teatime regarded the remnant of her cheroot, then tamped it out scrupulously in an earthenware ashtray.

“Of course,” she said, “the effects will not necessarily be disastrous. On the one hand, it would be highly beneficial if the story were to gain ground that Lucky Fen Wort puts lead into the pencils of elderly gentlemen. That, after all, is what we have tried to convey in more delicate terms through the advertisement columns.”

“Shoor,” agreed Brother Culpepper. Puckering his face, he sucked a final dividend of smoke from the brown pellet in his mouth corner, then extracted it between finger and thumb and flicked it accurately into the fireplace.

“What would not be beneficial,” resumed Miss Teatime, “is the suggestion by a medical man that our product had contributed not merely to the venal foibles of this Mr Winge but to his death as well. People are very readily swayed by the prejudices of doctors, and they do not like taking things which they fear may kill them.”

“Yurs, but ahr little old Wort ’d never do that.”

“Certainly not. You know and I know and all the good country folk around here know how benign are the remedies of nature. Unfortunately, the professional medical mind admits of no such persuasion.”

“O ye stiff-necked ’ippercrits,” muttered Culpepper. He leaned forward and peered hopefully into the coffee jug, but it was empty.

Miss Teatime got up and walked once or twice from one end of the room to the other.

“There is just one thing which I find extremely puzzling,” she said, halting by the window and looking down into the yard at two cats that lay together and snoozed in the sun. “Why did our friend Dr Meadow go out of his way to mention Samson’s Salad in connection with that man’s death? Doctors generally refuse even to acknowledge the existence of what they call quack medicines. His behaviour has been most uncharacteristic. I wonder why.”

Culpepper shrugged.

“The sergeant,” said Miss Teatime, “used the phrase ‘trying to put himself in the clear’. Clear of what, though? I should love to know.”

“Arst ’im,” suggested Culpepper, raspingly humorous.

Miss Teatime smiled. The smile lingered as she stood in thought.

“No, I have a better idea, Joe. We shall see what Bernie can find out.”

“Bernie?”

“Yes. He is, by the grace of God, still a member of the British Medical Association, is he not?”

“If they ain’t rumbled that little old puddin’ club clinic of ’is in ’Ampstead, ’e is.”

“Quite. But I have seen no report of his having fallen from favour. I shall make a few preliminary inquiries locally and then telephone Bernie tonight.”

“Knock an’ it shall be opened t’yer, me old dear,” quoth Brother Culpepper.

He looked at the clock.

“Nah then, wot’s ’appened to that little bugger Florrie this mornin’? We’re bunged up wiv bloody Wort til she gets ’ere.”

Miss Teatime discovered that Blackfriars’ Court was a sort of nodule on one of the narrow lanes between Flaxborough Market Place and the river. Enclosing a cobbled area about fifty yards square were four rows of Georgian and early Victorian houses. The houses were quite tall but mostly of only one room’s breadth. There was no space between them. They looked like a concourse of widowed sisters, much undernourished and huddled together for comfort.

Only at one spot had they parted company. This was to make way for a Baptist Chapel, a self-satisfied, brick interloper with two imitation campaniles and a rectangular stained glass window. The colours of the glass were neither sombre nor gay, but curiously and unpleasandy provocative. Miss Teatime decided that they had surgical connotations: she noted iodine (for cuts), picric acid (burns), and gentian violet (athlete’s foot).

While she was looking, the big imitation gothic doors of the chapel opened and gave birth to a battered sideboard, midwived by two men in white aprons. Miss Teatime recalled that the building was now a second-hand furniture saleroom.

She mounted three steps to the tall, narrow door of number eighteen Blackfriars’ Court and knocked. Almost immediately the yellowing lace curtain at the window on her right was edged cautiously aside. She stared resolutely at the knocker, pretending not to notice. Slow, ponderous footsteps echoed on a stone floor within. A bolt grated, then slammed back against its stop. The door opened.

Jumping Christ! said Miss Teatime to herself.

Looming in the shadowy doorway was a man in the uniform of a lieutenant-general of the late Czar’s Imperial Russian Army.

For some moments, Miss Teatime’s surprise prevented her remembering the formula by which she had planned to gain entrance. But at last she forced her gaze from the ankle-length greatcoat, from the gold braid and the eagle-crested buttons, from the medals and the epaulettes, up to the great grey mournful moon of a face that hung over them. She said:

“Good morning. I am from the Regional Health Insurance Board. Are you Mr Walter Grope?”

The lieutenant-general nodded doubtfully, as if he had not heard the name very often before.

Miss Teatime beamed.

“I wonder if I might come in for a few moments, Mr Grope. A small matter of administrational routine has arisen and I believe you could help us to clear it up.”

“It’s not about the tablets, is it?”

Grope sounded as vague as he looked. He had made no move to admit her.

“Tablets?” she repeated, encouragingly.

“The doctor said he was having to stop them.”

“Would that be Dr Meadow, by any chance?”

“He’s been on to you people about it, has he?”

“Ah, not directly, no...”

Mr Grope absent-mindedly fingered his Order of Vassily (Second Class).

“Perhaps you’d better come through into the room.”

He half-turned, making space for her to pass him, then closed the door.

Miss Teatime paused by the first doorway she came to.

“That’s right—in there,” called Mr Grope. She noticed, not unthankfully, that he had neglected to replace the bolt.

The room contained a great deal of furniture, including two pianos, a carved mahogany cupboard the size of a modest bus shelter, an oval dining table draped in port wine-coloured plush, a pedestal gramophone, and a number of formidable sundries that eluded immediate identification.

Miss Teatime picked her way between a piano stool and what she suspected to be a commode, and perched as gracefully as she could upon the arm of a bloated, tapestry-covered settee.

“Yes, these tablets,” she resumed briskly. “What was it that Dr Meadow told you about them? The fact is that some of our prescription records appear to have gone astray. The question of your tablets might well have a bearing.”

Mr Grope, who had entered the furniture labyrinth by another channel, stared gloomily at her over a bamboo plant stand.