Colin Watson - The Flaxborough Crab

“That could be the explanation, sir.”

“Could? It must be. Does a man with a case full of beautiful instruments like this steal an old stethoscope from some little country doctor?”

Purbright smilingly conceded that such behaviour was most unlikely. He was sorry that Mr Brennan—or Dr Brunnen, rather—had been subjected to inconvenience.

Brennan (or Brunnen) bowed. Not at all. These little misunderstandings did arise from time to time. He quite understood. Perhaps now that the matter had been cleared up, however...

In the midst of this mutual affability, Purbright had been keeping a wary eye on the progress of Sergeant Love. By now, he had methodically worked round to the front of the car and had just raised the lid of the engine compartment.

“Excuse me a moment, sir,” Purbright said to Brennan. “We might as well finish the formalities.”

He casually walked over to join Love and leaned with him over the engine.

“If it’s anywhere,” he murmured very softly, “it’s in here. He’s still got oil on his hands.”

Both men peered intently into every recess, every conceivable hiding place from end to end of the engine compartment. Love probed beneath the cylinder block and behind the clutch housing and would have unscrewed both the radiator and oil filler caps had not Purbright dissuaded him.

The search revealed nothing.

Purbright was the first to straighten up. He took care not to sigh too obviously. The sergeant remained dutifully inclined over the engine for a few minutes more. Then he, too, stepped back.

Purbright looked towards Brennan.

“That appears to be all, then, sir,” he said. He motioned Love to close the lid.

“Excuse me, inspector.”

Purbright turned to find beside him the small figure of Miss Teatime. She was gazing pensively at the car.

“That model, if I remember rightly,” she said, “is fitted with a one-and-a-half litre engine.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Purbright, more abruptly than he had intended.

“A four-cylinder engine, in fact,” she said.

“Possibly.”

“No, inspector—quite definitely. So why, I wonder, should there appear to be six distributor leads? I thought I had better mention it before the sergeant puts the bonnet down.”

Purbright reached forward and parted the complex of black rubber-covered cables that ran from the distributor to the four sparking plugs. Two were loose. They had been tucked and twisted amongst the others. And now that he was deliberately looking at them and not simply glimpsing and accepting them as familiar parts of a car’s mechanism, their greater thickness and newness registered immediately.

He tugged them free.

There came to light the little black box at their junction, then the stethoscope’s third tube, the foot of the “Y”, ending in the button-like microphone housing.

Purbright examined the find. It appeared to be identical with the seven instruments in Brennan’s case. The same design, the same workmanship, the same little Elixon name plate. Yet there was a difference. This one was noticeably heavier.

“Do you wish to give me any explanation about this, sir?”

Brennan stared contemptuously into the middle distance. He said nothing.

The inspector waited a while, then handed the stethoscope to Love and again addressed Brennan.

“Erich Brunnen, or Brennan, I am now going to take you into custody. You will be charged with stealing, at or about half past six in the evening of the twelfth of this month, in Heston Lane, Flaxborough, one stethoscope, the property of Dr Augustus Meadow...”

“What a fiendish device, Mr Purbright!”

It was three days later.

The Chief Constable was looking at a sketch that the inspector had made on the back of an envelope.

“Yes, sir. The forensic people were quite impressed. That, you see,”—he pointed—“is the compressed air cartridge, rather like a soda syphon bulb, which releases its charge when that switch is pressed. Hence the hissing noise that Mrs McCreavy mistakenly ascribed to Dr Meadow’s impatience.

“Now look at the two tubes that form the earpieces. That one is just a dummy, like the bottom tube with its imitation microphone, but the other is a piece of small-bore hydraulic hose with steel mesh reinforcement under a smooth rubber facing. A sort of flexible gun barrel, in fact.”

“Good Lord!” said Mr Chubb. “I see what you’re getting at, of course. The whole thing’s a kind of air gun.”

“Exactly, sir. And pretty powerful, according to the lab report.”

“What does it fire? A pellet, or something?”

“No, sir. Probably a dart, a small steel spike. As you can imagine, it would have to be fairly sharp to pass through the petrous bone.”

“Yes, of course it would.” Mr Chubb saw no immediate reason to admit that he had never before heard of petrous bone.

“Tell me, Mr Purbright—why did you suppose this fellow to be lying when he claimed he had not seen Dr Meadow that day?”

“I knew for certain that he was lying as soon as I saw the word that was printed under the switch. The German word for amplifier—Verstarker. The last thing that Dr Meadow said before he collapsed was so curious that Mrs McCreavy remembered it. According to her, it was ‘The fur’s darker’. That is just how a muttered and probably anglicized pronunciation of the word would be interpreted by someone over-hearing it. So it was clear that Meadow had been using one of Brennan’s new stedioscopes. And there was only one way he could have got hold of it. Brennan must have presented him with it before the surgery opened at six o’clock.”

“I suppose that from then on Brennan was hanging around in order to reclaim the thing as soon as it had...well, gone off?”

“Yes, sir. It was essential to prevent its being examined by anybody else.”

“He was taking an awful risk, wasn’t he?”

Purbright shrugged. “There was a great deal at stake, sir. We’ve turned up a copy of the letter Meadow wrote to Elixon immediately after the inquest on Alderman Winge. It stated his misgivings about this drug ‘Juniform’ and said that he would have to withdraw what he had published previously about its safety. Brennan and his firm stood to lose sales that promised eventually to be worth millions. Men in that position do tend to favour boldness.”

“Lucky that Teatime person had her wits about her, eh?” remarked Mr Chubb. “We owe her quite a lot, you know.”

“Yes, sir. She seems a very public-spirited lady.”

Inspector Purbright, too, could be magnanimous when he wished.