Colin Watson: Hopjoy Was Here

“In that case I’d say he was the survivor, then. Took his stuff with him. Hello...”

Warlock reached into the cabinet with a pair of tweezers and withdrew from among the dressings a small rectangle of metal. It was a single-edged razor blade. “What’s he been doing with this, I wonder.”

He pointed to where the brightness of the steel had been dulled across one corner by a brown deposit.

“Odd,” said Purbright, feeling somewhat lightly armed in the matter of forensic speculation. Warlock carefully propped the razor blade against the hammer shaft. Then he turned and motioned the inspector to lead the way downstairs.

A few steps from the bottom Purbright paused, eyeing the looming obstruction of Constable Donaldson who stood by the front door and darkened the diminutive hallway. “Bring a chair out and sit down,” Purbright said. “You make the place look like Downing Street.”

Re-entering the dining-room, they found Sergeant Love had cleared the contents of the bureau out upon the table and was now glancing through the pile of papers he had collected from the drawers and pigeon-holes. Through the half-open window came the sound of an exploratory spade being thrust at fairly long intervals into the dusty soil of the flower beds. The threatened shower had held off. Both men in the garden had removed their jackets. One absent-mindedly swung the trowel he was holding—he had succeeded in being unable to find a spade—and gazed at the earth his colleague had disturbed.

Purbright opened the door of the sideboard and pointed out to Warlock the basin and paint brush.

“I was just looking at this when you arrived. I think it’s the answer to some of the questions you were asking upstairs.”

Warlock squatted and examined the basin closely, not touching it. He lowered his head farther and sniffed.

“Wax, isn’t it?” Purbright asked.

“Paraffin wax. Melted candles, probably; there’s a piece of wick in it.” Warlock rocked gently on his heels and looked up. There was simple pleasure on his face. “Brushed hot over the plug seating and any breaks in the enamel—just the job, squire. And the chain—that could have been dipped through it.”

Love scowled at the papers that he was now sorting into three heaps which he mentally classified as letters, bills and odds-and-sods. His resentment of the cheerful Warlock was sharpened by the laboratory man’s anticipation of the very theory he had been nurturing in his own mind with the intention of producing it, like a prize marrow, at the opportune moment. He salvaged what, credit he could by breaking into the conversation with an announcement.

“That’s quite likely to be right, about the bath, inspector. I noticed when I was going over it for prints that there were traces of grease on the bottom.”

“Ah,” said Purbright, nodding sagaciously at Warlock.

“It looked,” added Love, “rather as if an attempt had been made to rinse it clean with hot water. But whoever did that forgot about the plug chain. It was slung over one of the taps and still quite thickly covered.”

He returned to his sorting.

Warlock regarded the basin with possessive joy. “One decent dab on you, sweetheart, and...”—he made the cork-drawing sound that seemed, for him, to symbolize the ultimate in desirable achievement. Love winced.

“It would be very helpful,” Purbright conceded. “Provided, of course, that we can establish whose print it is. I suppose the presumption must be strong that it belongs to whichever of the two gentlemen is still alive.”

“Bound to, squire.” Warlock glanced round at the inspector as if in wonderment that a man could view a certainty with such caution. “Mind you,” he added, “I’m not promising that anything will show up. It’s the sort of job for which anyone with sense would wear rubber gloves. Sloshing acid about, and so on. Don’t you think so?”

Purbright let the point pass. It seemed unfruitful. “The hairs on that hammer, now,” he went on. “How far are they going to be helpful?”

“That’s hard to say.” Warlock rose and slipped his restless hands into his trouser pockets, where they continued to rummage like inquisitive mice. “It’s identification you’re after again, I suppose. Yes, well, in itself a hair doesn’t tell a great deal. It’s comparative tests that are significant. Give me hair A and hair B and I’ll tell you if they’re from the same head—with a reasonable degree of certainty, anyway.”

The inspector considered this offer. Then he addressed Love. “Sid, I want you to chase some hairs for this gentleman. We’ll need to have a pretty fair idea of whom they belong to, though. Periam’s shop is one possibility: he may have kept a jacket or something there. We don’t know that the other fellow—Hopjoy—had a place of his own, an office or anything. See if there’s marked clothing of his among the stuff here.”

“What about initialled hairbrushes, sir?” Love was young in heart.

“Oh yes, rather. Initialled hairbrushes by all means.”

There was a gentle knock on the door and one of the plain-clothes men thrust his head round. “Excuse me, sir, but we’ve turned something up.”

“Have you, Mr Boggan?” Purbright sounded pleased.

“Yes, sir. I thought perhaps you’d like to have a look.”

Purbright and Warlock followed him into the garden. It was a neat, uninspiring arrangement of lawn bordered on three sides with flower bed and enclosed by a shoulder-high fence of creosoted boarding. The grass was not rank, but it obviously had not been mown for several weeks. The few plants regularly spaced along the surrounding strip of soil looked like old hotel residents: deep-rooted, uncompromising and reluctant to bloom. A sterile plum tree stood primly in the far corner, its trunk collared with a blackened remnant of clothes line.

Detective Boggan’s colleague was on one knee at the edge of the lawn, near a shallow pit in the flower bed. He was brushing soil from a sack that now lay on the grass. Suddenly he snatched away his hand, swore, examined a finger and pressed it to his handkerchief. When he withdrew it there was a glint of scarlet.

“You’d better go in and wash it,” Purbright said. He leaned over the sack. From a small rent protruded a fin of pale green glass; There were several other tiny holes in the sack. They looked like burns.

Purbright gingerly pulled back the neck of the sack. It was full of broken glass, some pieces as much as six or seven inches long. All were slightly concave as if they had formed a huge bottle.

“There’s your carboy,” said Warlock. He looked a little longer at the spilling fragments. “I wonder where he put the basket.”

“Basket?”

“Yes, these acid containers are usually set in iron lattice things like big fire baskets. They’re to protect them while they’re being shifted about.”

“Buried too, I suppose,” said Purbright. Boggan looked without favour at the stretch of flower bed that remained to be explored.

The detective who had cut his hand came out of the house and walked up to the group on the lawn. “I think,” he said to the inspector, “that I know where that thing was smashed up.”

He led Purbright and Warlock back into the kitchen and through a side door that opened into the garage. He pointed to a corner of the floor. “There’s a whole lot of little splinters round there, sir. I noticed them earlier on when I was looking for a spade.”

The others examined the floor, nodded acknowledgement of their guide’s perspicacity, and turned their attention to the rest of the garage.

Along one wall, lit now by the sun rays that filtered through a long, grimy skylight, there hung from hooks and nails a rusted saw, an oil-stained pictorial calendar for 1956, a cylinder head gasket, a tyre worn to the canvas, an old scouting haversack and something discernible as porcelain under its covering of dust. Purbright identified it, with some surprise, as a bed pan.