Colin Watson - Bump in the Night

Purbright looked at him searchingly.

“Yes, sir. It’s only a few days ago that I was sitting in with the chief inspector when he was questioning Biggadyke. Very much to the point, the chief was. As good as asked him straight out for an alibi. And Biggadyke told him about being over in Flax every Tuesday night.”

“But you had only his word for that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I believed in the alibi, sir. That sounded more like a tale for the wife than for the police. It’s just that Biggadyke didn’t strike me as the type. Bombs are tricky. They take intelligence.”

“And this man wasn’t especially intelligent?”

“Well...clever, yes”—Worple frowned and tugged his ear lobe—“but not up to anything really high-class. If you’re with me, sir,” he added doubtfully.

“I see what you mean,” Purbright assured him. “But that isn’t inconsistent with what happened. After three hits his cleverness ran out. He boobed. In any case it would be pushing coincidence rather far to suggest that in a town this size there are two characters mucking about with explosives.”

“I expect you’re right, sir. The chief has the same idea. Maybe that’s why I was a bit doubtful.”

Purbright made no comment. He was looking again at Worple’s little stack of envelopes. “Didn’t you pick anything up at the caravan?” he asked.

“Bits like those you mean, sir?”

“Yes. It must have been in the caravan that he made the things. Mr Larch said there was no trace of anything of the kind at his home or his office.”

“That’s right: it was me who went round to look. But I couldn’t find anything where the caravan had been either. Of course, it was burned right out by the time the chaps in the lorry depot saw the fire and came round by the road and the path. Only Biggadyke had a key to that back gate.”

Purbright put the envelopes back on the cupboard shelf. “You’d better not get rid of them yet awhile.” he said.

Worple looked shocked. “Certainly not, sir. They’re the only real evidence we’ve got.”

Two days later Purbright was able to satisfy his curiosity as to what a ‘decently conducted’ inquest was like. He was favourably impressed, in particular by the grave but kindly efficiency of Mr Ben Chalice, the Chalmsbury coroner.

The almost total baldness of Mr Chalice lent disturbing emphasis to eyebrows that were like great bundles of wire. He had the long face of an habitual and careful listener. He never interrupted his witnesses, all of whom he treated with equal respect and patience, yet he had only to bring his penetrating gaze to bear upon the over-voluble or the pompous for them to stutter to a stop. He refrained from expressing any personal opinion, would not dream of impugning the character or intelligence of a witness, and had not been known in all the thirty-two years of his office to deliver a single platitude or homily.

It was hard to believe that Mr Chalice was a coroner at all.

The inquiry was held in the magistrates’ court but with none of the ceremony to which the room might have lent itself. Ignoring the row of leather-backed chairs on the bench, Mr Chalice sat at the humbler level of the clerk’s table. The four people who had been called to give evidence had found themselves places, at the coroner’s invitation, around the same table. The scene would have resembled the meeting of a small firm’s board of directors had it not been for the gaunt, overbearing presence of Larch, who stood behind the coroner’s shoulder and looked mistrustfully at each of the assembly in turn.

Mr Kebble was wedged in the press box with three representatives of national newspapers who had been sent to extract what drama they could from the winding up of the affairs of the ‘Tuesday Terror’.

Evidence of identification was given by the widow. She was a short, puffy-featured woman, the cream of whose former prettiness had long since been curdled by the demands and deviations of jolly Stan. Purbright watched from the back of the courtroom while Mrs Biggadyke, looking petulant rather than grieved, acknowledged that the body she had been shown in the Chalmsbury mortuary was indeed that of her husband, Stanley Porteous Biggadyke, a company director, whom she had last seen... No, Purbright decided, she wasn’t exactly devastated: the loss was to board rather than bed. It must have been a nasty moment in the morgue though. Had she guessed why Worple had kept one hand on the top of her husband’s head while carefully slipping the sheet down a few inches?

“Do you know,” the coroner was asking her gently, “if Mr Biggadyke was interested in explosives? Had he experimented with such things at any time?”

She gave a slight shake of the head. “He never told me anything about his outside interests. He spent quite a bit of time in the workshop at the firm. Or so he said.”

“And in his caravan behind the depot?”

“He used that as an office. I never saw inside it.”

Mr Chalice’s steel-nibbed pen recorded her replies in flowing, generously looped script. It looked a slow business but Purbright found it soothing.

“Now I am going to mention three dates to you, Mrs Biggadyke, and I should like you to tell me, if you can, where you knew or believed your husband to be on those occasions. They are the nights of June the third, the seventeenth and the twenty-fourth. All were Tuesday nights.”

She answered immediately. “He went to Flaxborough every Tuesday and stayed overnight. Every week it was, so I don’t have to think of any dates.”

“For what purpose did he go to Flaxborough?”

“It was what he called his club night. The Trade and Haulage Club. He didn’t like driving home late, so he had an arrangement with a friend there to put him up for the night. Mr Smiles he was called. I never met him personally.”

The coroner paused after writing this down. Then he said: “I think it is only fair to tell you at this stage that evidence will be given by Mr Smiles that your husband did not stay at his home on any occasion during the past three months. Would you care to say anything about that, Mrs Biggadyke?”

“Only that I’m not in the least surprised.”

“I take it you did not enjoy your husband’s confidence in all respects?”

“In no respect whatever.” She spoke as if stating an obvious and not very important fact.

“I see. There is just one more point, I think, Mrs Biggadyke. From the series of Tuesdays I mentioned a short time ago one was missing. Tuesday, June the tenth. Can you say, of your own knowledge, where your husband was that night?”

The woman looked doubtful. “The tenth...no, well we’ve agreed I was wrong about him going where he said. To Flaxborough, I mean. So...” Remembrance suddenly came to her. “Of course—that night I do know where he was. In hospital after his accident. He didn’t come out until the Friday.”

The coroner having read Mrs Biggadyke’s deposition over to her slowly and clearly, she signed it. She was then directed by Chief Inspector Larch, mutely gesturing like an impatient head waiter, to remove herself a little further off. Her place next to the coroner was taken by the pathologist who had performed the post mortem.

The doctor’s evidence confirmed that death had been due to severe multiple injuries, including decapitation, consistent with the victim’s having been within short range of an explosion of considerable force.

“How short a range, doctor?” Mr Chalice asked.

“Oh, inches, I should say. There was a lot of burning on the front of the body. And, as I’ve said, the hands and forearms...well, they’d almost disappeared.”

“Would you go so far as to say the deceased had probably been handling the explosive substance, whatever it was?”