Colin Watson - Coffin Scarcely Used

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Very well. Secondly, if none of his friends had any reason to kill him, who else did?”

Bradlaw shook his head. “That’s your job to find out. I’d be inclined to ask who got anything out of it. But maybe nobody did. I don’t know.”

“Lastly, what was Gwill’s relationship with Mrs Carobleat?”

“You asked me that before.”

“Not in so many words.”

“I still can’t tell you. I only know what people have said, but that doesn’t signify. You should hear what some of them have hinted about my housekeeper. A lot of damned spiteful old cows. In this town you even need a chaperone when you go to measure a stiff.”

“How trying for you, Nab.” Purbright picked up his hat and motioned Love to leave with him. “You must bear up, my friend. Don’t give way like poor old Gloss.”

Bradlaw froze in the action of opening the door. He turned. “What the hell are you getting at?”

Purbright smiled and pushed past him into the street. “Gloss,” he said, “is scared—something horrid.” The two policemen moved off in what seemed to Bradlaw slow and ominous companionship.

At the end of the street, Purbright turned the corner and drew Love into a shop doorway some yards further on. “I’m going back to the station to see what the fellows have picked up from Heston Lane,” he said. “You hang on here and watch for Nab Bradlaw. I’ve an idea he’ll want to go visiting. If he takes that van of his, it’s too bad. He might feel like exercise, though.”

“How long do you want me to stick to him?”

“Only until he goes home again. It’s just on twelve now. He said he had some callers, so he’ll probably see them first. Don’t catch cold.”

Love remained a few minutes looking into the shop window. Then he walked back to the corner. He glanced down Bride Street towards Bradlaw’s house, saw no one, and crossed over. For the next quarter of an hour he did his best to make hanging around a deserted road junction on a winter morning look a reasonable occupation.

Eventually he saw a small group leave what he judged to be the undertaker’s office and walk away in the opposite direction. Shortly afterwards, a single figure emerged at the same point. As it approached, he recognized Bradlaw and sought another doorway. He gave Bradlaw time to reach the corner. Then carefully he looked out.

Bradlaw, whose walk was distinguished by a slight roll to the left like the motion of a top-laden boat, had turned off into St Anne’s Place and was now going away from Love. The sergeant gave him fifty yards’ lead and followed, keeping close to the shops on his left.

Several people were now between them, but Love had no difficulty in keeping the rhythmically listing figure of the undertaker in sight until, quite suddenly, it peeled off, mounted a short flight of railed steps, and disappeared.

Love slowed his pace and crossed the road. From the other side he could see only two doorways with steps. He strolled slowly until he was opposite the first. The door was closed. The second entrance was not. He concluded that it must have been through there that Bradlaw had passed.

He crossed over again and continued in the same direction, noting the names on the brass plates outside the second door. Then he became interested in shop windows once more and tried to forget how cold his feet were getting.

Nearly half an hour went by.

At last Bradlaw emerged. Love, at that moment twenty yards away, prepared to follow him again. He came nearer and tried to see which direction the undertaker had chosen. But there was no sign of him.

Love crossed the road carefully, craning his neck and rising on tip-toe to see over the intervening citizenry. It was only when a second man appeared at the top of the steps and hurried down to the kerb that Love realized what had happened.

He ran forward in time to see the car draw away and accelerate towards the town centre. The passenger was Bradlaw. The driver, whom Love recognized when he glanced swiftly behind him before letting out the clutch, was Mr Rodney Gloss.

Chapter Seven

Detective Constables Harper and Pook had spent the morning calling from door to door in Heston Lane, an occupation only a little less dispiriting than Love’s patrol of the chilling flagstones of St Anne’s Place. Every now and then, Harper (even numbers) would meet or be met by Pook (odd numbers) and compare notes on the remarkable blindness and defective hearing of the residents.

“Dead stupid, these people,” opined Harper, with dismal regularity.

“God, what a lot!” responded Pook.

It did not strike them as at all reasonable that a murder could have been committed so privately as to have escaped entirely the notice of upwards of sixty householders, most of them patently inquisitive insomniacs with a keen sense of the significance of every passing footstep and every distantly slammed door.

“They must know something,” Harper declared.

“Scared we’ll ask for their dog licence,” theorized Pook.

They parted once more for odd and even investigation, like vacuum cleaner salesmen doggedly canvassing a community served by gas.

About half-way through the morning, Pook discovered he was far ahead of the last point at which he had seen Harper march up a driveway. Perhaps the lucky devil had found a house where hot coffee and reminiscences of a son’s career in the North-West Frontier Police were waiting. Pook noted the number of his next call and strolled back. Harper, he saw, was just coming out of the house, looking at his notebook and apparently confirming something with a tubby, beady-eyed and garrulous woman who nodded energetically and pointed occasionally in the direction of The Aspens, whence the detective had been working their hitherto unproductive way.

“That one was a bit more useful,” said Harper as he rejoined his colleague.

“Coffee?” asked Pook, enviously.”

“Tea,” absently replied Harper, “I think.” He gave a final glance at his notebook and slipped it in his pocket.

Pook grunted and looked back sadly at the long line of odd and tea-less residences at whose doors he had knocked or rung in vain. “We’d better do the rest,” he said. “By the way, did you get anything out of her—apart from a cuppa?”

“Three, actually,” Harper corrected. “And a list of people who could have been at Gwill’s place after midnight.”

Worse and worse. Pook stared at him. “Don’t talk wet. These people all sink into a coma round about eight. She probably made something up because she was sorry for you.”

“On, no.” Harper was pleased and brisk. “It so happens her daughter was out at a dance or something and the old woman was so scared she’d come back ruined that every time she heard anyone coming from town she popped down to the gate to see if it was girlie. Hence the who’s who. She didn’t know them all, but I’ve four names and a few descriptions.”

The inquisition was resumed. But the houses here were much nearer the town. The detectives’ automatic catechism drew no more information that seemed to have any bearing on what had happened at or near The Aspens. Pook was reduced to putting down in his notebook an account of the narrow escape of one old woman’s cat from death beneath the wheels of a black van driven “furiously and without the slightest regard for animals” from the direction of Flaxborough at half an hour past midnight. “I noticed specially because it came back again later, officer, and poor Winston called out from the kitchen—well, they know , don’t they?”

It was at Winston’s home that Pook’s fast was ended. But his benefactor was still so upset that she very nearly poured him a saucer of milk before it occurred to her that he might prefer tea.