Colin Watson - Coffin Scarcely Used

For years afterwards, Love was to question his ridiculous, his lunatic failure to identify the simple sound that had guided him across the floor that night. As the light beam leaped alarmingly ahead, Love jumped as if he held a recoiling cannon in his hand.

From a couch five feet distant was rearing up in fright and indignation the lady whose measured breathing in a contemplative doze he had so fantastically misinterpreted.

In the fraction of time before he turned and rushed with mumbled apologies in the direction whence he had come, the policeman noticed two things.

One was the identity of the outraged female.

The second was the lady’s bizarre choice of costume: a heavy glass necklace and a pair of stockings, one slightly laddered.

It was not until later that a third, no less curious, circumstance registered. He recalled that she had flung after his retreating figure the epithet ‘bloody old devil!’, together with several kinds of threat of what would happen if he ‘tried a trick like that again’.

What did she mean by ‘old’, Love asked himself with some annoyance as he tramped back to where he had left the car.

Chapter Thirteen

Purbright was still in his office when Love drove the car into the police garage and walked past the night sergeant, who had begun his mysterious routine of entering things laboriously in books and juggling with plugs and cords on the switch-board.

The inspector listened attentively to the story of the shadowing of Alderman Leadbitter. He drew towards him a pad of paper, an ashtray and a cup half-full of cold, grey coffee.

“Now, Sid; let’s have that list you copied from the board on the landing.”

At Love’s direction, he marked out three columns and began filling them with the members and letters in the sergeant’s notebook. Then he pulled from a file the table he had compiled earlier of names, specifications and times coined in the answers to the advertisements in the Citizen .

“By the way,” said Love, “did you find who collected those box replies?”

Purbright nodded. “A young fellow from Gloss’s office. Lintz told me. I cornered the lad this afternoon, as a matter of fact, and he said his boss had sent him with the ticket—the counterfoil that’s issued when anyone places an advert—to pick up any letters under that number.”

“That would leave Gloss with something to explain, then.”

“He made no bones about it. He said the ticket had been amongst Gwill’s papers that he, as his solicitor, had been sorting out, and that he thought he’d better see if there was anything urgent about the business.”

“Had he the letters there?”

“Oh yes. All opened. He was most obliging. Showed them to me and asked me what I thought they could mean. The money was there, too.”

“Could he explain that?”

Purbright sighed. “My dear Sid, you should know by now that we’ve got everything out of that gentleman that he’ll part with until we can use the rack.”

He put the two lists side by side and began comparing them. His pencil point wavered from one column to another, pounced on a number or a set of initials, then moved beneath a name an address, a date. Twenty minutes went by. Love got up looked disconsolately out of the uncurtaind window at the blackness bloomed with a dim rejection of the room’s lamp-light upon rags of mist, and walked to the door. “I’ll see if Charlie can fix up a mug of something,” he said, and departed

Purbright’s manner of scrutinizig the pages before him became gradually more alert. Several details were now underlined. He passed his tongue over his dry upper lip and reached for the coffee cup. Absentmindedly he sipped its chilled, forbidding residue.

When Love came back with two steaming mugs, he motioned him to his side and pointed to one of the entries he had marked.

“This is interesting. Edward Leadbitter, you notice, wrote asking to see an antique pewter tankard...”

“A pewter antique tankard.”

“Eh? All right, then, a pewter antique tankard; and he specified eight-fifteen this evening. Now then”—Purbright moved his pencil over to the second sheet—“here’s the entry on that upstairs board of Hillyard’s. First of all, the time. Eight-fifteen. That checks. Next, the figure two. You said it was the second cubicle from which you heard his voice. Now in the last column on the notice board are these five initials: E.L.P.A.T.”

Love scratched his chin.

“Edward...” Purbright prompted.

“Edward Leadbitter...Pewter...Of course, it’s that bloody tankard again.”

“Exactly.”

“But I still can’t see any sense in it,” protested Love. “The place hadn’t an antique in sight. No pewter, no furniture, nothing like that at all. It was like a clinic or part of a hospital, except that it was more comfortable. It was certainly no antique that jumped up at me when I switched the torch on.” Love looked more gleeful than dismayed at the memory of the moment of revelation before his flight.

“Never mind the Venusberg aspect. Who was the fellow you said you saw on the landing?”

“Stamper. Bert Stamper.”

“The farmer?”

“That’s the one, yes.”

Purbright looked down the names on his letter digest. “Here we are—he just put initials to his reply. H.S. And over here”—he waved his pencil over to the ‘Treatment Schedule’—“they appear against seven-thirty and cubicle three.”

“Three was the cubicle where I found the door unlocked.”

“And looked at what the policeman saw.”

Love blushed happily.

“You say you know the girl?”

“Professionally, yes. Mrs Shooter—Margaret Shooter, I believe it was. I was beat-bashing in those days and she was listed with a few others for entertaining sailors in the place in Broad Street.”

“Over by the harbour?”

“Yes. There used to be more knocking shops than telegraph poles down there at one time. That was before Holy Harry blew out all the red lamps and set the girls to sew surplices.”

Purbright looked pained. “Don’t come that hell’s kitchen stuff to me, Sid. You know perfectly well that the Flaxborough brand of vice was never anything but shabby amateurism. The house you’re talking about closed down weeks before we could get any real evidence. By Holy Harry, I suppose you mean the late and questionable Mr Carobleat?”

“That’s the boy.”

“I'd never heard the soul-saving line before. What we suspected was that he got hold of a list of the ladies we were interested in when he was chairman of the Watch Committee and went round tipping them off.”

“They stopped operating, anyway,” said Love defensively.

“So far as we could prove, they did. But don’t delude yourself that they took to good works. However”—Purbright looked at his watch—“that’s neither here nor there. Let’s finish with Stamper, the honest hayseed.”

He sipped from the mug Love had brought in and found his place again in the letters summary. “It was the heavy stuff he was after, apparently. A mahogany and beech sideboard, of all things. Did you happen to trip over any sideboards in your flight from Mrs Shooter?”

Love looked at the second sheet. “There you are.” He pointed to a group of initials, six this time. “That’s clear enough—Herbert Stamper, Mahogany And Beech Sideboard.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Maybe the place is a private asylum.”

Purbright leaned back in his chair and stared into space. “You say you don’t know the big man who looked in at you while you were in Leadbitter’s cubicle. And yet he winked at you?”

“Oh, yes. Quite friendly, he seemed.”

“A wink,” Purbright went on, talking half to himself, “suggests sharing a joke, a lark, as you might say. Something private and perhaps risky or pleasantly scandalous. But not”—he joined his fingers—“desperately conspiratorial. No murders or burglaries. And no drugs, I fancy: that’s commonly a gloomy or else a hysterical business. Could that wink, though, have been one purely of medical commiseration between fellow candidates for boil lancing or colonic irrigation?”