Colin Watson - Coffin Scarcely Used

Purbright stared round the garden and ranged the fields on the other side of the bordering hedge. “Curious,” he muttered.

“What is?”

Purbright nodded towards the window. “Take a look at how neat the place is. Yet his woman didn’t come today. He must be an unusually tidy fellow.”

“You’d not say that if you saw the garage. You can hardly move for odds and ends and a great tangle of electric flex and stuff. I’d a job getting the door shut again.”

“Electric flex?” Purbright looked at him sharply.

“Yes, yards and...Oh...”

“Oh, indeed,” said Purbright. “Getting warmer, aren’t we?” He turned again to the window. “I suggest, you know, that ‘having reason to suspect’ and all that, we now take a closer look into things.”

He examined the window frame. “Ah, a precedent. How lucky for the Law.” Where recently made indentations appeared in the paint, he thrust upward a penknife blade and eased away the old-fashioned catch. Then he opened the window, climbed on the kitchen bench and jumped down. The slightly apprehensive Gibbins was admitted through the door.

They began to search, ascending first to an attic compartment that had been converted into the nearest approximation to a bath-room that a pumped water supply allowed.

Of the occupant of the cottage there was no sign. “One thing to be thankful for,” confessed Gibbins, “is that we haven’t found him strung up or simmering in chunks in the copper. That’s what I’m always afraid of in these out-of-the-way places. They’ve a nasty sense of humour in the country.” He mooched back into the kitchen and began peeping cautiously into drawers and cupboards.

A little later, Purbright called from the bedroom. “What do you make of this?” he asked, pointing to a jacket and waistcoat that hung behind the door, and then to an open drawer of the dressing table in which had been folded the matching pair of trousers.

Gibbins moved the trousers aside. Braces were attached to them. Beneath the trousers were some underclothes and a shirt. He looked at the cuffs; the links were there. Studs had not been removed from the collar-band.

“It seems,” said Gibbins, after considering these things, “that Mr Barnaby is abroad with precious little clothing on. People don’t put on clean shirts without changing the studs over. And they don’t have separate braces for every pair of trousers.”

“They don’t lay trousers in drawers, either,” Purbright observed. “Unless,” he added, “they happen to be someone else’s that they’ve decided to tidy away quickly. Can you see any shoes and socks over on that side?”

A pair of slightly muddied brogues was discovered in a corner. Further search revealed socks under one of the pillows. Gibbins held them up. “Inside out—like the shirt and vest. That suggests something.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Purbright agreed, pleased that Gibbins seemed to have entered so well into the spirit of things, in spite of the case having been, as it were, imported. “The gentleman was either an exceedingly careless dresser—which would be odd in anyone with such a passion for tidying things away—or else somebody took his clothes off for him.”

Purbright watched Gibbins going through pockets. “Any name tags?” he asked.

“Not one. No letters, no papers. Plenty of money and some odds and ends.” Gibbins laid on the dressing table a bundle of notes, cigarette case and lighter, keys, a pen and two handkerchiefs.

“No driving licence?” Purbright inquired. Gibbins shook his head.

Purbright moved about the room, unhurriedly peering, probing, picking up and setting down. He glanced into ashtrays and at the titles of a couple of books. His manner was inconsequential, like that of a bored man in a waiting-room. On the bedside table was a small china ornament. In passing, he lifted it and shook it gently, then tipped its mouth to the palm of his other hand. Out rolled a tiny, pear-shaped bead of glass. Purbright stared at it thoughtfully for a moment and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

Both men returned together to the kitchen.

Purbright stopped at the door and looked carefully round the room. Then he walked slowly from one end to the other, methodically examining the floor. Suddenly he stooped down and peered closely at the boards. Another piece of glass glittered in a crevice. Purbright prised it free with his fingernail, compared it with the first fragment, and held out both to Gibbins who mmm-ed politely but without comprehension.

“They’re off little glass phials,” explained Purbright. “You know—medical phials.” He stepped to the sink and surveyed the things that stood in it or on the draining bench close by; he did not touch them. They comprised a small saucepan that seemed to have contained milk; a deep plate with a few cereal fragments on its rim; a large china beaker; and an empty jug. All had been rinsed—apparently with water from a ewer that stood on the floor.

“I’d dearly like a sample of the milk that was in that jug,” Purbright said.

Gibbins stood disconsolately at the sink. “Do you think it was poured away? It could have been used up.”

“It could; but most people remember to leave a drop of milk in reserve, and there isn’t any other in the house. In any case, it stands out a mile that somebody’s...”

“Wait a minute,” Gibbins broke in. He bobbed down and thrust his head into the small cupboard beneath the sink. “See if you can get hold of a clean jar or bottle. A jar would be best.”

As Purbright searched shelves on the opposite wall, he heard Gibbins tapping in his retreat. He picked out a clean jam jar and handed it down. A moment later there was the sound of running liquid.

Gibbins emerged, red but triumphant, from the cupboard. He help up the jar, half filled with a whitish fluid. “Waste pipe,” he explained. “Now then, what do you reckon we’ve got here?”

“Something,” Purbright replied, “of which I fear Mr Barnaby has caught his death.”

Chapter Eighteen

When the Chief Constable opened the door of Purbright’s office shortly after eight o’clock the following morning, something more chilly than the draught from the corridor entered the room. His terse “Good morning” had an edge of irritation, and he said nothing further while he slowly and deliberately peeled off his gloves and laid them neatly side by side on the desk.

Purbright knew better than to waste time on mollifying preliminaries. “I understand, sir,” he said, “that Dr Hillyard is now at his home. I wish to execute the warrant at”—he glanced at the clock and considered—“at half-past nine. A special court has been fixed for ten. Formal remand, sir. In custody, of course.”

“Well?” Chubb had no intention of forgiving lightly the telephone call that had precipitated an early and unsatisfactory breakfast.

“Well, sir, the whole case may conceivably come to the boil, as it were, at any time now. I thought it desirable that you should be on hand. We may need your support in several ways that I cannot predict at the moment.”

Chubb regarded Purbright thoughtfully and with slightly less obvious disfavour. Then he pulled a chair to the middle of the room and sat down. “Go on, Mr Purbright.”

“In the first place,” said the inspector, manfully coping with the novelty of addressing Chubb from above, “I’d better give you a few more of the background facts we’ve been able to discover. We arrest Hillyard. Right: now there is plenty of evidence of his having allowed and, for that matter, actively helped to organize, the running of a...an immoral enterprise in a part of his house not accessible to his genuine patients.”

Chubb raised an eyebrow.