“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?”
“What’s that?” asked Love.
“Enemas.”
“He didn’t look as if there was anything wrong with him. And I’m sure he couldn’t have thought I wanted an enema.”
Purbright glanced at him briefly and again addressed the ceiling. “No, I’m sure he couldn’t. So there must be some other reason for the recognition of one man of the world by another.”
Love lifted one eyebrow, but said nothing.
“These cubicle things,” said Purbright. “Would you say they’d been there long? Were they an original part of the house?”
“I don’t think so. They looked like conversions. Not brand new, but recent.”
“Solid?”
“Well...” Love considered. “I don’t know much about building, but they looked a pretty sound job of carpentry. Sort of semi-permanent.”
“You didn’t go down the second corridor?”
“No, there was a sign up...”
“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten.” Purbright was silent. Then he looked again at his watch and yawned. “We do see life, don’t we?” He began tidying up his desk.
Before Love could ask what he was supposed to deduce from the evening’s events, he heard footsteps approaching from the main office. Purbright listened. “The Chief Constable,” he said, “is upon us.”
Mr Chubb knocked punctiliously before entering. He wore a grey overcoat of remarkable rigidity and carried a bowler hat and what he himself would have termed a gamp. He looked as if he might have been attending a public meeting of the better, quieter sort; of the Friends of Flaxborough Cathedral, say.
“Ah, Purbright,” he said, with “Evening, sergeant,” in kindly parenthesis, “I’ve just come from having a word or two with the Coroner. No, sit down, sit down.” He propped himself against a cupboard in his customary attitude of elegant detachment and gave the impression of being ready to hear petitioners. After some seconds he said: “He wants to get this Gwill business cleared up, you know. Amblesby’s rather old for adjournments. He can’t always remember what he’s adjourned or why.” Mr Chubb permitted himself a weak smile, then extinguished it and added: “A perfectly sound old fellow, of course.”
“Oh, yes,” Purbright agreed, with a shade of querulousness.
“You’re still confident poor Gwill was deliberately, er...”
“Quite, sir.”
“Mmm...” Mr Chubb regarded his yellow knitted gloves. “Anything turned up since last we talked about it?”
Purbright salvaged his file from the drawer into which he had pushed it a few moments before and turned over a few pages of notes. “I had quite an interesting conversation with Mr Smith, of the Eastern Provinces,” he announced.
“Percy Smith. Oh, yes; I know him very well. Extremely sound on coarse fishing. Not terribly forthcoming, though, as a rule.”
“No, sir,” Purbright agreed, drily. “But he did confide that Gwill was a beneficiary under the will of the late Mr Harold Carobleat—they were next door neighbours, if you remember, sir—in spite of the widow having been left nothing. And he also admitted that Gwill received and deposited sums of money in cash that appeared to have had nothing to do with his newspaper business.”
“Goodness me,” said the Chief Constable, tonelessly. He looked at Love, then back to Purbright. “Do you suppose that what Smith told you—the money side of it, one might say—had anything to do with the poor fellow coming to a sticky end? Of course,” he added hastily, “that will business sounds absolutely incredible. It does, really.”
Purbright replied that it was beginning to appear, in his opinion, that Gwill’s mysterious source of income might have had a great deal to do with his death and, further, that the arranging and accomplishment of his murder
