Into this aseptic chamber, Purbright gently ushered an exceedingly apprehensive-looking Bradlaw. Love followed, and a constable, bringing up the rear, shut the door and remained standing impassively before it. Bradlaw glanced at the inspector, then regarded the coffin as if searching for constructional flaws.
“Who is it, Nab?” Purbright asked quietly.
Continuing to trace with his gaze the outlines of the box, Bradlaw avoided looking directly at the bearded face within. “A fellow called John Barnaby. No one you know. He died here while he was visiting my housekeeper. His niece. Bit of a nuisance, but there you are.” He swallowed and looked up at Purbright. “Why? What’s all this about?”
“Who gave the certificate?”
“Hillyard. He’d been attending him.”
“Referees?”
Bradlaw shrugged. “Scott, I think. And that other chap in Duke Street. Rawlings.”
“They made no formal examination, I suppose? The usual dotted line stuff?”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Never mind.” Purbright’s voice was friendly. “By the way, did I tell you that Hillyard’s under arrest?”
Bradlaw stared at him, slowly drawing both hands from his overcoat pockets. “Has he...” he began, then was silent.
“I rather think,” said Purbright, “that I’d better caution you before we talk any more, Nab.”
Bradlaw looked down at his hands and began to rub the knuckles of one in the other palm. He appeared to be cold.
“You are not obliged to say anything in reply to my questions, but what you do say may be taken down and given in evidence.” Purbright nodded to Love, who drew a notebook from his pocket. To Bradlaw, the inspector added: “You can have your solicitor here if you’d rather, you know.”
Bradlaw glanced at the unoccupied slab. “He’s been here already—or had you forgotten?”
“Oh, yes. Gloss. I’m sorry.”
Purbright said nothing more for a while, but stood watching the slow, tense rubbing motion of the other man’s hands. They unclasped at last and spread in acknowledgment of surrender.
“All right. I’ll tell you what happened.” Bradlaw looked behind him, as if in hope of some charitable policeman having silently placed a chair there. Seeing nothing but the coldly gleaming wall, he hunched his shoulders, sighed deeply, and began.
“You may know, or you may not—I don’t suppose it matters much now—that Rupert Hillyard and a few others of us were running a sort of business side-line in the town. It wasn’t quite above board, if you follow me, and there were women mixed up in it. You see what...” He raised his eyes to Purbright. “Perhaps you’ve heard already, though?”
“Yes. We know.”
Bradlaw nodded and sniffed. “Yes, well there you are. It wasn’t a thing it would have done to let out. We all had a lot to lose. Except maybe that Carobleat woman. She was quite capable of doing the stupidest things just for spite. She hated Rupert and poor old Gwill, although I always got on fairly well with her.”
“She hated Gwill? Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. That story of her being stuck on him was just to put you off something else. Roddy Gloss thought that one up.”
“To put us off what?”
“I’ll come to that in a minute. The point is that Joan was in the...the business along with the rest of us. As a matter of fact, it was her old man who’d started it some time before he died. You didn’t know that, did you? Anyway, there she was and we had to lump it. Everything would have gone nicely, even so, if only she’d kept her mouth shut. God, what a bitch!” Bradlaw grew rigid momentarily in his indignation, then drooped once more.
“You see,” he went on, “she took up with a certain bright character in that country village of hers over in Shropshire. That’s where she came from in the first place, and when her old man died she started going back for week-ends. And that”—Bradlaw jerked his head in contemptuous indication of the coffin’s occupant—“is what she found for herself.”
“You mean Barnaby became her lover?”
“Lover and father bloody confessor. She told him all about what was going on here in Flax. Names and everything.”
“How did you get to know that?”
“How did we get to know! We soon knew all right when we started getting letters from the blackmailing bastard.”
Purbright raised his brows. “He began threatening you, did he? You’d not feel too pleased about that, I expect.”
“Not as you’d notice. We tried to buy him off. Soon he was bleeding the whole thing white. You know what blackmailers are. They’re worse than murderers. Even the police say that. Judges, too.” Bradlaw was gesticulating eagerly. “One said something just last week about it being understandable that a chap had gone for the fellow who’d been screwing money out of him.”
“Cambridge Assizes,” Purbright murmured.
“Yes, that’s right. Cambridge.” Bradlaw seized on the confirmation as though it were a long lost wallet. “Well, then: you see how we were fixed. This fellow Barnaby sucking us dry from all that distance away. Poor old Hillyard nearly going off his rocker with worry. A doctor—I ask you. As for me, I didn’t know what I was doing half the
