corridor below.
She stopped before a door almost at the end. They were at the back of the house. The air was cold and damp.
Mrs Poole looked at him earnestly. “Do you know when they’ll be bringing him home?” she asked. “I thought I’d better keep this room ready.”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you definitely, but it shouldn’t be later than tomorrow. You understand that what we call a post-mortem examination has had to be made?”
“I see.” She opened the door quietly and motioned him in. The room was dim but the outlines of its few pieces of furniture showed it to be spacious and arranged with austere practicality. Purbright walked slowly across to the window, pulled the curtain slightly aside, and looked out.
Below was the large back garden, dank and shrubby. A line of poplars screened its end like huge brooms stuck handles down in the earth. Weak winter sunshine fell aslant one of the two flanking walls. The bushes were motionless and dark against the frost-whitened soil.
Purbright let the curtain fall and re-crossed the room. The woman said nothing. He went past her and waited for her to close the door. Her eyes, he saw, had become slow and devoid of expression, like raisins in the dough of her face.
He put his hand on her arm. “What has been frightening you, Mrs Poole?”
She looked up and caught her breath. Then she gave a jerky little smile and replied: “Nothing frightens me, sir. Not now. I think it’s over.”
She began to lead the way back along the passage.
Chapter Three
Inspector Purbright did not pay his promised call on the lonely widow of Mr Carobleat. As he walked out through the open gate of The Aspens, he noticed activity in the field beyond the fence on the opposite side of the road and crossed over.
Detective Sergeant Sidney Love was gloomily trudging around in the grass, followed closely by a confused- looking uniformed constable. As Purbright joined them, he saw a small wooden stake driven into the ground a few feet from the base of the power supply mast.
Love eyed him without enthusiasm. “We’ve taken measurements, sir.”
Purbright gazed up at the pylon. “What an odd perch for a newspaper proprietor,” he murmured. “Power without responsibility, I suppose.”
“Is there anything else we can do?” Love asked. “It’s jolly cold here.”
“Have you measured the height of the cable arm?”
“What, climbed up, do you mean, sir?” The sergeant looked incredulously at the steel network.
“Maybe it’s pointless,” Purbright conceded. “Call it twenty-five feet, shall we? No, twenty-seven—that’ll sound as if we really know.” He walked slowly round the stake, scuffing the grass here and there with his shoe. “Nothing round here, Sid?”
“What had you in mind, sir?”
Purbright looked at Love from under his brows. “Clues,” he said. “Cloth fibres. Nail parings. Dust from a hunch-backed grocer’s shop. You know.”
“Wilkinson here found a mushroom.”
“In December?”
“It wasn’t up to much. I advised him to throw it away.”
“In that case we might as well get back into town. I’ve already spent a useless half hour in that mausoleum over there. Mrs what’s-her-name should flee to relatives before she works herself into a state of demoniac possession.”
Love glanced at him. “She gave you that sort of tale, did she?”
“She did indeed. It was rather like the ‘Cat and the Canary’. Come on; you’re right, it is cold.”
“Mrs Poole isn’t the only one with queer ideas about this business.” Love kicked the stake from side to side, drew it out and handed it to the constable. “There’s talk at some of the farms about hauntings and what have you. That’s right, isn’t it, Wilk?”
Wilkinson frowned as he waited for the others to climb over the fence. “Mind you, sir,” he said to Purbright, “it wouldn’t do to believe everything they say down this end. They think telling lies is a great joke down here—more especially if it’s likely to give us fellows a job to do for nothing.”
“Yes, but you told me you’d heard this latest tale direct from a cousin or something,” Love put in.
“That’s right, sir,”
“Go on then, man,” urged the sergeant.
Wilkinson looked a little resentful. He had not intended a piece of country gossip, passed on in an effort to cheer a chilled and chilly C.I.D. man, to be officially reported to the bland and (he had heard) “sarky” inspector. But Purbright, walking now almost paternally between them, turned upon the constable a look of kindly encouragement.
“Well, sir,” said Wilkinson, “I’ve no reason to believe this nor to expect you to, but according to this relative of mine—he has a garage a bit along the road there—some of the country people have had the notion for a while now that some sort of a ghost was trying to get into Mr Gwill’s house. It sounds daft, put like that”—the constable reddened—“and I wouldn’t think of repeating such nonsense except for something this chap says he saw himself latish on last night. He was cycling home from town when he saw Mr Gwill just behind that gate of his and
