Blue Murder
Book 10 in the Flaxborough series with Inspector Purbright
Colin Watson
Chapter One
Friday was market day in Flaxborough. It was a somewhat tenuous survival, perhaps, but not yet an anachronism. Long departed, certainly, were the little wheeled huts—not unlike Victorian bathing machines—in which corn and seed chandlers shook samples from small canvas bags into the palms of farmers, each the size of a malt shovel, and invited them to “give it a nose”, whereupon the farmer would inaugurate the long and infinitely casual process of making a deal by observing unrancorously that he’d seen better wheat dug out of middens. Nor were animals any longer part of the market-day scene. The iron-railed pens and corridors; the weighbridge; the show ring, pooled with the pungent staling of bullocks and stained here and there with dried-off urine that looked like lemonade powder; the raised, half-round, open pavilion with a clock tower on top, where the auctioneers impassively interpreted twitches, nods and glances from the stone-faced butchers and dealers: all these had disappeared from the Market Place. So, too, had the drovers, those wondrously misshapen but agile men, who hopped, loped and darted among the sweating beasts and intimidated them with wrathful cries and stick-waving. In the long, black coats, roped around the middle, that they wore in all conditions of weather, the drovers of Flaxborough had looked like demented medieval clerics, bent on Benedictine and buggery.
The market-day crowds now were indistinguishable from those on any other day—or in any other town, for that matter. Not for many years had there existed the sharp contrast between townsmen and countrymen, expressed chiefly in the visitors’ dogged affectation of blue serge, brown boots, and a hank of sun-bleached hair, spittle-slicked over a brow the colour of new brick. These—the “country johnnies”, as they had been termed contemptuously by the girls of Flaxborough High School—had long since adopted the conformity of casualness in both dress and grooming, and were safely anonymous.
Yet Flaxborough Market flourished in its modified form and continued by virtue of a four-centuries-old charter to defy the rationalizing zeal of county and national government.
One Friday in early August, Police Constable Basil Cowdrey was strolling slowly past a row of stalls where home-cured bacon and hams, sausages and other vestiges of a cottage food industry were still to be bought. It was a good part of the market in which to encourage, by slow and diligent passage and re-passage, kindly thoughts concerning a policeman’s lot (to say nothing of respect for his powers of discernment in matters relevant to the Food and Drugs Acts) and Constable Cowdrey was prepared to be pleasantly surprised sooner or later by the deliverance into his custody of a pound of sausage, plump, meaty and well saged and peppered in the style of Moldham and Gosby Vale.
His first tour was unproductive. This did not disturb him. He went on past the vegetable sellers and stood for a while staring at a man who sheared lengths of dress material with an expression of pained reluctance upon his sweaty pugilist’s face.
The man grew aware of Constable Cowdrey’s presence. His shears were stilled and he moved his gaze just far enough to meet the policeman’s eye.
“Want something, son?”
The nostrils of Constable Cowdrey paled and twitched. Unhurriedly, he moved to the side of the stall, ducked his helmet to avoid the canvas awning, and loomed beside the sad-eyed proprietor like an army of occupation.
From this vantage-point, he contemplated the four or five women who were waiting to be served. He spoke quietly but with grave deliberation.
“Do there exist upon these premises suitable means for the washing of hands as required under the terms of the Borough bylaws relating to market trading and the control of slaughter-houses?”
The women looked at one another, then at the bolts of cloth, the stallholder, and the policeman once more. Two of them shook their heads vaguely.
The trader sighed. The shears resumed their partition of dress lengths. “Van,” he said.
“Van?” The quite superfluous mention of slaughterhouses in his own question recurred to Mr Cowdrey’s mind and confused him. He had been thinking too hard about sausages perhaps. Was this fellow going to try and make him look silly? “Van?” he repeated.
“That’s what I said, son.” The head of the cloth salesman gave an impatient, indicative jerk. PC Cowdrey looked behind him. At five or six yards’ distance, parked close to the West Row corner, was an elderly green Bedford. One rear door was open, trailing half a yard of pink material.
“That’s not premises,” the policeman said.
The salesman began parcelling a folded cloth length in a sheet of newspaper. “Not a slaughterhouse, neither,” he remarked to the woman nearest him. The woman glanced at PC Cowdrey and tittered.
Emboldened by this show of disrespect, two of the customers embarked on a spirited debate—ostensibly between themselves, but accompanied by so many meaningful glances at everyone within hearing that public oratory seemed their real purpose. Under discussion was the foolishness of authority in general and that of PC Cowdrey in particular.
“Washing hands is for food. Stands to sense. Comestibles. That’s food. Comestibles. Them [a wave at some rolls of tweed] isn’t bloody food, duck. He [a contemptuous finger pointed at Mr Cowdrey] doesn’t eat that uniform when he goes home to dinner. He’s got mixed up. He’s bloody smock-raffled. Don’t you [direct and stern regard upon the salesman] let yourself get pushed around, duck. He’s on about comestibles. Food. [To the world at large.] That’s right, isn’t it?”
PC Cowdrey knew that nothing weakens the force of law more surely and rapidly than irresponsible attempts to involve its representatives in what his sergeant termed “argy-bargy”. He turned upon his heel and stepped out at once towards the van, which, “premises” or no, he was confident would contain no more suitable means for the washing of hands than a wet flannel stuffed into an old biscuit tin.
It was an unfortunate moment for such decisiveness.
Into the narrow strip of the Market Place between stalls and pavement, from which wheeled traffic was excluded on a Friday, there had entered a vehicle of such imposing proportions that no one thought to challenge its progress through a prohibited area. This strengthened the delusion of the driver that he had chanced luckily upon some sort of clearway or by-pass, so he accelerated in order to take full advantage of it.
For a fraction of a second, PC Cowdrey’s brain marvelled at the message it was receiving from the far extremity of his optic nerve. Seemingly so close that he might lean upon it and mist with admiring breath its fawn-coloured coachwork, great crystal lamp glasses, and a radiator like a silver temple, was a Rolls Royce motor car.
Then admiration was transmuted into athletics. In one coordinated movement, PC Cowdrey made a ninety-degree reverse spin, simultaneously toppling back in the manner of a felled tree until his body was at the correct elevation and pointing in the right direction for his ready-primed leg muscles to propel him to safety. He leaped from the path of the Rolls like an ibis and, to the great wonder and approbation of the ladies who so recently had derided him, landed square in the middle of the wares of the cloth salesman, whose stall (or premises) collapsed and forthwith immured the policeman in a welter of canvas, spars and unfurling rolls of cloth.