“Half-past ten in the morning, sir,” said Malley. “And don’t worry. It’ll all be very straightforward, I’m sure.”
Inspector Purbright stood at the entrance to The Aspens and looked with distaste at the large, naked house. Its brick face was a raw red, as if it blushed still for the intrusion into a secluded outskirt by its first owner, a successful bootlace manufacturer. Behind the tall, symmetrical windows, green curtains had been drawn. The semicircular lawn, lightly frosted now, its flanking gravel drive and the laurel-planted beds beyond, all looked sour and sullen. They wore the depressing neatness of ground laid out expressly to save the bother of gardening.
Purbright entered the drive past a high, wrought iron gate that had been swung back against the hedge and latched to a concrete stop. He walked up to the porched, dun-coloured front door and knocked. Almost immediately, he was looking into the red-rimmed, frightened eyes of a woman of about fifty, whose face hung in grey folds around an incongruously full-blooded and pert little mouth.
Mrs Poole led him through a lofty corridor to her own sitting room at the back of the house. It smelled of damp laundry and biscuits. Purbright accepted a seat and watched the late owner’s housekeeper subside nervously into an armchair that looked more like a pile of old covers. She took the cigarette he offered, lit it with a paper spill and drew in the smoke like religion.
“An unpleasant experience for you, ma’am,” said the inspector.
“Shocking. Oh, shocking!” rustled the voice of Mrs Poole. She looked straight at him and twitched her sagging cheeks. “I shouldn’t have left him, you know.”
“You think not?”
“Oh, no. He should never have been on his own. I know that now. But I wasn’t to be sure before. Mind you, he didn’t ask me to stay. He’d never have done that. But now...” She went on staring at the mild, benign, yellow-haired man, apparently content that he had taken her meaning.
Purbright tried to do so. “He wasn’t too well; was that it?” he asked.
“He was well enough,” retorted Mrs Poole, “but health never would have saved him. What was waiting for him didn’t take account of whether he came running or wheeled in a chair.”
Purbright remembered Lintz’s estimate of the housekeeper. “Just you tell me what you think happened to him, then,” he invited.
The woman frowned and carefully tapped the ash from her cigarette into an empty tea cup by her chair.
“I don’t know whether you believe in phenomenons,” she began, pausing to sharpen her regard of the inspector, “but it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t. There are such things, though they take a bit of understanding. Some spiritualists—and I don’t call myself that, mind—some say there’s nothing but good in what comes to us in that way. But never you believe them. It stands to sense that if the living’s good and bad mixed, then those who’ve passed over are two sorts as well. Only even more so, if you see what I mean.”
She left off to poke the small, smouldering fire, but seemed to expect no comment. “What we call possession,” she resumed, “is just the bad kind getting hold of someone here to be spiteful with. That’s all in books, so there’s no call for Mr Clever-pants Lintz to be so certain of himself. Not that he ever worried about his uncle’s troubles. There’s none so blind as those who won’t see. Mr Lintz never even noticed when it started in the summer. His uncle wasn’t as scared then as he got afterwards, of course, but I could have told you to the day when he first knew—Mr Gwill, I mean.”
Purbright found the flow of urgent, husky speech fascinating in spite of his sense of time being wasted on a woman half frightened, half hypnotized by her own fancies. He listened in silence, gazing first at one piece of furniture, then another, but avoiding now the eyes which had brightened with the fever-fire of psychic exposition.
“It all started a month to the day after that one”—she jabbed with her cigarette towards the wall beside her—“was put in his grave. He’d always been a quiet sort, had Mr Gwill, but dignified, you know. He didn’t show his feelings as a rule. But four weeks after the funeral from next door, I saw him trembling and clenching in the big room as if he’d got pneumonia. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, ‘but are you feeling all right?’ He looked at me as if he’d never seen me before and shot straight out of the house. And he was never the same after that. Sometimes he was better, sometimes worse, but he couldn’t really settle.”
“I thought this man, Mr Carobleat, was a friend of his,” Purbright observed.
“A friend, sir?” Mrs Poole’s chubby mouth twisted in derision. “Him?”
“That’s only what I’ve been told.”
“Oh, they were thick enough at one time. That Mr Carobleat was always in and out. But he wasn’t Mr Gwill’s kind. I couldn’t stand him, he was that sly and for ever m’dear-ing me as if I was a barmaid or something. And he hung about so...”
Purbright looked back from contemplation of the dresser to catch Mrs Poole staring at the window behind him. “Yes,” he prompted, “go on.”
Mrs Poole straightened. She shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t think I should say any more, sir.”
Purbright waited but she remained silent.
At last he said, “You weren’t in the house last night, I understand.”
“No, sir. I’d gone over to my sister’s. I got the eight o’clock train back this morning.”
“Yes, I’m only sorry you could have had no warning. It must have been a shock.”
“Oh, the policeman here was very kind. He told me what...what had happened.” Mrs Poole delved into the bundle-like chair and drew out a small handkerchief, with which she nervously dabbed the end of her nose.
“Do you happen to know if Mr Gwill was worried about business affairs?”
Mrs Poole looked blank. “You’d have to ask Mr Lintz about that, sir.”
“He didn’t appear to think there was anything wrong.”
“Then there can’t have been, I suppose. Mr Gwill wouldn’t have said anything to me, in any case.”
“But he was upset about something?”
Again the woman’s eyes flickered towards the window. In a suddenly decisive tone she declared: “He was being pestered, sir, and that’s the top and bottom of it.”
The inspector leaned forward slightly. “By whom?”
“No one you could lay your hands on, sir.”
Back to where we started, Purbright told himself. “Would you say...” he said slowly, “...would you say that Mr Gwill knew precisely what he was doing when the accident happened?”
“Ac-cident?” The scornfully stressed first syllable expressed Mrs Poole’s opinion of people who supposed her late employer might ever have done anything save with reason and intention.
“You think,” suggested Purbright, “that he could have done what he did deliberately?”
Mrs Poole ground out her cigarette stub—it was surprisingly short, the inspector noticed—against the fire back, and flicked her fingers over her pinafore. “Not that, either,” she said. “He was trying to get away, that’s all. Poor soul,” she added, almost to herself.