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 time.”
“And Gwill?” said Purbright, casually. “Was Gwill worried?”
“Of course he was. Not as much as me, perhaps. I take these things very badly. But he was very upset, all the same.” Bradlaw brightened suddenly. “That’s why he did away with himself. Don’t you see now? He was driven to it.”
“Was Gloss driven to it, as well?”
Bradlaw frowned. “How do you mean? Roddy didn’t commit suicide. He was killed.”
“By whom?”
“By that devil, of course.” He stretched his arm towards the coffin. “In cold blood. That’s the sort he was.”
Purbright seemed suddenly to have remembered something. “Excuse me a minute,” he said to Bradlaw; then, beckoning to Love to follow, he walked to the door. The constable opened it. Inspector and sergeant stepped out into the yard.
A few moments later, Purbright returned alone. Facing Bradlaw once more, he produced his own notebook. “We work on a shift system, you see.” Bradlaw, bolder now, managed to smile for a second.
Purbright unscrewed his pen. “Right. Will you go on from what you were saying?”
“I suppose,” said Bradlaw in a lowered voice, “you’d like me to get round to the other business now?” He glanced at the coffin.
“It’s up to you.”
“Has Hillyard...?”
Purbright said nothing. Bradlaw stared at him doubtfully. Then, “Of course, he’s a sick man,” he said, with the air of breaking bad news. “You understand that. I could do nothing with him once he’d started.
“It was when Roddy was killed that he seemed to make up his mind. Up to then, we’d never even seen Barnaby. We didn’t know where to find him. The money had had to be addressed post-what-do-you-call-it at Shrewsbury. But Rupert managed to pump a girl he knows at the telephone exchange here. She found out where Barnaby had made some calls to Joan Carobleat. It was a public kiosk and we guessed he must live nearby.
“Rupert got hold of a map and I agreed to take him over in the van. I thought the idea was to find Barnaby and to frighten him into letting us alone. I was in such a state I was ready to try anything.”
Bradlaw paused and shivered. “Look, can’t we go somewhere else? This place is freezing.”
Purbright stretched the arm with which he had been writing. “It is on the bleak side,” he conceded. “Try and hang on until the sergeant gets back, though, can you? He’ll not be long.”
“It’s hard to think in here, that’s all,” Bradlaw grumbled. “Still, if you say so...”
“Did you find Barnaby’s place?”
“Oh, we found it all right. But he wasn’t there. I tried to persuade Rupert to leave well alone. Instead of that, he started prowling round the place and found a window that was open a bit. He climbed in and let me in through the back door. It was then that I realized what he was up to. As I passed him, I spotted that drug case of his sticking out of his pocket. It gave me a shock, I can tell you.”
“You both went into the cottage, then?”
Bradlaw nodded. Then he looked sharply at the inspector. “I haven’t said it was a cottage, have I?”
“No; that’s true,” said Purbright quietly.
Bradlaw let this pass, but his manner became perceptibly more careful. “Rupert put the case down on a bench in the kitchen and took a syringe out of it. There were some tiny bottles there as well and he broke the top off one of them. Then he filled the syringe from it and went stalking round the place, looking into cupboards. After a bit, he came back to the kitchen table and squirted what was in the syringe into some milk that was standing there ‘That’ll have to do,’ he said, and I said, ‘You’re not trying to poison him, are you?’ and he said no, it was a drug to make Barnaby sleepy and less likely to go for us. I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth, but I didn’t argue.