At this point, there was a gentle tap on the door and Mrs Chubb, a fluffy, solicitous woman whom childlessness had rendered super-motherly towards all her husband’s ‘young men’, entered with two cups of tea. She beamed at Purbright, fleetingly surveyed the windows to ensure that he was not being exposed to a draught, and departed.
The inspector sipped his tea. “Carobleat must have fancied his position to be extremely strong,” he resumed. “He’d avoided certain ruin and a likely spell of imprisonment. His wife went on supplying him with his share of the proceeds from the one branch of his enterprise that continued to flourish, posthumously, as it were. And he had a firm hold—or so he thought—over the associates he’d left behind, none of whom would be likely to risk exposure. He could rely on his wife watching them and also conducting a rearguard action against the inquisitive police while she wore black for the man with whom she spent every other weekend over in Shropshire.
“Incidentally, Carobleat must have been highly amused by the falling into his wife’s lap of the sizeable lump of insurance he’d had the foresight to provide for when the idea of ‘dying’ first occurred to him.
“Then something happened that he hadn’t bargained for.
“He had quite a lot of money standing to his credit, and he’d naturally made arrangements to recover as much of it as he could. He had probably lodged with Gloss a simple will whereby the poor little widow would inherit the lot—less duty, that couldn’t be helped—and hang on to it, together with the insurance, until it it was safe for the pair to re-unite in Bermuda or somewhere.
“But up turns a will of a very different kind. To everyone’s surprise, the late Mr Carobleat proves to have made over all his possessions to his good friend and neighbour, Mr Gwill. Never mind if the will is a forgery. Carobleat’s wife can’t do anything. And Carobleat himself is scarcely the best person to contest it. So Gwill cleans him out, doubtless having agreed to split with the others later on.”
Chubb shook his head gravely. “It’s a damnably unethical business, Mr Purbright. I find it almost incredible that professional men could have taken part in a conspiracy of that kind.”
“Anyway,” Purbright went on, “it proved a more dangerous adventure than they’d imagined. They’d underestimated Carobleat hopelessly. He was an exceedingly resourceful man and an unforgiving one. And he had that enormous advantage of being officially non-existent. It was as good as a cloak of invisibility.
“I think we can take it that he’d been back to Flaxborough at odd times during the past six months. He’d bought himself a new car, probably through his wife, and although an accident involving a request for his licence would have been awkward, there wouldn’t have been much risk provided he came and went during darkness. It seems he even got in touch with Gwill once or twice by going between the two back gardens. That would account for poor old Mrs Poole’s obsession with walking corpses. What he would really be after, I fancy, was assurance that no double-crossing was being contemplated.
“Eventually, he must have learned the truth. The others couldn’t stall for ever. Once he knew what was going on, he wasted no time.
“He first avoided the danger of his wife being suspected later on by getting her to spend the week-end at the inn near his cottage. He drove overnight to Flaxborough, let himself into his old house, and fixed up the cable he’d brought with him. It so happened that Mrs Poole actually saw him running the wire along the hedge, but luckily for him her wits were in no fit state to grasp what it meant.
“While he was biding his time in the house, he rang round to Hillyard, Gwill, Bradlaw and Gloss and asked them to meet him in Gwill’s house late that night. According to Bradlaw’s statement, Carobleat asked for what he called a ‘friendly settlement’ that would include his getting out of the country. They talked it over among themselves and agreed to meet him. Bradlaw says that Hillyard was then in favour of killing Carobleat quietly and burying him in the garden, but the others shied at the idea because the ground would be hard.
“Bradlaw deliberately arrived late for the meeting. He hoped that if there were trouble he would be in nice time to miss it. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to stay away altogether”—Purbright consulted one of the sheets he had taken from his case—“and ‘risk being let down by those twisters’ as he put it. Bradlaw is something of a self-made man, sir; not very articulate, but shrewd,” explained the inspector.
“I’m interested to know how Gwill was lured out on his own,” said the Chief Constable. “He also was a shrewd fellow, as I remember.”
“He wasn’t lured out on his own, sir. The other three were with him. All Carobleat had needed to do after sluicing his neighbour’s drive to earth the victim nicely (it wasn’t Gwill at the gate when Wilkinson’s witness cycled by—he just assumed it was) was to switch on the power and make a phone call to next door.
“He said he’d hurt his leg and would be obliged if his friends would come round. They had no reason to refuse, so off they went. It was pure chance that Gwill reached the gate first. According to Bradlaw, he ‘jumped like a rabbit full of buckshot and went slap down on the gravel’. He goes on: ‘We all thought he’d been shot, although we had heard nothing. I opened the gate and there was nobody there...’ ”
“He opened the gate!” exclaimed Chubb. “Bradlaw, you mean?”
“Yes, sir. The discharge through Gwill must have blown the fuses in Carobleat’s house. Anyway, this is how Bradlaw’s statement goes on:
“ ‘The three of us picked Marcus up and carried him back into the house. Rupert Hillyard took a good look at him and said he was dead. He said he thought he had been electrocuted. We agreed it might look bad for us, so we decided to put the body over in the field opposite. Roddy Gloss pulled the gate open with a walking stick in case it was still alive. We put the body in the field. I think it was Roddy’s idea to lay it under the pylon to make it look like an accident. While we were still in the field, a car came out of Carobleat’s place and shot off up the road. It must have been him.’ ”
“Upon my soul!” said Chubb.
He stared for a while into his empty cup. “Tell me, though—why did Bradlaw tell you that rigmarole about Barnum—Barnaby—whatever his name was?”
Purbright shrugged and smiled. “A forlorn effort to save what was left of his professional reputation, I believe, sir. Always at the back of poor old Bradlaw’s mind was the thought of that fearfully unethical funeral trick; he’d played last summer. Keeping that quiet seemed more important to him than anything else. It even blinded him to the absurdity of his story about a blackmailer who tried to kill off his benefactors.”
“Yes,” said Chubb, “that would have been rather foolish, wouldn’t it?”