A geranium flush spread rapidly from neck to hat brim.
“Never! Certainly not! I have worked with Mr Winge for many years and known him up to that quite inexplicable affair today as a public-spirited and very religious gentleman!”
“Thank you, Miss Pollock. We are deeply obliged to you.”
Purbright rose and walked to the door.
The raincoat, surmounted by Miss Pollock’s round and indignant little head, glided out.
As the door closed, Malley suddenly flapped his hand in the air.
“Hey, hang on a minute...what about her statement?” He wound a sheet of paper into the typewriter.
Purbright said never mind, the deposition could be signed later; he’d have it sent round to her.
Thoughtfully, he resumed his seat behind the big, shabby desk.
“You know, Bill,” he said, “I don’t think she was quite as unprepared for old Steve’s crack at her virtue as she pretends.”
Malley began jabbing keys with two plump forefingers. “Oh, aye?” He watched the keys closely all the time, as if some might otherwise escape their share of punishment.
“I reckon she’d seen signs before. Her reaction to my asking her was a little too righteous to be convincing.”
Malley grunted. He was scraping out a misplaced letter with the tip of what looked like a hunting knife.
“Mind you,” Purbright went on, “it would be surprising if Winge had managed to gallop round like a rutting stag night after night without somebody noticing something. Even Doctor Jekyll couldn’t stop Mr Hyde peeping out occasionally at an inconveni...”
“They tell me you’ve got the Crab!”
In the doorway had appeared the cherubic features of Sergeant Love, bright with good news.
“So it would seem,” said Purbright. “You can let your young lady out again now, Sid.”
Love closed the door carefully behind him.
“My landlady won’t half be disappointed,” he said. “She’s been going up as far as the canal end every night this week, in hopes.”
“Have you fixed the inquest yet, Bill?”
“Tomorrow afternoon. Old Amblesby’s down in Cornwall, or somewhere, so I’ve had to call out Thompson. He’s not sat as deputy coroner since 1953. He’s bloody terrified.”
“I don’t know that he need be,” said Purbright, lightly. “It’s a straightforward enough case.”
Malley stopped typing and looked around.
“Didn’t I tell you who was doing the P.M., then?”
“No, you didn’t, as a matter of fact.”
“Heineman.”
“Oh,” said Purbright. He looked a fraction less carefree.
“And perhaps I didn’t mention that Winge’s family are getting both his solicitor and his own doctor to attend the inquest.”
“Solicitor....” Purbright frowned. “That wouldn’t be Justin Scorpe, would it?”
“It would.”
“And who’s the doctor?”
“Meadow.”
Love looked blandly from the inspector to the coroner’s officer.
“What’s the idea, then?”
“The family”—Malley leaned back in his chair and champed experimentally on the stem of a squat, black pipe—“are not very pleased.”
He fished a tobacco tin from the distorted breast pocket of his tunic, levered off its lid, and began ramming liquorice-like strands into the pipe bowl.
“I fancy that what they’ll be putting Meadow up to say is that the old man was suffering from something or other that caused him to be unaware of what he was doing. You know—very sad, but a sight more respectable than jumping on young women just because he felt like it.”
Love showed by a shrewd pursing of lips that he understood the logic of such strategy. He looked at the inspector.
Purbright murmured to himself: “Thompson...Heineman...Meadow...”
“They’re all doctors, you see,” Malley explained to Love.
“So what?”
“So,” said Malley, with great cheerfulness, “they all hate one another’s guts.”
Chapter Seven
The ignominious but, most citizens agreed, not undeserved end of the Flaxborough Crab was common knowledge long before the inquest was opened in the little dun-coloured courtroom adjoining the police station.
Alderman Steven Winge had been one of those public figures whose appearance on platforms, at committee tables and in chairs of jurisdiction and debate would seem to be inevitable and of limitless term. No week in the past thirty years had gone by without his having declared something open, or moved a vote of some kind, or given careful consideration to all the facts of a disturbing case.
Except in his role of magistrate, which entailed nothing but determination and sorrow, if Mr Winge’s court pronouncements were to be believed, his every duty in a lifetime’s service to the Flaxborough community had been prefaced by the assertion: ‘It gives me great pleasure...’
If bliss be a cumulative emotion, one could only assume that the waters of Gosby Reservoir had closed upon a supremely happy man.
But it was now plain to all that there had been another field of activity, private as distinct from public, that had engaged the alderman’s energies. It doubtless also had given him great pleasure. Would that day’s official inquiry in Fen Street unearth the regrettable details? Flaxborough devoutly hoped so.
The deputy coroner, Dr Thompson, took his seat at two o’clock precisely. He had been looking at his watch all morning and had spent the last half-hour lurking nervously in the corridors of the police station. Public office did not give him great pleasure; he cursed the proper holder of this particular one, Mr Albert Amblesby, as an irresponsible, cavorting, brain-softened old absentee. Which was not strictly fair, as the real coroner—admittedly senile, but in general reliably on hand—was at that moment comatose in a Cornish nursing home after falling downstairs during a visit to his married daughter in Truro.
Sergeant Malley, unhurried, efficient, kindly, stood behind Dr Thompson’s right shoulder. He held a sheaf of depositions ready to be slipped one by one in their right order before the deputy coroner as the witnesses were called.
Purbright was at the corner of the table farthest from Thompson. Next to him sat Dr Heineman, pathologist at the General Hospital. Also at the table, equidistant from Heineman and the deputy coroner, and carefully refraining from meeting the eye of either, was Dr Meadow.
The non-medical witnesses—Miss Pollock, Mrs Crunkinghorn, a fireman called Hackett, and the alderman’s widow, Mrs Olivia Winge—occupied a row of chairs beneath the room’s only window.
In a chair on his own, notebook on knee, was Henry Popplewell, of the Citizen.
At four minutes past two, a man arrived carrying a briefcase, a pile of books, and a spectacle case that might at a pinch have accommodated a brace of duelling pistols. He glanced mournfully round the court and took a place at the table opposite the deputy coroner by economically combining a deep bow with the motion of sitting down.