“If you’ll tell me what the complaint is, sir...”
“Well of course I’ll tell you,” Mr Chubb retorted irritably. “That’s what I’m doing now. It’s about the man’s body, actually. Very distasteful. You’ll remember that after the post-mortem and the adjournment of the inquest the coroner issued a burial certificate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, well the family fixed the funeral for tomorrow. All the arrangements were made. The undertaker collected the body. Everything normal, everybody happy. And then, dash me if the blessed woman doesn’t ask to see the corpse.”
The chief constable shook his head.
“Very ill-advised. Just morbidity, you know, but there you are. They let her.
“And straight away she played Holy Harry. Wanted to know what business the hospital had to stamp her husband like something going through the customs. The hospital people said post-mortems were the business of the police and nothing to do with them, so she went along to her brother-in-law.
“He confirms what the woman says. Somebody, at some time, has stamped a black cross on the bottom of her husband’s foot. And it won’t come off.”
Chapter Fifteen
Sergeant Love and his posse swept up to the door of Aleister Lodge with something of the panache of a car full of bootleggers in a mid-1930s film. Mrs Gloss, alarmed and annoyed by the noise of the displacement of gravel, hurried from the house. She was in time to see the sergeant glance back with bland interest at the furrows in the drive while he fished a paper from his inside pocket.
The search of the grounds was lengthy, thorough, and, in the subsequently expressed opinion of Inspector Purbright, undeservedly fruitful.
The finds were distributed mainly in and around the grove of ash trees which earlier had attracted the attention of Constable Palethorp.
They included six empty wrappings representative between them of four different brands of prophylactic. Two of the packs were so worn and dirty as to be only just identifiable. Of the rest, one was almost new. It lay behind a tuft of grass in the lee of one of the four short pillars that supported a stone slab about eight feet long by two wide.
This slab was damp and green. It looked very old. The supports had sunk into the ground irregularly, and the slab leaned a little to one side.
Several dark brown splashes were discernible on the stone, a group of them at its higher end. A policeman noticed that dead leaves had been strewn about on the ground near by. He brushed them aside. Quite a lot of blood had soaked into the earth.
The policeman scrutinized this area inch by inch. Eventually he discovered a sliver of ruby glass. Nothing else.
A few yards away, just clear of the trees, one of his colleagues was busy with cast-making materials. He had seen in a bald patch of soft ground the impression of a tyre tread. It seemed identical in pattern with the tread of one of Persimmon’s tyres, blown-up photographs of which he had been using as a guide.
Constables three and four took turns-with notebooks and tape-measures. Painstakingly they charted from heelmarks and from crushed and stained grass the short haul of a body.
Farther away, incidental finds were made, less dramatic, but significant in context.
Two bottles, overlooked by a Folklore Society cleaning-up detachment the previous Thursday morning, contained still the potent lees of pumpkin champagne laced with rum.
A policeman who zealously, but with misgivings, investigated a small parcel he had found in the summerhouse censer, jumped when there fell out the shrivelled corpse of a bat. The creature’s shroud was a page of the Baptist Bugle embellished with a photograph of the Rev. William Harniss.
Lastly, high in the branches of a fine yew tree near the house, the searchers descried what at first appeared to be a great roosting bird of prey. It proved on closet eradication to be a black corset.
Sergeant Love himself made it his business to see that Mrs Gloss was given no opportunity to use the telephone.
He tried to offset the irritation his persistent presence obviously caused her by making a fuss of the big sleek cat which had appeared from the kitchen.
The cat walked round him three times, unhurriedly bit him on the calf, and strolled out.
Mrs Gloss told Love that if she ever saw him ill-treat an animal again she would have him removed from the Force.
At the home of the Goodings, Constable Brevitt did his best to cope with fauna of a different kind.
Out in the garden an enormous black dog paced up and down, baying, while a pair of macaws in a cage high in a corner of the living room were carrying on a dialogue that sounded like a continuous rail disaster.
Mrs Gooding appeared to find the uproar not only tolerable but enlightening. She smiled knowingly and every now and again glanced at Brevitt’s face as if to confirm some particularly unpleasant characteristic that the birds had just pointed out to her.
Questioning Mrs Gooding in such circumstances was not easy. Doggedly and without much imagination, Brevitt followed his brief.
Had she, on the night of the Folklore Society’s Revel, seen anything of a man called Bertram Persimmon? No. Or a Miss Edna Hillyard? Yes. With whom? Lots of different people. Did she know a Mr Persimmon? No. Had there been a fight at the Revel? No. Any unnatural practices? What an idea! Who had dressed up as a bull? She didn’t know what he was talking about. Who had put offensive articles in the parish church? Ask somebody else. On the door of Sir Henry Bird? How would she know. In the office of the Medical Officer of Health? Likewise.
Brevitt looked grim. He sighed through clenched teeth.
“If my George was here,” Mrs Gooding said, suddenly removing her regard from the birds and ferociously swinging her big, knobbly face close to Brevitt’s, “d’you know what we’d do?”
The policeman involuntarily reared back.
Again Mrs Gooding’s features were thrust up to his.
“We’d pray for you,” she growled.
One of the imported officers, a Brocklestone plain clothes man called Miller, had been assigned to call on Press Secretary Parkin.
Parkin was not at home. Nor was his sister, Amy. Miller learned from the woman next door that Miss Parkin did not normally return from school until nearly five o’clock.
“And Mr Parkin?”
“Isn’t he at the shop, then?”
“What shop?”
A chemist’s shop. Dispensing. Well, no, he’d not know, not if he was a stranger to Flax. But that’s where Mr Parkin would be. Amis and Jeffrey, in Eastgate.
Miller asked if the Parkins kept chickens.
The neighbour said that was a funny sort of question and who was he, anyway?
A buyer of cockerels, replied Miller, with spontaneous cunning. Black cockerels he was especially interested in.