“I am inclined to the view,” he said, “that Gwill said what he did after having conveyed for reasons best known to himself a false impression of our relationship to some other person. This hypothetical third party, it may be, was fobbed off with the story that I had been given custody of monies of which he had been deprived, in order that he would make no direct or violent attempt to recover them from Gwill himself. As things have turned out, it appears that the ruse did not save Gwill from the revenge of the person he had provoked. But what very naturally concerns me, inspector, is that someone who has shown himself capable of murder is now at large and possibly obsessed with the notion that only I now stand between him and what he considers his due.”
At the end of this speech, Gloss turned slowly from the window and stood facing Purbright. “I trust,” he said, “you will now appreciate why I made the request—of which your Chief Constable has doubtless acquainted you—for police protection; and why I have disclosed to you what would normally be regarded as professionally confidential matters.”
Purbright rubbed his chin and sighed. He found the ponderous rectitude of Gloss’s recital tiring and an obstacle to his selection of suggestive facts.
“I wonder,” he said at last, “if you would care to tell me where you were on Monday night, Mr Gloss?”
The sudden change of subject seemed to set the solicitor thumbing hastily through some mental brief. “Monday night...Monday...”
“Yes. The night Gwill was killed.”
“Ah...” The court manner was returning. Some surprising revelation, clinching a case, confounding a prosecutor, vindicating a wronged client, was about to be tossed, with studied carelessness, before the bench. “Curiously enough, inspector”—Gloss slowly lowered himself back into his chair and gazed earnestly over interlaced fingers held just above his chin—“I spent Monday evening at the home of Marcus Gwill and stayed until after he was dead.”
Chapter Eight
“I suppose you would think me facetious if I were to ask if you killed him,” Purbright said.
“Not at alclass="underline" the question is a proper one in the circumstances,” Gloss conceded. “But I’m afraid my answer will not help you very much. It is no.”
Purbright took out a notebook. “I’m my own secretary today,” he remarked wryly. “I hope you won’t be put off by feeling sorry for me, but I really must take a statement after what you’ve just said.”
“Naturally. I have given the matter some thought and I feel that to give a frank account of what I know of the events of the other evening is the least I can do for the sake of my late client and”—Purbright looked up in time to see a man-of-the-world shrug—“of others.”
“Yourself included, sir?”
“Of course.”
“And Jonas Bradlaw?”
Gloss held up his hand. “You must not anticipate my statement, inspector.” He looked at his watch and listened. Above the muffled sounds of traffic, a horn sounded briefly. A ship’s siren moaned in the estuary beyond Flaxborough dock. There was a light step to the door, a knock, and a plump, spotty girl edged her way in with a tray. Gloss put away his watch and beamed a quick, unmeant smile at her. “Promptitude,” he said to Purbright when she had gone, “is one of the qualities most difficult to inculcate into one’s office staff today.”
Purbright grunted and put his cup on the desk beside him. He opened the notebook and looked expectantly at the solicitor, who took a sip of his tea and began slowly to dictate.
“Rather late on Monday night—it must have been approximately eleven-thirty—I left my home and walked to the house of Mr Marcus Gwill. I do not normally retire to bed early and a stroll about midnight is not an uncommon exercise for me, so you must not imagine that there was anything extraordinary in my being abroad on that particular night. I do not pretend, however, that the visit to Gwill was in response to a mere whim. He had telephoned me a short time previously and intimated that there was a matter of some urgency he wished to discuss.
“I recall nothing noteworthy about my walk along Heston Lane. I met no one I recognized, although there were several people about who might conceivably have recognized me. It would be about a quarter to twelve when I arrived.
“Another acquaintance of Gwill’s was already there. I say acquaintance; actually it was his doctor, the Scotsman Hillyard, whom you probably know. Like myself, he stood in a somewhat closer relationship to Gwill than a purely professional one. When I found him in the drawing-room, I concluded that some sort of a conference was intended, although Gwill had not explained over the telephone what he had in mind. I did not suppose the occasion to be of a purely social nature.”
Gloss paused to look at Purbright’s lightly pencilled shorthand worming between the lines. “Please tell me,” he said, “if I am forging too far ahead of that admirable squiggle.”
“Not at all, sir,” said Purbright, evenly. “My squiggle likes a fleet quarry. But I should like my cup of tea now, if you don’t mind.” And he drank it. “Will you go on from ‘social nature’, sir?”
Gloss frowned, then smoothly resumed.
“Hillyard was seated by the fire and drinking a glass of whisky. He appeared contemplative. Gwill fetched a glass for me and invited me to help myself from the decanter. He took nothing to drink himself; he was an abstainer, you know. I noticed he was chewing, however, and I remember feeling a little irritated at the sight of his jaws working away. Adult sweet-eaters invariably annoy me. They seem furtively self-indulgent and sensual in a horrid, immature way. I mention the fact of Gwill’s chewing because it explains why I can tell you very little of something that occurred almost immediately after my arrival, something which I think now may have been of significance.
“The telephone rang, and Gwill took the call in the room where we were sitting. As he listened, he put another loathsome sweet-meat into his mouth, and I was so preoccupied with the way his mastication moved the telephone earpiece up and down that I failed to take any notice of the conversation. There was no doubt of its outcome, though, for Gwill put the instrument down and hastened out of the house with no more than a mumble about being back in a few minutes.”
Gloss paused, then looked very solemnly at Purbright. “He did not come back and I never saw him again. Hillyard and I waited for perhaps half an hour. Then I went upstairs to ask Mrs Poole if she had any idea of where he might have gone and to request her to remain awake until his return. She was not there, of course. Hillyard and I could think of nothing practical to do in the circumstances and so we left the house and walked to our respective homes.”
Purbright glanced up. “Did you lock the door of the house, sir?”
“We decided it would be better to leave it insecure than to risk his having taken no key and being obliged to break a window or something of that kind.”
“You felt no anxiety on his behalf other than being worried about locking him out?”
“None. Why should we? As a matter of fact, we both took it for granted that he was visiting some house fairly close at hand. It was only later that I realized the unlikelihood of that having been the case.”