“Oh, yes,” Purbright agreed, with a shade of querulousness.
“You’re still confident poor Gwill was deliberately, er...”
“Quite, sir.”
“Mmm...” Mr Chubb regarded his yellow knitted gloves. “Anything turned up since last we talked about it?”
Purbright salvaged his file from the drawer into which he had pushed it a few moments before and turned over a few pages of notes. “I had quite an interesting conversation with Mr Smith, of the Eastern Provinces,” he announced.
“Percy Smith. Oh, yes; I know him very well. Extremely sound on coarse fishing. Not terribly forthcoming, though, as a rule.”
“No, sir,” Purbright agreed, drily. “But he did confide that Gwill was a beneficiary under the will of the late Mr Harold Carobleat—they were next door neighbours, if you remember, sir—in spite of the widow having been left nothing. And he also admitted that Gwill received and deposited sums of money in cash that appeared to have had nothing to do with his newspaper business.”
“Goodness me,” said the Chief Constable, tonelessly. He looked at Love, then back to Purbright. “Do you suppose that what Smith told you—the money side of it, one might say—had anything to do with the poor fellow coming to a sticky end? Of course,” he added hastily, “that will business sounds absolutely incredible. It does, really.”
Purbright replied that it was beginning to appear, in his opinion, that Gwill’s mysterious source of income might have had a great deal to do with his death and, further, that the arranging and accomplishment of his murder could no longer be assumed to have been the work of a specific individual.
“You think several people might have been in it?”
“Three, sir. Probably four. Perhaps even five.”
“Not Flaxborough people, surely?” There was a note of pleading in Mr Chubb’s voice.
“Those I have in mind are no strangers to the town, sir.”
The Chief Constable compressed his thin mouth, walked slowly across to Purbright’s desk and actually drew up a chair for himself. Then he sighed and said: “You’d better give me the names, my boy. Might as well know where we are. You could be wrong, of course.”
“Oh, certainly,” Purbright agreed. “I hope I am. But if it turns out that only one person did it, after all, it will be rather nice to feel that four citizens have been restored, as you might say.”
He went on, briskly: “As a matter of fact, you have the names already. I ran over them when I saw you after the inquest opening. They are all the obvious ones, of course, but I see no reason for discarding them on that account. Gloss presents an interesting study. He is a man whom professional training should have taught to leave no part of his dealings with the dead man capable of being interpreted unfavourably. Yet scarcely is the crime discovered before he is round to see you, sir, with hints of secret knowledge and personal danger. He admits to me his presence in Gwill’s house on the night of the murder. He is surprisingly frank about certain financial aspects of his client’s affairs. He gives all sorts of unexpected replies to questions. In short, he asks so persistently to be suspected that we can be quite sure he is trying to lead us along a blank alley, at the end of which he will have no difficulty in refuting any specific charge we might feel constrained to level against him.”
Love looked on in undisguised admiration of Purbright’s dialectic. Then he glanced to see how Mr Chubb was taking it.
The Chief Constable roused himself to ask: “But what hard evidence have you to support all this? It sounds—if you’ll forgive me saying so—just a fraction theoretical. I must admit,” he added almost with warmth, “that I never suspected you of applying such...such a wealth of psychology, as you might say. I’d always thought traffic was your forte. But it’s the unexpected that really puts us all to the test. Pity, in one sense, that we’re rather badly off for crime round here. Nastiness is as much as most of them can rise to.”
“Then there is Doctor Hillyard,” Purbright went on, keeping to his own track. “Hillyard was Gwill’s doctor and on fairly close social terms with him. He also was present at his home on the night of the murder. It may or may not be significant that Hillyard was the doctor in attendance upon Harold Carobleat at the time of his death six months ago.”
Mr Chubb started and puffed out his cheeks. “Oh, look here,” he said, then subsided and murmured, “Good Lord,” with great restraint.
“Yes, sir?” Purbright inquired respectfully.
“Well,” said the Chief Constable, “it’s only that you’ve mentioned this chap Carobleat several times before. If you’re going to bring him up again, at least you might explain what he has to do with all this. I really don’t see the connection, except through the widow woman, so to speak.”
“That is one connection, certainly,” Purbright agreed. “But I think I also mentioned Carobleat’s will, didn’t I, sir?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Which only turned up fairly recently.”
“I don’t remember your saying that.”
“No, sir. But that is what happened. And in view of the fact that Mr Gloss proves to have been Carobleat’s solicitor as well as Gwill’s, we might be forgiven for finding the unorthodoxy of the chain of events that began with Carobleat’s death somewhat disquieting. Particularly”—he forestalled another interruption—“as it is fairly clear that Carobleat, Gwill, Gloss, Hillyard and the undertaker Bradlaw were originally concerned together in some enterprise that they succeeded in keeping remarkably private, but which, if I am not mistaken, was illegal.” Purbright paused, then added with the air of having given the point some consideration, “And immoral, to boot.”
Mr Chubb looked shocked. Love, too, seemed taken aback—but rather in the manner of a schoolboy who succeeds in getting two packets of cigarettes from a kicked slot machine instead of one.
“Well, you know best what lines to work along, Purbright,” said Mr Chubb, “but do try and keep a charitable view of these people. Until you know the worst, of course. I don’t believe in sentiment where criminals are concerned. But background counts for a lot with me. Chaps don’t usually go off the rails overnight after years and years of being useful and respectable citizens.”
Purbright looked up from his papers and smiled. “No, sir,” he said. “Some of them are off the rails all the time but manage to keep the fact to themselves.”
The telephone on the desk rang. “Take it at the switch, will you, sergeant,” Purbright said to Love, “and tell whoever it is I’m engaged.”
“Don’t mind me, my boy,” Mr Chubb protested, but Love was already through the door and the bell did not ring again.
A few moments later, the sergeant came hurrying back into the office. His cherubic composure looked strained. “Excuse me—sir.” he said carefully to Purbright, “but perhaps you ought to know straight away. That was Mrs Gloss on the phone. The solicitor’s wife. She says Mr Gloss is dead. Someone took a stab at him as he was coming into his house a little while ago. That is what she alleges—sir.”