His visitor, after taking two turns round the room, in order, Purbright supposed, to dissipate some of the momentum of his arrival, poised himself by the briefcase and flicked it open. He looked zestfully at the inspector. “Nicest little job I’ve had in years. Absolutely fascinating...” His glance went down to the papers he was drawing from the case. “I hardly know where to begin.”
“By sitting down, perhaps?” suggested Purbright unhopefully. Warlock chuckled and seemed to grow two inches taller there and then. He spread pages of typescript on the desk and rapidly reviewed the underlined sub-headings.
“Ah, well; we might as well start with the bath, eh? You were quite right about that. It was melted paraffin wax that had been brushed over the chipped parts and the metal plug seating. There were still traces of it, although I’d say the whole caboodle had been sluiced out afterwards with water from the hot tap. And the chain was still thickly waxed. Your lad saw that, didn’t he? Now then, what else...Oh, yes; spots of corrosion on both taps. Splashes, probably. Slight discolouration of vitreous enamel consistent with submersion in fairly highly concentrated sulphuric acid. Acid traces on bathroom floor...”
Warlock’s finger moved slowly down the page. “Wax on bath corresponded with solid deposit in basin in dining-room sideboard...” He looked up. “Queer slip, that: leaving the thing about. Never mind, that’s not my pigeon.” He read on. “No distinguishable fingerprints on basin, damn it—still, it would have been asking a bit much.”
“Drains,” announced Warlock after a brief pause. “We didn’t do too badly with drains.” While still keeping his eyes on the report, he felt for the black box and slipped its catch. “Analysis of contents of drain trap established presence of unusual quantities of fat and carbon compounds, possibly of animal derivation, also distinct calcium traces...you’re with me there, I suppose, squire?”
Purbright nodded. “The late Mr Hopjoy, I presume.” He received an approving beam from the expert.
“Mind you, you mustn’t get the idea that anything like actual identification is possible from this sort of thing. It’s all a bit tentative.”
“Oh, quite.”
“But circumstantially impressive, all the same.” Warlock sounded eager to please. “Naturally, there’d been some dilution of what went into the drain trap. Fat and acid tests were absolutely conclusive, though. I’m only sorry there wasn’t anything exciting in the solid line—plastic buttons, gold teeth fillings—you know.”
“Pity.”
Warlock lifted back the lid of his box. He drew a test tube from a small rack at the back of it. “This has flummoxed us, I admit. It had caught in that little grill thing under the plug.”
Purbright turned the tube round in his hand. Within it he saw a knotted loop of whitish, translucent fibre. He held it to the light. “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”
“Oh, mineral,” said Warlock. “Almost certainly nylon.”
“Out of a nailbrush, perhaps?”
“Too long. Anyway, it wouldn’t be joined up like that. It’s not out of a brush of any kind. Nobody at the lab. had a clue.”
“Are you worried about it?”
Warlock scowled indignantly and whisked the tube out of Purbright’s grasp. “Of course I’m worried about it. We haven’t been foxed by anything in this line since the Retford fly-paper case. Do you know, we spent two months making inquiries at jewellers about that cuff-link in old Mrs Hargreaves’s duodenum. In the end we traced it to the bloody surgeon who did the autopsy.”
He put the test tube back in its rack. “Oh, we’ll get some joy out of this, don’t you worry. I’m sending it off to the top bods in the artificial fibre industry. I expect they’ll check it with their gauge records or something.”
“It may be quite unconnected with the case, of course,” ventured Purbright, who was beginning to find Warlock’s forensic rhapsody a trifle wearing.
“Five pounds to a gnat’s navel it has absolutely nothing to do with it, squire. Elimination, though...that’s what counts with us, elimination.” He looked again at his report. “Now then; where were we? Ah, bloodstains...”
There were six sites of staining. The bathroom floor had been spotted. The wall splashes had proved, as expected, positive. Blood accounted for the mark on the razor blade found in the bathroom cabinet. Then there was the hammer head. Finally, careful search had disclosed a few smears on the stair carpet and on the concrete floor of the garage.
The last two had lent themselves admirably to the process of elimination. They were not of human origin. All the others were, and they belonged to the same common ‘O’ group.
“I don’t quite see how the razor blade fits in,” said Purbright. “It’s hardly likely to have been used as a weapon. I mean you don’t fell a bloke with a hammer and then cut his throat: that would be sheer ostentation. Anyway, we should have found more mess, surely?”
Warlock watched him with the secretly gleeful air of a conjuror whose audience falls for diversion while the best part of his trick is in preparation.
“I told you, didn’t I, that this case is absolutely marvellous?” His eyes gleamed. “Now then; what do you think of this?”
Purbright picked up the large photograph that had been slid triumphantly before him.
It appeared to be of a huge, round butcher’s block on to which a handful of canes had been carelessly tossed. The canes were partly embedded in a thick, tarry substance, spread irregularly over the surface of the block. They stuck out, some straight, some curving, at varying angles.
“This one’s been pulled up even farther.” Warlock tossed down a second photograph. The canes had become long, segmented stovepipes, jutting from some sort of dune, coarsely granular in texture. Purbright was reminded of surrealist seashore paintings.
“The hammer head,” announced Warlock.
“Ah, yes.”
Warlock waited. “Of course, you see what’s wrong.”
The inspector held the second enlargement at arm’s length and squinted judiciously. “To be perfectly honest...”
Impatiently, scornfully almost, Warlock leaned over and jabbed his finger at the stovepipes. “No crushing. No skin. No follicles.”
The triple negation sounded like a maximum sentence without possibility of appeal. Purbright nodded meekly. “You’re perfectly right, of course. Not a follicle in sight.”
Warlock sighed and took up a relatively relaxed pose behind Purbright’s chair. He pointed, more gently this time, at the prints.
“You see, squire, it’s reasonable to expect that hairs are going to stick to a hammer when it’s used to bash somebody’s head in. But they get squeezed between two hard surfaces—steel and bone—for a fraction of a second before the skull gives way. So naturally they ought to show damage. These don’t.
“Another thing: the hairs, or some of them, are bound to come out, roots and all. Plus the odd bit of skin, of course. But in this case...well, you can see for yourself.”
Purbright studied the photographs a little longer and said: “Obviously, we’ll have to come back to these. But perhaps you’d like to run over what’s left of the other things first.”