Plaster Sinners
Book 11 in the Flaxborough series with Inspector Purbright
Colin Watson
Chapter One
Detective Sergeant Sidney Love had that happy degree of appreciation of works of art that is unlikely ever to become soured by scholarship. Nor was he acquisitive by nature, if the single exception be made of a complete set of “Giants of Steam” that was his legacy from an uncle who had smoked himself to death in the cigarette card era. As an aesthete, he was an all-rounder; honest and unpretentious: a sunset man, not soppy over gnomes, but ever ready to be pleased by a waterfall. Of cottages, too, he highly approved.
It was upon a cottage—or upon a representation of one—that Sergeant Love was gazing at ten minutes to nine one Thursday morning in the Volunteers’ Hall, Flaxborough.
At half-past ten there was to begin one of the town’s regular sales by auction of valuable antiques, that being the trade term for broken furniture, thrown-out pictures, cracked crockery, out-worn domestic machinery and discarded odds and ends of domestic adornment.
Most of the dealers had taken their view and had gone outside to drink from flasks of coffee in the cabs of their pick-up trucks or leaning on their estate Wagons. The more observant had noticed Love’s presence in the hall. It added to the interest of the occasion a possibility that one or more of the lots were on the police’s stolen list.
But the sergeant was not in search of stolen property. He was off duty until lunch-time and had been turning over in his mind the adventurous idea of actually taking part in the bidding. A model of a cottage, a bas-relief plaster cast, painted and framed, strongly commended itself to Love as a suitable tribute to his young lady, whose “Ooo, dinky!” he had learned over a courtship of several years to value as the highest encouragement of his intentions in that direction.
He looked about him and considered.
All the goods on offer in the well-heated but dreary building were arranged in moveable rows at the further end, with big articles such as wardrobes towering darkly against the yellow-painted brick wall. In front of the wardrobes were stacked tables and cupboards and commodes; gramophones that would still wind up and clocks that would not; a bread mixing bowl and a magic lantern and a set of records to teach Spanish; a bundle of golf clubs and a public house mirror advertising stout; a game suitable for all the family called Trippo; four refrigerators; a gas cooker with a herb-drying attachment; a meat safe; half an Encyclopaedia Britannica; a urinal and a knitting basket. There were other remarkable things of which Love took no notice.
The cottage upon which he had set his desire was at great remove from all these. It was not even dignified by a lot number of its own, having been tossed into one of a number of trays and shallow boxes in which miscellaneous bric-a-brac was offered for sale in small and unrelated batches. The cottage was accompanied by a pair of mauled golf balls, a tumbler formerly belonging to the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, a small meat mincer lacking means of being clamped anywhere, two decanter stoppers and a soap dish feverishly embellished with roses (Love’s practical turn of generosity had already chosen his landlady as recipient-elect of this).
Prospective buyers had been free to walk about the saleroom since eight o’clock. Many had come and left again after laying claim to one of the chairs set in rows throughout the hall. A coat or a shopping basket or even a catalogue was recognized as sufficient tally. At this particular moment, though, the place was almost empty. Apart from the assistant auctioneer, his clerk, two porters and a dealer, all of whom were gathered near the auctioneer’s pulpit-like desk, no one was present but Sergeant Love and a man almost immediately behind him, a man in dark, unobtrusive clothing, who was as deeply preoccupied with a pair of cast-iron door knobs as was Love with his cottage.
This man, had Love been observing the elementary rules of his profession and keeping one eye on anyone within coshing distance, would have been noted by him as being a little shorter than himself, with a sallow complexion and black hair that he was constantly smoothing back until it gathered in a ragged hank at the nape of his neck. The sergeant would have noticed also that he had a small mouth permanently held a little open by protruding teeth. This, together with an air of readiness to listen and a faint but enduring smile, gave the man an expression of simple, almost childlike amiability.
“Like a character out of Wind in the Willows,” Love might have described him to Detective Inspector Purbright, and the inspector would have understood what he meant. Purbright would not, however, have dreamed of offering the comparison either to Flaxborough’s patrician chief constable, or in any circumstances where it might arouse the fatuous derision of such hard-hats of literary criticism as officers Harper, Brevitt and Braine.
Not that Purbright was ever called upon to do so, for Love remained unaware of his companion’s existence, let alone the details of his appearance, up to the very moment when the door knob struck the back of his head just above the collar line and endowed him with almost immediate unconsciousness.
The sergeant fell silently, loosely and vertically into folds. From his new position on the floor he could be seen by none of the group near the auction stand. When next one of them happened to glance in that direction, he noticed that the tall, very clean-faced young gentleman (a policeman, was he?—yes, so he was, although terribly young surely?) had gone, presumably by one of the emergency exits, and that there now was no one else in that part of the hall but a man of middle years who appeared to find breathing somewhat difficult.
As soon as the casual observer—it was, in fact, the auctioneer’s clerk, Lewcock—had turned away once more, the man bobbed down and resumed the task from which physical exhaustion allied with a sense of self-preservation had prompted him to rise for air and a look round.
Sergeant Love had settled into an inert heap that was proving difficult to shift. His assailant abandoned trying to turn him over by heaving on one arm. He set to work on a leg. This was even less promising of result. Next he tried to get both hands under one shoulder whilst crouching astride the sergeant. By now he was breathing very heavily indeed and he soon had to surface once more, without having achieved anything.
Very cautiously, he rose and glanced towards the group by the auction stand. The porters were drinking mugs of coffee, their backs turned. The dealer had moved further away and was in conversation with some new arrivals at the main door. Other people came in. Lewcock was writing in a ledger at the dictation of the assistant auctioneer.
The man took half a dozen slow, deep breaths, then knelt beside the policeman to make a final effort to retrieve the object which Love, in his last moment of consciousness, had clutched and buried beneath his sixteen stones of body.
The man insinuated the fingers of his right hand between the floor and Love’s chest. He pushed. He felt, or thought he felt, the edge of a hard, square article. But already he had lost his chance.
The sergeant sighed, groaned, stirred. The man, who had been watching Love’s closed eyes, was alarmed to see the lids tremblingly begin to part. He tugged his hand free and half ran, half crept towards the escape door he had noted earlier.