The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  She ate the last of her toast and marmalade, poured more coffee, and lit a cigarette. The sun, strong now and likely to be oppressive at its zenith, freaked the room's sombre furniture with gold, and garden scents drifted in through the open windows, riding a light breeze which stirred the stiff chintz curtains and fluttered the roses in their vase. A bluebottle fulminated round the alabaster bowl which shaded the centre light. From the kitchen, the voice of Melanie Hogben, the seventeen-year-old girl who mismanaged Helen's house for her, could be heard raised in heartfelt, unfocused song. And Helen, watching the grey smoke of her cigarette turn vivid blue where it crossed a bar of sunlight, asked herself for the hundredth time what exactly she ought to do. What she now knew, Inspector Casby ought to know likewise – but tale-bearing, even where no promise of secrecy had been exacted, was as repugnant to her as to most people, and like the majority of Britons, she regarded it as one of the functions of an organized police to exempt her from such squalid necessities. On the other hand, her anger at Beatrice Keats-Madderly's death went very deep, and if there was anything she could do about it, then in honour that thing must be done . . .

  Stubbing out her cigarette when it was only a quarter smoked, she got impatiently to her feet, and, still fretting, went to the window and looked out. Casby, in his garden next door, was peering suspiciously at a rose-bush. The sun gleamed on his dark hair, and the expression on his face was of the blankest incomprehension. 'Green-fly!' called Helen, and 'What the devil does one do about it?' he called back.

  'One sprays it. But it looks to me, from here, as if that wretched thing's too far gone.'

  'Is it? Had I better root it up?'

  'I'll come and look if you like.'

  'I wish you would. I know nothing about flowers, nothing whatever.'

  So Helen climbed out of the window – not ungracefully either, she thought with a touch of complacency – and having passed through a gate which for some reason linked the two gardens, joined him in sober contemplation of the offending plant. 'It's dead,' she told him.

  'Yes, I suppose it is. What's that mould all over it?'

  'That's not a mould, it's green-fly.'

  'Oh, I see.'

  'And if you don't kill them off they'll soon be all over everything – my roses included.'

  'Oh, Lord . . . You know, it's beginning to occur to me that I'm not a very desirable neighbour to have.'

  'It can't be said that you're excessively sociable.'

  He gazed at her in dismay. 'No, I suppose I'm not. It's working in Twelford that's the trouble.'

  'Do you actually work, all the time you're not here?'

  'I think so. Apart from meals, that is, and the odd pint. But it isn't a penance. I enjoy it.' He gave her a rather worried smile. 'I do hope you haven't been thinking me horribly uncivil. I can never really believe that people are anxious for my company – and that isn't modesty, by the way; it's a peculiarly vicious form of inverted conceit.'

  'Well, since you like working so much, I've got some information for you.' As was usual with her, Helen had reached her decision on impulse, independently of reasoning or argument. 'It's probably quite unimportant, but –'

  'About the letters?' he asked quickly.

  'Yes. But don't get excited. I'm afraid it'll turn out to be a mare's nest.'

  'This does seem to be the season for them. The number of fledgling foals . . .'

  'Listen.' And Helen recounted what was relevant of her conversation with Harry Rolt. He heard her out attentively, and when she had finished said:

  'Yes. I rather suspected that, but I couldn't be sure.'

  'Suspected . . .?'

  'Inferred, anyway.'

  'But how?'

  'Well . . . It's quite a long story.' There was something of speculation in his glance, and it struck Helen that he was wondering how far to confide in her. Slightly irritated, she said; 'If you don't want –' but he interrupted her with: 'Please don't be offended. With policemen, being secretive gets to be a habit.'

  'Of course. There's no need –'

  'There's no need for me not to tell you. The fact is that after the letters started, I investigated – for obvious reasons – the background history of everyone living here who didn't one way or another fit in with the life of the place.' He hesitated a moment, and then added, with a lightness which his steady look belied: 'You, for instance.'

  It was at least five seconds before Helen grasped what he had said – and five seconds can seem a very long time.

  'Me?' she said. 'You thought that I –'

  'I was looking for misfits, and it would have been stupid to leave anyone out. One doesn't hunt one's thimble only in the obvious places.'

  'I see.' Helen battled with her anger and held it precariously at bay. 'But for a misfit I have a reasonable number of friends here, don't you think?'

  'In your case.' he said levelly, 'it was a question of money. I understand that you don't get as many patients as you deserve.'

  'Do you really?' Helen was trembling now. 'And I suppose you thought that because I was over thirty, and still not married, I had just the right sort of unsatisfied urges for an anonymous letter-writer . . . I think you said you enjoyed your work?'

  There was a pause before he replied. Then he said quietly: 'I find it worth while to help clean up the mess made by malevolence and folly. But I do try not to like the mess for its own sake. Liking the mess for its own sake is a – an occupational risk, and better policemen than I am have succumbed to it from time to time. That's one of the reasons why the Force isn't keen on imaginative types: they get too interested in the sewers they have to dabble in . . . ' But he was talking, Helen thought, less for the sake of justifying himself than with a view to keeping bitterness in check. And it flashed across her mind, fractionally dissipating the haze of resentment with which it was clouded, that it was strange a man should be so zealous to palliate a hurt he need never have administered in the first place. She said:

  'Why have you told me this? There wasn't the slightest necessity, that I can see.'

  And for the first time in their brief acquaintance she saw him confused, embarrassed, uncertain. He evaded the question, saying: 'I'm sorry. Routine sounds rather a threadbare excuse, but it's a real one just the same. I hope you'll forgive me.'

  'It's your job,' said Helen slowly.

  He smiled. 'Rather a qualified sort of pardon – but of course I'm lucky to get that . . . Let's see, where was I? Oh yes – Rolt. Rolt's childhood, I found, was spent in a certain part of Yorkshire – which discovery didn't interest me very much at the time I made it. But then, after the wretched business on Friday, I read in the burnt anonymous letter we found in the grate that Miss Keats-Madderly had been illegitimate; so naturally I investigated her childhood, and discovered that it had been spent in the same area as Rolt's – the obvious inference being that Rolt knew the circumstances of Miss Keats-Madderly's birth.'

  Cooler now, and beginning to feel a little ashamed of her pique, Helen laughed. 'After all the soul-searching I've been through . . .'

  'Soul-searching?'

  'About whether to be a good citizen and turn copper's nark, or just keep my mouth shut. And it seems you knew, all along.'

  'Not knew. I haven't talked to Rolt yet. If you hadn't told me this, he'd be in a position to lie, and get away with it.'

  'Actually,' said Helen, 'I very much doubt if he would lie.'

  'He impressed you like that, did he? Me too, what little I've seen of him.'

  'And I don't consider he has anything to do with any of the letters. By the way, what exactly was in that letter of Beatrice's? Or mustn't I ask?'

  'It was a simple statement, backed by some convincing detail, that Revelations Would Be Made.'

  'Made unless?'

  'No. No blackmail. Just devilry penny plain. And I don't think it came from the same source as the other letters.'

  Helen was surprised. 'Why shouldn't it have?' she demanded; but he only shook his head. 'I may
be quite wrong about that,' he said. 'The only thing is, there are one or two small indications such as – '

  'Oh, and another thing I wanted to ask you.' Helen had interrupted him before she clearly realized that he was on the point of telling her something interesting; and felt obliged, once having embarked on the interruption, to push it through. 'What did you mean when you told that man in the bar he ought to be staying with the Verger? I never knew we had a Verger.'

  'And you never read Edwin Drood either, I take it.'

  'Edwin D R O O D? Dickens?'

  'Dickens. It wasn't finished, you remember, so one can only guess at who and what the Mr Datchery in it was going to turn out to be. But he crops up at Cloisterham, lodging with the Verger, soon after the mystery gets under way, and it occurred to me when this man introduced himself as Datchery that a literary-minded bloke might adopt that name if he wanted to hang about here incognito investigating our mystery.'

  'Only he didn't react.'

  'You think not?'

  'Well, he was puzzled, as far as I could see.'

  'Yes. His error. If you're a cultivated man, as he obviously is, and you happen to have the same name as a character in a celebrated novel, then it's very unlikely you won't be aware of that character. And from what I've seen of this chap, I'm inclined to pay him the compliment of believing that he responded wrongly out of deliberate carelessness – which argues a rather frightening degree of self-confidence.'

  'But who do you think he really is?'

  'Haven't the vaguest.' Casby chuckled suddenly. 'But in case he's up to mischief, I shall keep an eye on him.'

  Helen regarded him thoughtfully. 'I'm damned if I can make you out,' she said. 'One moment you're competent and adult and a bit stand-offish, and the next you're friendly and naive and – and – '

  'Puerile would seem to be the antonym you're looking for.'

  'What's more, I don't believe any policeman uses words like "antonym". I don't believe you're a policeman at all.'

  'I am, though. The new sort: minor public school and Hendon Police College. As to the rest of your analysis, the friendliness and so forth are the natural man, and everything else is that ignoble kind of timidity which people politely call shyness.'

  Helen smiled. 'A shy policeman?'

  'It is absurd, isn't it? But of course, you get just as many different types of men in the Force as you do in any other profession.'

  'But why should you be shy?'

  'Well . . . A psychologist, I suppose, would put it down to an unhappy childhood.' He raised a hand to stroke his scar. 'And this ugly thing hasn't helped.'

  Their eyes met.

  A tremor passed through Helen's body; she desired to look away and could not.

  'You fool,' said Helen calmly. 'Oh, you fool.'

  Later – after what might have been a second or an eternity – she released herself from his arms to become conscious that Melanie Hogben, paralysed with amazement, was staring out at them from the kitchen window of the adjacent house with the saucer eyes and gaping mouth of an unarmed hunter confronted with a rogue elephant. In half an hour, thought Helen dazedly, this is going to be all over the village; well, and does it matter? In a shaky voice she said:

  'For a shy man you don't do so badly.'

  He was regarding her with an incongruous mixture of earnestness and pleasure: an artist, Helen reflected, in process of dealing with a novel and fascinating technical problem. Clearing his throat impressively, he said:

  'Would you say we were going to get married?'

  'I most certainly would.'

  'In that case . . .'

  'No.'

  'But, darling girl, I've always understood that all sorts of liberties – '

  'Not in the open air. Not in public.'

  'We'll go into my house?'

  'Perhaps . . . You know, I see now why you told me that.'

  'Told you what? I think . . .'

  'Not here. What I meant was, you told me about me being a suspect because you wanted to be honest. I'm not sure that a husband as upright as you won't be rather intolerable.'

  'I shall study to degenerate. The depths I haven't sunk to aren't extensive. And now–'

  But at this point they were interrupted by the sound of laughter. The laughter proceeded not from Melanie Hogben, who by now had recovered the use of her limbs and departed from Helen's kitchen window, but unmistakably from Mrs Flack, that monument of domestic incompetence who looked after Casby and who at the moment should have been engaged in her diurnal labour of sweeping dust under carpets. It was one of Mrs Flack's most notable characteristics that her laughter had in some fashion got itself detached from her sense of humour, so that it bombinated irrelevantly in an emotional vacuum. Perhaps as a consequence of this, it had developed a regular, mechanical tone, as though Mrs Flack were reading laughter – ha! ha! ha! – aloud from a book: an implausible sound which thanks to existing independently of Mrs Flack's emotional condition had frequently disconcerted funeral-goers and such of Mrs Flack's acquaintances as had tales of woe to purvey.

  The noise which Helen and Casby now heard, then, indicated no more than that Mrs Flack had company – and a moment later she was ushering it out of the back door. It proved to be Burns, the village constable, a bright, up-and-coming young man deficient in the conventions of slow rusticity which fiction commonly attaches to his office; but on this occasion he was pale and distraught, and when he hurried up to Casby and Helen they saw that he was breathless as well.

  'Beg pardon, sir,' he said. 'But it's urgent. That schoolmaster – Rubi, or whatever his name is – we've found him down in the coppice near Rolt's mill. I didn't find him, that is. It was Miss Penelope Rolt who gave the alarm. I'm afraid it's serious, sir.'

  'Well?'

  'That's to say, he's dead. And from what I've seen of him, sir, I'm pretty certain the reason he's dead is because he's been murdered.'

  10

  LAUGHING rowdily at nothing, Mrs Flack had retired into the house: curiosity was not one of her vices, and there was yet much dust requiring transference from the centre of rooms to the corners. Burns, still panting after what had evidently been a hectic ride, twitched off his helmet and ran stubby fingers through his damp hair, and Casby, glancing at his watch, made a rapid note of the time in a pocket diary.

  'I must phone Sims and Colonel Babington,' he said. 'After that we'll go along there. Shan't be a moment.' He turned towards the house, hesitated, glanced back at Helen, and smiled. 'So sorry,' he said. 'And I don't imagine this will be the last occasion, either. You see what you've let yourself in for.'

  'I'll try to bear it.'

  He said 'Thank you' seriously, and went into the house. Burns, at no loss to interpret the exchange, gazed interestedly at the heavens and ventured the fatuous comment that it was a fine day. 'Beg pardon, Doctor,' he added, 'but you did happen to be acquainted with the deceased?'

  Helen, conscious of a rummaged appearance, was making ineffectual efforts to remedy it. 'I only knew him by sight,' she said. 'He lived in that cottage out beyond Beedon's, didn't he?'

  'That's right, ma'am. Fiveways, in Ascot Lane. He was a bit of an oddity, by all accounts.' Burns coughed uneasily. 'And I don't know if you've heard about it, but Miss Rolt – '

  'Oh, my God.' Now belatedly digesting Burn's first words, Helen stopped preening herself abruptly. 'Didn't you say it was Penelope who found him?'

  Burns nodded. 'Couldn't hardly be worse, ma'am, could it?'

  'What sort of state is she in?'

  'No tears or hysterics, Doctor, if that's what you're meaning. Nothing so healthy as that, I'm sorry to say. She come up to my cottage calm and collected as you please, but her eyes all glazed and dead-looking, and her voice high and quick like a record that's playing too fast. Gabbled it out, she did, and then the wife took her in for a cup of tea or that, and that's the last I've seen of her.'

  'I'd better look in,' said Helen, 'and find out if there's anything I can do.'

>   'Might be as well, ma'am.'

  'Of course, there's no suggestion that she could have –'

  'No ma'am. I can't think she did it. He was only a little chap, I grant you, but spite of that, I still doubt she'd have the strength.'

  'How was he killed, then?'

  'Some sort of knife, ma'am, I think, though I didn't see no sign of it. Anyway, there's a fair size wound in his chest, over the heart. What it seemed to me might have done it was some sort of thing like a – '

  But here Casby rejoined them, and Burns fell silent. 'I can't get hold of Sims,' Casby said. 'He isn't home, I've left a message asking him to come along if he gets back within the next hour or two, but it's a damned nuisance just the same.'

  'If it's a doctor you want,' said Helen, 'there's me.'