The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  'For the record,' said Casby, 'I think you'd better make an examination.'

  Sims stared at the body, and his humourously ugly face twisted in a grimace. 'Do I know him? Is he local?'

  'He lives – lived, rather – at a cottage called Fiveways, in Ascot Lane. Swiss. A schoolmaster. Name's Rubi.'

  'Oh yes, I remember,' said Sims cheerfully. 'Poor devil. Well, here goes.' He dropped to his knees.

  And when, after a few minutes, he gave his conclusions, they matched with Helen's, even to the point about the grooves on the weapon. In conclusion he said: 'You're going to want a P.M., I suppose?'

  'I'm afraid so,' said Casby. 'How soon will you be able to do it?'

  'I can make a start on it after lunch. Good thing it's Sunday. In the meantime, if there's nothing else you want, I'll go back and try to squeeze in another set before I eat.'

  With that he departed, wiry, vigorous, and undeniably attractive. The routine of search, tedious now, went on interminably; the sun shone ever hotter. I suppose I can't do any good by staying, thought Helen; but she stayed none the less, warm and sticky and uncomfortable on the tree-stump which the fingerprints man had vacated, until at last, as the church clock struck one, Casby called off the search and sent for stretcher-bearers from the waiting ambulance to carry the body away. He was obviously exhausted, and he spoke little as with Helen he made his way out of the coppice into the water-meadow, bringing up the rear of the file of his men. His car, and the ambulance, and the big police car from Twelford, were parked in a line near the gap in the hedge, and a little group of staring villagers were loitering round them. 'This,' he said abruptly when they were half-way across the meadow, 'will give them something to talk about.'

  Helen put her hand timidly on his arm, and then, thinking better of the gesture, withdrew it again. 'Any clues?' she ventured.

  'Precious little.' He was curt, withdrawn, and had not acknowledged her touch by so much as a glance. 'The next thing I must do is see Penelope Rolt.'

  'I think,' said Helen quietly, 'that I'd better see her first. From what Burns said, she's in a pretty bad way.'

  He agreed to this, though not very graciously. Well, damn it, he's tired, thought Helen; and said: 'I wonder why he was killed?' Rolt was at the back of her mind, as he had been ever since Burns had brought the news of Rubi's murder; Rolt saying: 'And if they're up to mischief, and I get my hands on him . . .' But she pushed the memory aside. 'Could it,' she added, 'have anything to do with the letters? If Rubi was playing at detectives, he might have stumbled on the truth about them, and – and been put out of the way.'

  'That's possible, yes.' Casby turned his head to give her a wan smile. 'I'm sorry to be brusque,' he said, 'but I'm a bit on edge.'

  'You mean you're worried about whether you can clear this up.' And after a pause he murmured:

  'I haven't been doing so very well just recently.'

  He doesn't want to talk, Helen told herself: well, then, shut up, like a sensible girl, and leave him alone. But even as she issued this judicious fiat, some demon prompted her to say: 'I interrupted you back at the house when you were going to tell me something about Beatrice's letter. Something which made you think it wasn't in the same class as the rest of the letters.'

  'Yes,' he said; and there was a long silence before he went on: 'All the other letters have been made up of words cut from a considerable number of different newspapers. The words in Miss Keats-Madderly's letter had been cut from only two . . . By the way, you told me when we first met that you took only one newspaper. Which is it?'

  'The Times. But I sometimes buy the Express as well – just casually, you know: I don't order it.' Helen laughed, not very spontaneously. 'I hope those weren't the two newspapers used in Beatrice's letter.'

  'As a matter of fact, they were.'

  'Oh, but –'

  'But what?'

  Helen laughed again, even less confidently than before. 'I expect lots of people buy that particular combination of papers.'

  'Yes, of course.'

  'And besides, I wouldn't have any motive for sending Beatrice a letter like that, would I? We were very fond of each other.'

  They were only a few yards, now, from the waiting cars, and already the stretcher-bearers were manoeuvring Rubi's body up the slippery bank to the gap in the hedge, while the older men in the little crowd doffed their caps and the women muttered together in agitated speculation. Casby halted.

  'Motive?' he echoed. 'You haven't seen Bland, I take it?'

  'I don't even know who he is.'

  'He's a solicitor in Twelford. I got in touch with him yesterday because he was Miss Keats-Madderly's solicitor. Among other jobs, he drew up her will.'

  With a tightening of the throat, Helen said: 'What has that got to do with me?'

  'You're her legatee, that's all. She's left you her money. Forty, I think, or fifty thousand pounds.'

  11

  CONSTABLE BURNS took crime seriously. He had been accepted into the Police Force soon after his demobilization in 1946, and most of his spare time since then had been spent pouring over works of criminology for a view to fitting himself for the day when his longed-for transfer to the Criminal Investigation Department should be achieved. Hans Gross he had read, and Taylor on medical jurisprudence (though his ignorance of anatomy and of general medicine had made that particular book heavy and in the upshot not wholly satisfactory going), and Wilton on fingerprints, and Burrard on firearms and Rhodes on forensic chemistry. Mindful of the convenient omniscience of such heroes of detective romance as Dr Thorndyke and Mr Reginald Fortune, he had made random forays into the territory covered by Egyptology, speleology, religious heresy, and the habits of mollusca. He had attempted at considerable expense to train himself in identifying perfumes; he had peered at fabrics through lenses; he had taken casts of footprints, and on one momentous day, which nearly wrecked an otherwise ideal marriage, had dusted all his furniture with lampblack, copper powder, and metallic antimony in order to bring out latent prints, the afternoon he unluckily elected for his experiment being subsequent to a morning which Janet Burns had devoted to polishing . . . Constable Burns took (I repeat) crime seriously; and it was therefore a little unkind of the gods to decree that his contribution to the solution of the Rubi affair should result from anything so banal as observation and ordinary, unscientific common sense.

  From the water-meadow he cycled back to his cottage for Sunday dinner, which in his excitement he ate without, as Janet rather irratably noted, being in the least aware of its many rare perfections. She was mollified, however, by the sensational nature of his news.

  'Dr Downing came in five minutes before you got back,' she said when he had finished his account of the morning's work. 'The Inspector brought her here in his car. She was looking for Pen Rolt, but of course, I didn't know where she'd gone. Home, probably, was what I said.'

  'Ah.' The recollection of Penelope sobered Burn's professional elation somewhat. 'She was in a pretty bad way, wasn't she?'

  'Wouldn't stay here, though. Nor she wouldn't let me go with her when she left. "I'll be all right," she says over and over, "I'll be all right" . . . Will, you don't think she'd . . . well, do herself a mischief, do you?'

  'Lord, no.' But he was uneasy for all that. 'It's shock, that's all.'

  'She was keen on him, though, that'd make it worse. And Mrs Cuddy says that place where she found him was where they used to meet.'

  'Ah,' said Burns again. 'But you know what sort of a dirty-minded old bag Mrs Cuddy is. Some of the things she's told you –'

  'Still, but what I mean is, he might have been put there deliberate-like, so as the girl should find him.'

  Burns was interested. 'That's an idea. If that's what happened, then it looks as if whoever did the murder wanted to show he disapproved of their goings-on . . . not,' he added hastily, 'that I believe there were any goings-on, not at her age, and not with him the faddy, chatterbox sort he was . . . Yes, and that looks like our friend w
ho's been writing the anonymous letters, doesn't it? I wonder.'

  He wondered to such effect that they finished the meal in silence – a silence broken only by the sound of Burns eating feathery pastry as if it were carpet. Finally he pushed his plate aside, swallowed his tea, consulted his watch, and stood up.

  'Well, I'm off,' he said. 'The Inspector's meeting me' – he considered this, and then amended it to 'I'm meeting the Inspector' – 'at Fiveways, where this chap lived in Ascot Lane. Says he'll need me for the local detail and so forth. So keep your fingers crossed. This business might do me a bit of good if I handle it right.'

  'Just the same, don't you go acting the great detective, will you, or you'll only annoy people.'

  Burns chuckled. 'Don't you worry, love. I may be green, but I'm not that green. Expect me when you see me.'

  'Enjoy the pork, Will?'

  'Never better.'

  'What you ate,' said Janet demurely, 'was lamb.'

  Burns looked blank; then, awareness dawning, he grinned, 'I'll deal with you,' he said with cheerful menace, 'when I get back. And don't let me find any lovers in the cupboards, either.' After more than three years of marriage, this joke still kept its virgin charm.

  'Oh, but I'm always finished with them by tea-time,' said Janet, winking. Then she backed away in mock-terror. 'No, go on, Will, you've got work to do . . .'

  So ten minutes later, Burns, cycling in the statuesque, unruffled manner of his kind, turned out of the village street by the west end of the church and proceeded at a dignified pace towards Ascot Lane. Just beyond Weaver's shop he met Helen Downing, who was on foot, and stopped to ask if she had been able to find Penelope Rolt.

  'No, I haven't, I'm afraid,' said Helen. 'I went to her house, but she wasn't there. It's really rather worrying. If you get any news of her, let me know, will you? She oughtn't to be wandering about on her own, after what's happened.'

  'I'll let you know, miss.' But then, with his foot on the pedal in readiness to remount, Burns checked himself and stared. 'Hullo,' he said jocularly. 'Going to do an operation, are you?'

  'Operation . . .? Oh, this.' And Helen displayed what she was carrying. 'No, it's not as bad as that. Colonel Babington gave it me yesterday to take back to Weaver, and I completely forgot. So I'm returning it now.'

  And that was when Burns had his great inspiration. A butcher's steel; grooved, with a sharp point; just about the right width to have made a certain wound . . . He was so startled that he did not, for a moment, pause to consider the implications of his guess, if it should turn out to be correct: his lie which immediately followed stemmed from the habit of discretion rather than from mistruct.

  'I'll take it, miss, if you like,' he said casually. 'Passing the shop just now made me remember there was something I wanted to see him about anyway. So if it'll save you trouble . . .'

  'All right,' she said readily enough. 'Visiting Weaver isn't a thing I do for choice. By the way, there's nothing fresh, I suppose?'

  'About the murder, miss? Not that I know of.'

  'I see. Well, don't forget about Penelope, will you?'

  'I won't, miss.'

  But in the point of fact Burns had forgotten about Penelope within fifteen seconds; because this steel business, he reflected as he wheeled his bicycle back along the road, looked as if it might turn out to be something big. Colonel Babington had given Dr Downing the steel yesterday, so she'd said; and presumably she'd had it ever since. Well, then: by her own evidence, as well as Sims's, Rubi had been killed about seven that morning; and that meant – here Burns slackened his measured stride, frowning – well, of course, what it must mean was that someone had pinched the steel from Dr Downing, and then returned it afterwards. The only trouble was, why should they have returned it? So as to try and incriminate Dr Downing? Could be . . .

  The simpler possibility was one which Burns was not, at the moment, prepared to face.

  Thus rather inchoately brooding, he came to his destination – a little Georgian house standing on its own, whose ground floor had been converted with tasteful unobtrusiveness into a small shop, the single word 'Weaver' in faded gold-scrolled lettering above the window. It being Sunday, the shop was of course shut, and empty of wares; but the blinds had not been drawn, and Burns, glancing in as he propped his machine against the wall, could see the bare marble shelves, the scrubbed wooden tables, the knives, the massive door of the electrically operated cold-storage room, and the sawdust-strewn floor. Skirting the house, on a cinder-covered path between its west wall and the garage where the delivery van was kept, Burns arrived at, and portentously knocked on, the back door.

  It was opened to him, by Weaver in person, with disconcerting promptness. Seen at close quarters, Weaver was not a handsome man: his narrow, slightly equine face was perched on his long neck like a too-heavy flower on a too-slender stem, and the eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses were as small and black as currants in a cake. His smile showed large, discoloured teeth; his body moved with the suppleness of an india-rubber doll; his decent black serge was ostentatiously sabbatical. But in spite of his failure to prepossess, he was at once all deference, all gratification, when he recognized his visitor.

  'Mr Burns!' he cried. 'Come in, sir, come in! No, no, I insist . . . insist. Come along! There's a step down, so be careful not to trip and fall. I've only just this moment finished my bachelor repast, so you must excuse the muddle. This way, this way. The ladies in my little flock sometimes tell me my house badly needs a woman's touch, and I'm sure they're right, certain of it. But who, I ask them, would ever marry an ugly fellow like me? Here we are, then. Goodness, it does look rather a mess. If you'll just allow me a moment to clear away . . .'

  The room into which Burns had been unwillingly conducted was the kitchen, and it contrived in some mysterious way to be at once perfectly clean and entirely squalid. The window was closed, and the air frowsty with the smell of many meals; a tap dripped persistently; a mangy black cat sharpened its claws on the dresser. An old-fashioned black iron range occupied almost the whole of one wall, and the pictures were of Biblical personages who pointed dramatically with one hand at distant sheep, Galilean lakes, and so forth, while with the other they clutched providently at unmanageable-looking robes. On the centre table were the remains of a small cold lunch, and Weaver bustled about removing these to the neighbourhood of the sink while Burns looked on helplessly.

  'There!' said Weaver, in transit with the last plate. 'That's better! And now we must find you a chair. Dear, dear, what a wretched host I am, to be sure! Keeping you standing all this time! And you could do with a cup of tea, I expect.' He darted to an electric kettle. 'I wonder if you would oblige me by fetching out the plum cake from the cupboard in the corner?'

  Burns, who up to now had been almost literally hypnotized by this hospitable agitation, managed at long last to voice a disclaimer. 'Very good of you, Mr Weaver,' he said with a considerable effort, 'but I can't stay, I'm afraid. Official business is what I'm here on.'

  'Official business?' Replacing the kettle, Weaver shook his head in humorous perplexity. 'Well, what have I been up to now, I wonder. Or is it' – all at once he was serious – 'is it perhaps to do with the horrible crime which I understand to have been discovered this morning?'

  'You've heard about the murder then, sir?'

  'Indeed yes. Mrs Cuddy spoke to me of it when I was on my way to preach in our little temple here.' And at this, Weaver closed his eyes and levelled the point of his nose at the ceiling; he was praying, Burns assumed. 'Dreadful, dreadful,' he murmured after a moment. 'The wickedness of the human heart is indeed infinite, without God. In the midst of life –'

  Burns found him not unimpressive; but at the same time he was anxious to get to the point. Producing the steel, he said abruptly: 'But as to why I'm here, sir . . .'

  Weaver opened his eyes; he nodded deferential encouragement, his head bouncing back and forth on his long neck like a knob on a spring. 'As to why you're here . . .'

>   'Well, sir, what I want to know is, is this yours?'

  'The steel? Certainly it's mine.' Weaver was emphatic. 'I have owned it ever since my apprenticeship. But where did you . . .'

  'It was found, sir,' said Burns impressively. 'Found. Down by the river,' he improvised, feeling that something more explicit was called for. 'Have you any idea how it can have got there?'

  Weaver wiped sweat from his forehead; inside, as out, the afternoon was certainly insufferably hot. 'Little rascals!' he said somewhat obscurely; and grinned though without convincing Burns that he was much amused. 'It would be some of the village children who took it, I don't doubt.'

  'Just exactly how do you mean, sir – "took it"?'

  'Why, from the shop, Mr Burns, when my back was turned.'

  'I'd hardly have thought,' said Burns mistrustfully, 'that that was possible.'

  'Indeed yes. As you know, I have no assistant in the shop, and so naturally I am sometimes obliged to leave it unattended for a few moments while I am in the cold-storage room or elsewhere in the house. At such times . . .'

  'I see, sir. Yes. But what makes you think it was children specially? Could have been anyone, couldn't it?'

  Weaver shrugged. 'There are two reasons, Mr Burns, why I suggest that it was probably children who took the steel. The first is that I cannot see why anyone else should take such a thing. And the second is that – as I think you may remember – the village children have tried to play such jokes on me before.'

  Burns did remember; Weaver had complained of that particular nuisance two or three months ago. There had been little Burns could do about it, and that little he had done grudgingly, for he disliked Weaver and felt that in any case the man ought to be capable where children were concerned of looking after himself. Still, the complaint had had substance, Burns was bound to admit.

  'High spirits,' Weaver was saying now with a consciously wry smile. 'High spirits . . . The little ones think me a very comical fellow, and an excellent butt for their tricks. Of course, they mean no harm by it, but none the less . . .'