The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

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The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery) Page 12

by Edmund Crispin


  'Just which children,' Burns interposed, 'do you have in mind, sir?'

  But he got no clear answer to this. Children, it appeared, were a class of being not much more individualized in Weaver's recollection than so many ants, and his conjectures, on this occasion as on the previous one, were vague and lacking in confidence. Moreover, he had not, he said, particularly noticed any children lingering near the shop yesterday morning, when the steel had disappeared. 'All I can tell you, Mr Burns,' he concluded, 'is that I went for a moment into the cold-storage room, there being at the time no customers in the shop, and that when I came back the steel was gone. I was annoyed, of course, and was intending to notify you of the theft, but since the steel is now found . . .' He tentatively stretched out his hand for it.

  'Sorry, sir,' said Burns, 'but I can't let you have it back just yet awhile.' Weaver's hand dropped to his side. Burns swallowed, plunged. 'It'll have to be tested first, sir,' he said, 'to find out if it's got anything to do with the murder.'

  Weaver closed his eyes again.

  'Do I understand, then,' he said quietly, 'that you believe it to have been used to kill this unhappy young man? Horrible, horrible. And but for my carelessness . . .'

  'Come, come, sir.' Burns was discomfited by these scruples and moreover was already beginning to regret the precipitate statement which had given rise to them. 'There's no need to take on so, no need at all. Matter of fact, the odds are ninety-nine to one against this having anything to do with the murder. All I meant . . .'

  But Weaver was not listening. Without opening his eyes, he said: 'I have put temptation in the way of some wretched sinner. You will say that his crime would have been committed in any case. But can you be sure? Perhaps it was only the fact of the instrument's being at hand that drove him to his appalling deed. If that is so, I have much to answer for.'

  He dropped suddenly to his knees. In hideous embarrassment Burns fled. And his faith in his inspiration, as he pedalled under the blazing sun towards Ascot Lane, waned disastrously. The steel which he now had buttoned up inside his tunic might well be the sort of weapon that had killed Rubi; but that it was the actual weapon seemed increasingly doubtful – unless, of course, you were going to accuse Dr Downing of using it, which Burns, as one of her admirers, most certainly was not. It could have been stolen from her, of course – that had been his first idea – but stabbing weapons weren't like firearms, difficult to lay hands on, and a murderer who went so far out of his way as to procure one by those means wasn't very credible, to say the least. And besides, if stealing it had been unnecessary, returning it was ten times more so. No, the fact was that he'd been barking up the wrong tree, and this particular steel had nothing to do with the case: a queer coincidence, if you liked, but that was all. And I hope to God, thought Burns, that Weaver doesn't pass on what I said to him about it; that was damn-foolishness all right, and if the Super gets to hear of it, I'm cooked. What was it Janet had said? Don't go acting the great detective.' And that was just exactly what he had been doing . . . Constable Burns came to the small house named Fiveways with the spark of life in him burning rather low.

  Fiveways was the only house in Cotten Abbas that had been built since the war. A writer had it put up in the first place, had lived in it for a few months, tired of it, gone to live abroad, let it furnished; Rubi had been in it not much more than four months. It stood solitary in a small, neglected garden, its militant newness as yet unmitigated by wind and weather, with a dispiriting view from its front windows of cows in a field; and its name – since there was no cross-roads of any sort within half a mile – was distinctly fanciful. 'B-but my dear fellow,' its owner had once said to Burns when remonstrated with about this anomaly, 'the absence of c-cross-roads, is p-precisely the p-point. Don't you see?' Burns had not seen, and did not see even now; but then, he was scarcely, as he parked his bicycle against the hedge and trudged up the diminutive path to the front door, in the mood for sophisticated little jokes.

  It was Sergeant Pound who let him in – a gawky officer who like half the police force considered himself long overdue for promotion, but who was unusual in having allowed this persuasion to sour him. 'Ah, here you are,' he said unwelcomingly. 'High time, too. The Inspector's been here an hour already.'

  'He can't have had any lunch, then.'

  'He hasn't. Too busy for it – not like some I could name.' The sergeant paused to allow this thrust full penetration; then, since Burns only glowered: 'Well, get a move on, can't you? I'm not going to stand holding the door for you all day.'

  With this he led the way to the sitting-room, where Burns, glancing at the book-shelves, saw works by Freud, Jung, Adler, Ernest Jones, and other authors with the import of whose names his more modish criminoligical text-books had familiarized him. These clearly were Rubi's; but the impression left by the rest of the room, at a first glance, was no better than a blurred, unilluminating composite of his personality and the owner's, like two photographs taken on the same plate. Casby was seated at a desk by the window, looking through the pages of a note-book or diary which he seemed to have found there.

  'Sorry if I'm late, sir,' said Burns, saluting. 'But you didn't say any definite time, so I assumed . . .'

  'Yes, that's all right,' Casby answered abstractedly; and then with more vigour, after finishing his perusal in silence: 'Oh, damn this thing, it's all in German. Pound, you don't speak German, do you?'

  'No, sir.'

  'Burns?'

  'Well, yes, sir, I do a bit. Learned it at school for three years, and then I had a chance of keeping it up when I was stuck in Hamburg at the end of the war. I'm a bit rusty now, mind you. Still . . .'

  Pound made a whiffling noise, patently intended to express disgust. But Casby was pleased.

  'Good,' he said. 'I'll be getting a translation later, of course, but in the meantime it may be useful for me to have a rough idea of what it's all about.' He handed the diary – for it was that – to Burns. 'Sit down and have a look through it, will you? I'm going to prowl about upstairs. Pound, have you been out to the shed yet?'

  'Well, no, sir, not yet. The fact is . . .'

  'Then for heaven's sake do it now.' Hugely aggrieved, Pound saluted and went. 'Take off your coat if you like,' said Casby to Burns as he followed Pound out through the door. 'It's too hot to stand on ceremony.' He vanished, and Burns heard him clattering up the stairs.

  For all its alienist's jargon, Rubi's diary proved to be fairly easy going, and by the time Casby returned, after bumping about for ten minutes or so overhead, Burns had read all of it once and parts of it a second time.

  'But I'm afraid it's a bit of a disappointment, sir,' he said. 'More like a notebook, it is. There's a lot to do with his teaching, theory mostly, and a lot to do with the anonymous letters, but all of that's theory too, psychological stuff: he seems to have thought it was an unmarried woman writing them, but only – if you see what I mean – because of what his books told him; he obviously didn't know. Then there's some bits about Miss Rolt.' Burns flushed slightly. 'There's got to be science, I suppose, but it seems nasty cold-blooded stuff to me. No hint, though, that he thought of her as anything but a – an object of study; there's one place where he actually admits that he's pretending to be fond of her so as to be able to watch her.'

  'Rather unappetizing, yes.' Casby nodded. 'Anything about anyone else in the village?'

  'Well, yes, sir, there is, about quite a lot of people. But nothing personal, as you might say: just analysing them.'

  'I see. No note of engagements?'

  'No, sir. It's not that sort of diary. Abstract ideas, that's all there is in it. Except perhaps just this last entry.'

  'Well?'

  'He's been theorizing about the letters, you see, all just usual. But then it breaks off and you suddenly get this bit.' Burns read the German aloud. 'Die Zeitüngen: drei (vier?) Art von Geschäft. Ausfragebesuch (Gemütsbeschaffenheit ändert sich natürlich nach der Entdeckung).'

  'And that mea
ns?'

  ' "The newspapers," ' Burns translated: ' "three (four?) kinds of business. Visit for questioning (the mental condition isn't of course the same after detection)." '

  'Well, well.' Casby was pensive. 'So perhaps after all he did have a definte suspicion as to what person was writing those letters. And perhaps that person didn't like the sort of questions he asked . . .' Then more briskly: 'Well, that's something, anyway – namely a motive. Thanks very much, Burns; you've helped enormously. There are just one or two questions before you go – not about this, about other things. In the first place, do you happen to know who looked after this man?'

  'Yes, sir. It was Miss Tuffill.'

  'What was the arrangement, then? I mean, when did she come and how much did she do?'

  'Three times a week, sir, she's been coming: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And all she's been doing is the cleaning – he did his own cooking, it seems, and the bed-making and the washing up;

  'I see. And I imagine that if he did the cooking, he did the shopping as well.'

  'So I believe, sir. But as to that, Miss Tuffill, she told my wife he got most of his food in parcels from Switzerland. Tins galore, she said, and he as good as lived out of them.'

  'Yes, the kitchen confirms that. Even his milk seems to have come out of tins. Did any tradespeople deliver here? What I'm trying to get at is when he was last seen alive.'

  'Quite so, sir. But as far as I know he bought his bread and so forth from the shops, and carried it back here himself.' Burns paused dubiously. 'There's the postwoman,' he suggested.

  'I met her when I was on my way here, and spoke to her then, by way of routine. But apparently he got very little mail; she hasn't been here since Wednesday. This house is out of sight, too, and I imagine that as often as not he approached and left it on the side away from the village – which means he wouldn't be seen about much . . .' Casby pondered, sucking an unlit pipe. 'Well, I think that's all for the moment,' he said presently, gesturing dismissal, 'unless, of course, anything else has occurred to you that might help.'

  Burns hesitated, and the words great detective chimed cautionarily inside his head. But their chime, though still distinct enough, was fainter than before. For in the meantime Burns had made himself useful; he had translated German; like the psalmist, he had seen the ungodly – meaning Sergeant Pound – smitten upon the cheek-bone. In short, he was by now feeling a renewed, if limited, piety with regard to his Inspiration, and if he was going to mention the steel at all, this undoubtedly was the psychological moment . . . 'There's just one thing, sir,' he blurted. 'It's about the weapon.'

  'Yes? What about it?'

  'I may be quite wrong, sir' – Burns was fumbling at the buttons of his tunic – 'but it did occur to me that it might have been something like this.' He produced the steel. 'It's the right size, sir, or near enough, and it's sharp, and there's the grooves on it . . .'

  Casby had taken the steel and was examining it intently. Presently he took out a lens and made use of that. 'Blood, I think,' he announced, 'in the crevice between the steel itself and the handle.'

  'Well, sir, it is of course a butcher's steel.'

  Casby smiled. 'Oh, quite.' He found pocket callipers and adjusted them to the steel at its widest diameter. 'Seven sixteenths of an inch,' he said. 'Well, well. Pound can take it to the laboratory while I go and see Rolt . . . You're right, Burns. This does look very much like it.'

  Burns was not a little taken aback. 'The – the actual one that did the job, sir?'

  'Why not?' Casby looked up, struck by the incredulity in Burn's voice. 'Whose is it? Where did you get it?'

  Constable Burns told him.

  12

  THE Chief Constable's study was slightly shabby – as a room initially well-furnished can be allowed without offensiveness to become: the chintz a little faded; the ceiling smoky; the rugs, though still serviceable, frayed. Long lattice windows looked towards the front gate, and opposite to them were double doors which led into the drawing-room. The chairs and sofa were Edwardian, with a frail look: Edwardian, too, the massive roll-top desk. The only decisively modern things there were the green metal filing-cabinet and the telephone, and these, you felt, were interlopers, suffered there for their utility alone. The mantelpiece had photographs on it, many photographs; the decanters on the side-table wore necklace labels, shallow-incised lettering on rectangles of thin silver; the books were behind glass. At wood and fabric, brass and paint, the years had picked with delicate, untiring fingers, and the felts tacked on to eliminate draughts were like patches on an old ship.

  It was half past five. Inspector Edward Casby, his face so white with fatigue that the scar hardly showed, sat in an armchair by the fireplace, and Colonel Babington, fidgeting with his clipped moustache, was pacing the carpet. The heat was less now: westering, the sun had gained definition and no longer hurt your eyes.

  The Colonel glanced surreptitiously at Casby, halted.

  'My dear chap, you're overdoing it,' he said abruptly. 'Get some food and some sleep, that's my advice. There's nothing that won't keep till to-morrow.'

  'I'm afraid I can't be sure of that, sir.' Casby remained quietly dogged. 'And that's why I feel I must make some sort of interim report. There'll be' – he hesitated – 'there may be action you'll want to take.'

  'Action?' the Colonel stared. 'What sort of action, for God's sake?'

  'About me, sir.'

  'About you?'

  'You'll understand what I mean, sir, when I've told you the results I've got so far.'

  'Oh, very well, then.' The Colonel shrugged. 'If you must, you must. But you'd better have a drink first.' He went to the decanters, poured whisky for both of them, carried it back to the fireplace. 'Now,' he said, 'what is all this?'

  'As you know, sir, there are three separate problems.' Casby spoke with deliberation – with too much deliberation, Colonel Babington felt; what he was going to say plainly had an interest for him above and beyond his professional concern with it, and he was using logic to shut that interest out. 'Three problems: the letters in general, the letter sent to Miss Keats-Madderly in particular, and the murder of Rubi.

  'It may be that those three problems are quite separate and distinct; or it may be that two of them are connected, and the third is separate; or it may be that there's a nexus involving them all.'

  The Colonel looked at the ceiling. 'Yes,' he murmured. 'Yes, I see.'

  'I beg your pardon, sir.' Casby smiled faintly. 'Perhaps I am overdoing it rather, I didn't intend to imply . . .'

  'No, no, go on – my dear man. It's your report, after all.' Colonel Babington returned the smile. 'And I dare say that sometimes I am a shade slow-witted about these things. So don't mind me. Go ahead.'

  Casby sipped whisky and returned the glass carefully to its place on the bricks of the hearth. 'First, then, the letters in general,' he said. 'As you know, one doesn't, in the normal way, expect to be held up long over a problem like that; not in these days. But the fact remains that we've drawn a blank every time. The paper and envelopes – to start with them – have all been the same sort, cheap stuff that you can get at any Woolworth's; the paste used to stick on the bits of newspaper has always been Gloy, which half the population buys; the scraps of brush-hair we've found mixed in with it from time to time have all come from the sort of brush that's supplied with the stuff; and the newspapers – well, they've just been newspapers: various newspapers of various dates, and not all the snippings in any given letter have been of the same date, necessarily. Place of posting, in three cases here, in seven Twelford, in two Brankham; but quite often people have destroyed the envelopes – and of course there must obviously be letters which have never been handed to us at all. Time of posting, variable. And none of that helps, because people from here are constantly going into Twelford and Brankham to do their shopping. The pen used in addressing the envelopes has always been a blue-black Baby Biro, which is tricky, because with a Biro there's practically no difference
between the width of the up, down, and cross strokes, and that takes away half the writing's individuality before you begin; anyway, the graphologists say they can't possibly identify the writing on the envelopes with any of the various handwritings we've submitted to them, so we're foxed there. What's more, none of the obvious suspects uses a Baby Biro in the normal way, and although we've tried to trace recent purchases in the local shops, it's been a hopeless business – the girls in Woolworth's for instance, wouldn't be likely to remember any particular purchase.

  'So far, so bad. But there did seem to be just three possible lines of investigation we could try:

  'The first was analysis of dust and hair in the envelopes. Well, the dust so far has proved absolutely nothing, and the one and only hair we found turned out to belong to the woman to whom the letter had been sent. As far as hair's concerned, this letter-writer has either been extraordinarily careful or extraordinarily lucky . . . Oh, and I was forgetting fingerprints. None – and that, of course, means care; the writing and sealing and posting must all have been done in gloves.

  'Secondly, there was the marked-stamp idea – individualized twopenny-halfpennies to be sold to each of half a dozen suspects when they asked for stamps in the local post office. And you know what happened to that scheme.'

  Colonel Babington nodded. 'Someone came across it in a detective story,' he supplied, 'and in a day or two half the village had heard of it. Ample warning. So it's hardly surprising that it got no results. Of course, our choice of suspects was pretty arbitrary; we just picked people we knew to have, or thought might have, a grudge against the community, and hoped for the best. And that's really been the trouble all along. All our prying's been concentrated on those six, more or less, and quite likely the culprit isn't one of them at all.'

  'Just so, sir. But it's difficult to see what else we could have done. And naturally it was on those six that we experimented when we tried out the last of our possibilities – I mean the blood-group business. That looked promising, because very few people realize that you can tell a man's blood-group from his saliva, provided he doesn't belong to the fifteen per cent they call "non-secretors", and there was plenty of the letter-writer's saliva on the gummed-down flaps of the envelopes and the backs of the stamps. Well, it was tested: group A, it turned out to be. And that was when the idea began to look rather less promising, because forty-four per cent of the population are A. However, we went ahead and managed one way and another to get a blood or saliva sample from our six – and damn me if five of them, five weren't just that, group A'

 

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