The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  'Yes, but they can be explained away. Even taking them all together, they're nothing like conclusive.'

  'I'll tell you what is conclusive, though, and that's that blasted steel. I know Helen didn't kill the man. That isn't guessing – I know. But I can't see – can't see – how anyone else can have done it . . .'

  And that was when a new voice spoke, from the double doors which led from the study into the drawing-room.

  'Can't you?' said Mr Datchery, 'But I rather think I can.'

  13

  AT eight o'clock that Sunday evening Helen Downing was alone in her house by the churchyard, fighting down panic.

  Outside the windows of the room in which she sat, clouds were hastening across a yellowish sky. During the past hour they had multiplied much as a rabble, scenting riot or loot, will multiply in city streets, and now, in drunken-seeming confusion, they were being driven reeling towards the east by the wind's pursuit, their shadows flickering on the mounds and stones of the waiting dead like unquiet ghosts. Below, it was still calm; only rarely did a fringe of that furious movement of the upper air catch and shake a tree-top, or pause to whisper in the grass. But the sun had disappeared, and in its place a moon just past the full hung flat and unreal behind the hurrying vapours, passing them, it seemed, in listless or hostile review. Dusk was setting in; few, this evening, had lingered long in the church-porch to gossip after Evensong; and as for the birds, they in their wisdom had apparently gone early to bed . . .

  A storm, Helen told herself: there's going to be a storm. And with her coffee-cup cradled warm between her hands, she moved closer to the window, staring out. But her thoughts were not such as may be fettered by the spectacle of a sultry, threatening twilight; they too had their storms in prospect, and of a vehemence to surpass anything an English wind could do. Helen Downing looked out at the clouds and the saffron sky – and looked away again. Among the dark, heavy mahogany furniture, she moved back to her chair.

  'Forty, I think, or fifty thousand pounds.'

  Melanie Hogben, the servant, had Sunday afternoons off; the house with its solitary occupant was still, now, as if it had stood untenanted for years. There was movement enough, outside in the waning light, but since that movement was soundless, the impression it conveyed was much less of animation than – disagreeably – of stealth. Helen finished her coffee, lit a cigarette, and began prowling about the room, struggling to turn her mind outwards, to prevent it, by fixing it on material surroundings, from reverting again to the narrow circular path of fear and mistrust which it had traversed that evening a hundred times already. Here the desk at which her father had worked in his draughty Essex rectory; here his heavy silver-plated inkstand, a parting gift from the parishioners of his first living; here –

  'Forty, I think, or fifty thousand pounds.'

  That was when it had started: a stretcher being carried awkwardly up the nettle-grown bank; men from the village with their caps off, and a waiting ambulance. She had exclaimed involuntarily, then fallen silent as memories returned; and the silence had lasted until, after their fruitless call at Burn's cottage, Casby had put her down at her door. He too had been preoccupied; his kiss had been formal, almost cold. But there was little mistrust in Helen's nature, and she had attributed their slight temporary estrangement to the fact that as yet they knew too little of each other to have learned for any but intimate occasions the modus vivendi of lovers. She had humility enough, too, to be prepared to efface herself whenever (as now) his work must obviously be paramount, and for the time being she had forgotten his disturbing questions about newspapers in the larger shock of learning of her inheritance. So she had not been unhappy when she went in to lunch – perplexed, perhaps, and for no very compelling reason a little uneasy, but not unhappy.

  So far, so good. And over lunch her buoyancy had increased, for now she could look without the old misgivings at the unpaid bills stuffed into the pigeon-holes of the secretaire, could make splendid plans and dream gallant dreams. Callous to be so elated? No, surely not. Helen knew that if renouncing the money could have brought Beatrice back to life, she would have renounced it without a second thought – with eagerness, indeed, and with gratitude. But that was impossible. And that being impossible, to grieve at the gift – as opposed to grieving at its occasion – would surely be a kind of insult to the giver . . .

  Helen was conscientious – a dull virtue, but an immensely practical one – and to fail in a promise, however trivial, had always distressed her much more than, in this expediency-worshipping age, such sins of omission distress the great majority of people. Lunch over, she had therefore gone at once to unlock the garage and fetch the steel from her car, where it had stayed forgotten since yesterday. In the upshot Burns had relieved her of it, and at the time she had certainly not for a moment suspected him of any ulterior motive in doing so; not until several hours later had she looked back on the incident and seen it in a new and less reassuring light. No, the fact was that the meeting with Burns had set her mind moving in an altogether different direction: had reminded her again of Penelope Rolt. And it was with Penelope occupying her thoughts that she had strolled back to her house under the baking afternoon sun. Penelope had got to be found, and found quickly. To an already complex disturbance of mind had been superadded the appalling experience of finding her young man's murdered body, and that at a spot where, according to Janet Burns, rumour had it that they – Helen checked the thought, frowning; it was impossible to think of the relationship as having been in any sense an adult one, an age at which marriage, and Other things than marriage, are by no means inconceivable. Marriage . . . Penelope would have money, Helen supposed, when her father died; Rolt was the sort of man who did make money, and (what was more important these days) who had started making money before penal taxation made the accumulating of it impracticable. Had money been what Rubi had been after? A surprising number of girls stay faithful to their first loves, and to get in early might be a calculated act based on the knowledge of that. In any case, Penelope, as an heiress, would have to be exceedingly careful about the bona fides of anyone who proposed to her; any girl with money, or the prospect of it–

  And that was when Helen suddenly woke up.

  It has been said that mistrust was foreign to her nature, and that is the truth. But there are limits. Standing stock-still, with her hand on the latch of the gate, she for the first time realized, sick at heart, that Edward Casby had known of her inheritance when he proposed to her that morning.

  Realized that he had never made the least attempt to become friendly with her before.

  Realized that she had agreed to marry him on the basis of precisely four short meetings.

  Her loyalty fought back. Well what of it? If he had not made friends before, that was because he was diffident. And there had been nothing of the casting of accounts in the morning's embrace. But oh God, thought Helen, women had been sure of that sort of thing before, and especially? if they've been like me and missed love in their first youth, because then they've wanted it so much that they've seen it in a man's eyes when it was never there at all. Auto-hypnosis, that's called; what you look for and long for you're sure, sooner or later, to think you've found . . . Her thoughts grew inchoate, unmanageable. She went slowly indoors, and there attempted to distract herself with business matters. But the savour of her inheritance had turned to repulsion; it had come to her by evil means, and its first effect had been evil, and for all her difficulties Helen now passionately desired herself quit of it. Debts, good Lord! If having debts will restore love and confidence, let's have debts and be grateful, because love and confidence are cheap at that or any price. Money, someone had said, may not make you happy; but it does at least enable you to be miserable in comfort. Cheapjack stuff, thought Helen with anger. And then the rows of figures at which she was staring blurred as anger turned to tears.

  She had got a grip on herself presently, for she knew in her heart that she was making a great deal of fuss about a sus
picion which as well as being quite unsupported by evidence was essentially treacherous. By the time – half past three or thereabouts – that Casby dropped in to speak to her, her emotional condition had reverted to nearer normal and she had forced herself to suspend judgement. But there had still been that in her superficially equable greeting which caused him to look askance at her for a moment before stating his errand; and such composure as she had succeeded in achieving had been swept away like straw when she heard the few questions he had come to ask.

  At the outset, those questions had only bewildered her.

  'The steel? Yes, Colonel Babington asked me yesterday to take it back to Weaver. Only I forgot, I'm afraid. But why –'

  'Can you tell me where it's been in the meanwhile?'

  'Yes, of course. In my car.'

  'Lying on one of the seats, I suppose?'

  'Well, no. Actually it was tucked away in a pocket – you know, the sort on the inside of the door, with an elastic top to it, that you get in most old cars . . . But look, darling, what is all this?'

  He had attempted a smile. 'Probably nothing important. I'm just checking up, that's all. When did you last have the car out?'

  'Yesterday afternoon. I didn't have any patients to see this morning, so –'

  'You mean yesterday afternoon at the time Colonel Babington gave you the steel?'

  'Yes.'

  'Did you drive straight back here from his house?'

  'Yes. Mrs Babington was my last call. I put the car away about tea-time and haven't had it out since.'

  'Do you keep your garage locked?'

  After a long pause Helen had said quietly: 'I see. Stupid of me not to have seen before. You think the steel was what killed Rubi.'

  'No,' he had answered with some vehemence. 'I realize now that it can't have done. But it's been hanging about, and it's the sort of thing that could have made the wound, so I had to ask about it. You see, it occurred to me that someone might have had the chance of pinching it from you.'

  'That's impossible. I didn't stop anywhere on the way back from Colonel Babington's house, and I locked the car up immediately, and it's been locked up ever since. How does this particular steel compare with the wound for size?'

  'It's the right size exactly.'

  'Quite a coincidence,' Helen had said stiffly. 'Are there any traces of blood on it?'

  'A few. They're being tested now . . . Helen, you're certain no one could have stolen it?'

  Beneath her surface equanimity Helen was desperately afraid: it needed an almost physical effort not to lie in self-protection. 'And returned it as well?' she had responded coolly. 'That's asking a bit much, isn't it?'

  'I'm wrong, then,' he had said half to himself. 'And yet –'

  'And yet it looked so promising.' Helen's fear broke suddenly through the mask. 'Why don't you say straight out that you –'

  'It may have been planted on you.'

  'My dear man, how? How?'

  'All right, then. I am wrong about it – must be. But you can surely see that I had to follow it up.'

  'A little trustfulness would have saved you the trouble.'

  'A little trustfulness would put the police out of action for good.'

  'Damn the police!'

  He had not answered that. 'I'd better go,' he had said. 'We're in the hell of a mess, and we shall go on being in it till this whole filthy business is cleaned up.' Then his voice had grown gentler. 'I'm sorry, Helen. If it's any consolation to you, I can tell you that I shall probably chuck the case up in the next few hours.'

  'Thanks. I can understand that. Because you wouldn't want me hanged, would you?'

  'Of course I wouldn't want –' And then, looking into her eyes, he had suddenly realized what she meant. 'I see. Yes, I see how our marriage might look to a certain type of mind. Good-bye for now.'

  With that he had gone. For a time you could shut out the shame of your own wretched, indefensible innuendo by indulging your resentment at that 'certain type of mind'. But the more dreadful thing which underlay shame and resentment alike was such as no amount of emotional juggling could suppress. For Helen knew that whatever he might have said, Casby had gone away still believing, in spite of everything, that that damnable steel was what had killed the Swiss schoolmaster; and where the steel was concerned, not love and confidence were at stake but life itself . . .

  It was only later that she learned of his return to examine the garage; and that was well, for if she had seen what he did she would have known how to interpret it, and she was already quite close enough to panic without the addition of that. Moving restlessly about her sitting-room, while the daylight failed and the dull moon took lustre from its failing, Helen experienced positive loneliness for the first time in her life: it seemed to her that with Beatrice gone there was no one, no one, to whom in this extremity she could turn. A lawyer, she thought vaguely: I ought to get a lawyer. But long hours of wretchedness had so sapped her energies and her resolution that she was by this time incapable of action, incapable even of making plans.

  The room was wholly in shadow; light lingered only on the massive silver-plated inkstand and on the glass front of the corner-cupboard. In the whirligig of memory and emotion Helen had been oblivious of the besieging darkness. But now, as reflection petered out in misery and she raised her eyes from the desk at which she had been vacantly staring, she became all at once aware and afraid of the thickening gloom, so that her movement, when she swung round abruptly to turn on the lamps, had the quality of an animal's when it scents a trap.

  Quietly, almost timidly, someone knocked on the front door.

  14

  LIGHT filled the room as the switch clicked; the sullen, ponderous furniture, whose replacement – much as she hated it – Helen had never been able to afford, absorbed the light without refracting it, deadening it as sound is deadened in a building which lacks resonance. During the heat of the day Helen had left her front door standing open. In a village where two decades had not produced a single theft, that was often done, though it had not been done so much since the anonymous letter-writer had started work; the communal mistrust wrought by the letters had proliferated irrelevantly into every department of normal life. But the habit still prevailed so long as conscious defensiveness did not interfere, and Helen could hear soft footsteps, now, as her unknown visitor accepted the open door's invitation to stroll into the house. In the hall outside the sitting-room, a voice called inquiringly.

  'Hello!' it said. 'Anyone at home?'

  Inwardly cursing her nervousness, Helen strode to the sitting-room door and flung it wide.

  'Oh, there you are,' said Dr George Sims. 'I thought everyone must be out. Whatever were you doing – meditating in the dark?'

  When Helen had last seen him he had been in tennis kit. Now he wore an ancient, baggy hacking-coat with ancient, baggy grey trousers and a pink tie which clashed deplorable with his untidy ginger hair. His pale, straggling eyebrows were lifted in humorous inquiry; the summer sun had reddened his face (he had the sort of skin which can never acquire a tan) and had brought out orange freckles round the root of his irregular nose; a curved briar pipe, unlit, projected solemnly, with an air of self-parody, from a corner of his ugly, attractive mouth. As Helen stood aside, he ambled into the room with the nonchalance of perfect physical health; and for all that she hardly knew him, his coming seemed to her then like the magic of a fine hot fire in a chilly room, so that she laughed in sheer relief.

  'Meditating?' she said. 'Well, as a matter of fact, I was. Do sit down, and I'll get you a drink . . . Oh Lord, though, I don't believe there's anything but beer. I'm so sorry. The fact is –'

  'I like beer,' he said argumentatively, as though someone had accused him of the contrary. 'I drink a lot of it, especially in the evenings. The only trouble is that it makes one so hellish fat . . .' He looked round him with the naîve curiosity of a child. 'So this is where you live. It's nice,' he said politely.

  Helen, busy at the sidebo
ard, laughed again.

  'You know perfectly well it's quite awful. If I had any money, I'd burn every stick of furniture in the place, and buy a new lot.'

  'Not these days you wouldn't,' he responded a little absently. 'Not with quality and prices what they are . . .' Then with more interest: 'I say, though, it might be a good notion to put in a window-seat. There's room enough, and –'

  'I don't like them.' Helen was pouring beer into pint pewter tankards. 'If you want to look out of the window they give you a crick in the neck – and what's the good of that?'

  'Oh, nonsense,' said Sims vigorously. 'The whole point of them is – ' And for two or three happy minutes they argued zestfully about window-seats, so that Helen temporarily forgot her wretchedness, and wondered – at last recollecting it again – that so small a thing could succeed where all her solitary efforts had so pathetically failed. The effect lasted, too. There was a refocusing: her difficulties, when she thought of them again, seemed not quite so large or so immitigable as they had done in solitude. And the reason for that was that with George Sims you could never be other than uninhibited, since his own extravagance, his total absence of self-consciousness, made your social defences seem so petty and unnecessary that it was child's play to abandon them.

  'Well, all right, have it your own way,' he said impenitently at last. 'But I still don't believe a single word of it.' And then all at once he was serious, with a seriousness as large and unqualified as his controversial mood had been. 'Still, I mustn't go on all night about that. You'll be wanting to know to what you owe the pleasure, et cetera, and I'm afraid the reason I came here isn't particularly cheerful – rather the reverse, in fact . . .