The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  Presently Rolt appeared, carrying a tray of drinks. His eyes were bloodshot and his shoulders bowed; all the aggressiveness had been drained out of him. 'We can do with something,' he said, 'after that. Scotch? Brandy?'

  'Brandy, please.'

  He poured brandy for them both. They sipped in silence, savouring the fierce warmth it gave. And after a while he said:

  'Well?'

  'Well what?'

  'What's to be done?' He put his glass on a table beside him and folded his thick hands.

  'If I tell you,' said Helen, 'you'll only –'

  'Only snap your head off? No, lass, there won't be any more o' that. It seems I've managed to make a proper muck of it where Pen's concerned – so now I shall have to do what I'm told.' He stared at the carpet. 'Yes,' he reiterated vehemently, 'a proper muck of it, I've made. Though God knows, I meant it for the best.'

  'People always do,' said Helen dully. 'They always do.'

  There was a silence. Then, with an effort, he said:

  'But you still haven't told me –'

  'No, I haven't. I should have thought you could have guessed.'

  His face went very white. 'You don't mean a – some sort of a mental home?'

  'No!' Helen sat upright, battling against the inertia which was creeping over her. 'Of course not! What I meant –'

  'One o' these psychiatrists, then? I've always thought of Pen as being a healthy normal girl like all the others, but now –'

  'Of course she's healthy,' said Helen. 'Of course she's normal. And for heaven's sake get it out of your head that she tried to commit suicide. She may have thought of it, but she didn't do it; I saw her fall, and it was definitely an accident.'

  'Well,' he said obstinately, 'but she did think of it, didn't she?'

  'Precious few people don't, at one time or another in their lives. And God knows, she had reason enough.' Helen leaned forward earnestly. 'Let me just remind you of what she's been through in the past day or two. You told her she wasn't to see her young man. You – you beat her when she did see him. Then she came on his murdered body in a place where – which seems to have had some – some sentimental association for her. And then, eavesdropping, she overheard an interview which convinced her that her father had written a cowardly anonymous letter and caused a suicide by it. All that against a background of loneliness and adolescence, combined, according to you, with physical trouble of a sort which at her age can be horribly worrying . . .

  'But the worst thing of all, I need hardly tell you, has been your crazy vendetta against everyone else in the village. Oh, she was loyal enough, believe me – but of course that was bound to make her doubt you. And if she hadn't secretly doubted you she'd never for a moment have believed that you wrote that letter to Beatrice Keats-Madderly, or any of the other anonymous letters. No, she doesn't need a psychiatrist, because she's not temperamentally in the least abnormal. What she does need is a new father.'

  And Rolt winced, screwing up his face as if he were suffering actual physical pain. Then he said: 'I'd have the whole bloody mill pulled down if I thought it'd –'

  'That's hardly necessary. In fact, it'd be downright idiotic. A little ordinary civility is all that's required.'

  'Well, I dare say I might manage that.' He tried to smile. 'I'm a bit out of practice, but still . . . Look, lass, you're sure, aren't you?'

  'Sure about what?'

  'Sure Pen's mind's all right. This suicide business . . .'

  'There isn't anything the matter with her,' said Helen, 'that you can't cure.'

  Somewhere a telephone was ringing. Rolt hesitated, got to his feet, and lumbered out to answer it. In two minutes he was back.

  'Colonel Babington,' he said. 'Wants us both at his house as soon as we can get. Summat in the way of a show-down, I gathered.'

  Helen was mortally tired; she had had enough, and more than enough. But she knew it was impossible for her to stay away. Somehow she must see the day through to whatever its end might be. She stood up.

  'I don't like leaving the girl,' Rolt was saying, 'but –'

  'She'll be all right. She won't even wake.'

  They faced one another across the room; and: 'I've been a sight luckier,' he said abruptly, 'than I deserve.' Their eyes met, and for the first time there was sympathy between them.

  'Well, Duchess,' said Harry Rolt, 'this is it.'

  16

  IN the Chief Constable's study the curtains were drawn against darkness. To ward off the late-evening chill a small fire had been lit, and the cat Lavender, asleep in front of it, twitched his whiskers ferociously as he chased mice or Martians through the dim corridors of dreamland. The firelight was reflected in the glass fronts of the bookcases, in the silver necklace-labels of the decanters, in the green-varnished metal of the big filing-cabinet. There were roses, yellow ones, on the roll-top desk; the brass andirons gleamed with a rich butter-colour; the lamps had large, old-fashioned shades. Ever and again an edge of the carpet would stir as the great wind outside crept secretly, through a dozen holes and crannies, into the old house.

  Bulking large in his blue uniform, Constable Burns stood on guard just inside the door. His presence there was a reminder, had they needed it, that this was no social occasion. Across the room from him, beside the hearth, sat Inspector Edward Casby, gazing moodily into the clear young flames – Casby, who on Helen's arrival, in company with Rolt, had got to his feet along with the other three men, but who had avoided her eye then and was avoiding it still. Mr Datchery, in impenitent possession of the best arm-chair, was reclining comfortably on the small of his back, his lean face tranquil, his ice-blue eyes almost closed, his brown hair standing up, as always, in spikes at the crown of his head. Near him, George Sims fidgeted with a pipe. Helen and Harry Rolt were on the fragile-looking sofa, Colonel Babington in the revolving chair by the desk. And it was Colonel Babington who was speaking now.

  'I think you know why you're here,' he was saying brusquely. 'A decision has been reached as to the – the cause of our various troubles. And since all of you have been involved in them, either as witnesses or else in a – a more direct and personal sort of way, I thought it'd be only fair to let you know as soon as possible what that decision is. In the normal way, the police like to get a case thoroughly buttoned up before they say anything to anybody about it. But in view of what's happened already this evening' – his eyes flickered momentarily in Rolt's direction – 'it seemed best to keep you out of your beds an hour or two longer with a view to thrashing the thing out straight away.'

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the quarter after eleven, like tiny gold droplets falling into a crystal jar. No one moved. With the tempo of her heart-beats quickening momently, Helen glanced at her companions' faces. Rolt's was outwardly blank – but with a native shrewdness lurking somewhere behind the eyes; Casby's, unreadable; Sim's grave, perhaps a little scared; Mr Datchery's very slightly impatient; Burns's, stolid and unmoved. But the wariness which had at first been in Colonel Babington's grey eyes now diminished for a time as he leaned forward to continue speaking.

  'However, before we get down to that,' he said, 'there's a sort of – um – introduction I ought to make. You all know Mr Datchery.' The tone of Colonel Babington's voice suggested that he himself considered this fact to be not entirely to their credit. 'You may not have known him before this evening, but you can hardly have avoided hearing of him, because there hasn't been so much gabble in the village about a visitor since that wretched Dutchman came here in the first year of the war – the one everyone thought was a German spy . . . Well, Mr Datchery is not, as most people seem to have imagined, from Scotland Yard. But on the other hand, his name's not Datchery, either.'

  'That,' observed Dr George Sims, 'undoubtedly gets my prize for the year's most superfluous remark.'

  He grinned uncertainly at Helen – a rueful grin in which she read an apology for his behaviour earlier in the evening. And perforce she smiled back. She was a little afraid of hi
m now – since the unpredictable is always slightly scarifying – but his natural charm of manner still worked.

  'It was I' – Colonel Babington had ignored the interruption and was forging determinedly ahead – 'it was I who asked him to come here in the first place. And of course, it's from me that he's been getting his information.' Suddenly the Colonel was aggrieved. 'What I forgot about,' he said irritably, 'was his mania for needless impostures. This "Datchery" business –'

  Mr Datchery sat upright abruptly.

  'Needless?' he said with much indignation. 'It was not needless. You yourself admitted –'

  'All I admitted was a remote possibility that someone here might have heard of you.' The Colonel breathed heavily. 'And that if you used your own name, people might realize you were here for a particular purpose. But since, to the best of my knowledge, you've never made the least attempt to disguise the reasons for your presence, you might just as well not have bothered.'

  'It amused me,' said Mr Datchery more mildly. 'I grant you it hasn't been much practical use, but it's kept me happy, and it's done no harm. What I complain of –'

  George Sims, brown eyes twinkled; he pressed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

  'Well, you might put us out of our agony,' he said. 'Everyone in the village has been agreeing that you weren't what you seemed to be, but there've been the devil of a lot of different theories as to what you actually were. So do tell us now.'

  'I,' said Mr Datchery rather smugly, 'am Gervase Fen.'

  As a dramatic disclosure this was not a hundred per cent effective, for Rolt's reaction to it was to say bluntly: 'Never heard of you.' But 'Oh, I have, though,' said George Sims, all at once pensive, and 'And so have I,' breathed Helen, wide-eyed. 'I was talking to Alice Riddick on the phone, and she said –'

  'Yes. I'm afraid I overheard that.' Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, had the grace to look slightly uneasy. 'But look here – didn't you hear me announce myself when I was telephoning?'

  'No, I told you, I missed the start of that.'

  'Well, anyway, that's who he is,' said Colonel Babington, in the voice of a chairman who feels that the meeting is straying too far from the point. 'God help me. I've known him for years. And the thing about him is that on several occasions in the past he's helped the police to clear up one or two criminal matters, with the result – '

  'I'll be damned!' said Fen. 'Of all the unscrupulous mis-statements – '

  'With the result,' the Colonel went on unruffled, 'that it was him I thought of when – when –'

  He checked himself, remembering something. 'I say, Casby . . .'

  'Go ahead, sir.' Looking up from his contemplation of the fire, Casby still avoided Helen's eye. 'Please go ahead.'

  The Colonel did go ahead. But manifestly he was far from comfortable about it.

  'Well, it was the letters, d'you see,' he muttered after a short pause. 'A fortnight of them, and they were playing the very devil in the way of suspicion and so forth, and we still hadn't a clue. Of course, one thing I could have done' – The Colonel's discomfort perceptibly grew – 'was to take Casby off the case and substitute someone else out of the county C.I.D. Or alternatively, I could have asked for help from London. But neither of those ideas appealed to me much. As far as London was concerned, the county'd have got a horse-laugh for not being able to cope with anything so – well, so ordinary as a go of anonymous letters. And as far as our own chaps were concerned, there wasn't anyone who was likely to get results where Casby had failed . . .

  'Well, we've got our pride, I suppose.' Here the Colonel touched maximum embarrassment. 'Our C.I.D.'s as good as any C.I.D. in the country, and if I could help it I wasn't going to tout around publishing the fact that we'd struck a sticky patch, and couldn't get through it. So I thought I'd try a compromise.'

  'Which worked.' This time Casby did not look up, and Helen sensed that he was fighting down the same sort of bitterness she had experienced in being outpassed, professionally, by George Sims. 'Which worked,' he reiterated, suddenly smiling. 'And splendidly.'

  'Yes, Gervase has a taste for these problems, the Lord knows why,' said Colonel Babington, 'and perhaps a flair for solving them.' At this grudging testimonial, Fen snorted loudly. 'Anyway, he has, as Casby says, succeeded. Good luck to him, and we're grateful, though mind you, I think in time we ourselves –'

  'Of course you would,' said Fen quietly. 'I've been lucky, that's all . . .

  'I say, Andrew' – he found and lit a cigarette – 'hadn't we better get on with it now?'

  And with that the tension came back. Burns's boots creaked as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Helen could see Casby's muscles tighten under the old tweed suit, and beside her, Rolt moved his bulk to a less relaxed position on the sofa's edge. Of the seven people assembled in that room, Fen alone remained motionless. Rising momentarily from his seat, George Sims flung a spent match into the fire.

  'Yes, let's have it,' he said.

  The Chief Constable nodded. 'Go on, Gervase.'

  'I'm afraid,' said Fen, in a certain tone of voice, 'that one of you is not going to like this very much.'

  . . . And in that instant, Helen knew. There was a sense, she realized afterwards, in which she had known all along; but the knowledge had been buried deep in her subconscious mind, and until now she had only been very obscurely aware of it . . .

  'The letter,' she found herself saying, 'the letter which killed Beatrice . . .'

  From across the room Fen looked at her gravely.

  'Yes,' he said. 'You're quite right. It was written, with intent to kill, by Dr George Sims.'

  Wind rattled the panes, and the fire flared up suddenly. The cat Lavender stirred uneasily in his sleep. Getting slowly to his feet, George Sims said, in a voice that was not quite his own:

  'Are you insane?'

  His lips were dry, and he put out the tip of his tongue to lick them. 'Are you insane?' he repeated. 'Or is this some idiotic joke?'

  Fen stared back at him dispassionately.

  'No,' he said. 'I'm not insane. And you won't find it a very brilliant joke, by the time public opinion, and the law, are through with you. Morally, what you did was murder. The law can't get you for that, unfortunately, but I think we can still guarantee, my fine young gentleman, to make you wish you'd never been born.'

  The law can't get you for that . . . Helen understood then that what for a moment had seemed to be the end was only a beginning. But the wheels were moving faster now, and there was no time to look ahead . . . George Sims said quietly:

  'You bloody fool.'

  'In my time,' Fen answered without perturbation, 'quite a number of people have called me that. Most of them now inhabit prisons, or six foot of earth in a prison yard . . .

  'But since you apparently still don't believe I'm serious, let's look at the evidence.'

  And Sims laughed. He dropped back into his chair.

  'All right,' he said. 'If you're quite determined to make an exhibition of yourself, go ahead and do it.'

  'Oh yes. Yes, I'm quite determined . . . You know, the thing that's worried me most about this whole affair has been an envelope addressed in violet ink.'

  Fen paused, drawing thoughtfully at his cigarette. 'Violet ink,' he went on presently. 'When Colonel Babington told me about the violet-ink envelope – as he's told me about everything else that's happened – I remembered vaguely that an acquaintance of mine had always used violet ink. And I worried, in the way one does, because I couldn't at first recall who that acquaintance was. But this evening, at long last, I did remember. A girl I'd known when I was an undergraduate had always used it, and very likely was using it still. That girl's name was Emma Paton; and if you know anything about books at all, you'll recognize it as the name of the best-selling novelist she's developed into.'

  'Most impressive,' sneered Dr George Sims. 'You alarm me very much.'

  Fen closed his eyes. 'Yes,' he sai
d, 'I think I probably do . . .

  'Now, it would have been the purest coincidence,' he resumed, 'if Emma Paton's violet ink had had anything to do with the envelope which Beatrice Keats-Madderly received on Friday morning through the post, and in the normal way I probably shouldn't have taken the matter further. But as it happened, I had other reasons for being interested in that envelope. Let me tell you what they were.

  'Between the time Beatrice Keats-Madderly looked at her post and the time Inspector Casby examined it, that violet-ink envelope disappeared. It was not burned along with the anonymous letter which (presumably) it had contained –and there was no earthly reason why it should have been. And it was not to be found anywhere in the house.

  'Therefore someone had obviously taken it.

  'Of the people in Beatrice Keats-Madderly's house at the crucial period, Casby could be ruled out. If he had stolen the envelope – for whatever reason – he would scarcely have been wandering round drawing attention to its absence; that absence was a thing he could perfectly well, if he'd chosen, have concealed.

  'That left, as suspects in the envelope mystery, Dr Downing, Dr Sims, Burns, Harris the hedger, and Moffatt the gardener. Could any of them be ruled out? Probably not, I thought. The thief might – since an envelope's not very difficult to pocket unobserved – have been any one of them. And motive? Well, it seemed obvious at first that the envelope must in some fashion be a tell-tale envelope, capable of giving something or somebody away; and that would mean that the writer of this particular anonymous letter had been careless, and was now covering up – or alternatively, that an accomplice was covering up on his or her behalf.

  'Thus far, there was no conclusive evidence. But I did have a theory about that envelope – one of several, I may add – and on Sunday morning I went to Beatrice Keats-Madderly's house with a view to having a look at the house and seeing whether it fitted my theory. It did. It's a very symmetrical house, and the letter-box is in the exact centre of the front door. Which means that a man ostensibly knocking at that door could easily slip a letter in without being observed.