‘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 yet 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 Holt 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.’
Chapter Ten
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 did you 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 Burns’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 at 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.’
‘You would be very useful, if you felt up to it. Time of death, and so forth.’ And ‘Thank heavens,’ thought Helen, ‘he doesn’t insult me by trying to coddle me.’ Aloud she said:
‘My forensic medicine’s a bit rusty, I’m afraid, but I think I can remember enough about it to give you some sort of idea.’
‘Good…Burns, I don’t want to be tiresome, but I rather doubt if you ought to have left him unguarded.’
Burns went red. ‘I know, sir. Trouble was, I didn’t see a soul about I could have sent a message by. And by the time I’d got to a telephone, I was so near to here I thought I might as well come on. Ought I to have waited, sir, till someone happened along?’
‘No, I think in those circumstances you did quite right. Delay’s always a hindrance.’
‘I took a good look at him, sir, and I think I’d know it if anyone’s meddled with him in the meantime.’
‘Sensible. We’ll go, then. Unluckily, Colonel Babington wasn’t at home either when I rang him, but I got on to the Station at Twelford, and their people will be on the spot almost as soon as we are.’
‘I’ll fetch my bag,’ said Helen.
She rejoined them a minute later in front of Casby’s house, and they drove in his Morris down to the bridge by Rolt’s mill, and alighting there, followed the path across the water-meadow which Helen had taken early that morning immediately prior to her meeting with Rolt. It being Sunday, the mill was of course silent, and apart from a solitary angler just visible a considerable distance up-stream, they had the place to themselves. By now—the hour was nearly ten-thirty—the sun shone really hot, and Helen, who had intended after breakfast to substitute a cotton frock for her light-weight coat and skirt, began to wish that she had delayed long enough, when fetching her medical bag, to make the change. But about the unpleasant-ness awaiting her among the trees they were approaching she thought little, for Rubi had been no more to her than a name and a spare, small, neat figure rarely glimpsed on his way to and from the school at Twelford where he taught. What sort of life had he led? she wondered. And to Casby, as the three of them moved in single file along the narrow track with the rank grass proliferating on either side, she said:
‘He was a bachelor, wasn’t he?’
‘Oh, yes. Unless, that is, he’s got a wife tucked away in Zürich. His parents live there, by the way, and I must remember to cable them as soon as possible, poor souls.’
‘You seem to know quite a lot about him.’
‘Well, it wasn’t so very long after he came here that the anonymous letters started, so I had to find out what I could.’
‘Negative reaction?’
‘Oh, yes, I think so. Unless he was a first-rate actor, his English wasn’t idiomatic enough for him to have written the letters. He was a goo
d deal interested in them, though.’
‘Yes, Beatrice told me that, though I can’t say I paid much attention at the time. He went to Colonel Babington, didn’t he, and suggested the police should co-opt him as a psychiatry expert?’ “He did. I’m sorry to say that Colonel Babington was half in favour of the idea, though I talked him out of it in the end. The trouble was, I was making so little progress myself that I couldn’t afford to be too snooty when help was offered. But I said that if we had to get in outsiders, I’d much rather they were Scotland Yard people than amateurs.’
‘We’ve all been wondering,’ said Helen, ‘if Scotland Yard was going to be called in.’
‘Scotland Yard isn’t called in nearly as often as detective novelists seem to think,’ Casby replied with a trace of heat. ‘They’re not all that good, you know—if you look at the improvements in criminal science during the last twenty years, you’ll find that nearly all of them originated not in the Metropolitan C.I.D. but in the provincial ones, places like Coventry. That goes for elaborate laboratory work, too. The only real advantage the Metropolitan C.I.D. has is that it’s big… Am I right, Burns?’
Burns, in the lead, turned his head with a grin of professional understanding, not unmixed with pleasure at having his opinion canvassed. ‘I’ll say you are, sir. I was talking to Dr. Larkin in Twelford last week, and he tells me our County C.I.D.’s miles ahead of anyone else with the new blood-group tests. What he said was, they’re finding so many new groups and sub-groups that in ten or twenty years you’ll be able to identify a chap straight away just by his blood, like as if it was his fingerprints. But then as soon as we’ve done all the donkeywork, the Yard’ll pinch our results and go bossing about the country as if us police as don’t live in London was just a lot of thick-headed hayseeds. Ma’am,’ said Burns earnestly, ‘you just wait and see if they don’t.’
This warm apologia for criminal investigation in the provinces, which pleased Helen not a little, took them past the spot on the bank where she had sat with Harry Rolt, and in among the trees. The coppice was not a large one, and about ten yards along the path which traversed it Burns turned off to the left, and they pushed their way through bracken and bramble, by a route no more defined than children will mark out in going to and from their private dens and bowers, until the trees thinned momentarily to reveal a tiny glade, grass-floored and open to the sky. The moss-grown stumps of two or three birches, with charring still visible on the free surfaces of the wood, showed that the clearing was the result of a small fire which either had been speedily checked or else had burned itself out without spreading further.
Wild flowers, accessible here to the sun’s rays, grew more luxuriantly than in the shadier parts of the little wood. Hazel-leaved brambles bloomed about the circumference.
And at one side, half hidden from them by couch-grass, lay the body of Peter Rubi.
Both Casby and Burns halted at the edge of the glade to survey it carefully and so avoid eliminating, in their approach to the body, any suggestive traces which might remain. But to Helen’s inexpert eye, at least, no clue offered itself. The ground was bone-dry, the undergrowth tangled, the grass sprawling and prolific: a herd of elephants passing through would probably have left the place looking very much as it had before, and foot-prints were out of the question.
‘I didn’t cross over from here when I went to look at him, sir,’ said Burns. ‘Though of course there’s no knowing what Miss Rolt did. My idea was, I pushed my way round outside the clearing to where he is, and had a dekko at him from there, where there isn’t any sort of path.’
‘Good. We’d better do the same, I think.’ Casby moved away to the right, adding to Helen: ‘Sorry about your clothes, but we mustn’t trample all over the clearing till we’ve made sure there’s nothing to be got from it.’
So they forced their way round to where the body lay, and presently were standing over it. After scrutinizing it attentively for a few moments, Burns said:
‘I don’t think he’s been moved, sir, since I saw him. That little flower that’s bent down under his head—some sort of campion, isn’t it?—that’s lying exactly the way it was, and it’d have changed its position if he’d been moved.’
‘Good man,’ said Casby with approval. ‘I’m inclined to think you’re wasted here—you’d be very useful in the County C.I.D. Appeal to you?’
Burns flushed with pleasure. ‘I’ll say it does, sir.’
‘I’ll put in a good word for you, but don’t rely on anything. As you know, there are plenty of hindrances.’
‘Not fair,’ said Helen. ‘Having got a first-rate policeman in the village, we want to keep him.’
Burns was overwhelmed. ‘Well, anyway,’ said Casby, ‘this is hardly the moment for meditating careers. Burns, will you go back to the bridge, please, and bring my Twelford people along here when they arrive? They won’t know where we are. But don’t bother about Sims. He can find us on his own.’
Burns saluted and took himself off. ‘Nice lad,’ Casby murmured. ‘He ought to do well.’ Helen felt the gentle pressure of his hand on her waist, and he said: ‘There are lots of things I’d rather be doing than this. But all the textbooks tell one that the Investigating Officer must guard against becoming—what’s the phrase they use?—oh, yes, “emotionally involved” in whatever case he’s handling. They add rather gloomily that such an event will “cloud his judgement and result in the formation of prejudices”.’
Helen smiled. ‘What you mean is that this must remain a business trip.’
‘Emphatically. Don’t you agree?’
‘Darling, of course I do.’ Helen looked down dubiously at Rubi’s body. ‘And in the circumstances it’s rather unnatural of us to be even as cheerful as we are. But the thing is, he looks so peaceful, more as if he were sleeping…’
It was true. Rubi lay stretched out on his back, the legs straight and natural-seeming, the left arm at his side, the right hand resting lightly on his body just below the ribs; and although his mouth was a little open, showing white teeth, his eyes were closed. With his glasses askew on his nose, he looked astoundingly like a man in slumber, a man whom the beauty of the weather has tempted to lie down in a pleasant spot and who, immune from interruption and so careless of appearances, has allowed himself to doze off. But no trickle of breath came from those parted lips, no slightest movement of the rib-cage gave hope of air in the lungs; and in the open-necked shirt, just over the heart, there was a rounded hole nearly half an inch in diameter, smeared round with blood—a clean hole, a hole matter-of-fact rather than repellent, but wide enough and deep enough to let death in.
‘It looks like a bullet-hole at first sight,’ said Helen. ‘But Burns was quite right: it isn’t.’ She bent down, only to feel Casby’s restraining hand on her arm.
‘Don’t touch him yet,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Photographs first.’
Helen straightened up quickly; it was nothing more creditable than pride, of course, but she was desperately anxious not to make any sort of mistake. ‘I’m very stupid,’ she said humbly.
‘You’re a highly intelligent young woman, not to say…’ He checked himself in his swift defence of her, and added more lightly: ‘But no, I mustn’t get amorous: unpolicemanly lusts would undoubtedly cloud my judgement and result in the formation of prejudices, if I did. Business, then: why shouldn’t it be a bullet-hole?’
Helen was remembering the forensic medicine lectures she had been to at St Thomas’s, the notes gleaned at midnight from Taylor and Sydney Smith—remembering them not badly, either, considering how little use she had had for them since. But then, like most of her contemporaries, she had found it a particularly fascinating branch of her training.
‘It isn’t a bullet-hole,’ she said carefully, ‘for the simple reason that it’s much too big. It might be that size if it were an exit wound: but it isn’t that, because then the edges would be pushed outwards, and they’re not.’
‘Yes, I see. There seems to have be
en surprisingly little bleeding.’
‘There’s certainly less than I’d have expected.’ Helen stared at the body in some perplexity; something about it was subtly wrong—and the next moment she realized what that something was, saying excitedly: ‘You know, I don’t think he was killed here at all. That streak of blood down the left side of his shirt—well, surely there ought to be signs of it on the grass, and as far as I can see there aren’t. Of course, you’d have to move his arm to be sure, but just the same…’
‘Yes,’ he said mildly. ‘I quite agree.’
Helen sighed. ‘In fact,’ she stated in a rather flat tone of voice, ‘you’ve realized it all along.’
‘Practice, that’s all… Yes, as soon as we’ve finished here we shall have to start trying to find out where he was actually killed. And I wish those Twelford people would hurry up. I want to know about the time of death.’
They did not, however, have much longer to wait. Two minutes later Burns was conducting a miscellaneous troupe of men, hampered by a variety of equipment, to where they stood, and the ensuing quarter of an hour was devoted to stationing a harassed photographer in positions from which he could take photographs without trampling his boots on supposititious clues—a series of manoeuvres which he took in very bad part, saying ‘That one isn’t going to come out’ and ‘The light’s terrible from here’ and ‘Why I don’t leave the Force and do studio portraits…’ until, having finished his job, he resumed his former affability, packed up his camera, and climbed a small tree at the edge of the glade, from whose lower branches he emitted a sardonic commentary, sotto voce, on the subsequent activities of his colleagues. These consisted primarily of quartering and searching the glade, while Casby, having given some considerable time to examining the ground round the body, slowly and pensively circumambulated the body itself. And presently he said to Helen, who still remained just outside the clearing where he had left her:
‘Would you like to look at him before I shift him, or doesn’t that matter?’
The Long Divorce Page 10
