Two or three of the men glanced at Helen as he asked the question, and for a moment she was smitten with a blind panic of self-consciousness. For heaven’s sake, she thought desperately, what do I answer to that? And—damn him!—why does he have to ask it, in front of all these people…?
But he had seen that she hesitated, and before she could reply he went on without haste: ‘Most doctors don’t mind about it one way or the other, but a few of them make a fuss.’ The men looked away again—wholly uninterested, as Helen, recovering her wits, now saw—and she said briefly:
‘As far as I’m concerned, go ahead. The only thing is, don’t shake him about more than you can help.’
He made her a little mock-bow, but she sensed pleasure and respect underlying the mockery, and was happy, her earlier nervousness gone. She watched him as he went slowly and carefully about the job, and when he had finished, and had restored the body more or less to the position in which they had found it, she said:
‘We were right, then.’
‘About there not being any blood on the ground? Yes, we were. No weapon, either.’
‘My turn now?’
‘Fingerprints first. Though I’m afraid the only possible surfaces are his shoes and his glasses and his buttons and the little buckles at the back of his trousers. If chaps who proposed to get themselves murdered would only have the sense to put on a suit of nice shiny armour… Briggs!’
The fingerprints man joined them, did his job, and provisionally expressed himself displeased with the results. ‘Hardly any prints at all,’ he said, ‘and what there are look like turning out to be his own. I always have great hopes of bodies, miss,’ he added to Helen, ‘because its surprising the number of murderers who’ll wipe their prints off everything round the body for miles and miles, and completely forget about the body itself. But this…!’ He went off in disgust and settled down on a tree-stump with a magnifying glass and a note-book to make a start with the job of classifying Rubi’s prints. ‘They’re re-showing an old Betty Grable film at the Rialto to-night,’ he said in explanation of this assiduity, ‘and I don’t want to have to miss that.’
And now it really was Helen’s turn. Casby made no attempt to watch or supervise her, but went off (the combing of the glade having proved it barren of evidence) to organize a more extensive but less detailed examination of the locality. When he returned, a quarter of an hour later, Helen had done, without pleasure but also without repugnance, all that could be done.
‘The weapon’s some sort of rod-like thing,’ she told him, ‘about the width of the wound. I wasn’t able to measure it, I’m afraid, because I haven’t got—’
‘Oh, that’s easily managed.’ And presently, getting to his feet again: ‘Seven sixteenths of an inch. What else?’
‘It must have had a good sharp point, because there’s hardly any tearing.’
He was making notes in the Memoranda section of his pocket diary. ‘Yes. And then?’
‘Well, I can’t be sure about this, but I’ve a strong suspicion that the weapon was grooved, all round.’
‘Longways, you mean?’
‘Yes. There are little ridges which suggest that. The autopsy will give you a better idea, though.’
‘Any notion how long this weapon would be?’ Helen shook her head. ‘You can’t possibly tell that till you find out how deep the wound goes. And of course, even then you only get a minimum length.’
‘I suppose,’ he said vaguely, ‘that if one inserted a stick or something, and measured it afterwards…’
‘I certainly don’t advise it. You’d probably alter the shape of the wound and destroy most of the information you’d normally get from it at the autopsy.’
‘My mistake.’ He smiled at her. ‘You know, you’re getting far too good at this… But I suppose the weapon did pierce his heart.’
‘There’s no particular reason why he should have died if it didn’t… Oh, well, internal haemorrhage, of course. But I’m pretty sure it’s not that.’
‘Would he die as soon as the blow was struck?’
‘Oh yes. There are cases of people lasting quite a long time after heart wounds, but not, I think, after a wound as big and violent as this.’
‘For an engagement morning, this must be one of the most incongruous dialogues ever spoken… Well, and now we come to the most important thing: how long ago did he die?’
‘About five hours ago.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Seven to seven-thirty this morning, in fact. Is that based on rigor?’
‘M’m. It’s only half complete, and the fact that he’s been lying in the sun would speed it up—any heat does.’
‘Did you make any other tests?’
‘Well, the hypostasis confirms it. Temperatures no guide, because he’s hot from the sun. I could see how his eyes react to physostigmine, if you like, but if they do react, that’ll only mean he’s been dead less than ten hours or so, and we know that anyway, from the rigor.’
‘Right.’ Casby snapped the diary shut and returned it to his pocket. ‘Then that’s all about that. If Sims turns up I shall get a second opinion from him but that won’t be because I distrust your verdict: it’ll be because Sims is, after all, police-surgeon for this district… Oh, here he is now.’
Dr. George Sims pushed his way into the clearing. For a man engaged on his present errand he was somewhat oddly costumed, for he wore tennis shorts and shirt. ‘Sorry about these,’ he said to Casby. ‘But when I got your message I thought I’d better not stop to change.’ He smiled politely but not familiarly at Helen. ‘I’m glad you were able to hire a guest expert. Knows a hell of a sight more about it than I do, I imagine. Well, well. Shall I have a look at him now I’m here, or do you know all you want to know?’
‘For the record,’ said Casby, ‘I think you’d better make an examination.’
Sims stared at the body, and his humorously 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 finger-prints man had vacated, until at last, as the church clock struck one, Casby called off the search and sent for stretcherbearers 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, th
ough 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.’
Chapter Eleven
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 poring over works of criminology with 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 plain 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 irritably 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 Bums’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, and 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 who’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, 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 streetby 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 the 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 mistrust.
‘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 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.
The Long Divorce Page 11
