Thus rather inchoately brooding, he came to his destination—a little Georgian house standing on its own, whose ground floor had been converted with tasteful unobtrusiveness into a small shop, the single word ‘Weaver’ in faded gold-scrolled lettering above the window It being Sunday, the shop was of course shut, and empty of wares; but the blinds had not been drawn, and Burns, glancing in as he propped his machine against the wall, could see the bare marble shelves, the scrubbed wooden tables, the knives, the massive door of the electrically operated cold-storage room, and the sawdust-strewn floor. Skirting the house, on a cinder-covered path between its west wall and the garage where the delivery van was kept, Burns arrived at, and portentously knocked on, the back door.
It was opened to him, by Weaver in person, with disconcerting promptness. Seen at close quarters, Weaver was not a handsome man: his narrow, slightly equine face was perched on his long neck like a too-heavy flower on a too-slender stem, and the eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses were as small and black as currants in a cake. His smile showed large, discoloured teeth; his body moved with the suppleness of an india-rubber doll; his decent black serge was ostentatiously sabbatical. But in spite of his failure to prepossess, he was at once all deference, all gratification, when he recognized his visitor.
‘Mr. Burns!’ he cried. ‘Come in, sir, come in! No, no, I insist… insist. Come along! There’s a step down, so be careful not to trip and fall. I’ve only just this moment finished my bachelor repast, so you must excuse the muddle. This way, this way. The ladies in my little flock sometimes tell me my house badly needs a woman’s touch, and I’m sure they’re right, certain of it. But who, I ask them, would ever marry an ugly fellow like me? Here we are, then. Goodness, it does look rather a mess. If you’ll just allow me a moment to clear away…’
The room into which Burns had been unwillingly conducted was the kitchen, and it contrived in some mysterious way to be at once perfectly clean and entirely squalid. The window was closed, and the air frowsty with the smell of many meals; a tap dripped persistently; a mangy black cat sharpened its claws on the dresser. An old-fashioned black iron range occupied almost the whole of one wall, and the pictures were of Biblical personages who pointed dramatically with one hand at distant sheep, Galilean lakes, and so forth, while with the other they clutched providently at unmanageable-looking robes. On the centre table were the remains of a small cold lunch, and Weaver hustled about removing these to the neighbourhood of the sink while Burns looked on helplessly.
‘There!’ said Weaver, in transit with the last plate. ‘That’s better! And now we must find you a chair. Dear, dear, what a wretched host I am, to be sure! Keeping you standing all this time! And you could do with a cup of tea, I expect.’ He darted to an electric kettle. ‘I wonder if you would oblige me by fetching out the plum cake from the cupboard in the corner?’
Burns, who up to now had been almost literally hypnotized by this hospitable agitation, managed at long last to voice a disclaimer. ‘Very good of you, Mr. Weaver,’ he said with a considerable effort, ‘but I can’t stay, I’m afraid. Official business is what I’m here on.’
‘Official business?’ Replacing the kettle, Weaver shookhis head in humorous perplexity. ‘Well, what have I been up to now, I wonder? Or is it’—all at once he was serious—‘is it perhaps to do with the horrible crime which I understand to have been discovered this morning?’
‘You’ve heard about the murder then, sir?’
‘Indeed yes. Mrs. Cuddy spoke to me of it when I was on my way to preach in our little temple here.’ And at this, Weaver closed his eyes and levelled the point of his nose at the ceiling; he was praying, Burns assumed. ‘Dreadful, dreadful,’ he murmured after a moment. ‘The wickedness of the human heart is indeed infinite, without God. In the midst of life—’
Burns found him not unimpressive; but at the same time he was anxious to get to the point. Producing the steel, he said abruptly: ‘But as to why I’m here, sir…’
Weaver opened his eyes; he nodded deferential encouragement, his head bouncing back and forth on his long neck like a knob on a spring. ‘As to why you’re here…’
‘Well, sir, what I want to know is, is this yours?’
‘The steel? Certainly it’s mine.’ Weaver was emphatic. ‘I have owned it ever since my apprenticeship. But where did you…’
‘It was found, sir,’ said Burns impressively. ‘Found. Down by the river,’ he improvised, feeling that something more explicit was called for. ‘Have you any idea how it can have got there?’
Weaver wiped sweat from his forehead; inside, as out, the afternoon was certainly insufferably hot. ‘Little rascals!’ he said somewhat obscurely; and grinned, though without convincing Burns that he was much amused. ‘It would be some of the village children who took it, I don’t doubt.’
‘Just exactly how do you mean, sir—“took it”?’
‘Why, from the shop, Mr. Burns, when my back was turned.’
‘I’d hardly have thought,’ said Burns mistrustfully, ‘that that was possible.’
‘Indeed yes. As you know, I have no assistant in the shop, and so naturally I am sometimes obliged to leave it unattended for a few moments while I am in the cold-storage room or elsewhere in the house. At such times…’
‘I see, sir. Yes. But what makes you think it was children specially? Could have been anyone, couldn’t it?’
Weaver shrugged. ‘There are two reasons, Mr. Burns, why I suggest that it was probably children who took the steel. The first is that I cannot see why anyone else should take such a thing. And the second is that—as I think you may remember—the village children have tried to play such jokes on me before.’
Burns did remember; Weaver had complained of that particular nuisance two or three months ago. There had been little Burns could do about it, and that little he had done grudgingly, for he disliked Weaver and felt that in any case the man ought to be capable, where children were concerned, of looking after himself. Still, the complaint had had substance, Burns was bound to admit.
‘High spirits,’ Weaver was saying now with a consciously wry smile. ‘High spirits… The little ones think me a very comical fellow, and an excellent butt for their tricks. Of course, they mean no harm by it, but none the less…’
‘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 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. D-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 criminological 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 means?’
“‘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 definite 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 th
e 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 at 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.’
The Long Divorce Page 12
