The Long Divorce

by Edmund Crispin

  Burns was not a little taken aback. ‘The—the actual one that did the job, sir?’

  ‘Why not?’ Casby looked up, struck by the incredulity in Burn’s voice. ‘Whose is it? Where did you get it?’

  Constable Burns told him.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Chief Constable’s study was slightly shabby—as a room initially well-furnished can be allowed without offensiveness to become: the chintz a little faded; the ceiling smoky; the rugs, though still serviceable, frayed. Long lattice windows looked towards the front gate, and opposite to them were double doors which led into the drawing-room. The chairs and sofa were Edwardian, with a frail look; Edwardian, too, the massive roll-top desk. The only decisively modern things there were the green metal filing-cabinet and the telephone, and these, you felt, were interlopers, suffered there for their utility alone. The mantelpiece had photographs on it, many photographs; the decanters on the side-table wore necklace labels, shallow-incised lettering on rectangles of thin silver; the books were behind glass. At wood and fabric, brass and paint, the years had picked with delicate, untiring fingers, and the felts tacked on to eliminate draughts were like patches on an old ship.

  It was half past five. Inspector Edward Casby, his face so white with fatigue that the scar hardly showed, sat in an armchair by the fireplace, and Colonel Babington, fidgeting with his clipped moustache, was pacing the carpet. The heat was less now: westering, the sun had gained definition and no longer hurt your eyes.

  The Colonel glanced surreptitiously at Casby, halted.

  ‘My dear chap, you’re overdoing it,’ he said abruptly. ‘Get some food and some sleep, that’s my advice. There’s nothing that won’t keep till to-morrow.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t be sure of that, sir.’ Casby remained quietly dogged. ‘And that’s why I feel I must make some sort of interim report. There’ll be’—he hesitated—‘there may be action you’ll want to take.’

  ‘Action?’ The Colonel stared. ‘What sort of action, for God’s sake?’

  ‘About me, sir.’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘You’ll understand what I mean, sir, when I ’ve told you the results I’ve got so far.’

  ‘Oh, very well, then.’ The Colonel shrugged. ‘If you must, you must. But you’d better have a drink first.’ He went to the decanters, poured whisky for both of them, carried it back to the fireplace.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘what is all this?’

  ‘As you know, sir, there are three separate problems.’ Casby spoke with deliberation—with too much deliberation, Colonel Babington felt; what he was going to say plainly had an interest for him above and beyond his professional concern with it, and he was using logic to shut that interest out. ‘Three problems: the letters in general, the letter sent to Miss Keats-Madderly in particular, and the murder of Rubi.

  ‘It may be that those three problems are quite separate and distinct; or it may be that two of them are connected, and the third is separate; or it may be that there’s a nexus involving them all.’

  The Colonel looked at the ceiling. ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’ Casby smiled faintly. ‘Perhaps I am overdoing it rather. I didn’t intend to imply…’

  ‘No, no, go on—my dear man. It’s your report, after all.’ Colonel Babington returned the smile. ‘And I dare say that sometimes I am a shade slow-witted about these things. So don’t mind me. Go ahead.’

  Casby sipped whisky and returned the glass carefully to its place on the bricks of the hearth. ‘First, then, the letters in general,’ he said. ‘As you know, one doesn’t, in the normal way, expect to be held up long over a problem like that; not these days. But the fact remains that we’ve drawn a blank every time. The paper and envelopes—to start with them—have all been the same sort, cheap stuff that you can get at any Woolworth’s; the paste used to stick on the bits of newspaper has always been Gloy, which half the population buys; the scraps of brush-hair we’ve found mixed in with it from time to time have all come from the sort of brush that’s supplied with the stuff; and the newspapers—well, they’ve just been newspapers: various newspapers of various dates, and not all the snippings in any given letter have been of the same date, necessarily. Place of posting, in three cases here, in seven Twelford, in two Brankham; but quite often people have destroyed the envelopes—and of course there must obviously be letters which have never been handed to us at all. Time of posting, variable. And none of that helps, because people from here are constantly going into Twelford and Brankham to do their shopping. The pen used in addressing the envelopes has always been a blue-black Baby Biro, which is tricky, because with a Biro there’s practically no difference between the width of the up, down, and cross strokes, and that takes away half the writing’s individuality before you begin; anyway, the graphologists say they can’t possibly identify the writing on the envelopes with any of the various handwritings we’ve submitted to them, so we’re foxed there. What’s more, none of the obvious suspects uses a Baby Biro in the normal way, and although we’ve tried to trace recent purchases of Baby Biros in the local shops, it’s been a hopeless business—the girls in Woolworth’s, for instance, wouldn’t be likely to remember any particular purchase.

  ‘So far, so bad. But there did seem to be just three possible lines of investigation we could try.

  ‘The first was analysis of dust and hair in the envelopes. Well, the dust so far has proved absolutely nothing, and the one and only hair we found turned out to belong to the woman to whom the letter had been sent. As far as hair’s concerned, this letter-writer has either been extraordinarily careful or extraordinarily lucky… Oh, and I was forgetting fingerprints. None—and that, of course, means care: the writing and sealing and posting must all have been done in gloves.

  ‘Secondly, there was the marked-stamp idea—individualized twopenny-halfpennies to be sold to each of half a dozen suspects when they asked for stamps in the local post office. And you know what happened to that scheme.’

  Colonel Babington nodded. ‘Someone came across it in a detective story,’ he supplied, ‘and in a day or two half the village had heard of it. Ample warning. So it’s hardly surprising that it got no results. Of course, our choice of suspects was pretty arbitrary; we just picked people we knew to have, or thought might have, a grudge against the community, and hoped for the best. And that’s really been the trouble all along. All our prying’s been concentrated on those six, more or less, and quite likely the culprit isn’t one of them at all.’

  ‘Just so, sir. But it’s difficult to see what else We could have done. And naturally it was on those six that we experimented when we tried out the last of our possibilities—I mean the blood-group business. That looked promising, because very few people realize that you can tell a man’s blood-group from his saliva, provided he doesn’t belong to the fifteen per cent they call “non-secretors”, and there was plenty of the letter-writer’s saliva on the gummed-down flaps of the envelopes and the backs of the stamps. Well, it was tested: group A, it turned out to be. And that was when the idea began to look rather less promising, because forty-four per cent of the population are A. However, we went ahead and managed one way and another to get a blood or saliva sample from our six—and damn me if five of them, five, weren’t just that, group A.’

  ‘The odd man out,’ said Colonel Babington, ‘being—’

  ‘Being Rubi. He was B, we found, a rare group that only about eight per cent of Europeans belong to. So he hadn’t been writing the anonymous letters, or anyway he hadn’t been sticking the stamps on them, and finding that out wasn’t much help to us, because for other reasons he was practically eliminated already. All of which leaves us—well, leaves us where it leaves us, to wit, nowhere.’

  Colonel Babington grunted. ‘You certainly seem to have had the devil of a job. Fingerprints, blood-groups, hair, dust, pen, marked stamps—as far as I can see, the chances are a million to one against that combina
tion failing to get results. Still, it’s the odd chance that comes off, and there’s no use moaning about it. If it’s any consolation to you, I don’t see what more you could have done. But now, what about this letter that was sent to Beatrice?’

  ‘As regards that, sir, we’ve very little to work on. It was burned, as you know, and the envelope’s missing. But I’m still inclined to think that it wasn’t sent by the person who sent all the other letters. For one thing, the envelope—if Miss Pilkington’s to be relied on—was different: violet ink, and script, not capitals. For another, only two newspapers (both of them dated the first of this month) were used to make up the message.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Colonel thoughtfully. ‘Interesting, that. And particularly about the envelope. The form of the letter itself suggests that whoever sent it was making some effort to make it seem to have come from the same person who wrote the other letters. But then, why didn’t he bother to make the envelope seem the same, too? Everyone round here knew about the envelopes, about the block capitals and so forth.’

  Casby nodded. ‘That had occurred to me, too, and I confess I don’t know what the answer is. Just carelessness, perhaps. But now, about the message. You know what that was—’

  ‘My God, I do,’ said the Colonel with feeling. ‘Amazing thing. I suppose it is true? Some of these letters have accused people of the most unlikely—’

  ‘Well, sir, but if it isn’t true, the suicide becomes quite pointless.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Colonel assented gloomily. ‘Yes, I see what you mean… The trouble was, poor Beatrice would swank about her family so. If she hadn’t done that, no one would have cared a brass farthing what side of the sheet she was born on, except perhaps that dolt Mogridge.’

  ‘But in any case, sir, there’s proof. Rolt, you see, knows the history of it—of Miss Keats-Madderly’s birth, I mean.’

  ‘Rolt?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ And Casby repeated what Helen had told him of her meeting with Rolt in the water-meadow. ‘I’ve been to see him this afternoon,’ he added, ‘and he certainly didn’t try to deny knowing. What’s more, he insisted that he’d never told anyone else about it—not even his daughter.’

  Colonel Babington frowned. ‘Well, that doesn’t look much like guilt, does it? If he sent that letter, then he certainly wouldn’t want you to think he was the only person who knew about Beatrice’s birth.’

  ‘Quite so. And of course, someone else may have found out about it quite independently of Rolt. But that’s stretching the long arm of coincidence rather far.’

  ‘It’s pulling the damned thing right out of its socket,’ said the Colonel emphatically. ‘And yet… Oh Lord, what a muddle. There’s one other possibility, though: Beatrice might have confided in a particular friend. And I suppose you’d have to say that her best friend here was—’

  ‘Was Helen Downing.’

  If there was any alteration in Casby’s tone as he said these three words, Colonel Babington failed to notice it. ‘Helen Downing,’ the Colonel reiterated moodily; and then: ‘No, damn it, I don’t believe for a single second that she’d do a thing like that. After all, anyone who knew Beatrice would realize there was quite a danger of her acting rashly if she got a letter like that, so unless you had a motive for wanting her dead—’ He checked himself, suddenly remembering; and in a flat voice Casby said:

  ‘Fifty thousand pounds.’

  There was a silence. Colonel Babington, fretting, went to a silver cigarette-box on the desk, opened it, peered into it, and then closed it again with a bang. And the cat Lavender, which had hitherto been slumbering in a chair, took advantage of his preoccupation to leap up on to the side-table and pursue Martians among the cut-glass decanters there. With an exclamation of annoyance, the Colonel seized the cat Lavender and thrust it out of the room. ‘No, I don’t believe it,’ he said, returning to the fireplace. ‘Do you?’

  Casby made no direct reply. He said: ‘She was in Miss Keats-Madderly’s house at the time when the envelope disappeared.’

  ‘So were you. So were a lot of people.’

  ‘It’s not conclusive, of course.’ Casby still spoke tonelessly. ‘All I was trying to convey was this, that Helen Downing is apparently the only person with motive, just as Rolt is apparently the only person with the necessary knowledge. I’m assuming, mind you, that the letter sent to Miss Keats-Madderly was intended to incite to suicide, and that assumption may be quite wrong. If it is wrong, then obviously Rolt is the chief suspect.’

  ‘And he was one of our original half-dozen, wasn’t he? But if this letter to Beatrice was in fact different from the others, then presumably it wasn’t he who wrote the others.’ Colonel Babington made a gesture of despair. ‘It couldn’t,’ he suggested, ‘be much more confusing, could it?’

  ‘Finally, there’s the murder of Rubi.’ Casby was talking more rapidly now, and the Colonel sensed that they were approaching a crux. ‘My information about that still has a lot of gaps in it, but I’d like you to know what I’ve got so far… The worst gap, I think, concerns when he was last seen alive. Friday afternoon, when he left his school after taking a gang of boys out to test a grandstand or something, is the best I’ve been able to rake up so far.’

  ‘Friday? But good heavens, that’s two days ago. Wasn’t he teaching yesterday?’

  ‘No. Apparently his time-table happens not to involve any work on Saturdays. I gather that what he told one of his colleagues was that he was proposing to spend yesterday doing a long hike, but there’s no evidence as to whether he carried out that intention or not, and I understand from Rolt that there’s a possibility he didn’t.’

  ‘Oh? How’s that?’

  ‘Rolt told me, when I saw him this afternoon, that his daughter told him yesterday evening that she’d seen Rubi during the day; I gathered there had been a row about that. But I can’t check it, because at the moment neither her father nor anyone else seems to know where the girl is.’

  ‘Yes, I see… But does all this matter very much?’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘I mean, we know more or less when Rubi was killed, don’t we? Early this morning.’

  ‘Quite so, sir. But there’s one factor which makes it essential that we should find out where he’s been recently, and whom he’s seen.’ And Casby explained about the final entry in Rubi’s diary. ‘Of course, there may be nothing in it, but plainly it’s got to be looked into.’

  ‘Plainly,’ the Colonel agreed drily. ‘You may remember that at the time he came to us, and offered to help us over the letters, he was very positive he could find out who was writing them. And it rather looks now as if he did.’

  ‘We can’t be certain of that, sir,’ said Casby defensively. ‘He may have been murdered for some quite different reason.’

  ‘As, for instance, what?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, there’s no possible doubt that Rolt disapproved of his going about with Penelope. Disapproved strongly.’

  ‘Tcha! You don’t kill a man for that. You send the girl away for a month to forget about him; or else you give him a large piece of your mind; or both. And from what I know of Rubi, he wasn’t the sort of suitor to go on hanging around after the girl’s father had warned him off.’

  ‘But if the girl still insisted on seeing him—’

  ‘Oh well, it’s conceivable, I suppose. I’m not suggesting you should put it out of your mind altogether. But it sounds very thin to me… Who else in the village was this wretched young man friendly with?’

  ‘To the best of my knowledge, nobody. He kept himself to himself, as they say. You’ll remember, sir, that we made inquiries about him not long ago, in connexion with the letters, so we do know something about him in advance; and I quite agree that apart from Rolt he doesn’t seem to have had any enemies. But there’s still a lot of ground to be covered—his relations with his colleagues at school, for example. The diary’s suggestive, yes, but at present not more than that.’

  ‘He said
he thought the anonymous letter-writer was an unmarried woman, didn’t he? That seems to have been the line he was working on. And out of our six suspects only Helen Downing is that.’

  ‘As you said yourself, sir, our list of suspects was quite arbitrary. And there’s no evidence that Rubi didn’t change his mind—about the unmarried-woman theory, I mean.’

  ‘There’s no evidence that he did, either… Oh, damn it.’ Colonel Babington bunched his brows in annoyance and perplexity. ‘Well, anyway, go on with what you were saying. I don’t for a moment believe Helen’s a murderer, but these snags have got to be explained away somehow.’

  ‘There are others, too, sir.’

  ‘Are there, by God!’ The Colonel, who had wandered to the window and been gazing out, swung round abruptly. ‘About Helen Downing, you mean?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ The flatness was back in Casby’s voice. ‘For one thing, she was certainly very close to the spot where we found the body, at about the time the murder must have been committed. That—between seven and seven-thirty this morning—was when she met Rolt.’

  Colonel Babington sat down heavily in a chair at the other side of the hearth; for a moment he seemed not to know what to say. ‘But that,’ he ventured at last, ‘tells against Rolt as much as against Helen, doesn’t it? And besides, I thought it was certain that Rubi wasn’t killed in the place where he was found.’

  ‘The chances are, sir, that he wasn’t killed very far off.’

  ‘Why? I don’t see that. If you haven’t found the place where he was killed, then—’

  ‘We haven’t. But the point is this: even allowing a wide margin of error for what Helen Downing and George Sims say was the time of death, Rubi was pretty certainly killed in daylight (all else apart, he’s not very likely, in summer, to have got up and dressed while it was still dark). All right. But the-re’s nowhere you can take a vehicle within three hundred yards of the coppice, on any side. So if Rubi wasn’t killed in the coppice, or in the water-meadow close to it, then the murderer must have had to carry his body there, a considerable distance, in broad daylight, and all the time within view of the windows of several houses—not to mention the saw-mill. Well, I can’t for a moment believe that any murderer would be so idiotic as to do that, and that’s why I say that Rubi was killed somewhere within hailing distance of where he was found.’