The Long Divorce

by Edmund Crispin

  ‘But why—in that case—should the body ever have been moved at all? It seems senseless to me.’

  ‘Well, sir, it’s possible that the actual murder was done in a relatively exposed place—say at the edge of the coppice—and that the murderer shifted the body because he didn’t want it found too soon. We shall go on searching, of course, and I’ve no doubt we shall find the spot eventually.’

  ‘Yes… You’re pretty sure, I take it, that the scene of the murder wasn’t anywhere very close to the glade where the body was found?’

  ‘Yes, sir, fairly sure. We’ve searched a thirty or forty-yard radius already.’

  ‘That’s a point in Helen’s favour, then. Corpses don’t weigh light, and I can’t see her carrying this one, single-handed, over any very great distance—or dragging it, even.’ The Colonel paused to reflect. ‘Of course, she could hardly avoid telling you the true time of death, even if she’d wanted to, because she knew Sims was going to make an examination too… Look here, Casby, didn’t she realize?’

  ‘That she must have been about when the murder was committed? No, sir, she apparently didn’t. And I can understand that, in a way.’

  ‘Yes, yes, so can I. It’s devilish awkward, though.’ The Colonel sought reassurance in the hearth-rug, and seemed to find none. ‘Well, what next? What about the weapon?’

  ‘I think we may have found that, sir.’

  ‘My dear chap, admirable!’ The Colonel was temporarily cheered by this intelligence. ‘And what exactly is it? The wound was unusual, I gather, and—’

  But here he was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. ‘Babington speaking,’ he said into it. ‘Who…? Yes, he’s here.’ And to Casby: ‘For you.’ He handed the instrument across.

  ‘Yes,’ said Casby. ‘Yes… Just a minute, please.’ He fished out a pencil and settled his notebook open on his knee. ‘All right, go ahead.’ He listened, taking down what was said: and Colonel Babington, who had thought his face white enough to start with, saw that it was whiter now. ‘Thank you,’ Casby said presently. ‘Blood from the crevice in the weapon group B and rhesus-positive. Blood from the body identical. Can you give me a rough idea of what the chances are that the two lots of blood are the same…? Yes, I see… Yes, please, test for the M, N, S, and P groups, and for the rhesus sub-groups; we may as well be quite certain about it… Certain now, you think? So do I… All right. Thank you.’

  He got up to replace the telephone in its cradle. ‘That was our laboratory, sir,’ he said. ‘I took the liberty of asking them to try and find me here if I wasn’t at my house.’

  ‘My dear chap, of course… And I think I got the gist of it. Your weapon that you’ve got is in fact the murder weapon, eh?’

  ‘They say the chances of that are about two hundred to one on. Or to be more exact about it, they say it’s two hundred to one against the blood on the weapon not being Rubi’s. Fairly long odds. And as the weapon happens to fit an uncommon sort of wound uncommonly exactly—’ Casby shrugged. ‘Well, that would seem to be that.’

  ‘But you still,’ said Colonel Babington peevishly, ‘haven’t told me what it is. Or where it came from.’

  ‘It’s a butcher’s steel, sir.’

  ‘A butcher’s steel? Well, but damn it, it was only yesterday that—’

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s the one. It’s got the finger-prints of half Cotten Abbas on it, so there’s no lead there.’ Casby picked up his glass, drained it. ‘But at the time of the murder for which it was undoubtedly used, it was in the possession of Dr. Helen Downing.’

  For long seconds the room was as though in trance. Outside the windows, the leaves of rhododendrons stirred in a faint breeze. The sun was lower now, an orange ball streaked by the branches of the oak at the gate, and there was a blurring on the horizon which might mean cloud. Colonel Babington lifted one hand in instinctive protest and then dropped it again. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  So Casby related the history of the steel from the moment of its presumed theft from Weaver’s shop, yesterday morning, to its appropriation, earlier this afternoon, by Constable Burns. ‘On my way from Fiveways to Rolt’s mill,’ he said, ‘I dropped in at—at Dr. Downing’s house and spoke to her about it. She told me it had been in a pocket of her car from teatime yesterday up to lunch-time, or later, to-day; and that during the whole of that period her car was locked up in the garage.’

  ‘And you mean to say’—the Colonel, stammering, was almost beyond speech—‘that she still didn’t realize…’

  ‘She realized then,’ Casby answered. ‘But she hadn’t realized before—not, I mean, when she was looking at the body. And I can understand that, too; the steel, to her, was so close and—and trivial a thing that it must have been quite invisible in the context of the murder… That is assuming,’ he added with difficulty, ‘that she is in fact innocent.’

  ‘But she must be innocent!’ the Colonel exclaimed. ‘Damn it, man, if she were guilty she’d never dream of telling you the steel had been locked up in her possession at the time of the murder. Saying that is as good as putting a rope round her own neck. No, she’s made a mistake, that’s what it is. The steel must have been get-at-able all along. The murderer took it, and returned it afterwards, and…’ He faltered, aware, even as he spoke, of the extreme unlikeliness of this. ‘Well, but did you look at the garage, to see if anyone had forced an entry?’

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

  ‘Then for God’s sake,’ said Colonel Babington, ‘go and do it now.’

  Casby went…

  Half an hour later he was back again.

  ‘Nothing,’ he reported. ‘It’s a modern garage, solidly built. No windows, and a Yale lock which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been tampered with. And consider, sir: even if the murderer knew the steel was in the car inside, why the devil should he go to the trouble of pinching it and the even more fantastic trouble of returning it? It’s beyond belief. It just can’t have happened. But if it didn’t happen, then—?’

  ‘If it didn’t happen,’ said the Colonel staunchly, ‘then there’s some other factor in the equation that we’ve got wrong: the time of death, for instance.’

  ‘But three doctors agree about that—Sims, Helen Downing, and Larkin, who’s been helping Sims this afternoon with the autopsy. It’s not likely that they’re all wrong. And even supposing they’re as much as twelve hours out in their reckoning, we’re still left exactly where we were before.’ Casby was slurring his words: he had touched the limit of his endurance. He said: ‘I think you’d better know, sir, that just before I got news of the murder this morning I asked Helen to marry me; and that she accepted.’

  The Colonel went rigid; all colour vanished from his cheeks. ‘My dear chap,’ he said helplessly. ‘Oh, my dear chap.’

  ‘So you see why I felt I had to tell you all this. I can’t go on with it, of course. Even if it means resigning, which I imagine it may, I’m still bound to abandon the case.’ Casby stared with vacant eyes at the carpet. ‘But at the same time, I can see just how it’s going to look to someone whose sympathies aren’t involved. You and I—well, we’ve talked about it with kid gloves on, seeing all the objections to Helen’s guilt and skating over the things that tell against her. But to an outsider it’s all going to look very much simpler. There’s a foolproof court-case now—you could get a warrant and a committal and a verdict without any trouble at all. And the little things—my God, how they pile up!’

  ‘Yes, but they can be explained away. Even taking them all together, they’re nothing like conclusive.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what is conclusive, though, and that’s that blasted steel. I know Helen didn’t kill the man. That isn’t guessing—I know. But I can’t see—can’t see—how anyone else can have done it…’

  And that was when a new voice spoke, from the double doors which led from the study into the drawing-room.

  ‘Can’t you?’ said Mr. Datchery. ‘But I rather think I can.’

  Chapter Thirteen


  At eight o’clock that Sunday evening Helen Downing was alone in her house by the churchyard, fighting down panic.

  Outside the windows of the room in which she sat, clouds were hastening across a yellowish sky. During the past hour they had multiplied much as a rabble, scenting riot or loot, will multiply in city streets, and now, in drunken-seeming confusion, they were being driven reeling towards the east by the wind’s pursuit, their shadows flickering on the mounds and stones of the waiting dead like unquiet ghosts. Below, it was still calm; only rarely did a fringe of that furious movement of the upper air catch and shake a tree-top, or pause to whisper in the grass. But the sun had disappeared, and in its place a moon just past the full hung flat and unreal behind the hurrying vapours, passing them, it seemed, in listless or hostile review. Dusk was setting in; few, this evening, had lingered long in the church-porch to gossip after Evensong; and as for the birds, they in their wisdom had apparently gone early to bed…

  A storm, Helen told herself: there’s going to be a storm. And with her coffee-cup cradled warm between her hands, she moved closer to the window, staring out. But her thoughts were not such as may be fettered by the spectacle of a sultry, threatening twilight; they too had their storms in prospect, and of a vehemence to surpass anything an English wind could do. Helen Downing looked out at the clouds and the saffron sky—and looked away again. Among the dark, heavy mahogany furniture, she moved back to her chair.

  ‘Forty, I think, or fifty thousand pounds.’

  Melanie Hogben, the servant, had Sunday afternoons off; the house with its solitary occupant was as still, now, as if it had stood untenanted for years. There was movement enough, outside in the waning light, but since that movement was soundless, the impression it conveyed was much less of animation than—disagreeably—of stealth. Helen finished her coffee, lit a cigarette, and began prowling about the room, struggling to turn her mind outwards, to prevent it, by fixing it on material surroundings, from reverting again to the narrow circular path of fear and mistrust which it had traversed that evening a hundred times already. Here the desk at which her father had worked in his draughty Essex rectory; here his heavy silver-plated inkstand, a parting gift from the parishioners of his first living; here—

  ‘Forty, I think, or fifty thousand pounds.’

  That was when it had started: a stretcher being carried awkwardly up the nettle-grown bank; men from the village with their caps off, and a waiting ambulance. She had exclaimed involuntarily, then fallen silent as memories returned; and the silence had lasted until, after their fruitless call at Burns’s cottage, Casby had put her down at her door. He too had been preoccupied; his kiss had been formal, almost cold. But there was little mistrust in Helen’s nature, and she had attributed their slight temporary estrangement to the fact that as yet they knew too little of each other to have learned for any but intimate occasions the modus vivendi of lovers. She had humility enough, too, to be prepared to efface herself whenever (as now) his work must obviously be paramount, and for the time being she had forgotten his disturbing questions about newspapers in the larger shock of learning of her inheritance. So she had not been unhappy when she went in to lunch—perplexed, perhaps, and for no very compelling reason a little uneasy, but not unhappy.

  So far, so good. And over lunch her buoyancy had increased, for now she could look without the old misgiving at the unpaid bills stuffed into the pigeon-holes of the secretaire, could make splendid plans and dream gallant dreams. Callous to be so elated? No, surely not. Helen knew that if renouncing the money could have brought Beatrice back to life, she would have renounced it without a second thought—with eagerness, indeed, and with gratitude. But that was impossible. And that being impossible, to grieve at the gift—as opposed to grieving at its occasion—would surely be a kind of insult to the giver…

  Helen was conscientious—a dull virtue, but an immensely practical one—and to fail in a promise, however trivial, had always distressed her much more than, in this expediency-worshipping age, such sins of omission distress the great majority of people. Lunch over, she had therefore gone at once to unlock the garage and fetch the steel from her car, Where it had stayed forgotten since yesterday. In the upshot Burns had relieved her of it, and at the time she had certainly not for a moment suspected him of any ulterior motive in doing so; not until several hours later had she looked back on the incident and seen it in a new and less reassuring light. No, the fact was that the meeting with Burns had set her mind moving in an altogether different direction: had reminded her again of Penelope Rolt. And it was with Penelope occupying her thoughts that she had strolled back to her house under the baking afternoon sun. Penelope had got to be found, and found quickly. To an already complex disturbance of mind had been superadded the appalling experience of finding her young man’s murdered body, and that at a spot where, according to Janet Burns, rumour had it that they— Helen checked the thought, frowning; it was impossible to think of the relationship as having been in any sense an adult one, and yet—well, after all, Penelope was sixteen or seventeen, an age at which marriage, and other things than marriage, are by no means inconceivable. Marriage… Penelope would have money, Helen supposed, when her father died; Rolt was the sort of man who did make money, and (what was more important these days) who had started making money before penal taxation made the accumulating of it impracticable. Had money been what Rubi had been after? A surprising number of girls stay faithful to their first loves, and to get in early might be a calculated act based on the knowledge of that. In any case, Penelope, as an heiress, would have to be exceedingly careful about the bona fides of anyone who proposed to her; any girl with money, or the prospect of it—

  And that was when Helen suddenly woke up.

  It has been said that mistrust was foreign to her nature, and that is the truth. But there are limits. Standing stock-still, with her hand on the latch of the gate, she for the first time realized, sick at heart, that Edward Casby had known of her inheritance when he proposed to her that morning.

  Realized that he had never made the least attempt to become friendly with her before.

  Realized that she had agreed to marry him on the basis of precisely four short meetings.

  Her loyalty fought back. Well, what of it? If he had not made friends before, that was because he was diffident. And there had been nothing of the casting of accounts in the morning’s embrace. But oh God, thought Helen, women have been sure of that sort of thing before, and specially if they’ve been like me and missed love in their first youth, because then they’ve wanted it so much that they’ve seen it in a man’s eyes when it was never there at all. Auto-hypnosis, that’s called; what you look for and long for you’re sure, sooner or later, to think you’ve found… Her thoughts grew inchoate, unmanageable. She went slowly indoors, and there attempted to distract herself with business matters. But the savour of her inheritance had turned to repulsion; it had come to her by evil means, and its first effect had been evil, and for all her difficulties Helen now passionately desired herself quit of it. Debts, good Lord! If having debts will restore love and confidence, let’s have debts and be grateful, because love and confidence are cheap at that or any price. Money, someone had said, may not make you happy; but it does at least enable you to be miserable in comfort. Cheapjack stuff, thought Helen with anger. And then the rows of figures at which she was staring blurred as anger turned to tears.

  She had got a grip on herself presently, for she knew in her heart that she was making a great deal of fuss about a suspicion which as well as being quite unsupported by evidence was essentially treacherous. By the time—half past three or thereabouts—that Casby dropped in to speak to her, her emotional condition had reverted to nearer normal, and she had forced herself to suspend judgement. But there had still been that in her superficially equable greeting which caused him to look askance at her for a moment before stating his errand; and such composure as she had succeeded in achieving had been swept away like straw
when she heard the few questions he had come to ask.

  At the outset, those questions had only bewildered her.

  ‘The steel? Yes, Colonel Babington asked me yesterday to take it back to Weaver. Only I forgot, I’m afraid. But why—’

  ‘Can you tell me where it’s been in the meanwhile?’

  ‘Yes, of course. In my car.’

  ‘Lying on one of the seats, I suppose?’

  ‘Well, no. Actually it was tucked away in a pocket—you know, the sort on the inside of the door, with an elastic top to it, that you get in most old cars… But look, darling, what is all this?’

  He had attempted a smile. ‘Probably nothing important. I’m just checking up, that’s all. When did you last have the car out?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. I didn’t have any patients to see this morning, so—’

  ‘You mean yesterday afternoon at the time Colonel Babington gave you the steel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you drive straight back here from his house?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs. Babington was my last call. I put the car away about tea-time and haven’t had it out since.’

  ‘Do you keep your garage locked?’

  After a long pause Helen had said quietly: ‘I see. Stupid of me not to have seen before. You think the steel was what killed Rubi.’

  ‘No,’ he had answered with some vehemence. ‘I realize now that it can’t have done. But it’s been hanging about, and it’s the sort of thing that could have made the wound, so I had to ask about it. You see, it occurred to me that someone might have had the chance of pinching it from you.’