‘It amused me,’ said Mr. Datchery more mildly. ‘I grant you it hasn’t been much practical use, but it’s kept me happy, and it’s done no harm. What I complain of—’
George Sims’s brown eyes twinkled; he pressed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.
‘Well, you might put us out of our agony,’ he said. ‘Everyone in the village has been agreeing that you weren’t what you seemed to be, but there’ve been the devil of a lot of different theories as to what you actually were. So do tell us now.’
‘I,’ said Mr. Datchery rather smugly, ‘am Gervase Fen.’
As a dramatic disclosure this was not a hundred per cent effective, for Rolt’s reaction to it was to say bluntly: ‘Never heard of you.’ But ‘Oh, I have, though,’ said George Sims, all at once pensive, and ‘And so have I,’ breathed Helen, wide-eyed. ‘I was talking to Alice Riddick on the phone, and she said—’
‘Yes, I’m afraid I overheard that.’ Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, had the grace to look slightly uneasy. ‘But look here—didn’t you hear me announce myself when I was telephoning?’
‘No, I told you, I missed the start of that.’
‘Well, anyway, that’s who he is,’ said Colonel Babington, in the, voice of a chairman who feels that the meeting is straying too far from the point. ‘God help me, I’ve known him for years. And the thing about him is that on several occasions in the past he’s helped the police to clear up one or two criminal matters, with the result—’
‘I’ll be damned!’ said Fen. ‘Of all the unscrupulous misstatements—’
‘With the result,’ the Colonel went on unruffled, ‘that it was him I thought of when—when—’
He checked himself, remembering something. ‘I say, Casby…’
‘Go ahead, sir.’ Looking up from his contemplation of the fire, Casby still avoided Helen’s eye. ‘Please go ahead.’
The Colonel did go ahead. But manifestly he was far from comfortable about it.
‘Well, it was the letters, d’you see,’ he muttered after a short pause. ‘A fortnight of them, and they were playing the very devil in the way of suspicion and so forth, and we still hadn’t a clue. Of course, one thing I could have done’—the Colonel’s discomfort perceptibly grew—‘was to take Casby off the case and substitute someone else out of the county C.I.D. Or alternatively, I could have asked for help from London. But neither of those ideas appealed to me much. As far as London was concerned, the county’d have got a horse-laugh for not being able to cope with anything so—well, so ordinary as a go of anonymous letters. And as far as our own chaps were concerned, there wasn’t anyone who was likely to get results where Casby had failed…
‘Well, we’ve got our pride, I suppose.’ Here the Colonel touched maximum embarrassment. ‘Our C.I.D.’s as good as any C.I.D. in the country, and if I could help it I wasn’t going to tout around publishing the fact that we’d struck a sticky patch, and couldn’t get through it. So I thought I’d try a compromise.’
‘Which worked.’ This time Casby did not look up, and Helen sensed that he was fighting down the same sort of bitterness she had experienced in being outpassed, professionally, by George Sims. ‘Which worked,’ he reiterated, suddenly smiling. ‘And splendidly.’
‘Yes, Gervase has a taste for these problems, the Lord knows why,’ said Colonel Babington, ‘and perhaps a flair for solving them.’ At this grudging testimonial, Fen snorted loudly. ‘Anyway, he has, as Casby says, succeeded. Good luck to him, and we’re grateful, though mind you, I think that in time we ourselves—’
‘Of course you would,’ said Fen quietly. ‘I’ve been lucky, that’s all…
‘I say, Andrew’—he found and lit a cigarette—‘hadn’t we better get on with it now?’
And with that the tension came back. Burns’s boots creaked as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Helen could see Casby’s muscles tighten under the old tweed suit, and beside her, Rolt moved his bulk to a less relaxed position on the sofa’s edge. Of the seven people assembled in that room, Fen alone remained motionless. Rising momentarily from his seat, George Sims flung a spent match into the fire.
‘Yes, let’s have it,’ he said.
The Chief Constable nodded. ‘Go on, Gervase.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Fen, in a certain tone of voice, ‘that one of you is not going to like this very much.’
And in that instant, Helen knew. There was a sense, she, realized afterwards, in which she had known all along; but the knowledge had been buried deep in her subconscious mind, and until now she had only been very obscurely aware of it…
‘The letter,’ she found herself saying, ‘the letter which killed Beatrice…’
From across the room Fen looked at her gravely.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re quite right. It was written, with intent to kill, by Dr. George Sims.’
Wind rattled the panes, and the fire flared up suddenly. The cat Lavender stirred uneasily in his sleep. Getting slowly to his feet, George Sims said, in a voice that was not quite his own:
‘Are you insane?’
His lips were dry, and he put out the tip of his tongue to lick them. ‘Are you insane?’ he repeated. ‘Or is this some idiotic joke?’
Fen stared back at him dispassionately.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not insane. And you won’t find it a very brilliant joke, by the time public opinion, and the law, are through with you. Morally, what you did was murder. The law can’t get you for that, unfortunately, but I think we can still guarantee, my fine young gentleman, to make you wish you’d never been born.’
The law can’t get you for that… Helen understood then that what for a moment had seemed to be the end was only a beginning. But the wheels were moving faster now, and there was no time to look ahead… George Sims said quietly:
‘You bloody fool.’
‘In my time,’ Fen answered without perturbation, ‘quite a number of people have called me that. Most of them now inhabit prisons, or six foot of earth in a prison yard…
‘But since you apparently still don’t believe I’m serious, let’s look at the evidence.’
And Sims laughed. He dropped back into his chair.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you’re quite determined to make an exhibition of yourself, go ahead and do it.’
‘Oh yes. Yes, I’m quite determined… You know, the thing that’s worried me most about this whole affair has been an envelope addressed in violet ink.’
Fen paused, drawing thoughtfully at his cigarette. ‘Violet ink,’ he went on presently. ‘When Colonel Babington told me about that violet-ink envelope—as he’s told me about everything else that’s happened—I remembered vaguely that an acquaintance of mine had always used violet ink. And I worried, in the way one does, because I couldn’t at first recall who that acquaintance was. But this evening, at long last, I did remember. A girl I’d known when I was an undergraduate had always used it, and very likely was using it still. That girl’s name was Emma Paton; and if you know anything about books at all, you’ll recognize it as the name of the best-selling novelist she’s developed into.’
‘Most impressive,’ sneered Dr. George Sims. ‘You alarm me very much.’
Fen closed his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I probably do…
‘Now, it would have been the purest coincidence,’ he resumed, ‘if Emma Paton’s violet ink had had anything to do with the envelope which Beatrice Keats-Madderly received on Friday morning through the post, and in the normal way I probably shouldn’t have taken the matter further. But as it happened, I had other reasons for being interested in that envelope. Let me tell you what they were.
‘Between the time Beatrice Keats-Madderly looked at her post and the time Inspector Casby examined it, that violet-ink envelope disappeared. It was not burned along with the anonymous letter which (presumably) it had contained—and there was no earthly reason why it should have been. And it
was not to be found anywhere in the house.
‘Therefore someone had obviously taken it.
‘Of the people in Beatrice Keats-Madderly’s house at the crucial period, Casby could be ruled out. If he had stolen the envelope—for whatever reason—he would scarcely have been wandering round drawing attention to its absence; that absence was a thing he could perfectly well, if he’d chosen, have concealed.
‘That left, as suspects in the envelope mystery, Dr. Downing, Dr. Sims, Burns, Harris the hedger, and Moffatt the gardener. Could any of them be ruled out? Probably not, I thought. The thief might—since an envelope’s not very difficult to pocket unobserved—have been any one of them. And motive? Well, it seemed obvious at first that the envelope must in some fashion be a tell-tale envelope, capable of giving something or somebody away; and that would mean that the writer of this particular anonymous letter had been careless, and was now covering up—or alternatively, that an accomplice was covering up on his or her behalf.
‘Thus far, there was no conclusive evidence. But I did have a theory about that envelope—one of several, I may add—and on Sunday morning I went to Beatrice Keats-Madderly’s house with a view to having a look at the house and seeing whether it fitted my theory. It did. It’s a very symmetrical house, and the letterbox is in the exact centre of the front door. Which means that a man ostensibly knocking at that door could easily slip a letter in without being observed.
‘You see now what my theory was. All the other anonymous letters had come through the post. It was generally assumed that this one had come through the post also. But as it was different from the earlier letters in several other respects, there was no a priori reason why it shouldn’t have differed from them further in being delivered by hand instead of posted.
‘All this—I need hardly point out—was speculation and speculation only; there wasn’t as yet a shred of evidence for it. I mention it solely in order to make it clear why, when the name Emma Paton occurred to me in connexion with violet ink, I decided that that lead must be followed up.
‘Earlier this evening, then, I went round to Dr. Downing’s house—she being the person who had known Beatrice Keats-Madderly best—and asked who the dead woman’s favourite author had been. “Emma Paton”, I was told. All right. No doubt she’s lots of people’s favourite author. But that, of course wasn’t going to stop me telephoning her to find out if by any chance she’d written to Beatrice Keats-Madderly in the last few days.
‘And she had. Beatrice Keats-Madderly had sent her a fanletter. You know the sort of thing. “Dear Miss Blank, I do not usually write to authors, but I feel I must tell you how much I enjoyed your… etcetera.” Authors who get a lot of letters like that tend to have stock typewritten replies in readiness, but Emma, I remembered, was conscientious, and always answered them individually in her own handwriting… Yes, she said, she had had a letter of that sort from a Miss Keats-Madderly living in Cotten Abbas. Yes, she had replied to it, and the reply had been posted from Manchester—where for some unknown reason Emma elects to live—on Thursday.
‘Thursday.
‘So it ought to have reached Beatrice Keats-Madderly on Friday morning—the morning of her suicide.
‘And according to the postwoman, it did.
‘You see, of course, what that means. It means that the whole of Beatrice’s post on Friday morning was quite innocent.
‘And that means—can only mean—that the anonymous letter was delivered at the house by hand.’
Fen paused to stub out his cigarette in an ash-tray. The room was like a sealed globe of silence inside a cocoon of wind. Helen could not trust herself to look at George Sims, but she could hear his rapid, shallow breathing close beside her.
‘Delivered by hand,’ Fen repeated. ‘Well, and by whom?
‘Let me be a little inexorable about this, because I don’t want any doubt to be left in anyone’s mind when I’ve finished.
‘The postwoman could have delivered that letter, but she could not have stolen the violet ink envelope. She, therefore, is out.
‘Moffatt the gardener could have delivered that letter, but it’s scarcely credible that, knowing what Harris’s evidence would be (they had plenty of time to talk about it), he would then incriminate himself by swearing that no one had approached the house from the back.
‘Mutatis mutandis, the same argument applies to Harris.
‘And that leaves just one person. Dr. George Sims.
‘He and he alone approached the house that morning—on a professional visit which he intended to combine with a little message-bearing. If you’re concerned to defend him you can say, of course, that the letter arrived during the night, or some time in the early morning, before Harris and Moffatt took up their positions at the front and back of the house; that Beatrice didn’t bother to open it till she got back from Twelford. Perhaps. But in that case, why was Emma Paton’s letter removed?
‘There’s only one hypothesis, you know, which will explain that. Summoned, as police-surgeon, to examine the body of the woman he had driven to suicide, George Sims was unexpectedly confronted, when Harris and Moffatt gave their evidence, with a very alarming situation. The anonymous letter had been delivered by hand—a fact which interrogation of the postwoman would soon discover, even if the unstamped envelope in which it came were not found; the house had been watched; and the watchers were ready to swear that only Sims and the postwoman had been anywhere near it during the relevant period. At whatever cost, then, it must be made to seem that that letter had arrived through the post—and three of you may remember what I’ve only been told, that towards the end of the interview with Moffatt and Harris Sims left the sittingroom, returning a little later to announce the arrival of the postwoman. What, during that interval, was he doing? Plainly he was looking through the morning mail—postmarks would assure hiin it was that—which lay still unexamined on the hall table, in search of an envelope in which it might colourably be assumed, by the authorities, that the anonymous letter had come. Anything liable to result in further correspondence he would naturally have to reject, since the senders would be only too liable to come forward, when the facts were published, and claim that their letters must have been among the ones Beatrice received that morning. But just as it happened, Emma Paton’s letter was perfect for his purpose: it obviously neither expected nor desired a reply. He would take that, then. The envelope would have to be taken as well, since if it were not, if a photograph of it appeared in the papers, if Emma Paton came forward indignantly to claim it as hers, he would only be back where he had started from, in a very equivocal position indeed. And, of course, he would also take the envelope inwhich the anonymous letter really had been delivered—that’s assuming that it was in fact delivered in an envelope, though it needn’t have been.
‘That’s it, then. Unless Emma Paton is lying—which is inconceivable—my explanation is the only possible one. If you can think of another, produce it by all means. But I don’t imagine you’ll be able to.’
Fen stopped. And Helen saw George Sims’s eyes flicker as he glanced first at the curtained window and then at Burns, burly and intensely watchful in front of the door. A great deal of the colour had already gone from George Sims’s cheeks, but he was not giving in yet. As Helen stared at him, two pictures recurred to her mind-pictures whose incompatibility ought to have struck her long ago: George Sims white and shaken after inspecting Beatrice’s body: and George Sims jaunty and unperturbed after inspecting Rubi’s. Yes. He had known Beatrice and he had not known Rubi; Beatrice’s body, in death, had been ugly, Rubi’s had not. But the discrepancy in George Sims’s reactions had still been far too wide. I ought to have guessed just from that, Helen said to herself: I ought to have guessed just from that…
‘Very pretty,’ he was saying now; and he squirmed a little at the unvarying contempt in their faces. ‘Very ingenious. And where the hell, may I ask, do you imagine I can have come by the contents of that letter?’ His head jerked towards Rolt
. ‘He, I was given to understand, was the only person in the village who knew anything about Beatrice’s birth. And he’s never told anyone. Not even me.’
Rolt nodded. ‘That’s right, lad. You may as well take what comfort you can, while you can.’
Fen flicked his fingers impatiently. ‘As to that, of course Beatrice told you herself. But without intending to. She’d had measles, shortly before she committed suicide. Her temperature had been very high. She’d been delirious—and I didn’trely on hearsay for that: I questioned the nurse who’d looked after her, and got an answer in spite of all her professional discretion. Well, people when they’re delirious rave, and say things they wouldn’t dream of saying in their right senses. I think that Beatrice in her delirium talked about her childhood. I think she was coherent enough for you, attending her as her doctor, to be able to put two and two together and investigate further. That, no doubt, was how you knew she was illegitimate. But even if we can’t prove that, it won’t make any difference. There’s quite enough evidence against you without it.’
Sim’s colouring was yellowish now and ghastly. His fingers trembled as he pretended to concentrate on the tobacco in his pipe. But he made one last attempt to break out of the net which had tightened round him.
‘Well then, why?’ he snarled. ‘Why should I send Beatrice a letter like that? What did I have to gain from it, for God’s sake?’
‘Her death,’ said Fen. ‘You knew her well enough,’ he went on, ‘to realize that when she got such a letter she might—just might—take it so seriously as to kill herself. If she didn’t—well, nothing was lost, even if nothing was gained, either. Of course, you could probably have blackmailed her, but I think you were too cowardly, without even the courage of your disgusting motives, to try that. You’ve been very, very cautious, haven’t you, all along?
The Long Divorce Page 18
