‘No, you preferred to have her dead. Because you knew who was going to get her money when she did die. And it seemed to you a great pity that that money shouldn’t find its way somehow into your pocket.’
Helen half rose from the sofa as understanding came. ‘You mean—‘
Oh, yes. The ladies all adore him, you know. In the three days I’ve been here I’ve heard that fact retailed often enough to last me a lifetime. He really thought he could have any one of them he chose. He was certain he could have you, together with Beatrice Keats-Madderly’s money, for the asking-so certain, that for the sake of being secure from any possible suspicion—he’s a great one for looking after his own skin, is Dr. George Sims—he felt he could afford to wait, before approaching you with his irresistible proposal, until after Beatrice Keats-Madderly was dead. Yes, he’s been very devious, very careful. There’s not a great deal we can do to him, in the courts, even now. But we can and shall get him struck off the register. We can and shall make his name stink to high heaven.’
Helen laughed—a bitter laugh, but an antiseptic one too.
‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘No wonder he took it so hard.’
Fen raised his eyebrows. ‘Took what so hard?’
‘My turning his proposal down, earlier this evening—just before you arrived at my house, in fact. All that trouble to get Beatrice’s money into the pocket of a nice malleable little fool, and then he finds she’s got herself engaged to someone else.’ Helen laughed again—this time with real amusement. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he did look sick…’
And that was when George Sims moved, scrambling out of his chair to run to the windows, thrust the curtains aside, and wrestle frantically with a tight-fitting latch. In three effortless strides Burns had reached him. Sims swung round, panic-stricken, doubled his fist, and drove it straight at Burns’s face. He was in fine physical condition, and if the blow had connected, Burns would have been felled. But it did not connect. Burn’s training had not all been theoretical. George Sims screamed as his arm was twisted up behind his back, went limp. ‘Don’t,’ he sobbed. ‘Don’t… I’ll—let me go and I’ll do anything you want. I can’t stand pain, can’t stand it, I tell you…’
The voice diminished to an incomprehensible whisper. Unimpressed, Burns looked inquiringly at Colonel Babington. ‘Should I take him away, sir?’ he asked.
‘No, bring him back to his chair,’ said the Colonel with disgust. ‘He may as well stay till the finish. And next time, if he tries anything on, you can hurt him a little.’
Cursing under his breath, with tears of self-pity in his eyes—tears such as Helen had seen once before that evening—George Sims was brought back among them. But Helen had now no attention to spare for him. ‘The finish?’ she echoed. ‘You mean—’
‘I mean,’ said Colonel Babington, ‘that there are still the other anonymous letters, and the death of the schoolmaster, to talk about.’
‘Did the same person—’
‘Yes, the same person was responsible for both.’
Rolt said suddenly: ‘And that—that butchering maniac’s here?’
‘He’s here,’ said Gervase Fen.
At Burns’s back the study door was flung open. Sybil, the Babingtons’ diminutive maidservant, appeared in the doorway, her eyes gleaming with suppressed excitement, and there was another figure behind her in the obscurity of the hall. For a moment, Sybil, in the immensity of her emotion, could do no more than stammer. Then she spoke.
“Ere’s the butcher, sir,’ she said.
Chapter Seventeen
Black-garbed, stooping a little, a fixed smile on his rather equine face, Amos Weaver stood blinking in the dazzle of the lights. The lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses glittered as he inclined his head. His sallow complexion was slightly mottled from the wind. The black hair on his wrists showed below the cuffs. And when he spoke, they could see muscles move in the long neck projecting from the stiff white collar.
‘I received a message,’ he announced after a fractional hesitation, ‘asking me to come here.’
Colonel Babington nodded.
‘Sit down, Weaver,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ve got things to talk about.’
Weaver’s eyes shifted slowly, warily, from face to face. Treading with cat-like softness, he came forward and settled on the edge of the only unoccupied chair.
‘I think,’ the Colonel went on, ‘that you know everyone here—oh, except perhaps Professor Fen.’
Weaver stood up immediately, extending a large hand towards the armchair in which Fen still lay sprawled.
‘An honour, sir,’ he said, ‘and a privilege.’ But Fen made no attempt to take the hand, and after an uncomfortable pause Weaver withdrew it and sat down again. ‘I believe,’ he said presently, ‘that I saw you among our congregation this morning.’
‘You did.’
‘And you will have benefited, if I may be so bold as to suggest it, from our simple little service.’
‘I found it,’ said Fen dryly, ‘informative.’
With some difficulty, Burns had coaxed a slightly overwrought small maidservant out of the room, and was now once again straddled across the doorway. George Sims, indifferent to everything except his own plight, sat nursing his wrenched shoulder, his features blank with terror, the tear-stains on his cheeks shiny like the tracks of snails. At Helen’s side the steady wheezing of Rolt’s breath never quickened, never varied.
‘Informative,’ Fen repeated, ‘though at that time I wasn’t, of course, aware of your being a murderer.’
Weaver said nothing. Nor did his expression alter.
‘Our problem,’ said Fen almost didactically, ‘has been this. Time of death, between six and eight this morning. Weapon, quite certainly a butcher’s steel, which, equally certainly, was locked up at the moment of the murder in Dr. Downing’s garage. If you put it as simply as that, and assume Dr. Downing’s innocence, then there’s only one answer you can possibly arrive at: the time of death is wrong.’
Helen stared at him. ‘But—but three of us—’
‘Just wait a moment. Let’s assume—as in fact we’ve got to assume—that Rubi was killed some twenty-four hours earlier than we’ve believed so far. Is there any evidence to conflict with that assumption?’
‘Yes, there is,’ Rolt interposed. ‘There’s my girl met him some time yesterday. Told me so herself, knowing damned well it’d rile me—so she’d hardly have made it up.’
‘But she did make it up, I’m afraid.’ Fen smiled. ‘A Gesture, she called it, and I can quite see her point of view. If you’re firm with anyone that age, and tell them not to do a thing, you can rely absolutely, provided it isn’t an immoral thing, on their doing it. The trouble in your daughter’s case was that she, couldn’t do it, since Rubi had told her he was going off yesterday on a long hike. But to show her independence she said she’d done it—that being the next best thing.’
‘Well, I’m—!’ said Rolt, using a word which is respectable in the United States and tolerable in the north-country, but which has not so far gained admission to many of the drawing-rooms of the south. ‘The little devil! You can’t help but admire her for it, though, can you?’ Then he reflected, and his brow darkened. ‘Look here, Professor Fen, you seem to know the hell of a lot about Pen’s goings-on. How—’
But Fen waved this aside. ‘People confide in me,’ was his only explanation. ‘Never mind that now. The point is that our assumption about the time of death still stands. And the more you look at it, the more plausible it seems.
‘Just consider. ‘Rubi hadn’t any duties at school yesterday—that’s the first thing. The woman who looked after him didn’t go to his house on Saturdays or Sundays—that’s the second. He got his milk from tins, so that bottles wouldn’t pile up significantly on his doorstep—that’s the third. The postwoman hasn’t been to his house since Wednesday—that’s the fourth. His house is isolated, so that there would be no one to see him come and go, or not come and go—that
’s the fifth. And no tradesmen deliver there—that’s the sixth.
‘It’s quite possible, then, for the time of death to be wrong.’
Helen could contain herself no longer. ‘In that sense it’s possible, yes,’ she said. ‘But from the medical point of view it isn’t possible at all. One doctor might make a mistake over that. But when it comes to three…
‘Listen. Rigor mortis usually starts about three hours after death, in the jaw-muscles. In the two hours following that it spreads down the body to the legs, and in eight to twelve hours after death it’s usually complete. In summer weather the rigidity lasts thirty-six hours or so, and then disappears in the order it appeared in, from the jaw downward. Of course, there are certain variable things you’ve got to allow for, but it’s really out of the question that there’s been a mistake of as much as twenty-four hours. So—’
‘Certain variable factors,’ Fen echoed her dreamily. ‘Such as what, for instance?’
‘Well, heat. That speeds the process up. And cold slows it down.’
‘And refrigeration?’ Fen enquired blandly.
‘Refrigeration? Well, that—that—’
‘That,’ Fen supplied, ‘delays the onset of rigor mortis for just as long as ever you like.’
Helen was staggered. ‘Yes!’ she whispered. ‘Yes! What—what blind idiots we’ve all been…’
‘It did seem,’ said Fen apologetically, ‘to be the only possible answer. Put your corpse into cold-storage immediately after death, and it will stay limp for as long as it’s frozen. Then lay it out in the sun to thaw, and as soon as the thawing is complete, rigor mortis will get going in the normal way, thereby causing otherwise reliable doctors to go wildly astray in their estimates of the time of death.
‘Once you’d grasped that that was what had happened to Rubi—and if anyone has an alternative explanation to offer, I shall be gratified to hear it—then, of course, it wasn’t very difficult to deduce the identity of the murderer, because very few people have cold-storage rooms on their premises sufficiently large to admit a man.
‘But now let’s leave that for a moment, and go back a bit. ‘One of the very first things I heard about your anonymous letters was that they were made up of words and letters cut out of “lots of different newspapers”. And that interested me considerably, because there are precious few households which buy newspapers in quantity. On the other hand, there are several sorts of businesses which do: newsagents, obviously; and butchers and fishmongers, for wrapping purposes. Those, by the way, are probably the “three kinds of business” Rubi was referring to in his diary. The conjectural fourth that he had in mind was very likely a greengrocery.
‘Now, the anonymous letter-writer was clearly an inhabitant of Cotten Abbas: no one but an inhabitant could possibly get to know so much scandal about the other inhabitants. It seemed reasonable, then, to inquire what businesses there were in the village which would involve newspapers. There was no newsagent, I found, nor any fishmonger. But there certainly was a butcher. It was conceivable, I thought, that someone living in the village kept or worked in such a shop elsewhere, so I inquired about that, too. Apparently there was no one.
‘All of which was just sufficient to make me mildly interested in Weaver—though as serious evidence it certainly didn’t mean much, and I’m not pretending it did. I made a few casual inquiries about Weaver. This morning I went to hear him preach. And as a result of all that, I came to certain conclusions about him.
‘There have been two sorts of anonymous letter: the first sort pornographic, the second sort mischievous. Given a certain kind of mental kink—which is to be pitied rather than blamed—anyone might write the first sort of letter. But the second sort suggested a grudge against the community, and the existence of such a grudge—or at least of good cause for it—can’t easily be concealed. And did Mr. Weaver have cause for a grudge against the community? Heavens, yes!
‘In working all this out, I naturally wasn’t ignoring other people. Mr. Rolt, I learned, had a grudge against the village too, since its better-to-do inhabitants had done their damnedest to prevent him putting up his saw-mill. But he had a remedy: he could, and did, express his resentment openly and in no uncertain terms. For Weaver, who had suffered in very much the same way, there was no such remedy. Once he started openly expressing resentment, he’d be out of business.’
Colonel Babington stirred uneasily.
“Suffered in very much the same way”?’ he said. ‘That’s one thing I don’t quite see.’ Out of the corner of his eye he looked uncertainly at Weaver. But that lean, black-clad figure, balanced with folded hands on the edge of the chair, remained mute, immobile, expressionless as before.
‘In very much the same way, yes.’ Fen lit a new cigarette. ‘You people here seem of recent years to have had two hobbies. One was trying to prevent Rolt’s mill being put up. And the other was trying to get Weaver’s chapel pulled down. I’ve no doubt that in both cases your motives were excellent. But you could hardly expect either of the intended victims to appreciate them. In one case, money was at stake. And in the other, something even more important than money.
‘I mean religion.
‘Now, in my opinion, Weaver isn’t, except perhaps in a very superficial sense, a hypocrite. l’ve listened to a good many preachers in my time, and I think that by now I can distinguish between those who preach for show and those who preach from conviction. Weaver this morning was preaching from conviction. His religion is sincere. And once you realize that, then this gay, aesthetic-minded attempt to raze his chapel begins to appear in a new and less carefree light. To him, the mere threat of it must have been unspeakably dreadful. And the worst of it was that in order to keep his head above water he was obliged, in his everyday business, to be obsequious to precisely those people who were plotting—as it must have seemed to him—against the thing he reverenced. Can you really wonder that that situation should engender hatred?
‘Weaver, then, had newspapers—“lots of different newspapers”. And he had better reason than anyone else I knew of for using them in the way they were being used. Thus far, conjecture only. But then came the murder of Rubi, and that really did give the game away.
‘I needn’t go over the evidence again. That point about refrigeration and the onset of rigor mortis seems to me pretty well conclusive in itself. Weaver alone, in this village, has a cold-storage room large enough to contain a man—and it’s hardly likely that he’d have put Rubi in it just to oblige a friend. But there’s one other thing that’s worth considering, and that’s the weapon.
‘A butcher’s steel.
‘No one seems to have found the use of a butcher’s steel particularly surprising. But I must say, I did—or rather, I would have done if I hadn’t suspected Weaver of the murder already. Suppose you’re an intending murderer, and you want to stab someone, and you don’t possess a weapon. What do you do? Well, I’ll tell you one thing you don’t do: you don’t go around looking for a butcher’s steel; you look for something like a dagger. But if, at the moment when the murderous impulse seizes you, there happens to be a butcher’s steel ready to hand, then…’ Fen gestured expressively. ‘In other words, the use of that particular weapon suggested convenience, not choice. And that, of course, was yet another pointer in the same direction.
‘Here is how I think it must have happened:
‘By thinking about newspapers—in much the same way as I thought about them—Rubi became interested in Weaver. As we know, Rubi was an amateur psycho-analyst, and it’s obvious from his diary that he was smitten with the idea of enlarging his practical knowledge of that science, in its psychiatrical aspect, by a talk with whoever was writing the anonymous letters. Some time yesterday morning, then (I suspect fairly early), he went to Weaver’s shop to do a little probing. And they must of course have been alone there together. As to what was said at that interview, one can only guess. But what happened is perfectly clear. What happened was that Weaver, thinking himself di
scovered in good earnest—in spite of the fact that there was no real evidence against him whatever—lost his head.
‘I do not believe that this was a deliberate murder. I believe it was a panic murder. And when I think of the cold-blooded scheming of the other gentleman we’ve dealt with this evening, the disparity between the penalties they’ll get makes me feel slightly sick. But in either case the result was the same: a body. And unlike Dr. George Sims, Weaver had somehow to dispose of his. To attempt to remove it from the house in broad daylight would have been impossibly risky. So temporarily he hid it.
‘The refrigeration business can’t have been design. The explanation of it, quite simply, is that the cold-storage room happened to be the nearest convenient hiding-place—Weaver has no wife and no assistant, remember, so that he was in a position to keep a whole charnel-house in his cold-storage room, if he felt like it, without anyone’s being the wiser. Exactly what happened to the steel, after the murder, I can’t say—and since up to a point I feel a certain sympathy for Weaver, I advise him not to make any statement about that, or about anything else, except in the presence of a solicitor: he may as well take advantage of what few chances he has got… The steel may in fact have been subsequently stolen by children, as he told Burns. Or he may have felt an irrational impulse to rid himself of it as soon as possible—murderers occasionally do. Whatever the truth about that may be, the steel eventually came by chance into my hands, and from mine into Dr. Downing’s; and the rest of its history we know.
‘I’ve admitted to feeling a certain sympathy for this man. But now I must qualify that. When he first came in, I refused to shake hands with him, and I had what I consider a good reason for that refusal—a reason I shall remember if ever I should be inclined to fret about his hanging. Because, you see, the thing he did next was gratuitously mean and spiteful. He had to get Rubi’s body off the premises; under cover of last night’s darkness, with the aid of his delivery-van, that presented no serious difficulties. But you all know where, of the many places he might have chosen, he eventually elected to put it. He elected to put it in a place which, according to the local scandal-mongers—and on the evidence of the letters, Weaver must have had a good deal to do with them; this Mrs. Cuddy I’ve heard of was doubtless a rich source—in a place which according to the scandal-mongers Rubi and Penelope had used as a rendezvous; a place where he had reasonable hopes of Penelope’s finding the body, as in fact she did. That can’t have been just coincidence; it was wilful, and it’s largely because of it that I’m stating the case against him with a certain gusto… Well, the rest’s obvious. The body thawed—its thawing aided, when daylight came, by the fact that the glade in which it lay was open to a hot sun; the normal processes of dissolution set in. And so forth.
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