‘That’s my indictment, and there’s only one alternative to it—I mean the theory that Helen Downing is guilty. As to that, all I can say is that if she’s guilty, she’s also quite loopy, because every time she’s opened her mouth she’s said something to incriminate herself. I personally don’t believe murderers do that sort of thing; if any different possibility exists, that possibility is obviously the truth. And as I’ve shown you, a different possibility very definitely does exist.
‘There are detectives at Weaver’s shop now; they’ll stay there till they find the human blood they’re looking for in the cold storage room and the delivery van—and blood-group analysis is such a fine art these days that they’ll be able when they find it to be quite certain about whose blood it is. In conjunction with what I’ve told you, that, I think, will fix him.’
There was a long silence when Fen had finished speaking. Physically and emotionally, they were all exhausted. A log collapsed in a flurry of sparks. The cat Lavender stretched, licked perfunctorily at a paw, began gazing about him with large and speculative eyes. Casby, who of all the people there had spoken the least, remained like a man in a trance.
But none of these things interested them. With the exception of Casby and of Sims, still fathoms deep in his self-pity, they were all looking at Weaver.
His taciturnity, his lack of expression and his immobility had a hypnotic effect, so that you began to wonder if he were conscious of anything that had been said. When at last he got to his feet—slowly and painfully, so that for a moment they were all off guard—he was like a man drugged.
And then he moved.
He moved not, as they might have expected, in the direction of the door or the windows. Instead, he ran to Colonel Babington’s desk, before anyone could hope to stop him, and pulled a drawer open. And in his hand, when it emerged from the drawer, there was a loaded revolver.
They learned later that he must have seen it there more than a month before, when he had visited the study to discuss a possible error in a bill. But however he may have known it was there, he had it now, and that was all that seemed to matter. With the exception of Holt, they were all of them standing by the time he backed towards the windows. They saw him fumble, still watching them, at a catch, saw him loosen it. Then they saw his eyes change when the window failed to open.
‘No use, Weaver,’ said Colonel Babington. ‘I took the precaution of putting the shutters up. Now, be a sensible fellow, and…’
But Weaver was not listening. He was looking at Constable Burns, who was between him and the door, and the movement of his head was as plain and as unequivocal as speech.
Burns stayed where he was.
‘By the time I’ve counted three,’ said Weaver. ‘One.’
Burn’s eyes glazed a little, but still he stayed where he was.
‘Two.’
‘Get away from the door, Burns,’ said Colonel Babington quietly. ‘That’s an order. Even if he escapes from the house, he can’t possibly—’
In Burns’s powerful body not a muscle stirred. It could have been courage; it could have been simple obstinacy. All Helen knew, through the black mists of her fear for his safety, was that it was somehow splendid.
‘Three,’ said Weaver. The hammer of the gun jerked back as his finger squeezed the trigger.
‘And this,’ said Harry Rolt placidly, ‘is where I take a hand.’
He heaved himself up out of the sofa. Tank-like, he moved across the room towards where Weaver stood, and the whole magnificent reliability of the great county of Yorkshire was in his unfaltering step. The muzzle of the revolver shifted in his direction.
‘Keep your distance,’ Weaver said.
‘If there’s any shooting to be done,’ said Rolt without stopping, ‘I’m the one to be at the receiving end. Young Burns is sticking to his post, and I admire him for it. But he’s no more than a lad—so you can have a go at me instead.’
He was very close now, and still advancing. The gun in Weaver’s hand pointed directly at him.
‘I’m warning you for the last time,’ said Weaver in a high, thin voice. ‘Keep away.’
And with that, everything seemed to happen at once.
Looking back on it afterwards, Helen realized that without knowing it she had been aware all the time, in a remote corner of her mind, of what the cat Lavender was doing. To say that she had been in any sense attending to the goings-on of the cat Lavender would be a gross distortion of the truth. But she did (she remembered later) somehow contrive to notice that at the moment when Harry Rolt intervened, the cat Lavender was gazing thoughtfully up at the top of a bookcase against the wall behind Weaver’s back. Perhaps two seconds later, it jumped.
So as Harry Rolt moved towards Weaver, the situation was this. On one end of the bookcase-top was the cat Lavender. In the middle of the bookcase-top was a very large and fragile empty porcelain vase. And at the other end of the bookcase-top, invisible to all except the cat Lavender, were a number of Martians.
Simultaneously with Rolt’s advance upon Weaver, the cat Lavender began advancing on his interplanetary foes. Reaching the vase, which blocked his path, he paused uncertainly. But at whatever cost, Earth must be guarded from the depredations or her solar neighbours. Head high, the cat Lavender marched on.
The results were immediate.
With an unnerving crash, the porcelain vase fell to the floor. Practically instantaneously, Weaver fired—and the two sounds might almost have been one. Not quite, however. At the violence of that unexpected detonation immediately behind him, Weaver started-and that was just enough to deflect his aim. Certainly the bullet hit Rolt—at so short a range it was scarcely possible to miss. The bullet hit Rolt and he was stopped by it as if by a blow from a hammer. But it only partly disabled him. Recovering his balance, he lunged forward while the echoes of the detonation still rang in their ears, and the acrid powder-smoke was still fresh in their nostrils. He fell on Weaver’s gun-arm, twisted it. In the next instant Fen, Burns, and Casby were with him.
The gun-muzzle caught Fen a glancing blow on the temple, so that he collapsed on the floor in an indignant daze. And Rolt, now that his job was done, was down on his knees with his hand pressed hard against his side and the blood spurting out between his fingers. But the loss of two men hardly mattered: against the combination of Burns and Casby, Weaver had no chance whatever. The gun clattered on the bare boards. Handcuffs snapped shut. As she crouched beside Harry Rolt, Helen said:
‘Ambulance. With any luck it won’t be serious, but we must get him to hospital at once.’
After that, confusion. There were a few images which stood out: George Sims slumped in a chair with his hands covering his face; Weaver, sullen and speechless, being thrust out through the door; the cat Lavender, in a state of high alarm, getting under everybody’s feet…
And last but not least Colonel Babington, saying carefully to nobody in particular: ‘I think that in view of all this excitement I might allow myself just one cigarette…’
Chapter Eighteen
At the bottom of Helen Downing’s garden, on the side away from the churchyard, there was a straggling copse of trees—young beeches and birches, with bracken in drifts and scabious flowering among the bracken. Towards this, at teatime on the Monday, Helen walked out from her house with Inspector Edward Casby beside her. Last night’s wind, tamed now to the mildest of mild breezes, blew warm in their faces. They walked preoccupied, aimless, without looking at one another.
To the inquest on Beatrice Keats-Madderly, held that morning in Twelford, Helen had not been, though of necessity Casby had. It had produced no sensations, no surprises. George Sims had given his evidence—medical evidence—with shaky bravado, and had then been returned to custody; he was to face the magistrates to-morrow afternoon. But the question of the authorship of the anonymous letter sent to Beatrice had not arisen, and such rumours of yesterdays happenings as had already leaked out were too vague and contradictory to influence the pr
oceedings to any serious extent. On Wednesday, the same court would be considering the death of Rubi, and at that session Helen, as a witness, definitely would have to be present. In the meantime, she was grateful for a respite, grateful for the chance to refocus and re-examine her own personal problems. Not that it was possible to be in the least dispassionate about them, even now. In a situation like this, you took what came, hoping only that it would be better than you deserved…
There were still a few late violets along the borders of the narrow gravel path. Afterwards, Helen could remember making some comment on them, though she never remembered what. Then the silence came back. They had been able, up till now, to talk of the inquest, of Weaver’s attempted suicide during the night, of this and that detail left out of Fen’s exposition the previous evening. But you cannot, in some situations, go on speaking of indifferent things indefinitely, and both of them were conscious, as they strolled constrainedly in the warm sunshine, that the moment had come when certain decisions must be made. It was Casby who spoke first.
‘What,’ he said abruptly, ‘are your plans?’
They had reached the outposts of the trees. Helen halted, sick with apprehension, to stare back pointlessly at the house. In a voice that shook a little, she said:
‘I—I’m afraid I was still hoping—’
And then she checked herself. It was not pride which silenced her, but rather the fear that he had not yet forgiven, perhaps never could forgive, her intolerable imputation of yesterday afternoon. ‘I don’t know,’ she went on after a moment in a colourless voice. ‘There—there hasn’t been time to think about that. I suppose—well, I suppose I shall just carry on as usual.’ She tried to smile. ‘There’s no competition now, is there?’
He did not answer that. But his eyes flickered, and she was suddenly dismayed to realize that he had been oblivious of her faltering—that he had even, it might be, interpreted her words as a dismissal. Panicking, she added:
‘I don’t mean that’s what I most want. It isn’t. I—I’d much rather—’
And then, with a supreme effort, she managed to cease this incoherent stammering and to ask the question which had to be asked.
‘Are we,’ said Helen Downing in the voice of a stranger, ‘still engaged?’
They could hear the droning of the saw-mill, and the nearer droning of early bees. But in moments of crisis consciousness shrinks to a pin-point, and those sounds might have been on another planet for all the awareness of them they could show. At the bottom of the garden, close to the trees, they stood facing one another. Their acquaintance was not broad-based; on the plane of everyday communication they had scarcely met. And so they stood hapless for a time, each confronted with an alien being whose reactions he or she did not possess the experience to gauge.
‘I haven’t,’ he said bitterly at last, ‘been very bright. Not about anything.’
She waited, and presently, groping for the words, he went on.
‘Last night, when Fen was talking, I don’t believe I took in a quarter of what he said. Of course, by that time none of it was news to me, but even if… No, the only thing I could think of was what a bloody fool I’d been. I ought to have thrown up the case the second it began to seem that you were involved in it. I ought to have asked you to marry me the day we first met—when you came to me with that letter. God knows, I wanted to enough. But no, I had to be cool and airy and knowledgeable, while all the time something inside me was screaming at me to grab you and kiss you and never let you go.’
Helen’s eyes shone. But he was looking away from her, into the distance, and so failed to see it.
‘This puerile shyness!’ he breathed, grinding one clenched hand into the palm of the other. ‘This shyness! I wanted desperately to see you again, but 1 was afraid. Afraid of making myself unwelcome, I suppose, and getting hurt… But what an excuse! Good God, what an excuse for a man in love to have to make! That by itself ought to convince you that I’m not worth your while. And added to the other things—’
‘Don’t,’ said Helen gently. ‘Please don’t talk like that.’
She put her fingers timidly on his arm.
‘If you still want me,’ she said, ‘here I am.’
He turned his head slowly towards her. ‘You mean,’ he said incredulously, ‘that in spite of everything, you’d still—’
‘Provided you,’ she answered him steadily, ‘can forgive me.’
‘Me forgive you?’ He was genuinely startled. ‘My dearest girl, what the devil for?’
She told him.
‘That!’ he exclaimed. ‘So that’s all you’ve been worrying about! Good heavens, girl!’
Helen hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.
‘“All”?’ she echoed him, deciding to do a little of both.
“All”? Really you are the—the most unspeakable hypocrite… The next thing you’ll be saying is that you’d forgotten about it.’
‘But damn it, I had!’ he protested with obvious truth. ‘I remember now, of course, and I remember its annoying me at the time. But really… I say, do you know what I’m going to tell you?’
‘W-why all the Irishry? No, I don’t.’
‘We have been a couple of imbeciles.’
‘Yes.’
‘Cloth-heads.’
‘Yes.’
‘Gawps.’
‘What are gawps? Darling, what are gawps?’
He took her head in his hands and kissed her lips. ‘I’m inclined to think,’ he said judicially, ‘that this spot is rather too—um—public to be suitable for communicating information of that sort. In among those trees, on the other hand—they being in full leaf—’
‘Yes, but we mustn’t forget Professor Fen’s coming to tea.’
Later, Helen said: ‘Darling, we mustn’t forget Professor Fen’s coming to tea.’
‘No,’ said Inspector Edward Casby with an air of gravity and decision, ‘we most certainly must not.’ They then forgot about it immediately.
‘Dr. Sims!’ Mogridge kept saying. ‘Dr. Sims—just think of it! And Weaver! Not that I ever trusted him, mind,’ said Mogridge, who as a matter of fact had trusted Weaver implicitly. “Never rely on fanatics, Mogridge”—that’s What the Chairman of our South-eastern Regional Catering Sub-committee said to me once. “Never rely on a fanatic,” he said. And he’s a man who knows what he’s talking about. Well, sir, it’s all turned out for the best, in my humble opinion. The lark’s in his heaven, the slug’s on the thorn, as Lord Tennyson somewhere phrases it. And to think,’ said Mogridge sycophantically, ‘that I myself should have been entertaining an angel unawares!’
The angel unawares regarded him bleakly out of pale blue eyes. ‘How you do go on, Mogridge,’ it said. ‘How you do go on.’
A train was due to leave Twelford for Oxford at 7.5. Fen had elected to catch this train rather than an earlier one in part because of Helen Downing’s invitation to tea, in part because he was stiff and bruised from yesterday’s adventures, and required time in which to recuperate, and in part because of a congenital incapacity for setting forth on any journey, however trivial, without hours of preparation beforehand. His appearance at the moment was sufficiently remarkable. Feeling a small patch of sticking-plaster on his temple to be an inadequate memorial of his share in the fight with Weaver, he had purchased a large bandage and wound it completely round his head, so that the effect produced was of something carelessly disinterred from an Egyptian tomb. Thus decorated, he left the inn to go and say good-bye to Colonel Babington, and the children emerging from school threw up their hands and shrieked loudly in mock-terror as he passed.
Colonel Babington proved to be in his shirt-sleeves amid a welter of ropes and ladders. The cat Lavender, it transpired, had carried its cosmic war up on the roof, and was now unable to descend again without assistance.
‘He’s really not much better than half-witted, you know,’ said the Colonel sourly as he adjusted a ladder in readiness for the climb. ‘But I suppose
we can’t just leave him there.’
He stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette against the wall of the house and then put it providently in his pocket. ‘So you’ve started again,’ said Fen rather coldly.
‘Well,’ said the Colonel, ‘the way I look at it is this. I’ve proved now that I can give it up—and that’s really all I set out to do. After all, it’s not as if I couldn’t afford to smoke, or had a wonky heart or anything. And I’ll tell you another thing, giving it up was affecting my behaviour slightly. I wasn’t quite my normal self.’
‘No doubt,’ said Fen even more coldly. ‘I admire your moral resilience, I must say.’
Presently, feeling that from the social point of view little was to be gained from the spectacle of Colonel Babington crawling precariously up the tiles, he shouted his farewells—whichwere returned in a muffled, apprehensive voice from behind a chimney pot—and set off to visit Helen Downing. There would be lovers’ difficulties for him to compose, he suspected, and in addition, he thought he would take the opportunity of explaining the case to them all over again… At Helen’s front door he knocked and waited. From the kitchen of the adjacent house, where Melanie Hogben was talking murders with Mrs. Flack, regular, improbable-sounding laughter could be heard. After a pause, Fen knocked again, waited again. Nothing happened.
The Long Divorce Page 20
