The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  '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 combination 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 has 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, s
ir, that we made inquiries about him not long ago, in connection 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: 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 there'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.'

  '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 MNS 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 Cotton 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 lunchtime, or later, to-day; and 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!'