The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  'Do let me get to the point, or you'll be running me into another one-and-ninepence. What I want to know is whether you've had a fan-letter from a woman named Beatrice Keats-Madderly, living in a place called Cotten Abbas.'

  'Nonsense, you don't get as many fan-letters as all that.'

  'Well, go and look, then.'

  A pause.

  'You have? Did you answer it?'

  'No,' I know I don't answer letters, but that's not the point.'

  Well, when?'

  'You think Thursday definitely. And it'd be posted that day?'

  'It would. Excellent. In your own hideous scrawl, I take it.'

  'Well, there's no need to jump down my throat like that. Violet ink as usual?'

  'Yes, good. And of course, it wouldn't be the sort of letter that'd invite or imply any further correspondence between you.'

  'My language is not pedantic.'

  'Yes.'

  'No.'

  There are the pips.'

  'Well, if you want to go on talking we must reverse the charges.'

  'Quick, or it'll be another three minutes.'

  'Of course not. Goodbye.'

  'I said, goodbye.'

  An extremely long pause.

  'Oh, do listen, there are the pips again.'

  Half a minute later Mr Datchery returned to the sitting-rooom, counting out three-and-sixpence from his trousers pocket into the palm of his hand. This sum he deposited conscientiously on the mantelpiece. 'Did you hear?' he asked. 'You were meant to.'

  Helen nodded. 'All except the very beginning. But' – she gestured helplessly – 'but what does it all mean?'

  He might have explained it then, had there been opportunity; but as it turned out, there was not. Even as Helen spoke, a car, driven fast, pulled up outside the house with a squeal of brakes, and they heard its occupants hurrying up the path to knock violently at the front door. With Mr Datchery at her heels, Helen ran to meet them. The thick, unshaven face of Harry Rolt loomed up in the dim light of the hall, and Constable Burns was behind him.

  'My girl,' said Rolt succinctly. 'Not here, is she?'

  Helen shook her head. 'But what –'

  'Not been home all day, not since she found that chap's body. But Burns here, he says he saw her eavesdropping at the window when the Inspector and me were having our talk.'

  Burns started to explain: 'She ran off, though, when I called to her, and by the time I got round the side of the house –' But Mr Datchery interrupted him.

  'Your talk,' he said sharply, 'about what?'

  Rolt eyed him with momentary hostility. 'I don't know who the hell you are to ask questions,' he said unpleasantly, 'but if you must know, we happened to be talking about me being the only one in the village as knew about Beatrice Keats-Madderly's birth. And what I'm afraid of –'

  He stopped, for once irresolute and unsure of himself.

  Very distantly, on the main-line railway which skirted the village they heard the whistle of a train.

  15

  'A BRIDGE,' said Mr Datchery. 'A railway-bridge stuck in the middle of a field, somewhere out in the Brankham direction. I'm not sure that I could find my way back to it, but you'll know where it is. And I suggest we get there quickly.'

  There are some voices you do not think to question. Looking back on it afterwards, recreating in her mind's eye the shadowy hall with the wind still rising in the darkness outside the open door, Helen realized that neither to herself nor to the other two, in that moment of crisis, did it occur to require of Mr Datchery the why and wherefore of his unexplained assurance. The door had slammed behind them, and they were out in the night, before another word was spoken – and that word was addressed by Rolt not to Mr Datchery but to Burns, by way of confirming the whereabouts of the place that had been described. Then, silent again, they were hurrying down the path to the gate, and with Rolt at the wheel – Burns beside him, Helen and Mr Datchery in the back – the big, battered car leaped forward, twenty horses strong, to skid with a screech of stretched tyres round the angle of the church and accelerate fiercely along the main street.

  Helen never kept any clear impression of that short and hectic ride. She could remember the smell of petrol and of stale cigar smoke; could remember that by a common trick of the retina it was the clouds which seemed to her to be fixed and the moon which seemed to be anchorless; could remember her finger's finding and enlarging a hole in the leather upholstery of the seat on which she sat, her nail scratching at the soft, damp kapok inside. But these were isolated images; the sum of them she could never recall. And the silence which lay heavy on them was broken only once, when Mr Datchery said abruptly:

  'Is there an express due?'

  The dashboard light was in a hollow hood projecting abovs the instrument-panel. Burns leaned forward, twisted the hood to turn it on, glanced at his wrist-watch. The small glow-worm of light vanished again.

  'In five minutes,' he said.

  Then they were out of the village, among trees, meadows, hedges. All of them had known where they were going; all of them now knew why. The headlamps converged to a white splash on the empty road, and fitfully, whenever the clouds uncovered her, the moon blanched them with her own light, as a fire in a room will grow cold under the sun's rays. The wind was blowing not uniformly but in violent, unpredictable gusts, like buffets from the ragged hem of an immense rough garment, and the trees seethed with it. Dust, piled up during the long, windless drought, whirled round them in clouds, eddying violently wherever the thrust of their progress conflicted with the direction of the wind. And all along the banks, the June wildflowers bent their thready stems as the car passed. 'Easy, sir,' said Burns, as the Humber approached a sharp bend without slackening speed. 'Easy does it . . .' And then Mr Datchery grunted as Helen was flung against him, and the hedges wheeled in dizzying ellipse, and they were in the straight again . . . Helen had lost all sense of time; at one moment it seemed to her that they had already covered many long miles, at another that the slam of the front door, as they left the house, was still vibrating in her ears. She found out afterwards that in sober fact the whole journey had taken them three minutes exactly.

  Helen, Burns, and Mr Datchery were out of the car before it stopped, and scrambling over the stile which gave access to the right-of-way across the field they sought. Gasping painfully from the unaccustomed effort, Rolt followed, and then they were all of them running, stumbling in the darkness on tussocks of uncropped grass at the path's verge, in the direction in which they knew the old bridge to lie. Knew, and presently saw. For now the moon was unveiled again, and they could make out the flattened arcs of the stone parapet, and the geometrical belt of shadow, at the field's crest, which marked the shallow cutting. For an instant they paused, straining their eyes for what more the moon might show. But they were still too far off for certainty, and so in another moment they were running again, running towards a shadow whose edge – as more cloud spread like a stain over the bright disc overhead – raced to meet them across the uneven slope. In six strides the darkness reclaimed them.

  It was uphill the last part of the way. They struggled on, spaced out now according to their physical capacity: Burns ahead, then Mr Datchery, then Helen, with Rolt a good way to the rear. The wind blew hard against their faces, thrusting their expired breath back into their mouths and overfilling their lungs when they sucked air in; where there were drops of sweat on their foreheads it struck chill. Helen tripped, and only recovered her balance by a convulsive movement which strained a muscle in her thigh. Then the ground became level again, and the wire fence which guarded the cutting's lip loomed up in front of her. In the black depths below, the metal of the rails gleamed very faintly, and far along to the right was the single eye of a green signal-light. She heard again the whistle of the approaching engine, and from behind her, as if released by the sound, Rolt's voice spoke.

  'Pen!' it called in agony. 'Pen, girl! Pen!'

  The clouds were like smoke, without depth or
cohesion, spindrift-thin. Through a rent in one of them the moon looked out again. And Helen saw.

  In the last stages of the ascent she had evidently strayed unawares from the path, so that the bridge was now a hundred yards to her left, with the blurred figures of Burns and Mr Datchery between her and it. You could distinguish details – weeds sprouting from crevices in the crumbling stone, a flustered night-bird clapping his wings on the bare bough of a dying oak, the wind-whipped swaying of the tall brome-grass. But Helen had no attention to spare for any of these things; they somehow found lodgement in her mind, so that later she was able to recollect them, but the whole of her consciousness was fixed, in that moment of revelation, on the slender figure, ghostly in the moonlight, which stood at the centre of the bridge, gazing across the nearer of the two parapets in the direction from which the train would come. Its hair was tangled. Its eyes glittered like a cat's as the head turned. And in the instant that Helen became aware of it, it moved, climbed swiftly on to the parapet to stand there balanced precariously against the wind. Burns started to run again, with Mr Datchery after him. But they had not taken half a dozen steps before words from the poised figure, shaky yet shrill and clear, halted them.

  'Don't come near!' called Penelope Rolt. 'Don't come near or I'll jump!'

  'Pen!' Rolt shouted. His voice choked as he sought breath. 'Don't do it. Pen! Don't do it! Oh, my Christ!' He staggered to Helen's side, his hand pressed hard against his ribs and his cheeks blotchy with tears. 'Do something,' he whispered. 'For God's sake do something.'

  In their several ways, they added their voices to his. But it was hopeless; in that rough, fickle wind they could not even be sure they were heard – for there were times when Penelope seemed to be calling back to them, and yet they could distinguish no articulate sound. 'Your father is cleared!' Mr Datchery was shouting. 'He had nothing to do with the letters!' And that at least Penelope heard, since her thin voice retorted with: 'You're just saying that! You're just saying that so as to stop me! Keep away, I tell you! Keep away!'

  Stolidly, Burns, who was nearest, moved forward again. A gust caught the figure on the parapet, so that it tottered, off balance, and hung dreadfully poised above the drop to the metals below. Burns stopped as if turned to stone; he was still too distant for a sudden rush to be any good. And as Helen watched, her heart throbbing painfully, Penelope recovered, dropped to her hands and knees, dropped further to lie sprawled face down, with her head towards them. For a moment the sour taste of death had been in her mouth; perhaps now she would reconsider. But when Burns strode forward she lifted her eyes, and it was still 'Don't come near! Don't come near or I'll jump!'

  And now indeed there was no more time for pleas or reasoning. Already they could hear the rumble of the night express. Helen swung round sharply at the touch of a hand on her arm.

  'Give Burns and me just half a minute,' said Mr Datchery. 'Then go and get her – and don't stop whatever she says or does.'

  'But – '

  'If she should jump, we shall be down below.'

  'But she may not really mean to,' said Helen desperately.

  'We can't rely on that. Somehow the thing's got to be precipitated, one way or the other. Do as you're told – and God help us all if you don't.' He was gone.

  The moon vanished again. Had Helen known it, that was what Mr Datchery wanted, because otherwise he and Burns would be too clearly visible to Penelope when they stood beneath the bridge. Catching Burns by the arm, Mr Datchery hurried him to the farther side of the bridge – the side away from the parapet where Penelope crouched – explaining rapidly as they went. On the face of it, his scheme was insanely risky, but there was no time for weighing chances. 'A train coming up half does it for you . . .' Twisting and slithering, Burns and Mr Datchery scrambled through the wire fence and down the cutting's bank.

  There was a platelayer's hut there – small and dingy, with a tarred roof. Mr Datchery remembered seeing near it, where he had been on the bridge with Penelope that morning, part of a tarpaulin such as is used to cover goods wagons. It was still there – stiff and intractable from long exposure, so that they tore their nails on it, and grazed their skin, as they toiled to spread it out – and there were cords attached to it through tarnished brass rings let into the edges, cords long enough to wind round the wrists . . . But all of that took them a long time to accomplish. Too long. They were not ready with the tarpaulin until the train was actually in sight, travelling at perhaps fifty miles an hour some four hundred yards away along the cutting. With the canvas stretched between them, they ran along the line towards it, under the bridge and out at the other side below the place where Penelope was.

  Or rather, below the place where they hoped she was. Of all the weak points in Mr Datchery's plan, this, the darkness being almost absolute, was the weakest. They could only station themselves in what seemed the likeliest place and hope for the best. A poor best, too. The canvas might split under the weight of a falling body, or the cords break; Burns and Mr Datchery might well lack sufficient strength to cope with the impact; none of them might be able to get out from under the wheels of the oncoming engine . . . But it was no use thinking of the scheme in those terms. It was a gigantic gamble, not a calculated act, in any serious sense, at all. If Penelope fell, and they happened not to be in the right place to catch her, well then . . .

  The engine was very close now. The ground trembled premonitorily beneath their feet, and it needed an extreme effort of will to step directly in the train's path. Its noise, as it came ever closer, shut out most other sounds, but they could just hear Helen shouting, somewhere above their heads, and Penelope shouting back. At the last possible moment, they would jump aside; in the meantime, both waited steadily, feet apart, with hands gripping the edges of the tarpaulin and the cords wound about their wrists.

  The noise grew. The tremors of the ground jarred them. The huge weight of hurtling metal was almost on top of them now. Again the engine whistled – a prolonged blast which increased in volume with hideous rapidity as it bore down on them. And then, faint above the uproar, they heard a scream, and in that fraction of a second both of them moved.

  They moved by instinct – not farther in under the bridge, but farther out, to meet the train. Had they not done so, it would have been the finish. Even as it was, Penelope's hurtling body landed a great deal nearer the edge of the canvas than the centre, so that they had to twist it in order to prevent her falling out of it. Mr Datchery cried out involuntarily as the cords bit deep into his flesh. Then, a split second later, they had hurled themselves aside, literally scooping Penelope with them, and were lying, all three of them, in a tangled heap with the filthy tarpaulin on the other line, while the train thundered by within inches of them: bruised, pallid and shaken, but in no other way hurt. The long line of lighted windows flashed past; the shrieking whistle diminished in volume, dropped in pitch, ceased. It was over.

  Twenty seconds later, and Helen, with Rolt behind her, was creeping down the bank towards them. Seven minutes more, and all five of them had climbed back to the top. 'Thank God,' was all Helen could say. 'Oh, thank God.' Hers had been the easier part, but in all conscience it had been terrifying enough. To her last day she would remember going towards Penelope while the din of the train grew enormous in the cutting below; would remember Penelope, as she came near, scrambling to her feet on the parapet; would remember the high, piercing shriek as, with Helen not three feet from her, she had fallen . . . Penelope was whey-faced now, dazed and hysterical. 'I didn't mean to,' she said over and over again. 'It was an accident, I didn't mean to.' And Mr Datchery, who had gone on to the bridge, summoned Burns to join him.

  'Look,' he said.

  By the moon's wan light they could see that where Penelope had stood a great chunk of stone was broken away. 'That,' Mr Datchery, suggested,' and the wind . . .'

  'A good thing, sir,' said Burns, 'that that load of rock didn't cosh one of us when we was down below.'

  'And as to your
report –'

  'As to that, sir,' Burns answered steadily, 'an accident's what I shall say. Attempting suicide's a felony, of course, but I don't know of any law to stop you standing on the parapets of bridges, if that's your idea of fun.'

  There was a silence while they gazed at the freshly broken surface of stone. 'Nor I shan't be going against my conscience, either,' Burns added. 'She wouldn't have jumped, not if I know anything about it . . . Well, so there we are. And we've come pretty well out of it, sir, don't you think?'

  Mr Datchery rubbed the weals on his wrists. 'Firemen,' he said with a complacency which for once was not wholly unjustified, 'is what we ought to be.'

  An hour later, and Helen Downing was alone in the drawing-room of Rolt's house by the mill.

  It was one of the oldest houses in Cotten Abbas, and he had bought it along with the land on which the mill was built. The furnishing of the room in which Helen waited was opulent but unfriendly; clearly it was not much used. But Helen, exhausted, both physically and emotionally, as she had never been exhausted before, was in no mood to criticize. She lay back in a chair with her eyes closed, wondering if the day's shocks were ever going to end.

  They had driven to the house after dropping Burns and Mr Datchery at the Brankham end of the village street. During the drive, Mr Datchery had spoken only once. 'All this must stop,' he had said quietly, and something in the tone he used had made Helen shiver . . . Penelope, dazed and silent, had been put to bed, had eaten greedily after her day's fast, had fallen, with Helen's nembutal to aid her, into a heavy slumber. Marjory Bonnet, the nurse, had been telephoned, found unengaged; she was upstairs in the bedroom now, would be there all night. And Rolt, whom the evening's events seemed to have aged by ten or twenty years, had gone off to wash, after begging Helen to remain and talk to him . . . The ormolu clock on the mantelpiece showed twenty minutes past ten, and with its drowsy ticking in her ears Helen sat relaxed – relaxed save only for the straining of her eyeballs beneath the closed lids as she strove to stay awake.