The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  '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 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 connection 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 fan-letter. 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 Moffat 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 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 sitting-room, 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 him 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 in which 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 Sim'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't rely 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 mig
ht – 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 black-mailed 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?

  '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 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.

  17

  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 over-wrought 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 th
at 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 apolegetically, '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 had 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.