The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

by Edmund Crispin

  'But now let's leave that for a moment, and go back a bit.'

  'One of the very first thing 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 businessess 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, 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 a 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. I'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 be 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 round looking for a butcher's steel; you look for something like a dagger. But if, at the moment when the murderous impulse seized 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 discovered 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 this 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 – a
nd 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.

  '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 perfuntorily 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 Rolt, 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 revolved 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 of 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 seconds 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 . . .'

  18

  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 yesterday's happenings as had already leaked out were too vague and contradictory to influence the proceedings 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?'