The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery) Read online

  However, his story, as elicited by Casby, was clear and level-headed enough. He had arrived that morning shortly after eight; had seen his employer leave for Twelford; had worked all morning in the garden behind the house, had eaten lunch there under a tree, and at about two o'clock had entered the house by the back door with a view to arguing his instructions about a herbaceous border. That was when he had found the body and telephoned to the police. Could there, unknown to him, have been anyone else in the house at that time? No, he was sure there couldn't. Could anyone, during the morning, have entered or left by the back way? No again. Certain? Certain.

  Len Harris was coarser stuff; a youngish man, new to the village and not much liked, but a good worker. Yes, he'd been trimming the hedge out at the front. Yes, he'd seen her leave all right, about nine it'd have been, and she'd come back with her shopping towards one. No, no one had come to the house while she was away, except Dr Sims and the postwoman, he could swear to that. Nor between one and two, either, when he'd been having his bread and cheese. Helen mistrusted the gleam of unhealthy excitement in his eyes, but there could be no doubt that he was a completely reliable witness – as indeed was later proved. She herself was able to answer Casby's question about servants. There was only one, she told him, an elderly maid-of-all-work who two days ago had been taken to Twelford hospital to be treated for infective phlebitis; and Beatrice had refused to look for a substitute for her, insisting that she was quite well enough to see to her own needs till Elsie was better. Which meant –

  But at this point they were interrupted by a knock on the front door. Towards the end of the interrogation Sims had wandered out of the room, and it was he who now put his head in to announce that the afternoon post had arrived, and that he presumed Casby would want to talk with the postwoman. Casby did want, and Helen, terrified of inaction, followed him out to the doorstep where Miss Pilkington waited. For over forty years now Miss Pilkington had delivered the mail in Cotten Abbas, and her small, bent uncurious figure was as familiar there as the church tower itself, plodding on unexpectedly large feet from door to door in every sort of weather, never hurried, never late, never at fault. She waited now with the passive disinterest of a soul so long wedded to routine that nothing can rouse it; but her answers to Casby's questions were lucid and acute.

  Five letters, she said, had come for Beatrice Keats-Madderly by the morning post that day. Could she describe them? – yes, certainly she could; since the anonymous letters started she'd been more than commonly interested in people's post, and if she was to be blamed for that, all she could say was – Casby called a halt to this shadow-boxing and got her back to the point; five letters, he reminded her . . . Yes, well, one of them was a long envelope, address typewritten, penny stamp, obviously a circular; another, typewritten also, had looked like a bill; and the remaining three were all twopenny-halfpennies, addresses in writing, one of them in violet ink; no, none of them in block capitals. As to recognizing them again if they were shown to her, Miss Pilkington didn't think she'd have much difficulty in doing that.

  A small, untidy heap of letters and envelopes, hitherto unexamined, lay on the hall table, and Casby now went inside to fetch them. Yes, said Miss Pilkington, that was them all right. Only four of them, though: the violet-ink one was gone . . .

  'And where?' said Casby as soon as Miss Pilkington had taken herself off. 'Where has it gone? Anyone got any ideas?'

  Helen was surprised. 'Burned, surely,' she said.

  'The message, perhaps. But why burn the envelope it came in?'

  'The other four letters are all right, then?'

  'Perfectly harmless.'

  'I see what you mean. If she – if Beatrice committed suicide because of an anonymous letter she'd destroy that, to stop people knowing what was in it. But there'd be no point in destroying the envelope as well . . . unless . . . oh well, you know, she may have done. I don't expect' – and Helen's voice shook a little – 'I don't expect she was feeling very calm and reasonable at the time.'

  'The fact remains that the ashes in the grate are the ashes of a single sheet of paper, and nothing more. If that envelope's here I must find it. I don't like loose ends.'

  'I'll help you look,' said Helen . . .

  But a quarter of an hour later they were still looking.

  'It's no good,' said Casby at last. 'This isn't getting us anywhere. I'll have another go later on. In the meantime I must phone the mortuary for a van, and I suppose I'd better get in touch with the Chief Constable as well . . . You don't know of any relatives, do you?'

  Helen shook her head. 'She never spoke of any. There'll have to be an inquest, I suppose?'

  'Yes. That certainly. And as to' – he hesitated – 'the other arrangements, if no relatives turn up, then I suppose . . .'

  'I'll see to all that.'

  'Good. I hoped you might. By the way, who was her lawyer?'

  'I'm not quite sure.' Helen frowned. 'Someone in Twelford that much I can tell you, but I've forgotten the name.'

  'We'll find him,' said Casby, and went to the telephone.

  Helen might have left then; there was nothing for her to do, and she knew she was in the way. But it was somehow unthinkable that Beatrice should be taken away from the home where she had lived so long with no one but strangers to see her go, and Helen determined to remain at least until that had been done. She went out into the garden and sat down on a wooden seat which surrounded a sundial amid roses. By now, inside the house, they would be cutting through the scarlet sash of the house-coat, lowering the body, carrying it to – to the sitting-room sofa, Helen supposed: no point in putting it in the bedroom when it would so soon be gone . . . Helen sat among the roses and cried quietly, easily, her shoulders hardly moving beneath her brown coat.

  Half an hour later George Sims came out; evidently he had finished his examination and was leaving. He hesitated when he saw Helen, and for a moment seemed to contemplate speaking to her. But if he ever had the idea he soon dismissed it, raising his hand diffidently in lieu of good-bye, climbing into his car and driving off with much din and blue smoke. 'George Sims tells me you avoid him,' Beatrice had once said to Helen in her usual forthright way. 'Not been making unwelcome passes at you, has he?' And Helen had laughed. 'Good Lord, no – not but what I'd be the envy of every woman in the county if he had.' 'Well then, why?' Beatrice had persisted; and Helen had been hard put to it to adduce a satisfactory reason, even to herself. It was not, certainly, a question of personal dislike, for what little she had seen of George Sims had attracted her rather than the reverse. Nor – Helen was ready to swear it on her honour – could it be accounted for by professional pique. No, the only answer she had been able to find was that she had kept away from George Sims because she had obscurely felt that a distance between them would be – what was the word? – yes, politic, expedient. Beatrice, who was nothing if not practical, had been very little impressed by this halting and nebulous explanation; but then, Beatrice, as a well-to-do woman with an independent income, had never known what it was to be driven to the verge of insolvency by the legitimate rivalry of someone who was better at your job than you were . . .

  Helen sat on; and it seemed a long time before the front door opened and Casby reappeared. He scanned the garden, sighted her, and crossed the lawn to join her. 'Hello,' he said, 'I thought you'd gone long ago.'

  'I was waiting for the van to come.'

  'Yes, it's not exactly prompt, is it? I've got to get back now, but I'm leaving Burns to look after things. Will you be all right?'

  'I shall, thank you. Is there anything –'

  'Anything new? No, nothing. I think it was quite certainly suicide, if that's what you mean. The only oddity is the disappearance of that violet-ink envelope. She definitely didn't burn it with the letter, and yet it isn't anywhere to be found. Still, there's probably some obvious explanation I haven't thought of: I always was apt to be over-subtle about these things.'

  'And you think you'll be able to read
what's in the letter?'

  'Probably. Why?'

  'I was wondering,' said Helen slowly, 'if whatever's in it will have to come out at the inquest. I suppose it's silly to think it matters now, whatever it is, but at the same time . . .' She hesitated, and he said:

  'At the same time, it'd be a pity. Yes, I agree. The trouble is that that depends on the coroner, not on me. But I'll see what I can manage.'

  He nodded and went, and his car must have passed the mortuary van immediately after turning into Brankham road, for it seemed to Helen that she had hardly sat down again before the white-coated attendants appeared at the gate. She walked unselfconsciously beside the covered stretcher when they carried it from the house to the van, and with Moffatt the gardener watched from the gate as it was driven away. Then she went into the house and drew all the curtains. A meaningless piety, she knew – but to be always meaningful makes a cold world.

  It was not until she was driving back into the village that the giddiness came, and the nausea. She felt her heart flutter, felt her skin go damp and cold, saw the village street blur and quiver before her eyes, pulled in frantically to the kerb outside 'The Marlborough Head'. Helen hated physical weakness, and feared it; she fought it down, got out of the car and pushed open the door of the Lounge Bar: modern medicine disapproves of alcohol as a remedy, but Helen was in no mood for professional niceties, and in her present condition dared not, for the moment, go on driving. Inside, she was fleetingly conscious of Mogridge and of a tall, lean, affable stranger with oddly formidable-looking pale blue eyes; then the giddiness returned. Clutching at speech as the drowning clutch at straws, Helen spoke for the mere sake of it, careless of what she said or why. After that oblivion.

  The world she returned to was new, different, dream-like, all passion spent. She was aware that Casby was in the bar, and Colonel Babington; was aware of Mogridge proffering smelling-salts with an air of manly solicitude; was aware of being spoken to and of answering; was aware of the stranger's introducing himself, and of Casby's asking him some incomprehensible question about a Verger; was aware, finally, of being driven home by Casby and committed to the care of her servant Melanie. All these things she knew and afterwards remembered, but they were like scenes looked at through an inverted telescope: lucid, yet infinitely remote and infinitely unimportant. There was only one thing that was important. Helen Downing climbed the stairs, lay down on her bed, and in a moment was fast asleep.

  6

  'AND now, Mogridge,' said Mr Datchery with firmness, 'you must answer me some questions, if you please.'

  It was early afternoon of the following day. To say that Mr Datchery had not in the meantime been idle would be slightly disingenuous, for he was by nature a volatile man, readily distracted by trifles from any business which he happened to have in hand, and he had never found in total inactivity the tedium which proverbial wisdom ascribed to it. On his current mission, however, he had succeeded in keeping more or less to the point, and it was perhaps the consciousness of virtue, as much as Mogridge's natural talent for being victimized, which caused him to adopt his present rather hectoring tones.

  Mr Datchery's virtue had taken the form of gossip, for as a stranger to Cotten Abbas he felt it essential to acquire at the outset some knowledge of the dramatis personae with whose lives he was proposing, if possible, to interfere. And the harvest so far had been good. About Beatrice Keats-Madderly's suicide, for example, he by now knew as much as anybody in the village, and he had in addition built up an adequate mental picture of Helen Downing and George Sims and the two Rolts. Casby alone remained, as a personality, elusive; no one, in the bar last evening or in the village this morning, had seemed to have any very decided views about him, and Mr Datchery's own acquaintance with him, in the few minutes after Helen Downing had recovered from her faint, had been too brief to reveal much more than the fact that he was shrewd and quick-witted. For on Mr Datchery's introducing himself: 'Oughtn't you,' Casby had pleasantly inquired, 'to be staying with the Verger?' And at Mr Datchery's calculated reply 'Ought I? Would it be better than here?' he had raised his eyebrows in polite surprise at this unlikely lack of awareness of a fictional namesake . . . Yes, Casby's was certainly a mind to be reckoned with. But apart from that – well, apart from that, the only thing Mr Datchery had noticed about him was that in an undemonstrative way he had seemed emotionally interested in Helen Downing; and for that interest there might, Mr Datchery thought, be more motives than one.

  Mr Datchery had spent that morning, the morning of the Saturday, wandering about the village chatting to whomever he met; had lunched in Twelford; and had returned to 'The Marlborough Head' to find Mogridge in process of shutting up the bar. Mogridge was glum, a condition disagreeably familiar to him since his wife's discovery that he was 'friendly' (as in discussing the matter with intimates he decently termed it) with the buxom and rapacious Cora; that discovery had been communicated to him, by about the most public method conceivable, in this very room, and he was liable in moments of depression to feel that those who had witnessed it – which is to say, half Cotten Abbas – had only to set eyes on him for the event to monopolize their recollection to the exclusion of all else. He was troubled, moreover, by the irrational conviction that his undoing had been bruited about the nation like a rumour of war, and that in consequence the colleagues on his cherished Innkeepers' Regional Committee, coming to know of it, would expel him, ignominously and for ever, from their elevating deliberations. These fears were as a matter of fact almost wholly unfounded, but they continued to bedevil him none the less for that. And although plump Cora had been spectacularly dismissed and an elderly woman prone to fits of causeless weeping substituted for her, although Eunice Mogridge had long since settled down to the pleasing routine of neither forgiving nor forgetting, although the Mogridge upheaval had some time ago been superseded in the general interest by other and more recent occurrences of a similar sort – despite all these things, the harrassed Mogridge continued, in his mauvais quarts d'heure, to plumb untold depths of embarrassment and social discomfort.

  He greeted Mr Datchery wanly, therefore, and the prospect of catechism seemed not to cheer him very much. 'Newspapers, sir?' he echoed drearily in response to Mr Datchery's first question. 'There's no one sells them in the village, you'll find. Those the residents have on order come in every morning in a van from Smith's in Twelford. If you wanted to borrow one –'

  'No, thank you, Mogridge. Is there a fishmonger in the village?'

  'A fishmonger, sir? What sort of fish would you be requiring?'

  Mr Datchery sighed; he had learned from hard experience that thanks to Mogridge's habit of reading between the conversational lines, instead of accepting what people said at its face value, communication with him almost always degenerated into a maze of cross-purposes. 'It isn't fish I want,' he said patiently. 'It's a fishmonger. A purveyor, or tradesman.'

  Mogridge made a half-hearted attempt to look knowledgeable. The finest turbot hereabouts,' he said, 'is to be had, if I'm not much mistaken, from Potter's in Twelford. As to Dover sole –'

  'But is there a fishmonger in this village?'

  The impact of this proved sufficient to jerk a negative out of Mogridge before his helpfulness had time to step in and prolong the misunderstanding. 'None at all?' Mr Datchery reiterated with emphasis. 'None?'

  'None,' said Mogridge peevishly. 'If people here should happen to require fish' – and his defensive tone implied that this whim seized them far more often than Mr Datchery imagined – 'they send for it from Twelford.'

  'Well then, is there a butcher in the village?'

  'If it was sausages you were thinking of –'

  Mr Datchery groaned. 'Awful Mogridge,' he said. 'A butcher. Not sausages, a butcher.'

  And Mogridge brightened slightly. 'There's Weaver,' he ventured.

  'And he has a shop here? In this village?'

  'Oh yes, sir. Quite an up-to-date little shop, too. It's in Cork Lane, round by the church. H
e's religious,' said Mogridge, 'is Weaver.'

  'I'm very glad to hear it. And lastly, does anyone living in Cotten Abbas keep or own or work in a shop at Twelford, or anywhere outside the village?'

  Mogridge thought not; he thought definitely not, and Mr Datchery, tiring of the inquisition, left him. Mr Datchery had learned that morning that the professional nurse who had looked after Beatrice Keats-Madderly during her illness, by name Marjory Bonnet, lived on the outskirts of the village; and it was to her cottage that he now made his way. As he had expected, the inquiry with which he addressed her was not well received. But whatever her other qualities, Miss Bonnet was not subtle, and Mr Datchery's guileful approach induced her to give him his answer, by implication, as surely and as unambiguously as if she had put it into so many words. He came satisfied away from her door, meditating on violet ink; and although the association with that fluid, which certainly existed somewhere at the back of his mind, refused to reveal itself, he felt that in all other respects his affairs were decidedly prospering . . .

  It was in this state of complacency that he encountered the tot.

  The encounter did not, at the time, seem specially portentous, though events were to prove it so. Nor, all things considered, was the encounter surprising; where there are cottages, there will be tots also, squatting pensively in the dust or moving unsteadily about, absorbed in the tremendous adventure of proceeding unaided from one point to the next. But Mr Datchery's tot was peculiar in this, that it seemed to be carrying something altogether incommensurate with its physical resources. It was female, Mr Datchery saw, and about three years of age; and it was staggering grimly towards him with a murderous-looking object clutched precariously in its arms.