It was in the village of Chigfold, isolated on a corner of one of the Devon moors, that Gervase Fen encountered the only man who has ever seemed to him to be definitely evil.
A word like ‘evil’ needs (he will tell you) to be used with precaution: the descent of Avernus has no milestones which mark out for the traveller – or for others watching him – the stages of his journey. And yet at the same time there is, perhaps, somewhere along it a point of no return. On the maps of infamy it is never shown, since for each individual its location will be different. Moreover, the setting foot across it, in the downward direction, involves a spiritual crisis so acute, and an effort of will so intolerably degrading, that it is only very rarely passed. But that young St John Leavis had passed it, Fen never for a moment doubted. It was not the attempted parricide which produced this overwhelming conviction; that, horrible though it was, seemed to Fen merely the ratification of a treaty already concluded. Rather, it was a wholesale reversal of normal personality which you scented the instant you met the man, and which made even the dullest-witted of ordinary wholesome sinners inexplicably uneasy in his company.
Yet there was nothing you could put your finger on, saying ‘This is the mark of the beast’. In all externals St John Leavis was charming; and even if he were now and again petulant, that petulance so closely resembled the petulance of a child that it took you off-guard, compelling you to assume, against your better judgment, that there was a child’s innocence underlying it. At the time when Fen met him, at Chigfold, he was just twenty-five years old – a good-looking young man with crisp, curly fair hair and big light-blue eyes. Laziness, and self-indulgence, had thickened his neck, had fattened his cheeks and chin, blurring, like a gauze, their original fineness, but he remained unusually personable in spite of that. His tastes were literary; his conversation was witty; his manners were impeccable. And by the end of the first five minutes of their acquaintance, Fen detested him.
It was irrational, of course – quite irrational and unfair: in discussing the matter (which he is oddly reluctant to do), Fen confines himself to a simple statement of the fact, making no attempt to justify it. Spiritual issues are irrelevant, in any case, he says, so long as a story is all you want: the act of violence was unquestionably an act of self-interest, and you are quite at liberty to rest content with that – which is a perfectly adequate explanation in itself – and to refuse to delve deeper. The fact remains, however, that to an actual participant the overtones were infinitely more impressive than the note which produced them; and it appears that the only person who was altogether deaf to those overtones, until the terror at last unstopped his ears, was St John’s victim, his father.
This – in Fen’s opinion – was to be expected. The mere temperamental contrast between father and son was a formidable barrier to mutual understanding in itself, even if you left aside the natural blindness which goes with kinship and overfamiliarity. For George Seymour Leavis differed from St John in every important particular. At forty-seven he was boisterous, ‘sporty’, an open-air man; red in the face, active, a faddist in his diet, an unconquerably simple mind. He had made money, a good deal of it, out of steel. St John, on the contrary, had never made any money out of anything, and avowedly had no intention of trying. And of this attitude, his father, as a self-made man, very definitely disapproved, with the result that St John’s allowance was exiguous, and he was forced, if he wanted a change from the great sooty Victorian-Gothic house in the Midlands, to take his holidays – as on the present occasion – in company with Leavis senior. In this circumstance lay the more superficial explanation of the attempt to kill: Mrs Leavis had died years before, and St John was his father’s sole heir.
The inn at Chigfold had three guest-rooms; and during that last week of April 1949 they were all occupied, two of them by the Leavises and the third by Fen, who was filling in time before returning to Oxford for the Trinity term. St John drank, and read, and complained inoffensively of boredom; his father, and Fen, walked – together, for the most part, in the companionable silence which both of them liked better, while exercising, than conversation. Thus uneventfully the first part of the holiday went by. But there came a day when Fen found himself obliged to go walking alone: Leavis père had taken the bus into Tawton, twelve miles away across the moor, in order to attend a Rotary luncheon, and since he had decided to return to Chigfold on foot, would not be in until nightfall. St John was no walker, even if Fen had had the slightest wish for his company, and in any case was proposing to drive into Barnstaple for the afternoon and evening, and see a film. After an early tea, therefore, Fen put on a mackintosh, recovered his stick from the teeth of the over-exuberant wolf-hound which was supposed to protect the inn against burglars, and thus equipped, set out on his own. Outside the inn, he hesitated. The road running through the little stonebuilt village beckoned impartially in either direction. But it was on Barnstaple that he turned his back, towards Nag’s Tor and Tawton that he went. Leavis senior had hitherto shown a marked preference for the Barnstaple direction; and this fact, by provoking in Fen a natural reaction as soon as he was left to his own devices, was destined to save Leavis senior’s life.
From Chigfold to Nag’s Tor is a matter of some seven miles across deserted, wind-swept moorland. There is a road, of course – a white road which dips and rises, following the contours of the land like a stretched tape; but except in summer, pedestrians are as rare on it as vehicles, and Fen reached his goal, towards twilight, without having encountered a single living soul. He paused, staring up at the prominence – turf- and heather-covered, with outcrops of flaky-looking rock – in whose shape, viewed from the proper angle by a strenuously imaginative man, something dimly equine was said to be discernible. Then he began to climb. It was a longer and steeper ascent than it had seemed from the road; and the rocky gullies, when you actually came to them, were revealed as tolerably deep and dangerous. Fen reached the summit safely, however. And it was not until he was descending again – by the slopes away from the road – that he happened on the elder Leavis’s body.
It lay sprawled and still at the foot of a high pile of rocks – hands clutching, left leg twisted. The drop was a big one, so that Fen, scrambling down circuitously, had little hope that Leavis would be still alive. Pulse imperceptible, he found. But when, after polishing his cigarette-case on his sleeve, he applied it to the pale, sagging lips, it grew ever so faintly misty; with the result that on hearing the distant drone of a car coming up the road he turned and ran, stumbling hurriedly down the lower slopes of the Tor to intercept what proved to be a baker’s van. Having given urgent instructions to its driver, he made his way back to Leavis; and since it would obviously be more risky to move the man, and try to apply first aid, than to leave him as he lay, Fen occupied himself, while he waited, in studying the scene.
His examination was unrewarding, however. That Leavis had fallen from the top of the rocks was plain enough – but as to whether the thing had happened by accident or by design, there was no evidence, for the ground was too dry to take footprints. A gleam of gold, in a tuft of grass immediately beside the body, led to the discovery of a watch which might well have dropped from Leavis’s waistcoat pocket as he fell. But Fen refrained from touching it, for fear of obliterating fingerprints (a precaution which was eventually nullified by the Tawton inspector of police, who apparently felt no such qualms); and when he came to consider the problem of whether it belonged to Leavis or not, he found he could remember no occasion in their brief acquaintance on which any question of watches, or the time of day, had arisen … Presently, the light having become too poor for such work, Fen abandoned his search of the area, perched himself on a rock, and lit a cigarette. That mere motive is no proof of attempted murder, he was well aware; yet the feelings which St John had aroused in him were such that the possibility of accident scarcely even crossed his mind. Proof was the problem – proof. And he was still pondering it, still vainly, when the police and the ambulance arrived.
*
Three days more, and the injured man was sufficiently recovered to be able to talk to visitors.
He had been fairly badly damaged – a broken leg, a broken finger, two broken ribs; and if he had been left to lie out on the moors all night, shock would certainly have finished him. Once that was remedied, however, the doctors pronounced him out of danger, for there was no injury either to the skull or to the internal organs. And if he still looked sick and pale and withdrawn when Fen went to see him at the Tawton Cottage Hospital – well, there was perhaps another reason for that. Entering, Fen had passed St John who was on his way out, and the rage and fright which he had glimpsed in that plump young face, before the shutters dropped and the expected commonplaces passed between them, had appalled him. It was as well, Fen reflected, that he had succeeded in badgering Inspector Waycott into leaving a man on guard, night and day, in the patient’s room.
The patient himself was making a gallant attempt to appear normal. ‘Damned stupidity,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘losing my balance like that. High time I packed it up, if I’m going to nearly kill myself every time I go out alone … I was wanting to see you, though, because they tell me it was you who found me. Lucky you happened along … Thanks, anyway: thanks a lot.’
For a minute or two they talked constrainedly. Then Fen noticed, on the bedside table, the watch he had discovered lying beside Leavis’s body, and picked it up. Flipping it open, he noted idly that it was an English watch with a fourteen-carat gold case: plain but expensive. ‘I’m glad this didn’t come to any harm,’ he said. ‘It’s a nice thing.’
Leavis nodded in a superficially casual manner; but now he was watching his visitor warily. ‘I’m glad, too,’ he answered. ‘It was my father gave it me, for my twenty-firster, and I shouldn’t have liked to have it damaged.’
‘Ah.’ Fen returned the watch to its place. ‘Well, I’d better leave you now, I think, or the nurse’ll start nagging me.’ But as he turned to go, a defect in the little room, of which subconsciously he had been aware since his arrival, suddenly took substance in his mind. ‘I thought you had a policeman on guard here,’ he said sharply. ‘What’s happened to him?’
Leavis smiled feebly. ‘All a lot of nonsense,’ he said. ‘When the inspector came to see me, earlier on, I told him to take the chap away. Anyone’d think someone had tried to murder me.’
‘Yes, well, someone might have, you know,’ Fen countered. ‘We couldn’t be sure about that, till you came round.’
‘Nonsense.’ Leavis spoke with a throaty vehemence which verged on anger. ‘Utter nonsense.’ And with that Fen was obliged to be content.
Outside the hospital he paused, unsure of his next move. It was a moral certainty, he thought, that St John had pushed his father off the rocks at Nag’s Tor; but even if Leavis had been prepared to denounce his son – which patently he was not; and with the tutelary policeman removed from the room at the hospital they had now had the opportunity to patch up a story between them – even then, there was no proof of that odious young man’s guilt. A second attempt? Fen thought it by no means impossible: no man can be on his guard all the time, even if he knows in what quarter the danger lies. Moreover, Leavis now possessed a knowledge so dangerous to his son that, even if he were sensible enough to disinherit the boy immediately, he would still remain in constant peril on account of his knowledge alone. On the other hand, if the police were to find some definite indication that St John was responsible for the Nag’s Tor affair, and he knew that they had found it, then the father would be relatively safe, in that another suspicious incident would be too big a risk to be worth taking. Some definite indication … But what?
Fen is not, as a rule, much impressed by the operations of chance.
But he thinks it at least vaguely portentous that during these reflections he should have been wandering aimlessly into the little town of Tawton; and that on asking himself the crucial question stated above he should have returned to awareness of his surroundings to find himself gazing blankly at the watches displayed in a jeweller’s window. 14ct. gold, he read on a label, as new. And reading it, he remembered something he had once encountered in a book. And remembering, he did a simple sum in his head. And when that was accomplished, he walked with a light step to Tawton police station and asked for Inspector Waycott.
It cannot be said that Waycott was pleased to see him, for Waycott was a choleric man with a streak of real viciousness in his make-up, who had all along made a point of keeping Fen at arm’s length. This had not perturbed Fen greatly, other than at the moment when the inspector’s carelessness had obliterated the fingerprints which might have established the watch’s ownership; the only matter on which he had insisted had been the posting of a man in Leavis’s room at the hospital. But in that he had got his way only by employing crude threats concerning his influence at the Home Office (which as a matter of fact was non-existent), so that he was scarcely surprised by the unfriendly welcome he received now.
‘No, sir,’ said Waycott irritably. ‘It’s finished, I tell you. Tied up and done with. Mr Leavis has said it was an accident, and there’s no reason, to my mind, for thinking anything different. Admittedly there’s no proof his son went into Barnstaple that afternoon, but then, there’s no proof he didn’t, either. And now, my time’s valuable even if yours isn’t, so if you’ll kindly let me get on with my work …’
‘You’re ordering me out, are you?’ said Fen mildly. ‘You’re not prepared to listen to what I have to say?’
With his clenched fist Waycott struck the desk a blow which rattled the ink-pots. ‘I’m telling you to get out and stay out, d’you hear? And to stop poking your superior nose into what doesn’t concern you.’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Fen regarded him with interest. ‘Just get your Chief Constable here and repeat that in front of him, will you?’ His tone altered. ‘Listen to me, Waycott, and try not to be more of a fool than you have to. There was a watch – as even you will remember – lying beside Leavis when I found him. It’s in his room at the hospital now, and he’s just stated definitely to me – no, don’t interrupt – that his father gave it to him for his twenty-first birthday.
‘But, d’you see, Waycott, it’s an English watch with a fourteen-carat gold case. And the fourteen-carat standard wasn’t introduced here till 1932, when it replaced the twelve-carat and fifteen-carat standards as a sort of compromise, a mean, between them. What follows? Well, this is 1949, and Leavis is forty-seven years old. And if you’ll do a little sum on your blotter, you’ll find that Leavis must have celebrated his twenty-first birthday in 1923, or 1924 at the latest. In other words, he’s lying about that watch. It isn’t his at all. And you can guess why he’s lying, Waycott, can’t you?’
The inspector, whose first reaction to this lecture had been to deflect or stifle it at any cost, had grown quieter as it proceeded, and by the end was visibly shaken, with all the fight gone out of him. He sketched a gesture of defeat and slumped back into his chair. ‘You mean the watch is really the boy’s, and it was the boy’s pocket it fell out of?’
‘That is indicated, yes.’
Waycott considered the implications of this. ‘Well, if it is the boy’s,’ he said, ‘there oughtn’t to be much difficulty about proving it …’ Then he frowned. ‘But so long as the father insists it was all an accident, there’s no case. He can just say his son lent him the watch, or something like that.’
‘Only that isn’t what he’s just told me,’ Fen pointed out. ‘Of course, the danger is that he’ll retract that particular lie about the watch as soon as he gets a hint of where it’s leading us – that he’ll say he was tired and ill and bored and in pain, and simply mumbled the first thing that came into his head in order to get rid of me … On the other hand, if we could get him to repeat the lie, we really should have something. I say, Waycott, how about you going along to the hospital now, on some pretext, and seeing if you can induce him to tell you the same story? It’s a pity to use the poor man so ruthlessly, when he’s trying to shield his ghastly son, but it’d be for his own protection.’ And Fen explained just how he believed it would be for the elder Leavis’s protection.
Without another word, Waycott got up and went; and in under twenty minutes he was back again.
‘Yes, he did repeat it,’ he said. ‘So if it’s ever needed, it’ll be pretty awkward to explain away. But there’s still no case, mind. All we can do now is go to that young devil and tell him what we know, and hope that that’ll keep him quiet for the future.’ He hesitated. ‘I suppose that’s my job, really, but unless I’m actually charging him with something …’
‘No,’ said Fen. ‘Not your job at all. I’ll do it.’
*
And so it came about that on that same evening, in the inn at Chigfold, Gervase Fen paid a visit to the bedroom of the only man who has ever seemed to him to be definitely evil. In the public bar below they heard voices raised, and presently the landlord saw Fen coming away with a sweat and a pallor like sickness on him. What was said in that bedroom no one has ever learned. But the landlord will tell you that Fen got precious little sleep that night, to judge by the look of him when he paid his bill next morning and left.