Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (15 page)

In his heart he’d known all along where she must be. He abandoned the stony channel, and climbed inland, as quietly as he could, until he stood hesitating unhappily over the entrance to the tunnel.

He couldn’t follow her in there without meeting her face to face, and somehow he couldn’t bring himself to precipitate a situation like that, at least not until he knew what he was doing. He looked round him for the best cover, compressed his slight person into a screened corner as close as he dared to the passage, and sat there silently, his arms wound round his knees, his heart thumping. She couldn’t possibly stay long, whatever she had to do there, because she had to return by the same way, and to make good her retreat from the cave before the tide engulfed it. But if she didn’t come, what must he do? Get out in time himself, and tell Jim? But Jim must surely know already. Husbands and wives were in each other’s confidence, weren’t they? Tell Hewitt, then? Or ought he to stay there and take care of Rose? But he
couldn’t
do that to his mother, not again! He was getting hopelessly confused as to where his duty lay.

Rose spared him a decision. Before he heard her footsteps he saw a thin, pale pencil of light filter out of the rock wall, and waver across the shaly floor. She was hurrying, perhaps afraid of the tide, though she had still plenty of time by his reckoning. He heard the pebbles rasping, and uneven, running steps suddenly ending in a soft thud, as she threw herself down to creep through the low opening. The light of her torch leaped and fluttered with every thrust of the hand that held it. She clawed her way through, careless of the noise she made, as though a demon had been hard at her heels. When she scrambled to her feet, he saw the flickering light cast from below upon her pale hair, from which the scarf had been dragged back on to her shoulders. He saw her face twisted hopelessly into a child’s mask of anguish, smeared with tears, the soft mouth contorted, the round chin jerking.

She blundered away from him down the slope, slipping and recovering in her frantic haste, and he heard the convulsed sobbing of her breath, and a faint, horrified whimpering that made the short hairs rise in the nape of his neck. The rattle of pebbles from under her feet receded and was still.

He sat for some minutes hugging his knees and shaking, reluctant to creep out after her where he must be seen. It didn’t seem decent to let her guess that he’d been spying upon her in that condition. It didn’t seem decent now that he had ever thought of doing it, but he had, and he hadn’t meant any harm to her, rather the opposite. Better not to say anything to anybody, because whatever she was so frightened and so unhappy about, Rose couldn’t have done any wrong, she had no wrong in her, she was too soft and mild. Better to go through the Hole to the Pentarno side; he might have to roll up his slacks and wade out at the entrance that side, because it lay a couple of feet or so lower than the Maymouth end. But it wouldn’t be any worse than that, and he could still be home before his mother began to get worried.

He scurried down the slope to the thread of water that was gathering in the channel, and clambered hastily through the Hole again, to splash through the first encroaching foam and take to his heels up the Pentarno beach. The remembered vision of Rose Pollard hung before his eyes every step of the way, both aims spread for balance, the glow of the torch flailing in her right hand.

One thing at least was certain. When she came back from her mysterious errand, she had no longer been carrying anything under her arm.

PHIL WAS WASHING UP after tea when Hewitt called. She put her head in at the door of the living-room to report: “For you, Simon. Mr. Hewitt says the pathologist’s come to have a look at Mrs. Treverra’s body, and if you and Tim would care to be present, he’d be grateful. I suppose he wants to have the family represented, so that there can’t be any complaints or anything later. Shall I tell him you’ll be along?”

All three of them had looked up sharply at the message, Paddy sensitive to the quiver of feeling on the air, and stirred out of his unnaturally subdued quietness. All afternoon Tim and Phil had been exchanging anxious glances over his head, and wondering how long to let him alone, how soon to shake him out of his abstraction. A very dutiful, mute, well-behaved boy who sat and thought was not at all what they were used to.

“How about it, Tim? I don’t say it’s the pleasantest thing in the world to see, but if we can learn anything from it, I think we should.”

“I’ll come, I want to. It’s a hell of a thing,” said Tim soberly.

“Then he says in a quarter of an hour, at St. Nectan’s. They don’t propose to disturb her, not unless there’s absolute need. I’ll tell him you’ll be there.”

Tim looked at Paddy. There was no guessing what was in his head, but it could only be the shocks and readjustments of yesterday that were still preoccupying him. Unless directly addressed, he hadn’t once said a word to Simon, and they had refrained from discussing the inexplicable tragedy of Morwenna in front of him. But sooner or later he had to learn to move and breathe in the same air with Simon again, and find some sort of terms on which he could live with him, and he might just as well begin at once.

“How about you, Paddy?” invited Tim after a moment’s hesitation. “Come along with us for the ride?”

The serious face brightened, wavered and smiled. “I bet that means I don’t get to come in,” he said, but he got up from his chair with every appearance of pleasure.

“I think I’d rather you didn’t. But I’ll tell you about it as we go.”

“O.K., Dad, I’ll come, anyhow.” He hadn’t been with Tim very much during the day, and he found that he wanted to. To sit by him in the front seat of the Mini, and touch shoulders with him now and again, was comfort, pleasure and reassurance. Subdued and amenable, he wasn’t going to ask any favours; if he was required to sit in the car while they went down into the vault, he’d do it, and not even creep to the top of the steps to peer down in the hope of a glimpse of forbidden sights. It was his pleasure to please Tim. You can be demonstrative with mothers, but showing fathers how you feel about them is not quite so simple, you use what offers, and hope they’ll get the idea.

They threaded the sunken lane, halted at the coast road, and crossed it to the track among the dunes. The smell of the evening was the smell of the autumnal sea and the fading grasses.

“I didn’t know they were thinking of opening Mrs. Treverra’s coffin, too. Why did they? Was that this morning?”

Any other time he would have been asking Simon, hanging over the back of the seat and feeding on his looks and words like a puppy begging for cake. Now he sat close and asked Tim, in his quiet, young baritone, touchingly grave and tentative.

“Yes, this morning. After you left, I suppose it must have been. I wasn’t there. Mr. Hewitt thought it necessary to search every possible place in the vault, because it seems there must have been something there to account for Trethuan’s not wanting it opened. And the only place that hadn’t been searched already was Morwenna’s coffin. So they opened that, too.” Tim eased the Mini down into the rutted, drifting sand, and was silent for a moment. “She’s there, Paddy. It isn’t like the other one, she is there. Well, this chap’s going to tell us whether the body that’s there is from the right time, and so on, but I don’t think there’s much doubt. But what’s terribly wrong is that she—well, she isn’t at peace. She’s fully dressed—she
was
—and she was trying to get out. She—must have been alive when they left her there. It could happen. Sometimes it has happened.”

He had felt the young, solid shoulder stiffen in unbelieving horror, and he wanted to soften the picture, to set it two centuries away, like a dream or a sad song.

“They hadn’t modern methods or modern knowledge. There could be conditions like death. They weren’t to blame. And thank God, they couldn’t have known. Only we know, when it’s all over, two hundred years and more. Like ‘The Mistletoe Bough.’ It wouldn’t be quite like you think. The air would give out on her, you see. She’d only have what was inside the stone coffin, and then, gradually, sleep. It wouldn’t be long.”

Simon might not have been there. There was no one else in the car. Paddy leaned closer by an inch, delicately and gratefully,

“It could look like a struggle, but be only very brief. Very soon she grew drowsy. Only she stayed like that, you see, fighting to lift the lid and get out. She slept like that. And when she was dead—Well, you’ve read her epitaph. This makes me think she wrote it herself. I don’t even know why, but it does.”

Paddy said, in a small but still adult voice, perhaps even a note or two nearer the bass register than usual: “I always thought she was so beautiful.”

“So did I. She’ll find him again, you can bet on that. She wasn’t the sort to let death stop her.”

The Mini turned in to the left among the dunes. The little open lantern of St. Nectan’s stood clear against the sky.

“It wasn’t ugly,” said Simon unexpectedly from the back seat. “A scent, and a puff of air, and a little dust. She was very little, like in her picture, and all muffled up in a travelling cloak with a hood—at least, I think so. She had masses of black hair, and such tiny bones.”

Paddy said nothing more. He sat almost oblivious when they got out of the car and left him there between the shadowy dunes. He woke out of his daze when he heard the strange voices, and turned his head to see them met and greeted by Hewitt, with George Felse in attendance, and a stranger who must be the police pathologist. He watched them unlock the padlock on the gate, and go in single file down the steep staircase. He heard the heavy door below swing wide, but he didn’t move. If the window of the car had not been open, he would not have heard the raised tones of their voices, like gasps of amazement and consternation rising hollowly out of the grave.

Something was wrong, down there. Something, was not as they had expected it to be. Paddy put out a hand to open the door of the car, and then drew it back, shivering, afraid to want to know.

But you can’t turn your back on knowledge, just because it may be uncomfortable. Supposing someone else should need what you know? Someone who belongs to you, and doesn’t know how much you know already?

He slipped out of the car, and crept close to the rail of the vault. The open doorway showed him nothing but a corner of Treverra’s empty tomb, and half of George Felse and all of Tim, hiding from him even the foot of the second coffin. But the voices sailed up to him clearly, roused and brittle, and in signal agreement.

“None of it was there this morning,” said Hewitt. “There was
nothing
with her in the coffin. All of us but Mr. Rossall were here, we know what we uncovered.”

“We couldn’t possibly have missed seeing this,” said Simon. “Even if we didn’t disturb or touch her, we looked pretty carefully. It’s enough to make you look carefully, isn’t it? Well, she’d none of all this with her then. Nothing!”

“But if you’ve had both keys in your own hands all the time, and you locked up again carefully this morning,” said the one strange voice with dry mildness, “it would seem to be impossible.”

“It is, damned impossible, but it’s happened.” It was the first time Paddy had ever heard Hewitt sound exasperated. “Take a look at this, this is real enough, isn’t it? That wasn’t here, none of this was here spilled round her feet, at eleven o’clock this morning. But it’s here now at six in the evening. And I’m telling you—I’m telling myself, for that matter—this place has been locked all that time, and I’ve had both keys on me. And tell me, just tell me, why should anyone, guilty or innocent or crazy or what, bring
this
here and leave it for us to find?”

He plunged a hand suddenly into something that rattled and rang like the loose change in a careless woman’s handbag, and brandished across the coffin, for one moment full into Paddy’s line of vision, a handful of coins and small trinkets that gleamed, in spite of all the discolorations of time, with the authentic yellow lustre of antique gold.

He shut himself into the front passenger seat of the car, and held his head, because it felt as if it might burst if he worked the brain within it too hard. One little guinea in the sand of the tunnel, and a fistful of them in Morwenna’s coffin. And the door locked, and both keys in police custody, and the whole thing impossible, unless—it was the last thing he had overheard as he retreated—unless there was yet another key.

Or another door
! Nobody had said that, but he couldn’t stop thinking it. Not an ordinary door, a very retiring door, one that wasn’t easy to find.

Under the ground he’d had almost no sense of direction, but Dominic had said—somewhere under the dunes. Paddy took an imaginary bearing from the church towards the blow-hole under the Dragon’s Head, and tried frantically to estimate distances. It was possible. It had to be possible, because there was no other possible way of accounting for everything.

They were down there a long time, nearly an hour. He stayed in the car all the time, because it had dawned on him that if he spied on them, or even asked them questions when they returned, he would have to tell them things in exchange; and he couldn’t do that, not yet, not without other people’s consent. No, there was only one thing to do, and that was go straight to the Pollards, and tell them what he knew, and try to make them see that the next move was up to them.

But there was no reason why he shouldn’t use his eyes to the best advantage when the five men emerged from the deep enclosure of the Treverra tomb. Hewitt climbed the steps only to cross to his car, take a small rug from the boot, and make a second trip down into the vault with it. When he came up again he was carrying the rug rolled into a thick, short bundle under his arm. What was inside it, allowing for the bulk of the rug itself, might be about the size of a three-pound bag of flour, but seemed to be a good deal heavier. Say, a small gunnysack full of coins—or maybe a little leather draw-string bag, such as they used for purse and wallet in the eighteenth century. About the right size, at any rate, to match that small, shapeless bundle Rose had carried under her arm at noon.

Tim got into the car prepared for questions, and there were none. “Don’t you want to know if it is really Morwenna?” he offered, concerned at such uncharacteristic continence.

“Well, yes, of course!” The boy brightened readily. “I thought you’d tell me what I’m allowed to know. I didn’t want to poke my nose past where the line’s drawn.”

“Such virtue!” said Tim disapprovingly. “You’re not sickening for something, are you?”

He started the engine, and the Mini came about gently in the trodden space before the church, and followed the police car back to the road.

“Is Uncle Simon riding with them, this time?”

“Yes, he wanted to talk to the pathologist. We’re pretty sure it’s Morwenna. Right age, right period, right build, no reason to suppose it would be anyone else. There’ll be some work to do on fabric, and all that, but it looks authentic.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Back to the police station. We’ve got a bit of conferring to do, if you wouldn’t mind amusing yourself for an hour or so. Or would you rather I took you home first?”

“No,” said Paddy, almost too quickly and alertly. “I’ll come down into town with you, that’ll suit me fine. While you’re in your official huddle, there’s somebody I want to see.”

He knocked at the front door of the second pink cottage in Cliffside Row just as the church clock was chiming half past seven; and on the instant he recoiled a step or two nervously, almost wishing he had let well alone, for the consequences of the knock manifested themselves before the door was opened. Something—it sounded like a glass—shattered on a quarried floor. A girl’s voice uttered a small, frightened cry, and a young man’s, suddenly sharp with fury and helplessness, shouted: “For God’s sake, girl, what’s up with you to-day? Anybody’d think a gun had gone off. It’s only the door. If there’s something wrong with you, I wish you’d have the sense to tell me. Oh, come out! I’ll go.”

The door, suddenly flung wide, vanished with startling effect, as if Jim Pollard’s large young fist had plucked it off. Levelled brown eyes under a thick frowning ridge of brow stared dauntingly at Paddy.

“Well, what’s up?” The eyes, once they focused upon him, knew him well enough. “Oh, it’s you, young Rossall. What do you want?” Less unfriendly, but as anxious as ever to get rid of him and get back to whatever scene they had been playing between them there in the doll’s-house living-room. The knock on the door had been only a punctuation mark. Paddy felt small, unsupported, and less certain of the sacred harmony of marriage than he had been two minutes ago. But he’d started it, and now there was no backing out.

“I’d like to talk to you and Rose, please. It’s very important.”

“Mrs. Pollard to you, my lad,” said Jim smartly. “All right, come in.”

“I’m sorry! She used to let me call her Rose, but I won’t do it if you don’t like it. It was only habit.”

He stepped over the brightly-Cardinalled doorstep into the pretty toy room, and Jim closed the door behind him. Rose, clattering dust-pan and brush agitatedly in the minute kitchen beyond, was sweeping up the fragments of the glass she had dropped. The door between was open, and Paddy saw her slide a furtive glance at him, and take heart. All the same, her eyes were evasive and her hands unsteady when she came in.

“Hallo, Paddy, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing with me,” he said, making straight for the essential issue, head-down and ready for anything. “It’s
you
! I came to tell you I know where you went this morning, and what you did. I saw you take something with you into the Dragon’s Hole, and I know where you left it. Don’t you see how silly it is to act as if you’ve done something bad, when you haven’t? Mr. Pollard, you must get her to tell the police everything, it’s the best thing, really it is. I know about the money and the jewellery, you see, I know she put them—”