Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (18 page)

It was barely a quarter of an hour before the telephone rang. Hewitt lifted it out of its cradle before it could cough out a second call. He listened for a moment with an unreadable face. “Thank you, Henry! That’s exactly what I wanted to know. I’m very grateful. Good-bye!” he replaced the instrument, and sat looking at George.

“The body that came up on the Mortuary and was buried as Walter Ruiz was identified, by the man who was considered to be his closest, maybe his only, friend. Zebedee Trethuan.”

It accounted for everything. They sat and looked at it, and details of Rose’s story fell into place like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, filling in what had seemed, until this morning, the most mysterious third of the whole picture.

“Well, I know now which identification I’d trust,” said Hewitt with curious mildness, pacing the room again, but with a longer, easier stride. “A handy and unrecognisable corpse turns up on the Mortuary, and you have need of just that to lay a ghost. The ghost of someone known to have been associated with you, and now missing, supposedly drowned at sea. How nice and easy to say this is it, and get it put away under a stone with your man’s name on it, so that no one will ever start asking awkward questions. Walter Ruiz is dead and buried respectably, and everybody knows it. Everything beautifully tidy and safe. And then this interfering Simon Towne comes along, and puts it into the old lady’s mind, of all crazy things, to
open the Treverra tomb
!”

A cool voice from the doorway said deprecatingly: “I’m afraid he’s interfering again. I’m sorry, I did knock.”

They both swung round in surprise. So intent had they been on their revelation and its implications that they had failed to hear Simon’s light feet climbing the stairs. He stood in the doorway, eyebrows cocked obliquely, smiling a little. “The desk sergeant told me I could come up. Don’t blame him, I told him I had something that might be relevant to tell you. I really did knock, but you didn’t hear me. And I was just in time to hear no good of myself. Would you rather I waited downstairs?”

“No, that’s all right, Mr. Towne, come in. You might as well hear the context as well,” said Hewitt good-humouredly. “I wasn’t calling you interfering on my own account, it was what you might call an imaginative projection. Come in, and close the door.”

“I seem to have missed a lot.” Simon hitched a knee over the corner of the desk, and looked from one to the other of them, frowning. “Did I hear you talking about Ruiz? That’s the fellow Rose Pollard talked about last night, the one who was shipping pieces of jewellery abroad for her father? What’s he got to do with the Treverra tomb? I thought he was buried in St. Mary’s churchyard.”

“So did everybody else, Mr. Towne, except one person, the one who knew he was somewhere very different. In Jan Treverra’s coffin, where we found him.”

“
We found him
?” Simon drew breath sharply, and flashed a doubtful glance at George. “This is serious? Then you’re telling me that the unidentified one—the one underneath—
that
is
Ruiz
? But they wouldn’t bury a man under that name without good authority. Someone must have vouched for him.”

“Someone did. He came up practically naked and featureless, after six weeks in the sea. What could be better? The man who’d put the real Walter Ruiz in Treverra’s coffin, where he hoped he’d lie uninvestigated till doomsday, jumped at his chance when it offered, and got another body buried as Ruiz, publicly and decently. And that would have been the end of it, if you hadn’t conceived this notion of finding out whether Treverra really did have his poems buried with him. Imagine how this fellow would feel when he heard it! Wasn’t it enough to make him frantic? Wasn’t it enough to account for his threatening you, pestering you, trying to frighten you off? Anything to get you to go away and leave well alone.”

Open-mouthed, eyes huge and blank with astonishment, Simon whispered: “Trethuan?”

“Who else? Doesn’t it make sense of everything? He got Ruiz to help him dispose of the valuables he’d been steadily lifting from Mrs. Treverra’s coffin, they were partners for about six months, so Rose says. Then they quarrelled, and she thinks Ruiz was demanding a bigger share of the proceeds, maybe threatening to make trouble if he didn’t get it. And shortly after that Ruiz’s boat vanished one night, and never came back and Ruiz was presumed drowned. And the next possible and unidentifiable body that came up on the Mortuary—Trethuan identified it as Ruiz. Isn’t it plain what his reason must have been?”

“It looks,” said George, “as if Trethuan killed him either actually in the vault, or very close to it, maybe in the rock tunnel. Why else hide him there? He was a big man. Admittedly Trethuan was a pretty powerful person, too, but he wouldn’t want to move the body any farther than necessary. The sea was close, but the sea was no good. Ruiz had a skull fractured by repeated blows. No passing that off as the work of the sea. A drowned man, like Trethuan himself later, is another matter.”

“I see two possibilities,” said Hewitt. “Either Ruiz pretended to be reconciled, and then spied on Trethuan on his next trip, confronted him in the act, and was killed—for you can bet your last bob a man like Trethuan would want to keep the source entirely to himself and Rose, he’d never willingly let his partner into the secret. Or else—and perhaps this is the more likely—Trethuan pretended to agree to whatever Ruiz wanted, offered to prove his good faith by showing him where their profits were coming from, and took him there with the fixed intention of killing him and hiding him there. If he’d looked in the lady’s coffin, he’d looked in Treverra’s, too, he wouldn’t miss anything. He knew the coffin was empty. He supplied it with a body.”

“Could it be done by one man alone?” asked George, and turned his head and looked at Simon.

“Yes, it could. One man couldn’t possibly get either of the stones off and replace it again unbroken. But he could prise it sidelong, all right. Enough to probe inside. Enough to dump a man inside, and cover him again—”

He drew breath in a deep gasp, realising the full implications of what he was saying. He sat voiceless and motionless, his eyes blank and colourless as glass, staring inward at his own imaginings.

“It could be done, all right,” said Hewitt. “Trethuan did it repeatedly, didn’t he? Morwenna’s stone is lighter than the other, that one he must have shifted whenever he went back for another raid, enough to get his arm down into the poor thing’s belongings. The other, presumably, he moved only twice, once when he made his assay and found the coffin empty, once when he filled it.”

“There was still the boat to dispose of,” said George.

“That wouldn’t be any problem. Trethuan was an amphibian like all the rest of Maymouth. His folks were fishermen. He had a dinghy of his own. To scuttle Ruiz’s boat by night and get back to land safely wouldn’t cause him much trouble. You don’t have to go far off this coast to find deep water. And he had time. Ruiz lived alone, nobody was going to raise a hue and cry immediately he didn’t come home to supper. We’ll go through all the circumstances again. We’ll find out who first called attention to the fact that he hadn’t come in from fishing. And when. It may even have been a couple of days later, time enough to wait for a pretty blowy night.”

“And wouldn’t there be a certain risk in rushing to claim a corpse, like that?” suggested George. “Suppose he said it was Ruiz, and then somebody else really did recognise it—by a ring, or something?”

“Ah, but he didn’t rush! He was canny. He waited for one nobody else was claiming. Henry tells me—it wasn’t my department—the police had been appealing for help in identifying that body for several days before he stepped in. And even then, if it had been obviously the wrong height or age, or shape, he only had to let well alone and say no, I don’t know him. No, he had everything sewed up. And he lay low with his thefts for a year or so, and left the stuff where he thought it was safest, before he started hawking pieces round the buyers in this country. And then you came along, Mr. Towne, and heaved a brick through all his plans and precautions. Nobody’d ever shown any interest in the tomb before. He made haste to shift the rest of the valuables, but he was terrified to move the body. No wonder he tried all he dared to scare you off. He knew it wouldn’t pass for Treverra, once the scholars and antiquaries got their noses into it.”

Simon lifted a dazed face from between his hands, and stared before him. George had not noticed until this minute the blue rings under his eyes, the copper shadows hollowing his lean cheeks. He might not have noticed even now, if he had not possessed knowledge acquired by the accident of being with Phil Rossall on the evening of Paddy’s disappearance. Not everybody had reason to see beyond the bright, handsome public image of Simon Towne to the marginal failures and deprivations that crippled his private progress.

“Look, do you really mean to say that whoever killed Trethuan took him in there, and dumped him into the coffin with—
the man he himself had killed
?” He said this very slowly and deliberately, as if his lips were stiff, and had to be driven to form the syllables.

“That’s exactly what I mean to say.” Hewitt was triumphant. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that that’s what happened. And a supreme bit of irony it is!”

“A supreme bit of cheek!” said Simon furiously. “If I wrote that and published it, I’d be hooted out of journalism. Nobody, not even a novelist, could get away with a bare-faced coincidence like that.”

“Not a coincidence at all,” Hewitt objected brusquely. “There were completely logical reasons why Ruiz should be disposed of precisely there, and in that way. As we’ve demonstrated. And there’ll be equally logical causes leading to the precise effect we’re left with, the presence of Trethuan’s body in the same hiding-place. Don’t forget there’s a waste of sand all round it. Don’t forget that a stone coffin is good cover. But I grant you we’ve still got to find out what the precise causes were in Trethuan’s case. He drowned in the sea, that’s definite. He was taken dead into the vault. Why, and how, we don’t know yet. It may have been through the door, with one of the two keys. Or it may have been through the tunnel. If young Paddy really saw him in the water about half past five, then the body might well be brought ashore on the Mortuary after the next high tide. He might be cast up fairly close to St. Nectan’s. And anyone who didn’t know the vault was going to be opened might still think it a pretty safe hiding-place.”

“There couldn’t have been many who didn’t know,” said Simon. “I advertised my intentions loudly enough, for obvious reasons.”

“Well, that’s just one of the things we shall have to look into. That case remains. But this one is as good as closed. A few details to fill in, some back history to verify, but I’m in no doubt of the result myself. It’s kind of tantalising,” he said thoughtfully, “to know the middle of a story, and not the beginning or the end.”

“That’ll come, all in good time,” said Simon, rising. He felt through his pockets for a crumpled packet of cigarettes, and offered them, and again began to search for matches. “Lord, I’m forgetting what I came for!” It was some small object at the bottom of his trouser pocket that had reminded him. He fished it out, a tiny, folded square of tissue paper.

“Paddy forgot to mention this last night, what with all the excitement, and to-day he’s on duty, Tim being his own cowman on Sundays. I said I’d bring it in to you. They found it yesterday in the tunnel, not far from the entrance into the vault.”

He leaned across to the lighter George was offering, and drew in smoke deeply and gratefully before he completed the unwrapping of the minute thing, and held it out on his open palm. A thin, broken gold ring, bent a little out of its true circle, the two ends pulled apart about a quarter of an inch. Hewitt took it up between finger and thumb, and stood staring at it warily, as though it might close on him and bite.

“I don’t suppose it means a thing,” said Simon apologetically, “but I said I’d deliver it, and I have. Can I run you back to the Dragon, George? It’s on my way.”

“Mr. Towne!” Hewitt had threaded the ring on the tip of his large brown forefinger, and was still gazing at it, a small, smug flare of pleasure in his eyes. “Where did you say this was found?”

“In the tunnel from the Dragon’s Hole to the vault. Only about twenty yards from the vault end, Paddy says, but I daresay he can show you the exact spot. Tamsin actually found it. Does it matter?”

“The spot where this was found may very well be the actual spot where Ruiz was killed,” said Hewitt happily, “that’s all. It happens to be the identical twin to the one ring he’s still wearing in his left ear.”

ON THEIR WAY up through the quiet Sunday reaches of the town they passed the narrow opening of Church Street, and Simon suddenly braked hard as they overshot it, and began to reverse along the empty road.

“You don’t mind a few more minutes’ delay, George? I suddenly thought I’d like to have a look at the other fellow’s grave, the one who isn’t Walter Ruiz.” He slowed the car beside the small lunette of gravel at the churchyard gate. The young lime trees, leaves just ripening into the yellower green of autumn, leaned over them.

“A sad sort of end he had,” said Simon, threading the maze of little paths between the graves, “dying solitary in the sea, and then cast up here among humankind again, only to be used as a pawn in a dirty game, and have another man’s name wished on him for all time. That’s the sort of ghost I’d expect to haunt us. Somebody we’ve deprived even of his identity. After all, he was a man, too, somebody may have loved him, he may have had children. Suddenly he seems to me the most injured of all. I’d like just to see what they gave him to last him till doomsday. You did say there was a stone?”

“Hewitt said so. I wondered who paid for it.”

“I wonder, too. Where do you suppose he’d be? It’s a burial only two and a half years old. I should think that would be in the new part.”

They passed by the vestry door, and the Vicar came out in his cassock, and joined them as naturally as one stream joins another. He had the hymn-board for the evening service in one hand, and a fistful of numbers in the other, and went on placidly slotting them into their places as he walked.

“Dan, you’re just the man we need,” said Simon. “We’re looking for a grave. The man you buried as Walter Ruiz, a couple of years or so ago.”

“You’re heading the wrong way, then,” said the Vicar tranquilly, neither missing nor acknowledging the doubt thus cast on the recorded identity, as though it did not matter one way or the other. “He was a seaman, we made room for him among the older graves, where all the mid-nineteenth-century sailors are. I thought he’d be more at home. This way!”

He led them, skirts fluttering round his Great-Dane strides, along a thread-like path swept darker in the high grass, to a remote corner in the angle of the stone wall, shaded with thorn trees.

“235,” read Simon aloud, deciphering the numbers on the hymn-board upside-down. “Abelard’s hymn. Maybe I should come to church to-night.”

“Maybe you should, but don’t expect me to tell you so.”

“You won’t believe this, but I used to sing in the choir. Alto. I could sing alto before my voice broke, and after. I still can, it’s a technique I was somehow born with. There’s a splendid alto to ‘
O Quanta Qualia
.’.” He began to sing it, softly, mellifluously, afloat above the pitch of his own true baritone speaking voice, and in Latin.