Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (10 page)

They had reached the rising curve in the road, where the plantation of young trees came into view, fringing Aurae Phiala with delicate pales of green.

‘Insecure young girls,’ said Lesley seriously, ‘are often happiest with much older men. They feel safe.’ And suddenly she laughed, a gay peal, refreshed by a whole day of escape from her selected cage. ‘Doesn’t always work out that way, though. Yes, you really must make the acquaintance of your great-uncle. Now there’s a handsome old dog! He knows it, too! He must have put in some agile footwork at times, to get this far through his life still single, and yet have all the fun he’s had.’

‘I’ve been hearing about his reputation as a lady-killer,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘Everyone tells the same tale about him, so it must be true.’

‘I speak,’ said Lesley feelingly, ‘as one of the many at whom he made charming and—relatively—harmless passes.’

‘I thought you might!’

‘But unfortunately—I suppose it isn’t surprising in the circumstances—Stephen is almost pathologically jealous of me, so it wasn’t much fun. It was pretty innocuous play, but I had to discourage it. Absurd, but even so it could have been dangerous.’

‘I suppose,’ said Charlotte casually, ‘you haven’t heard from him since he left for Turkey? He went straight from here to the airport, I was told.’

‘That’s right, he did. No, I haven’t had any word. He knew it wouldn’t be a good idea, you know. Neither has Stephen, I’m sure. But in the ordinary way we shouldn’t expect to, of course, he isn’t a writing man. Only books! And they’ve been friends long enough to take each other for granted, turn up when they feel like it, and shut up when they’re busy. They always get on well, except that they never can agree about Aurae Phiala. After all,’ she said simply, ‘it’s all Stephen has, and he’s never going to excavate it, not really, nobody’s ever going to put up the money. But he lives on the hope, and that’s enough.’

The Morris rolled briskly through the carriage gates, and down the gravelled drive towards the house.

‘And you’ve never had any regrets?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Me?’ said Lesley, opening her wide eyes even wider in amused surprise. ‘I never regret anything.’

George slept until six o’clock, and was then awakened by the telephone. Sergeant Noble had a comprehensive report to make, the day’s summary of his own activities and those of several others.

‘Got a preliminary estimate for you from Goodwin, but he’s not through yet, he’ll be on the line again later this evening.’ The pathologist attached to Comerbourne General Hospital enjoyed Home Office recognition in this region, and he was an old friend, and amenable. ‘It confirms what Braby suggested, but we’ll have to wait until he’s finished the post-mortem. Yes, the father showed up to identify. Very composed, considering. Shall I read it out?’

He did so. Doctor Braby, hard-worked GP and police surgeon to the district, had done more than confirm the fact of death on this occasion, he had called immediate attention to certain peculiarities about the body, and boldly essayed a guess at the length of time it had actually been in the water. A very suggestive guess, too, but there was no acting on it until Dr Reece Goodwin had made a more detailed examination and confirmed or corrected Braby’s estimate. Noble’s matter-of-fact voice made short work of the interim report.

‘And this shed of Benyon’s. We’ve about mapped it, took us most of the day. He was there, all right. We got a set of his prints from the body. The letters on the glass are drawn, of course, but you were right about the dot. Right forefinger tip—a beauty. But besides that, we’ve collected half a dozen more, various but his, from all round the place. And as good as a complete set off the vice—the metal had the thinnest possible film of oil. He was there, and there for some time, poking into everything. No damage, no mischief, just having a look. Like you and Benyon put it—passing the time.’

‘So, alone,’ said George.

‘That’s how it looks. Nearly all the other prints we lifted are Benyon’s, naturally. One or two of someone else, probably Paviour himself, but of course we haven’t got him on file, and these are where you’d expect ’em, on the door, where you might well finger it if you just looked in to have a word with the incumbent, so to speak.’

‘So young Boden spent some time alone in there, alive and active. What about getting in there, considering where he was last noticed?’

‘Easy! The box hedge is solid as a wall as far as the corner, but just round there it ends, and that short side is privet, and there’s a place in it where an old wicket’s been taken out, and the gap hasn’t grown in completely yet. Not much doubt he slipped in there and went to earth in the shed, for some purpose of his own. Otherwise
someone
would have seen him again.’

‘And waited. For what, I wonder? I can’t think he had any date to meet somebody there. He came with the party, and halfway through the visit he was still showing off for his fans and being mildly provocative towards all authority. He wasn’t doing any showing off when he slipped quietly away into Orrie’s shed. Something happened, something came into his mind, while he was there at Aurae Phiala, that prompted him to disappear and let the party leave without him.’

‘He may not have expected them to do that,’ objected Noble reasonably. ‘They never had before. Maybe he just wanted to make ’em hunt and fret a bit.’

‘Look, Orrie’s shed isn’t any special joy, and this was a boy who liked his comfort, and company, and adulation. He might sit it out ten minutes just to annoy, but not the time it took him to fidget all round the place as he seems to have done. He’d have to have a much more compelling reason than that. It looks to me more as if he wanted them to push off and abandon him. For his own reasons. And that means a reason right there on the spot, otherwise, once out of sight, he’d simply have made off for wherever it was he wanted to be. But he didn’t. Where he wanted to be was right there, but unobserved. He camped out and waited. For what?’

‘Closing time,’ said Noble. ‘For everyone to go away.’

‘You’re not far off target, either, but it’s no answer. Look, there wasn’t any sign in there of a scuffle of any kind? Even tidied up afterwards?’

‘Not a thing. The dust lay peacefully, except where he’d actually trodden or pawed. Nobody’d been fighting in there, take it from me.’

‘Then nothing to suggest that—granted he walked in of his own will—he didn’t walk out the same way?’

‘I was coming to that,’ said Sergeant Noble with satisfaction. ‘He walked out, all right. I don’t know if you noticed, but just outside the door, where the ground’s trodden, the grass thins, and there’s a slight hollow that obviously holds water every time it rains, and only dries out gradually in between—nice smooth black mud like double-cream. It’s in first-class shape just now. I’ve got two and a half beautiful prints in that layer of mud, heading
out
of the shed. I haven’t got the shoes he was wearing, but I have got his spare school pair. They’re his prints, all right. If there was any doubt, there’s one very nice curl of metal swarf, shed from the shoe, bang in the middle of one of those prints. I’ve got the whole piece of turf under plastic. It looks like the same sort of swarf that’s lying under Orrie’s bench. I reckon when we get the actual shoes we may find some more. That stuff works into composition soles like nails knocked into wood. He walked in, and he walked out—alive, in case you were wondering…’

‘For a while,’ George conceded, ‘I was. It was just a possibility. Knowing what we know.’

‘Yes, granted. But there it is. He went out of there alive and alone, after a fairly lengthy stay. And where do we go from here?’

‘Home to bed,’ said George, ‘in your case, and leave me the file. In my case—back to Aurae Phiala.’

It was after nine o’clock, however, by the time he got there, since his route was complicated, and involved calls at the mortuary of the General Hospital, at police headquarters, and a telephone call to the forensic laboratory. He collected the full list of the contents of the dead boy’s pockets, and one unexpected item in the collection sent him out of his way to pay a visit to ‘The Salmon’s Return’ before he finally reached Paviour’s house.

‘Why, Mr Felse!’ said Lesley, opening the door to him, and blessedly forgetting to think of him first by his rank and office. ‘Do come in! Do you want Stephen, or all of us?’

He said that he didn’t mind who was present, that he had something to communicate which might slightly affect the convenience of everyone in residence here, and therefore could be stated in everyone’s presence. And he hoped it wouldn’t inhibit the activities of anybody here. Anybody, of course, with an easy conscience.

‘I don’t promise anything,’ said Lesley serenely, ‘about anybody’s conscience except mine. But I don’t anticipate any real onslaught from you, somehow. Come along in!’

They were all there, opportunely including Bill Lawrence. Paviour greeted the visitor with immaculate politeness, but a certain air of acid disapproval which might well have stemmed from nothing more than nervousness. ‘I thought,’ he said, in withdrawn enquiry, ‘that we had answered all the relevant questions already. Your men have had access wherever they wished. Is there anything more we can do?’

‘No questioning is entailed tonight,’ said George. ‘I called to tell you that we find it necessary to remain on your grounds for a day or two. It might—it’s for you to decide—be preferable to close Aurae Phiala to the public for some days. No doubt you’ll consult Lord Silcaster about that. We’re prepared to cordon off our section if you see fit to continue admitting the public. I’m sorry to put you to any inconvenience, but it can’t be helped. What we intend is to take up the area of ground you now have roped off, or a part of it—the broken corner of the hypocaust.’

Paviour shot up out of his chair, for once jerked erect to his full gangling height, which was impressive. He looked more than ever like Don Quixote confronting the most formidable of spectral windmills; and his tenor voice blazed from a reed to a trumpet in his indignation.

‘You can’t do such a thing! You’ve no right! Can you imagine the harm you might do? Uninformed digging is disastrous. Lord Silcaster will never tolerate it.’

‘Lord Silcaster has already given his permission. On the grounds set before him.’

‘I can’t believe it! Grounds? What grounds? I quite understand that where there’s some reasonable connection, some prospect of information to be gained… But surely here, tragic though the circumstances may be, there’s no question of a crime? This poor boy fell into the river—’

‘I’m afraid your information is not quite complete,’ George said equably. ‘Gerry Boden did not simply fall into the river and drown. He was knocked on the head, just as Mr Hambro was last night, and
put
into the river.’

Paviour stood rigid, frozen into silence like the rest.

‘Put into the river,’ said George, studying the circle of shocked faces, ‘somewhere on these premises. He showed particular interest in that subsidence, it’s reasonable to assume that his object was to return to it at a time when there would be no one around to interfere with him. I can also tell you, roughly, at any rate, the time when he entered the water. It was somewhere around ten o’clock. And you won’t need reminding what happened here at very much the same time last night.’

No, they needed no reminding. Charlotte had been the first to make the connection; her eyes lit with a spark of alert intelligence which was meant as a communication, and as briefly acknowledged by a warning flicker of George’s glance in her direction. She said nothing. Paviour was the last to understand. His habitual greyness faded into a bleached and waxen pallor.

‘We were concerned last night,’ said George, ‘with the question of what Mr Hambro could possibly have blundered into, to make it essential that he should not survive to talk about it. Now we needn’t wonder about that any longer.’

When he left the house, he went down to the riverside, and spent some time considering the extent of the job they were about to tackle, the resources they were going to need, and the best way of setting about it. He came back to his car, parked inconspicuously on the grass by the privet hedge, shortly before half past ten. From the darkness where the thicker growth of box began, a shadowy figure slipped out to join him, and he saw the oval of a girl’s face as a paler gleam above her dark coat.

‘Miss Rossignol! What are you doing here?’

‘I had to speak to you,’ she said in a hurried whisper. ‘It’s all right, they won’t miss me. I think they were glad to have a little time to themselves. I said I’d like to walk a little way with Bill Lawrence when he left. I had a sudden thought, when you mentioned the timing. One I don’t much like, and can’t quite believe in, but it’s there.’

‘What is it? What’s on your mind?’

‘I was pretty close behind Gus Hambro last night. I know you realised I was following him. And it was a quiet night, no noise from wind or leaves. Look, I’m no expert at that sort of thing. I was as quiet as I could be, but all the same, I can’t help wondering if at some stage he realised I was on his heels. There
is
something curious about him, you know. The way he shook me off, as soon as you left us, and hurried off down the river like that. And even his
being
there at the inn. He pretended to me that he was already booked in there, but he wasn’t—I heard him ask for the room afterwards. When he knew who I was.’

‘You think that’s significant?’ George asked, and drew her a step deeper into the darkness of the hedge.

‘I think it ought not to be,’ she said earnestly. ‘But yes, I think it is. So it adds up to something ambivalent about him, so much so that I
have
to wonder. Was he genuinely attacked, because he blundered into murder? That’s what the timing suggests, but that’s not the only thing it could suggest. The other is that he heard me following, and staged the attack on himself, with the help of some accomplice unknown—for it couldn’t have been done alone, could it?—to put himself in the clear, and immobilise me long enough for the other person to get away, and the body to be well downstream. Maybe someone bold enough to improvise like that would even take the risk of getting himself really knocked out and dropped in the water, knowing I couldn’t fail to find him in a few minutes.’

‘And knowing you,’ George added. She sensed that he was smiling, and was a little disconcerted. ‘Enough to estimate your capabilities, at any rate. In the circumstances you outline, I agree I’d rather take a chance on you than on most people.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but I think you’re laughing at me.’

‘I assure you I’m not. But I’d still be a bit wary of taking a risk like that. Even on you.’

‘It would be a pretty desperate choice, though, wouldn’t it? It isn’t a thought I like, myself,’ she admitted. ‘But I
know
he isn’t what he seems to be. He isn’t here by accident, and your news about an unofficial hunt being launched for the boy sent him off in a hurry to this place.’

‘As it well might,’ said George, interpreting, ‘if the boy was already dead, and concealed somewhere here, and Hambro had guilty knowledge of it. The news that the police were interested made it imperative to get the body away at once—and the river was the obvious ally. Is that what you think happened?’

‘I hadn’t thought as far as that,’ she said, quivering. ‘It simply seemed a possibility that he was somehow involved.’

‘That isn’t what I asked you.’

Now it was she who was invisibly smiling, oddly encouraged and reassured. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it isn’t what I think. I
don’t
think it. But I could be wrong, too, that’s why I had to hand it over to you.’ And abruptly reverting to painful gravity: ‘
Was
the boy already dead?’

‘It isn’t certain yet. We shall get the pathologist’s report tomorrow. But yes, I think he was.’

‘Not drowned, then?’

‘In confidence, though again we haven’t yet got the word officially—no, not drowned. I’m trusting you with some part of the background. I’m afraid you saw the beginning of it. This boy had found something very intriguing and exciting here at Aurae Phiala yesterday afternoon. I rather think he must just have picked it up when Mr Hambro chased him away from the cave-in. He didn’t dare attempt to go back again until the coast was clear, so he hid himself until everyone was gone. Not until dark, since his intention was to search that patch of ground thoroughly. But he may have waited until it began to be dusk. And someone—someone from close by, someone on or near this site—caught him in the act, and took drastic action. Whoever it was didn’t go through his pockets. His find was still there when they stripped him at the mortuary.’