Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (17 page)

The boundary flue had one other great advantage, considering his present condition of exhaustion and light-headedness. When he came to it, it would be a blank T-crossing, with no way ahead, and could not be mistaken. He had been telling himself as much, and promising that it would come soon, for what seemed hours, which only indicated how tenuous his grasp of time had become, and how slow his progress. But at every move he still reached out a hopeful hand to flatten against the facing wall that still wasn’t there—as now.

But this time it was there. His palm encountered the unmistakable rough texture of brickwork, squarely closing the way ahead. He lay still for a few minutes, his head swimming with the weakness of relief, and also with the thick, smothering odour of the air, which had congealed into a peculiar horror of old, cold physical death. He groped out fearfully towards the left, which was now his way, and the flue beside him was open, and clear of rubble as far as he could reach. He fingered the walls, and they were sound; the ceiling above, and it felt firm as rock. He shifted his weight with labour and pain, carefully moving the dangling mask out of harm’s way, and reached out towards the right. If that way, too, the flue seemed whole and sturdy, he would begin to believe that his luck was changing at last, and in time. Because either this air was fouler than any he had encountered yet, or he was losing control of his remaining senses.

The vault to the right held up as strongly as on the other side. He felt his way down from ceiling to floor, and his hand touched something which was not mere dust or the ground fragments of brick, or even thick, foul cobweb, but parted beneath his touch in rotting threads, with the unmistakable texture of cloth.

He couldn’t believe it, and yet it revived him as nothing else could have done. The helmet was no find of his, but if this was cloth, then this was all his own. His questing fingers felt shudderingly over the scrap he had detected, passed over a few inches of flooring, and recaptured the same evident textile quality in several more tindery rags. And they had this up, he thought, and never found anything better than a few animal bones and pottery, when they couldn’t have been more than a few feet away from here. Curiously, though he had no way of verifying his calculations, at this moment he was absolutely sure of them.

And it was at that very moment that his fingers, moving with wincing delicacy where there might be priceless discoveries to be made, encountered what was unquestionably bone, but exceptional in being not fragmentary, but whole, as far as he could reach, without lesion. Stretching, he touched a joint, where the bone homed into the cup of another mass, as naked and as clean. He searched in his blind but acute memory, and brought up vividly the image of a human hip joint, intricate and marvellous.

He was a hundred per cent alive again, and he had to get out of here alive now if it killed him, because he had to know. There was one minor city, not unlike this one in its history, where they found two human skeletons in the hypocaust, some poor souls who had taken refuge in the empty heating system when the place was attacked, and almost certainly suffocated when most of the town was fired over their heads. The same could have happened here. He forgot how nearly dead he was, and how completely and precisely buried, and quickened to sympathy and pity for this poor soul who had died after his burial, so many centuries ago. Very softly he drew his finger-tips down the mass of the femur, stroked over the rounded marble of a knee-joint, and then reached out tentatively where the foot should be. For a leather sandal might have remained embalmed perfectly all this time, as durable almost as the ivory of the wearer’s bones. Quite close to his right knee, under the wall of the flue, his knuckles struck against the erected hardness, and the sound was music to him. A solid, thick sole. He felt from heel to toe, and then round to where the straps should be, and the still-articulated bones of instep and toes within. Gently, not to do damage. Also out of some reverence a great deal older than Christian ethics, the universal tenderness towards the dead.

The leather sole was sewn to a leather upper. Clearly his raw finger-tips relayed to him, with agony, what they found. No straps, no voids between. A very hard, dehydrated shape moulded inwards from the sole, seamed over a smooth vamp, finished at the heel with a hand-stitched band. Above, where the two wings joined over the instep, the small, metallic roundels of eyelets, and the taut cross-threading of laces. The bow he touched parted at the impact, and slid, still formed, after his withdrawing fingers.

Not a fourth-century Roman sandal on this skeleton foot, but a conventional, hand-sewn, custom-made, twentieth-century English shoe.

It was approaching half past seven that evening when George Felse made his appearance at the curator’s house, completely shattering Lesley’s arrangements for dinner, and throwing the entire household into confusion. He delayed saying what he had to say until Bill Lawrence was summoned from the lodge to join them; and he made no pretence of maintaining a social relationship with any of them while they waited. The atmosphere of strain that built up in the silence might well have been intentional; or he might, Charlotte acknowledged, simply have shut them out of his consciousness while he considered more important things, and the fever might have been their own contribution, a kind of infection infiltrating from person to person, guilty and innocent alike, if there were here any guilty creatures, or any totally innocent. George sat contained and civil and pseudo-simple outside their circle, and waited patiently until it was completed by the arrival of a dishevelled and uncertain Bill.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you waiting, but I wasn’t even properly dressed…’

‘That’s all right,’ said George. ‘I regret having to fetch you over here, but this concerns you as being connected with this site, and I can’t afford to go over the ground twice. Sit down! You all know, of course, that Mr Hambro left here last night at very short notice. You know that he left a note stating definite intentions, though in very general terms. I am here to tell you that because of certain discoveries Mr Hambro is now listed as a missing person, and we have reason to suspect that the account given of his departure, whether by himself or others, is so far totally deceptive. No, don’t say anything yet, let me outline what we
do
know. He is stated to have left here late in the evening, having received a telephone call asking him to give an opinion on an antique offered for sale on the other side of England. He is understood to have packed all his belongings, loaded his car, left a note to explain his departure and apologise for its suddenness, and driven away at some time prior to half past eleven, when you, Mr Lawrence, arrived home and found his note. Now let me tell you what we also know. His car was driven into a quarry pool on the further side of Silcaster, probably during the night. It is now in process of being recovered, and has already been examined. Mr Hambro was not in it, either dead or alive, nor is there any trace of the suitcase he removed from here last night. We have, so far, no further word of him after he left here. We are treating this as a disappearance with suspicion of foul play.’

The murmurs of protest and horror that went round were muted and died quickly. To exclaim too much is to draw attention upon yourself in such circumstances; not to exclaim at all is as bad, it may look as if you have been aware of the whereabouts of the car all along, and may know, at this moment, where to find the man. Only Charlotte sat quite silent, containing as best she could, like pain suppressed in company, the chill and heaviness of her heart. If she had neither recognised nor even cared to recognise, until now, the extent to which Gus Hambro had wound himself into her thoughts and feelings since he regained his life at her hands, and how simply and with what conviction she had begun to regard him as hers, recognition was forced upon her now. Paviour already looked so sick and old that fresh shocks could hardly make any impression upon his pallor or the sunken, harried desperation of his eyes. Bill sat with his thin, elegantly-shaped, rather grubby hands conscientiously clasped round his knees, carefully posed but not easy. The fingers maintained their careful disposition by a tension as fixed and white-jointed as if they had been clenched in hysteria. Only Lesley, her mouth and eyes wide in consternation, cried out in uninhibited protest: ‘Oh, no! But that’s monstrous, it makes no sense. Why should anyone want to do him harm? What has
he
ever done…’

She broke off there, and very slowly and softly, with infinite care, drew back into a shell of her own, and veiled her eyes. She did not look at her husband; with marked abstention she did not look at anyone directly, even at George Felse,

‘I shall be obliged,’ said George impersonally, ‘if you will all give me statements on the events of yesterday evening, especially where and how you last saw Mr Hambro. I should appreciate it very much, Mr Paviour, if we might make use of the study. And if the rest of you would kindly wait in here?’

Paviour came jerkily to his feet. ‘I am quite willing to be the first, Chief Inspector.’ Too willing, too eager, in far too big a hurry, in spite of the fastidious shrinking of all his being from the ordeal to which he was so anxious to expose himself. George was interested. Was it as important as all that to him to get his story in before his wife got hers?

‘I should like to see Mrs Paviour first, if it isn’t inconvenient.’

‘But as a matter of fact,’ Paviour said desperately, ‘I believe I was the last person to see Mr Hambro…’

‘That will emerge,’ George said equably. ‘I’ll try not to keep any of you very long.’

It was useless to persist. Paviour sank back into his chair with a twitching face, and let her go, since there was now no help for it.

She was quite calm as she sat in the study, her small feet neatly planted side by side, and described in blunt précis, but sufficiently truthfully, how she had slipped out instead of going to bed, and wilfully staged that brief scene with Gus Hambro.

‘Not very responsible of me, I know,’ she said, gazing sombrely before her. ‘But there are times when one feels like being irresponsible, and I did. There was no harm in it, if there was no good. It was a matter of perhaps three or four minutes. Then my husband came.’ Her face was composed but very still, in contrast to her usual vivacity. It was the nearest he had ever seen her come to obvious self-censorship. ‘My husband,’ she said guardedly, ‘is rather sensitive about the difference in our ages.’

She had not gone so far as to mention the embrace, but her restraint spoke for itself eloquently enough.

‘So he ordered you home,’ said George, deliberately obtuse, ‘and you obeyed him and left them together.’

Her eyes flared greenly for one instant, and she dimmed their fire almost before it showed. Her shoulders lifted slightly; her face remained motionless. ‘I went away and left them together. What was the point of staying? The whole thing was a shambles.
I
wasn’t going to pick up the pieces. They could, if they liked.’

‘And did they?’ George prompted gently. ‘You know one of them, at least, very well. The other, perhaps, less well? But you have considerable intuition. What do you suppose passed between them, after you’d gone?’

‘Not a stupid physical clash,’ she said, flaring, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I’m thinking nothing, except what your evidence means, and what follows from it. I’m asking what you think happened between those two men. Of whom one, I would remind you, is now missing in suspicious circumstances.’

She shrank, and took a long moment to consider what she should answer to that. ‘Look!’ she said almost pleadingly. ‘I’ve been married to an older man a few years, and I know the hazards, but they’re illusory. I’ve known him jealous before, for even less reason, but nothing happened, nothing ever will happen. It’s a kind of game—a stimulus. He isn’t that kind of man!’ she said, in a voice suddenly torn and breaking, and closed her eyes upon frantic tears. They looked astonishingly out of place on her, like emeralds on an innocent, but they were real enough.

‘You’re very loyal,’ said George in the mildest of voices. Her momentary loss of control was over; she offered him a wry and reluctant smile. ‘So is he,’ she said, ‘when you come to consider it.’

‘And your husband joined you—how much later?’

The voice was still as mild and unemphatic, but she froze into alarmed withdrawal again at the question; and after a moment she said with aching care: ‘We occupy separate rooms. And we don’t trespass.’

‘In fact, you didn’t see him again until this morning?’ In a voice so low as to be barely audible, she said: ‘No.’

‘So he left,’ said George, ‘because you asked him to leave.’

‘I didn’t have to ask him in so many words,’ said Paviour laboriously. ‘I made it clear to him that it was highly undesirable that my wife should see him again. He offered to pack up and go at once, and make some excuse to account for his departure. I told you, I make no complaint against Mr Hambro, I bear him no grudge. I’m aware that the initiative came from my wife.’

There was sweat standing in beads on his forehead and lip. He had had no alternative but to tell the truth, since he had no means of knowing how fully Lesley had already told the same story; but his shame and anguish at having to uncover his marital hell, even thus privately, without even the attendance of Reynolds and his notebook, was both moving and convincing. A humiliation is not a humiliation until someone else becomes aware of it.

‘And you manage not to hold this propensity against her, either?’ George asked mildly.

‘I’ve told you, it’s a form of illness. She can’t help it. And it can’t possibly go beyond a certain point—her own revulsion ensures that.’

‘And yet you deliberately kept watch on her last night, and followed her out expressly to break up this scene. You won’t try to tell me that it happened quite by chance?’

‘It’s my duty to protect her,’ said Paviour, quivering. ‘Even in such quite imaginary affairs, she could get hurt. And she could cause harm to relatively innocent partners, too.’

It was all a little too magnanimous; she had caused plenty of pain, fury and shame to him in her time, by his own account, but apparently he was supposed to be exempt from resenting that.

‘Very well, you parted from Mr Hambro close to the lodge, and came back to the house. And that’s the last you saw of him?’

‘Yes. I had no reason to think he wouldn’t keep his word.’

‘As apparently he did. We’ve seen the note he left behind. You can’t shed any light on what may have happened to him afterwards?’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve told you I came straight back to the house, and went to bed.’

‘As I understand,’ said George gently, ‘alone.’ There was a brief, bitter silence. ‘You realise, of course, that no one can confirm your whereabouts, from the time your wife came back to the house without you?’

‘I’ve been here nearly a year now,’ said Bill Lawrence. ‘I know the set-up well enough to keep out of trouble. Actually I’ve known the place, and the Paviours, longer than that, I used to come over occasionally during the vacations, when I was at Silcaster university, and help out as assistant. I had to get a holiday job of some kind, and this was right in my line. I’d started planning my book then. So I know the score. No, he’s never actually talked to me about Mrs Paviour, but it’s easy to see he’s worried every time another man comes near her. Especially a young man. It isn’t altogether surprising, is it?’

‘And Mrs Paviour
has
talked to you about her husband?’

The young man’s long, slightly supercilious face had paled and stiffened into watchfulness. ‘She warned me, when I came here officially for this year, that it would be better to keep relations on a very formal basis.’

‘She gave you to understand, in fact, that her husband was liable to an almost pathological jealousy, and for the sake of everybody’s peace of mind you’d better keep away from her?’

‘Something like that—yes.’

‘And she acted accordingly?’

‘Always. It was possible to get along quite well—one developed the knack, and then enjoyed what companionship was permissible.’

That had a marvellously stilted sound, and contrasted strongly with the strained intensity of his face.

‘And did she act accordingly with—for example—Mr Hambro?’

Dark red spots burned on the sharp cheekbones. Paviour wasn’t the only one who could feel jealousy, and there wouldn’t be much room here for elderly magnanimity. Bill clamped his jaw tight shut over anger, swallowed hard, and said at last: ‘I’m not in a position to comment on Mrs Paviour’s actions. You’ve had the opportunity of talking to her in person.’

‘Very true. Mrs Paviour was admirably frank. All right, you can rejoin the others. No, one moment!’ Bill turned and looked back enquiringly and apprehensively from the doorway. ‘You say you used to visit here before you came to work here regularly. Did you, by any chance, pay a visit while Doctor Alan Morris was staying here? That was a year ago last October, the beginning of the month.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I was invited over to meet him one evening,’ said Bill, bewildered but relieved by this turn in the conversation. ‘I angled for an invitation when I knew he was coming, and Mr Paviour asked me over for dinner. That’s the only time I ever got to talk to a really first-class man on my subject. I was disappointed in his book, though,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘I got the impression it was rather a dashed-off job. That’s the trouble with these commissioned series.’

‘Ah, well, you’ll be able to offer a more thorough study,’ said George with only the mildest irony. ‘By the way, you walked to the village and back last night, I believe. So you didn’t use the Vespa yesterday? I notice you didn’t use it to hop over here tonight.’

‘It didn’t seem worth getting it out. I’d cleaned and put it away the night before last. It hasn’t been out since. Why?’

‘How was it for petrol, when you left it?’

‘I filled up the day I cleaned it, and it hasn’t been anywhere but across here since.’ He was frowning now in doubt and uneasiness. ‘Why, what about it? What has the Vespa got to do with anything?’

‘We borrowed it an hour or so ago, without asking your permission, I’m afraid. You shall have it back as soon as we’ve been over it. The tank’s practically empty, Mr Lawrence. And by the still damp mud samples we’re getting from it, it’s certainly had a longish run since the rain set in.’

‘But I don’t understand!’ His face had fallen into gaping consternation, for once defenceless and young, without a pose to cover its alarm. ‘I haven’t had it out, I swear. I haven’t touched it. What do you mean?’

‘If somebody drove Mr Hambro’s car as far as the quarry beyond Silcaster, then—always supposing that somebody belonged here, and had to be seen to be here as usual by morning—he’d need a way of getting back, wouldn’t he? Preferably without having to use public transport and rub shoulders with other people. With a little ingenuity a Vespa could be manoeuvred aboard an Aston Martin, don’t you think? By the time we’ve been over your machine properly we may know for certain where it’s been overnight. With a lot of luck,’ he said, watching the young face blanch and the frightened eyes narrow in calculation, ‘we may even know who was riding it.’