Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (5 page)

‘You see? That same floor we’ve been crossing reaches right to here, one great caldarium, with that hypocaust deployed underneath it all the way. And just here is the vent from the heating system, the column that brought the hot air directly up here into the room when required.’

It was merely a framework of broken, blonde walls, barely knee-high, like the shaft of a huge well, a shell withdrawn into a corner of the great room. Over the round vent a rough wooden cover, obviously modern, was laid. Gus put a hand to its edge and lifted, and the cover rose on its rim, and showed them a glimpse of a deep shaft dropping into darkness, partially silted up below with rubble.

‘Yes—it would take some money and labour to dig that lot out! Wonder what happened to the original cover? It would be bronze, probably. Maybe it’s in the museum, though I think some of the better finds went to the town museum in Silcaster.’

‘This is what you call the laconicum?’ she asked, drawing back rather dubiously from the dank breath that distilled out of the earth.

‘That’s it. Though you might, in some places, get the word laconia used for small hot-air rooms, too. They could send the temperature up quickly when required, by raising the cover—even admit the flames from the furnace if they wanted to. Come and have a look round the museum. If you’ve time? But perhaps you’ve got a long drive ahead,’ he said, not so much hesitantly as enquiringly.

‘I’m staying at “The Salmon’s Return”, just upstream,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes’ walk, if that. Yes, let’s see the museum, too.’

It was a square, prefabricated building, none too appropriate to the site, but banished to the least obtrusive position, behind the entrance kiosk. It was full of glass cases, blocks of stone bearing vestigial carving, some fragments of very beautiful lettering upon the remains of a stone tablet, chattering schoolboys prodding inquisitively everywhere, and the young teacher, perspiring freely now, delivering a lecture upon Samian ware. Boden was not among his listeners, nor anywhere in the three small, crowded rooms. By this time Charlotte would have felt a shock of surprise at ever finding that young man where he was supposed to be.

They made the round of the place. A great deal of red glaze pottery, some glass vessels, even one or two fragments of silver; tarnished mirrors, ivory pins, little bronze brooches, a ring or two. Gus, tepid about the collection in general, grew excited about one or two personal ornaments.

‘See this little dragon brooch—there isn’t a straight line in it, it’s composed of a dozen quite unnecessarily complex curves. Can you think of anything less Roman? Yet it is Roman—interbred with Celtic. Like the mixed marriages that were general here. This kind of ornament, in a great many variations, you can locate all down this border. In the north, too, but they differ enough to be recognisable.’

She found the same curvilinear decoration in several other pieces, and delighted him by picking them out without hesitation from the precise and formal Roman artifacts round them.

‘Anything that looks like a symbol for a labyrinth, odds on it’s either Celtic or Norse.’

It was nearly closing time, and the school party, thankfully marshalled by its young leader, was pouring vociferously out into the chill of the early evening, and heading with released shouts for its waiting coach. The last and smallest darted back, self-importantly, to inscribe his name with care in the visitors’ book, which lay open on a table by the door, before allowing himself to be shepherded after his companions. On impulse, Charlotte stopped to look at what he had added in the ‘Remarks’ column, and laughed. ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, announced the ball-pen scrawl.

‘You should sign, too,’ said Gus, at her shoulder.

She knew why, but by then it was almost over in any case, for when was she likely to see him again? So she signed ‘Charlotte Rossignol’, well aware that he was reading the letters as fast as she formed them.

‘Now may I drive you back to the pub?’ he said casually, as they emerged into the open air, and found the studious young man of the kiosk waiting to see his last customers out, one finger still keeping his place in a book. ‘I’m staying there, too. And as it happens, I didn’t walk. I’ve got my car here.’

The car park was empty but for the elderly gentleman’s massive Ford, which was just crunching over the gravel towards the road, an old but impressive bronze Aston Martin which Charlotte supposed must belong to Gus—it sent him up a couple of notches in her regard—and the school bus, still stationary, boiling over with bored boys, and emitting a plaintive chorus of: ‘Why are we waiting?’ The driver stood leaning negligently against a front wing, rolling himself a cigarette. Clearly he had long since trained himself to tune out all awareness of boys unless they menaced his engine or coachwork.

And why
were
they waiting? The noise they were making indicated that no teacher was present, and there could be only one explanation for his absence now.

‘He’s lost his stray again,’ said Gus, halting with the car keys levelled in his hand.

‘Here he comes now.’ And so he did, puffing up out of the silvered, twilit bowl of Aurae Phiala, ominous at dusk under a low ceiling of dun cloud severed from the earth by a rim of lurid gold. A glass bowl of fragile relics closed with a pewter lid; and outside, the fires of ruin, like a momentary recollection of the night, how many centuries ago, when the Welsh tribesmen massed, raided, killed and burned, writing ‘Finis’ to the history of this haunted city.

‘Poor boy!’ said Charlotte, suddenly outraged by the weariness and exasperation of this ineffectual little man, worn out by a job he had probably chosen as the most profitable within his scope, and now found to be extending him far beyond the end of his tether. ‘Whoever persuaded him he ought to be a teacher?’

‘He’s not that far gone,’ Gus assured her with unexpected shrewdness. ‘He knows when to write off his losses.’

The young man came surging up to them, as the only other responsible people left around. ‘I beg your pardon, but you haven’t seen one of my senior pupils around anywhere, by any chance? A dark boy, nearly seventeen, answers—
when
he answers!—to the name of Gerry Boden. He’s a professional absentee. Where we are, he is most likely not to be. Sometimes with escort—chorus, rather! This time, apparently, without, which must be by his own contriving. I’m missing just one boy—the magnate himself.’

Between them they supplied all they could remember of the encounter by the roped-off enclosure above the river.

‘He never did come back to us,’ said the young man positively. ‘I always know whether he’s there or not. Like a pain, if you know what I mean.’ They knew what he meant. He shrugged, not merely helplessly, rather with malevolent acceptance. ‘Well, I’ve looked everywhere. He does it on purpose, of course. This isn’t the first time. He’s nearly seventeen, he has plenty of money in his pockets, and he knows this district like the palm of his hand. We’re no more than ten miles from home. He can get a bus or a taxi, and he knows very well where to get either. I don’t know why I worry about him.’

‘Having a conscience does complicate things,’ said Gus with sympathy.

‘It simplifies this one,’ said the teacher grimly. ‘I’ve got a conscience about all this lot, all of ’em younger than our Gerry. This time he can look out for himself, I’m going to get the rest home on time.‘

He clambered aboard the coach, the juniors raised a brief, cheeky cheer, half mocking and half friendly, the driver hoisted himself imperturbably into his cab, and the coach started up and surged ponderously through the gates and away along the Silcaster road.

Charlotte turned, before getting into the car, and looked back once in a long, sweeping survey of the twilit bowl of turf and stone. Nothing moved there except the few blackheaded gulls wheeling and crying above the river. A shadowy, elegiac beauty clothed Aurae Phiala, but there was nothing alive within it.

‘When did it happen?’ she asked. ‘The attack from the west, the one that finally drove the survivors away?’

‘Quite late, around the end of the fourth century. Most of the legions were gone long before that. Frantic appeals for help kept going out to Rome—Rome was still the patron, the protector, the fortress, even when she was falling to pieces herself. About twenty years after the sack of Aurae Phiala, Honorius finally issued an edict that recognised what had been true for nearly a century. He told the Britons they could look for nothing more, no money, no troops, no aid. From then on they had to shift for themselves.’

‘And the Saxons moved in,’ said Charlotte.

He smiled, holding the passenger door open for her. By this time he would not have been surprised if she had taken up the lecture and returned him a brief history of the next four centuries. ‘Well, the Welsh, over this side. Death from the past, not the future. A couple of anachronisms fighting it out here while real life moved in on them from the east almost unnoticed. But their kin survived and intermarried. Nothing quite disappears in history.’

But she thought, looking back at that pewter sky and narrow saffron afterglow as the Aston Martin purred into life and shot away at speed: Yes, individuals do! Perversely, wilfully or haplessly, they do vanish. One elderly, raffish archaeologist in Turkey, one uneasy, spoiled adolescent here. But of course they’ll both emerge somewhere. Probably the boy’s halfway home by now, ahead of his party, probably he thumbed a lift the other way along this road as soon as he got intolerably bored. That would amuse him, the thought of the fuss and the delay and the inconvenience to everyone, while he rode home to wherever home is, in the cab of a friendly lorry.

And Doctor Alan Morris? He could be accounted for just as easily, and much more rationally. Total absorption in his passion could submerge him far below the surface of mere time. Somewhere in Anatolia, as yet unheralded, a major news story was surely brewing, to burst on the world presently in a rash of photographs, films, television interviews—some new discovery, one more Roman footprint in the east, stumbled on happily, and of such delirious interest that its discoverer forgot about the passing of the year, his minor responsibilities, and his fretful solicitor.

Over Aurae Phiala the April dusk closed very softly and calmly, like a hand crushing a silvery moth. But her back was turned on the dead city then, and she did not see.

The Salmon’s Return’ lay a quarter of a mile up-river, and dated back to the early seventeenth century, a long, low, white-painted house on a terrace cunningly clear of the flood level of the Comer, and with ideal fishing water for some hundreds of yards on either side of it. It was small, and aware of the virtues of remaining small, lurking ambiguously between hotel and pub, and retaining its hold on the local bar custom while it lured in the fanatical fishermen from half the county for weekend indulgences and occasional contests. Its ceilings were low, and its corners many and intimate. And it belonged to a family, and reflected their stubborn conservative tastes, with a minimum of staff providing a maximum of service. The only relatively new thing about it was its romantic and truthful name, which someone in the family had thought up early in the nineteenth century as an improvement on ‘The Leybourne Arms’; for the Leybourne family had been extinct since the fourteenth century, while salmon regularly did return several miles up-river from this house, and were regularly taken for a mile on either side. Downstream, the nearest weir was a tourist sight in the season, flashing with silvery leaps as the salmon climbed to their spawning-grounds.

From the narrow approach lane a gravel drive swung round to the side door of the inn, and then continued, dwindling, to the rear, where there was a brick garage and a half-grassy car park. Gus halted the Aston Martin at the doorway instead of driving straight on to the garage, and was out of the driving-seat like a greyhound out of a trap, to dart round to the passenger side and hand Charlotte out. His meticulous performance slightly surprised her; there had been moments when they seemed to have achieved a more casual contact, and he couldn’t be still trying to impress. However, she allowed him to squire her to the desk, without comment and with a straight face, told him the number of her key, though keys were almost an affectation at ‘The Salmon’s Return’, more for ornament than use, and let him take it down for her and escort her to the foot of the oak staircase, which wound in slightly drunken lurches about a narrow well, the polished treads hollowed by centuries of use.

He stood back then, and let her go, and she mounted the first flight, and the second, planting her fashionable square heels firmly on the beautiful old wood, which was austerely and very properly without covering, and recorded her movements accurately for anyone listening below. She didn’t look back, and she didn’t linger, but her ears were pricked at every step. She felt, rather than heard, how he turned smartly and loped back across the panelled hall towards the door, no doubt to drive the car round into the garage. No doubt! Except that he was in no hurry about starting it up. Its aristocratic note was not loud, but proudly characteristic. Though she had no car of her own just now, Charlotte had been driving, and driving well, for more than four years.

The second landing was carpeted, the wood of the flooring being slightly worn and hollowed. Her steps could no longer be heard below, once she reached the corridor. She did not even go as far as her room—the sound of the door being unlocked, opening and closing again should surely not carry down to the hall. She kicked off her shoes on the carpet, and slid back silently to listen down the well of the staircase; and picking up from this level only minor and ambiguous sounds, she went quickly down again one floor, to where she could lean cautiously over the glossy black banister, and train both eyes and ears upon any activity in the hall below. Visually, her range was limited. The acoustics were excellent.

She had no idea, until then, why she was acting as she was, or what she suspected, or why, indeed, she should suspect anything but a straight pick-up, and one so simply and attractively engineered as to be quite unalarming; a normal minor wolf on the prowl, with a long weekend to while away, and an eye cocked for congenial company, preferably intimate, but in any case gratifying. And yet she held her breath as she leaned out from the cover of the first-floor corridor, and hung cautiously over the oak rail.

Mrs Lane was there just below her; she could see the top of the round, erect, crisply waved head of iron-grey hair, and the bountiful bulges, fore and aft, of the pocket-clipper figure below. Mrs Lane was the miniature goddess who controlled her large, tolerant, good-humoured menfolk, and made this whole organisation work. And at this moment she had a finger threading the maze of the register, and one hand already vaguely gesturing towards the key-board.

‘Well, yes,’ said the comfortable border voice, pondering, ‘I can give you a single room, but only for two nights, I’m afraid. Weekends we’re usually booked up in advance, you see, even in the close season. There’s a club meeting here for a social weekend—I think they like to keep their places warm here for when coarse fishing starts again. Number 12, if two nights is any good to you?’

‘Better than nothing,’ said Gus Hambro’s voice heartily, but with circumspect quietness. ‘I’ll take it, and gratefully. This is a dream of a position you’ve got here, with the path down-river. You ought to keep rooms for archaeologists as well as fishermen.’

‘They’re not so predictable,’ said Mrs Lane practically, ‘and they do so tend to camp, you know. The fishermen are good men for their comforts, and then they do patronise the bar. After all, you need an audience when you talk about fish, and salmon especially. You don’t fish yourself now, Mr Hambro?’

‘I never really had time,’ said the winning baritone voice. ‘You might convert me, at that! Number 12, you said? And I can move my car round into the garage? Fine, I’ll find my way. I’ll sign in when I’ve put her away for the night.’

Charlotte withdrew into cover, and hoped no one on the upper deck had fallen over her discarded shoes. Gus was plunging away out of the door, contented with his dispositions, and Mrs Lane, apparently satisfied of his
bona fides
—and Mrs Lane had an inbuilt crystal globe, and took some satisfying—had subsided into her private enclosure and was lost to sight. Charlotte climbed the stairs to her own room, and let herself in silently, with considerable doubts about her own situation.

She sat on the edge of her bed and thought it out. It need not, after all, be so abstruse, or so deeply suspect. He was young, alert, very much aware of the opposite sex, and with a personal taste which apparently inclined strongly towards her type. When she had revealed that she was staying here, he had simply decided to hook up and join on. But no, that wouldn’t do! She chilled, remembering. She had told him where she was booked, and at that stage he hadn’t reacted at all. Not until she had signed her name in the book, at his request, and his long-sighted eyes had read it over her shoulder. Only after that had he said: ‘Let me drive you back, I’m staying there, too’. As he had certainly not been, it seemed; not until now.

But what could her name mean to him? It wasn’t Morris, it wasn’t identifiable, even to a keen archaeologist—not unless he happened to be all too well informed about the experts who had interested themselves in Aurae Phiala, and even in their heirs and heiresses, down to herself.

But why? What could he be after, where could he fit in, if this was true? No, she was imagining things. He had simply hesitated to take the plunge and stake on a worthwhile weekend with her, and it was pure chance that he had made up his mind just after he had learned her name. Logic argued the case for this theory, but instinct rejected it. Unless she was much mistaken in that young man, pure chance played very little part in his proceedings. His manipulation of impudence and deference was too assured for that. Whatever he was about, there was method in his madness.

Well, she thought, it won’t be difficult to judge how right I am, if I pay out a few yards of line for him. If he isn’t just amusing himself, then I can expect total siege. And I shan’t be making the mistake of attributing it to any charms of mine, either. And even if I’m wrong—well, I might find it quite amusing, too.

She had not intended changing for the evening, country inns being the right setting for good tweed suits; but now she took her time about dressing, and chose a very austere frock in a dark russet-orange shade that touched off the marmalade lights in her eyes. Why not use what armoury one has? If he was setting out to find out more about her, she could certainly do with knowing a little more about him, and her chances were at least as good as his.

He was sitting in the bar with a drink and the evening paper when she came down, and though he appeared not to notice her quiet descent until she was at the foot of the stairs, she had seen him shift his weight some seconds before he looked up, ready to spring to his feet and intercept her. The look of admiration and pleasure, she hoped, was at any rate partly genuine.

‘May I get you a drink? What would you like?’ No doubt about it, he meant to corner her for the evening. If he had been simply playing the girl game, she reasoned, he would be getting steadily more intimate, and here he is reverting to deference. Because I’m Uncle Alan’s niece? But she could not believe in him as that kind of reverent fan, whatever his enthusiasm for his subject.

‘Since we’re both alone here,’ said Gus, coming back from the bar with her sherry, ‘will you be kind enough to have dinner with me? It would be a pity to eat good food in silence, don’t you think?’

‘Thank you,’ she said gravely, ‘I’d like that very much.’ Not that she intended accepting any favours from him, but she knew he was booked in for two nights, which gave her time to return his hospitality if she could not manipulate tonight into a Dutch treat.

‘When you get bored with my conversation,’ he said, ‘I promise to shut up. There’s even a telly tucked away somewhere.’

Boredom, thought Charlotte, as she made her way before him across the small panelled dining-room, is one thing I don’t anticipate.

By the time they reached the coffee stage it had become clear that he was doing his best to pump her, though she hoped he had not yet realised how little result he was getting, or how assiduously she was trying, in her turn, to find out more about him. The process would have been entirely pleasant, if the puzzling implication had not lingered in her mind throughout, like a dark shadow without a substance. And his method had its own grace.

She saw fit to admit to her musical background. Why not, since some of her midland concerts would be advertised in the local press, and inevitably come to his notice? ‘I call that one of the supreme bits of luck in life,’ he said warmly,‘ to be able to make your living out of what you love doing.’

‘So do I. One you enjoy, too, surely? Don’t tell me you don’t love your archaeology. But how does one make a living at it? Apart from teaching? Are you attached to one of the universities?’ Her tone was one of friendly and candid interest, but she wasn’t getting many bites, either. We should both make better fish than fishermen, she thought.

‘There aren’t enough places to go round,’ he said ruefully, ‘and I’m not that good. Some of us have to make do with jobs on the fringe.’

‘Such as what? What
do
you do, exactly?’ No need for her to be as subtle as he was being. She had, as far as he knew, no reason to be curious, and therefore no reason to dissemble her curiosity. It was an unfair advantage, though; it made it harder for him to evade answering.

‘Such as acting as consultant and adviser on antiques generally—or in my case on one period. Valuer—research man—I even restore pieces sometimes.’

‘Freelance? It sounds a little risky. Supposing there weren’t enough clients?’

He smiled, rather engagingly, she admitted. ‘I’m retained by quite a big outfit. And there’s never any lack of clients.’

It was at that point that the stranger entered the dining-room, and stood for a moment looking round him as if in search of an acquaintance. Charlotte had seen him turn in the doorway to speak to Mrs Lane, whose placid smile indicated that she knew and welcomed him. He looked like a local man, at home and unobtrusive in this comfortable country room as he would have been in the border landscape outside. He was tall and thin, a leggy lightweight in a dark-grey suit, with a pleasant, long, cleanshaven face, and short hair greying at the temples and receding slightly from a weathered brown forehead. He was of an age to be able to wear his hair comfortably short and his chin shaven without eccentricity, probably around fifty. Middle age has its compensations.

There were only a few people left in the dining-room by that time, two elderly men earnestly swopping fishing stories over their brandy, a young couple holding hands fondly under the table, and a solitary ancient in a leather-elbowed tweed jacket, reading the evening paper. The newcomer scanned them all, and his glance settled upon Charlotte and her companion. He came threading his way between the tables, and halted beside them.

‘I beg your pardon! Miss Rossignol? And Mr Hambro? I’m sorry to intrude on you at this hour, but if you can give me a few minutes of your time you may be able to help me, and I’ll be very much obliged.’

Charlotte had assented to her name with a startled bow, but without words. Gus Hambro looked up with rounded brows and a good-natured smile, and said vaguely: ‘Anything we can do, of course! But are you sure it’s us you want? We’re just visitors around here.’

The stranger smiled, still rather gravely but with a warmth that Charlotte found reassuring. ‘If you weren’t, you probably wouldn’t come within my—strictly unofficial—brief. We locals don’t frequent Aurae Phiala much, we’ve lived with it all our lives, it doesn’t excite us. I gather from the visitors’ book that you were both there this afternoon, that’s the only reason for this visit. May I sit down?’

‘Oh, please!’ said Charlotte. ‘Do excuse us, you took us so by surprise.’

‘Thank you!’ he said, and drew up a third chair. His voice was low, equable and leisurely; so much so that only afterwards did it dawn upon Charlotte how very few minutes the whole interview had occupied. ‘My name is Felse. Detective Chief Inspector, Midshire C.I.D.—I mention it only by way of presenting credentials. Strictly speaking I’m not occupied on a case at the moment, and this is quite unofficial. If you were at Aurae Phiala this afternoon you probably saw something of a party of schoolboys going round the site with a teacher in charge. A coachload of them from Comerbourne.’