Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (7 page)

The details sounded like a collection of attractive oddities. The sum total was a quite arresting beauty. And the most jolting fact about her emerged only by implication. In a nylon jersey house-gown of peacock pattern and iridescent colouring, which clung like a silk glove, she could not possibly be anyone but Mrs Paviour, that same Lesley who walked when the fit took her, last thing at night, and had been home twenty minutes when Charlotte rang the door-bell. Ergo, the wife of this elderly Don Quixote, Great-Uncle Alan’s colleague and contemporary, who must be well into his sixties at the very least, and slightly arid and passé even at that. How old was the girl in the doorway? Not a day over twenty-five, Charlotte reckoned—hardly two years senior to herself. Perhaps even less. What an extraordinary mis-match! And not just because of the tale of years involved. The old man was a cracked leather bottle trying to contain quicksilver. She
could not
feel anything for him! It made no sense. And yet she had not the look of a woman cramped or dissatisfied. She glowed with ease and wellbeing.

At sight of her Gus, stiffening into startled consciousness between his supporters, set foot of his own volition on the last step, and his soiled eyebrows soared into his muddy hair, in reflection of the apparition before him. Very faintly but quite clearly he said: ‘Good God!’ and seemed to have no breath left for anything more explicit.

The moment of charmed stillness collapsed—or more properly exploded—into motion and exclamation. The girl in the Chinese house-coat narrowed her eyes upon the central figure in the tableau before her, and the supple lines of her face sharpened into crystal, and lost their smiling gaiety.

‘My God!’ she said, in the softest of dismayed voices. ‘What’s been happening, Steve?’ And she went on briskly, springing into instant and efficient comprehension: ‘Well, come on, bring him in to the fire, quickly! I’ll get brandy.’

She turned in a swirl of nylon jersey, and flung wide the door to the study, where the subsiding glow of the fire still burned. Her movements, as she receded rapidly along the passage beyond, were silent and violent, a force of nature in action. Only gradually did it emerge that she was rather a miniature whirlwind, perhaps an inch shorter even than Charlotte, but so slender that she escaped looking like a pocket edition. When she came back, with a tray in her hands, they had installed their patient by the fire in a deep chair, and peeled the soggy, wet jacket from him. They were five people in one small room, and hardly a word was said between them until Gus Hambro had a large brandy under his belt, and was visibly returning into circulation. His still dazed eyes followed his astonishing hostess around, measuring, weighing and wondering, in forgetfulness of his own predicament. He said nothing at all, as yet, but very eloquently. Charlotte hung back in a corner of the room, and let them encircle him with their attentions. So far he had not even registered her presence, and she was in no particular hurry to enlighten him.

‘He should have a doctor,’ said Paviour anxiously, standing over him with the empty brandy glass.

‘I don’t want a doctor,’ protested the patient, weakly but decidedly. ‘What could he do for me that you’re not doing? All I’ve got is a headache.’ He looked round him doubtfully, winced abruptly back to his original position, and clapped a surprised hand behind his right ear. ‘What happened?’ he asked blankly.

‘You fell in the river,’ said Paviour patiently. ‘I shouldn’t worry about remembering, if I were you. The main thing is, you’re here, and you’re going to be all right.’

‘Fell in the river?’ repeated Gus like an indignant echo, and stared at the smear of blood staining his muddy fingers. ‘I never did! I was keeping well on the landward side of the path, on the grass. And that’s where I was lying when I came round just now. All I’ve got is a welt on the head here. Somebody jumped me from behind and knocked me out.’ He looked from face to face, questioning and wondering. ‘If I was in the river,’ he said reasonably, ‘what am I doing here now?’

‘This lady,’ said Paviour, stepping aside to allow him to follow the mild gesture that indicated Charlotte, ‘pulled you out. Not only that, she administered artificial respiration and brought you round, and then came here to get help. Why did you suppose we were setting off with a stretcher and torches, at this time of night?’

‘I didn’t know… I never realised…’ He sat forward, staring in outraged recognition at Charlotte. ‘You mean
you
… it was
you
who…’ He shut his mouth and swallowed hard, and in the space of about two seconds she saw a whole kaleidoscope of emotions flash in succession through his mind. If she’s here, if she found me, it’s because she followed me! If she followed me, it’s because she doesn’t trust me, and if she doesn’t trust me it’s because she knows something, or has found out something. So far she was sure of her ground. And what followed was neither surprise nor mystery to her. For suddenly Gus Hambro performed a minor miracle, by producing a fiery blush that made itself visible in waves of dubious gratitude and indubitable mortification even through the layers of river mud that still decorated his face. Tales of gallant rescues ought not to go into reverse, and cast the lady as hero and the man as helpless victim. Especially when, whatever other circumstances may hold good, the man has been exerting himself to make an impression on the lady in question. Fate, thought Charlotte, gazing innocently back into his admiring, devoted, humiliated and furious face, has certainly given me the upper hand of you, my boy!

‘The kiss of life, I hope?’ said the young man Lawrence, putting a deliberate finger through the slight tension which was palpably building up within the room.

‘Schafer,’ said Charlotte shortly. ‘The only method I know.’

Gus did not sound at all like a man recently revived from drowning as he said with sharp disquiet: ‘Right, that disposes of how I got out, and I’m duly grateful, believe me. But now will somebody please explain to me
how the hell I ever got in
?

They were all staring at him in speculative silence when the sound of a car’s engine circled the house, coming to rest in the arc of gravel before the door. After it died, the silence was absolute for a few moments. Then incongruous suburban chimes jangled from the front porch.

‘That must be the police inspector,’ said Paviour. ‘Will you let him in, dear?’

His wife turned without a word, and went to open the door; and presently ushered in Detective Chief Inspector George Felse, mild, grey-haired and ordinary, a tired middle-aged man who would have been inconspicuous and among his peers almost anywhere he cared to materialise.

‘I got a message,’ he said, ‘that you wanted me here.’

He looked round them all as though none of them afforded him any surprise, though two of them did not belong here, and to his certain knowledge had been elsewhere only a short time ago. So short a time, Charlotte realised with a shock, that he could not possibly have returned home in the meantime, since he was a close neighbour of the Bodens, who lived ten miles from Aurae Phiala. The relayed message must have found him somewhere not far from this house. Somewhere by the river, she thought, downstream. Whatever went into the flooded Comer here would fetch up at one of several spots, no doubt well known to the police, where curves and currents tended to land what they had carried down. The chief inspector had just come, case or no case, from setting a close watch on those spots, in expectation—in foreboding, rather—that the flood would bring some unusual freight aground very shortly.

Only then did she fully realise that if she had been five minutes later the watchers keeping a lookout for a stray boy might, tomorrow, have been hauling ashore the sodden body of Gus Hambro.

Washed, warmed, with a shaven patch and an adhesive dressing behind his right ear and a second large brandy nursed gratefully in his hands, Gus told his story; though not, perhaps, quite ingenuously.

‘All I did was come out for a walk before going to bed, and I was about by that place where the bank’s caved in, when somebody jumped me from behind. I never heard a thing until maybe the last two steps he took, I never had time to turn. Something hit me on the back of the head, here, and I went out like a light. I remember dropping. I never felt the ground hit me. But I do know
where
I was when I fell—in the belt of grass under the bank, and facing straight ahead the way I was walking. And when I came round I was in the same place. I took it for granted I’d just been lying there since I went out, and whoever had jumped me had made off and left me there. When I could make it, I got up and made for the nearest shelter. There was a lighted doorway here, I steered for that. And just outside the garden I ran into this rescue party coming out to find me. Now they tell me,’ he said flatly, ‘that I was in the river, drowning, and Charlotte here pulled me out and brought me round.’ He had used her Christian name without even realising it, so intent was he on pinning down the details of his own remembrance.

‘When I found him,’ said Charlotte, ‘he was lying right across the path.’

‘
Across
the path?’

‘
Across
the path,’ she said firmly, ‘with his feet just touching the grass on the landward side, and his head and shoulders in the river. His face was completely under water.’

She felt them all stiffen in instinctive resistance, not wanting their routine existence to be invaded by anything as bizarre as this.

‘There may be a simple explanation for this discrepancy,’ ventured Paviour hopefully. ‘If there was a fresh fall of earth there—the bank is quite high, and we’ve seen that there’s brickwork exposed there… Perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate attack at all, just a further slip that struck him and swept him across the path. After all, we didn’t go along to have a look at the place.’

‘
I
was there,’ said Gus drily. ‘There wasn’t any fall.’

‘I was there, too,’ said Charlotte. ‘There’s something else. When you get a blow on the head and fall forward, whether it’s flying stones or a blackjack, you may fall heavily, but even so I don’t think you’d embed yourself as deeply in the mud as Mr Hambro was embedded.’

Chief Inspector Felse sat steadily watching her, and said nothing. It was Paviour who stirred again in uneasy protest. ‘My dear girl, are you sure you’re not recalling rather more than happened? After stresses like that, the imagination may very easily begin to add details.’

‘I’m recognising things I did see, and never had time to recognise then. But the other thing is a good deal more conclusive…’

George Felse asked quietly: ‘How were his arms?’

‘Yes, that’s it!’ she said. ‘How did you know? When you fall forward, fully conscious or not, you put out your hands to break your fall. His arms were down at his sides. Nobody falls like that. Even if you were out on your feet, and fell as a dead weight, your arms wouldn’t drop tidily by your sides. And that’s how his were.’

She was watching the chief inspector’s face as she said it, and she knew that he believed her, and accepted her as a good witness. Both the Paviours were stiffening in appalled disbelief, even young Lawrence had drawn a hissing breath of doubt. Probably Gus himself found it hard to swallow, and would have preferred not to accept it, the implications being too unpleasant to contemplate. But George Felse had come halfway to meet her.

‘But, good God,’ objected Stephen Paviour faintly, ‘do you realise what you’re suggesting?’

‘Not suggesting. Stating. I’m saying that someone, having knocked Mr Hambro cold, dragged him across the path to the water, and shoved him firmly into the soft mud with his face under water, to die.’

In the stunned silence George Felse got up, without speaking, and crossed the room to where Gus’s jacket hung on the back of a chair, turned towards the replenished fire, and steamed gently as it dried. He slid his hands into the sleeves, and lifted it to turn the back to the light, and for a few minutes stood studying it closely.

‘The back,’ said Charlotte, watching, ‘was dry as high as the shoulder-blades. Except that I probably made some damp patches, handling him after I got him out.’

‘Quite a difference from actually lying in the river.’ He spread the jacket between his hands, holding it out for them to see. ‘Look in the middle of the back, here, from just above the waist upwards. What do you see?’ He turned to look at Gus, with a faintly challenging smile.

‘A moist patch—sizeable. Two patches, rather, but practically joined in one.’ The warm, heathery colours of the tweed darkened there into a duller, peaty shade, two irregular, fading patches, with a vague dry line between. A thin rim of encrusted mud, drying off now, helped to outline the marks, but even so they were elusive enough until pointed out.

‘Well? What do you make of it? You tell me!’

‘It’s a footmark,’ said Gus, and licked lips suddenly dry and stiff with retrospective fear. ‘I know what to make of it, all right! It means some bastard not only laid me out cold, and stuck me face-down in the Comer, but even rammed me well down into the mud with a foot in the small of my back to make dead sure of me, before he lit out and left me there to drown.’

They were too numbed by then, and too tired, to do much exclaiming, however their orderly minds rebelled at believing in mayhem and murder at Aurae Phiala. They stared in fascination at the imperfect outline which did indeed look more and more like the print of a shoe the longer they gazed. Lawrence said hesitantly, with almost exaggerated care to sound reasonable and calm: ‘But why? Why should anyone want to… to kill him?’ It took quite a lot of resolution to utter it at all. ‘Just a visitor here like anyone else. There couldn’t be any personal reason.’

‘I think,’ said Lesley sensibly, ‘I’ll make some coffee. We could all do with some.’ And she walked out of the room with something of the same wary insistence on normality. It was then still some twenty minutes short of midnight, though they seemed to have devoured the greater part of the night already in this improbable interview.

‘Someone,’ said Gus, ‘didn’t want me around, that’s certain. But wasn’t he still taking rather a chance, if it was all that important to him that I shouldn’t survive? I might have revived enough to struggle out, once he was gone.’

‘So you might,’ George agreed. ‘With a river handy, and you past resistance, why not do the obvious thing, and shove you far enough in to make sure the current took you? Even a swimmer with all his wits about him might well be in trouble down those reaches at this time of year. Out cold, you wouldn’t have a dog’s chance.’

‘You comfort me,’ said Gus grimly, ‘you really do. Go on, tell me, why didn’t he?’

‘Pretty obviously that’s what he intended. He simply didn’t have time.’

‘Because he heard me coming,’ said Charlotte.

‘I think so. He needed no more than one extra minute, or two, but he didn’t have it. He heard you, and he preferred to run for it. He dropped Mr Hambro where he was, in the edge of the water, and planted a foot between his shoulders to drive him in deeper before he made off.’

‘But without reason!’ protested Paviour. ‘Surely no one but a madman…’

‘The procedure would appear to be far from mad—quite coldly methodical. And since, as Mr Lawrence says, there could hardly be anything personal in the attack, we’re left with the probability that
anyone
who had happened along at that moment would have been dealt with in the same way. You were suspected, in fact, of having blundered head-on into something no one was supposed to see.’

‘I didn’t see a thing,’ Gus said bitterly. ‘Not a thing! He needn’t have bothered scragging me, if that was his trouble.’

‘He could hardly ask you, and take your word for it, could he? Obviously he thought you’d witnessed something you shouldn’t have. At best he was afraid you
might
have, and that was enough. But Miss Rossignol was some way behind, and advancing without stealth.’ He cast one brief glance at Charlotte, caught her large, clear, self-possessed eye, and one conspiratorial spark of laughter passed between them. He knew she had been exercising what stealth she was capable of, and he knew why, but that was purely between the two of them. ‘There was no need to think she’d noticed anything, and whoever he was, he wasn’t mad enough to go looking for extra murders. He took a chance—admittedly an almost negligible one—on you, and slipped away to avoid her.’

Lesley brought in a laden tray, set it down on a side-table, and distributed cups in silence.

‘In view of the apparent urgency of getting rid of you,’ said George Felse, stirring his coffee, ‘it might be an idea if you tried to recall what, if anything, you
did
see.’

Gus held his head, and pondered. ‘Well, of course there’s always some reflected light, once your eyes get used to being out at night. But I didn’t meet anyone, I didn’t hear anyone. Oh, yes, after I got to the perimeter of Aurae Phiala, where you can see clean across the bowl to the road the other side, I did see cars pass there a couple of times. You get a sort of lighthouse flash from the headlights, as they swing round the curve there and out of sight. The lights cross the bowl gradually, and out again, and then the dip in the road cuts them off. Yes, and the second time that happened it swept across the standing walls there, and in the near end of the caldarium there was somebody standing by the wall. No, not moving, quite still. It was only a glimpse. The light swerves off in an instant, and it’s darker than ever. But he was there, all right.’

‘
He
?’ said George.

‘Oh, yes, it was a he. The whole cut of him,’ he said, imprecisely but comprehensively. ‘No doubt about it.’

‘But nothing more detailed? Clothing? Build?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Gus irritably. ‘One flash of light, and gone. Just a mass, like a Henry Moore figure. He didn’t have any clothing, just a shape. All I know is, it was a he, and he was there.’

‘And how long was this before you were attacked?’

‘I’d say about three full minutes, maybe even four, before I was hit. I didn’t think anything of it. He had as much right to be out walking as I had.’

‘Not in Aurae Phiala,’ said Stephen Paviour, in tones of quiet outrage. ‘Not at that hour. Our gates are closed at six—seven in summer. He had no right inside the enclave, whoever he was.’

‘No, true enough. But the path along the river is a right of way, and there’s only a token wire in between. Anyone could walk up into the enclosure. You’d have a job to stop them.’

‘You know,’ said Lesley, busy at the coffee-tray, ‘I must have been out there about the same time. Oh, no, I wasn’t down by the river, I was over on the side next to the road. I often have a little walk along the new plantation there. That’s what cuts off the headlights, you see. The site is very exposed on that side, in Roman times there was a woodland there, so it was sheltered. Now we’re trying to replace it, to reproduce the same conditions. I was home well before ten, though. I never noticed the exact time, but I was in the bath when I heard the stir down here.’

‘You didn’t see anything of this man in the caldarium?’ George asked.

‘No, I didn’t. Though I must have been around just at that time, I think. I do remember seeing two—maybe three—cars pass on the Silcaster road, but I didn’t notice anything shown up in their headlights.’ She hesitated for a moment, poised vulnerably with the coffee-pot in one hand, and the jug of hot milk in the other. ‘You know… please don’t think I’m being funny!—maybe Mr Hambro saw the Aurae Phiala ghost. And don’t think I’m crazy, either,’ she appealed warmly. ‘Look, it’s only half a joke. You go and ask in the village. People
have
seen things! You don’t have to take my word for it, they’ll talk about it quite freely, they’re not ashamed or afraid of it.’

‘My dear, this is frivolous,’ her husband said with frowning disapproval. ‘Mere local superstition. We’re concerned with realities, unfortunately.’

‘
Are
there such stories?’ George asked mildly.

‘Can you imagine such a place as Aurae Phiala existing without giving rise to its own legends? I have heard loose talk of people seeing things here by night, but I’ve never paid the least attention, so I can’t tell you what they claim.’

‘I’m not being frivolous,’ Lesley declared firmly, ‘and these
are
realities. I don’t mean helmeted sentries literally do patrol the walls by night, I don’t mean even that anything’s actually been seen, but the things that go on in people’s minds
are
realities, and
do
influence events. It hardly matters whether there’s a ghost there to be seen or not—what matters is whether someone is convinced he saw it. Besides, what’s a ghost, anyhow? I’m not a convinced believer, I just don’t find it difficult to credit that in these very ancient sites of occupation, where such emotional things are known to have happened, people should develop special sensitivities, racial memories, hypernormal sympathies, whatever you like to call them. I don’t see anything supernatural about it, just rather outside most people’s range of knowledge. The test of that is, that the local people treat the experiences they claim to have had as perfectly acceptable—almost take them for granted. They don’t go challenging them, they respect them, take what’s offered but don’t go probing any farther. A thoroughly healthy attitude, I call it. Look at Orrie,’ she appealed to her husband. ‘He’s seen the sentry twice. He doesn’t run away, or hang out crosses or wreaths of parsley, or ring up the local press, he merely mentions it to his friends in passing, and gets on with his work. And you couldn’t find anyone more down-to-earth than Orrie.’

‘Orrie?’ George enquired.

‘Our gardener. He’s local stock from way back. They had the same site, even bits of the same cottage, in the sixteenth century.’ She laughed suddenly, the evening’s first genuinely gay sound. ‘You wouldn’t credit what the Orrie’s short for! Orlando! Orlando Benyon! The name’s been in the family for generations, too.’

‘And Orrie’s seen the Roman sentry?’

‘Listen!’ she said, abruptly grave again. ‘I’ve seen him myself, or else hearing about it has put me in a special state of mind, and all the other factors have come up right, atmospheric conditions, combinations of light and dark, what you like, and made me create what I believed I was seeing. Twice! A figure in a bronze helmet, both times a good way off, and both times close to the standing walls. I didn’t find anything very strange in it, either. In its last years Aurae Phiala surely did mount a watch every night. Just such a sentry must have been the first to die, the night the Welsh came.’

Paviour’s uneasiness and distaste had grown so palpable by this time that his rigid bones looked tensed to breaking point. He said with nervous acidity: ‘We’re not dealing with atmospheric hallucinations here, but with an attempt at murder. When violence breaks in, something a good deal more material than imagination is indicated.’

She agreed, with an unabashed smile. ‘
And
when ordinary mundane light like a car’s headlights starts making the immaterial perceptible. Now that would be supernatural! I paint a bit for fun,’ she said, with a grimace of deprecation for the unsatisfactory results. ‘I do know about masses and light, even if I can never get them right. No, this person you saw was a pretty solid kind of reality.’

‘And he wasn’t wearing a helmet,’ said Gus.

‘Tonight’s haunting was for a pretty compelling reason,’ said George. ‘But what you’ve told us is very interesting, Mrs Paviour. We’ll see what the village has to add.’ He put down his coffee-cup in the tray with a sigh. ‘You’ve been very kind to put up with us all for so long, I’m most grateful. But now I think there’s nothing more we can do here, and it’s time we left you to get some rest. If you feel fit to go back to the inn, Mr Hambro, I’ll be glad to drive you and Miss Rossignol round there.’

Lesley had begun to gather up the remaining cups, but at the mention of Charlotte’s name she put down the tray abruptly, and turned with a startled smile. ‘Rossignol? You’re not
Charlotte
Rossignol? Steve, did you hear that? There can’t be two—not two and both connected with Roman antiquities! You must be the niece Doctor Morris mentioned. He told us once his sister’s girl had married a Frenchman.’

Charlotte admitted to her identity with some surprise. ‘I didn’t think he took so much interest in me. We’ve always been a rather loosely-knit family, and I’ve never seen him.’

‘It’s true he didn’t often talk about his family, but I couldn’t forget your lovely name, I liked it so much. You know Steve is an old fellow-student of his, and a close friend? Isn’t it wonderful, darling, Miss Rossignol turning up like this?’

His face was grey and drawn, Charlotte thought, perhaps with pure fatigue, for after all, he was an old man. He favoured her with a slightly haggard smile, but his voice was dry and laboured as he said: ‘I’m delighted to meet my old friend’s niece. I’m only sorry it had to be in such circumstances of stress. I hope you’ll give us the opportunity of getting to know you better, on some happier occasion.’ His lips were stiff, the words of goodwill could hardly get past them.

‘I’m not quite such a coincidence as I seem,’ she said, ‘I’ve just been reading my uncle’s book on Aurae Phiala, that’s why I came to have a look at the place for myself. He didn’t really do it justice, did he? I find it beautiful.’

‘Stephen doesn’t agree with him, either,’ said Lesley, smiling, ‘but of course Aurae Phiala is our life. Are you going to stay a little while, now you’re here? You should!’

‘I have a few concerts in the Midlands, and I thought I’d make my base somewhere close by until they’re over. Yes, I think I shall stay on for a few days here.’

‘But not at the “Salmon”! Oh, no, you can’t! Anyone belonging to Alan Morris has a home here, of course. You must come to us. Look at all the rooms we have, the house is much too big for two. Do come! Stay tonight, too, I can find you everything you need overnight, and we’ll fetch your things from the pub tomorrow.’

Confronted by sudden and eager invitations from strangers, Charlotte’s normal reaction was one of recoil, not out of insecurity, but to maintain her independence and integrity. She was never afterwards quite sure why she sidestepped only partially and temporarily on this occasion. There existed a whole tangle of possible reasons. She was in search of a closer knowledge of her great-uncle, and here were informed friends of his, one of them of long standing, who could surely tell her a great part of what she wanted to know. She was attracted by this place, and here was her opportunity of remaining. She was held by the disturbing events of the night, and here was her chance to wait out a better understanding of them on the spot. And also there was something in Lesley’s appeal that engaged her sympathy in a way she hesitated to analyse. Here was this young creature, beautiful and restless, married to a man almost old enough to be her grandfather, and apparently setting out to make the very best of it, too, with no signs of regret or self-pity; but the prospect of having a girl of her own age in the house, even for a few days, might well matter to her a great deal more than the extension and acceptance of a mere conventional politeness. And Charlotte heard herself saying quickly:

‘That’s awfully kind of you, and I should love to come for a couple of days, if I may. But I’d like to go back with Mr Hambro to the “Salmon” now, if you don’t mind. If I may come tomorrow?’