Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (18 page)

The night was dark, moonless and overcast. Traffic was always light up here at night, and the sense of the border hills closed in even on lighted roads, like the shadow of history, age-old and solitary and quite unmoved.

‘Now suppose you tell me,’ suggested Sam, with arduous calm, ‘just what you know about all this business that we don’t know.’ And Toby told him the reason for Bossie’s misplaced loyalty. Apart from that they were all silent until they turned into the lane that led to the gates of the abbey, when Toby suddenly said aloud: ‘I wish now I’d never touched the bloody thing!’

‘Oh, come off it!’ said Sam comfortingly. ‘I wish I had a quid for every time I’ve said something like that. What makes you think you should be any different?’

There was one police car waiting for them, as well as Sergeant Moon’s ancient Ford. The portion of the drive between the old entrance gates and the ticket-kiosk was still shrouded in its overgrown trees and shrubs, and hid unusual activities very efficiently. Jack Moon came out of the darkness to meet them as they climbed out of the car.

‘I sent a couple of the lads round to look for the place where the kid got in. We’ve got it pinned and covered now, if he slips out that way. We’ve made no other move yet.’

‘And Stubbs still isn’t around?’ The resident warden was no scholar himself, his orders as regards the work in hand came from Charles Goddard, but his responsibility for the site, like his authority within it, was absolute, and he should have been there. ‘What are his free nights, do we know?’

‘We do,’ said Moon flatly. ‘On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday he can be away the entire day if he likes, but he’s responsible for security from six o’clock on. Saturday and Sunday evenings he has a relief to make the evening rounds, so he’s free from closing time. The rest of the week he’s in sole charge, apart from the help he gets during the day, which is voluntary but usually plentiful. This is Tuesday, and he should be here. He may be, but if he is, he’s taking a hell of a time over making the round of the property. It’s big, but not that big.’

‘With or without him,’ said George, ‘we’re going in.’

‘That’s what I thought, so I fetched Grainger along with me.’ Grainger was the best man in the Midshire force on locks, and happened to live in Moon’s territory. ‘The telephone switchboard is in the ticket-office, we’re going to need that, and of course the office is locked. Even if Stubbs is off with the keys to everything in his pocket, there should be a second set in there somewhere. Has he got your authority to break in?’

‘As fast as possible,’ said George without hesitation, and led the way. Authorisation could be legalised afterwards.

‘History repeats itself,’ murmured Toby, following, and shook his shoulders to dislodge a foreboding that was not so easy to jettison. ‘Well,
I
got out again all right!’

Bossie was relieved but vaguely disquieted when he tried the door at the corner of the northern walk, to find that, like the gate, it was still unlocked. But after all, there was nothing here to steal, nothing profitable even from the point of view of an antique dealer, except the tiles in the flooring, and it was doubtful if they carried a great commercial value. Dispersed from their proper site, they were just moderately-priced antiquarian junk.
In situ
they were treasure. And nobody was going to bring a fleet of pantechnicons and remove the stable block en masse.

Once inside, he eased the latch softly back into its cradle, and stood for a moment in the vast darkness, sensible of the shape it took, feeling his hair erected by the soaring of the timbered roof, and his vision channelled into the form of its noble length, closed in on either side, on his left by the eighteenth-century brickwork with its high, small windows that hardly showed at all for relief against the dark, on his right by the huge, decrepit stone wall that had survived at least six hundred years. Under that wall his membrane had been found, lying among the growth of grass and weeds nurtured on years of rubble, dust and moisture. And he was sure now that it had been one among many, very many, and could not by any accident have been winnowed far enough away from its fellows to be discovered in absolute solitude. And nobody else had even made similar finds here, or they would have been written up for everybody to read, and photographed and made much of. No, the secret was here, somewhere, however obscurely hidden. He was certain.

When he had stood still long enough to have his breathing under control, and to be sure he was really alone, he switched on his torch. The long vista of the north walk opened before him, the ancient vaulting gone, the complex timbering of the later roof making a shadowy pattern overhead. The stones of the north wall showed wonderfully jagged and crude in the cross-light, and at their foot the earth flooring, swept bare and trodden hard, looked the least likely hiding-place for secrets that he could imagine. He walked its length, searching the angle of floor with wall, and could see no possible place where anything could have been hidden from those who had done this thorough job of cleaning the ground.

Bossie drew back and viewed the whole. There was a quantity of stuff, old wood, fragments of carved, weathered stone retrieved from various places about the site, rope and twine, all piled in the far corner, together with a handcart and some brushes and brooms. Nothing there to conceal treasure, though they might, if necessary, conceal somebody who wanted to be invisible here. Then there was the area of relaid paving tiles, inside the ropes, and a heap of excavated tiles, some whole, some broken, waiting to be assembled into the pattern, after due repairs.

And outside everything, wherever he turned the tiny beam of his torch, the huge, impersonal darkness, distorted by enormous shadows that dwarfed the little light, and a smell of disturbed earth, like a cemetery. It was getting distinctly chilly, too, he felt himself shivering.

Well, if there had been anything concealed in the upper layers here, in the centre, where they were working on the tiling, they would certainly have found it. No need to disturb anything there. All that remained was the wall itself, and the flooring under it, which was certainly where Toby had found his leaf, even if it didn’t look very promising now.

He was working his way methodically along the rim of the roped-off area, where the earth flooring was excavated to a depth of about three inches, and the raw edges at least offered a possibility that a corner of parchment might show among the soil and gravel, when a sudden small sound caused the hair to rise on the nape of his neck, and sent him diving into the corner behind the hand-cart, his torch hastily extinguished. The grate of a key in the lock might have alerted him more rapidly, but the door was not locked, and what he heard was the neat click of the latch yielding, and without even a full second in between, the door swung silently open. It was new, light and noiseless; it ought to have been heavy, creaky and slow, to give him time to make the best of his inadequate cover. But if this was simply a routine round, there would be the merest flick of a torch round the interior, and then the warden would move on, satisfied.

Bossie had miscalculated, owing to inadequate data. The careful restorers of the paving, salvaging broken tiles from under layers of soil, matching and repairing and patiently assembling the fours into their patterns of coiled leaves and tendrils, had sometimes worked both early and late, and fitted up for their needs a highly efficient temporary lighting system, which was not used during show hours. Of all the things to which Bossie was blind, the marvels of technical efficiency came at the head of the list. Probably Ginger could have told him the place was wired for a perfect blaze of light, but Bossie had noticed nothing, neither the switch by the door nor the dangling bulbs all along the north walk. And the flood of light that suddenly sprang up overhead almost flattened him into the floor with its unexpected force. Crude white light that threaded through the wheels of the handcart, probed behind the stacked wood, and reduced the derelict stones to unhelpful pebbles. Light crashed down on his head and pressed him to his knees, but he knew at once that if this person in the doorway came on into the room, he could not possibly avoid being seen. His heart stopped for one frightful instant, and then sturdily picked up its beat. Being scared was no protection whatever, he might as well go on breathing, after all. There could be credible, if not respectable, reasons for being here at this hour.

‘Well, well!’ said a familiar voice, mild, amused, even teasing. ‘This is really excess of enthusiasm. I gathered you were a devotee, but don’t you think this is carrying it to absurd lengths? Oh, do come on out of there! You might as well, I can see you perfectly, and I don’t get one like you every trip. I’ve recognised you already, and you don’t look at all comfortable’

Bossie wasn’t comfortable, and besides, he had recognised the intruding voice as quickly as its possessor had recognised him, and the relief was enormous. Not the warden, after all, but the nice guide who had been so patient and accommodating in showing them round in the afternoon. In any case, Bossie’s dignity was affronted at crouching behind a handcart in full view of an eye-witness. He rose to his full unimpressive height, and came out from behind his barricade. The big, fair-haired, amiable young man grinned at him from just within the doorway, and made no intimidating move to approach nearer.

‘Well, now I’ve seen everything! I’ve known kids driven in here in a state of mutiny, but I’ve never before known one come back for more out of hours. You’ve made my day. But I shudder to think what you’re laying up for yourself. Do you realise it’s getting on for ten? Your parents must be worried sick about you. Whatever possessed you to hide away in here like this?’

He sounded just as he had sounded in the afternoon, patient, tolerant and amused, and that gave him every right to take the mickey, in his airy way. Bossie drew a little nearer, cautiously but placatingly.

‘I wasn’t going to steal anything, or do any damage. But did you know there are stories that the last prior buried the church plate and treasures somewhere here? I wanted to try and find them, make some fabulous discovery and get to be famous. But if I’d found anything, I should have told!’

‘I’m sure you would,’ agreed the guide with amusement, and studying him very attentively. ‘Well, that’s all very nice, I dare say, and no doubt places like this ought to be bulging with buried treasure all over the shop. But we’ve exhausted the possibilities in this part, you know, and you are rather wasting your time. As well as frightening your folks half to death, I should think. And just as well for you it happens to be me making the rounds tonight, and not the warden, he’d have you frog-marched up to the police station in no time flat. You be thankful he wanted to go out tonight, and I volunteered to do the locking up for him.’

‘Oh, I am!’ agreed Bossie fervently. ‘But I didn’t mean to do anything wrong, really, and I didn’t realise it was as late as all that.’

‘I should think not! Do you realise you could have got yourself locked in here overnight? That would have scared them even worse, and I don’t suppose you’d have been feeling quite so cocky yourself when it got really cold. So now hadn’t you better tell me where you live, and let me drive you safely home? And don’t blame me if you get your behind tanned when you get there!’

That was when Bossie made his great mistake, and after that there was no salvaging it. Obviously he couldn’t let himself be driven home, having accounted for a night’s absence, or in the stress of the moment he had no time to realise that that would now have been his safest and sanest course, however many awkward explanations it might involve. He never gave up his enterprises easily; and before he had time to think he heard himself politely declining this fair offer.

‘That’s awfully kind of you, really, but you see I’m staying with some friends for tonight, here in Mottisham. So my people won’t be worrying about me. But thank you, all the same. It’s only five minutes’ walk.’

There was a brief and deep silence. The guide did not move from his position with his back against the door, and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully upon the small, stolid figure before him, though he continued to smile and speak with amused resignation.

‘It is, is it? And home, I suppose, is somewhere a good deal further away. But surely
somebody
must be wanting to know where you’re prowling at ten o’clock at night? What sort of friends do your parents have, if they let you run wild to this hour?’

Bossie floundered in deeper in his haste, and felt the morass of all too detectable fibs tugging at his feet, but it was too late to draw back. ‘Oh, they weren’t expecting me very early, because I told them I should be coming late from my music lesson.’

‘About three hours late, I imagine,’ said the young man drily.

He ought to have known. He could see all the flaws himself. A twelve-year-old’s music lesson would be arranged for a civilised hour like half past six or seven. He’d given himself away completely. It wouldn’t take a genius to conclude that he was lying about his night’s lodging, and it wasn’t a long step from that to concluding positively that he had so played off the two ends against each other as to leave his parents convinced he was safe with a known host in Mottisham, while the supposed host had no notion whatever that he was anywhere but in his own bed at home. In short, nobody knew where he was, or what he was doing…

The fair young man heaved a philosophical sigh, smiled at him even more benevolently, and reaching a hand into his pocket, drew out a bunch of keys, and selected the right one with a flick of long fingers. Silently he closed the door, and moving aside for the first time, turned the key, and locked them in together.

Perhaps the act in itself would have been enough, but it was what the act revealed that hit Bossie like a lightning-stroke. For a moment he stopped breathing, frozen with shock. The flooding light that had blazed down on them all this while now fell for the first time directly on the right hand that was so deliberately turning the key. and on the third finger of that hand was a large, flattish seal-ring made from a black stone like an onyx or a very dark moss agate. He had seen just that motion and just that flat flash from the polished blackness once before, and had failed to remember and identify it. Among the tangle of tombs under the church tower that same hand, wearing the same ring, had turned up Rainbow’s limp head to the light of a torch No other part of the nocturnal marauder had been lit like that. Now the turn of the long muscular hand echoed the same gesture, and memory recovered from the paralysis of shock. He didn’t know who this man was, but he knew all too well
what
he was. He was Rainbow’s murderer.

And he, Bossie, was locked in with him, and like a fool he had brought it on himself. If only he’d jumped at the offer to drive him home, maybe snivelled a little and repented of his adventure, this man might have been reassured that he knew nothing, had nothing to tell, could never identify him; and he might have done just what he had offered, driven him home and stopped worrying about him. Which would have been his mistake. But now Bossie was the one who’d made the mistake. There was only one thing he hadn’t betrayed, and that was that all five of his companions of the afternoon knew very well where he was, and could tell the police as soon as it dawned on somebody that something was wrong. If he dropped that out now, casually, or deliberately and with obvious intent, would he be believed? And would it make any difference now? No, it was too late. If he’d blabbed all that like a scared kid right at the beginning, it might have worked, his captor might have decided it was too dangerous to make away with him, and returned to his role of tolerant Dutch-uncle. Not now! He’d watched the door being closed, and the murderer had watched his face as he took in the significance of the act. It would take more than a sudden story of five potential witnesses to undo that. Even if he was believed, it would only hasten whatever was going to happen, to get him out of the way at once, and Bossie was pretty sure he was in no hurry to get on with it.

Which left only the delaying tactics of gormless, childish stupidity, innocence almost incredible. Notice nothing, admit nothing, remain trustingly ingenuous, not to say imbecile.

He shuffled his feet uneasily, and crossed his eyes, as he could do at will, though he never knew when he did it involuntarily. ‘I’m sorry, it wasn’t really true, that stuff I told you. I shouldn’t have tried to fool my parents like that. Maybe I ought to go home, after all. I only wanted to explore… I did tell them I was going to stay with Philip Mason, I’ve often done it before, so they won’t be anxious. But it wasn’t right, was it? You know, I’m ever so glad you came. I don’t really like this place, after all, not now it’s dark…’ Bossie could raise a tear just as nimbly as he could raise a fist, and produced a heart-rending contortion of a face never notable for beauty, as well as a genuine trickle down his cheek. And all the while he knew it wasn’t any good. His brains did show so plainly!