The Tiger In the Smoke (37 page)

‘I
said
you were lucky.' Her voice sounded joyful, like a child's.

‘I am lucky,' he said, and struck.

The fang of plaster and the bright steel blade split together and together fell to join the other débris.

‘Oh!' She was concerned at his loss. ‘I'm so sorry.'

He did not hear her. He was listening to the rhythm of petrol engines, still too far away to be anything but an undercurrent to the breeze blowing up from the valley. He flicked the useless shaft over his shoulder and caught the bundle with both hands.

‘Take care, oh, please take care! It's very, very delicate.'

She bent forward to help him and he permitted it, because he knew the thing must surely be too heavy for him to lift alone. Together they set it down softly on the moss-padded stones.

The roar of an aeroplane engine, heavier than the one belonging to the little silver scout of earlier in the afternoon, swooped down through all the other noises which were converging on the ice-house. Its proud clamour as it began to circle over the smooth pasture on the cliff top drowned the revving engines in the valley and the shouting from the sea. Neither of the two in the house in the garden heard it at all. The stiffened blankets round the bundle had rotted and they fell away easily from the main structure, which lay solid and uncompromising before them.

It was a wooden chest hollowed from a section of a single elm bole, white and seared with age and worm but hooped like a barrel with iron. For a moment its impregnability was too much for the man and his hands flickered over the gnarled surface with awful helplessness.

‘It opens here. Look, there's a hinge and a catch.' Her voice reached him without any personality, as if it were the voice of the Science itself, and in the same unreal way he saw her stoop across the box and heard the gentle whine of the dry hinges.

The rounded lid fell back, disclosing a lining of fine embroidery and stump work on silk so old and fragile that a breath must rend and destroy it.

Inside there was a mound, covered prosaically with modern cotton-wool, pounds of it rising up absurdly like whipped cream on a cake.

Suddenly he was so frightened that his outstretched hand paused in mid-air and Meg was before him.

Very cautiously she drew back the covering and the Sainte-Odile Treasure lay regarding them with the same sweet innocent solemnity with which it had regarded all the cruelties, the bawdinesses, and the unconquerable hope of six hundred years.

It was a Virgin and Child in ivory, fourteenth-century work, and carved out of a single curving tusk so that the main figure bent slightly as if the better to support its gentle load.

It was not quite the twin of its more famous sister at Villeneuve lès-Avignon. That exquisite work of art has been damaged and there is a strange sense of pain, as well as a trace of Oriental over-subtlety, in some of its detail. But this, the unknown master's other surviving work, was perfect and without blemish. It was a later product by a man who, though still a prisoner in a strange land, had known the mercy of his inspiration. The work's serenity flowed up naturally from the breath-taking drapery at knee and hem to the medieval face, not quite a saint's nor yet a child's.

For a full minute the two stared at it in a silence which nothing could penetrate. Meg sank down on her heels in the dust and her eyes grew slowly wider and wider until the tears formed in them. It was the time-honoured reaction, the Sacred Mystery which had given the treasure its name. Honest women wept when they saw it first. It was a phenomenon which had been noticed during eighteen generations.

As the drop fell on her hand she started, coloured, and turned apologetically to the man who had helped her.

‘I didn't expect it,' she said huskily. ‘I didn't expect anything like it. It must be the most beautiful thing in the world.'

He did not move and she was spared the sight of his face.

It was typical of him that in that moment of disaster Havoc remained realistic, as it was his pride to be. He was a modern. He kept his feet on the ground. He had inherited at least that much grace from civilization's hard-won store. He made no attempt to humanize his Science of Luck and so to credit it with cruelty or deliberated deception. The self-discipline which had rendered him capable of discerning the reality at all had made that mental escape impossible.

He saw the position immediately and with perfect clarity. The mistake was his own. The Science of Luck was an impersonal force, vast as the slipstream of the planets, relentless as a river winding down a hill. He had realized that from the beginning. That was why Avril had frightened him so when he had appeared to say the same thing. He was sorry to have had to put the old chap out before he could part up with a bit more information. He had no comforting illusions. The only human, and therefore blameable, element in this whole catastrophic mistake was himself.

As he crouched by the open box his body seemed to contract and grow smaller as a corpse does when the life leaves it.

There was no other mystery about the Treasure save the little miracle which it had already performed when Meg had wept. The figure filled each crevice of the ancient case, which had been hewn to fit it. There was no space left for a secret cache of jewels or other lesser trove. All there was lay before him, open to his hand.

Overhead, the pilot of the police plane shut off his engine and prepared to land. Where the road forked eastward a car full of men in uniform hooted violently at the Talbot which had passed it on the corner.

Havoc scrambled to his feet and swayed over the girl.

‘What will it fetch?' He was clutching at a straw, as he knew better than anybody. Even supposing the wretched thing could be moved without busting, then what was it? A few shillings' worth of junk.

Her reply only just reached him.

‘Who could possibly buy it?'

That was the answer. He could hear any of the dealers giving him that one. He let a fantasy which he knew was moonshine creep into his mind. Didn't they hide things in images in the old days? Perhaps there was something worth having buried inside it.

‘I'll smash it,' he said aloud.

He saw her swift upward glance in which there was no fear, only a deepening of the concern which had so infuriated him earlier. Then, very smoothly and with much more certainty than he possessed himself over his movements, she closed the lid of the chest and quite calmly sat down upon it.

‘You're ill,' she said, and the authority in her voice was frightening because she sounded so strong, like a nurse or someone long ago. ‘You listen to me. You may not know it, but you're out on your feet. You've helped me and I'm very grateful to you and I'm going to pay you back. I feel guilty because now I look at you I don't think I ought to have let you exhaust yourself.'

He found he could only just see her. She looked tall and quiet and the power in her was greater than his power because he was so tired.

‘You've broken your knife, too,' she was saying, not realizing how it sounded. ‘Anyway, let me square up with you for that.'

He still stood before her, unaware that he was not terrible. He could see her bag and guessed that it contained at most a few thousand francs. There was her coat, of course, which looked all right if he only had somewhere handy to flog it. Her hands were so covered with the plaster that he could not see if her ring, and she only wore one, was any good or imitation.

He shook his head and motioned to her to move. He did not want to have to touch her, because he needed all the strength he possessed and time was short. All the same he thought he would smash the doll. There might be something in it and it would be a satisfaction anyhow. The girl was still sitting there like a fool, and he let her have it.

‘Get up!'

She seemed to be much farther from him than he had thought, for the blow missed her entirely and all but overbalanced him. Her sudden laughter was the most terrible sound he had ever heard, for he knew what she was going to say a fraction of a second before he heard the words.

‘You look like the little boy next door, Johnny Cash, who took my toy theatre and tore it up to get the glitter out of it, and got nothing, poor darling, but old bits of paper and an awful row. Do lie down. Then you'll feel better.'

Old bits of paper, yellow and red and thick tinny gold, lying on the coalshed floor. A cardboard horse on which the colours were running. His best shirt covered with dye. And outside the locked door, Nemesis thundering on the boards. It was not even a new mistake. He had made it before.

He turned from her blindly, shambled across the floor, and staggered out into the airless garden, yellow and overgrown and reeking with its strange bitter smell.

Now the whole hillside was alive with noise, and from down on the rocks hoarse exclamations floated up as men, whose very tongue sounds excited to Anglo-Saxon ears, fished for a pallid body in shallow water.

The man who fled lurched against the door into the courtyard. It did not give becaus it opened the other way, and that was lucky for him. He heard a footstep on the stones within and had just time to drop down behind a dark bush beside the post before the door swung inwards and Luke, followed by his opposite number from the
Sûreté
, came charging through on his way to the ice-house.

At the same moment the Talbot and a police car raced each other into the yard.

Havoc edged a step backwards, missing his footing, and rolled over into a ditch which had been completely hidden by the long grasses. His luck was persisting. It had never failed him since he had found its key. Where he directed, so it led him safely.

It was soft and cool in the ditch and he could have slept where he lay, but he resisted the temptation and crawled on a foot or so to find that an old conduit pipe, quite large enough to take his emaciated body, passed under the wall and out on to the open hilltop.

As he emerged, lifting his head wearily amid the weeds, he discovered that the cover continued. He was in a disused waterway, a deep narrow fold in the open plain with the house to his left. He could stand in it, even, without his head showing above the dry grass on its edges.

Behind him the noise and commotion, the shouting and the signals from cliff to beach, were all receding, and as he stumbled painfully on they grew fainter.

He could not tell where he was going and the curve in the hollow was so gradual that he was never aware of it. He moved blindly and emptily, asking no questions, going nowhere save away.

The ditch wound round towards the cliff edge where the coast was deeply indented, as if the sea had one day taken a single bite out of the rocky wall. The tiny bay thus made was now almost three parts of a circle, and, long before, falling water draining off the land had worn deep sides to a pool two hundred feet below.

Havoc paused. The great beam which had been let into the bank on either side to save any unfortunate animal swept away by the rains supported him at breast height, and he hung there for some minutes looking down.

Beyond the bay the sea was restless, scarred by long shadows and pitted with bright flecks where the last of the winter sun had caught it. But the pool was quiet and very still.

It looked dark. A man could creep in there and sleep soft and long.

It seemed to him that he had no decision to make and, now that he knew himself to be fallible, no one to question. Presently he let his feet slide gently forward. The body was never found.

THE END

‘Don't start reading these books unless you are confident that you can handle addiction'
Independent

Finding himself the victim of a botched kidnapping attempt, Val Gyrth suspects that he might be in a spot of trouble. Unexpected news to him – but not to the mysterious Mr Campion, who reveals that the ancient Chalice entrusted to Val's family is being targeted by a ruthless ring of thieves.

Fleeing London for the supposed safety of Suffolk, Val and Campion come face to face with events of a perilous and puzzling nature – Campion might be accustomed to outwitting criminal minds, but can he foil supernatural forces?

‘One of the finest golden age crime novelists'
Sunday Telegraph