A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

CHAPTER IV

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

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DETECTIVE-SERGEANT HEWITT was pure Maymouth from his boots to his sober utilitarian hair-cut, a stocky, square man of middle age with a vaguely sad countenance, who used few words, but in some curious fashion turned other people voluble. In taking his last look round the Treverra vault before they locked it and left it to its ravished quietness, he said nothing at all. Only his solemn eyes lingered thoughtfully along the propped edge of the stone lid, with its specks of pallor where the iron had bitten into the stone; and Tim, following their reproachful survey, said apologetically: “I know, it’s a pity we had to use crowbars and foul up the possible traces. But we couldn’t possibly have known—” The grieved gaze moved lower, to the trampled patterns in the dust of the floor, and five pairs of feet did their best to appear smaller. “I’m afraid we have rather driven the herds over everything,” said Simon ruefully. “It was dead smooth when we came in, though—just a blown layer of sand, as usual.”

“Yes, well—if you gentlemen will go along with Snaith to the police station, right away, we’d like to have statements from all of you. Your individual observations may help us.” He didn’t sound hopeful, but he probably never did. “Mr. Felse, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to have you along with me for a call on the way. We’ll join the others in half an hour or so.”

“Glad to, if I can be any help,” said George.

“And I’ll take the key, Mr. Towne.” Simon surrendered it, and watched it turned in the great lock, with a soundless efficiency which did not fail to register with the Detective-Sergeant. “I see you’ve been preparing for to-day. This is the key from the Place?”

“Yes, the only one, as far as I know. I’ve had it three days now. Miss Rachel gave it to me when I wanted to bring down some of the gear”

“Yes, I gathered from what you said just now that you’d been in the vault before to-day. How often?”

“Twice. On Wednesday morning—the Vicar was with me that time—we came down to clear the steps and clean and oil the lock, and tried the key to be sure how it worked. But we didn’t go farther then than just inside the doorway.” And that, thought George, was probably when Simon spotted the illicit stores there, hence his discreet withdrawal, and the public declaration of his programme that evening. Nor had he actually said that they had in fact cleaned and oiled the lock, merely that they had come here with that intention. This job at least had proved unnecessary. “Then I came in again yesterday afternoon, and dumped those sheets of felt.” To make sure that the hint had been taken?

“Notice anything at all different then? Or when you came in to-day?”

Simon considered. “Not that I recollect.”

“You didn’t sweep the floor clean of sand?”

“No. Never occurred to me, even if I’d had a broom. I was surprised how dry and clean it was in here, only a blown layer of sand. Just like now—except for our hoof-marks, of course,” said Simon ruefully.

“Ah, well, you’ll have time to think it over. Mr. Felse and I will be with you shortly.”

They climbed the narrow steps on which the sand whisked softly like blown spray, and closed the latchless gate upon the solitude so bewilderingly void of Treverra, and so over-populated with others who had no business there. The Land-Rover and the Porsche set off for the police station in Maymouth, Detective-Constable Snaith, son of a long line of fishermen, ensconced in George’s place beside Simon. Only when the little convoy was well away did Hewitt climb ponderously into his Morris.

“We shan’t be going far out of our way. Just along the quay to where his girl lives. I thought a detached witness might come in handy, if you don’t mind being used. I’ve known Rose since she was first at school. Being this close to a place has its drawbacks, as well as its advantages.”

“I know,” said George, thinking of his own home village of Comerford, where every face was known to him. “Trethuan’s daughter?”

“Yes, only relative, as far as I know. She’s been married a year to a decent young fellow, Jim Pollard. Fisherman, of course, they all are. Lives about three minutes’ walk from where Trethuan lived.”

“Alone, I take it? Now that the girl’s married?”

“Yes, alone. Did for himself most of the time, and Rose did the real cleaning for him. Thought I’d better see her and tell her myself.”

It should have been a daunting prospect, but though he maintained his aspect of professional and permanent discouragement, Hewitt did not, in fact, appear at all daunted. And wasn’t there, perhaps, something in that gaunt, powerful, unprepossessing corpse in Treverra’s tomb that ruled out any harrowing possibilities of family lamentation? There are people it’s almost impossible to love, however the blood may struggle to do its duty.

They drove over the neck of the Dragon, the coastal road rising to its highest point near to the hotel. A fair portion of the juvenile population of Maymouth was still deployed along the cliff paths looking towards Pentarno; no doubt armed with fruit and sandwiches, and with an organised errand-service for ice-cream. Then the road dipped again, and the slate-grey cottages of the upper town closed in upon it, backgrounds for their small, crowded flower-gardens, that blazed with every possible colour. From the steep High Street they could see the harbour below them, locked between the huge bulk of the Dragon’s Head and the crook of the mole, all the invisible streets doddering down towards it, seen only as thread-like channels between the slate roofs. Uniformly grey from this aerial view, the houses flowered into apple-blossom pinks and forget-me-not blues as the car descended, every shade of peach and primrose and pale green, foaming with window-boxes full of geraniums.

In the square, four-sided about an ugly Victorian fountain and embattled with solid shop-fronts, they saw the Porsche and the Land-Rover parked. But Hewitt drove on imperturbably, down towards the harbour, and the clusters of colour-washed houses that clung like barnacles to the rocks along the sea-front.

A row of leaning cottages, six in all, propped their backs against the outlying rocks of the Dragon, and stared out to sea over beached boats and a flurry of gulls. Each was painted its own individual shade, two different pinks, a daffodil yellow, one blue, one green, and one dazzlingly white. Hewitt parked the car on the cobbled shoulder of the quay, and led the way to the second pink house. A little horse-shoe knocker rapped on the jet-black door. The whole row looked like toys in a child’s box.

Rose Pollard opened the door. At first glance Rose looked like a round, soft, primrose-haired doll to go with the toy house, but this illusion lasted only for the fraction of a second it took her large, inquiring eyes to recognise Hewitt. The round face, as delicately- coloured as a nursery-rhyme dairy-maid’s, nevertheless had some form and character when it sharpened into awareness; and there was nothing doll-like about the small, bright flares of fear that sprang up in her eyes. Hewitt was known to everyone, as surely as he knew everyone. But why should she be frightened at the very sight of him? Or, wondered George ruefully, was it occupational naivety on his part even to ask such a question?

She mastered her face, and rather nervously invited them in. The front door gave directly into the tiny living-room, which was as neat and frilly as the exterior of the house suggested it would be. The mind behind that pretty, plaintive face was probably itself furnished in the same innocent fashion; not much style, and no sophistication, but shining with cleanness and prettied up with pouffes, scatter cushions and net curtains. Not a very clever girl, but meant to be gay and bright; and certainly not meant to habit with things or people or thoughts that could frighten her.

“Sorry to butt in on you at dinner, Jim,” said Hewitt placidly, looking over her shoulder at the young man who rose from the table as they entered. “Just a few things I ought to ask you and Rose, if you’ve got a minute or two to give me.”

“That’s all right,” said Jim Pollard, uncoiling his tall young person awkwardly. “We’re finished, Mr. Hewitt. I was late coming in, or we’d have been all cleared away. Is there something the matter?”

He was a brown, freckled boy in a loose sweater and faded dungarees, with a face that must normally have been pleasant, good-natured and candid, but at this moment was clouded with the slight blankness and uncertainty consequent upon being visited by the police. It happens to the most law-abiding, it need mean nothing; but the barrier is instantly there, and the trouble is that there’s never any telling what’s behind it.

“Well, there’s just this matter of Mr. Trethuan’s movements,” said Hewitt with nicely calculated vagueness. “Have you seen him to-day?”

Rose said: “No!” She moved nearer to her husband, and the small, wary lights in her eyes burned paler and taller. The boy said: “No,” too, but in a mystified, patient tone, ready to wait for enlightenment. His steady frown never changed.

“Or yesterday? Well, when did you last see him, Mrs. Pollard?”

“Wednesday morning,” she said, “when I went in to clean. I usually go in Wednesdays and Saturdays and give the house a going-over. He was finishing his breakfast when I went. I only saw him for a few minutes, then he went off to work.”

“And you haven’t seen him since? You don’t know whether he came home that night?”

“Why should she?” said Jim Pollard evenly. “He’s capable, he can look after himself. Often we don’t see him for days on end.”

“Even though he only lives just round the corner in Fore Street?”

“Maybe he does, but it is round the corner, we don’t run into one another going in and out of the back doors. Thank God!” said Jim with deliberation, eyeing Hewitt darkly from under his corrugated brow.

“Now, Jim!” said Rose in a faint murmur of protest.

“Never mind: Now, Jim! Mr. Hewitt knows as well as you do there’s no love lost between your old man and me. Less I see of him, the better. I might as well say so.”

“So you might, lad,” agreed Hewitt placatingly. “Then I take it you don’t know anything about him since your missus saw him Wednesday morning?”

“No, I don’t, Mr. Hewitt. I haven’t set eyes on him since last Sunday in church. What’s he done to interest you?”

Rose shrank under her husband’s hand, and turned her head to shoot him a look of panic entreaty, but all his attention was on Hewitt, and whatever his own disquiet, he seemed to feel nothing of the urgency of hers.

“It isn’t what he’s done,” said Hewitt heavily. “I’m afraid this is going to be a bit of a shock to you, Rose, my girl. Your father was found this morning by Mr. Towne and the others, when they went to open the Treverra vault—”

Her soft, round face lost its colour in one gasp, blanched to a dull, livid pallor. Her eyes stared, enormous and sick. Her lips moved soundlessly, saying: “In the vault—?” Then her mouth shook, and she crammed half her right fist into it, like a child, and swallowed a muted cry.

“Yes, in the vault. He’s dead, Rose. I’m sorry!”

Her knees gave way under her, and Jim caught her in his arms and held her, turning her to him gently. “Now, love, don’t! Come on, now, Rose, hold up!”

She clung to him and wept, but they were not tears of any particularly poignant grief, only of excitement, and nervous tension, and—was it possible?—relief. She cried easily, freely, with no convulsive physical struggle. Even fear was submerged, or so it seemed, until Hewitt added rather woodenly: “It looks like foul play. We shall have a lot of work to do on the case before we have full information. We’ll be in close touch with you. And if you can think of anything that may help to fill in his movements in the last days, we shall be glad to have it.”

“Are you trying to tell us,” demanded Jim Pollard, scowling over his wife’s blonde head, “that old Zeb’s been murdered?”

“Yes,” said Hewitt mildly, “that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you.”

Then they were both absolutely still; and perceptibly, even while they stood motionless, they withdrew into themselves, and very carefully and gently closed the doors to shut the world and Hewitt out. Jim tightened his hold on his wife, and that was the only reaction there was to be seen in him. Rose—and how much more significant that was!—Rose drew a long, slow, infinitely cautious breath, and stopped crying on the instant. She needed her powers now for more urgent purposes.

“Well,” said Hewitt, turning the car uphill again at the corner of Fore Street, “what do you make of them?”

“Rose is frightened,” said George. “Very frightened. Her husband, as far as I can see, is merely normally cagey. When the police come around asking about one of the family, nobody’s at his most expansive. But what’s more interesting is that she was frightened before you even asked a question. And most frightened of all when you mentioned the Treverra vault, before—I think—she realised you meant he was dead.”

“Ah!” said Hewitt cryptically, but with every appearance of satisfaction with his own thoughts. “You do notice things, don’t you? I just wanted to know. Then you can’t very well have missed the broom-marks.”

“Broom-marks?” said George carefully.

“On the steps of the vault. And the floor, too. Mr. Towne didn’t have a broom down there, but somebody did. Very delicately done, but still it showed. Take another look at the corners, where none of you stepped to-day. Somebody had moved around that room, and then carefully swept it, and dusted a layer of sand over it again to wipe out the prints. Almost impossible to do it as smoothly as time and the wind do it.”

He slanted a knowing look along his shoulder at George’s wooden face.

“Ah, come off it! I’m not in the excise. It’s a murderer I’m after. I’m not interested in what a whole bunch of people were doing in there just ahead of the researchers. Murder is a solitary crime, Mr. Felse. No easy-going muddle of local brandy-runners put Trethuan in Jan Treverra’s coffin, that I’ll bet my life on. But what I am interested in—”

“Yes?” said George with respect.

“Is the key they let themselves in with. And who else may have had access to it.”

“Oh, no,” said the Vicar, emerging from deep thought, “I don’t think he had any actual enemies. Only people who’re positive enough to have friends have enemies. When you’re as glum and morose as he was, people just give up and go away.” He glanced round the circle of attentive faces in Hewitt’s office, and ruffled his untidy hair. “I don’t think he wanted or needed liking, you know. Not everyone does.”

Hewitt gave him a brief, baffled look, and returned with a sigh to his summing-up.

“Well, we’ve got him to Wednesday morning. He worked on the churchyard extension, hedge-clipping and then scything, all the morning, or at least he was at work on it when Mr. Polwhele and Mr. Towne came home to lunch after their trip down to the vault. He had his meal in the vicarage kitchen, and went back to work, and he was there when Mr. Towne left to go on to Treverra Place. Both Mr. Towne and Mr. Polwhele agree that would be about a quarter to three. Mr. Towne exchanged words with Trethuan in the churchyard as he walked through. Mr. Polwhele saw him put away his tools shortly afterwards and leave. That was nothing unusual? He arranged his own work as he pleased?”

“Yes, I never interfered unless I wanted something special. He got through everything if you left him to it. He could be awkward if you tried to give him orders.”

“So it was nothing surprising if he was missing from round the church for a couple of days or so in mid-week. He fitted in his gardening jobs for Miss Rachel as he thought best. And it looks as if he did go down to Treverra Place that same day, after he left the churchyard. Anyhow, the next we hear of him is there. About four o’clock he brought into the house a basket of plums he’d picked, told Miss Rachel he couldn’t stay longer on the job then, but he’d come in next day and get in all the plums and apricots for bottling. Then he left. She saw him start down the drive. And so far that’s the last we do know of him, until he turned up this morning in Treverra’s coffin. According to the doctor’s preliminary estimate, he was dead probably before nine o’clock, Wednesday night. Well, gentlemen, that’s how it stands. Has anyone got anything to add? No second thoughts?”

“Yes,” said Sam Shubrough, and: “Yes,” said Simon at the same moment. They looked briefly at each other, and Simon waved a hand: “After you!”

“I’ve got a key,” said Sam modestly. “One that belongs to that vault. I never bothered to mention it, because it wasn’t needed, Miss Rachel was providing the one for official use. But it’s plain now that you need to know about all the ways there are of getting in there, since somebody did get in and dump a body. So that’s it. It’s the only other key I know of, and I’ve got it. I’ll turn it in if you want to have it in your own hands.”

Hewitt closed his notebook with a movement of terrible forbearance. “Oh, you have a key. Well, that’s helpful, at any rate. Would you mind telling us how you got it in the first place?”

“Not a bit. When I was a kid, St. Nectan’s was our favourite playground. I found the key, once when we dug our way into the church for some game or other. It was down in the sand, under a nail on the wall, where I take it it used to hang. The wire on the bow was frayed through. I brought it home and cleaned it up, and it didn’t take me long to find out it fitted the Treverra vault. We were a bit scared of going in,” said Sam, smiling broadly under cover of his whiskers, “but sometimes we did. I’ve had the key ever since. It’s in a bunch on a nail in my shed right now.”

“Where, I take it, anyone could get at it? Do you keep the shed locked, even?”

“No, there’s nothing special in it, and anyhow, we don’t lock things, you know that. So I suppose anyone could get at it. But he’d have to know it was there, or else have an extraordinary stroke of luck, happening on it and finding out where it fitted. Do you want me to turn it in? I’ll go and get it right now, if you’ve finished with me for the moment.”

“If you’ll be so good.” And there were not now, and there never would be hereafter, any awkward questions about how, and how often, that key had been used. Hewitt was after a murderer, he was not going to be side-tracked. Sam rose and left the conference with only one bright, backward glance in Simon’s direction.

“Now, Mr. Towne, you were going to add something, too?”

“Yes, I was. I didn’t think much of it at the time—I don’t now, for that matter—but you know all the talk there was when I first let it get round that I meant to open the Treverra tomb? A lot of people went off at half-cock, as usual, about the attempt being irreverent and blasphemous, about how a curse would fall on us, and so on. You must have heard it. Then when we made it known that it was a serious project, and the bishop had given permission, and Miss Rachel was positively egging us on, then all the fuss died down. All but this chap Trethuan. Well, of course, he was the verger, and I made allowances for certain prejudices, but he did begin to be a bit of a nuisance. He took every occasion he could to buttonhole me and try to persuade me to drop it. At first he just denounced it as ungodly, and said there’d be a judgment if we went ahead. Then he began to get threatening. I listened politely at first and made soothing noises, but I got tired of it finally and gave him the brush-off. But he didn’t give up. He got more urgent.”

“And was that what he spoke to you about on Wednesday,” asked Hewitt, “when you came away from the vicarage?”

“It was all he ever spoke to me about. He saw me coming through the churchyard, and he came and stood right in the path, blocking the way, with the scythe in his hand. Something between Father Time and Holbein’s ‘Death’,” said Simon wryly, “that long, bony man with his lantern face, clutching a scythe and pronouncing doom.”

“Did he actually threaten you?”

“Physical threats? Not exactly. Just hints that I should regret it if I went ahead. But he did seem desperately disturbed about the whole thing, as if it was a matter of life and death to him.”

“And what did you say to him?”

“Told him to do his worst, of course. Bring on your lightnings, I said, and pushed past him and left him standing there.”

“By the Vicar’s account,” said Hewitt sharply, “he didn’t stand there long. He didn’t, by any chance, follow you to Treverra Place? He turned up there shortly afterwards.”

“If he did, I never looked back to see. I didn’t see him at the Place, either, I didn’t know he was there. I spent the next hour or so with Miss Rachel, sitting talking in the garden. So it must have been after I left that he took his plums into the house and talked to her. I left around four o’clock, I suppose.”

“You didn’t say anything about Trethuan’s queer behaviour to the old lady?”

“No, why should I? Oh, because it was her pet project—no, I didn’t. I’d forgotten all about him by then, and anyhow, why bother Miss Rachel with it? We weren’t even talking about Treverra that day, only about personal things.”

“And after you left?”

“I hadn’t brought the car out that day. I walked down into Maymouth for some cigarettes, and then took my time walking back over the Dragon’s neck on my way home to Pentarno to tea. And that’s when I came upon George’s boy and our Paddy, down on the Pentarno beach. I saw them from the road and ran down to them. Dominic had just hauled Paddy out of the sea. And that reminds me,” he said, stricken, “of why he said he went out so far. He said he’d seen a man in the sea.”

“A man in the sea?” Hewitt’s head jerked up smartly at that. “This is the first I’ve heard of any man in the sea.”

“We didn’t believe there ever was one. But, my God, now I’m beginning to wonder. It’s like this, you see. There were these two boys, and it seemed Dominic had seen Paddy swimming dangerously far out off the point, and felt he ought to go and bring him in. But when he did, Paddy up and swore he thought he’d seen a body going out with the tide, and was trying to reach him. Dom and I went in again to see if we could see anything of him, but never a sign. Neither of us thought there was anything in it. But now—if Trethuan really drowned in the sea, as it seems he probably did—”

“About what time would that be?”

“Past five, maybe as late as half past, or even a little later. Could it have been? As early as that?”

“And only young Paddy actually claims he saw anything?”

“Even he wasn’t positive. But he was worried. I promised I’d notify the coastguard, just to satisfy him, and I clean forgot. Not believing in it, you see, and then there was no report of anyone missing. I wish now I’d taken it more seriously.”

Hewitt looked at Tim. “We’d better get hold of your boy, Mr. Rossall, and let him tell his own story. There may be nothing in it, but we can’t afford to miss anything.”

“I’ll call him and tell him to bike over here. He’ll come like a bird.”

“Do. And maybe we’d better get your boy, too, Mr. Felse. He was on the scene before Mr. Towne arrived, there just may be something he can tell us.” He handed the telephone across his desk, and Tim dialled his own number.

And thus began the great hunt for Paddy Rossall.

“No, he isn’t,” said Phil. “He didn’t come home to lunch. I took it for granted he’d sneaked round to the dunes to watch your operations from a distance, since you wouldn’t let him in on the ground floor. Maybe he cadged a lunch with Aunt Rachel. Try there. I’m waiting for those apricots, the monkey!” She added at the last moment, with the first faint and distant hint of anxiety in her voice: “Call me back if you find him, Tim, won’t you?”

“No, he isn’t,” said Miss Rachel, with some asperity because of her own irrepressible conscience. “Tamsin took a snack out to him about half past eleven, and he’d already filled his basket and gone. Naturally I took it he’d taken them home to Phil. Oh—and he hasn’t been near the church, either? He’d want to keep out of sight, of course. Well, don’t fuss over him, Tim, that’s fatal. He’ll come home when he’s hungry.”

She replaced the receiver with unnecessary violence, and found Tamsin studying her very narrowly across the desk.

“I gather Paddy didn’t go home.”

“No, he didn’t. You said yourself where he’d most likely be,” snapped Miss Rachel.

“I know I did, but it seems he isn’t. And I didn’t know, when I published my estimate, what you’d been saying to him—did I?”

“You still don’t,” pointed out Miss Rachel, all the more maliciously for the alarm she couldn’t quite allay, and wouldn’t acknowledge. “He’ll come home when he’s got everyone nicely worried, that’s what he’s after. I’m not going to fall for that, if you’re stupid enough to buy it. Children are born blackmailers.”

He was perfectly all right, of course. He was simply hiding somewhere and sulking, and gloating over the uneasiness he was causing everyone. Well, it wasn’t going to work. He’d run away once, as a very small boy—like many another before him, in dudgeon over some fancied injustice. But he’d come home fast enough when it began to rain. Children are realists; they know which side their bread’s buttered.

“No, he isn’t,” said Dominic, surprised. “Have you got Dad there? No, not to worry, only we heard the rumours that are running round, and we couldn’t help wondering. But we haven’t seen anything of Paddy. Yes, of course I’ll come, like a shot. Well, I’ve been out there on the Head part of the morning, it is like a grandstand, but I haven’t seen hide or hair of Paddy. Look, suppose I scout round now, before I come down, and see if I can find out anything? No, there’s hardly anybody hanging about round the church now, only a handful of people who were late coming, but I’ll have a look there, too. Sure, I’ll be down as soon as I can make it.”

“He isn’t anywhere,” said Tim, banging down the receiver for the tenth time. Dominic was already with them by then, with a negative report and a curiosity that positively hurt him, though he was containing it manfully. “That’s all his closest friends crossed off. And he hasn’t had anything to eat! I don’t like it.”

Hewitt didn’t like it, either. His solid face, conditioned to the suppression of all feeling except the deceptive pessimism he used for business purposes, was letting anxiety through like a slow leak.

“He wouldn’t go off anywhere out of town without telling anyone. He isn’t irresponsible. It isn’t that he’d do anything harebrained. But anyone can have an accident.”

“I’m wondering,” said Hewitt heavily, “if he saw something else, when he saw—or thought he saw—that body in the water. Maybe without at all realising the significance of what he was seeing. I’m wondering if he saw someone else, say up on the Head above the rocks, just at the crucial moment. Or whether somebody who was up there may think Paddy saw him, even if he didn’t.”

“You don’t think he could be in danger?” asked Tim, shaken and pale.

“I’d have said no, up to this noon. But now it’s all over this town that Trethuan’s body has turned up, and the hunt’s on. Whoever killed him will be pretty desperate now to remove anyone who may—even may—have noticed and recognised him, and may blurt out to the police what he knows.”

“Then we’ve got to find Paddy, quickly. My God, if anything happened to him—”

“Nothing will happen to him,” protested Simon strongly. “He’ll turn up soon, safe and sound, and with a perfectly simple explanation, you see if he doesn’t.”

But Hewitt was already on his feet, and reaching for the telephone. “I’d rather not wait, Mr. Towne. What was he wearing this morning? Oh, Blakey, I want every man we can spare, we’ve got a full-scale hunt on our hands. We’ve lost a boy—young Paddy Rossall, most of our fellows will know him on sight. Missing with a bike, since this morning. Yes, we need everybody.”

“Well, if it’s like that, you’ve got a handful of volunteers right here,” said Simon, solid and calm at Tim’s shoulder. “You’re the boss, where do we start?”

Tamsin turned from her uneasy pacing along the range of the library windows, and marched through the doorway into Miss Rachel’s sitting-room. The old lady looked up with a face resolutely complacent, and told herself for the twentieth time that day that young people nowadays had no stamina. No wonder all modern children were spoiled.

“They still haven’t found him,” said Tamsin. “I’m sick of this, I’m going down to help look for him.”

“You’re going to do nothing of the sort. Don’t be foolish. His parents are bad enough, there’s no need for you to start. The boy is where he went of his own will, you may be absolutely sure, and he’ll turn up when it suits him. When he’s demoralised everybody so much that he needn’t fear reprisals. Not before!”

“You,” said Tamsin forcefully, “are a heartless old woman, that’s what you are. I wish you’d tell me what you did to him this morning. I know there’s something.”

“What I did to him, indeed! Don’t be impertinent! I’m the old woman who pays your salary, at any rate,” said Miss Rachel tartly, because no matter how firmly she held the door, the demons were getting through it. “You’d better remember that, miss. I hate dining alone, and you know it. And I haven’t had my game of chess. So stop being melodramatic, and get the board.”

“You’ll have to make do with patience,” said Tamsin. “I shan’t be here.”

Miss Rachel called after her towards the door, in high indignation. “If you go, you needn’t bother to come back.”

“Good-bye, then,” said Tamsin pleasantly, and closed the door after her without even a slam.

Miss Rachel, left alone, was astonished and annoyed to find herself crying.