A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

CHAPTER VI

SATURDAY MORNING

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PHIL LOOKED IN at Paddy’s door as soon as she was up on Saturday morning. The early sunlight came in softened and dimmed through the drawn curtains, and the boy lay curled comfortably, with cheek and nose burrowed into his pillow, fast asleep. She looked at him with her love like a warm, golden weight in her, and was drawing back silently when a faint movement in the shadows of one corner arrested her.

Simon was sitting in a chintz-covered chair, drawn back where the light could not reach him. He was looking at her by the time she saw him; but she knew very well that until that moment he had been watching Paddy’s sleep. He looked as if he had been there half the night. Maybe he had. He had his own key, and she hadn’t heard him come in.

Only a few days ago she would have stiffened in jealousy and suspicion, willing him away, and stared her orders unmistakably. Now she stood looking at him thoughtfully and calmly, and in her heart she was sorry for him. It was the first time she had ever achieved that. This morning she was sorry for everybody who wasn’t herself or Tim, and hadn’t got a son like Paddy; and sorriest of all for Simon Towne, who had had one and lacked the sense to hang on to him while he had him. She smiled, meeting his tired and illusionless eyes. He got up very quietly, as though she had warned him off, and followed her out of the room and down the stairs.

“I’ll grind the coffee,” he offered, following her into the kitchen. He was handier about the house than Tim, and quieter. She supposed widowers of long experience—nearly fifteen years now—easily might be. She began preparing breakfast. Even the solid blue and white crockery looked new, as if to-day everything began afresh. But not for Simon.

Not because she had the better of him, and knew it, but because he was a figure so much more appealing now that he was shaken and vulnerable and fit for sympathy, she had never liked him so much before. But you couldn’t alter Simon, or teach him anything, just by liking him better. He would have to learn the hard way.

“Have you been to bed?” she asked, slicing bread.

“No. I brought the Land-Rover down with Paddy’s bike aboard, and then fetched the car and went for a long ride. Then I came home and lay down for a bit, and had a bath. I hope I didn’t disturb you when I came in?”

“No, I didn’t hear you. How long have you been guarding Paddy’s sleep?” She didn’t sound either suspicious or resentful; he found that surprising, and for some reason it pricked a spring of resentment in him.

“I don’t know. A couple of hours or so. I enjoy looking at him. Do you mind?”

“No, I’m glad. I enjoy looking at him, too.” She came from the pantry with a bowl of eggs balanced on one hand, a jug of milk in the other. Simon left his grinding to take the eggs from her, and being so near, leaned impulsively and kissed her cheek, without apology or explanation. Phil smiled at him. “It’s all right, Simon. I know what happened to you, when you were afraid Paddy was gone for good. But do you know what happened to him? A fifteen-year-old bubble burst, my dear, and we’re none of us ever going to be the same again. Miss Rachel got annoyed because Paddy was cheeky to her, and because she thought he didn’t appreciate his good home as he ought. So she told him he only enjoyed it on sufferance. He knows now that he—” She couldn’t say: “He isn’t ours.” because it wouldn’t be true; it would be more monstrously untrue now than it had ever been before. “He knows we adopted him. That’s what happened to Paddy.”

Simon put the eggs down very carefully on the kitchen table, and straightened up to turn upon her the gravest face, and the least concerned for the effect it might be producing upon the outside world, that she had ever seen him wear. After a long moment of quietness he asked in a voice that was avoiding strain with some care “Did she tell him he was really mine?”

Phil smiled. He hadn’t chosen the words as a challenge or a claim, in a sense he hadn’t consciously chosen them at all, but they still indicated his implicit belief in their truth. “No, she didn’t. But she told me she could have. After all this time, why did you tell her?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I suppose I simply wanted somebody to know, just so that I could talk about him and be understood. Preferably somebody who’d feel sorry for me, to tell the whole truth. But I never meant this to happen, Phil. I suppose it’s because of what I told her that she had this thing in her mind, a stick all ready to beat him with when he offended her. I’m sorry! I never thought of anything like that.”

“I know, I’m not blaming you.”

“But since he knows so much—I don’t know that I’d feel there was anything now to stop me from telling him the rest.” He turned on the gas ring and put on the kettle with steady and leisurely movements. A fine spark of intent had kindled deep in his eyes, and that meant mischief. The faintest hint of the usual bold quirk twitched at the corner of his mouth, and again his face had a wayward acquisitiveness about it. Tamsin’s hackles had risen at sight of that debonair and much-admired face with which he pursued his dearest objectives, but it hadn’t taught him anything.

“You won’t have to bother,” said Phil. “I’ll tell him myself.”

“You?” He was surprised into a genuine laugh.

“I haven’t much alternative now, have I? You must know very well that the first thing he’s going to ask me, when he gets round to thinking about it seriously, is: Who am I? Of course I shall tell him.”

She turned and looked at him sharply, and saw exactly what she had expected to see, the sleek glow of triumph and speculation and hope warming his face into golden confidence. She closed the oven door with a crisp slam.

“Look, Simon, wake up, while there’s time. It isn’t going to do you any good, you know.”

“Isn’t it? Phil, you’re positively inviting me to see what I can do. Aren’t you afraid I’ll sneak him away from under your nose even now? Don’t you think I could?”

“I know you couldn’t,” she said steadily. “I don’t think you’d even try, if I begged you not to. But I’m not begging you—am I? I don’t have to, Simon, that’s why. You couldn’t get him away from us now whatever you did, fair or foul. You’ve had a long innings, charming the birds from the trees, and getting golden apples to fall into your lap whenever you smiled. You can’t realise, can you, that it isn’t going to last for ever? The high days are over, Simon, middle age is only just round another corner or two. You’d better start settling for what you can get, because the long holiday’s running out fast. And whatever you do, you won’t get Paddy.”

For a moment it seemed to her that his brightness had grown sharp and brittle, and his eyes were staring at something he would rather not have seen. Then they took heart and danced again.

“What will you bet me?” he said with soft deliberation.

Remembering the long years of friendship through which Tim had followed him around patiently, picking up the things Simon dropped and putting together the things Simon broke, she wondered for a moment if her motives were as pure as she would have liked. But if it was vengeful pleasure that was prompting her to invite him to his downfall, why was this moment so sad, so strangely the shadowy reverse of the serenity and joy that made this morning a portent and a prodigy? And why should she feel so much closer and kinder to him than she had ever felt before?

“I should be betting you Paddy, shouldn’t I?” she said, gently and quietly. “What more do you want?”

Paddy opened his eyes and stretched delightedly, and then remembered why everything felt and looked different to-day. Not necessarily better or worse, not yet; just different. And as if in answer to a call which had certainly never been uttered except, perhaps, in his mind, Phil was suddenly there in the room, bringing him a clean pair of slacks and a shirt from the airing cupboard.

“Good morning, mudlark! How do you feel this morning?”

He felt strange; larger than usual, more responsible, and more subdued. Big with all the things he had to think about. But beyond all question, he felt good. Good, in a state of well-being; and good, virtuous.

“I feel fine. Is it really that time? And I’ve got to go to the police station, haven’t I?” He sat up, solemn-faced, remembering.

“Mummy!” The sudden charged softness of his voice warned her what was coming, but he was longer about framing it than she had expected, and the end-product, when it emerged, was a revelation.

“Mummy, who was I?”

Her heart gave a leap of joy and triumph. She thought: Poor Simon! She laid Paddy’s clean clothes on a chair, and came and sat down on the edge of his bed. Flushed and bemused from long sleep, he faced her earnestly and trustingly, and waited for an answer. It mattered, just to the private thinking he had to do about himself; but it couldn’t affect what they had between them now.

“You know,” he said, “what I mean.”

“Yes, I know. Your mother was a very nice girl, a good friend of ours, Paddy. She was only twenty-one when she died, from some illness that came on after you were born. And her husband—your father—You know him, Paddy. You know him very well, and he’s very fond of you. You know him as Uncle Simon.”

He didn’t exclaim, his face didn’t show surprise, or consternation, or relief, or pleasure, or anything else but the same charged gravity. He accepted it, and sat digesting it.

“His wife died,” said Phil, “and left you on his hands. He was just beginning to be well-known then, and he had a contract for his first big tour. He couldn’t take a baby with him. And I’d lost one only a few months before, and the doctors said I couldn’t have another. So you mustn’t blame him too much. He loved his wife very much, and he was wretched about losing her, and wanted to get away. It wasn’t just fear of losing his big opportunity.”

Since she had invited this single combat, she felt obliged to conduct it scrupulously; and besides, one should never allow a child to contemplate the possibility that he may have failed to make himself loved. But was this a child facing her? The fluffy crest and slender neck and unformed forehead said yes; the grave eyes and something in the set of the face suggested that this juvenile image was already a little out of date.

“It doesn’t mean he didn’t love you,” said Phil firmly. But he didn’t, she thought honestly; he wasn’t a person to whom babies were quite human beings at all, and he isn’t alone in that, it’s something he couldn’t help. “Well, you’ve got to know him pretty well, this visit. He hasn’t shown any want of affection, has he?”

Paddy received the revelation in silence, and continued to ponder with an almost forbidding concentration.

“O.K., Mummy, I see. Thanks for telling me. Now we’re all straight.” He slid his legs out of bed. “I’d better get a move on, or Mr. Hewitt will be sending an escort for me. But I don’t know that I’m going to be much use to him, am I? I mean, my little trek isn’t going to tell him who knocked old Trethuan on the head and tossed him in the sea, is it?”

“That reminds me,” said Phil, glad of the distraction. “Do you know what I found in your pocket last night?” She brought the little gold com, and displayed it triumphantly in her palm.

“Oh, that!” he said, rather disappointingly. And then, as his eyes took in the design and the colour of it, which seemed to be totally unfamiliar: “Gosh, is that what it turned out to be? But it looks really something.” He took it and turned it about curiously, examining it with astonished delight.”What is it? Do you know?”

“You’re a fine one!” said Phil, amused. “First you say ‘Oh, that!’ Then you start goggling at it as if you’d never seen it before.”

“But, silly,” he said, laughing, “I never have seen it before. It was pitch dark in there, I told you, that’s why I had to give up and turn back in the end. I’ve felt it before, though.”

“You found it in this passage in the cave?”

“Yes, way along it as far as I went. I fell over a bit of rock and went down on my hands, and this thing was sticking in my palm. Well, I could tell it was a coin, but all I thought was, somebody else exploring must have had a hole in his pocket, and I was a shilling up. It looks like gold,” said Paddy disbelievingly. “Could it be?”

“I think it could, you know. Guineas and half-guineas were minted in gold, and this seems to be a Queen Anne guinea. You could show it to somebody at the museum, to make sure.”

“You mean it’s really worth a guinea?” His eyes were wide with visions of wealth, and had lost for a moment their look of solemn preoccupation.

“More, I should imagine, if it’s genuine, and I can’t think of a reason why it shouldn’t be. But it might be treasure trove, technically, we should have to find out about that.”

“I thought there’d be a catch in it.” He grinned at her cheerfully enough, still having at least the thrill of discovery. “But there might be more of them, did you think of that? Smugglers might have hidden them somewhere there.” She could feel him suddenly planning, and checking, and contemplating a barrier he might have to get round before he could proceed. Moments of crisis boil up so abruptly out of nowhere. “Mummy!”

The careful, gentle, tentative voice nerved itself, moving in on her. Here it comes, Phil, she thought, and whatever you do there mustn’t be any hesitation.

“Mummy, you don’t mind if I go back there and take another look? With a torch, of course, this time.”

It was a stiff fence for both of them. Knowing he’d frightened her half to death once, and she’d hardly had time yet to get over it, terrified of being babied, but aware that it might be hard for her to give him his head to frighten her in the same way again, he couldn’t quite manage the right easy tone. But that was something she mustn’t let him realise she had noticed.

“No, of course I don’t mind, darling. Take Daddy’s big torch, there’s a new battery in it. Don’t want to risk getting left in the dark again. Do I get a commission, if the hoard turns out to be legally yours?”

After a brief, blank instant of astonished relief and admiration, shaken to the heart at finding himself trusted without even a caution, he said gruffly: “You bet you do! We’ll go halves.”

“Low tide’s about a quarter to twelve. You’ll be able to get in any time after ten. So hurry and get up to Mr. Hewitt, and then you’ll have time enough before lunch.” Blessed reassurance, he wouldn’t risk missing his lunch, not on a day when he was happy, not for all the guineas Queen Anne ever minted.

“I’ll be careful,” he volunteered even more gruffly, and dug his toes hastily into his slippers and headed for the door.

There he checked, ears suddenly pricked, catching the unmistakable sound of Simon’s Porsche starting up in the yard. Phil saw him stiffen, and the resolute shade of thought came down again upon his face. There was a relationship still to be adjusted somehow, and it wasn’t going to be easy.

She wished she could guess what was going on in his mind, but the set of his face told her nothing. All that charm and glamour and excitement suddenly his for the claiming, and more than ready to fall into his lap—if only he would say something to give her a clue! But when he did make his one pregnant comment, it wasn’t much help to her.

“I suppose I’m more fun now,” said Paddy bafflingly, and whisked away to the bathroom.

“I’m sorry,” he was saying, three-quarters of an hour later, in Hewitt’s office overlooking the square, “I don’t seem to have been much help. But I really didn’t look up at the Dragon’s Head at all, and I didn’t see a soul until Dominic came yelling at me. It isn’t as if I’d seen anyone fall from up there, you see. I don’t even know anything accurate about times, because I ran down in my trunks, like I always do, and I didn’t have my watch. I’m sorry!”

“Well, there it is,” agreed Hewitt, no more nor less lugubrious than usual, but distinctly more loquacious, solid and fresh behind his shabby desk, with George Felse and Simon Towne in silent attendance, one on either side. “Can’t be helped, laddie. Don’t you worry about it any more.”

“And you don’t think my passage in the cave, and that guinea—if it really is a guinea?—you don’t think they’re anything to do with Treverra?”

“I didn’t say that, Paddy, my boy. I think it’s unlikely, but I didn’t say I wasn’t interested. But I’ve no time to investigate that to-day.”

“Well, is it all right if I go and explore there again myself? I haven’t got much time left, you see, I go back to school Monday.” School was the boarding-house of the best local grammar school, twelve miles inland. Its shadow cast a light cloud over the last week of his holidays, but promised escape, at least, from his present difficulties. He hadn’t once seemed to look at Simon since he balked in the office doorway on finding him there, but he hadn’t missed a single shade of expression that crossed the somewhat drawn and sombre face. He saw it tighten now, saw the quick flash of uneasy brown eyes in George’s direction.

“My mother’s given me permission,” said Paddy, with immense dignity.

“I’ve no objection, laddie,” said Hewitt heartily. “You go ahead, and good luck. Let me know if you find out where the treasure’s buried.” He saw Paddy’s eloquent eyes rest calculatingly upon the small gold coin that lay before him on the desk, and palmed and tossed it to him so smoothly that the act seemed spontaneous. “Here, better keep your sample by you. You’ll let me see it again if necessary, I’m sure.”

Paddy’s smile blazed like the sun. The little glitter of metal vanished into his ready palm and into his pocket. “Yes, of course!”

“Why don’t you show the place to Dominic?” suggested Simon, lightly and quickly. “You just about owe him that.”

And Mr. Felse, equally easily: “He’d certainly be glad to come with you. I look like being busy for a while, and he won’t want to go souvenir-shopping with his mother, that’s sure. Give him a ring, Paddy.”

“I will,” said Paddy politely. “Thank you.” He was pretty quick on the draw, was Mr. Felse, but of course a detective-inspector would have to be. He got Uncle Simon’s message as fast as I did, thought Paddy, withdrawing aloofly from the room. He didn’t want me to go back in the cave alone. Mummy still trusts me, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid something may happen to me.

And in the instant he saw it in reverse, and was dazzled. Uncle Simon, who can do everything better than anyone else, who goes everywhere, and ventures everything, and doesn’t know what it is to be afraid for himself, he’s afraid for me. He does care about me. Uncle Simon that was. Now I don’t know what to call him. I don’t know what he is.

I know what I am, though. I know who I am. And Mummy cares about me, too, and maybe she was just as afraid—more, because she’s a woman. But all the same, she trusted me, and didn’t even say: Take Dominic with you.

Meantime, it was hardly Dominic’s fault, and you could see their point of view, and all that. So he’d do just what he’d said he’d do, and call him and invite him to come along. He was a little bit prefect-type, to be honest, but it was difficult not to be at that age; and he’d been jolly decent last night, and had the tact to vanish into the background as soon as the fussing began. He deserved to be rescued from souvenir-shopping.

“Well, that didn’t get us much forrarder,” observed Hewitt, when the door had closed and Paddy’s feet were clattering down the stairs. “No surprise, really, I didn’t think it would. So here we still are with two bodies that shouldn’t have been there, and—don’t forget this little detail—minus one that should.

“With the older body we still haven’t got much to go on. The first job is to identify him. According to the reports so far he was about thirty years old, about six feet tall, and a pretty husky specimen. His ears were pierced, and there’s a thin gold ring still in one of ’em. The body shows no injuries except to the skull, and those were clearly the cause of death. It looks as if he was bashed on the head from behind, maybe two or three blows, with a solid and probably jagged object, such as a lump of rock. The fragments of cloth suggest he was a seaman, most likely a fisherman.”

“Which means probably a local man,” said Simon intently.

“It doesn’t necessarily follow, but everything rather indicates it as a probability. He’s been dead between two and three years—certainly not two centuries. The one really good lead for identifying him is in his jaws. He’s got a lot of very good dental work, most likely all done in one series of treatments after a long period of neglect. Whoever did that job on him will have it on record, and he’ll know his own work again. It means we’ve got to get on to every dentist here and maybe up and down the coast, but it’s only a matter of time, and we’ll find him. And then, with any luck, we’ll know who we’ve got down there.

“Now the other one, he’s a very different matter. Here we have a fellow everyone knows, who was seen alive as late as four o’clock last Wednesday, and according to the medical evidence and the set of the tides must have been dead before ten o’clock the same night. The blow or blows that left that mark on his face didn’t do more than knock him out, which seems to have been the object. He’s otherwise more or less undamaged. He drowned in salt water, and was then put in the Treverra vault. And though Miss Rachel’s key was in your possession during the material time, Mr. Towne, we now know that another key exists, and was kept in a place where anyone who had a little inside knowledge or a bit of luck could get at it. That leaves us a pretty wide field. It may have occurred to you, as a limiting factor, that surely only somebody who didn’t know the vault was about to be opened could think of it as a good hiding-place for a murdered man. But even if we accept that—and I wouldn’t put too much reliance on its importance—the field’s still wide enough.

“Now here we’ve got an unfriendly man who kept himself very much to himself, and usually managed to grate on other people so much that they were glad to let him. Obviously we’re obliged to make a pretty thorough check on the movements of his son-in-law, because it’s no secret that young Jim had a good many breezes with Trethuan before he got Rose away from him, and relations have been strained, to say the least of it, ever since. I’m not saying I think Jim Pollard makes a very likely murderer, but he’s got a temper, and these things happen without much warning sometimes. There are holes in Jim’s alibi that won’t be easy to fill. He was down to the yard at the south end of Maymouth, Wednesday afternoon, for some timber for a little repair job at home, and then he did one or two more errands for paint and stuff round the town, and ended up working late on an old boat he’s got beached in Pentarno haven, so he says. Which makes him mobile and at large but for the times of his various calls, and leaves plenty of time between for an unexpected brush with Rose’s dad, supposing he met him in a nasty mood.

“However, he’s just one possibility among many. If I should ask you, now, what’s the oddest thing about Trethuan’s own behaviour in the last days of his life, what would you say?”

He had looked at Simon, but Simon held his tongue. When the guileless stare turned upon George he responded promptly: “Why was he so insistent that the vault must not be opened?”

“Exactly! Why? Religious objections? Superstition? That would account for anyone in his position criticising and prophesying evil, yes. But by all accounts this was more than that. He was desperate about it. Is that too strong, Mr. Towne?”

“No,” said Simon shortly, “that’s how he struck me.”

“So what was it that made it so urgent? Now I hear most of what goes on around here, and I don’t mind telling you openly, I know all about your sporting warning issued in the Dragon bar on Wednesday night, Mr. Towne. And I saw—and so did Mr. Felse, if you didn’t—the signs that the vault had been artistically swept and garnished and sanded over again before I got to it, and presumably before you did, on Friday. It’s an old and time-honoured profession, is smuggling. You know it still goes on, I know it still goes on. I doubt if there’s a licensee along this coast who doesn’t get a drop of the real stuff that way. We know the vault was used as a liquor store, we know there was a nice, handy key, the one Sam Shubrough came by as an innocent child. And we know they won’t use the same place again, if it’s any reassurance to you—not since they cleared out their contraband, whenever they did. There wasn’t any sense of desperation there. They didn’t care a toot when you tipped ’em the wink, they just took the tip, and shifted their store to a safer place. And slipped you one on the house as an acknowledgment, I shouldn’t wonder. Only one person was really concerned, and that was Trethuan. A lone wolf who wouldn’t be wanted in any such confraternity, and who wouldn’t want to be in it, anyhow.

“So I’m telling you, I don’t believe smuggling or contraband had anything whatever to do with Trethuan’s death, and I don’t think you need worry about any of the otherwise law-abiding chaps around here who don’t feel it any sin to slip a few kegs of brandy past the preventives. They’re not my job. Murder is. And we’re left with Trethuan and the something that made it absolutely vital to him that Treverra should rest in peace. Always supposing he’d been resting there at all, which as it turned out he wasn’t. Did Zeb have something private and dangerous of his own that came over with the brandy? I doubt it. No, more likely his preoccupation was about something quite separate from theirs. There’s only one certain thing we know about it. It was somewhere in the vault. Why else should he be so desperate to stop you from opening it?”

“And why couldn’t he move it,” said George, “since apparently he could put it there in the first place?”

“And where is it?” added Simon. “The place is as bare as the palm of your hand but for those two stone coffins. One of those we’ve exhausted already. There’s nowhere left but Mrs. Treverra’s coffin.”

“And that’s exactly it, Mr. Towne. You represent Miss Rachel’s interest in this matter. I’m going to suggest to you that we ought to open the second coffin, too. The Vicar thinks he can justifiably sanction it, on the strength of the permission already given for her husband. If you’re prepared to join me and come along down to St. Nectan’s right now, we can at least see if there’s anything there to account for Zeb Trethuan’s acting like a desperate man.”

“For the record,” said Simon, his eyes kindling golden-brown with curiosity, “maybe we should. If it turns out to be full of Swiss watches that have never paid duty, then we shall be getting somewhere.”

“According to precedent to date,” said George dryly and ruefully, as they went down the stairs, “the one thing that certainly won’t be in it is Mrs. Treverra!”

But that was where George was wrong. For when they had carefully lowered Jan Treverra’s coffin-lid with slings to the floor of the vault, and prised the smaller stone lid beneath it, with its fine, defiant flourish of cryptic verse, out of its seating, when they had levered it clear and lowered it to rest beside its fellow, when they stood staring into the coffin, it was plain to be seen that the lady was all too surely there.

The shadow slid from over her almost reluctantly. A gush of fine dust ascended into the beam of their lanterns, and a dry, dead, nostalgic scent, as though pressed flowers, long since paper-fine and drained of nature, had disintegrated into powder at a touch. The outer air spilled in upon her, flowing over the broken and displaced lid of the wooden coffin that had once held her, and the frozen turbulence of silks and woollen cloth that overflowed from the box, stirred by the displacement of air, billowed for one instant buoyant and stable in their sight, and then collapsed together with a faint, whispering sigh, crumbling away at hems and folds into fragmentary rags.

A subsiding drift of dust and tindery cloth settled and fluttered down into the grave, disclosing the small, convulsed bones of hands and arms and drawn-up knees that thrust vainly and frenziedly upward, a shapely skull arched back in anguished effort among a nest of crumbling silks and laces, and the withered black of once-luxuriant hair, powdered over with the drab of perished silk and the fine, incorruptible dust of death.

Morwenna did not rest in peace. Contorted, struggling, fighting to force her way out, she seemed for a moment to be about to rise and reach her fragile, skeleton hands to them. Then even her bones began to rustle and crumble stealthily, settling lower and lower before their eyes into the stone tomb in which she had quite certainly been buried alive.