A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

CHAPTER VIII

SATURDAY EVENING

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PHIL WAS WASHING UP after tea when Hewitt called. She put her head in at the door of the living-room to report: “For you, Simon. Mr. Hewitt says the pathologist’s come to have a look at Mrs. Treverra’s body, and if you and Tim would care to be present, he’d be grateful. I suppose he wants to have the family represented, so that there can’t be any complaints or anything later. Shall I tell him you’ll be along?”

All three of them had looked up sharply at the message, Paddy sensitive to the quiver of feeling on the air, and stirred out of his unnaturally subdued quietness. All afternoon Tim and Phil had been exchanging anxious glances over his head, and wondering how long to let him alone, how soon to shake him out of his abstraction. A very dutiful, mute, well-behaved boy who sat and thought was not at all what they were used to.

“How about it, Tim? I don’t say it’s the pleasantest thing in the world to see, but if we can learn anything from it, I think we should.”

“I’ll come, I want to. It’s a hell of a thing,” said Tim soberly.

“Then he says in a quarter of an hour, at St. Nectan’s. They don’t propose to disturb her, not unless there’s absolute need. I’ll tell him you’ll be there.”

Tim looked at Paddy. There was no guessing what was in his head, but it could only be the shocks and readjustments of yesterday that were still preoccupying him. Unless directly addressed, he hadn’t once said a word to Simon, and they had refrained from discussing the inexplicable tragedy of Morwenna in front of him. But sooner or later he had to learn to move and breathe in the same air with Simon again, and find some sort of terms on which he could live with him, and he might just as well begin at once.

“How about you, Paddy?” invited Tim after a moment’s hesitation. “Come along with us for the ride?”

The serious face brightened, wavered and smiled. “I bet that means I don’t get to come in,” he said, but he got up from his chair with every appearance of pleasure.

“I think I’d rather you didn’t. But I’ll tell you about it as we go.”

“O.K., Dad, I’ll come, anyhow.” He hadn’t been with Tim very much during the day, and he found that he wanted to. To sit by him in the front seat of the Mini, and touch shoulders with him now and again, was comfort, pleasure and reassurance. Subdued and amenable, he wasn’t going to ask any favours; if he was required to sit in the car while they went down into the vault, he’d do it, and not even creep to the top of the steps to peer down in the hope of a glimpse of forbidden sights. It was his pleasure to please Tim. You can be demonstrative with mothers, but showing fathers how you feel about them is not quite so simple, you use what offers, and hope they’ll get the idea.

They threaded the sunken lane, halted at the coast road, and crossed it to the track among the dunes. The smell of the evening was the smell of the autumnal sea and the fading grasses.

“I didn’t know they were thinking of opening Mrs. Treverra’s coffin, too. Why did they? Was that this morning?”

Any other time he would have been asking Simon, hanging over the back of the seat and feeding on his looks and words like a puppy begging for cake. Now he sat close and asked Tim, in his quiet, young baritone, touchingly grave and tentative.

“Yes, this morning. After you left, I suppose it must have been. I wasn’t there. Mr. Hewitt thought it necessary to search every possible place in the vault, because it seems there must have been something there to account for Trethuan’s not wanting it opened. And the only place that hadn’t been searched already was Morwenna’s coffin. So they opened that, too.” Tim eased the Mini down into the rutted, drifting sand, and was silent for a moment. “She’s there, Paddy. It isn’t like the other one, she is there. Well, this chap’s going to tell us whether the body that’s there is from the right time, and so on, but I don’t think there’s much doubt. But what’s terribly wrong is that she—well, she isn’t at peace. She’s fully dressed—she was—and she was trying to get out. She—must have been alive when they left her there. It could happen. Sometimes it has happened.”

He had felt the young, solid shoulder stiffen in unbelieving horror, and he wanted to soften the picture, to set it two centuries away, like a dream or a sad song.

“They hadn’t modern methods or modern knowledge. There could be conditions like death. They weren’t to blame. And thank God, they couldn’t have known. Only we know, when it’s all over, two hundred years and more. Like ‘The Mistletoe Bough.’ It wouldn’t be quite like you think. The air would give out on her, you see. She’d only have what was inside the stone coffin, and then, gradually, sleep. It wouldn’t be long.”

Simon might not have been there. There was no one else in the car. Paddy leaned closer by an inch, delicately and gratefully,

“It could look like a struggle, but be only very brief. Very soon she grew drowsy. Only she stayed like that, you see, fighting to lift the lid and get out. She slept like that. And when she was dead—Well, you’ve read her epitaph. This makes me think she wrote it herself. I don’t even know why, but it does.”

Paddy said, in a small but still adult voice, perhaps even a note or two nearer the bass register than usual: “I always thought she was so beautiful.”

“So did I. She’ll find him again, you can bet on that. She wasn’t the sort to let death stop her.”

The Mini turned in to the left among the dunes. The little open lantern of St. Nectan’s stood clear against the sky.

“It wasn’t ugly,” said Simon unexpectedly from the back seat. “A scent, and a puff of air, and a little dust. She was very little, like in her picture, and all muffled up in a travelling cloak with a hood—at least, I think so. She had masses of black hair, and such tiny bones.”

Paddy said nothing more. He sat almost oblivious when they got out of the car and left him there between the shadowy dunes. He woke out of his daze when he heard the strange voices, and turned his head to see them met and greeted by Hewitt, with George Felse in attendance, and a stranger who must be the police pathologist. He watched them unlock the padlock on the gate, and go in single file down the steep staircase. He heard the heavy door below swing wide, but he didn’t move. If the window of the car had not been open, he would not have heard the raised tones of their voices, like gasps of amazement and consternation rising hollowly out of the grave.

Something was wrong, down there. Something, was not as they had expected it to be. Paddy put out a hand to open the door of the car, and then drew it back, shivering, afraid to want to know.

But you can’t turn your back on knowledge, just because it may be uncomfortable. Supposing someone else should need what you know? Someone who belongs to you, and doesn’t know how much you know already?

He slipped out of the car, and crept close to the rail of the vault. The open doorway showed him nothing but a corner of Treverra’s empty tomb, and half of George Felse and all of Tim, hiding from him even the foot of the second coffin. But the voices sailed up to him clearly, roused and brittle, and in signal agreement.

“None of it was there this morning,” said Hewitt. “There was nothing with her in the coffin. All of us but Mr. Rossall were here, we know what we uncovered.”

“We couldn’t possibly have missed seeing this,” said Simon. “Even if we didn’t disturb or touch her, we looked pretty carefully. It’s enough to make you look carefully, isn’t it? Well, she’d none of all this with her then. Nothing!”

“But if you’ve had both keys in your own hands all the time, and you locked up again carefully this morning,” said the one strange voice with dry mildness, “it would seem to be impossible.”

“It is, damned impossible, but it’s happened.” It was the first time Paddy had ever heard Hewitt sound exasperated. “Take a look at this, this is real enough, isn’t it? That wasn’t here, none of this was here spilled round her feet, at eleven o’clock this morning. But it’s here now at six in the evening. And I’m telling you—I’m telling myself, for that matter—this place has been locked all that time, and I’ve had both keys on me. And tell me, just tell me, why should anyone, guilty or innocent or crazy or what, bring this here and leave it for us to find?”

He plunged a hand suddenly into something that rattled and rang like the loose change in a careless woman’s handbag, and brandished across the coffin, for one moment full into Paddy’s line of vision, a handful of coins and small trinkets that gleamed, in spite of all the discolorations of time, with the authentic yellow lustre of antique gold.

He shut himself into the front passenger seat of the car, and held his head, because it felt as if it might burst if he worked the brain within it too hard. One little guinea in the sand of the tunnel, and a fistful of them in Morwenna’s coffin. And the door locked, and both keys in police custody, and the whole thing impossible, unless—it was the last thing he had overheard as he retreated—unless there was yet another key.

Or another door! Nobody had said that, but he couldn’t stop thinking it. Not an ordinary door, a very retiring door, one that wasn’t easy to find.

Under the ground he’d had almost no sense of direction, but Dominic had said—somewhere under the dunes. Paddy took an imaginary bearing from the church towards the blow-hole under the Dragon’s Head, and tried frantically to estimate distances. It was possible. It had to be possible, because there was no other possible way of accounting for everything.

They were down there a long time, nearly an hour. He stayed in the car all the time, because it had dawned on him that if he spied on them, or even asked them questions when they returned, he would have to tell them things in exchange; and he couldn’t do that, not yet, not without other people’s consent. No, there was only one thing to do, and that was go straight to the Pollards, and tell them what he knew, and try to make them see that the next move was up to them.

But there was no reason why he shouldn’t use his eyes to the best advantage when the five men emerged from the deep enclosure of the Treverra tomb. Hewitt climbed the steps only to cross to his car, take a small rug from the boot, and make a second trip down into the vault with it. When he came up again he was carrying the rug rolled into a thick, short bundle under his arm. What was inside it, allowing for the bulk of the rug itself, might be about the size of a three-pound bag of flour, but seemed to be a good deal heavier. Say, a small gunnysack full of coins—or maybe a little leather draw-string bag, such as they used for purse and wallet in the eighteenth century. About the right size, at any rate, to match that small, shapeless bundle Rose had carried under her arm at noon.

Tim got into the car prepared for questions, and there were none. “Don’t you want to know if it is really Morwenna?” he offered, concerned at such uncharacteristic continence.

“Well, yes, of course!” The boy brightened readily. “I thought you’d tell me what I’m allowed to know. I didn’t want to poke my nose past where the line’s drawn.”

“Such virtue!” said Tim disapprovingly. “You’re not sickening for something, are you?”

He started the engine, and the Mini came about gently in the trodden space before the church, and followed the police car back to the road.

“Is Uncle Simon riding with them, this time?”

“Yes, he wanted to talk to the pathologist. We’re pretty sure it’s Morwenna. Right age, right period, right build, no reason to suppose it would be anyone else. There’ll be some work to do on fabric, and all that, but it looks authentic.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Back to the police station. We’ve got a bit of conferring to do, if you wouldn’t mind amusing yourself for an hour or so. Or would you rather I took you home first?”

“No,” said Paddy, almost too quickly and alertly. “I’ll come down into town with you, that’ll suit me fine. While you’re in your official huddle, there’s somebody I want to see.”

He knocked at the front door of the second pink cottage in Cliffside Row just as the church clock was chiming half past seven; and on the instant he recoiled a step or two nervously, almost wishing he had let well alone, for the consequences of the knock manifested themselves before the door was opened. Something—it sounded like a glass—shattered on a quarried floor. A girl’s voice uttered a small, frightened cry, and a young man’s, suddenly sharp with fury and helplessness, shouted: “For God’s sake, girl, what’s up with you to-day? Anybody’d think a gun had gone off. It’s only the door. If there’s something wrong with you, I wish you’d have the sense to tell me. Oh, come out! I’ll go.”

The door, suddenly flung wide, vanished with startling effect, as if Jim Pollard’s large young fist had plucked it off. Levelled brown eyes under a thick frowning ridge of brow stared dauntingly at Paddy.

“Well, what’s up?” The eyes, once they focused upon him, knew him well enough. “Oh, it’s you, young Rossall. What do you want?” Less unfriendly, but as anxious as ever to get rid of him and get back to whatever scene they had been playing between them there in the doll’s-house living-room. The knock on the door had been only a punctuation mark. Paddy felt small, unsupported, and less certain of the sacred harmony of marriage than he had been two minutes ago. But he’d started it, and now there was no backing out.

“I’d like to talk to you and Rose, please. It’s very important.”

“Mrs. Pollard to you, my lad,” said Jim smartly. “All right, come in.”

“I’m sorry! She used to let me call her Rose, but I won’t do it if you don’t like it. It was only habit.”

He stepped over the brightly-Cardinalled doorstep into the pretty toy room, and Jim closed the door behind him. Rose, clattering dust-pan and brush agitatedly in the minute kitchen beyond, was sweeping up the fragments of the glass she had dropped. The door between was open, and Paddy saw her slide a furtive glance at him, and take heart. All the same, her eyes were evasive and her hands unsteady when she came in.

“Hallo, Paddy, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing with me,” he said, making straight for the essential issue, head-down and ready for anything. “It’s you! I came to tell you I know where you went this morning, and what you did. I saw you take something with you into the Dragon’s Hole, and I know where you left it. Don’t you see how silly it is to act as if you’ve done something bad, when you haven’t? Mr. Pollard, you must get her to tell the police everything, it’s the best thing, really it is. I know about the money and the jewellery, you see, I know she put them—”

His impetuous rush had carried him thus far through a silence of stupefaction on one side and desperation on the other, but now, in a subdued way which didn’t carry beyond the walls, hell broke loose. Rose burst into tears and flung herself face-down into a chair. Jim gaped open-mouthed from one to the other of them, and with a muted bellow of rage clouted Paddy on the ear with an open right hand as hard as a spade. The blow slammed him back against the wall, from which one of Rose’s pretty little calendar pictures, a golden-haired tot with a bunch of forget-me-nots, promptly fell and smashed.

“You nasty little brat!” growled Jim through his teeth. “You come here slandering my wife, and see what you’ll get! Who d’you think you’re threatening with the police, you—”

Nobody had ever hit Paddy like that before. Instead of taming him it infuriated him. Clasping his smarting cheek, he shouted back into the menacing face that leaned over him: “I wasn’t threatening her, I wasn’t slandering her, I said—”

“I heard what you said. Accusing her of taking money and jewellery—”

“Don’t be so bloody stupid!” yelled Paddy, blazing with rage. “I never said she took them, I said she put them back! Why the hell don’t you listen?”

It was not language of which either his parents or his teachers would have approved, but it stopped Jim, in the act of loosing a damaging left at him, as though the breath had been kicked out of him. His hands dropped. Shades of doubt and consternation and suspicion pursued one another over his candid face. Rose, through her desperate sobs, implored indistinctly: “Don’t hurt him, Jim! He doesn’t mean any harm.”

Her husband turned and looked at her, quaking in the frilly chair. “Now, look! There’s one bloke around here who doesn’t seem to be in any of the secrets, and that’s me. And I’m going to know, and pretty sharpish, so you can both make up your minds to that. Maybe what this kid’s saying has got something in it, after all. The way you’ve been acting the last couple o’ days, there could well be something queer going on, and you mixed up in it. If there is, I want to know. Now!”

His voice had worked its way down from the peak of anger to an intimidating quietness. He plucked Paddy away from the wall by the shoulders, and plumped him down hard in a chair.

“If I went off at half-cock, and you’re being straight with me, I’m sorry, kid. But first I’ve got to know. Come on, let’s have it. The lot. I’ve been trying to get some sense out of her for days, and she’s been putting me off and swearing there was nothing, and going round like a dying duck in a thunder-storm. I’m about sick of it. If you know anything, let’s have it, and know where we are.”

Paddy took a deep breath, and told him everything he knew and everything he guessed. Rose, subsiding into exhausted silence, still hid her face.

“I came to tell you,” said Paddy, with dignified indignation, “that I know very well you can’t have done anything wrong, and it’s dead silly to carry on as if you have. I don’t know what’s behind all this, but I do know you’ll only get yourself into trouble if you go on hiding things. What you ought to do is go straight to the police, and tell them all you know. That’s the only way to help yourself.”

Jim took his hands from the boy, and looked down at Rose’s heaving shoulders. There was hardly any need to ask, but he asked, all the same, his voice baffled and exasperated, and painfully gentle.

“Is that right, Rose, what he says? Did you—”

A fresh spurt of tears, but she scrubbed them away with the stoical determination of despair. “I had to get them out of the house. I didn’t want you to know. It wasn’t my fault, but it was even less yours, and I wanted you kept out of it.”

“Go and wash your face and pretty yourself up,” said Jim. “We’re going to the police. Now.” He turned to fix a stern but no longer unfriendly eye on Paddy. “All three of us,” he said with emphasis.

“Yes,” said Rose, bolt upright and pale of face on one of Hewitt’s hard chairs, “it’s true, there is a way in. I’ll show you. If somebody’d leaned against the right edge of the right stone, there in the vault, he’d have found it, only it’s placed so nobody’s likely to, not by accident. It’s one of the facing slabs in the corner. It swivels on an iron bar that runs through it from top to bottom. I reckon they put it all in when the vault was made. It’ll only swivel one way, and you’d have a job to find it from the tunnel side unless you know.

“And it’s true, I did go there, like Paddy told you. I went and put the things back in the poor lady’s grave—but I never took them in the first place. I wanted to give them back, and I didn’t know how else to do it. I was going to put them loose in the vault, because I couldn’t have shifted the stone. But she—she—you’d uncovered her. I saw her—” She put her hands up to her cheeks and drew breath in a single hysterical sob, her eyes fixed and horrified. Jim put his hand on her shoulder, and his index finger stroked her neck surreptitiously above the collar of the smart cotton shift-dress, with a quite unexpected tenderness. It calmed and eased her, reminding her of life. Death was a long way off, and she could make a good fight of it if events threatened her tenure or Jim’s. She stooped her cheek to his hand fleetingly. They all saw it, and could not help being moved.

A nerve of awareness quivered in Paddy, and troubled his innocence, but the sensation was pleasurable and private, and he kept it to remember and ponder afterwards.

“How did you know about the tunnel and the entrance to the vault?” asked Hewitt, in the neutral tone he found so productive.

“My dad showed me.”

“And how did he discover it?”

“I don’t know. Accident, I suppose. He was a questing kind of man, he liked nosing things out. It was going to happen to somebody, sometime, and it just happened to be my dad. He never told me how it happened. But he found it. About three years ago, it would be. He began to bring home little things he hid, and in a small house it isn’t easy to hide that you’re hiding things. And I’m curious, too. I hunted for them, I found some gold buttons. I didn’t know they were gold, not till he told me.”

“You asked him about them then?”

“Yes, I did, but at first he wouldn’t tell me anything. Then he got a bit above himself, and started showing me more things, a ring it was, once, and another time three gold coins. And then one day he made me go with him, and he took me and showed me the tunnel in the rock, and showed me how to get into the vault at the end of it. That was the first time I ever saw the coffins. He told me he’d got the stuff he was bringing out of the smaller one—the lady’s coffin. I didn’t want anything to do with it, I begged him to put them all back and leave them alone, but he never took any notice of anything I said. I was scared, but I didn’t like to tell anyone, not on my own father. Even if there’d been anyone to tell, then,” said Rose, simply, and fondled Jim’s hand on her shoulder. “And there wasn’t. Not close to me.”

“Was he, do you know, disposing of any of these pieces he lifted out of the grave?”

“Yes, he began to. I think he didn’t know how to go about it himself, but after a bit he took up with a fisherman who used to come after me, a queer fellow he was, name of Ruiz. Spanish he was, only way back. I mean, he’d always lived in Cornwall himself, and his folks, too. My dad started encouraging him, and wanted me to be nice to him, but I didn’t like him much. He got to be quite a crony of Dad’s, and that was queer, because he didn’t have many. They used to knock about together quite a bit. I got to thinking maybe this Ruiz chap was shipping some of the things out abroad for him, because he knew a lot of people over there, in France and Spain, and he spoke the languages, too. They went on like that for about six months, and then they fell out. I think this here Ruiz wanted a bigger share, and was threatening to give the show away if he didn’t get it.”

“Did they talk about it in front of you?”

“No, only that one time, when they fell out, and then it wasn’t much, Ruiz flung off out of the house, and my dad went after him, and they made it up. Anyway, they came back together, and they had their heads together all the rest of the evening, as thick as ever. But then a bit later this Ruiz was drowned at sea. I don’t know if you remember, his boat never came back from fishing, one blowy night. His body was washed up on the Mortuary a few weeks later. Then I did hope my dad would give up, not having anyone to sell the things for him, and I think he did for nearly a year. But then he began to bring things again, and started going off sometimes for a couple of days at a time, and wouldn’t tell me where he was going.”

“And where did you think he was going? You must have had some ideas on the subject.”

“Not about where, not exactly. But I did think he’d started selling the things himself where he could, round antique shops, and like that. I tried to get him to stop, but he only told me not to be a fool. And by that time Jim had started coming after me.” She flushed warmly even at the mention of his name. “We had a bit of a fight for it, because Dad didn’t want to lose his housekeeper. But we did it in the end. And was I glad to get away to a home of my own!”

Hewitt turned his pen placidly on the desk, regarding her with his most benevolent and unrevealing face. “But that didn’t end it, did it?”

“It did, until about a week ago.” She thought back, biting her lip. “Last Monday it was—five days ago. Dad came when Jim was out, and brought this whole bag of coins, and some rings and things, all there was left. He said so. He said to hide them and keep them for him. I know I ought to have refused, but I was scared of him. You can’t just stop being scared of somebody,” said Rose, with unexpected directness and dignity, “when you have been all your life. He said he’d take it out of Jim if I didn’t do what he wanted. It seemed the easiest thing then to put them away out of sight till I could see my way. But then,” she said, apprehensive eyes on Hewitt’s face, “you came yesterday and told us he was dead. And I knew you were sending men to ask questions all over about Jim and me. I didn’t know what to do, I was terrified you might search the house, and find those things there. I had to get rid of them, and the only thing that seemed even half-way right was to put them back where he took them from. And that’s what I did. Only she—I never can forget it—seeing her—”

“You should have told me,” said Jim reproachfully, “and not tried to do things by yourself, that way.”

“Jim never knew anything about it until now. He never knew the things were in the house. And I never wanted them. I never wanted anything to do with it.”

“All right, Rose! Now you’ve done what you should have done in the first place, and if ever you find yourself in a spot like that again, don’t you run the risk of putting yourself under suspicion, you just come to me, and bring the whole thing into the open. Now there’s one thing you can do to help us, as well as showing us the entrance into the vault. Can you remember any of the pieces your father brought home in all that time?”

“Yes, some I can,” she said hopefully. “They were all that old, you know, they were different from the sort you see now.”

“Well, when you go home, you try to make out a list of the ones you remember, and describe them as well as you can, so that we can try to find them again. Will you do that?”

“Yes, Mr. Hewitt, I’ll try.”

“And don’t keep secrets from your husband from now on, if you want a peaceful life. All right! I may want to ask you some more questions to-morrow, for now we’ll let you rest and think it over. Jim, I’d like you to go with her, Snaith will drive you down to the old church, and I’ll follow in a few minutes and join you there. After that you can take her home and keep a strict eye on her, see she doesn’t get into any more mischief.”

“She won’t,” said Jim grimly, and twisted a finger furtively in her fair hair, and tweaked it tight.

On the way out, still holding his wife very possessively by the arm, he halted squarely in front of Paddy, and stood looking down dubiously but not particularly penitently at the print of his fingers on the boy’s swollen cheek and ear. The kid looked tired, dazed, battered but content. Large eyes stared back just as appraisingly, withholding judgment but assessing quality. They liked each other. They liked each other very well. True, Paddy did burn for one moment in the dread that Jim would blurt out an apology for the clout, and call everyone’s attention to it; but he should have known better.

“Thanks, mate!” said Jim calmly. “I’ll give you as fair a chance, some day, and we’ll get even.”

“That’s all right, mate,” said Paddy, wooden-faced, and eyeing the precise spot at the angle of Jim’s jaw where ideally he should connect. “And I’ll take it.”

“Come three or four years,” observed Jim, looking him over critically, “I reckon you’ll be about ready, too.” There wasn’t much muscle on the light body yet, but he had a nice long reach, and speed, and spirit enough for an army.

“I reckon so,” said Paddy; and with mutual respect they parted.

A concerted sigh of relaxation and wonder and speculation went round the room as soon as the door had closed, and the sound of feet descending the stairs had ebbed to a distant, lingering echo. They stirred and rose, drawing together round the desk.

“You believe her story?” asked Simon.

“Yes, I believe it. All of it, maybe, most of it, certainly. Maybe Jim’s clever enough to put over an act of knowing nothing about it, but I don’t think so.”

“He didn’t know,” said Paddy, standing up in the middle of events with authority, for hadn’t he precipitated this single-handed? “They were rowing when I got there, before I ever got in the house. She was all nerves and cried if he looked at her, and he was just about frantic trying to get sense out of her. Why should he act when there was nobody else there?”

“I’m prepared to accept that,” agreed Hewitt benevolently. “Rose has cleared up quite a number of things for us, but she hasn’t shed any light on who killed her father. There’s nothing to put Jim out of the running for that, so far.”

“He didn’t know about the tunnel into the vault,” said Paddy doggedly, “so he couldn’t have put him there.”

“Oh, yes, he could, laddie. Finding a back way in doesn’t block the front door. There was a key almost anyone could get at. There could be others who knew about the back door, too, of course. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t say Jim makes a good suspect, but he isn’t out of it. We’ve got plenty to do yet—looking into Trethuan’s finances, for one thing.”

He reached for his hat, smothering a yawn. “Well, I’ll be off down and take a look at Rose’s swivelling stone. Care to come along?”

“Not me,” said Tim firmly, after a quick glance at his son. “Paddy and I are off home.”

Paddy wasn’t really sorry. He’d had enough excitement for one day, and a mere hole in the wall isn’t so wonderful, once located. Secret tunnels sound fine, but they’re two-a-penny wherever there was organised smuggling a couple of hundred years ago, whether on a sporting or a commercial scale. It would keep. He went down the stairs after the others, Tim’s arm about his shoulders.

“Well, at any rate,” said Simon, as they emerged into the faint, starry, salty coldness of after-summer and not-yet-autumn, “we do know now what Trethuan was acting so cagey about, why he didn’t want the tomb opened.”

“Do we?” said George Felse.

“Don’t we? With all that stuff there to be found—”

“Ah, but it wasn’t there. There was nothing there this morning but the body—remember? He must have made a special journey, last Sunday, and taken away all that was left of Morwenna’s treasure. At any rate, on Monday he gave it to Rose to hide for him. Once that was done, what was there to betray him? No one would know he’d been stealing it, no one would ever know it had been there at all. Oh, no,” said George pensively, “we haven’t found out yet why Trethuan was so mad to keep you out. It certainly wasn’t because of Mrs. Treverra’s money and jewels, removing them was no problem. They were a good deal more portable than the—purely hypothetical, of course,—brandy. No, the most puzzling thing about that little hoard is something quite different.”

They had halted beside the cars. “Such as what?” asked Simon.

“Such as: What was it doing there in the first place?”

“That’s it! That’s it exactly! The way it looks,” sighed Hewitt, sliding into the driving seat, “no one ever told Mrs. Treverra that you can’t take it with you.”