A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

CHAPTER IX

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

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DOMINIC CAME DOWN to lunch in his best suit, and with a demure gait to match, threaded his way between the tables in the bar, and slid on to the stool next to his mother’s, in the approved casual manner.

“Dry Martini, please, Sam.”

“Darling, you have come on!” said Bunty admiringly. “You even sound as if you expect to get it.”

“Careful, now!” cautioned Sam, with a face so straight that apart from the moustache it was practically featureless. “That vermouth’s powerful stuff.” He spared a moment, in spite of the noon rush of business after church, to admire his young guest’s grave Sabbath appearance. “I hear you’ve got old Hewitt coming to lunch.”

Dominic centred the knot of his tie more severely. “This won’t stay on past two o’clock, if it lasts that long. But it’s the least I could do. After all, Dad did put on a collar and tie for me, the night we got to know Simon and the Rossalls. Not unprompted,” he added, looking down his nose into his glass.

“Look who’s talking!” said Bunty. “Twelve minutes ago he looked like something a water spaniel had dragged in off the beach. If anyone gets the credit for his present appearance, it should be me.”

“Well, congratulations, Mrs. Felse,” said Sam reverently, “it’s very, very beautiful.”

Dominic began to get down from his stool with great dignity, but not so purposefully as to suggest that he had any real intention of leaving. “Look, I’ll go away if I’m cramping your style at all.”

“Leave the glass,” said Bunty accommodatingly, “I’ll take care of it.”

“You touch it!” He took care of it jealously himself, spreading both elbows more comfortably. Through the windows that overlooked the terrace, half-empty today because the wind was in the wrong quarter and the sunny air deceptively cool, they saw George and Hewitt approaching in earnest conversation.

“They’re here. Good, I’m hungry. And, Sam, talking of powerful stuff, don’t you think you could find us a drop of the real McCoy to go with the coffee? The special, for Mr. Hewitt. I think you really should offer it with the compliments of the house.”

“I might, at that,” said Sam, grinning.

“And serve it yourself. Just to show your conscience is clear.”

“My conscience is always clear. I’ve got it properly trained.”

“I bet you you daren’t,” said Dominic, glittering with mischief.

“You bet me what I daren’t?”

“The price of the brandy.”

“Plus duty?”

“Oh, have a heart!” protested Dominic, injured.

Bunty slid from her stool and shook out the peacock blue skirt that made her chestnut hair take fire in opposition. “I hate to admit an impediment to this marriage of true minds, but I’m not really sure that this is the right time to tease Detective-Sergeant Hewitt. Are you both sure of your alibis? He might have a warrant in his pocket right now.”

George and Hewitt were already entering the doorway. Sam watched them approach, his face benign and childlike. Apart, of course, from the whiskers. Those whiskers, Dominic reflected, must be worth a fortune to him.

“Don’t you worry,” he said, momentarily serious, “the old boy knows all about my alibi long ago. He may look stolid, it’s his stock-in-trade, but there isn’t much he misses. I’m checked up on and passed harmless, that’s for sure, or we should have seen more of him around.”

“Well, hang it,” said Dominic, “I was one of the blokes trying to pull the victim out of the sea. Everybody knows where I was.”

“That could be very good cover for anyone who’d just thrown him in,” pointed out Bunty darkly, and took her son firmly by the elbow. “Come on, we have a guest. Put your company face on.”

“It is on,” he said indignantly.

“It’s crooked, then. Straighten it.”

Sam appeared at Bunty’s shoulder with the coffee, beaming and benign, and distributed the delicate, tall-stemmed balloons he kept for special occasions.

“With the compliments of the house, Mr. Felse,” he said ceremoniously, catching George’s inquiring eye, and began to pour the brandy with reverence.

“That’s very handsome of you, Sam,” George acknowledged civilly. He looked at Bunty, and her face was limpid and innocent. He looked at Dominic, and his was pleased and bland.

“Not at all,” deprecated Sam, rubbing thumb and forefinger together gleefully at Dominic from behind Hewitt’s back. Dominic remained seraphic, flattered and serene, just artful enough to retain a pinch of the schoolboy in his impersonation of the man-of- the-world. It didn’t fool George. But good brandy is good brandy.

“What is it, Sam, a drop of special?”

“My own favourite,” said Sam fondly and truthfully, and judiciously withdrew the bottle, leaving only a very modest dose in Dominic’s glass. That should have shaken the practised calm, if anything could, but Dominic merely flicked one glance at Sam, unreadable to the others, and contained his displeasure to loose it at a more opportune time. His small, delighted smile never wavered for an instant. “Give me your opinion, Mr. Hewitt, I know you’re a good judge.”

Hewitt caressed and warmed the glass in his large palms, and let his nose enjoy itself. “Lovely bouquet, Sam! Not a trace of that overtone of brass you sometimes get.”

“That’s just what I like about it,” said Sam, feelingly. “I’m glad to have my judgment confirmed by an expert. You don’t mind if I quote you, Mr. Hewitt? Try the flavour, you won’t be disappointed.”

Hewitt tried it, and was not disappointed. One heavy eyelid lifted from the happy contemplation of his glass, one round, bright eye examined Sam minutely, shifted from him to Dominic, and lingered thoughtfully. Dominic retired coyly into his glass, but slanted one glance across it, so quickly that it should have slid harmlessly by. Hewitt winked. Dominic looked down his nose and appeared to have noticed nothing unorthodox. Honours were approximately even.

“That’s lovely stuff, Sam. You go on buying it as long as it’s on offer, that’s all the advice I can give you.”

“I will, Mr. Hewitt, glad to know it has your approval.”

It was a pity that Mrs. Shubrough should have to loom up at that moment from the direction of the bar, and strike the one discordant note: “Telephone for you, Mr. Hewitt. It’s Mr. Rackham calling from the police station. He says it’s very important.”

The little bubble of comedy burst damply round them. They watched the stocky figure shoulder its way out through the glass doors, and they were back with an unsolved double murder.

“I feel cheap,” announced Dominic, after a moment of self-examination.

“Don’t be self-important,” said George witheringly. “You don’t think fate’s got time to cast a disapproving eye on your little capers, do you? Besides, you don’t feel cheap at all, you only feel you ought to. Now if you want to make yourself useful, take your mother out for the afternoon, because I suspect I shall be out of circulation. And kick up your heels all you want—there won’t be any nemesis listening to you. Nemesis has got more important things to do.”

“I’ve had two men out since Friday,” said Hewitt, slowing at the beginning of the steep drop into the town, “looking for the dentist who put in all that work on our unidentified corpse’s teeth. Rackham’s found him. At least, it seems likely it’s the right fellow, but he’s a cautious one, won’t say for sure from the charts. Wants to see the molars before he commits himself, but is sure he’ll know his own work again if it is the bloke he thinks.”

“If he’s as cagey as that,” said George, “I take it he’s naming no names yet. Where did your man find him? Evidently he isn’t a Maymouth man.”

“Plymouth. Just got back with him.”

“What sort of a fellow is he? I hope he knows what he’s going to see.”

“Small, dapper and highly-strung,” said Hewitt, “according to Rackham. He’ll be all right. It’s the big, husky ones that keel over.” He turned into the square, almost deserted at this hour on a fine Sunday, the old-fashioned shop-fronts gated, shuttered and still. “Well, if we can’t do much on the Trethuan case until to-morrow, maybe we can get somewhere on this other one. Didn’t have more in his deposit account or in the house—Trethuan, I mean—than you could account for as a careful man’s savings, but I fancy he’s got a lot put away somewhere in cash from this antique traffic of his. Maybe in a safe-deposit box somewhere, maybe under the floor-boards at home. We haven’t been over the house properly yet. It’ll be somewhere. And we’ll find it. As far as we can tell, all of the stuff that he hadn’t already disposed of piecemeal, we’ve got in custody. Rose has identified what we’ve got, and furnished us with a nice little list of things he brought home earlier. We should be able to trace some of them through the trade. Here we are! Don’t come down to the mortuary with us unless you want to, George. You’ve had all that once.”

“I can stand it. I might learn something. I like to hear an expert on his own subject.”

Rackham was a deceptively simple-looking young local man, fresh-faced and bright. Beside his cheerful, extrovert bulk the dentist from Plymouth looked meagre and unreal, and as highly-strung as his companion had indicated, but a second and narrower look corrected the impression. He was wiry, durable and sharply competent, and he had come armed with all his relevant records and charts, ready to go into extreme detail. So firmly astride his hobby-horse, he was not to be thrown by any corpse, however fragmentary, provided its jaw was still intact. In the chill basement mortuary he probed, matched and demonstrated in complete absorption; and at the end of his examination he snapped the rubber band back into place round his records, and declared himself satisfied, and prepared to swear to the dead man’s identity in court as soon as it might be required of him.

“I was practically certain from the charts your man brought with him, but it was essential that I should see the work for myself. Yes, it’s mine. I can give you dates for the whole sequence of treatments. They went on for about eight weeks in the spring of 1961, and occasionally we had to adjust the appointments because of his sea trips. He should have come back to me for a check-up six months later, but he never came. That does happen, of course, it needn’t mean anything. But it could mean that by then he couldn’t come. He was a fisherman, and he gave me a Maymouth address—I’ve got it here in the records. His name,” said the little man blithely, unaware that he was springing a land-mine, “was Walter Ruiz.”

“On the face of it,” fretted Hewitt, prowling the length of his small office like a restive tiger, “it’s damned impossible. Walter Ruiz is buried in St. Mary’s churchyard, up the town, with a stone over him to prove it. There was an inquest, and he was identified.”

“He’s just been identified again,” said George dryly. “Very impressively, for my money. It seems that one or the other of two equally positive identifications must be mistaken. The question is, which?”

“You heard him. That amount of dental work in one course of treatment, fully documented as such things have never been before, coupled with the individual formation of the bones, and all the rest of it, makes this man’s jaw about as unique as a set of finger- prints. That evidence would stand up at any inquest.”

“But so did something else, presumably something that looked equally sound, at the previous inquest. According to what Rose told us last night, Ruiz and his boat failed to come home after fishing in rough weather, and his body was washed up on the Mortuary a few weeks later. A few weeks in the sea don’t make a body any easier to identify, even a landsman knows that. But somebody did identify this one. Who was it? His parents? A brother? His wife? But no, he didn’t have a wife, he came courting Rose, and her father wanted her to be nice to him. Her father found him useful, until he got a bit too demanding, and knew a bit too much.”

Hewitt came back to his desk, and stood gazing at George across its empty surface for a long, dubious minute of silence.

“If you’re trying to put ideas in my head, George, you’re too late. They’re there already.” He reached out a large hand, and picked up the telephone, and with deliberation began to dial.

“I’m trying to sort out the ones I’ve got in mine,” said George. “It looks as if we’re both being driven on the same shore. Did he have any family? It seems to me that a solitary like himself would be most likely to appeal to Trethuan as an ally, if he found it expedient to look round for one at all.”

“You’re so right, Ruiz didn’t have any family. You’re neck and neck with me, George.” His head came up alertly as the burr of the telephone was answered. “Hallo, Henry! This is Tom Hewitt. Sorry to interrupt your Sunday nap, but I need a quick reference to something about two and a half years back, and you’re the quickest and most infallible referee in town. Nip down to your files and look it up for me, will you? You probably know the answer, but look it up anyhow, I want to have it officially. An inquest on a seaman drowned and cast up on the Mortuary, I think it will be in March or April, 1962. Name of Walter Ruiz. A routine job, it seemed at the time. But now I want to know who identified him. Just that. Call me back as soon as you can. And thanks very much!”

He hung up, laying the receiver so softly in its cradle that there was no sound to break the slight tension in the room. He sat down gently and folded his hands, and looked at George.

“No family. No brothers, no sisters. There was his widowed mother, up to about seven years ago, I remember. They had a cottage down the south end of the sea front. After she died he lived alone, kept himself to himself, and bothered nobody. The excise people did have their suspicions of him, though not, I think, over the occasional drop of brandy. He was never actually caught out over anything. Just another lone wolf. If he needed hands he took on casuals, and dropped them again afterwards. Nobody ever worked with him regularly. Nobody was ever in his confidence.”

“That was your local paper?” Local papers are formidable institutions. They may ignore national events, but they must get every name right, and every date, and every detail, within their own field. “Proprietor? Editor? Or both?”

“Both. Henry still lives above his own offices, he won’t be long looking it up, his files are kept in apple-pie order. I could,” admitted Hewitt, “have got the same information at least three other ways, but not so quickly.”

It was barely a quarter of an hour before the telephone rang. Hewitt lifted it out of its cradle before it could cough out a second call. He listened for a moment with an unreadable face. “Thank you, Henry! That’s exactly what I wanted to know. I’m very grateful. Good-bye!” he replaced the instrument, and sat looking at George.

“The body that came up on the Mortuary and was buried as Walter Ruiz was identified, by the man who was considered to be his closest, maybe his only, friend. Zebedee Trethuan.”

It accounted for everything. They sat and looked at it, and details of Rose’s story fell into place like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, filling in what had seemed, until this morning, the most mysterious third of the whole picture.

“Well, I know now which identification I’d trust,” said Hewitt with curious mildness, pacing the room again, but with a longer, easier stride. “A handy and unrecognisable corpse turns up on the Mortuary, and you have need of just that to lay a ghost. The ghost of someone known to have been associated with you, and now missing, supposedly drowned at sea. How nice and easy to say this is it, and get it put away under a stone with your man’s name on it, so that no one will ever start asking awkward questions. Walter Ruiz is dead and buried respectably, and everybody knows it. Everything beautifully tidy and safe. And then this interfering Simon Towne comes along, and puts it into the old lady’s mind, of all crazy things, to open the Treverra tomb!”

A cool voice from the doorway said deprecatingly: “I’m afraid he’s interfering again. I’m sorry, I did knock.”

They both swung round in surprise. So intent had they been on their revelation and its implications that they had failed to hear Simon’s light feet climbing the stairs. He stood in the doorway, eyebrows cocked obliquely, smiling a little. “The desk sergeant told me I could come up. Don’t blame him, I told him I had something that might be relevant to tell you. I really did knock, but you didn’t hear me. And I was just in time to hear no good of myself. Would you rather I waited downstairs?”

“No, that’s all right, Mr. Towne, come in. You might as well hear the context as well,” said Hewitt good-humouredly. “I wasn’t calling you interfering on my own account, it was what you might call an imaginative projection. Come in, and close the door.”

“I seem to have missed a lot.” Simon hitched a knee over the corner of the desk, and looked from one to the other of them, frowning. “Did I hear you talking about Ruiz? That’s the fellow Rose Pollard talked about last night, the one who was shipping pieces of jewellery abroad for her father? What’s he got to do with the Treverra tomb? I thought he was buried in St. Mary’s churchyard.”

“So did everybody else, Mr. Towne, except one person, the one who knew he was somewhere very different. In Jan Treverra’s coffin, where we found him.”

“We found him?” Simon drew breath sharply, and flashed a doubtful glance at George. “This is serious? Then you’re telling me that the unidentified one—the one underneath—that is Ruiz? But they wouldn’t bury a man under that name without good authority. Someone must have vouched for him.”

“Someone did. He came up practically naked and featureless, after six weeks in the sea. What could be better? The man who’d put the real Walter Ruiz in Treverra’s coffin, where he hoped he’d lie uninvestigated till doomsday, jumped at his chance when it offered, and got another body buried as Ruiz, publicly and decently. And that would have been the end of it, if you hadn’t conceived this notion of finding out whether Treverra really did have his poems buried with him. Imagine how this fellow would feel when he heard it! Wasn’t it enough to make him frantic? Wasn’t it enough to account for his threatening you, pestering you, trying to frighten you off? Anything to get you to go away and leave well alone.”

Open-mouthed, eyes huge and blank with astonishment, Simon whispered: “Trethuan?”

“Who else? Doesn’t it make sense of everything? He got Ruiz to help him dispose of the valuables he’d been steadily lifting from Mrs. Treverra’s coffin, they were partners for about six months, so Rose says. Then they quarrelled, and she thinks Ruiz was demanding a bigger share of the proceeds, maybe threatening to make trouble if he didn’t get it. And shortly after that Ruiz’s boat vanished one night, and never came back and Ruiz was presumed drowned. And the next possible and unidentifiable body that came up on the Mortuary—Trethuan identified it as Ruiz. Isn’t it plain what his reason must have been?”

“It looks,” said George, “as if Trethuan killed him either actually in the vault, or very close to it, maybe in the rock tunnel. Why else hide him there? He was a big man. Admittedly Trethuan was a pretty powerful person, too, but he wouldn’t want to move the body any farther than necessary. The sea was close, but the sea was no good. Ruiz had a skull fractured by repeated blows. No passing that off as the work of the sea. A drowned man, like Trethuan himself later, is another matter.”

“I see two possibilities,” said Hewitt. “Either Ruiz pretended to be reconciled, and then spied on Trethuan on his next trip, confronted him in the act, and was killed—for you can bet your last bob a man like Trethuan would want to keep the source entirely to himself and Rose, he’d never willingly let his partner into the secret. Or else—and perhaps this is the more likely—Trethuan pretended to agree to whatever Ruiz wanted, offered to prove his good faith by showing him where their profits were coming from, and took him there with the fixed intention of killing him and hiding him there. If he’d looked in the lady’s coffin, he’d looked in Treverra’s, too, he wouldn’t miss anything. He knew the coffin was empty. He supplied it with a body.”

“Could it be done by one man alone?” asked George, and turned his head and looked at Simon.

“Yes, it could. One man couldn’t possibly get either of the stones off and replace it again unbroken. But he could prise it sidelong, all right. Enough to probe inside. Enough to dump a man inside, and cover him again—”

He drew breath in a deep gasp, realising the full implications of what he was saying. He sat voiceless and motionless, his eyes blank and colourless as glass, staring inward at his own imaginings.

“It could be done, all right,” said Hewitt. “Trethuan did it repeatedly, didn’t he? Morwenna’s stone is lighter than the other, that one he must have shifted whenever he went back for another raid, enough to get his arm down into the poor thing’s belongings. The other, presumably, he moved only twice, once when he made his assay and found the coffin empty, once when he filled it.”

“There was still the boat to dispose of,” said George.

“That wouldn’t be any problem. Trethuan was an amphibian like all the rest of Maymouth. His folks were fishermen. He had a dinghy of his own. To scuttle Ruiz’s boat by night and get back to land safely wouldn’t cause him much trouble. You don’t have to go far off this coast to find deep water. And he had time. Ruiz lived alone, nobody was going to raise a hue and cry immediately he didn’t come home to supper. We’ll go through all the circumstances again. We’ll find out who first called attention to the fact that he hadn’t come in from fishing. And when. It may even have been a couple of days later, time enough to wait for a pretty blowy night.”

“And wouldn’t there be a certain risk in rushing to claim a corpse, like that?” suggested George. “Suppose he said it was Ruiz, and then somebody else really did recognise it—by a ring, or something?”

“Ah, but he didn’t rush! He was canny. He waited for one nobody else was claiming. Henry tells me—it wasn’t my department—the police had been appealing for help in identifying that body for several days before he stepped in. And even then, if it had been obviously the wrong height or age, or shape, he only had to let well alone and say no, I don’t know him. No, he had everything sewed up. And he lay low with his thefts for a year or so, and left the stuff where he thought it was safest, before he started hawking pieces round the buyers in this country. And then you came along, Mr. Towne, and heaved a brick through all his plans and precautions. Nobody’d ever shown any interest in the tomb before. He made haste to shift the rest of the valuables, but he was terrified to move the body. No wonder he tried all he dared to scare you off. He knew it wouldn’t pass for Treverra, once the scholars and antiquaries got their noses into it.”

Simon lifted a dazed face from between his hands, and stared before him. George had not noticed until this minute the blue rings under his eyes, the copper shadows hollowing his lean cheeks. He might not have noticed even now, if he had not possessed knowledge acquired by the accident of being with Phil Rossall on the evening of Paddy’s disappearance. Not everybody had reason to see beyond the bright, handsome public image of Simon Towne to the marginal failures and deprivations that crippled his private progress.

“Look, do you really mean to say that whoever killed Trethuan took him in there, and dumped him into the coffin with—the man he himself had killed?” He said this very slowly and deliberately, as if his lips were stiff, and had to be driven to form the syllables.

“That’s exactly what I mean to say.” Hewitt was triumphant. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that that’s what happened. And a supreme bit of irony it is!”

“A supreme bit of cheek!” said Simon furiously. “If I wrote that and published it, I’d be hooted out of journalism. Nobody, not even a novelist, could get away with a bare-faced coincidence like that.”

“Not a coincidence at all,” Hewitt objected brusquely. “There were completely logical reasons why Ruiz should be disposed of precisely there, and in that way. As we’ve demonstrated. And there’ll be equally logical causes leading to the precise effect we’re left with, the presence of Trethuan’s body in the same hiding-place. Don’t forget there’s a waste of sand all round it. Don’t forget that a stone coffin is good cover. But I grant you we’ve still got to find out what the precise causes were in Trethuan’s case. He drowned in the sea, that’s definite. He was taken dead into the vault. Why, and how, we don’t know yet. It may have been through the door, with one of the two keys. Or it may have been through the tunnel. If young Paddy really saw him in the water about half past five, then the body might well be brought ashore on the Mortuary after the next high tide. He might be cast up fairly close to St. Nectan’s. And anyone who didn’t know the vault was going to be opened might still think it a pretty safe hiding-place.”

“There couldn’t have been many who didn’t know,” said Simon. “I advertised my intentions loudly enough, for obvious reasons.”

“Well, that’s just one of the things we shall have to look into. That case remains. But this one is as good as closed. A few details to fill in, some back history to verify, but I’m in no doubt of the result myself. It’s kind of tantalising,” he said thoughtfully, “to know the middle of a story, and not the beginning or the end.”

“That’ll come, all in good time,” said Simon, rising. He felt through his pockets for a crumpled packet of cigarettes, and offered them, and again began to search for matches. “Lord, I’m forgetting what I came for!” It was some small object at the bottom of his trouser pocket that had reminded him. He fished it out, a tiny, folded square of tissue paper.

“Paddy forgot to mention this last night, what with all the excitement, and to-day he’s on duty, Tim being his own cowman on Sundays. I said I’d bring it in to you. They found it yesterday in the tunnel, not far from the entrance into the vault.”

He leaned across to the lighter George was offering, and drew in smoke deeply and gratefully before he completed the unwrapping of the minute thing, and held it out on his open palm. A thin, broken gold ring, bent a little out of its true circle, the two ends pulled apart about a quarter of an inch. Hewitt took it up between finger and thumb, and stood staring at it warily, as though it might close on him and bite.

“I don’t suppose it means a thing,” said Simon apologetically, “but I said I’d deliver it, and I have. Can I run you back to the Dragon, George? It’s on my way.”

“Mr. Towne!” Hewitt had threaded the ring on the tip of his large brown forefinger, and was still gazing at it, a small, smug flare of pleasure in his eyes. “Where did you say this was found?”

“In the tunnel from the Dragon’s Hole to the vault. Only about twenty yards from the vault end, Paddy says, but I daresay he can show you the exact spot. Tamsin actually found it. Does it matter?”

“The spot where this was found may very well be the actual spot where Ruiz was killed,” said Hewitt happily, “that’s all. It happens to be the identical twin to the one ring he’s still wearing in his left ear.”