The Detective Omnibus: "City of Gold and Shadows", "Flight of a Witch" and "Funeral of Figaro"

CHAPTER FOUR

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She stooped with her ear against his lips, and could detect no sound of breathing, spread her fingers against his chest under the sodden jacket, and felt no faint rise and fall. Yet he could not have been long in the water. She had not been far behind him, and yet had heard no sound to prepare her for this. She felt nothing now but the urgency of her own role, and acted without thought or need for thought. She wound her arms about his knees and dragged him laboriously across the gravel into the safe, thick grass; his right cheek suffered, but he was hardly going to hold that against her if he survived. In the soft turf she turned his face to lie upon that grazed right cheek, and spread his arms above his head. Somewhere in the depths of her mind the fact was recorded, and later recalled, that from the shoulders down his back was dry, and even in front, from the knees down he was merely damp and muddy from the slime of the river bank. His head and his chest were soaked, and streaming water into the grass.

But at the time she had no awareness of any such details, though her senses missed none of them. She was entirely concentrated on the curved grip of her hands on his loins, and the rhythmic swing of her body as she leaned and relaxed, forcing the water out of him and dragging the air into him, and waited, holding her own breath, for the first rasping response out of his misused lungs. At first it was like leaning into a thick, inert sponge, and that seemed to go on for an age. Actually it was only a matter of perhaps fifty seconds before the first convulsive rattle of protest shook his ribs, and then she felt the first thread of breath drawn out long and fine under her coaxing fingers as she sat back from him. She dared not halt upon so tenuous a promise. She went on industriously compressing and releasing, but now she felt the breath of life responding to her touch, following the pressure of her hands in and out, lifting the body under her, until she was only orchestrating the performance, and signalling its progression by the measured touch of her palms and undulation of her body.

She ventured at last to sit back on her heels, let her hands lie in her lap, and listen. And palpably, audibly, he breathed. She heard him catch at air, and cough up the last slime of the river. Then he heaved in a breath that must have gone right down to his toes, and his whole body arched and stiffened, and then relaxed on as prolonged an exhalation. She waited, for a time renewing the light, guiding pressure on his back, afraid to leave all the labour to him. By then he was breathing so strongly and normally that she was able to extend her consciousness to details, every one of which was stunningly unexpected and astonishing, even the flickering yellow eye of the torch still beaming upon the recumbent body. She looked up, and became aware of the vault of faintly luminous sky over them, and the silence. An absolute silence.

She understood then that if she had had leisure to listen at the right moment, she might have heard the faint, suggestive sounds of a third presence. For men do not come out by night with the intention of lying down to drown in eight inches of water at the edge of a riverside path. Not cocky young men with roving eyes and a nice taste in girls. Now, of course, there was nothing to be heard at all, nothing to be seen but the sudden, wheeling pallor of one more set of headlights taking the curve in the Silcaster road, far beyond Aurae Phiala.

She leaned down to check closely upon the steady rise and fall of his chest, and the slight, rhythmic warmth of the air expelled from his lungs. The pulse in his wrist was vehement and strong. Cold, if he lay here too long, might be a greater enemy to him now than anything else. And if one thing was certain, it was that she could not get him from here alone. Probably he needed a doctor, but certainly he needed warmth and shelter and a bed. Twice she turned from him, and again turned back to make a double and treble check. The third time she clambered stiffly to her feet and looked about her, dazed by the darkness outside the closed circle of torchlight, and switched off the beam to acclimatise once again to the starry night. It was like enlarging herself tenfold into a chill but resplendent vastness, like taking seisin of the night. She gave herself a full minute to find her bearings in this mute kingdom, and her senses made the adjustment gratefully. Gus Hambro—ridiculous name, she thought, with wonder, exasperation and affection, for he enjoyed it now by her grace—continued to breathe strongly and regularly in his oblivion. And she knew that she not only could, but must leave him.

Her memories of Aurae Phiala were sharp, but now she could not be sure how accurate. The entrance with its kiosk and museum was away at the far side, and not inhabited by night. But before her, downstream, was the hedge of the garden hemming the curator’s villa. Gerry Boden, the lost boy, had made off in that direction when he was hunted out of the dangerous area. Somewhere along that hedge he had last been seen, and by her. By this time he was certainly in his own home, fed, unchastened, and ready for fresh mischief tomorrow. At this moment she did not believe in tragedies; she had just averted one.

She took the torch, using it freely now because speed was of the first importance, and stealth of none at all, and went on down the slippery path towards the thick box hedge, behind which the invisible red roof hung, representing help and companionship. There was a narrow gate opening on the pathway, as she had expected there would be. Within it, the curator’s garden climbed in three steep terraces, concrete steps lifting the level at each stage. The house loomed undefined, a large bulk between her and the milky sky. She found herself facing a glass-panelled door, with the luminous dot of a bell set in its frame. She pressed the spark, and seemed to feel a warmth in it. There were people on the other side of that door. She was not accustomed to wanting people, but she wanted them now.

She seemed to wait a long time before she heard footsteps within, and then a light sprang up beyond the frosted glass. There was an interval of clashing bolts and keys turning—she had to remind herself that it must be nearly eleven by this time, and that this was an isolated spot—before the door opened. But at least it opened fully and vehemently, offering every hope of a welcome within. Somehow she had expected six inches of semi-darkness, and half a face enquiring suspiciously what her business might be at this hour.

This was not the front door, but a garden way to the river. She saw a white conservatory full of plants, soft light filling it, a few flowers making knots of dazzling colour; and at the door, casting a spidery shadow, a long, meagre but erect man, all angles, like a lesser Don Quixote put together out of scrap iron. A well-shaped grey head leaned to peer at her out of concerned hollow eyes, whose colour she could not determine. By this light they had no colour, only an engraved darkness in his ivory face. He had a small, pointed, elusive beard like the Don, and wispy grey moustaches drooping to join it.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said a high tenor voice, soft and mild in surprise, and apologising even for the surprise, ‘but we don’t normally use this door, and especially at night. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.’

With distant astonishment at her own efficiency, she heard her voice saying very clearly and reasonably: ‘I do beg your pardon, but I came to you as the nearest house. I’ve just pulled a man out of the river, two hundred yards or so upstream. I’ve been giving him artificial respiration, and I think he’s going to be all right, but we ought to get him into shelter as quickly as we can. Can you help me? Could we bring him here?’

After one stunned instant, for which she could hardly blame him, he reacted with admirable promptitude. The door opened wider than ever. ‘Come inside!’ he said. ‘I’ll call my colleague, and we’ll get the poor chap indoors at once.’

‘I could help you carry him in,’ she said. ‘We ought not to lose any time.’

‘Don’t worry, Lawrence is only a couple of minutes away. He has a scooter, he’ll be here in no time. You sit down by the fire, you’re wet and cold. I’ll be back directly.’ And he thrust her briskly into a small, book-lined room, and himself went on along a passage to the hall and the telephone, leaving the door open between them. She heard him dial, and speak briefly and drily, almost as though similar rescue operations landed on his doorstep every night. It might not be the first occurrence, she realised. People who live beside flood rivers are liable to be recruited from time to time. Certainly he wasted no time in calling up his reserves. After the click of the hand-set as the connection was cut, she heard him dial and speak once more.

When he came back into the doorway of the room where she waited, he had a duffle coat over his arm, and was carrying a folding garden-bed with a rigid aluminium frame and a patterned canvas cover printed with brilliant sunflowers. Incongruously festive for a stretcher, but she saw that it would serve the purpose very well.

‘If you wouldn’t mind coming along to light us on the way back? I’ve got a coach-lantern here in the garden room. I called the police, as well,’ he explained. ‘You may not know, but we had an officer here looking for a missing boy, earlier this evening. I hope you may have found him for them.’

‘No,’ said Charlotte quickly, ‘this isn’t the boy. I do know about that, but this is someone else, a man I know slightly. He’s staying at “The Salmon’s Return”, like me.’

‘Oh… I see! A pity… I called the number the chief inspector gave me, I felt sure… Well, never mind, here’s Lawrence! Let’s get this one in, at any rate.’

The busy sputter of a Vespa came rocking round the bulk of the house, and the young man of the custodian’s box put his head in at the open door, gave Charlotte a brief, blank glance, and asked briskly: ‘Where is he?’

‘By the path, just upstream. Here, take this! I’ll lead. And mind how you go,’ he said, heading rapidly out through the garden, the lantern held out beside him to light the steps for Charlotte. ‘That path’s in a very dangerous state until it dries out properly. What was he doing taking a night walk there? A stupid thing to do!’

His voice was detached and impersonal, but she heard very clearly the implication: And what were you doing taking a night walk there? ‘Lucky for him you came along,’ he said, almost as if he had recognised the implication, too, and was making a token apology for it.

‘Listen!’ said the young man named Lawrence suddenly, and checked to strain his ears for the small, recurrent sound that had reached him. ‘Someone else out late, too. This place is getting like Brighton beach.’

They had reached the gate in the box hedge, and froze in the grass for an instant to listen. Slow, irregular footsteps, audible only by reason of the slight sucking of soft mud at the heels of someone’s shoes as he approached along the path.

‘I called the chief inspector,’ said the curator, advancing again to meet the sound. ‘I thought it likely this might be the young fellow he was looking for. But he couldn’t be here yet.’

‘He wouldn’t be coming along here, anyhow. He’ll be driving. Mrs Paviour surely wouldn’t walk this way in the dark, would she?’

‘Lesley’s home, twenty minutes ago, and gone to bed. I hope she’s sleeping through this disturbance.’

They walked towards the unsteady steps, and a figure took shape out of the darkness, weaving as it came and blinking dazedly as the lantern was lifted to illuminate its face. Wet and muddy, but moving doggedly under his own steam, Gus Hambro lurched into the circle of his would-be rescuers, braced his rubbery legs well apart, and stood dazzled, holding his head together with both hands.

‘It’s him!’ said Charlotte, humanly indifferent to grammar at this crisis. ‘He’s walking… he’s all right!’

The young man named Lawrence put her aside kindly but firmly, and took over in her place, drawing Gus’s left arm about his shoulders. ‘Man!’ he said admiringly. ‘Are you the tough one! Here, girl, cop hold of this thing, we don’t need a stretcher for types like this.’

The curator moved to the other side, encircled Gus competently but aloofly, and handed over the lantern. It was Charlotte who led the way back slowly and carefully through the garden. Mounting steps was what Gus found most bewildering at this stage; his feet made manful efforts, but tended to trail, and he was half-carried the last few yards to the door. And yet he had come to himself unaided, clambered to his feet without even the support of a fence to lean on, and made his way some two hundred yards towards the single light of the curator’s open door. A tough one, as Lawrence had observed. Or else his handicap had been rather less than she had reckoned. She was tired by this time, and unsure of her judgement: of stresses, of odds, even of personalities.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gus, quite distinctly but as if from a great distance. ‘I seem to be causing a lot of trouble.’

‘Not to worry, chum!’ said the Lawrence youth benignly, puffing a little on the steps but indestructibly cool and amiable. ‘See that nice, bright hole in the wall? Aim for that, and you’re home and dry!’

The nice, bright hole in the wall stood wide, as they had left it, gleaming with the reflections of white paint within. They bore steadily down upon it. And suddenly the oblong of light was inhabited. A shadowy silhouette materialised, rather than stepped, into the frame, and stood leaning forward slightly, peering understandably into the dimness outside, and curious about the massed group of figures converging upon the doorway. There was an outside light which no one, so far, had thought to switch on. The girl in the conservatory reached out a hand and flicked the switch, lighting them the last few yards, and floodlighting herself at the same time. Appearing magically out of shadow, suddenly she shone there before them, the focus of light and warmth and refuge. She had not the least idea what was going on, and she was smiling into the night in enquiry and wonder, her brows arched halfway to laughter, her lips parted in a whimsical welcome to whatever might be pending.

There was one brief moment while she stood illuminated thus theatrically, and still not at all comprehending that the group which confronted her had had a close brush with tragedy. She had a heart-shaped face, of striking, creamy smoothness, and broader than its length from brow to chin, like the bright, intelligent countenance of a young cat, innocent, assured and inquisitive. Her eyes were so wide-set and widely-opened that they consumed half her face in a dazzling pool of greenish-blue radiance. Her nose was neat, small and short, and her mouth full-lipped and firmly formed above a tapered but resolute chin. She had a cloud of short hair curving in clinging waves about her head, the colour of barley silk, and under the feathery fringe her forehead bulged childishly, with room in it for a notable brain, the one thing about her that was not suavely curved and ivory-smooth.

The details sounded like a collection of attractive oddities. The sum total was a quite arresting beauty. And the most jolting fact about her emerged only by implication. In a nylon jersey house-gown of peacock pattern and iridescent colouring, which clung like a silk glove, she could not possibly be anyone but Mrs Paviour, that same Lesley who walked when the fit took her, last thing at night, and had been home twenty minutes when Charlotte rang the door-bell. Ergo, the wife of this elderly Don Quixote, Great-Uncle Alan’s colleague and contemporary, who must be well into his sixties at the very least, and slightly arid and passé even at that. How old was the girl in the doorway? Not a day over twenty-five, Charlotte reckoned—hardly two years senior to herself. Perhaps even less. What an extraordinary mis-match! And not just because of the tale of years involved. The old man was a cracked leather bottle trying to contain quicksilver. She could not feel anything for him! It made no sense. And yet she had not the look of a woman cramped or dissatisfied. She glowed with ease and wellbeing.

At sight of her Gus, stiffening into startled consciousness between his supporters, set foot of his own volition on the last step, and his soiled eyebrows soared into his muddy hair, in reflection of the apparition before him. Very faintly but quite clearly he said: ‘Good God!’ and seemed to have no breath left for anything more explicit.

The moment of charmed stillness collapsed—or more properly exploded—into motion and exclamation. The girl in the Chinese house-coat narrowed her eyes upon the central figure in the tableau before her, and the supple lines of her face sharpened into crystal, and lost their smiling gaiety.

‘My God!’ she said, in the softest of dismayed voices. ‘What’s been happening, Steve?’ And she went on briskly, springing into instant and efficient comprehension: ‘Well, come on, bring him in to the fire, quickly! I’ll get brandy.’

She turned in a swirl of nylon jersey, and flung wide the door to the study, where the subsiding glow of the fire still burned. Her movements, as she receded rapidly along the passage beyond, were silent and violent, a force of nature in action. Only gradually did it emerge that she was rather a miniature whirlwind, perhaps an inch shorter even than Charlotte, but so slender that she escaped looking like a pocket edition. When she came back, with a tray in her hands, they had installed their patient by the fire in a deep chair, and peeled the soggy, wet jacket from him. They were five people in one small room, and hardly a word was said between them until Gus Hambro had a large brandy under his belt, and was visibly returning into circulation. His still dazed eyes followed his astonishing hostess around, measuring, weighing and wondering, in forgetfulness of his own predicament. He said nothing at all, as yet, but very eloquently. Charlotte hung back in a corner of the room, and let them encircle him with their attentions. So far he had not even registered her presence, and she was in no particular hurry to enlighten him.

‘He should have a doctor,’ said Paviour anxiously, standing over him with the empty brandy glass.

‘I don’t want a doctor,’ protested the patient, weakly but decidedly. ‘What could he do for me that you’re not doing? All I’ve got is a headache.’ He looked round him doubtfully, winced abruptly back to his original position, and clapped a surprised hand behind his right ear. ‘What happened?’ he asked blankly.

‘You fell in the river,’ said Paviour patiently. ‘I shouldn’t worry about remembering, if I were you. The main thing is, you’re here, and you’re going to be all right.’

‘Fell in the river?’ repeated Gus like an indignant echo, and stared at the smear of blood staining his muddy fingers. ‘I never did! I was keeping well on the landward side of the path, on the grass. And that’s where I was lying when I came round just now. All I’ve got is a welt on the head here. Somebody jumped me from behind and knocked me out.’ He looked from face to face, questioning and wondering. ‘If I was in the river,’ he said reasonably, ‘what am I doing here now?’

‘This lady,’ said Paviour, stepping aside to allow him to follow the mild gesture that indicated Charlotte, ‘pulled you out. Not only that, she administered artificial respiration and brought you round, and then came here to get help. Why did you suppose we were setting off with a stretcher and torches, at this time of night?’

‘I didn’t know… I never realised…’ He sat forward, staring in outraged recognition at Charlotte. ‘You mean you … it was you who…’ He shut his mouth and swallowed hard, and in the space of about two seconds she saw a whole kaleidoscope of emotions flash in succession through his mind. If she’s here, if she found me, it’s because she followed me! If she followed me, it’s because she doesn’t trust me, and if she doesn’t trust me it’s because she knows something, or has found out something. So far she was sure of her ground. And what followed was neither surprise nor mystery to her. For suddenly Gus Hambro performed a minor miracle, by producing a fiery blush that made itself visible in waves of dubious gratitude and indubitable mortification even through the layers of river mud that still decorated his face. Tales of gallant rescues ought not to go into reverse, and cast the lady as hero and the man as helpless victim. Especially when, whatever other circumstances may hold good, the man has been exerting himself to make an impression on the lady in question. Fate, thought Charlotte, gazing innocently back into his admiring, devoted, humiliated and furious face, has certainly given me the upper hand of you, my boy!

‘The kiss of life, I hope?’ said the young man Lawrence, putting a deliberate finger through the slight tension which was palpably building up within the room.

‘Schafer,’ said Charlotte shortly. ‘The only method I know.’

Gus did not sound at all like a man recently revived from drowning as he said with sharp disquiet: ‘Right, that disposes of how I got out, and I’m duly grateful, believe me. But now will somebody please explain to me how the hell I ever got in?

They were all staring at him in speculative silence when the sound of a car’s engine circled the house, coming to rest in the arc of gravel before the door. After it died, the silence was absolute for a few moments. Then incongruous suburban chimes jangled from the front porch.

‘That must be the police inspector,’ said Paviour. ‘Will you let him in, dear?’

His wife turned without a word, and went to open the door; and presently ushered in Detective Chief Inspector George Felse, mild, grey-haired and ordinary, a tired middle-aged man who would have been inconspicuous and among his peers almost anywhere he cared to materialise.

‘I got a message,’ he said, ‘that you wanted me here.’

He looked round them all as though none of them afforded him any surprise, though two of them did not belong here, and to his certain knowledge had been elsewhere only a short time ago. So short a time, Charlotte realised with a shock, that he could not possibly have returned home in the meantime, since he was a close neighbour of the Bodens, who lived ten miles from Aurae Phiala. The relayed message must have found him somewhere not far from this house. Somewhere by the river, she thought, downstream. Whatever went into the flooded Comer here would fetch up at one of several spots, no doubt well known to the police, where curves and currents tended to land what they had carried down. The chief inspector had just come, case or no case, from setting a close watch on those spots, in expectation—in foreboding, rather—that the flood would bring some unusual freight aground very shortly.

Only then did she fully realise that if she had been five minutes later the watchers keeping a lookout for a stray boy might, tomorrow, have been hauling ashore the sodden body of Gus Hambro.

Washed, warmed, with a shaven patch and an adhesive dressing behind his right ear and a second large brandy nursed gratefully in his hands, Gus told his story; though not, perhaps, quite ingenuously.

‘All I did was come out for a walk before going to bed, and I was about by that place where the bank’s caved in, when somebody jumped me from behind. I never heard a thing until maybe the last two steps he took, I never had time to turn. Something hit me on the back of the head, here, and I went out like a light. I remember dropping. I never felt the ground hit me. But I do know where I was when I fell—in the belt of grass under the bank, and facing straight ahead the way I was walking. And when I came round I was in the same place. I took it for granted I’d just been lying there since I went out, and whoever had jumped me had made off and left me there. When I could make it, I got up and made for the nearest shelter. There was a lighted doorway here, I steered for that. And just outside the garden I ran into this rescue party coming out to find me. Now they tell me,’ he said flatly, ‘that I was in the river, drowning, and Charlotte here pulled me out and brought me round.’ He had used her Christian name without even realising it, so intent was he on pinning down the details of his own remembrance.

‘When I found him,’ said Charlotte, ‘he was lying right across the path.’

‘Across the path?’

‘Across the path,’ she said firmly, ‘with his feet just touching the grass on the landward side, and his head and shoulders in the river. His face was completely under water.’

She felt them all stiffen in instinctive resistance, not wanting their routine existence to be invaded by anything as bizarre as this.

‘There may be a simple explanation for this discrepancy,’ ventured Paviour hopefully. ‘If there was a fresh fall of earth there—the bank is quite high, and we’ve seen that there’s brickwork exposed there… Perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate attack at all, just a further slip that struck him and swept him across the path. After all, we didn’t go along to have a look at the place.’

‘I was there,’ said Gus drily. ‘There wasn’t any fall.’

‘I was there, too,’ said Charlotte. ‘There’s something else. When you get a blow on the head and fall forward, whether it’s flying stones or a blackjack, you may fall heavily, but even so I don’t think you’d embed yourself as deeply in the mud as Mr Hambro was embedded.’

Chief Inspector Felse sat steadily watching her, and said nothing. It was Paviour who stirred again in uneasy protest. ‘My dear girl, are you sure you’re not recalling rather more than happened? After stresses like that, the imagination may very easily begin to add details.’

‘I’m recognising things I did see, and never had time to recognise then. But the other thing is a good deal more conclusive…’

George Felse asked quietly: ‘How were his arms?’

‘Yes, that’s it!’ she said. ‘How did you know? When you fall forward, fully conscious or not, you put out your hands to break your fall. His arms were down at his sides. Nobody falls like that. Even if you were out on your feet, and fell as a dead weight, your arms wouldn’t drop tidily by your sides. And that’s how his were.’

She was watching the chief inspector’s face as she said it, and she knew that he believed her, and accepted her as a good witness. Both the Paviours were stiffening in appalled disbelief, even young Lawrence had drawn a hissing breath of doubt. Probably Gus himself found it hard to swallow, and would have preferred not to accept it, the implications being too unpleasant to contemplate. But George Felse had come halfway to meet her.

‘But, good God,’ objected Stephen Paviour faintly, ‘do you realise what you’re suggesting?’

‘Not suggesting. Stating. I’m saying that someone, having knocked Mr Hambro cold, dragged him across the path to the water, and shoved him firmly into the soft mud with his face under water, to die.’

In the stunned silence George Felse got up, without speaking, and crossed the room to where Gus’s jacket hung on the back of a chair, turned towards the replenished fire, and steamed gently as it dried. He slid his hands into the sleeves, and lifted it to turn the back to the light, and for a few minutes stood studying it closely.

‘The back,’ said Charlotte, watching, ‘was dry as high as the shoulder-blades. Except that I probably made some damp patches, handling him after I got him out.’

‘Quite a difference from actually lying in the river.’ He spread the jacket between his hands, holding it out for them to see. ‘Look in the middle of the back, here, from just above the waist upwards. What do you see?’ He turned to look at Gus, with a faintly challenging smile.

‘A moist patch—sizeable. Two patches, rather, but practically joined in one.’ The warm, heathery colours of the tweed darkened there into a duller, peaty shade, two irregular, fading patches, with a vague dry line between. A thin rim of encrusted mud, drying off now, helped to outline the marks, but even so they were elusive enough until pointed out.

‘Well? What do you make of it? You tell me!’

‘It’s a footmark,’ said Gus, and licked lips suddenly dry and stiff with retrospective fear. ‘I know what to make of it, all right! It means some bastard not only laid me out cold, and stuck me face-down in the Comer, but even rammed me well down into the mud with a foot in the small of my back to make dead sure of me, before he lit out and left me there to drown.’