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

CHAPTER EIGHT

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They dug him out with their bare hands, scrabbling like frantic terriers to clear the soil away from his head and shoulders; and within minutes they had him laid out like a stranded fish on one of their plastic sheets in the grass. All the internal filth of generations, cobwebs and dust and soot, had been discharged on top of him as the joints of the roof parted, but an outstretched arm had sheltered his head and face, and he was not only breathing, but spluttering out the dirt that had silted into mouth and nostrils. They had to brush away the layers before they could examine him for worse damage, George on one side of him, Barnes on the other, feeling urgently at a skull that seemed to have escaped all but the loose, light weight of the fall. They drew off his damp, soiled jacket, and felt at shoulders and arms, and could find no breakages. Everyone hovered unhappily. Little rivulets of loose soil trickled capriciously down the slope of raw earth. Somewhere on the sidelines Paviour could be heard protesting that they could not possibly proceed with this excavation in these conditions, that the risks were too great, that someone would be killed.

‘No damage,’ said Barnes, breathing gusty relief. ‘Just knocked silly. He’ll be round and as right as rain in five minutes. All that got him was the loose muck, not the bricks.’

‘I’ll fetch some brandy,’ Lesley offered eagerly. ‘And take this jacket to sponge and dry, he can’t possibly put it on again like this.’

They were two deep round him in any case, nearly a dozen people hanging on the least movement of a finger or an eyelid. She’s right, Charlotte thought, watching dubiously but compulsively like all the rest, one grain of sense is worth quite a lot of random sympathy.

‘I’ll bring one of Stephen’s coats,’ said Lesley, and set off at a light, long stepping run for the house.

Charlotte offered tissues to wipe away the trailing threads of glutinous, dirty cobweb from the victim’s eyes, for his eyelids were beginning to contract and twitch preparatory to opening. He lay for some minutes before he made the final effort, and then unfurled his improbably luxuriant lashes upon a bright, golden-brown stare of general accusation.

‘What in hell do you all think you’re doing?’ he said, none too distinctly and very ungratefully, and spat out fragments of soil with a startled grimace of distaste. ‘What happened?’

It was a fair enough question, considering how abruptly he had been obliterated from the proceedings. His exit had been brief, but absolute, while they, it seemed, were still in possession of their faculties and the facts. He sat up in the circle of George’s arm, seemed to become suddenly aware of his shirt sleeves and the late April chill, and demanded, looking violently round him: ‘Where’s my jacket?’

‘Mrs Paviour’s taken it away to clean and dry it out for you. You were taking a look inside there, and half the roof came down on you,’ said George patiently. All the victim’s limbs seemed to be in full working order, even his memory was only one jump behind.

‘Oh, blimey!’ he said weakly. ‘Was that it?’ And he leaned forward to peer at the spot where two policemen were stolidly clearing away newly-fallen rubble from the mouth of the flue, and a third, well above them on the level ground, was cautiously surveying the crater. ‘You’ll have to dig for that torch of yours,’ he said more strongly, not without a mildly vindictive satisfaction. ‘I let go of it when things started dropping on me. That chap up there had better watch his step, there was a gleam of daylight a good two yards forward from where I got to. He didn’t put one of those beetle-crushers through there while I was inside, did he?’

‘He did not,’ said George tolerantly. ‘The thing just gave. Mea culpa. I shouldn’t have let you do it.’

‘The thing just gave. Did it?’ He was coming round with remarkable aplomb now, it was with the old, knowledgeable eye that he stared at the ruin of the neat archway which had been their entrance to the flue only ten minutes ago. But all he said was: ‘You know what? Either I’m accident-prone, all of a sudden, or else somebody, somewhere, is sticking pins in a wax image of me.’

Some minutes later, when all anxiety on his behalf had ebbed away into renewed interest in the job on hand, when he was sitting hunched with Price’s sportscoat draped round his shoulders, and one of George’s cigarettes between his lips, and not a soul but George within earshot, he said, softly and with intent: ‘Watch it from now on! I’m getting clearer every minute. Somebody’d been hacking at the brickwork inside there. That wasn’t any accident.’

‘You sure?’ asked George in the same tone.

‘I’m sure. I lost your torch—and switched on, at that, you won’t get much mileage back in that battery!—but I know what I’d already seen. Fresh-broken surfaces, high in the wall. The upstream side was what I noticed. A gash in the brickwork, pale and clean. Even if you have to dig out from on top, now, with care you’ll find it. Somebody aimed to bring that flue down.’

‘Nobody,’ said George, gazing ahead of him at the spot where Price was re-deploying his forces on the level of the caldarium floor, ‘can have got into that place ahead of you. Earlier, yes, that I believe. Not since the slip.’

‘They wouldn’t have to. I told you, at least one gleam of daylight ahead there. More than one hole on top. A crowbar down one of those would be all he needed.’ The momentary silence irritated him. He said with asperity, and considering his recent escape with some justification: ‘It worked, didn’t it?’

‘It worked, all right. I’m considering motives. What was the object? To have a second go at you? They couldn’t have known you’d even be available, much less put your head in the trap.’

‘No, that’s out,’ admitted Gus generously. ‘To seal off the flue, more likely.’

‘To hide what’s there?’

‘Not a chance! There’ll be nothing there. To hide the traces of what was there.’

Lesley came back from the house with a tweed coat over her arm and a flask in her hand. ‘We can also,’ she said, looking down at Gus with a slightly quizzical smile, ‘offer a bath, if and when you feel equal to it. You can hardly go back to “The Salmon’s Return” looking like that.’

He looked down, slightly startled, at the state of his shirt and his hands, and admitted the difficulty.

‘And you can’t see your face,’ said Lesley helpfully, her friendly, candid eyes dwelling upon the spectacle with detached amusement, but not with any apparent repulsion.

‘That’s immensely kind of you. I’d like to take you up on it, if Mr Paviour will allow me,’ he said, suddenly aware of a little chill in the blood that warned him not to leave out the curator from this or any other exchange on these premises.

‘Of course,’ Paviour said, with prompt but distant courtesy, ‘by all means avail yourself. I can offer you a change of shirt, if the size is right.’

‘And as I’ve got lunch on the way in about three quarters of an hour, hadn’t you better take it easy and join us? You’ll just have time to make yourself presentable. Bill will be staying, too,’ she said, firmly arranging everything to her own satisfaction.

This somewhat drastic rupture in her ordinary routine must in its way, Charlotte thought, be a godsend to Lesley, however deplorable the reason for it. She was also reacting in an understandably female way to having a ready-made casualty of pleasant appearance and attractive manners dropped at her feet. For the second time, too! But on the first occasion, even when deposited half-drowned and battered in the Paviour household, he had belonged by rights to Charlotte, who had pulled him out of the river and demanded shelter for him. This time he was, so to speak, legitimate prey, and Lesley intended to enjoy him.

‘If you feel like walking up with me now, I must go back and keep an eye on lunch. Charlotte, will you come and help me?’

The three of them walked back together, Gus steady enough on his legs, and only slightly exercised in mind at leaving the excavation, which had now been transferred of necessity to the higher level. There could be no more attempts to enter the flues from the slope, they were going to have to take up all that island of rotten ground and expose them from above. A more thorough job, and a safer, but infinitely slower. They were staking out the limits of the subsidence now, and Bill Lawrence was clipping a new sheet of graph paper to his board. One of the plainclothes men was busy with a camera. And Paviour, torn between the instinct to follow his wife and the desire to pursue George Felse and renew his protests, hovered in indecision. Charlotte looked back once, and saw him standing motionless, gazing after them, lean and desiccated as a stick insect, but with a face all too human in its tormented anxiety; not all, perhaps, about his beloved and ravaged city.

Lesley could, she thought, do a little more to placate and reassure a husband she knew to be almost pathologically jealous. It was easy to believe that she had no regrets about her bargain, and no intention of backing out of it, but in the circumstances this was a reassurance that needed to be repeated endlessly. And yet everything she did had an open and innocent grace about it. If she devoted herself to her new guest all through lunch, she did so out of a pleasurable sense of duty, and not at all flirtatiously. It was impossible to associate the word with her; there was nothing sidelong or circuitous about the way Lesley approached anyone, man or woman.

As for Gus, bathed and polished and reclothed in his own beautifully pressed sportscoat, he trod delicately, dividing his attention as adroitly as he could between the two of them, repaying Lesley’s direct friendliness with wary deference, and turning as often as possible to Paviour with leading remarks on Aurae Phiala, to draw him into eloquence on the subject dearest to his heart.

‘I imagine,’ said Paviour, regarding him almost with favour over the coffee, ‘that you’ll be interested in seeing this distasteful invasion limited as much as possible. The damage could be incalculable. I suppose,’ he said, almost visibly writhing at coming so near to begging, ‘you haven’t any influence? The authorities, I believe, do sometimes listen to the opinions of scholars…’ His thin, fastidious voice faded out bitterly on the admission that he was none.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Gus ruefully, ‘that nobody who won’t listen to you, sir, is going to pay the slightest attention to me. But I don’t believe, from what I’ve heard this morning, that the police want to take the dig a yard past where it need go. After all, they do have some evidence, apparently, to connect this boy Boden with the place.’ He added deprecatingly: ‘I think Chief Inspector Felse means to brief us, as fully as he can, this evening.’

‘Will you be staying on to see the job through?’ asked Bill Lawrence.

‘I’d have liked to, but it doesn’t look as if I shall be able to. I got my room at the pub for only two nights. From Friday night on you have to be a fisherman to get in at “The Salmon’s Return”, even in the close season. I’ve got to get out today.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Lesley, aggrieved. ‘What a shame, when you’re being so helpful. Stephen, don’t you think we…?’

She had rushed in where angels might have hesitated to set foot, and almost instantly she recognised it, and halted in contained but palpable dismay. And Bill Lawrence put in smoothly, as if the tension had never communicated itself to him, but so promptly that Charlotte, for one, knew it had: ‘Why don’t you move in with me? I’ve got the whole lodge as bachelor quarters, there’s plenty of room for one more, if you don’t mind sharing a room? Two beds,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and acres of storage space. We can run over and pick up your things, if you say the word?’

‘Consider it said,’ Gus said heartily, ‘and thanks! I should have hated to have to go away and miss this chance. I thought I should probably have to go as far as Comerbourne to get a room without notice, and it hardly seemed worth it commuting from that distance. Especially,’ he said, with an engaging smile in Paviour’s direction, ‘as I more or less invited myself to the dig in the first place.’

Lesley had recovered resiliently from her momentary disarray. She sat serenely silent, apparently well content at having Gus’s problem and her own solved so economically. It even entered Charlotte’s mind, watching, that there were moments when Lesley deliberately made use of Bill Lawrence to pull chestnuts out of the fire for her.

Afterwards, in the car on the way to ‘The Salmon’s Return’, Bill said, after too patent deliberation and in too world-weary a voice: ‘Look, it’s easy enough living in this set-up, but you have to know the rules. Be my guest, use my experience and save your own, boy. Rule number one: Never even seem to get too close to that lady.’ His tone was lightly cynical, and a little rueful; there was no knowing for certain how deeply he felt about what he was saying.

‘I wondered,’ said Gus, ‘why you got off the mark so fast and so smoothly. Apart from having a generous disposition, of course.’

‘Don’t mistake me, there’s nothing wrong with Lesley. She’s straight, and she means what she offers. It’s her old man. He’s mad jealous of her. Oh, he’d have backed up her invitation, all right, if he’d had to. Very correct, very hospitable. But then he’d have made life hell for you, her, and above all himself, by being suspicious of every glance you gave her. It’s better to keep a nice safe distance, and be a bit of the landscape, like me.’

‘And you’ve experienced that yourself?’ Gus asked mildly.

The voice beside him became even lighter and drier. ‘I didn’t have to. I’ve only confirmed it from my own observations since. I was warned off privately, as soon as I came here. By Lesley herself.’ There was a brief but weighty pause, and then, as if he had felt oppressed by its suggestive possibilities, he made the mistake of adding, with the same airy intonation: ‘Probably she never fancied me, anyhow.’

Gus kept his eyes on the road ahead, and sat stolidly, as though the sharp note of bitterness had passed him by. But from then on he was in no doubt that, whatever this young man felt for Lesley Paviour, it was certainly not indifference.

‘In view of all the circumstances,’ said George Felse, facing the assembled household in Paviour’s study that evening, ‘I think it only fair to give you some idea of how this enquiry is progressing. Your professional proceedings are affected, and you have a right to be told why that’s inevitable. We want your co-operation. We don’t want to upset your routine any longer than we must, or to extend our intrusion a yard beyond what’s necessary.’

They were all there, including the young men from the lodge, invited by Lesley to dine at the house. Not an invariable favour, Gus had gathered. Not much doubt that Bill attributed it cynically to his guest’s presence.

‘Let me substantiate,’ said George, ‘our claim to move in on your ground. In the first place, the post-mortem on Gerry Boden has shown that he did not drown. There is no penetration of water into his lungs. He died of suffocation, most probably while still stunned by a blow on the head. The time of death, while it’s always somewhat more problematical fixing it than is usually supposed, was considerably earlier than the time when, as we have several reasons to believe, he was put into the water. Provisionally, his death occurred somewhere between six and eight in the evening. In other words, about midway between the time when he was last seen, and the time when Mr Hambro was attacked. It’s a fair assumption that the attempt on Mr. Hambro’s life took place because the murderer believed he had seen the boy’s body committed to the river. Seen, or heard, or at any rate become aware of something queer going on, something that might make sense to him and be reported later, even if it made no sense then.’

Paviour licked bluish lips, and ventured hesitantly: ‘But if there was such an interval, the boy may have been anywhere during that time, not here in Aurae Phiala at all.’

‘Oh, yes, he was here. We know that he hid himself in order to stay here and have the free run of the place when everyone else had gone. We know where he hid. And we know where he was hidden, after his death. From under the clump of broom bushes we removed this morning we recovered, as perhaps you noticed, certain small bits of evidence. One was the broken cap of a red ball pen, fellow to the black one he still had on him when found. It was trodden into the turf, underneath those bushes. They were dragged together and heaped over him after he was killed. Another, from among the broom roots, was a sample of hair, which I think will certainly turn out to be Boden’s. He was concealed there on the spot, because at the time of his murder it was barely dusk, and the whole of your river-shore is only too plainly visible from the other side. Therefore, that is where he was killed—right there beside the cave-in.’

‘But after you came enquiring for him,’ protested Paviour feverishly, ‘the enclosure of Aurae Phiala was searched. Surely he would have been found?’

‘I’d hardly call it searched. We did walk over the site. It was then dark, perhaps dark enough for the murderer to have risked getting him down to the river, if we hadn’t been around. But we were not looking for a body then, at least not on dry land. The fact remains, he was there. Further laboratory work should tell us more. His clothes, for instance. They’ve already told us something of the first importance, the reason for his hanging around here until after closing-time.’

He looked round them with an equable, unrevealingg glance, a pleasant, greying, unobtrusive man at whom you would never look twice in the street.

‘Gerry carried a purse for his loose money. Among the coins in it, which the murderer hadn’t disturbed, was a gold aureus of the Emperor Commodus, in mint condition. He can only have found it during the school visit. And he can only have found it there, at that broken flue of the hypocaust.’

‘That’s an impossibility,’ said Paviour hoarsely. ‘You’ll find this is some toy of his own, a fake, a copy… How could you account for such a thing? A freshly-minted coin after years in the ground?’

George picked up the cue, and proceeded to account for it bluntly and clearly, as he had done for Charlotte in the night. He sketched in the figure of the murderer, also waiting for dark, to remove his buried treasure from its perilous position, and his unexpected encounter with the inquisitive boy on the same errand; the instant decision that only the boy’s total removal could now protect his profitable racket; and the immediate execution. He described the items of Roman jewellery turning up with inadequate pedigrees during the past year, and the peculiarities of style which linked them, if not necessarily to this site, at least to no more than four or five, of which this was one.

‘In short, we believe that someone has been systematically milking Aurae Phiala of small pieces, some very valuable indeed, for a year or more.’

There was a long, tight pause, while he eyed them gently again, his glance passing unrevealingly from face to face round the circle. Then Bill Lawrence said, a little too loudly but with admirable bluntness: ‘You mean one of us.’

George smiled. ‘Not necessarily. There are a good many people in the village who’ve been here longer than you have, and known this place just as intimately, some of them before it was organised and shown as it is now. The site could hardly be more open. The riverside path makes access easy for everyone who knows this district, and that includes not only the village, but large numbers of fishermen, too.’

‘But only somebody with specialist knowledge,’ Bill pointed out forcibly, ‘would know how to dispose of articles like that to the best advantage.’

‘True enough, but gold is gold, and in certain parts of the world it commands far more than its sterling value, even if it’s hard to sell in its original form. There may have been other, larger pieces besides the coins, of course, they’d be a problem to an amateur. The helmet, for instance…’ he said innocently.

Paviour stiffened in his chair, staring. ‘Helmet?’

‘The helmet the ghost is said to wear. You remember Mrs Paviour’s interesting account of what she and others saw, or thought they saw? That may be no legend, but a chance find, retained as a property to scare off the superstitious, and divert any curiosity about movements here in the night.’

Paviour gathered himself together with a perceptible effort, sitting erect and taut. ‘Such a traffic,’ he said firmly, ‘would require not just some specialist knowledge, but an expert of the first quality as adviser, if it was to escape detection for long.’

‘Such as yourself?’ said George.

If it was a shock, he was then so inured to shocks that it made no impression. With bitter dignity he said: ‘I am a third-rate sub-expert and a fifth-rate scholar, and the real ones know it as well as I do.’

Lesley whispered: ‘Stephen, dear!’ and laid a hand appealingly on his arm.

Imperturbably George pursued: ‘But other authorities have visited Aurae Phiala. There have even been brief and limited digs under some of them.’ He was gathering up his few notes, and stowing them away in an inside pocket, preparatory to leaving. He looked up once, briefly, at Charlotte, a glance that told her nothing. ‘You might give it some thought. Consider who has visited here, and who has dug, during—say—the past year and a half to two years. No, please don’t disturb yourself, I can find my way out.’

He was halfway to the door when he added an afterthought: ‘One name we do know, of course. It’s just about eighteen months, isn’t it, since Doctor Alan Morris left from here on his way to Turkey.’

They were still staring after him, motionless and silent, when the door closed gently; and in a few minutes they heard his car start up on the gravel drive.

The inquest opened formally on Saturday morning, took evidence of identification, and at the police request adjourned for one week. George drove the bewildered but stonily dignified pair who were Gerry Boden’s parents back to their home, from which he had also conveyed them earlier, because he was by no means sure that Boden was yet in any case to drive. Not that they were making difficulties or distresses for anyone; their composure was chill and smooth and temporary as ice, but though it might thaw at any moment, it would certainly not be in public. Their disciplines included containing their private sorrows. And in a sense Gerry had always been, if not a sorrow, an ambivalent sort of joy, a perilous possession, capable of piling either delights or dismays into their laps at any moment without warning. Life without him was going to be infinitely more peaceful and inexpressibly dimmer. He could have been anything he had put his mind to, good or bad, and now he was a carefully but impersonally reconstructed body put together by strangers to be presentable enough to be released for burial. Boden had already seen him dead. Mrs Boden had not, but would surely insist on doing so when he was given back to them.

Afterwards, of course, they would take up the business of living again, because they were durable, and in any case had not much choice. And in time they would be comfortable enough, being happily very fond of each other, though they had never in their lives been in love.

George went home to do a little thinking, and take a fresh look at the laboratory reports he’d hardly had time to read that morning. Also to get the taste of despair and disgust out of his mouth and the mildew of misanthropy out of his eyes by looking at Bunty. She was getting a little plumper and a little less sudden now that she was in the middle forties, but her chestnut and hazel colouring was as vivid as ever; and knowing every line of her only made her more of a delightful surprise in everything she said or did. For George had been in love with Bunty ever since he had first heard Bernarda Elliot sing at a concert in Birmingham, while she was still a student, and had never got over her unhesitating choice of marriage with him in preference to a career as a potentially first-class mezzo. Police officers are not considered great catches.

Their only son was busy mending agricultural machinery and driving tractors for an erratic but effective native mission in India, and had just welcomed to the same service his future wife, fresh from an arts degree and a rushed course in nursing. And what Tossa was going to make of the Swami Premanathanand’s organisation was anybody’s guess, but arguably she would fall completely under the spell of its gentle but jolting founder, as Dominic had done, and lose herself in his hypnotic ambience. George thought of them, and was lifted out of his despond. He withdrew to the study of his morning’s professional mail in better heart.

He was halfway through compiling an up-to-date précis when Bunty looked in, unastonished as ever, and announced: ‘Miss Rossignol wants to talk to you.’ Bunty vanished on the word, and Charlotte, small and trim and magnificently self-possessed, at her most French, came sailing in upon him from the doorway. She looked very determined, and very young.

‘Now this,’ said George, ‘is a pleasure I wasn’t expecting. Come and sit down, and tell me what I can do for you.’

‘You can tell me,’ said Charlotte, looking up intently into his face, ‘whether you really meant what you implied last night. Because I’ve been thinking along the same lines, and not liking it at all. And then, if you don’t mind, and it isn’t top secret, you can tell me what you know that I don’t know about my great-uncle Alan.’