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

CHAPTER NINE

« ^ »

By late morning the diggers had exposed the broken roof of the flue, and half the arch of its slightly damaged neighbour, for a distance of about six feet, and were setting to work in earnest to remove the shattered brickwork and lay bare the channel below. Since this process involved moving sacred relics, and it was a life-and-death matter to Paviour that they should not be damaged or allowed to fall into disorder, both he and Bill Lawrence were now employed, not so much fully as frantically, in trying to label and number everything that emerged, and laying out the materials of the arch in the grass, aside from the affected area. Barnes, out of pure good-nature and some reviving interest in archaeology, lent a hand under Paviour’s irritable and anxious direction, but even with three pairs of hands they had all they could do to keep pace. Gus Hambro had taken over one of the small sheds attached to the museum, where there was a sink and a water tap, and removed himself there with all the minor trophies of the first day’s work, and with sleeves rolled up, and an array of small nailbrushes for weapons, was carefully washing off the corrosion of soil and dust from dozens of little objects, most of them derisory: fragments of red glaze, one segment of cloudy glass from the lips of a jug, a plethora of animal bones, two plain bone hair-pins and one with the broken remnants of a carved head, and the single interesting item, a bronze penannular brooch with coiled ends to the ring. A boring job, but a vital one. He had good reason to want to be first in discovering and studying whatever there was to be found, but so far the result was disappointing.

It was a little past noon when the door of his shed opened, and Lesley looked in.

‘Lunch prompt at one,’ she informed him, and came to his elbow to examine the trifles he had laid out on a board beneath the window. ‘Dull,’ she said, sadly but truthfully. ‘Do you need any help?’ There was still a heap of grimy objects awaiting his attentions, their nature almost obscured by layers of soil grown to them like rust.

‘I shouldn’t. You’ll get terribly dirty.’ And after a moment’s hesitation he asked what he had been wondering all morning. ‘What happened to Charlotte? I haven’t seen her around at all today.’

‘I know. She went off after breakfast in my car. She said she wanted to see somebody in town, but she promised to be back for lunch. I offered to drive her wherever she wanted to go,’ said Lesley, frowning thoughtfully down at the little bronze brooch, ‘but she wouldn’t let me, so I saw she didn’t want company. Only two days, and you know, I really miss her. I’ve just got used to having somebody to chatter to, a rare luxury here. Stephen doesn’t chatter, or understand being chattered to. Stephen converses. When he isn’t being totally taciturn, that is.’ She laughed suddenly, recognising how fluently she was illustrating her own theme. ‘You see? Failing Charlotte, someone else gets sprayed with words. You don’t mind being a stand-in, do you? All the others are far too busy, and you can at least go on brushing bones while you listen.’

‘You don’t know,’ he said, ‘where she was going?’

‘Charlotte? She didn’t say, so naturally I didn’t ask her. Lend me that bigger brush, I can be whisking the top dirt off these things. I’m no use down there, and there’s half an hour or so before I need go back to the kitchen.’

She fell in companionably beside him, and went to work removing the worst of the encrustations from still more inevitable bits of bone and animal teeth. ‘Graveyard exercise, isn’t it? Like Mr Barnes, I dream of digging up another Mildenhall treasure instead of a cow’s incisors, but it’s never likely to happen to me.’

She had leaned nearer to him, to drop the despised tooth into the sink, and she felt the slight tension that stiffened the arm she brushed against. She drew back a distinct pace, and kept that distance; but he knew that her eyes were on him, in no sidelong glance, but regarding him widely and directly. The challenge to turn and look as straightly at her was irresistible. Greenish-blue like the off-shore sea under sunshine, her disconcerting eyes were laughing at him, though the rest of her face was mild and grave.

‘I suppose Bill’s been warning you about Stephen and me,’ she said quite placidly.

She had set the key, he might as well follow.

‘Shouldn’t he have done? I understand you warned him yourself.’

She shrugged. ‘Just as well to know where you stand, don’t you think? I don’t suppose it came as any great surprise to you. Only the very unintelligent could help wondering about us. And you’re not very unintelligent. Are you?’

‘I’m wondering that myself,’ he said.

‘The door’s open,’ she said, smiling. ‘Anyone’s welcome to walk in. And you could walk out any moment you pleased.’

‘Quite. But why, if it’s like that, did you walk in? And stay in?’

Perhaps by that time he should have been feeling that the conversation had got out of hand, but he had no such feeling. On the contrary, it was proceeding in perfect control, and not a word had been said on either side without consideration and intent.

‘Because I’m a person, too,’ she said, sparkling with angry animation. ‘He’s jealous—all right! But I’m alive and gregarious and talkative, and I’m damned if I’m going to change my nature because he sees more in everything I say or do than I ever put into it. Let him fret that I’m disloyal, if he has to, just as long as I know I’m not. It isn’t as if I had any reason to be afraid of him, you know. A gentler, more attentive old idiot never stepped. No, when I went about virtuously warning nice, harmless young men like Bill to keep clear, it was all out of consideration for his peace of mind. Now I’m considering mine. I’m what he married. Why should I suppose I’d be doing him a favour by changing into something else? So I’ve given up the practice. I’m staying the way I am.’

The invitation to equal candour was proffered, palpable on the air. He accepted it. For some reason it would have seemed perverse to refuse it.

‘Why he married you,’ he said briskly, ‘is no mystery to anyone. Given the chance, that is. Why was he given the chance? That’s the puzzler.’

She had put down the shard of Samian ware she had been brushing, and the brush after it. She leaned with one hip against the edge of the sink, her back half-turned to the window, the better to face him; and even her sea-green eyes had stopped laughing now.

‘Because his timing was right. Because he came as such a nice change after the young, handsome, dashing, cold-hearted bastard who’d dropped me into the muck the minute it suited him, and put me off love for life. Or so I thought then. Jilted, I tell you, is no word for what happened to me. And there was Stephen trotting in and out of the office with his little manuscripts, looking rather distinguished and being terribly anxious and patient and kind. So I told him what I hadn’t told a soul besides, and he did everything possible to comfort me and make it up to me—as if anyone could! And one of the nice things he thought of was to ask me to marry him. It looked good to me—really, then, it looked like the answer to everything. So I married for what was left, since I’d finished with love. For security, and kindness, for a respectable position, and a crash barrier against all the young, handsome, dashing, frosty-hearted bastards left in the world. The world stopped, and I got off, and that was marriage. And look at me now!’

It was an unnecessary instruction; he was looking at her very intently and steadily, and at a range of scarcely more than a foot. She had turned until she was confronting him squarely, leaning back a little against the stone sink, her hands, grubby from the clinging soil, childishly held up beside her shoulders, with widespread fingers, to avoid dirtying her cashmere sweater. Her short fair hair quivered and seemed to erect itself as if electrically charged, in the small, freakish draught from the window behind her, and through some trick of the fitful sunlight. She had set the pace in all these improbable exchanges, and whether she had now far outdistanced her own intention there was no knowing; but there was no point in trying to turn back, and there might, at least, be something to be gained by following through. For one thing, he doubted very much if she would have revoked on her bargain, even now.

‘If it’s that bad,’ he said deliberately, ‘why do you stay with him? The world’s still there, if you want to get on again.’

‘There’s an awful lot of time around, too,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting. I can afford to wait.’

‘For the right moment?’

‘Or the right man,’ she said.

It was said quite impersonally, almost to herself, but with such abrupt desolation and longing that he was filled with an entirely personal dismay on her account, and instinctively put out his hands to take her by the waist and hold her fast while he found something, however fatuous, however inadequate, to say to her. She was turning slightly away from him when he took her forcibly between his palms. He felt her whole body convulsed by a huge tremor of revulsion and panic, and was distressed into a sharp cry of pity and protest.

‘Lesley—don’t! My God, I never intended…’

She came to life again, her flesh lissom and warm. She twisted to break free, and he held on only to try and reassure her before he let her go, for it was like holding a cat unwilling to be held, the boneless body dissolving between his hands. She reached out to the rim of the sink, to have a purchase for forcing him off, and her fingers missed their grip and slid into the turgid water. She fell against him, drawing breath in deep, transfixing sighs, and suddenly she was silk, clinging with both hands. Her head was against his shoulder, her face upturned close beneath his, with wide-opened eyes and parted lips.

He kissed her, and the passive mouth flowered and burned, in shocked, involuntary acceptance. He felt her hands close on his back, pressing convulsively.

Over her shoulder he saw through the window the whole sweep of grass suddenly inhabited by a single approaching figure, looming large against the driven clouds and gleaming sun, and the distant, skeletal walls. He saw the brisk stride broken and diverted, only a dozen yards away; he saw the long, narrow body lean back, waver and halt. There could be only one reason for such a dislocation. The glass before him had been recently cleaned, and the noon sun shone directly into it. Paviour, coming hopefully up from the dig with a new bouquet of trophies in their plastic sacks, had clearly seen the tableau in the shed.

There was a strange, brief pause, while they hung eye to eye, across all that distance, and perfectly understood that there was now no possibility of disguising their mutual knowledge, that it could only be publicly denied and privately accepted. Then, wheeling to the left with a sudden, jerky movement, Paviour walked away towards the house, still clutching his little plastic sacks. Probably he had forgotten he was holding them.

Gus stood motionless, afraid almost to breathe for fear Lesley should turn away from him in a new access of revulsion, and face the window before that long, stilted, pathetic figure had vanished out of range. It was pure luck that her back had been turned to the light; she had seen nothing. His palms were still clamped with involuntary force on either side of her body, he would have felt any stiffening, any tremor, and she hung fluidly and heavily against him, like draped silk. And Paviour had walked clean out of the frame of the window and out of their sight.

It almost hurt to unclamp his grip on the girl, and separate himself from her, and he did it with infinite care not to offend by the separation as he had offended by first touching her. ‘I’m sorry!’ he said constrainedly. ‘I never meant to scare you.’

She turned aside from him at once, as soon as he released her, reached automatically for her brush and towards the dingy pile of relics awaiting attention. She moved with economy and resignation, and looked curiously calm, as though her recent experience had left her in shock.

‘I’m sorry, too. I never thought you did. It simply happens to me. I panic. I can’t help it.’

He wondered if he should tell her, if she needed to know. He thought not. She was better off as she was. Her innocence would be impregnable; she had nothing to fear.

‘I’d better go,’ she said, almost naturally, and put down the brush. ‘I’ve got to see to the lunch.’

She made very little sound, departing, because the door was open, and she moved as lightly as a kitten in her soft walking shoes, so nicely matched to her boyish, slim style in slacks. But he knew the moment when she left, without looking round from his automatic operations on one more fragmentary ivory pin, by the slow, settling tranquillity she left behind her.

Lunch was a minor nightmare only because nothing whatever happened. It cost him an effort to reassemble his stolidly innocent face before he need appear; and then, when he was reasonably assured that his façade was impervious, he had to meet Charlotte head-on at the door.

He had never seen her look quite so un-English or so serenely formidable. There was no wind, and the curled plumes of black hair deployed across her magnolia cheeks might have been lacquered there, they were so steely and perfect. Also he had never realised until that moment how small and slender she was, almost as tiny as Lesley. His mind started involuntarily measuring her waist, and the exercise led on to other highly speculative considerations concerning the resilience of her bones and the scent of her hair, should she ever find herself in his arms, due to an emotional miscalculation on his part and a panic reaction on hers. He failed to imagine it adequately. She didn’t look the type. But then, neither did Lesley.

‘I missed you,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘You’ve been gone all morning.’

‘I had a call to make in town, on personal business,’ she said coolly. ‘I hope you managed to divert yourself even without me.’ And her thick, genuine, loftily-arched black brows went up, and the eyes beneath them flashed a golden gleam of amusement at his proprietary tone. During the past two days he had given her very little cause to suppose that he attached particular importance to her presence. ‘Any interesting discoveries?’

She was referring only to work in progress, and he knew it, and yet every word she said seemed to find a way of probing between the joints of his armour with prophetic force. The defensive reaction she set up in him made him tongue tied when he would most gladly have been fluent; he felt that if he turned his back on her she would see, clean through the tweed of his jacket, the prints of two small, splayed hands, soiled from brushing trivia, clamped against his shoulder-blades.

‘If you like,’ she said generously, ‘I’ll be your runner this afternoon, and ferry the bits and pieces up to you.’

‘Do,’ he said, cheered and astonished. ‘I’d like that.’ Charlotte darting in and out would be an insurance policy second to none. Against Lesley? When he stood back to consider the incident he couldn’t seriously persuade himself that she was likely to come near him again of her own will, however perversely she desired to let off steam. Against himself, then? He flinched from considering it, but it remained a strong possibility.

‘We’d better go in,’ said Charlotte, only slightly disturbed by his uncharacteristic fervour. ‘I’m hungry.’

So they went in. And lunch was the nadir of normality, without an original thought or a perilous suggestion to enliven it. The confrontation through the glass of the window might never have taken place.

By that hour the police had already segregated certain sections of brick and tile marked with recent scars, a few curved shards of pottery from a jar, and covered from injury a small area of flooring within the flue, with its dust still displaying the faint but positive print of the base of just such a ceramic jar. There had been no gold coins in the detritus. No doubt the last of them had been removed in haste after the murder of Gerry Boden. Only the single one from his purse remained to testify.

On Saturday evenings Bill Lawrence, that ambitious and scholarly young man, had an extra-mural class in Moulden. Which meant that the general invitation to dinner issued at lunch by Lesley raked in only Gus Hambro in addition to the curator’s household. Bill had generous license to come along for coffee afterwards, however late, but his class was timed to finish only at nine-thirty, and since it met in the rear clubroom at ‘The Crown’ it was long odds against the argumentative local savants consenting to go home before closing time, so that his attendance was at best only hypothetical. Moreover, Bill’s own attitude was decidedly ambiguous; nobody had to tell him that his commitments were well known, and invitations issued accordingly. He knew when he was, or was not, wanted.

Not that Bill was missing anything, Gus thought, before the evening was half over. The pretence that everything was normal, that they were a party of congenial people enjoying a social get-together, had become downright oppressive, as if everyone was working a little too hard at it. They had an afternoon of unremitting labour behind them, and perhaps were too tired to make a good job of keeping up appearances. Paviour had grown so brittle that he looked as if the least jolt might send all his joints jangling apart; and though Lesley’s extrovert lightness of heart was beyond suspicion, it was rapidly becoming unbearable in this context. All very well for her in her innocence, but Gus was in a very different case. Worst of all, there was no chance whatever of making any real contact with Charlotte, and it was exasperating to have her sitting there opposite him, so near and so inaccessible, watching him with the black, acute gaze of a sceptical cat, pupils high-lighted in gold; a look that asserted nothing, merely observed and analysed, stopping short of judgement only, he was afraid, out of indifference.

As soon as he decently could, and on the plea that they were all tired—to which Lesley frankly assented, eliding a yawn into an apology—he excused himself and withdrew to make his way home. He was glad to be alone, and made the most of the ten-minute walk to his bed, taking it at leisure.

It was a restless, luminous night, the kind that late April sometimes casts up between frosts, mild, starry, with a laggard and minor moon. The shape of Aurae Phiala came into being gradually as he walked, looming largely on his right hand, a series of levels marked out by a series of verticals, standing bones of masonry rearing from long planes of turf.

She came silently out of the unregarded spaces on his left, and stood in his path, a small, compact figure quite still and composed; not making any demands upon him, except by being there. He knew which one she was, though the two of them were very much of a build.

‘Lesley…’

‘It’s all right,’ she said serenely, still neatly enfolded into her own shadowy silhouette. ‘Nobody’s going to miss me. Believe it or not, I was so tired I went up to bed the moment you left. You surely don’t think I share a room with him, do you? Or with anyone!’

‘You shouldn’t have come out after me,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t suppose I should. What makes you think it was after you?’

‘You do,’ he said brutally, and stood fronting her, for want of any way by. ‘Who else did you think would be making off this way? Don’t pretend you just happened to choose this way for your evening constitutional.’

‘I never pretend anything,’ she said, in the soft, mild voice that seemed to belong so aptly to the dark. ‘And I never just happen to do anything. In any case, it must be quite plain to you that I ran most of the way from the back gate, or I couldn’t have got here before you. I simply felt I wanted to talk to you again. But it wasn’t much use my finding out how much I liked you, if all I’ve done is to make you dislike me.’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’ he said.

‘That’s the way it looks from where I’m standing.’

‘Maybe you can’t see very well from there.’

‘I could come closer,’ she offered.

It was a highly dangerous gift she had, this one of writing both halves of the dialogue. There never seemed to be any possible answer except the one she wanted. Not that he was trying very hard to deviate from the script.

She took two long, slow steps towards him, her arms at her sides, her head tilted back to look up at him. One more step, and the points of her small, high breasts almost touched him. In the darkness her face was serene and pale, and her dilated eyes huge and fixed. He had the impression that she was smiling.

‘Do I look any more friendly from there?’ he asked, keeping very still.

She said: ‘Gus…’ experimentally, as if she were memorising and tasting his name; and she laughed, very softly, at its ridiculous brevity and inappropriateness. ‘Are you waiting for me to explode when touched? Not this time! Something happened to me this morning that never happened before. Try it. Touch me!’

Her face was very close, turned up to him like a white, wide-open flower; and in obedience to the rules of this game he very nearly did take her at her word. But then he changed his mind, and deliberately held still, even when her warmth leaned and touched him. In a voice he had never heard from her before, whispering, almost fawning, and yet still laughing, she said: ‘Gus…’ again, two or three times over, changing the note as though plucking descending strings. ‘It’s you,’ she said, ‘you, you, you’re the one… It was never like that for me—never—not even with him…’

She put out her hands, and flattened them gently against his chest; and then suddenly her arms were round him, and her body was pressed hard against his, clinging from shoulder to knee. He returned her embrace partly out of pure astonishment, but kept his close hold of her after that out of heady delight. Her intensity was electrifying. Her body moved against him, tensing and turning fluid again, finding every vulnerable nerve. She freed a hand to tug at the buttons of his jacket, and wound her arms about him within it, manipulating the muscles of his back with fierce, hard fingertips. Her mouth reached up to him hungrily, and fastened on his as he leaned to her, in a kiss that left them both gasping for breath. Her lips, progressing by little, biting caresses along his cheek, whispered dizzily: ‘Love me, love me, love…’ until he found her mouth again with his and silenced her.

They were so wildly engrossed in each other at that moment that they heard nothing outside themselves, only the pounding of their hearts and the gusty breaths they drew. Paviour was within six feet of them before they were aware of him. Gus lifted his head and looked over Lesley’s shoulder, and there motionless before him, a lean, angular shape in the darkness, the jealous husband stood waiting with bleak courtesy to be let into their world.

Lesley felt the stiffening jolt that passed through Gus’s body, and stirred and turned protestingly to look for its reason. There was one strange moment while they both stared at Paviour, and he at them, rather as though they had no shared language between them, and speech could not help them. Very slowly the two tangled bodies drew apart and stood clear; the most important thing just then seemed to be to accomplish this necessary manoeuvre with a little grace and dignity, not in a humiliating scramble. Even when they were separate, their linked hands parted only gradually and gently.

‘I’m sorry!’ said Paviour with cold civility. ‘I regret forcing this intrusion upon you, but you’ll agree it’s inevitable.’ He looked at Lesley, without any perceptible signs of anger; all that Gus could detect in his voice and his stillness was discouragement and grief. ‘Go back to the house, my dear,’ he said, ‘and go to bed. Leave me to talk to Mr Hambro.’

The most remarkable thing was that she did as she was told, not in a manner that suggested any fear of him, or any great desire to justify herself or placate him. Her shoulders lifted in a small, resigned shrug. She cast a glance at Gus, hesitated no more than a second, and then turned and walked away into the darkness, towards the distant shape of the house within its girdle of trees.

‘I have no wish to embarrass you,’ said Paviour, when the last faint rustle of her steps in the grass had died away. ‘That was not my intention.’ There was no dislike in his voice, he stood detached and withdrawn into the night, and the lack of precise vision made this encounter easier than Gus would have believed possible. ‘But you see, of course, that I had to intervene.’

‘You’re being absurdly generous, in fact,’ Gus said honestly. ‘I’m not going to attempt to justify myself. But I can at least assure you, for what it’s worth, that things have gone no further than what you’ve seen.’

‘I’m well aware of that,’ said Paviour drily; and though it seemed incredible, there was the suggestion of a sour smile in his voice this time. ‘And it won’t be necessary to defend yourself. I understand the situation perfectly. I should, I’ve lived with it for some years now. You mustn’t think, my dear Hambro, that you’re the first. And I can’t hope that you’ll be the last.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Gus, stiffening.

‘You will. Do you mind if I walk with you down to the lodge? It’s a little cold for standing around, and we can talk as we go.’

Bemused, Gus fell into step beside him on the path. They walked with a yard or so of the dark between them. And after a moment Paviour resumed gently; ‘I take it you’ll have heard from Lesley about her earlier love affair, and the way it ended. The way, in fact, that we came to get married. I needn’t go into that again. And I needn’t tell you what’s obvious, that Lesley is a beautiful and charming girl, and highly intelligent. But she has an affliction. Not surprising, in the circumstances. That early shock in love damaged her permanently. She was ill-—not physically, but you’ll understand me—for some time. On that one subject she will never again be entirely well. What has just happened to you is routine,’ he said tiredly. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to get used to the thought. No doubt she’ll have told you that I’m pathologically jealous of every man who so much as comes near her—hasn’t she? Well, have I behaved like that? Do you really think I didn’t see you with her this morning?’

‘I know you did,’ said Gus. ‘I knew it then. That was not quite what it seemed. It happened almost by accident.’

‘You think so?’ said Paviour, and the bitter smile in his voice was clearer than before. ‘My dear boy, Lesley has a temperamental disposition to repeat her ruinous love affair with every unwary male who enters her life. Every presentable one, that is. She behaves with every one of them just as she has been behaving with you today. But heaven help any poor fellow who takes her seriously. The game goes only so far. You may even have detected a rather violent reaction on her part, if you ever got so far as taking the initiative?’

Gus walked dourly beside him, and said nothing.

‘Yes—I thought so. The signals turn red very abruptly. You’d get no further, I assure you. She would kill you or herself rather than actually surrender. I have good reason to know. She’s emotionally crippled for life, and it’s my life-work to protect and conceal her disability, and prevent her from doing harm to herself and others. I married her to take care of her. As I have done already through several affairs, all as fictional as this one with you.’

He felt, and misunderstood, or understood only in part, the obstinate silence walking beside him.

‘Yes,’ he said challengingly, almost as if defending his manhood against some implied accusation, ‘I love her as much as that. It was a little late, in any case, for me to marry for any other kind of passion. This does well enough. It’s more than anyone else will ever have of her.’

Gus came out of his own private chaos of speculation and enlightenment just in time to capture the implication, and too late to absorb the shock in silence.

‘You mean to say that even you…’ He swallowed the rest of the indiscretion with a gulp, and was thankful for the darkness. His mind had been careering along in quite a different direction, it was too much to ask him to assimilate this all in a moment.

‘The inference you’re drawing,’ said Paviour, in a voice thinner and more didactic than Gus had ever yet heard it, ‘is a correct one. I knew all about her panic abhorrence before I married her, Sexually, I’ve never touched her. She is a virgin. She always will be.’

Dignified, pathetic and decent, the man stood there quite obviously telling the simple truth as he saw it, and who was likely to see it more clearly? And it all made sense, or would have done if Gus’s blood hadn’t still been racing with the remembered persuasion of her body against him, and the ravenous expertise of her mouth, and the ferocity of her nails scoring into his back. That memory confounded the argument considerably. And yet it was true, the initiative had still been hers. All he’d had time to do was go along with her wishes; and if he’d just been reaching the point of having wishes and intentions of his own, he’d been saved by the bell, and she hadn’t had to react. Try it! she’d said. Touch me! But deliberately he’d left the next move to her. And now maybe he’d never know which of them was crazy, himself or this elderly masochist—or hero, or whatever he was—who got his satisfaction in cherishing and protecting his wife like a delinquent daughter.

‘So you see why it’s essential,’ said Paviour, gently and firmly, ‘that my wife should not see you again. You’re not in any illusion that her heart is involved, I hope?’

‘No,’ said Gus, ‘I’m not in any illusion. She won’t have any trouble getting over my loss.’

By common consent they had halted well short of the low hedge of the garden at the lodge. The house was in darkness, Bill could not have left the village yet. It would be quite easy, however inconvenient, and there was now no help for it, nothing to be done but what Paviour obviously wanted and expected of him.

‘I’ll remove myself,’ he said, ‘totally and immediately. She needn’t see me again. I’ve got my car here, I can pack and get out before Bill comes back, and leave him a note, and my apologies to deliver tomorrow. I shall have had a telephone call. Family business—illness—I’ll think of the right thing.’

‘I shall be very much obliged,’ said Paviour. ‘I felt sure I could rely on your good feeling.’ And he turned, with no more insistence than that, and no firmer guarantee, and walked away towards his own house, leaving Gus staring after him.

He did exactly what he had promised he would do, and did it in ruthless haste, for fear Bill should come back too soon. True, the same excuse could be offered to him face to face, but there might be some dispute over whether it was strictly necessary to leave before morning, and moreover, in view of Bill’s own remarks on the subject of the Paviour marriage, he was not likely to be deceived. Far simpler to leave a few fresh doodles on the telephone pad, and a note propped on the mantelpiece, and get out clean.

‘Dear Bill, Client called home, and they ran me to earth here. He wants me to drive over to Colchester and look at a piece he’s been offered and has his doubts about. Rush job, because if good it’s very good, and there’s another dealer in the field, so I’m going across overnight. Didn’t want to call the house at this hour, please make my apologies to Mr and Mrs Paviour, and thanks to you and them for generous hospitality. I’ll be in touch later.’

Probably Bill wouldn’t believe any of it, certainly not the last words, but it would do. And Lesley was no doubt used to abrupt diplomatic departures, and would shrug him off and look round for the next entertainment. Perhaps even give a whirl to Bill, whom she hadn’t fancied, but who rather more than fancied her, if everyone told the truth. Better not, that might be a collision she wouldn’t shrug off so easily.

He needn’t go far, of course, but all the same this was a nuisance just at this stage. They might elect to fetch him off the job altogether, and put someone else in in his place. That couldn’t be helped. What mattered now was to get out.

He dumped his case in the car, and drove out from the gate of the lodge, and up the gravelled track that ran within the boundary of Aurae Phiala. Bill would be walking home from the village by the riverside path, and the whole expanse of the enclosure and the bulk of the curator’s house and garden would be between him and the way out on to the main road. With luck he wouldn’t even hear the car. If he did, he would never think of it in connection with a sudden departure until he read his guest’s note. All very tidy.

He had to get out and open the gate when he reached the road. He drove the Aston Martin through, and parked it in the grass verge while he went back to close the gate again and make sure it was fast.

He had the stretch of road to himself, and the late moon, at the beginning of its sluggish climb and rimmed with mist, cast only a faint, sidelong light over the standing walls and pillars of Aurae Phiala. Just enough to prick out before his eyes a single curious spark, that moved steadily along within the broken wall of the frigidarium, appearing and disappearing as the height of the standing fragments varied. It proceeded at a measured walking pace, and at the corner it turned, patrolling downhill towards the tepidarium; and for a moment, where the standing masonry dropped to knee-height, he saw the shadowy figure that walked beneath it, and caught the shape of the glowing crest against the sky. The enlarged head, with its jut of brow, was all one metallic mass, hardly glimpsed before it was lost again in the dark. A helmet, with neck-guard, earpieces, he thought even a visor over the face. Dream or substance, the helmeted sentry of Aurae Phiala was making a methodical circuit of the remaining walls by fitful moonlight.

He left the car standing, and let himself in again through the gate; and even then he took the time to snap the lock closed before he set off at a cautious lope across the grass towards the walls of the baths. Once into the complex, he had to slow to a walk, but he made what speed he dared. The night had grown restless with a rising wind; rapid scuds of cloud alternately masked and uncovered the veiled moon, and drifts of mist moved up from the river in soft, recurrent tides along the ground. A night for haunting. He wondered if there was a policeman standing guard overnight, and felt sure there was not; there are never enough men to cover everything that should be covered He and the sentry had the place to themselves.

The glimpses he got now of the helmet which was his quarry were few and brief, but enough to enable him to gain ground. It had reached the shell of standing walls at the corner of the caldarium. Clearly he saw it glimmer between two broken blocks of masonry, beyond the low rim of the laconicum. Then it vanished. He approached cautiously, and stood by the edge of the shaft in braced silence, preferring to keep his bearings in relation to this potential hazard, while he waited with straining ears and roving eyes for a new lead.

Cloud blew away from the moon’s face for a moment, and a spilled pool of light glazed the tops of the broken walls and blackened the shadows; and there suddenly was the helmeted head burning in the brief gleam. As he fixed his eyes upon it, the figure turned, darkness from the shoulders down, bright above, and stood confronting him, and he caught one glimpse of a frozen, splendid, golden face with empty black eye-sockets, under the bronze peak of the helmet.

It was a rapid displacement of air behind him, rather than a sound, that suddenly raised the short hairs on his neck, and caused him to swing round on his heel, too late to save himself. He caught a chaotic glimpse of a looming shape and a raised arm, a violent shifting of shadows and deeper shadows. Then the contours of earth and the complexities of starlight whirled and dissolved about him, as the stone that should have struck him squarely at the base of the skull crashed obliquely against his temple. An arm took him about the thighs and heaved him from the ground; and in some remaining corner of consciousness he knew what was happening to him, and could not utter a sound or lift a finger to fend it off.

He fell, cold, dank air rushing upwards past his face for what seemed an age, and dropped heavily upon some uneven and loosely shifting stuff that rolled at the impact, and bore him helplessly with it.

The breath was knocked out of him, but he never let go of that last glimmer of consciousness. Something rebounded from the wall of the shaft above him, with a heavy thud and a faint ring of metal, and scraped the opposite wall. The light, the only light, was the faint circle of sky now beginning to glow almost with the radiance of day by contrast with this incredible, dead blackness where he was. In the confused panic of shock he prised himself upwards to run, and struck his head sickeningly against an arched ceiling. All over his body the delayed protests of pain began, outraged and insistent. They helped him, too. They made him aware that he was alive, and acutely aware of other things in the same instant: that he was down the shaft of the laconicum, that the wooden cover had been removed in advance to facilitate his disposal, and that the second object tipped down after him must be his suitcase.

He put his head down in his arms for a moment, feeling horribly sick; and before he had gathered his damaged faculties, the thump and reverberation of falling earth and stones began in the shaft, and disturbed dust silted down over him acridly, choking him. He dragged himself frantically forward as stones began to fall about his legs, and holding by the rough bricks of the floor, found the solid wall ahead of him, and groped left-handed along it into the mouth of an open flue.

The rain of stones went on, heavier fragments now, broken masses from the very masonry of Aurae Phiala, or more likely the rim of the laconicum itself, hurled down to lodge awkwardly in the loose rubble, and pile up until they began to climb the walls.

Then he knew that someone was deliberately filling in the shaft. For a long time there followed a staccato rattle of loose brick and tile, and after that there was already so much matter between him and the outer air that the continuing softer fall of earth over all made only a slight, dull sound, receding until he could hardly distinguish it.

The circle of starlight was quenched. Nothing broke the solid perfection of the dark. He was buried alive in the hypocaust, ten feet beneath the innocent green surface of Aurae Phiala.