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

CHAPTER ELEVEN

« ^ »

It was approaching half past seven that evening when George Felse made his appearance at the curator’s house, completely shattering Lesley’s arrangements for dinner, and throwing the entire household into confusion. He delayed saying what he had to say until Bill Lawrence was summoned from the lodge to join them; and he made no pretence of maintaining a social relationship with any of them while they waited. The atmosphere of strain that built up in the silence might well have been intentional; or he might, Charlotte acknowledged, simply have shut them out of his consciousness while he considered more important things, and the fever might have been their own contribution, a kind of infection infiltrating from person to person, guilty and innocent alike, if there were here any guilty creatures, or any totally innocent. George sat contained and civil and pseudo-simple outside their circle, and waited patiently until it was completed by the arrival of a dishevelled and uncertain Bill.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you waiting, but I wasn’t even properly dressed…’

‘That’s all right,’ said George. ‘I regret having to fetch you over here, but this concerns you as being connected with this site, and I can’t afford to go over the ground twice. Sit down! You all know, of course, that Mr Hambro left here last night at very short notice. You know that he left a note stating definite intentions, though in very general terms. I am here to tell you that because of certain discoveries Mr Hambro is now listed as a missing person, and we have reason to suspect that the account given of his departure, whether by himself or others, is so far totally deceptive. No, don’t say anything yet, let me outline what we do know. He is stated to have left here late in the evening, having received a telephone call asking him to give an opinion on an antique offered for sale on the other side of England. He is understood to have packed all his belongings, loaded his car, left a note to explain his departure and apologise for its suddenness, and driven away at some time prior to half past eleven, when you, Mr Lawrence, arrived home and found his note. Now let me tell you what we also know. His car was driven into a quarry pool on the further side of Silcaster, probably during the night. It is now in process of being recovered, and has already been examined. Mr Hambro was not in it, either dead or alive, nor is there any trace of the suitcase he removed from here last night. We have, so far, no further word of him after he left here. We are treating this as a disappearance with suspicion of foul play.’

The murmurs of protest and horror that went round were muted and died quickly. To exclaim too much is to draw attention upon yourself in such circumstances; not to exclaim at all is as bad, it may look as if you have been aware of the whereabouts of the car all along, and may know, at this moment, where to find the man. Only Charlotte sat quite silent, containing as best she could, like pain suppressed in company, the chill and heaviness of her heart. If she had neither recognised nor even cared to recognise, until now, the extent to which Gus Hambro had wound himself into her thoughts and feelings since he regained his life at her hands, and how simply and with what conviction she had begun to regard him as hers, recognition was forced upon her now. Paviour already looked so sick and old that fresh shocks could hardly make any impression upon his pallor or the sunken, harried desperation of his eyes. Bill sat with his thin, elegantly-shaped, rather grubby hands conscientiously clasped round his knees, carefully posed but not easy. The fingers maintained their careful disposition by a tension as fixed and white-jointed as if they had been clenched in hysteria. Only Lesley, her mouth and eyes wide in consternation, cried out in uninhibited protest: ‘Oh, no! But that’s monstrous, it makes no sense. Why should anyone want to do him harm? What has he ever done…’

She broke off there, and very slowly and softly, with infinite care, drew back into a shell of her own, and veiled her eyes. She did not look at her husband; with marked abstention she did not look at anyone directly, even at George Felse,

‘I shall be obliged,’ said George impersonally, ‘if you will all give me statements on the events of yesterday evening, especially where and how you last saw Mr Hambro. I should appreciate it very much, Mr Paviour, if we might make use of the study. And if the rest of you would kindly wait in here?’

Paviour came jerkily to his feet. ‘I am quite willing to be the first, Chief Inspector.’ Too willing, too eager, in far too big a hurry, in spite of the fastidious shrinking of all his being from the ordeal to which he was so anxious to expose himself. George was interested. Was it as important as all that to him to get his story in before his wife got hers?

‘I should like to see Mrs Paviour first, if it isn’t inconvenient.’

‘But as a matter of fact,’ Paviour said desperately, ‘I believe I was the last person to see Mr Hambro…’

‘That will emerge,’ George said equably. ‘I’ll try not to keep any of you very long.’

It was useless to persist. Paviour sank back into his chair with a twitching face, and let her go, since there was now no help for it.

She was quite calm as she sat in the study, her small feet neatly planted side by side, and described in blunt précis, but sufficiently truthfully, how she had slipped out instead of going to bed, and wilfully staged that brief scene with Gus Hambro.

‘Not very responsible of me, I know,’ she said, gazing sombrely before her. ‘But there are times when one feels like being irresponsible, and I did. There was no harm in it, if there was no good. It was a matter of perhaps three or four minutes. Then my husband came.’ Her face was composed but very still, in contrast to her usual vivacity. It was the nearest he had ever seen her come to obvious self-censorship. ‘My husband,’ she said guardedly, ‘is rather sensitive about the difference in our ages.’

She had not gone so far as to mention the embrace, but her restraint spoke for itself eloquently enough.

‘So he ordered you home,’ said George, deliberately obtuse, ‘and you obeyed him and left them together.’

Her eyes flared greenly for one instant, and she dimmed their fire almost before it showed. Her shoulders lifted slightly; her face remained motionless. ‘I went away and left them together. What was the point of staying? The whole thing was a shambles. I wasn’t going to pick up the pieces. They could, if they liked.’

‘And did they?’ George prompted gently. ‘You know one of them, at least, very well. The other, perhaps, less well? But you have considerable intuition. What do you suppose passed between them, after you’d gone?’

‘Not a stupid physical clash,’ she said, flaring, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I’m thinking nothing, except what your evidence means, and what follows from it. I’m asking what you think happened between those two men. Of whom one, I would remind you, is now missing in suspicious circumstances.’

She shrank, and took a long moment to consider what she should answer to that. ‘Look!’ she said almost pleadingly. ‘I’ve been married to an older man a few years, and I know the hazards, but they’re illusory. I’ve known him jealous before, for even less reason, but nothing happened, nothing ever will happen. It’s a kind of game—a stimulus. He isn’t that kind of man!’ she said, in a voice suddenly torn and breaking, and closed her eyes upon frantic tears. They looked astonishingly out of place on her, like emeralds on an innocent, but they were real enough.

‘You’re very loyal,’ said George in the mildest of voices. Her momentary loss of control was over; she offered him a wry and reluctant smile. ‘So is he,’ she said, ‘when you come to consider it.’

‘And your husband joined you—how much later?’

The voice was still as mild and unemphatic, but she froze into alarmed withdrawal again at the question; and after a moment she said with aching care: ‘We occupy separate rooms. And we don’t trespass.’

‘In fact, you didn’t see him again until this morning?’ In a voice so low as to be barely audible, she said: ‘No.’

‘So he left,’ said George, ‘because you asked him to leave.’

‘I didn’t have to ask him in so many words,’ said Paviour laboriously. ‘I made it clear to him that it was highly undesirable that my wife should see him again. He offered to pack up and go at once, and make some excuse to account for his departure. I told you, I make no complaint against Mr Hambro, I bear him no grudge. I’m aware that the initiative came from my wife.’

There was sweat standing in beads on his forehead and lip. He had had no alternative but to tell the truth, since he had no means of knowing how fully Lesley had already told the same story; but his shame and anguish at having to uncover his marital hell, even thus privately, without even the attendance of Reynolds and his notebook, was both moving and convincing. A humiliation is not a humiliation until someone else becomes aware of it.

‘And you manage not to hold this propensity against her, either?’ George asked mildly.

‘I’ve told you, it’s a form of illness. She can’t help it. And it can’t possibly go beyond a certain point—her own revulsion ensures that.’

‘And yet you deliberately kept watch on her last night, and followed her out expressly to break up this scene. You won’t try to tell me that it happened quite by chance?’

‘It’s my duty to protect her,’ said Paviour, quivering. ‘Even in such quite imaginary affairs, she could get hurt. And she could cause harm to relatively innocent partners, too.’

It was all a little too magnanimous; she had caused plenty of pain, fury and shame to him in her time, by his own account, but apparently he was supposed to be exempt from resenting that.

‘Very well, you parted from Mr Hambro close to the lodge, and came back to the house. And that’s the last you saw of him?’

‘Yes. I had no reason to think he wouldn’t keep his word.’

‘As apparently he did. We’ve seen the note he left behind. You can’t shed any light on what may have happened to him afterwards?’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve told you I came straight back to the house, and went to bed.’

‘As I understand,’ said George gently, ‘alone.’ There was a brief, bitter silence. ‘You realise, of course, that no one can confirm your whereabouts, from the time your wife came back to the house without you?’

‘I’ve been here nearly a year now,’ said Bill Lawrence. ‘I know the set-up well enough to keep out of trouble. Actually I’ve known the place, and the Paviours, longer than that, I used to come over occasionally during the vacations, when I was at Silcaster university, and help out as assistant. I had to get a holiday job of some kind, and this was right in my line. I’d started planning my book then. So I know the score. No, he’s never actually talked to me about Mrs Paviour, but it’s easy to see he’s worried every time another man comes near her. Especially a young man. It isn’t altogether surprising, is it?’

‘And Mrs Paviour has talked to you about her husband?’

The young man’s long, slightly supercilious face had paled and stiffened into watchfulness. ‘She warned me, when I came here officially for this year, that it would be better to keep relations on a very formal basis.’

‘She gave you to understand, in fact, that her husband was liable to an almost pathological jealousy, and for the sake of everybody’s peace of mind you’d better keep away from her?’

‘Something like that—yes.’

‘And she acted accordingly?’

‘Always. It was possible to get along quite well—one developed the knack, and then enjoyed what companionship was permissible.’

That had a marvellously stilted sound, and contrasted strongly with the strained intensity of his face.

‘And did she act accordingly with—for example—Mr Hambro?’

Dark red spots burned on the sharp cheekbones. Paviour wasn’t the only one who could feel jealousy, and there wouldn’t be much room here for elderly magnanimity. Bill clamped his jaw tight shut over anger, swallowed hard, and said at last: ‘I’m not in a position to comment on Mrs Paviour’s actions. You’ve had the opportunity of talking to her in person.’

‘Very true. Mrs Paviour was admirably frank. All right, you can rejoin the others. No, one moment!’ Bill turned and looked back enquiringly and apprehensively from the doorway. ‘You say you used to visit here before you came to work here regularly. Did you, by any chance, pay a visit while Doctor Alan Morris was staying here? That was a year ago last October, the beginning of the month.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I was invited over to meet him one evening,’ said Bill, bewildered but relieved by this turn in the conversation. ‘I angled for an invitation when I knew he was coming, and Mr Paviour asked me over for dinner. That’s the only time I ever got to talk to a really first-class man on my subject. I was disappointed in his book, though,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘I got the impression it was rather a dashed-off job. That’s the trouble with these commissioned series.’

‘Ah, well, you’ll be able to offer a more thorough study,’ said George with only the mildest irony. ‘By the way, you walked to the village and back last night, I believe. So you didn’t use the Vespa yesterday? I notice you didn’t use it to hop over here tonight.’

‘It didn’t seem worth getting it out. I’d cleaned and put it away the night before last. It hasn’t been out since. Why?’

‘How was it for petrol, when you left it?’

‘I filled up the day I cleaned it, and it hasn’t been anywhere but across here since.’ He was frowning now in doubt and uneasiness. ‘Why, what about it? What has the Vespa got to do with anything?’

‘We borrowed it an hour or so ago, without asking your permission, I’m afraid. You shall have it back as soon as we’ve been over it. The tank’s practically empty, Mr Lawrence. And by the still damp mud samples we’re getting from it, it’s certainly had a longish run since the rain set in.’

‘But I don’t understand!’ His face had fallen into gaping consternation, for once defenceless and young, without a pose to cover its alarm. ‘I haven’t had it out, I swear. I haven’t touched it. What do you mean?’

‘If somebody drove Mr Hambro’s car as far as the quarry beyond Silcaster, then—always supposing that somebody belonged here, and had to be seen to be here as usual by morning—he’d need a way of getting back, wouldn’t he? Preferably without having to use public transport and rub shoulders with other people. With a little ingenuity a Vespa could be manoeuvred aboard an Aston Martin, don’t you think? By the time we’ve been over your machine properly we may know for certain where it’s been overnight. With a lot of luck,’ he said, watching the young face blanch and the frightened eyes narrow in calculation, ‘we may even know who was riding it.’

He was in the act of crossing to the drawing-room to tell the silent company within that he was leaving them in peace—insofar as there would be any peace for them—for the rest of that night, when there was a loud knock at the side door, along the passage by the garden-room, and without waiting for anyone to open to him, Orrie Benyon leaned in, vast in donkey-jacket and gum-boots.

‘Is Mr Paviour there?’ He made George his messenger as readily as any other. ‘Ask him to come for a minute, eh? I won’t traipse this muck inside for the missus.’

His knock had brought them all out: Paviour, Lesley, Charlotte and Bill Lawrence from the drawing-room, instant in alarm because their lives had become a series of alarms, and instant in relief and reassurance when they saw a normal phenomenon of the Aurae Phiala earth leaning in upon them; and Reynolds and Price from the rear premises and the outer twilight respectively, quick to materialise wherever there was action in prospect. Orrie looked round them all with fleeting wonder at their number, and returned to his errand.

‘I’ve just been up as far as the top weir. That path’s under water in three places, and the Comer’s still rising. She’s over to the grass, close by that dig of yours, and fetched down a lot more o’ the bank. You’re going to have to concrete in all that section and make it safe, after this lot, or we’ll be liable for anything that happens to the folks using the path. You’d better come and have a look.’

There was a compulsion about him, whether it arose from his native proprietary rights in this soil or simply from his size and total preoccupation, that drew them all out after him into the semi-darkness of the evening. After the recent heavy rain the sky had cleared magically, and expanded in clear, lambent light after the sunset, so that it was bright for the hour, and after a minute in the open air it seemed still day to them. The morning would be calm, sunny and mild. Only the river, their close neighbour on the right hand as soon as they let themselves out of the garden, denied that the world was bland and friendly. The brown, thrusting force of the water lipping the land had a hypnotic attraction. Charlotte, slipping and recovering in the wet turf in her smooth court shoes, felt herself drawn to it by the very energy of its onward drive, as though all motion must incline and merge into this most vehement of motions. The pale green, glowing innocence of the sky over it was a contradiction and a mockery.

This path was terribly familiar to her, and walking upstream here was like walking back, against her will, to the moment when Gus Hambro had lain at her feet with his face in the river, quietly drowning. Now she did not even know where he was, or whether he was alive or dead. All she knew was that he had not been in his car when it was driven over the edge of the quarry, nor had he been dropped separately into the same deep pool. And therefore there was still hope that he was extant, somewhere in the world, and no great distance from her. It was no secret now that it mattered to her more than anything else in the world, that the life she had held in her hands safely once should not slip through her fingers now.

Orrie stalked ahead like a prehistoric god on his own territory, huge and intent, never deviating from the path even when he waded ankle-deep in turgid water. The rest went round, not being equipped for wading, Paviour scurrying back to Orrie’s shoulder round the incursions of the river, anxious and ineffective in this elemental setting, the others strung out in a line that picked its way with deliberation along the foot of the slope, in the wet but thick and springy grass.

Above the glistening dotted line of wet clay that was the path, the bevelled slope of grass rose on their left, and the untidy fall of loose earth had certainly spilled across into the rising water. They came to the place where the first slip had occurred, and where, above them on level ground, the opened flue lay exposed to the sky. It had yielded nothing of value, either to the police or the archaeologists, except the few evidences of wilful damage. Whatever precious thing had ever rested there in hiding, it had certainly been removed in time. Soon the flue would be carefully built up again, if not covered over. But now the expanse of raw, reddish soil was twice as wide, for both shoulders of the original fall had begun to slide away. They stood in a chilly little group at the edge of the torn area, and looked at the slope in concerned silence. The path was still passable here, but by morning, if Orrie was right and the river still rising, it might well be covered.

‘If she comes over and starts eating under this bank,’ Orrie said with authority, ‘all this loose stuff’ll wash away like melting snow, and the bank’ll go. Ask me, we ought to put up warning notices, both ends of the path. It’ll be us for it, if somebody comes along here, not knowing, and goes in the river, or gets buried under that lot when it gives.’

‘I should have been glad to have it closed long ago,’ Paviour admitted, ‘but you know what happens if one tries to close a right-of-way, however inconvenient and dangerous. However little used, for that matter, though this one does get used. You think the river will rise much more? It’s some hours now since the rain stopped.’

‘Yes, but it takes a couple of days for the main weight to come down out of Wales. I reckon she may come up another two feet yet afore she starts dropping again. What’s more, we’ll need to do something permanent about it, besides closing it now. That’s not going to be safe again unless we firm up this bank with a concrete lining, and lift the path.’

‘That would probably be a shared responsibility,’ said George Felse, ‘with the local council, but Orrie could be right. Is this the only bad place?’

‘No, there’s a couple more just close to our boundary. But no falls there, so far. This,’ said Orrie, jerking his cropped reddish curls at the slope before them, ‘is moving now. Look at it!’

As though some infinitesimal tremor of the earth troubled the stability of the whole enclosure, little trickles of soil were starting down from the raw shoulder, a couple of yards to the left of the exposed flue, and running downhill with a tiny, sibilant sound, resting sometimes as they lodged in a momentarily stable hold, then continuing downhill on a changed course; all so quietly, without haste. The disturbed dead, Charlotte thought, trying to get out. If they could remember what it was like to be alive, she thought with a quite unexpected surge of desolation and dismay, they’d let well alone.

A curious effect, this boiling of the earth. When the pool of Bethesda was troubled, it did miracles. She badly needed a miracle, but she doubted if this narrow well into the depths of history, for all its disquiet, could provide one.

‘We’d better have a look at this bit upstream,’ said George, ‘while we’re about it. Orrie’s right, you may have to put up those notices, for your own protection, as well as other people’s.’

Orrie turned willingly, and led the way again, surging through the shallows, and the others strung out behind him on the dry side of the path, gingerly skirting the shifting pile of loose soil. Charlotte was last in the line, since they had to proceed in single file or wade, like their leader. She never knew exactly why she looked back. Perhaps, being the nearest, she heard the slight crescendo of furtive sound that was too small to reach the ears of those in front. The little drifts of earth insisted, and stones began to break free and roll gently and sluggishly downwards. Only small stones, too little to change the world, but they ran, and rolled, and jumped, and the trembling of the well was every moment more urgent with the promise of a miracle; and something prophetic, a small flame of wondering and hoping, kindled in her mind.

So it happened that her chin was still on her shoulder, and she had actually halted and turned in order to watch more attentively, when she saw a sudden small, dark hole burst open in the high mask of earth above her. Not just a hollow, shadowed darker than its surroundings, but a veritable hole upon total blackness. It grew, its rim crumbled away steadily. She saw movement varying its empty blackness, something paler moving within, scraping at the soil. Another biblical image of portent, the cloud, the hole, no bigger than a man’s hand, that grew, and grew, like this…

It was a man’s hand! Feeble, caked with grime, fingers struggled through and clawed at the soil, sending fresh trickles bounding down towards her. A real human hand,a live and demanding, felt its way through into the light with weary exultation.

She was not given to screaming or fainting, and she did neither. She stood stock-still for perhaps ten seconds, her eyes fixed upon that groping, dogged hand, her mind connecting furiously, with a speed and precision she had never yet discovered within herself. The dead were breaking out of their graves with a vengeance. Somebody dumped his car—somebody did this to him—somebody close here, somebody among us. Twenty hours under the earth! He wasn’t supposed ever to show up again. Someone is quite confident, quite sure of his work. ‘I want to know who! Only one minute, two minutes, she promised silently, and I’ll come, I’ll get you out of there. But first I want to know which of them did it! And I want to strike him dead at your feet!’

She turned and called after the dwindling procession winding its way along the riverside: ‘Wait! Come back here a moment, please, come and look! I’ve found something! ’ The right voice, pleasurably excited, urgent enough to halt them, not agitated enough to give them any warning of more than some minor discovery, some small find carried down by the fall, or the vault of another flue broken open. And that was true, how true, but they wouldn’t know the reason. When they turned to look, she waved them imperiously back to the spot, herself planted immovably. ‘Come here! Come and see! It’s important.’

They came, half indulging her and half curious. She watched their faces as they drew near, and they were all interested, enquiring and untroubled by any forewarning, for their eyes were on her, and the hand, grown to a wrist and forearm now, laboured patiently some feet above her head. She waited until they were all close, and only then did she turn and point, ordering sharply: ‘Look! Look up there!’

Two braced arms within the hypocaust thrust at the thinning barrier of soil at that moment, and sent its ruptured fringes scattering. A heaving body, blackened and encrusted with soil, erupted out of its grave, and with a staggering jerk, stood erect for one instant on the shifting slope, before its weight set the whole surface in motion, and hurled it down upon them in a skier’s leaning plunge.

She missed nothing. She even took her eyes from him, and let the police jump forward to break his fall, in order to watch all those other faces. There had been a general gasp of fright and horror; no wonder, there was nothing in that to incriminate. Bill Lawrence stood with mouth fallen open in stunned bewilderment, Lesley clapped her hands to her cheeks and uttered a muted scream. Even Orrie, though he stood rooted and silent as a rock, stared with eyes for once dilated and darkened in disbelief. But Paviour gave a high, moaning shriek, and flung up his hands between himself and the swooping figure, making an ineffectual gesture of pushing the apparition away. Then, as though he had felt his hands pass clean through its impalpable substance, he plucked them back, and turned blindly to run. Charlotte saw his face stiffen suddenly into blue ice, his eyes roll upwards whitely, and his lips, always bloodless, turn livid. He lifted his hands, span on his heel in a rigid contortion, and fell face-down on the muddy path like a disjointed puppet.

Gus Hambro reached the grass still upright, in a rushing avalanche of loose soil, and reeled into the arms of George Felse and Detective-Sergeant Price. For a few seconds he stood peering round at them all, and they saw that his eyes were screwed up tightly against the waning twilight as though for protection against a blaze of brightness. He heaved deep breaths into him, dangled his blackened and bloody hands with a huge sigh, and collapsed slowly and quietly between his supporters, to subside into the wet grass beside the enemy Charlotte had terrified herself by striking senseless, if not dead, at his feet.