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

CHAPTER TWELVE

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To Charlotte, in her state of minor shock and illogical guilt, the next twenty minutes resembled one of those ancient comedy films in which sleep-walkers stride confidently about the scaffolding of an unfinished building, converging with hair-raising impetus and missing one another by inches: a purposeful chaos with a logic of its own, and all conducted in comparative silence. After the first stupefying moment, exclamation was pointless. Some one, Charlotte supposed it could only have been George Felse, must have given orders, for the whole group, apart from George and Reynolds, dispersed like a dehiscent fruit bursting, Sergeant Price, with Lesley in anxious ward, to telephone Paviour’s doctor, Charlotte to rustle up blankets, Bill Lawrence and Orrie Benyon to fetch the sun-bed stretchers from the garden-room, while George and his constable did what they could, meantime, for the casualties. The principle that victims of sudden collapse and probable acute heart failure should not be moved without medical advice hardly held good on a chilly, wet slope of grass beside a steadily rising river, and with night coming on.

At that hour on a Sunday evening it was hardly surprising that Dr Ross, who had been Paviour’s doctor for years, should be away from home. His answering service offered the number of his partner on call, but Price preferred to cut the corners and ring up the police doctor, whom he knew well, and to whom he could indicate—Lesley being temporarily out of the room helping Charlotte to collect rugs and pillows from a cupboard in the hall—what the trouble was likely to be.

‘Blue as a prime blue trout, and got all his work cut out to breathe at all. Looks pretty bad to me.’

He hung up as Lesley came in, and hoped she hadn’t heard. She had hardly spoken a word throughout, and what she was thinking was more than he could guess. For she could connect as quickly as anyone. Not much doubt of that. And who but the man who had put Gus Hambro underground for good should all but drop dead from shock when the corpse insisted upon rising?

Paviour was laid in blankets on the couch in the sitting-room, livid-faced and pinched, breathing in shallow, rattling snores. She sat beside him, sponging his face and bathing away the sweat that gathered on his forehead and lips. Gus Hambro had been carried straight upstairs to the bathroom to strip him of his wrecked clothes and clean the grime of centuries from his body, and Bill, at his own suggestion, had slipped away to the lodge to bring him some pyjamas and clothes of his own, since the victim’s effects were a total loss. Out in the hall by the front door Orrie hovered uneasily, plainly unwilling to leave until he knew what was going on, waiting for the doctor to arrive, and rolling himself one shapeless cigarette after another.

Dr Braby came with an ambulance as escort, having considerable confidence in Price’s judgement. The attendant followed him in to await orders, and fetch and carry if required. Lesley relinquished her place by the couch without a word, and stood aside, intently watching, as the doctor turned back the blankets and began a methodical examination. The sight of the sunken, leaden face and the sound of the anguished breathing made him look up at her briefly over his shoulder.

‘Will you show Johnson where the telephone is, please? Get the Comerbourne General, and say you’re bringing in a congestive heart failure, urgent. I’ll give you a note on what he’s getting: digoxin, intravenous, fifteen millilitres. We need a quick response, and in his condition I doubt if there’ll be any nausea reaction. Hot water, would you mind, Mrs Paviour?’

He spread his bag open beside him, within reach of one freckled, middle-aged hand, and prepared his injection, and very slowly and carefully administered it. For a few minutes afterwards he sat with his fingers on his patient’s pulse.

‘No history of heart trouble previously?’

‘No,’ said Lesley, ‘he’s never complained. He seemed very well, and he didn’t bother about regular check-ups, as long as he felt all right.’

‘Like most of us. We’ll have to send him into hospital, I can’t do more for him here. The digoxin will begin to take effect in ten minutes or so, and should reach maximum within a couple of hours. Then he should rally.’

‘I’ll go along with him,’ said Lesley. ‘Give me three minutes to put some things together for him.’ She looked the doctor squarely in the face. ‘You can tell me the truth, you know. Is he going to get over it?’

‘No saying yet, I’m afraid. He’s bad, but he may pull out of it successfully. Live in hope!’

Was it possible that her hopes inclined the other way? Her voice was so level and her face so still that it was left to the imagination what ambivalent thoughts they covered. If he had really attempted murder, what was there waiting for him if he got over this attack?

‘Do you want me to come along with you?’ Charlotte asked.

Lesley gave her a faint, brief smile, perhaps detecting the reluctance with which the offer was made. ‘No, thanks, you stay here and stand in for me if anyone needs feeding, or coffee, or a drink. I’m going to pack a case for Stephen.’ And she went up the stairs at a light and purposeful run, in command of herself and in need of no one to hold her hand, and in a very few minutes was back with her burden. She followed the stretcher men out through the hall, and there was Orrie still waiting in case he was needed.

He got up when the stretcher came through, his eyes dwelling in fascination upon the swathed body. It looked like a preternaturally long and narrow collection of old bones very imperfectly articulated. There seemed to be virtually nothing under the covering blanket, only two bony feet at one end of it, and a fleshless head with luxuriant grey hair and pointed beard at the other. The face wasn’t covered, so he wasn’t dead, after all. Just in process of dying. Or pretty near to it, anyhow, touch and go. Orrie looked up at Lesley, and the case in her hand, and understood.

‘How you going to get back, then? I tell you what, I’ll bring the Morris along to the General after you, and drive you home.’

‘Oh, would you, Orrie? It would be a help.’ She groped in her handbag and fished out the car keys for him. ‘I was going to get a taxi back, but I should be grateful. I’m sorry to spoil your Sunday evening like this.’ For ordinarily Orrie would have been in ‘The Crown’ by this time, or on a fishing day probably in ‘The Salmon’s Return’. She smiled at him, rather wanly, and went on quickly into the ambulance after her husband; and Orrie went off with the keys in his hand to get the Morris out of the garage.

‘Now where’s the other one?’ Braby demanded briskly, as soon as the ambulance had driven away.

He looked down with astonishment at the slight body in the bath, newly emerged from its indescribable grime. Gus was covered from head to foot with bruises and abrasions, his knees were rubbed raw, and his hands were a mess, but that appeared to be the sum of what ailed him. His state was something between unconsciousness and sleep, but steadily relaxing into simple sleep. He breathed deeply and evenly.

‘Now what in the world,’ demanded the doctor, ‘has been happening to this one?’

‘That,’ said George, ‘is a long and interesting story, and one I intend to tell you, if you can hang around for a while. Because I think you may very well be useful in more ways than one.’

‘Tell me now, it might help. And you may as well finish the job you’ve started, while you’re about it. By the look of him, he won’t mind waiting for my services.’

George told him, while they lifted Gus out and wrapped him in a bath-sheet, and patted him dry with gingerly care, for there was hardly a square inch of him without minor lesions. They were still busy when Charlotte tapped at the door.

‘I’ve made up a bed for him,’ she reported, when George opened the door to her. ‘He’s going to be fit to stay here, surely? And Bill’s brought him pyjamas, and some clothes of his own. They won’t fit too well, but they’ll be better than Mr Paviour’s. Bill’s sleeping here overnight, too. I think Lesley’ll feel better with a man in the house. It seemed the best thing to do.’

‘You’re a treasure,’ said George warmly, and came out of the room to her, shutting the others in. ‘Which bedroom have you chosen for him? Show me!’

She showed him, saying nothing about the fact that it was next to her own, but it seemed that he had divined as much. He looked at her with a small, approving, almost affectionate smile, and she gazed back at him stubbornly and refused to blush. There were more important considerations.

‘I understand your choice,’ he said respectfully. ‘But for my purposes it might not be a good idea. Would you mind changing to another one? Let’s have a look at what’s on offer.’

He chose a room as remote from the regularly used ones as the large house permitted, its door solitary on a small cross-landing above the back stairs, which were well carpeted. The window looked out on the shrubberies and orchard at the rear, and was out of sight from the sunny front living rooms where all the activity of the household centred. The room had a large, walk-in wardrobe which had almost certainly been a powder-closet in Queen Anne’s day, when the house was built.

‘This,’ said George, ‘will do fine. You make up the bed, and we’ll get him into it.’

‘It’s too remote,’ she said accusingly. ‘You can’t keep an eye constantly on this room. And supposing he came round and called out? No one would hear him.’

‘No,’ said George, ‘they wouldn’t, would they?’ He met her eyes and smiled. ‘Bring the sheets, and I’ll help you make the bed.’

She didn’t know why she did what he told her, when she distrusted, or felt she ought to distrust, his proceedings. But she went for the sheets, all the same.

Doctor Braby’s report on Gus Hambro was made twice over, once informally upstairs, while he examined the patient, and dressed the abrasions on his hands and knees; and once, with more ceremony, downstairs to the assembled company before he left the house. Gus continued oblivious of both the care lavished on him and the indignities to which he was subjected. The only motion he made was when the doctor, with thumb and finger, delicately parted his eyelids, and then his brows contracted protestingly, and his eyes screwed tight against even this invasion of light.

‘Perfectly natural reaction,’ said Braby, ‘after twenty-odd hours of digging his way out like a mole. As soon as he’s released from the necessity of struggle he collapses. There’s nothing wrong with him but pure exhaustion, a combination of tension—and that’s relaxed now-—wear and tear—and that can move into the stage of reparation—and sheer want of sleep. I suppose he hasn’t eaten anything all that time, either, but that’s a comparatively low priority. After about ten hours’ sleep he may wake up enough to want something, but don’t worry if he stays out even longer. Pulse is like a rock. He’ll do all right.’

The second time—it was considerably later—he phrased it rather differently. He came down the stairs with George just after the Morris had drawn up outside. Lesley was coming in at the door, her face set and pale, with Orrie hesitating half-anxiously and half-truculently on the doorstep behind her. But for the master of the household, the cast was complete, for Charlotte and Bill Lawrence were just coming through from the kitchen with coffee and sandwiches, specially prepared against Lesley’s return.

‘They say,’ said Lesley tiredly, in response to enquiries, ‘I can telephone early tomorrow, and they’ll be able to tell me more then. They said whatever it was you gave him was only just beginning to take effect. I left him looking just the same.’ She looked round with slightly dazed tranquillity, seemed faintly surprised to see so many of them, and fixed upon George. ‘How is Mr Hambro?’

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said George. ‘We’ve made free with your house and your bed-linen, and put him into the back bedroom over the shrubbery, where he’ll be quiet. He isn’t fit to be moved. But we think—we hope—he’s going to be all right.’

‘Then he’s still unconscious?’ she said, her eyes widening. ‘He hasn’t been able to tell you anything? About what happened to him? About who could have…?’ Her voice was carefully hushed and moderate, but she shied away from finishing the sentence. They could almost see the tall, wavering shape of her husband standing behind her, an old man tormented by his inadequacy, and by the youth of every young man who came in sight.

‘No,’ said George gravely, ‘he hasn’t come round yet, and he’s not likely to before morning. We still don’t know whether he ever saw whoever attacked him, or even where and how it happened.’

Bill Lawrence said, with the authority of the half-expert: ‘It has to be the laconicum. There isn’t any other way he can have got in there. If he’d been exploring from the open flue, he wouldn’t have needed to trail around in there for a day and a night. He knew his stuff, he wouldn’t lose himself. And there’s his car. Whoever made away with that tried to make away with him. Shouldn’t we be having a close look at the laconicum right now, whether it’s night or not?’

‘The laconicum will keep till morning,’ said George. ‘As for Mr Hambro’s actual condition, Doctor Braby can inform you better than I can.’

‘Mr Hambro,’ said the doctor firmly, ‘is suffering from an extreme degree of exhaustion, physical and mental, and however minor his physical injuries may be, they certainly don’t help his general condition. At this moment I’d say his nervous collapse has passed into more or less normal sleep, and since his immediate need is for recuperation, I’ve left him under fairly strong sedation, so that he shall certainly sleep overnight without a break, and probably longer. I realise it’s important to get a statement from him—for it seems from his head injury that he certainly was attacked—but from my point of view it’s even more important that he should get the long period of total rest which he requires. I’m afraid police enquiries will have to wait until he’s fit to deal with them.’

‘And will he be fit?’ asked Bill. ‘I mean eventually? Will he remember, after all this?’

‘Remember? Look, we’re dealing with a perfectly sound and strong young man, who at this moment happens to be gravely weakened by circumstances strictly temporary. There’s no question of serious concussion. Nothing whatever to impair his memory, unless a nervous block occurs, and frankly, I think that very unlikely. Yes, he’ll remember. Whether he saw anything of relevance, whether he can identify his assailant, of course, is another matter. But whatever he did record, he’ll remember. We may have to wait a day,’ he said indifferently, ‘to find out what he has to tell, but he’ll be perfectly capable of telling it when he does surface.’

He came down the rest of the staircase, passed by Lesley with a sympathetic smile and a general goodnight, and walked out to his car.

‘I think,’ said George, ‘we should all leave you now to get what rest you can. I’m assured that Mr Hambro will be all right until morning, and I’ll be in in good time tomorrow to see him.’

‘Do you think we should sit up with him?’ asked Lesley. ‘We would, you know, we’d split the watch. I mean, if he should wake up, and feel lost? After an ordeal like that… and in the dark…’

George shook his head. ‘He won’t wake up. The doctor’s sunk him for twelve hours or so, I assure you. Sleep is what he needs, and what he’s going to get for a while. We shall have to wait. It’s only sense, you know.’

He walked out, too, closing the door gently after him. He was not at all surprised to find, before he reached his car, that Charlotte was there in the darkness beside him, though she certainly had not got there by way of the same door.

‘You can’t do it,’ she said in a rapid, indignant whisper in his ear. ‘You can’t just go away and leave him like this. You’ve just made it clear that he hasn’t said a word yet, but may have plenty to say when he does wake up. Everybody knows it, you’ve made sure of that. And then you go away and leave him to it!’

‘What would you like?’ asked George as softly. ‘A couple of constables with notebooks sitting by his bed?’ He looked at her closely and smiled. ‘So you don’t accept Paviour’s evidence against himself? If the would-be murderer is in hospital at Comerbourne, seriously ill, what is there left to worry about?’

‘I don’t know! It did look like that. It does look like that. All I really know is that Gus is in there asleep, the one person who may be able to identify the man who tried to kill him, and everybody knows he hasn’t spoken yet, but tomorrow he will. Supposing it wasn’t Mr Paviour, after all? People do have heart attacks. I know what I did, I know I meant it, but after all perhaps he was just the most vulnerable. Then there’s somebody still around with an interest in seeing that Gus never speaks. That he doesn’t live to speak! If it was urgent to kill him last night, it’s twice as urgent now.’

The brief and unprotesting silence shook and enlightened her. Dimly as she could see his face, she knew he was looking at her with respect, with affection, certainly with a very gentle and grave measure of amusement.

‘That’s what you want!’ she whispered. ‘You’ve got him all pegged out for bait, like a goat for tigers, waiting for someone to have another attempt.’

‘In which case,’ said George mildly, ‘you may be sure I don’t intend the event to go unwitnessed—or uninterrupted.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Charlotte, charmed into meekness.

‘Well, if you insist—it isn’t strictly necessary, but it would help. When you’re sure everyone else is in bed, you can go quietly down and slip the catch on the back door.’

‘I will.’ The door at the foot of those well-carpeted back stairs that led to the room where Gus Hambro was asleep; the room, she remembered, with a spacious walk-in wardrobe. ‘And what after that?’

‘After that,’ said George, ‘go to bed. And go to sleep.’

‘I should have to have a lot of faith in you,’ she said, ‘to do that.’

‘Well?’ said George. ‘You have a lot of faith in me, haven’t you?’

George drove as far as the nearest telephone box that worked, and made two calls, the first being to Barnes, who was standing by for orders, the second to the ward sister in the Comerbourne General Hospital. He was lucky; the night sister on duty was an old friend, and though she was slightly disapproving, she knew him well enough to consent to bend her conscience very delicately to oblige him.

Then he went home to bed.

Barnes let himself in gently by the back door when the house was in complete darkness and silence, eased the catch into place after him without a sound, and made himself reasonably comfortable inside the wardrobe that opened out of Gus’s bedroom. Not too comfortable, for fear of drowsiness. He left the door unlatched, but only a hairline open, to admit sound or light should there be either, and adjusted his own line of vision to cover any approach to the bed where the patient still slept, not so much peacefully as rapturously.

He spent a disappointing, even a puzzling night. Nothing whatever was heard or seen to break the serenity. Nothing whatever happened.

Lesley arose very early, to catch the night sister before she handed over duty. She was allowed to ring through to the ward instead of merely making routine enquiries through the office, the case being new and this the first and crucial call.

‘Mr Paviour is still unconscious,’ said the ward sister, in the carefully bracing voice of one trying to make dismal news sound better than it is, ‘but I wouldn’t say he’s lost ground at all. His breathing is very slightly easier, perhaps, but of course he’s very weak. I’m afraid his condition must have been developing for some time without producing warning symptoms. The degeneration is marked. But there’s no need to be too discouraged.’

‘You mean he isn’t really any better?’ said Lesley, irritated and demanding. Why must nurses say so much and mean so little?

‘Well… his condition is much the same. I wouldn’t say he’s worse…’

That did convey something, more than it said.

‘Do you think…’ Lesley hesitated. ‘Should I visit this afternoon? If he’s unconscious, it can’t help him…’

‘Well, I don’t think he’s going to know you, of course… I’m afraid he probably won’t have regained consciousness. But don’t feel discouraged from coming on that account. I think that you’ll be glad to feel that you did everything possible… In fact, you could arrange to visit briefly at any time that’s convenient to you, if you ask at the office. In the circumstances…’

‘Thank you,’ said Lesley, in a small, thoughtful voice, and put down the receiver in its rest.

There was no point now in going back to bed. The morning was bright, clear and still. From the window she could see the river glittering in the first slanting light, like frost-fire. She went down and made coffee, and sat over it for a long time, staring out at the dawn, and going over the telephone conversation word by word, sorting out the grain from the chaff. ‘In the circumstances…’ Visiting hours at the General were generous but fixed; the circumstances that permitted visiting at any time did not need spelling out. But the sister could be wrong, even doctors can be wrong. People confidently expected to die did sometimes turn their backs on probability and decide to come back again, against all the odds. Still… ward sisters are very experienced in the prognostication of death. Especially night sisters.

She heard one of her guests stirring overhead in the bathroom, and got up to make fresh coffee and prepare the breakfast. She was busy laying the table, here in the bright, cheerful kitchen instead of the sombre dining-room, when Charlotte came in.

‘I’m sorry, I meant to be up before you and start the breakfast, and now you’ve done everything. I hope you managed to get some sleep?’

‘I slept extraordinarily well,’ said Lesley, and meant it. ‘I don’t know how it is. Trust in providence, or what? But I did.’

‘You haven’t called the hospital yet?’

‘I have. I wanted the sister who really knew something, rather than one who’d just come on. She was the one I saw last night, she promised me she’d be standing by for a call from me. His condition is unchanged,’ she said, answering Charlotte’s unasked question. ‘No better. And she insists, no worse. But I’m not sure the lady doesn’t protest too much.’

‘I’m sorry!’ said Charlotte, reading the look more attentively than the words.

‘Darling, I married a man nearly forty years older than I am. I’ve lived all the while with the obvious knowledge that I certainly was going to survive him, probably by many years. All I hope is that I haven’t always been awful to him, and he really did get something out of it. While it lasted. It could hardly last all that long, could it? I was grateful, I was contented and happy, and I hope I made all that clear. In love,’ she said firmly, ‘I never was. Not with him. I don’t feel that that was any failure on my part, I never promised it.’

‘I don’t feel it was, either,’ agreed Charlotte, reassured. ‘Where do you keep the marmalade?’

They finished the cooking together, just in time for Bill Lawrence’s entrance. He was used to breakfasting in pyjamas, unshaven, on the corner of his desk; it did him good to have to face two young women over the breakfast-table. He was scrubbed and immaculate this morning, like the sky, almost arrogantly clean and pure. We must, thought Charlotte, be one of the oddest trios sitting down to coffee in England this morning. How did any of us get here, in Stephen Paviour’s house, in this tragic palimpsest of a city without people? And yet everything felt improbably normal and ordinary, like the extraordinary encountered in a dream.

‘You didn’t look in on Gus?’ asked Lesley, looking up at Bill.

‘I did, as a matter of fact. I thought maybe I should check. He’s still asleep. I’d even say he’s snoring now. I hope that’s a good sign. I went up to the bed, but he never stirred, so I left him to it. He’ll probably sleep until noon.’

It was at that exact moment that the sound exploded above them, somewhere upstairs, remote at the back of the house. A distant, peremptory, wordless bellow of alarm and conflict, curiously like an antique battle-cry. And then a confused thudding and heaving of bodies braced in mute struggle, frightening out of all proportion to its loudness.

They rose as one, strained upright and motionless for the fraction of a second. Then they raced for the doorway, Charlotte first because she had been quivering on the receptive for just such a signal, not only here in the kitchen, but half the night before. They streamed out into the hall and up the stairs in frantic silence.

It was almost over by the time they burst into the rear bedroom where Gus Hambro had been sleeping. Charlotte flung open the door and stood transfixed, a mere witness, with the others brought up short against her braced shoulders.

The sash window stood wide open, the lower half hoisted to its full extent. The top of a ladder projected above the sill; one man was in the act of leaping into the room, a second head loomed just within view behind him. On the bed a large body crouched froglike, leaning with thrusting forearms over an incongruous orange-coloured cushion, which had missed planting itself squarely over Gus Hambro’s sleeping face only because, in fact, he had not been sleeping for an hour or more previously, and had hoisted a sharp knee into his aggressor’s groin and rolled violently to the right at the moment of impact. He heaved and strained still at this moment, but he was too light a weight to shift that crushing incubus, though nose and mouth were safe from suffocation. It was Detective-Constable Barnes, circling behind him for the right hold, who hooked a steely forearm under the murderer’s chin, and hoisted him backwards off his prey with a heave that could well have broken even that bull neck.

The assailant crashed heavily against the wall, and gathered himself as vehemently to battle again; and Barnes and George Felse, one on either side, pinned his arms and wrestled the lunging wrists into handcuffs behind him. He heaved himself to his feet only to find himself bereft of hands. The cushion lay under the chair from which he had lifted it, beside the window; and Constable Collins, climbing in too late to be of more vital assistance, replaced it automatically, and patted it into shape against the wicker back.

‘Orlando Benyon,’ said George, running rather tiredly through the familiar formula, ‘I arrest you on a charge of the attempted murder of Augustus Hambro, and I caution you that you are not obliged to make any statement unless you wish, but that anything you do say will be taken down in writing, and may be used in evidence.’