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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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She laughed again, when she was alone with George in his office at C.I.D. headquarters in Comerbourne, with no shorthand writer at hand and no witnesses, and he asked her, with genuine and unindignant curiosity—since indignation was quite irrelevant in any dealings with Lesley—: ‘Do you always contrive to have not merely one fall guy on hand in case of need, but at least two? And doesn’t it sometimes make things risky when you decide to change horses in midstream?’

‘I never plan,’ she said with disarming candour, ‘not consciously. I just do what seems the clever thing at the moment.’

All too often, he reflected, it not only seemed clever, but was. She had matched every twist until the last, the one she hadn’t foreseen even as a possibility. For some built-in instinct certainly acted to provide her with escape hatches and can-carriers well in advance of need. Why, otherwise, had she gone out of her way to let Charlotte not only see but handle the package still waiting to be reclaimed from the bank? And to tell her guilelessly that it was Orrie’s, and not the first time he had put similar small items into safe-keeping? Thus underlining for future reference his involvement and her own naïve innocence. She had even scattered a few seeds, according to Charlotte, concerning Bill Lawrence’s solitary and furtive prowlings about the site, in case she should ever need yet another string to her bow. Lesley collected potentially useful people, and used and disposed of them like tissues, without a qualm.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘it was so clever to write off Orrie. I wonder at what stage you made up your mind to throw him to the lions? You did allow him the chance to drive you back from the hospital last night. Hadn’t you decided then? He’d been waiting on hot coals for a chance to talk to you alone. He wanted you to do your share, didn’t he? You were in the house, it was your turn to do the necessary killing. Even a delicate little woman could press a cushion over the face of a man fast asleep under drugs after an exhausting ordeal. But you never intended sticking your neck out for him. Why didn’t you tell him so? Obviously you didn’t, or he wouldn’t have left his own attempt so late. He waited all night, hoping you’d do the job for him. And I don’t doubt you slept soundly.’

‘Never better,’ she said.

‘Was it more fun letting him sweat? Was it just to make sure he would mistime it and be caught? Or were you afraid you wouldn’t get back alive from the hospital with him if you pushed him too far?’

‘I’m never afraid,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I don’t drive through red lights, but I’m not afraid.’ He believed that, too.

‘And of course,’ he said, ‘it was only going to be your word against his, since your husband was going to die. And if you were winding up the operation and getting out with the proceeds, Orrie was going to be a liability as well as an expense, wasn’t he? But what would you have done if he’d refused to put his neck in the noose, and decided to take a chance on Gus, and sit it out?’

‘I’d have thought of something,’ said Lesley confidently.

‘In the end even you had to make one slip.’

‘I shan’t make another. I knew your thumbs were pricking about me,’ she said without animosity, ‘when you encouraged me to do poor old Stephen out of his alibi for the night. I could hardly do that without pointing out that I hadn’t got one myself, could I? But even now, what are you going to charge me with?’

‘Concealing a death will do to begin with.’

Lesley laughed aloud. ‘You’ll never make even that one stick. Not without Stephen’s evidence, and you’re going to have to go rather a long way to get that, aren’t you?’

‘Just as far,’ said George, ‘as the General. It’s a mistake to be too clever at reading between the lines. Neither Doctor Braby nor Sister Bruce told you any lies, they just didn’t tell you the whole truth. Sister told you repeatedly he wasn’t any worse. She didn’t say he wasn’t any better. He is, very much. Digitalisation is taking effect excellently. He’s out of danger.’

‘But she told me,’ said Lesley, genuinely indignant at such duplicity, ‘that he was dying!’

‘She did nothing of the sort. She told you simply that you could visit any time, even out of visiting hours. What you read into that is your worry. So you can visit, if you’d like to—under escort, of course.’

She made a small, bitter kitten-face, wrinkling her nose. The jolt was shrugged off in a moment; she adapted to this as nimbly as she did to everything. ‘Thanks, but in the circumstances perhaps it wouldn’t be tactful. It certainly wouldn’t be amusing. But even if you do get to talk to him,’ she said, strongly recovering, ‘he won’t say a word against me, you know.’

‘You may,’ said George, rising, ‘find you’ve over-estimated even his tolerance. How will you get round it then?’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Lesley.

It was two days before Stephen Paviour was sufficiently recovered to be visited briefly in hospital, and even then George put off what he really had to tell and ask him for two days more, and consulted his doctors before taking the risk of administering a new shock. By Thursday evening his condition was so far satisfactory as to allow the interview.

In all his life of half-fulfilment, of disappointments and deprivations, of loving without being loved, he had perhaps become accustomed to the fact that no one ever came to break good news. It was better to hear the whole story at once than to put it off, since his forebodings were almost always worse than the reality. And with long experience he had acquired a degree of durability against which even this might break itself and leave him unbroken. All the same, George approached the telling very gently and very simply. Flourishes would only have made sympathy intolerable.

Paviour lay and listened without exclamation or protest. There was offence and pain in it for him, but beneath the surface there was no surprise. When it was over he lay and digested it for a minute or two, and strangely he seemed to lie more easily and breathe more deeply, as though a tension and a load had been lifted from him.

‘They both admit this? It’s been going on—how long?’

‘Since before Doctor Morris’s visit. Perhaps two years. Perhaps even more.’

‘I was rejected,’ he said slowly. ‘I had to respect her morbid sensitivity, and cherish her all the same, and I did it. That I could bear. And all the time she was wallowing with that beautiful draught-horse, that piece of border earth. While she fended me off with those elaborate lies, because I was too dull, too civilised, too old to serve her turn.’ He thought for a moment, and there was colour in his grey face, and a spark in his normally haggard and anxious eyes. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘exactly what happened, though I see now that it was not what happened at all, since there’s no truth in her. This propensity of hers—to provoke men and then recoil from them—this feigned propensity… She used it on Alan Morris, too. You know he was a ladies’ man? But a gentleman, and experienced enough to be able to deal with her. I was not worried at all.’

It was a bad moment to interrupt, but George had thought of one thing he needed to ask. ‘Do you remember one evening during his visit, when young Lawrence came to dinner? Was there a conversation then about the criminal side of the archaeological interest? About how to market stolen antiques?’

Paviour looked faintly surprised, but the intervention did him good by diverting his own too fixed bitterness.

‘I do remember it. I couldn’t understand then why she should be so interested in such things. I understand now. She was picking his brains. I took it simply as her way of engaging his attention. I’m sure it was she who began the discussion.’

She had, George thought, such a housewifely sense of economy. She never threw away a solitary detail that might some day, suitably perverted, turn out to be useful.

‘I’m sorry, I put you off. Please go on.’

‘The last night of Morris’s stay I had a lecture in the village, one of a series the county education office was putting on. When I came back I found Lesley sitting on the steps of the garden-room, in a hysterical condition. She was wet and cold and crying.’

No doubt, thought George, she can cry at will. God help the jury that has to deal with her!

‘She said, ’went on Paviour in a level, low voice, drawing up the words out of a well of anguish, ‘that she had gone out for a walk with Alan by the river, and he had attacked and tried to rape her. And she had fought him off and pushed him into the Comer. It was credible, you understand, I had experience of the violence of her revulsion. She was very convincing in my case! And I loved her, and let her be. With someone who didn’t understand—yes, there could be a tragedy. I didn’t question it. She said she had got him out, but he was dead. She swims very well, you know, she was born by the river. I coaxed her to take me where he was. He was dead. There was no mistake. I knew—then, of course!—that exposure of such an affair, however accidental it might be, however innocent she might be, would destroy her totally. Her balance was already so precarious, you see. So I hid his body in the hypocaust. We were in process of closing the small dig we’d managed to finance that year, at the corner of the caldarium. It was pitifully small, and we got almost nothing from it. But it did afford a grave. I did it all myself, by night. I’d kept back his typewriter, and all his documents, and a suit of his that fitted me best. There was nothing to be done but take his place, his flight was booked, and it would account for his leaving. We were much the same build, and of course the same age. That goes a long way towards making a passport photograph acceptable, unless the officers have reason to suspect something, and they had none. I had to shave off my beard, but he wore a moustache, that was a help. He was not really very like me in the face, but the same general type, I suppose. And I was wearing his clothes, his hat, his glasses. It worked quite smoothly. We’d talked about his plans, I knew what was needed. And if I’d forgotten anything, I realise now, she would have prompted me. She did prompt me, many times. I took up his air reservation, his hotel reservation in Istanbul. And I worked over his text there, on his typewriter, and made sure that the manuscript he sent to his publishers on Aurae Phiala should put off all enquirers thereafter. It had to. There must never be a full-scale dig here, never.’

‘The purpose was not, in fact, to conceal any valuable find,’ said George. ‘Just a body.’

‘I never knew of any valuable find until now. No… I was hiding poor Morris. It wasn’t a grave he would have rejected, you know.’

‘We’ve found him,’ said George. ‘The pathologists may still be able to tell us how he died. I very much doubt if it was by drowning. I should guess he walked slap into one of their meetings, and found out what they were doing. In the circumstances, I doubt if he’d hold anything against you.’

‘I hope you’re right. I always envied him, but we were good friends. After I’d posted his book—yes, that he would hold against me, wouldn’t he? That must be put right!—I telephoned his friend at Aphrodisias, and apologised for a change of plans, and paid my bill and went to the railway station. I changed to my own clothes in the baths there, and then flew home on my own passport. We’d left the last segment of the hypocaust open on purpose. I put all his other effects underground with him, and covered him in again with my own hands. It was not easy. None of it was easy.’

Very gently and reasonably George asked: ‘Will you, if the issues we have in hand come to trial, testify against your wife? I promise you shall be fully informed of the weight of evidence against her with regard to any charges we prefer.’

‘I’ll testify to the truth, as far as I know it,’ said Paviour, ‘whether it destroys her or no. I realise that I myself am open to certain charges, graver charges than I understood at the time. Don’t hesitate to make them. I have a debt, too. I made her possible.’

‘No wonder the poor soul nearly dropped dead with shock when you came heaving out of the earth,’ said George, two days later, in a corner of the bar at ‘The Salmon’s Return’, with a pint in front of him, and Charlotte and Gus tucked comfortably into the settle opposite him. ‘He took you for his own dead man rising. You’d hardly credit the difference in him now it’s all over, now he doesn’t have to live with his solitary nightmare, and there’s no hope and no horror from her any more. The tension’s snapped. Either he’ll collapse altogether for want of the frictions that have kept him on edge, or else he’ll look round and rediscover an ordinary world, and start living again. Just now I’d say all the odds are in favour of the second, thank God!’

‘Do you think he’ll really testify against her?’ Charlotte wondered. ‘He may feel bitter against her now, but what about when it comes to the point?’

‘He’ll testify,’ said George with certainty. ‘You can’t love anyone that much, and be betrayed as callously as that, and not find out how to hate every bit as fiercely. Not that we know yet who did kill Doctor Morris. If those two decide to talk, of course, she’ll say he did it, and forced her to trick her husband into covering up for him. What he’ll say I wouldn’t bet on, except that it’s more likely to be true than anything we get out of Lesley.’

‘Who do you think actually did it?’ asked Gus.

‘Ordinarily she was the teller and he was the doer. But supposing Doctor Morris really did drown, in this case she may very well have done it herself. If he started taking a suspicious interest because of all her leading questions, she’s the one he’d be watching and following. There’s a skull fracture, not enough to have killed him, probably, but it does bring Orrie into the picture. We may get a conviction for murder against both, but at least we can fix her as an accessory. Paviour will see to that.’

‘Did you know when you set your trap,’ asked Charlotte, ‘that it was Orrie you were setting it for?’

‘It wasn’t for him,’ said George simply. ‘It was for her. I had a queer hunch about her, even before Gus came round and told me what he could. Two people were involved. And the cast wasn’t all that big, even if I did make soothing noises about the village and the fishermen not being ruled out. And all of them male but Mrs Paviour, and all, somehow, so accurately deployed all round her, like pawns round a queen. If Gus was being stage-managed out of the world, who was more likely to be the stage-manager, the one who initiated that scene in the night, or the one who interrupted it? And if she had an accomplice, who was it likely to be but a lover? I did toy with the idea of young Lawrence. He was obviously jealous, though that could be regarded as evidence either for or against. And the Vespa was his, but his consternation when he heard about it being used rang true. And then, which of them was Lesley more likely to choose? The nice, dull, civilised scholar, her husband in embryo? Not on your life! So I was betting on Orrie, yes, but I didn’t know! I was beginning to feel we might make a respectable case against him for Gerry Boden, though it would be mostly circumstantial. The boy had inhaled fibres from a thick, felted woollen fabric. I hope we’ll be able to identify them as coming from Orrie’s old donkey-jacket. His brand of wood-dust, fertiliser and vegetable debris should be pretty unique. And so’s he, in his way. He must have slipped back from the vicarage garden as soon as it began to get dusk, caught the boy grubbing in the hypocaust, killed him and hid his body until it should be dark enough to get it down to the water, collected his aurei, and gone calmly back to his work. He almost certainly had the gold pieces in his pocket when Price called on him at home around nine o’clock to ask about Gerry’s disappearance. And even after that he was cool enough to call in at “The Crown” before he went back to Aurae Phiala to send the body down the river. Not a nerve anywhere in him.’

‘So you were following up his movements all the time,’ said Charlotte, ‘while you hardly ever seemed to look in his direction.’

‘Never let wild creatures know you’re watching them. They tend to go to earth. If you carry on as if you haven’t even noticed them they may emerge and go about their business. Not that it paid off with Orrie. There’d have been gaps in his time-table, if we’d had to proceed on the evidence, but we couldn’t have proved how they were spent. Still, I’d have taken the risk of charging Orrie. On her I had nothing. I hoped—so did Orrie!—that she’d attempt the job herself. Then we’d have had her red-handed. I hoped she’d be frightened enough. He hoped—he believed—she cared enough. But we were both wrong. So I had to bluff it out the hard way, and hope to get through her guard somehow.’

‘And I thought I’d wrecked it,’ Charlotte said ruefully, ‘going off at half-cock like that over her key. I’d only just realised what was going on. I wasn’t very clever.’

‘Not a bit of it! Once I had that key she had her back to the wall. Oh, she could have stuck to her story that she knew nothing about the coins. But she’d have had hard work accounting for the rest of the deposit.’

Stephen Paviour had authorised the opening of the box two days previously, and it had yielded, in addition to the coins, a highly interesting collection of documents concerning Lesley’s buoyant financial situation, though without a word to explain it. She must have made good use of her holidays abroad with her husband, and the few occasions when she had accompanied him to digs in other countries. Nor is it always necessary to go abroad to find the kind of collector who asks no questions, and doesn’t mind keeping his acquisitions to himself, well out of sight.

Charlotte thought of those tormented and tormenting lovers, so unevenly matched except in beauty, who now stood charged jointly with the murder of her kinsman. ‘Would she ever really have gone away with him, as he thought? If their plans had gone on working out, right to the end?’

‘Not a chance!’ said George. ‘Not with a crude, handsome, lumpish piece of earth like Orrie. She had all the money at her disposal, she could vanish and be rich. He’d helped her to put away plenty, mostly in banks in Switzerland. And what a trusting soul he was, everything was in her name! No, he’d given her a lot of pleasure, and been a lot of fun, but she’d have sloughed him off without a qualm. The world is full of men!’

‘Not,’ said Charlotte, torn between satisfaction and unwilling pity, ‘the world where she’s going.’

‘Don’t be too sure!’ warned Gus feelingly, thinking with almost superstitious dread of the kitten’s emerald eyes and sharp, insidious claws. ‘Even if we do fix her, come eight years or so, and she’ll be out on the world again—sooner if the charge is reduced. She isn’t going to deteriorate, she isn’t going to forget anything, only learn new tricks, and never in this world is she going to change. She’ll come out ripe and ready for mischief. Give her half a chance, and she’ll be popping up in another mask to lure another poor sucker to his death. No, my girl, you save your sympathy for me and the world that has to cope with her.’

George finished his beer, collected their glasses, and brought them another round. They had been installed here with Mrs Lane all the week, and they seemed, he thought, to be getting on very satisfactorily together. Gus was involved in the documentation of the case from two angles, and could also claim to be a convalescent, entitled to take his duties at a rather leisurely pace, but it was questionable whether he would have strung out his work locally quite so long if Charlotte had not been still at ‘The Salmon’s Return’. Tomorrow Gus was leaving for London and duty at last; and it could hardly be coincidence that Charlotte was going to town by the same train, to confer with her solicitor and make preparations for the reburial of her great-uncle. He had known even stranger circumstances bring people together. In a sense, Gus Hambro had been a dead duck from the moment he drew Charlotte after him on his nocturnal rush to have one more look for a missing boy. When you have given someone his life back, it may be magnanimous to give it wholly and go right away and forget the benefit, but it’s very human to keep a thin, strong string attached, and retain a proprietary interest.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said George. And he looked at Charlotte with the private look that had somehow developed between them. ‘It’s a big step, you know. I’d sleep on it, if I were you.’

‘Your wife didn’t,’ said Charlotte.

They halted at the crest of the bowl to look back over the shallow, undulating expanse of Aurae Phiala. The flood water had passed, the weather was settling into the pure, spring-like hush that sometimes comes before a turbulent May. The river ran deeply green and tranquil under its shelving banks. Away to their right, round one corner of the caldarium, tarpaulin screens fenced off the enclosure where the police had dug Doctor Alan Morris out of his grave. The inquest had not yet opened. But there would be no problem of identification there, with all his belongings securely buried round him, like a pharaoh.

‘I wish he could have come out of it alive,’ said Charlotte. ‘But I’m glad he comes out of it with credit. In a sense he was defending the ethics of the profession, if he died because he suspected their thefts and tried to prevent them. For a time you thought I might be here as his agent, didn’t you?’

‘And for a time,’ he said, ‘you thought I might be behind the racket myself, didn’t you?’

‘You knew so much about it, too much. How was I to know which side you were on? I always knew you weren’t what you seemed. And I knew you’d latched on to me after you found out my name, not for my charm.’

‘Only half true,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe you were ever in doubt for a moment how I felt about you.’

Their voices were as tranquil as the evening sky, and they were standing hand in hand.

‘There was a time,’ she owned serenely, ‘a very brief time, though, when I did wonder just what you were feeling for Lesley.’

‘I’d never given her a thought of any kind,’ he said firmly, ‘until she began to make a dead set at me, after she’d whisked my jacket away to dry and brush it, when I got buried that time. She’d begun to have suspicions already, because she seized that opportunity like a pro. And I was fool enough to carry stuff on me that I shouldn’t have done—my passport, with the bill from that Istanbul hotel still in it, and some notes, and even a drawing of that gold triskele brooch from Italy, the one that started me on the case. She couldn’t very well mistake it. She sold the thing in Livorno. After that it was all “do stay to lunch”, and “move in with us, we’ve got plenty of room”. You she wanted under her eye to find out what you were up to, me to dispose of permanently. Not that I realised it then. I just played her shots back to her, to find out what the game was. She’d made up her mind I had to go for good. Underground. I was getting a lot too near to what I was after.’

He remembered with a convulsion of painful rapture and guilt the clinging frenzy of that small body, which this one beside him must some day wipe out of mind. Aloud he said: ‘Those scenes with me were staged for him. She could manipulate him like modelling clay. His job was to interrupt us and very politely, very considerately, ask me to leave. So that she and Orrie could entice me back to the caldarium and dispose of me, with everything accounted for, a farewell note waiting, and no questions asked.’

The moon, a filigree wafer of silver foil, was rising, and the Welsh shore had dimmed into a deep, twilit blue of folded hills. Aurae Phiala was as beautiful as ever, and as pure. No part of this greed, violence and deceit had done more than glance from its present-day surface, which was only illusory. It had outlived all its own tragedies long ago.

‘I went to see Mr Felse at his home on Saturday morning,’ said Charlotte, ‘after he flew that kite about Great-Uncle Alan, and started Lesley thinking what a convenient scapegoat he’d make. And he told me about the Yard enquiries, though not about you, and said they’d led inevitably to considering my uncle as one possibility. And then I asked him again if he believed in it. And he said, personally, no. He said scholars are seldom rich, but no matter how great the temptation to personal gain, if a find of that magnitude did turn up, the strongest temptation of all would be the innocent one, to the excitement and glory and public admiration. I loved him for that. Because, you see, until then I hadn’t been quite so sure myself. But he was right. And because I wanted him to be right. I began to take his word for everything.’

‘So that was when you met his wife,’ said Gus, remembering George’s enigmatic valediction. ‘What was that all about, anyhow? What was it his wife didn’t do?’

They had begun to walk back, turning away from the crude tarpaulin shape and the scarred ground. And they forgot all the dead of Aurae Phiala in the blessed conviction of being themselves rather more than usually alive.

‘She didn’t back away and demand time to sleep on it,’ said Charlotte, ‘when she was asked if she’d consider marrying a policeman.’

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