Rainbow's End

CHAPTER FIVE

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The telephone rang just as George was clearing up for the evening, with every intention of putting his feet up for the few hours remaining, and renewing his perspective on the case by seeing it at greater distance and through Bunty’s eyes. He should have known better than to expect anything so pleasurable.

‘Glad you’re still there, sir.’ It was Barnes on the line. ‘I thought I might catch the sergeant, at any rate. We’ve got a rather rum thing here, hit-and-run, up in the southerly road, where the Lyons drive comes in. People in a following car picked up the victim, and the lady’s gone in with the kid to the hospital, called the ambulance and all. Reason I thought it just might be something for you, the lad who got knocked down is one of the choirboys, and it was Mrs Rainbow who came along in the Aston Martin and salvaged him. Maybe I’m reaching rather far, but unless coincidence is working overtime, there ought to be some connection. Anyhow, I thought you should know, right away. It’s Sam Jarvis’s lad. Not to worry too much, from all I gather he just got knocked sideways and shocked and grazed, no serious injuries, he’ll be all right.’

‘Thank God for that!’ said George. ‘Have his people been notified? Where have they taken him? Comerbourne General?’

‘That’s right. Mrs Rainbow said she’d call them from the hospital as soon as they got there.’

‘Good, but I’ll have a word with Sam, too. Who was it travelling with Mrs Rainbow? People, you said. ’

‘That’s right. Mr Swayne was with her. He stood by and took care of the boy while she went to call the ambulance. Now the lads are on the spot he’s taken the Aston Martin and followed on down to the hospital to collect her.’

Well, well! Not Colin Barron, not John Stubbs, none of her old circle, but our own Willie the Twig, thought George. Heading out, not homeward, with Barbara, after nine o’clock at night. That little flame of interest at the house-warming didn’t just flicker out when they were apart. Two people worse-suited, on the face of it, it would be hard to find. Willie the impervious and self-sufficient recluse, married to a forest and never likely to want a divorce, and Barbara the sophisticate and hostess, out of her world when out of the city. On the face of it!

‘Right, we’ll be out there and have a look.’ George hung up, and reached for his coat. ‘Come on, Jack, we seem to have what may or may not be a further development.’

He told him about it in the car, on the way to the quiet stretch of road where the farm drive swept down into the highway. It was considerably less dark now, with a policeman standing by to flag down any stray traffic, and lights surrounding the area where the approximate position of Bessie’s form had been chalked out on the tarmac. After fine, dry weather the surface showed nothing of wheel-tracks.

‘But the hedges in the lane want brushing back,’ said the uniformed sergeant in charge, turning his lights on the thick greenery. ‘There’s been a car backed in there on to the edge of the grass, see, backed in just far enough to be out of sight, the tracks go no further. Courting couple, most likely, finding a nice private place and reckoning there isn’t going to be much farm traffic this late. It looks as if that was the car that came out and hit him, luckily the knock just threw him clear. There might be traces on the wing, if ever we find the right car, but they could be very slight, nothing to attract attention.’ There were ends of grasses and a few small twigs brushed out from the hedge where the car had stood, and scattered a yard or two after its progress, obviously freshly severed.

‘Won’t get any tyre-marks out of that lot,’ said Sergeant Moon thoughtfully. ‘In the grass it’s just a furrow, and as soon as it touches the lane surface it vanishes. Too hard and too dry.’

‘And the other car? Mrs Rainbow’s? I hear she went with the boy in the ambulance.’ That was nice of her, and for some reason not at all surprising.

‘Yes, sir. That one was standing back here ten yards short of where the boy was lying, when we got here, heading away from Abbot’s Bale, over the ridge. Mr Swayne stayed to give us a statement, and then followed down to the hospital. Everything bears out their account. They heard a car start up, fast, before they came into this stretch. By the time they did, all they saw were the rear-lights just vanishing at the end of this longish straight. They were driving quite slowly themselves, and have first-rate headlights, or they might have driven over the boy, he was in dark school clothes, and this surface eats light.’

‘Thanks,’ said George, ‘we’ll get to them as soon as we’ve checked how Bessie’s doing.’

‘Accident?’ wondered Moon, as they drove down the valley towards Comerford.

‘Apparently. Even probably. But there’s always the odd possibility…’

‘She’ll have contacted his parents,’ said Moon comfortably, ‘the minute she had something officially reassuring to say. And ten to one she’ll stay around until the docs have been over him and voted him sound as a bell.’

His view of the alien female was illuminating, as though some false outlines in the portrait of Barbara were beginning to melt and run, and reassemble into a different pattern. ‘And if she’s still there,’ he went on positively, ‘you’ll find Willie the Twig sitting waiting for her, with all the patience in the world.’

Barbara’s Aston Martin was standing alone in the public car park attached to one flank of the Comerbourne General Hospital, when they reached it just before ten o’clock, and Willie the Twig, in his normal leather-elbowed, thorny tweeds and creaseless, comfortable slacks, was sitting on one of the synthetic hide benches in the reception area, one long leg crossed over the other, and a very old Country Life in his lap, exchanging occasional sallies with the nurse at the reception desk and the aide on the switchboard, but for the most part turning the pages of his magazine with imperturbable patience and a certain startled interest, perhaps viewing the prices of houses at five years’ remove, and wondering at the way they had ballooned since. His spiky fair hair was on end in all directions, which was normality itself, and the elongated, fleshless image he projected, from natural-Shetland, polo-collared throat to narrow classical brogues, was, if one stood back and took a fresh look at the whole, elegant in the extreme. Elegance of body and mind might well count with Barbara. Money could not match it, as money could not provide it.

He looked up when George entered, with Sergeant Moon at his elbow. His thick, reddish-blond brows shot up, and his bright grey eyes radiated mild surprise and pleasure.

‘Well, hullo, have they dragged you in on this, too? I call that excess of zeal, you know. The kid’s going to be as right as rain, all he’s got is a grazed cheek, a bunch of bruises on one hip, and a bad case of precautionary sedation. I’d have given him a shot of brandy and put him to bed for about twenty hours, and he’d have come out fighting.’

‘From all we know of him,’ agreed George drily, ‘he probably will. Is Mrs Rainbow still in there with them?’

‘Try and get her out until she knows the score. His folks are on the way, did they tell you? We called them, they know he’s OK. The chap who hit him took off like a rocket when he heard us coming. We wondered what had bitten somebody up there ahead of us. I reckon he was going to have a look what damage he’d done, but when he heard us coming he didn’t want to be there to answer for it.’

‘Lucky you were driving so circumspectly,’ said George, with only the mildest irony, for Willie’s volcanic but expert driving was notorious.

‘I wasn’t driving, George. And we were in no hurry.’ Willie the Twig had a gentle line in irony, too.

The nurse on reception, who was young, and not a local girl, hovered suggestively, primly waiting for the newcomer to state his business and credentials, but she was forestalled by the appearance of an elderly sister who knew Superintendent Felse very well from many and varied contacts. Sailing before her, in a burst of brightness that cried aloud gloriously against all the hospital white, came Barbara Rainbow. She wore a long, narrow skirt slit to the knee, in a deep petunia colour, and an embroidered mandarin coat of thin, padded silk, and her hair was knotted in a bunch of curls on top of her head, and fastened with a tall jet comb. Anything further removed from widow’s weeds it would have been impossible to imagine; maybe that was the reason for the get-up. And here sat Willie the Twig in his usual country suiting, as perfectly content with her brilliance as she was with his casualness. She saw George, and smiled radiantly. She looked fulfilled and roused and happy, whether for private reasons of her own and Willie’s, or simply because she had risen to an unexpected occasion with decision and success, and felt all the better for it.

‘You don’t want to see the patient tonight, do you?’ said the sister promptly. ‘It wouldn’t do you a bit of good, he’s sedated, and in any case the doctor won’t let anybody try to question him yet.’

‘I did come with that intention,’ George admitted, ‘but I’d already gathered it wouldn’t be allowed. As long as he’s all right I don’t suppose leaving it until tomorrow morning will make much difference. You are keeping him overnight?’

‘Doctor thought it wise, in case of delayed shock, but if you ask me he’s pretty tough. Dazed, but there doesn’t seem to be any concussion. But we’re keeping him in to be on the safe side.’

‘And there’s nothing really damaged? Nothing to worry about?’

She detailed Bessie’s few abrasions and bruises placidly, and guaranteed his generally sound condition.

‘Did he have anything to say when you got him in? He usually has plenty, if he was conscious I can’t imagine him being silent.’

She thought about that seriously, as if something unusual had just been brought to her notice. ‘Now you come to mention it, we hardly got a cheep out of him, except answers to, “does that hurt?” and that sort of thing. Oh, and he did say he’d lost his music-case, and Mrs Rainbow assured him Mr Swayne had picked it up and it was quite safe. After that he really did go mute. I suppose it was catching up with him by then.’

Perhaps. But for some reason it failed to sound like Bossie.

‘Any use my putting a man in with him, in case he wakes up and wants to get it off his chest in the night?’

‘Wouldn’t get you a thing,’ she assured him. ‘He’s as good as out now, and he’ll sleep right through until tomorrow. You can make it fairly early, though, and see if he’s awake about seven.’

So that was that, and the arrival of Sam and Jenny, roused and anxious but calm, brought the number of people attendant upon Bossie to an inconvenient crowd.

‘Come on,’ said Willie the Twig practically, ‘they’re not closed yet, and I’m hungry. And I rather think the Superintendent would like the first-hand story from us, at any rate, since he can’t get it yet from the kid. Let’s all go and get a pint and a snack at the “Fleece”, and George can ask us whatever he wants to know.’

They left both cars where they were, safe in the hospital grounds, and walked the few hundred yards to the “Fleece”, an old, half-timbered pub, with mediaeval tiles still paving its short passage to the public bar. There were deep settles in which small groups could be as private as in separate rooms, and if the bread, though pleasantly crusty, was slightly past its best at this time on Saturday night, the cheese was good, the ham even better, and the pickles home-made.

‘It was going to be a slap-up dinner over at the “Radnorshire Arms”,’ said Barbara, buttering bread with ardour. ‘But that went for a Burton. Tomorrow, maybe?’ She looked across the table at Willie the Twig, and her eyes were large and eloquent.

‘If we’re still out of jug,’ said Willie imperturbably.

‘Maybe George could arrange for a double cell,’ she said serenely. ‘That would be nice.’

‘If you’re trying to tell me something,’ said George tolerantly, ‘I’d rather you did it right-way-round. But first of all, about tonight. Let’s have your version.’

‘We were going out to dinner,’ said Barbara, ‘as we’ve mentioned, and then we were going to have a long night drive round through Wales and come back over the border to the forest lodge. Time was no object, and I was driving, and I’m wary of those dark, winding, narrow farm roads, in any case, so we were only doing about thirty, probably less. We hadn’t seen another car since we turned into that road, and you know how it winds. One thing I’ll swear to, there weren’t any car lights on, anywhere ahead of us. Even with those hedges cutting off direct vision, in that darkness there’d have been a gleam, enough to see. Agreed, Willie?’

‘Absolutely. And then suddenly there were lights, just switched on, obviously, some way ahead and round a couple of bends, but you see the aura clearly enough.’

‘And it stayed like that maybe half a minute,’ confirmed Barbara, ‘by which time we were getting nearer, and then suddenly whoever it was opened the throttle and put his foot down hard, and the light patch shot off like a bullet. By the time we turned into that longer straight, just past the end of the lane, the rear lights were pin-points at the far end, and then vanished. Then Willie spotted the little boy, lying in the road. And we stopped, and went to see how badly he was hurt, but it wasn’t so bad after all. And Willie stayed with him and went over him for breaks and so on, and wrapped his coat round him, while I dashed off back to telephone. And that’s about all.’

‘I lifted him to the side,’ said Willie. ‘I thought I’d better, and there was nothing busted, it was safe to move him. But I marked the way he’d been lying.’

No particular surprise that Willie the Twig should have a stick of chalk somewhere in his pockets. He was the sort of man who habitually had string, nails, screwdrivers, and half a dozen other useful things distributed about his person.

‘And the timing?’

‘We left Barbara’s place just after nine, say five or ten past. I reckon it would be about five minutes later when we heard the car shoot off like that.’

It fitted. And possibly the simple theory that a courting couple had been making use of the Lyons’ drive, and taken to the road again without due care, was the correct one. But there were things about the affair that pricked in George’s mind like burrs.

‘Then this car, apparently, was parked well up that sloping lane absolutely without lights?’

They looked at each other, and confirmed with an assured exchange of glances that this was so.

‘No mistake about it. If they’d even had sidelights on I believe the faint radiation would have shown. When the lights came on, the car was out on the road.’

So what would even a courting couple have been doing, drawn in on the grass in absolute darkness, to their own peril? What were the odds against any such car sailing carelessly out and knocking down probably the only pedestrian in all the miles of that road at that time, just by chance? Chance is very, very methodical in its distribution of probabilities, and uses sheer coincidences only very sparingly.

‘Or, of course,’ pointed out Barbara obligingly, ‘you may take the view that this is simply our concocted story, and we first knocked the child down and then picked him up again.’

‘And drove the other car away by remote control? Of course, you were the one who went to telephone, and then set off with the ambulance. You haven’t actually inspected the place where somebody certainly was parked, backed up into the side of the lane ready to drive out on to the road. Maybe Willie did see it before he left. The other car was there, all right, he brought some fragments of grass and fresh hawthorn leaves out with him. By the way, where did you leave the Land-Rover?’

‘On the gravel in front of the house,’ said Willie, surprised. It took him a second or two to get the drift. He grinned. ‘True, that would leave me without transport, wouldn’t it, if we were working our way round to come to my lodge from Wales. Unless, of course, I was coming all the way back to Abbot’s Bale with Barbara. By which time it would be rather late to set off back up the valley with the Land-Rover. Nice guessing, and only slightly wrong. Actually, we were planning on spending the night at my place, not hers, and driving down in the morning.’

That fitted, too. If they had driven away from Abbot’s Bale House openly in the Aston Martin, and left the Land-Rover standing on the forecourt for anyone to see who cared, plainly they had opted for a policy of complete openness. Which, George recollected, had hardly been Barbara’s attitude two days ago, so it must be Willie who had made the decision, and convinced her of its rightness.

‘Am I allowed to ask you again, Mrs Rainbow,’ said George equably, ‘whether you want to alter your amended account of Thursday night? In the light of all this, I feel I’m being invited to show an interest.’

‘On Thursday night,’ said Willie firmly, ‘Barbara left as soon as her husband was off to choir practice, and drove up to my place. Not for the first time. We were there together from about half past eight until half past eleven, when she left for home. By which time, I gather, her husband was dead. Barbara told you a tall story because she didn’t want to bring me into the affair at all. Which was nice of her, but pointless, since I am in it, and in any case it means that I can vouch for her absolutely. When somebody killed Rainbow, Barbara was up in the forest with me.’

‘Idiot,’ said Barbara, affectionately and serenely, ‘don’t you see that leaves us both in it up to the neck? Obviously, each of us would be ready to give the other an alibi any time of the day or night, but what makes you think George has to accept that?’

‘Idiot,’ said Willie, just as buoyantly, ‘do you think that makes us any different from all the rest of Middlehope? There isn’t a native up there who wouldn’t give every other native an alibi, as against the aliens. George knows it. Even if he didn’t – but he does! – Jack Moon would have told him. That puts us just alongside all the rest. Even if we happen to be telling the truth! In any case, where else would we want to be?’

It was a point of view which George could appreciate, but one, plainly, which had never fully dawned on Barbara until this moment. She laid down her knife, and gazed wide-eyed at Willie across the table, and her slow, astonished smile of acceptance was something to see. That Willie the Twig should include her without question in that ‘we’, as though she had been born and bred in the secret world of Middlehope, as he had, charmed and flattered her. That he could do it without in the least considering that she should feel charmed and flattered was even more staggering. Love was one thing, love you couldn’t help, it went out to alien creatures if it so chose, and there was nothing you could do about it. But this patient, assured instruction that she belonged, and ought to have the sense to stop behaving as if she did not, this was quite another matter. There were startled tears, as well as irresistible laughter, in Barbara’s eyes as she agreed almost meekly:

‘That’s right! So we’re still in the running, along with all the rest of the valley.’

‘Neck and neck,’ said Willie the Twig heartily, and speared the largest remaining pickled onion.

Bossie awoke when the light of a fine Sunday morning reached his face, and lay blinking at all the whiteness that surrounded him, and wondering where he was. They had put him in a single room so minute that there was no room in it for much beyond the bed, the inevitable bedside locker, and a tiny wash-basin. There was, however, a large and eastward-facing window, which let in the sun into his eyes. Not home, that was definite. So there had to be a reason, and that started his memory working overtime at picking up clues out of what began as a nightmare agglomeration of disconnected impressions. Darkness, and car noises and car lights, and rolling face-down on spiky boulders like a fakir on a bed of nails. And something crazy, a face of extreme beauty leaning down over him, and a voice like a velvet paw stroking his senses – Bossie knew about voices, and this was a show-stopper.

He moved, and a lot of things hurt, but not acutely, just protestingly, to remind him they were there. Especially his left hip and side, on which he was lying. He turned over, which also hurt, and then he found the pillow rasping his right cheek. The safest position seemed to be flat on his back. Like a sensible person he adopted it, and heaved himself up slightly on the pillow, and settled down to think things out.

If his muscles were stiff and sore, there was nothing the matter with his mind, once it came awake enough to function. He remembered walking along the dark road from the bus stop, as he had done dozens of times before, and then the terrifying rush of air and metal and bulk bearing down on him from the lane on the right, in total darkness until the headlights suddenly sprang up to pin him. He remembered the jolting pain hoisting him by the left hip and slamming him down on the road, grazed and stunned, and the indignity of struggling to move, and not being able to shift his weight by an inch. Just like the kind of nightmare where you fall down in front of a steam-roller, and watch it approaching, dead slow, and find your own movements even slower, absolutely helpless to remove you from its path.

He lay thinking with his usual concentrated ferocity, and the longer he thought, the clearer all the details became, things he had never consciously noticed at all. And the clearer the details became, the clearer still did it become that Bossie was in need of help. He could no more tell the whole truth now than a couple of days ago, when he had carefully refrained from telling any of it; but the hour had clearly come to pick his way gingerly through the minefield, and unload at least a part of the burden on somebody official. While he could!

A skittish nurse came to take his temperature, asked archly how we were feeling this morning, and generally behaved as to a juvenile of doubtful intelligence, which was all the more offensive because she was barely six years older than he was. Bossie refrained from blasting her until she had brought him his breakfast, a sensible precaution, and then demanded to know how long he was going to be kept here.

‘Once the doctor’s seen you,’ she said goodhumouredly, ‘they’ll probably throw you out. Your folks are coming in later to take you home.’

‘Then before they come,’ ordered Bossie firmly, ‘I want to talk to the police. Somebody sensible. Sergeant Moon would do.’ For what had happened to him had happened in Sergeant Moon’s territory, and he would certainly have been informed of it.

‘Now isn’t that convenient,’ said the nurse smugly, ‘seeing the police are here to talk to you, and the doctor says they can? It isn’t Sergeant Moon, though, it’s Detective-Superintendent Felse. You must have been up in the top reaches of crime to have the C.I.D. after you.’

He didn’t resent that; it was, after all, badinage of a kind rather flattering to his ego. He was busy arranging within his mind what he could and could not tell, and stepping delicately round the places where they overlapped, and by the time George came in, closed the door, and sat down beside the bed, Bossie was ready for him.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked George. ‘Fit to talk about it?’

‘Yes.’ He had made up his mind to that, but there was still a certain tentative look about him, as though a degree of editing was going on behind his corrective lenses. His right cheek was grazed and swollen, but the damage was not great, and beauty had never been Bessie’s long suit. ‘I was walking home from the bus,’ he began briskly, for this was only the preface to the real story, ‘and I was just past the end of the lane from the farm, when all of a sudden this car came rolling down the slope and out on to the road, and turned after me. There hadn’t been a sound until then. He never switched on his engine or his lights until he was out, and then he came straight at me. I jumped for the hedge, but the wing hit me and knocked me down, and I was sort of stunned.’

‘And he stopped when he was past you?’ prompted George.

‘Yes, a few yards past. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move, and I could see his rear lights right in front of me.’

‘So it looks, doesn’t it, as if he meant to do the right thing, and stop and salvage you, and report the accident, if he hadn’t lost his nerve when he heard another car coming? You know, don’t you, that Mrs Rainbow’s car came along, and she called the ambulance and the police, and came down here with you?’

‘No, really? Was that who it was?’ Momentarily sidetracked into the recollection of all that indignant beauty bending sympathetically over him, Bossie gaped and dreamed. ‘You know, I don’t remember ever seeing her close to, before, only going past in the car. She didn’t come to church, only once or twice.’ Not surprising, thought George; Rainbow’s preoccupation was her respite. ‘But it wasn’t like that,’ said Bossie returning to the matter in hand. ‘It wasn’t an accident. And he didn’t stop because he’d hit me – he stopped because he’d missed me. He stopped to have another go.’

After a moment of silence, though not of complete disbelief, George said reasonably: ‘You’ll have to justify that, you know. Go into detail. There must be certain things that have given you that impression. Now you tell me. You were lying half-stunned, but you say you could see his rear-lights only a few feet away. Then you must also have been able to see his number-plate, though you may not be able to recall it now.’

‘No,’ said Bossie, with a hint of satisfaction, ‘I not only don’t remember, I never saw his number. There was only a blank between the rear lights. Dull, like sacking. I think he’d got his number-plates covered.’

‘He’d get picked up if he was seen on populated roads like that.’ But he was on a road practically deserted at night, and it wouldn’t take many minutes to swathe a number-plate, or many minutes to uncover it again, once safely away from the spot. ‘Go on, you’ve got something more to say, haven’t you?’

‘He started backing the car,’ said Bossie.

George forbore from pointing out the grisly reasons why no sane assassin, having failed in a forward hit, would then back over his victim, but Bossie’s next delivery was unnerving evidence that he had thought of them for himself.

‘Oh, not straight towards me, over to my left. He started backing past me. His front wheels were about by my shoulder when he suddenly changed his mind and shot off at speed and left me there, and I only realised then that there was another car coming along from the village, and he’d heard it and run for it. Before they could come on the scene and get a look at him. If they hadn’t come,’ stated Bossie positively, ‘he was going to straighten out again behind me – nothing would have shown on the road – and run me over. It would have passed for a hit-and-run, and if he got away all right he’d have plenty of time to clean up the car.’

‘So what you’re asking me to believe,’ said George neutrally, ‘is that somebody was actually lying in wait for you there. Expressly for you. Well, before we go into that, can you give us anything on the car? Registration, obviously not, but anything about it? Description, colour, size?’

Bossie showed embarrassment for the first time; of all the things this noticing child failed to notice, mechanical objects held the least interest for him, even in broad daylight, and this had happened in the dark. ‘Middling-sized,’ he hazarded dubiously, ‘and dark, but I never really saw what it was like. But it had a good sort of sound when it took off – you know, quiet and fierce…’

‘Hmmm, pity, but let it go. Now, if this was a deliberate attempt on you – you are saying that, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Bossie with finality.

‘Then how would the person concerned know you’d be passing there at that time?’

‘I think,’ said Bossie carefully, ‘he followed the bus up from Comerford, or maybe from somewhere in between. There was a car went past just as I was getting off the bus. I did have a sort of feeling I heard the same sound again, ahead, when I was walking home. I’m better at sounds, you see, I notice them more. If that was him, he’d have had time to get into position before I got near the place.’

‘In which case he’d have to know in advance who you are, where you live, which way you’d be walking.’

‘I think he does. Even which night I go to music-lesson. It isn’t often I’m out in the dark on my own, he’d need to do his homework on that, wouldn’t he?’

The surprising child was actually becoming involved in this puzzle, even enthusiastic about it. From the safety of a bed in hospital the terrifying aspects were gratifyingly distant and vague. Sitting snugly here under police protection, he was beginning to feel like the hunter instead of the hunted.

‘Right, now tell me one good reason,’ said George gently, ‘why anyone in the world should be lying in wait for you – specifically you! – with murderous intent?’

‘Because,’ said Bossie, taking the plunge, ‘I was hanging about in the churchyard the night Mr Rainbow was killed, and he’s afraid I may be able to identify him.’

He was relieved to observe that there was going to be no out-and-out disbelief, no exclaiming, no time wasted in casting doubts on his memory or his veracity. George merely asked at once: ‘And can you?’ Bossie approved that. First things first.

‘No, that’s the hell of it, I don’t know a solitary thing that would pick him out from anybody else. But he can’t be sure of that, can he? Because I did see him, if you’d call it seeing, when it was among the trees there, and pitch-dark.’ He gazed rather deprecatingly at George, and said apologetically: ‘It’s a long story. I ought to have told you before, but we were scared. But it was only a leg-pull to start with, we never meant to do any harm.’

‘Suppose you tell me now? Do you want to wait until your parents come? They’ll be in to collect you in an hour or so, you can hang on until then if you like. Or we can have in Sergeant Moon and listen to it now, if that’s what you want.’

Bossie scorned the idea that he needed his hand held while he trotted out his confession. ‘They won’t mind you and Sergeant Moon,’ he assured George generously. ‘I’d rather you heard it first.’ The protecting arm of the law might be valuable in more directions than one.

‘All right, then, that’s what we’ll do.’ And George went to summon the sergeant, who came in placidly nursing a notebook, and greeted the patient with a cheerful lack of condescending pity. He had known him from birth.

‘A fine how-d’you-do you set up for us last night,’ he said accusingly, and against all regulations made himself comfortable on the bed. ‘You can tell the docs aren’t worrying about you, or they wouldn’t turn us loose on you. All right. I’m set. Get on with it.’

Bossie squared himself sturdily back against his pillows, and got on with it.

‘It started with an idea I had, when nobody seemed to know what to do to get rid of Mr Rainbow.’ The infelicity of this opening, luckily, did not strike him. ‘Nobody liked him, everybody wanted him to up-anchor and go away somewhere else, but nobody was doing anything about it, and the longer he hung on, the harder it was going to be to shift him. So I had this idea. I thought if we trailed some bait for him, some sort of an antique, and made a fool of him in front of everybody, that was the one thing he wouldn’t be able to stand. Like these art critics, after they’ve been had for suckers by fake pictures. Well, I had a thing I thought might do the trick. It was a leaf of real parchment, with bits of at least one lot of writing on it in Latin, only I think it had been cleaned, but not very well – you know, to use again. It was pretty faint, anyhow, but it was really old, and I did it up for him specially. I borrowed one of Dad’s books for a copy, and cooked up just a few words in Latin here and here, sort of half faded out, so you could just read a bit about some land with its ’purtenances, and I got in the word “gold”, I knew that would fetch him. And at choir practice I stayed behind and showed this to him, and told him where I’d found it, and asked him what it was all about, and if it was important…’

‘And where did you find it?’ asked George, as Bossie paused for breath. ‘You told him. You haven’t told us.’

‘In one of those old chests up above the bell-ringers’ room,’ said Bossie without hesitation. ‘I was up there with Mr Llewelyn, you know, when he went to take the swarm that got in there.’

‘Why hadn’t you shown it to the vicar, or your father?’

‘I never thought much about it, I just kept it as a trophy. I still don’t think it’s anything much,’ said Bossie, shrugging it off with disdain, ‘but I made it look good for him. And he bit like anything. He behaved very offhand, but I knew he was interested. He said he’d take it home and study it properly, and he asked me if I’d shown it to anyone else, and when I said no, he said better not, until we found out whether it was of any importance, but he doubted if it would be. So I knew if it looked good to him he was going to keep it for himself. It didn’t really matter, though, whether he went rushing to the vicar to boast of a great find, or hung on to it and never said a word, because either way we could show him up for a fool or a thief, and either way he’d be the laughing-stock of the place. He’d never stand that, he’d pull up his roots and go right away. That’s what everybody wanted,’ said Bossie simply, ‘but they left it to us to do something about it.’

‘But for heaven’s sake,’ said George helplessly, ‘how could you hope to take him in? He can’t be an expert on everything, but at least he’d know a genuine membrane of parchment when he saw one – ’

‘But it was, you see! According to Dad’s books, the writing on it, what you could make out, was about thirteenth century. So I made my bits from a copy rather later, to be on top of the old one. It looked pretty good. Anyhow, he took it fast enough, didn’t he?’

‘Quite! He wouldn’t pass up the chance, however small, I suppose. But it wouldn’t take him long to see through it. Even the modern ink would give you away.’

‘It wouldn’t, you know. Oh, it wasn’t proper thirteenth century ink, but it was seventeenth – I got the recipe out of The Compleat Houfewife, with walnut-shells and skins and all, and oak-galls. It came up a sort of faded brown. He might think it a bit fishy, but he wouldn’t find it was modern, because it wasn’t. And I cut a proper quill to do the writing with. And he was taken in! He must have been, because the next week at choir practice— That was the night it happened,’ said Bossie, suddenly stricken at the recollection. ‘I asked him if it was anything special, and he said no, it turned out to be quite worthless. But he didn’t give it back! And after practice he stayed behind, and he’d asked me specially where these chests were. We were all going along home, and I heard the organ playing again, and I knew he was staying behind to have a look up there privately. So I went back. I was wary of going in, so I just waited among the trees, where I could watch the door. I knew I should hear when the organ stopped, and then I was going to creep into the porch and watch what he did. But I gave him a few minutes to come down from the organ, and I was just on my way to the door when somebody came walking out.’

‘Somebody came out? Mr Rainbow himself?’

‘No, it wasn’t him. I thought at first it must be, and after all he was just going home, quite innocently. But I had to duck out of sight myself round a corner, not to be spotted, so I never did get a look at whoever that was. But I realised at once it couldn’t be Rainbow, because he didn’t stop to lock up, he just walked out of the lych-gate and went away. Then I didn’t quite know what to do, but I hung around for a bit, and I was just making up my mind to go home and forget it, when he fell. Crashing down among the grave-stones. I didn’t even understand what it was that had fallen, I thought a piece of the parapet must have dropped off. I was even going round that way to have a look, when I heard somebody else coming along between the tombs from the church door. I was among the bushes, a fairish way off, and I lay low there, and saw this sort of dark, stooping shape hurrying along, almost running. But that’s all it was, just a shape. Then he stooped, and stooped down lower, and switched on a flashlight, and his other hand was just turning up something to look at it in the light. I knew the way it moved it wasn’t stone, and then I saw it was Mr Rainbow’s face. He was dead,’ said Bossie, flat-voiced and huge-eyed, ‘I knew he was dead. He couldn’t have been anything else.’

‘What about this chap standing over him?’ demanded Sergeant Moon briskly, deflecting the fixed gaze to a more bearable target. Bossie blinked and shook himself, and ceased to stare.

‘It was very dark, and the torch went out very quickly, and made it seem even darker. I just don’t know! I’ve been trying and trying to think of anything special about him, but I couldn’t even tell whether he was tall or short, he was stooping and running. I’m sure it was a man, but that’s all I’m sure of. Honestly, if he thinks I could recognise him again, he’s crazy. But he’d be even crazier to take the risk. wouldn’t he?’

‘Assuming he knew you were there at all, yes,’ agreed George cautiously. ‘But up to now there’s no reason to suppose that he did.’

‘Oh, yes, he knew. I was in the bushes, and I must have made some movement that made them rustle, because this man suddenly straightened up and seemed to be staring right at me, and I just turned and ran for it, and I knew he was coming after me, and then after all he stopped, and I just went like a bat out of hell for home.’

‘There you are, then,’ said Moon with monumental calm. ‘He may know there was somebody there watching, but he still doesn’t know who.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Bossie, with a superiority at once smug and desperate, ‘he does. It wasn’t till I got home I found I’d lost my copy of the anthem we’d been practicing. It was Locke – “Turn Thy Face from my sins,” ’

‘Very appropriate,’ murmured Moon, but Bossie was not to be soothed or diverted.

‘I had it folded and stuck in my blazer pocket, you see, and it was too long, and stuck out rather a way, and it must have fallen out while I was running. I looked for it the next day, after you’d all finished and gone away, but I never found it, and I bet you didn’t, either. Because I reckon he found it first. It had my name and address on it,’ said Bossie, between terror and triumph.’ That’s why he was waiting to come at me out of the farm lane, last night.’