Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (13 page)

“Low tide’s about a quarter to twelve. You’ll be able to get in any time after ten. So hurry and get up to Mr. Hewitt, and then you’ll have time enough before lunch.” Blessed reassurance, he wouldn’t risk missing his lunch, not on a day when he was happy, not for all the guineas Queen Anne ever minted.

“I’ll be careful,” he volunteered even more gruffly, and dug his toes hastily into his slippers and headed for the door.

There he checked, ears suddenly pricked, catching the unmistakable sound of Simon’s Porsche starting up in the yard. Phil saw him stiffen, and the resolute shade of thought came down again upon his face. There was a relationship still to be adjusted somehow, and it wasn’t going to be easy.

She wished she could guess what was going on in his mind, but the set of his face told her nothing. All that charm and glamour and excitement suddenly his for the claiming, and more than ready to fall into his lap—if only he would say something to give her a clue! But when he did make his one pregnant comment, it wasn’t much help to her.

“I suppose I’m more fun now,” said Paddy bafflingly, and whisked away to the bathroom.

“I’m sorry,” he was saying, three-quarters of an hour later, in Hewitt’s office overlooking the square, “I don’t seem to have been much help. But I really didn’t look up at the Dragon’s Head at all, and I didn’t see a soul until Dominic came yelling at me. It isn’t as if I’d seen anyone fall from up there, you see. I don’t even know anything accurate about times, because I ran down in my trunks, like I always do, and I didn’t have my watch. I’m sorry!”

“Well, there it is,” agreed Hewitt, no more nor less lugubrious than usual, but distinctly more loquacious, solid and fresh behind his shabby desk, with George Felse and Simon Towne in silent attendance, one on either side. “Can’t be helped, laddie. Don’t you worry about it any more.”

“And you don’t think my passage in the cave, and that guinea—if it really is a guinea?—you don’t think they’re anything to do with Treverra?”

“I didn’t say that, Paddy, my boy. I think it’s unlikely, but I didn’t say I wasn’t interested. But I’ve no time to investigate that to-day.”

“Well, is it all right if I go and explore there again myself? I haven’t got much time left, you see, I go back to school Monday.” School was the boarding-house of the best local grammar school, twelve miles inland. Its shadow cast a light cloud over the last week of his holidays, but promised escape, at least, from his present difficulties. He hadn’t once seemed to look at Simon since he balked in the office doorway on finding him there, but he hadn’t missed a single shade of expression that crossed the somewhat drawn and sombre face. He saw it tighten now, saw the quick flash of uneasy brown eyes in George’s direction.

“My mother’s given me permission,” said Paddy, with immense dignity.

“I’ve no objection, laddie,” said Hewitt heartily. “You go ahead, and good luck. Let me know if you find out where the treasure’s buried.” He saw Paddy’s eloquent eyes rest calculatingly upon the small gold coin that lay before him on the desk, and palmed and tossed it to him so smoothly that the act seemed spontaneous. “Here, better keep your sample by you. You’ll let me see it again if necessary, I’m sure.”

Paddy’s smile blazed like the sun. The little glitter of metal vanished into his ready palm and into his pocket. “Yes, of
course
!”

“Why don’t you show the place to Dominic?” suggested Simon, lightly and quickly. “You just about owe him that.”

And Mr. Felse, equally easily: “He’d certainly be glad to come with you. I look like being busy for a while, and he won’t want to go souvenir-shopping with his mother, that’s sure. Give him a ring, Paddy.”

“I will,” said Paddy politely. “Thank you.” He was pretty quick on the draw, was Mr. Felse, but of course a detective-inspector would have to be. He got Uncle Simon’s message as fast as I did, thought Paddy, withdrawing aloofly from the room. He didn’t want me to go back in the cave alone. Mummy still trusts me, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid something may happen to me.

And in the instant he saw it in reverse, and was dazzled. Uncle Simon, who can do everything better than anyone else, who goes everywhere, and ventures everything, and doesn’t know what it is to be afraid for himself, he’s afraid for
me
. He
does
care about me. Uncle Simon that was. Now I don’t know what to call him. I don’t know what he is.

I know what I am, though. I know
who
I am. And Mummy cares about me, too, and maybe she was just as afraid—more, because she’s a woman. But all the same, she trusted me, and didn’t even say: Take Dominic with you.

Meantime, it was hardly Dominic’s fault, and you could see their point of view, and all that. So he’d do just what he’d said he’d do, and call him and invite him to come along. He was a little bit prefect-type, to be honest, but it was difficult not to be at that age; and he’d been jolly decent last night, and had the tact to vanish into the background as soon as the fussing began. He deserved to be rescued from souvenir-shopping.

“Well, that didn’t get us much forrarder,” observed Hewitt, when the door had closed and Paddy’s feet were clattering down the stairs. “No surprise, really, I didn’t think it would. So here we still are with two bodies that shouldn’t have been there, and—don’t forget this little detail—minus one that should.

“With the older body we still haven’t got much to go on. The first job is to identify him. According to the reports so far he was about thirty years old, about six feet tall, and a pretty husky specimen. His ears were pierced, and there’s a thin gold ring still in one of ’em. The body shows no injuries except to the skull, and those were clearly the cause of death. It looks as if he was bashed on the head from behind, maybe two or three blows, with a solid and probably jagged object, such as a lump of rock. The fragments of cloth suggest he was a seaman, most likely a fisherman.”

“Which means probably a local man,” said Simon intently.

“It doesn’t necessarily follow, but everything rather indicates it as a probability. He’s been dead between two and three years—certainly not two centuries. The one really good lead for identifying him is in his jaws. He’s got a lot of very good dental work, most likely all done in one series of treatments after a long period of neglect. Whoever did that job on him will have it on record, and he’ll know his own work again. It means we’ve got to get on to every dentist here and maybe up and down the coast, but it’s only a matter of time, and we’ll find him. And then, with any luck, we’ll know who we’ve got down there.

“Now the other one, he’s a very different matter. Here we have a fellow everyone knows, who was seen alive as late as four o’clock last Wednesday, and according to the medical evidence and the set of the tides must have been dead before ten o’clock the same night. The blow or blows that left that mark on his face didn’t do more than knock him out, which seems to have been the object. He’s otherwise more or less undamaged. He drowned in salt water, and was then put in the Treverra vault. And though Miss Rachel’s key was in your possession during the material time, Mr. Towne, we now know that another key exists, and was kept in a place where anyone who had a little inside knowledge or a bit of luck could get at it. That leaves us a pretty wide field. It may have occurred to you, as a limiting factor, that surely only somebody who didn’t know the vault was about to be opened could think of it as a good hiding-place for a murdered man. But even if we accept that—and I wouldn’t put too much reliance on its importance—the field’s still wide enough.

“Now here we’ve got an unfriendly man who kept himself very much to himself, and usually managed to grate on other people so much that they were glad to let him. Obviously we’re obliged to make a pretty thorough check on the movements of his son-in-law, because it’s no secret that young Jim had a good many breezes with Trethuan before he got Rose away from him, and relations have been strained, to say the least of it, ever since. I’m not saying I think Jim Pollard makes a very likely murderer, but he’s got a temper, and these things happen without much warning sometimes. There are holes in Jim’s alibi that won’t be easy to fill. He was down to the yard at the south end of Maymouth, Wednesday afternoon, for some timber for a little repair job at home, and then he did one or two more errands for paint and stuff round the town, and ended up working late on an old boat he’s got beached in Pentarno haven, so he says. Which makes him mobile and at large but for the times of his various calls, and leaves plenty of time between for an unexpected brush with Rose’s dad, supposing he met him in a nasty mood.

“However, he’s just one possibility among many. If I should ask you, now, what’s the oddest thing about Trethuan’s own behaviour in the last days of his life, what would you say?”

He had looked at Simon, but Simon held his tongue. When the guileless stare turned upon George he responded promptly: “Why was he so insistent that the vault must not be opened?”

“Exactly! Why? Religious objections? Superstition? That would account for anyone in his position criticising and prophesying evil, yes. But by all accounts this was more than that. He was desperate about it. Is that too strong, Mr. Towne?”

“No,” said Simon shortly, “that’s how he struck me.”

“So what was it that made it so urgent? Now I hear most of what goes on around here, and I don’t mind telling you openly, I know all about your sporting warning issued in the Dragon bar on Wednesday night, Mr. Towne. And I saw—and so did Mr. Felse, if you didn’t—the signs that the vault had been artistically swept and garnished and sanded over again before I got to it, and presumably before you did, on Friday. It’s an old and time-honoured profession, is smuggling. You know it still goes on, I know it still goes on. I doubt if there’s a licensee along this coast who doesn’t get a drop of the real stuff that way. We know the vault was used as a liquor store, we know there was a nice, handy key, the one Sam Shubrough came by as an innocent child. And we know they won’t use the same place again, if it’s any reassurance to you—not since they cleared out their contraband, whenever they did. There wasn’t any sense of desperation there.
They
didn’t care a toot when you tipped ’em the wink, they just took the tip, and shifted their store to a safer place. And slipped you one on the house as an acknowledgment, I shouldn’t wonder. Only one person was really concerned, and that was Trethuan. A lone wolf who wouldn’t be wanted in any such confraternity, and who wouldn’t want to be in it, anyhow.

“So I’m telling you, I don’t believe smuggling or contraband had anything whatever to do with Trethuan’s death, and I don’t think you need worry about any of the otherwise law-abiding chaps around here who don’t feel it any sin to slip a few kegs of brandy past the preventives. They’re not my job. Murder is. And we’re left with Trethuan and the something that made it absolutely vital to him that Treverra should rest in peace. Always supposing he’d been resting there at all, which as it turned out he wasn’t. Did Zeb have something private and dangerous of his own that came over with the brandy? I doubt it. No, more likely his preoccupation was about something quite separate from theirs. There’s only one certain thing we know about it. It was somewhere in the vault. Why else should he be so desperate to stop you from opening it?”

“And why couldn’t he move it,” said George, “since apparently he could put it there in the first place?”

“
And where is it
?” added Simon. “The place is as bare as the palm of your hand but for those two stone coffins. One of those we’ve exhausted already. There’s nowhere left but Mrs. Treverra’s coffin.”

“And that’s exactly it, Mr. Towne. You represent Miss Rachel’s interest in this matter. I’m going to suggest to you that we ought to open the second coffin, too. The Vicar thinks he can justifiably sanction it, on the strength of the permission already given for her husband. If you’re prepared to join me and come along down to St. Nectan’s right now, we can at least see if there’s anything there to account for Zeb Trethuan’s acting like a desperate man.”

“For the record,” said Simon, his eyes kindling golden-brown with curiosity, “maybe we should. If it turns out to be full of Swiss watches that have never paid duty, then we shall be getting somewhere.”

“According to precedent to date,” said George dryly and ruefully, as they went down the stairs, “the one thing that certainly won’t be in it is Mrs. Treverra!”

But that was where George was wrong. For when they had carefully lowered Jan Treverra’s coffin-lid with slings to the floor of the vault, and prised the smaller stone lid beneath it, with its fine, defiant flourish of cryptic verse, out of its seating, when they had levered it clear and lowered it to rest beside its fellow, when they stood staring into the coffin, it was plain to be seen that the lady was all too surely there.

The shadow slid from over her almost reluctantly. A gush of fine dust ascended into the beam of their lanterns, and a dry, dead, nostalgic scent, as though pressed flowers, long since paper-fine and drained of nature, had disintegrated into powder at a touch. The outer air spilled in upon her, flowing over the broken and displaced lid of the wooden coffin that had once held her, and the frozen turbulence of silks and woollen cloth that overflowed from the box, stirred by the displacement of air, billowed for one instant buoyant and stable in their sight, and then collapsed together with a faint, whispering sigh, crumbling away at hems and folds into fragmentary rags.

A subsiding drift of dust and tindery cloth settled and fluttered down into the grave, disclosing the small, convulsed bones of hands and arms and drawn-up knees that thrust vainly and frenziedly upward, a shapely skull arched back in anguished effort among a nest of crumbling silks and laces, and the withered black of once-luxuriant hair, powdered over with the drab of perished silk and the fine, incorruptible dust of death.

Morwenna did not rest in peace. Contorted, struggling, fighting to force her way out, she seemed for a moment to be about to rise and reach her fragile, skeleton hands to them. Then even her bones began to rustle and crumble stealthily, settling lower and lower before their eyes into the stone tomb in which she had quite certainly been buried alive.