Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (14 page)

OH, IT’S YOU at last, miss, is it?” said Miss Rachel into the telephone, in her most belligerent tones, for fear she should be suspected of even the least shade of penitence. “And about time, too! What do you think you are doing, absenting yourself in this undisciplined way, and where, may I ask, are you doing it?”

“I’m at the Dragon. You told me not to bother to come back, remember? But as a matter of fact, I did ’phone Alice, pretty late, after we found Paddy. I beg his pardon, after he came back, I should have said. He wasn’t lost, he knew only too well where he was. And all your fault, in case nobody else has raised enough courage to tell you. Me? What have I got to lose? You as good as fired me.”

“I did nothing of the sort! But if you’re not back here pretty quickly, miss, I will! You can’t leave without giving me a month’s notice, and even if you did, I wouldn’t take it, so don’t be so uppish. Is Paddy there? I thought I heard his voice a minute ago.”

“Yes, he’s here.” He was giggling like a girl in the background, but a little conscience-stricken, too. “He came up to ask Dominic to go out somewhere with him, and if you want to know, I’m going, too. I like handsome young escorts, and now I’ve got two of ’em. Don’t expect me back before lunch, and I’ll be late for that. What? No, don’t be silly. We were just rather late, and I was very dirty and hungry, so I accepted Mrs. Felse’s offer to come here with them for dinner and borrow some clothes from her. Then I called Alice, and she said you knew Paddy was O.K., and you were just about exhausted with worry and then relief, and had gone to bed. So I thought I might as well stay here overnight, as Bunty was kind enough to lend me everything I needed. O.K., so you weren’t worried. Then why were you carrying on like a broody hen? Well, tell Alice you weren’t, she told me. Half-way up the wall, she said—Yes, sure you were right, cleared the air like a thunderstorm. All right, I’ll be home this afternoon. Yes, he’s all right. Do you want a word with him?”

Paddy smoothed her in one breathless sentence: “Hallo, Aunt Rachel, I’m terribly sorry about the rest of the apricots, it was all a mix-up, I meant to come back. Would some of them be all right to-morrow? Mummy’s making jam with those. No, I don’t mind, really I don’t. I’m glad. Yes, I do mean it. Can we keep Tamsin for to-day? She was the one who found me last night—one of the two, that is, Dominic was the other. ’Ess, me dear, I’ll be up-along soon as I can. To-morrow for sure, because I’m going back to school Monday, you know. O.K., I’ll tell her. ’Bye, Aunt Rachel!”

He hung up, grinning. “She says to tell you Alice has instructions not to keep lunch hot for you.”

“Good!” said Tamsin, linking her other arm in Dominic’s. “That means I’ve got the whole day off. Come on, let’s go and pan gold in Paddy’s cave.”

They went down the steep path from the Dragon, where Simon had risked his neck on Paddy’s cycle, three abreast, linked and light-hearted. At the edge of the harbour they halted to buy three immense cones of candy-floss, and went down the harbour steps in single file, flourishing them like torch-bearers in a procession, and nibbling the fringes like fire-eaters. They paid no attention to anyone or anything but their own mid-September holiday happiness, reprieved from yesterday’s shadow. But a girl who was just hurrying out of the narrow, rocky alley behind the six colour-washed cottages of Cliffside Row checked and drew back at sight of them, and stood in the shadow of the rocks, watching them recede, linked and hilarious, down the slate-coloured sands.

The tide was nearing its lowest ebb, and beyond the pebbly stretches the finer sand gleamed moist and bright in a watery sun. The three young people, the taller boy, the visitor, on the right, young Paddy Rossall on the left, Tamsin Holt in the middle with her arm about Paddy’s shoulders and the other boy’s arm about hers, bore steadily sidelong into the cliff face, and halted to finish their hectic pink torches before they vanished into the black mouth of the Dragon’s Hole.

Paddy looked back up the beach towards the coloured cardboard stage set, the impossibly charming and gay toy theatre of the harbour and the town. He saw another flare of candy-floss, primrose-gold, burning at the corner of the dark alley behind the cottages, and recognised Rose Pollard, a round, soft, appealing doll in neutral Shetland sweater and tartan trews, standing there braced and alert. She seemed—he couldn’t be sure, but that was how it struck him—she seemed to be watching them, and wondering, and hesitating. And when she moved at last, it was to draw back softly into the shadow; but his eyes, following movement rather than colours, assured him that she had not gone away, and his intuition, already sharpened beyond ordinary this morning, warned him that she had not stopped watching.

“I can’t believe it,” said Tamsin disgustedly. “We’ve walked how far?—more than half a mile underground, and suddenly the whole thing folds up in a blank wall. And you said yourself the stone’s been worked with tools in places, so somebody was interested in improving the passage for use. Why would it just stop, without arriving anywhere?”

Dominic’s eyes followed the beam of Paddy’s torch from stone ceiling to stone floor. To call it a blank wall that faced them was simplifying things; it was a rough confusion of broken planes, sealing off the small chamber into which the passage had opened. But quite certainly there was no cleft nor hole in it through which they could pass. This was the end of the journey.

“Maybe the passage was an end in itself,” he said. “There’s room among some of these side-pockets we’ve passed to store any amount of contraband. The whole complex could be a pretty good hiding-place. And they may have taken steps to hide the entrance even better, when it was in use.”

“But, look,” said Paddy acutely, “if the passage was to be the cache, they didn’t need half a mile of it, a hundred yards would have done. They could have got a ship-load of stuff in that first bulge. You don’t chip your way along half a mile underground unless you’re aiming to
get
somewhere.”

“I have to admit,” agreed Tamsin thoughtfully, after pondering this for a minute, “that he’s got something there.”

“Do you suppose we’ve missed a turning somewhere? It may go on in another direction.”

“We could have a more thorough look on the way back. We’ve got time, it’s not much after twelve. And there’s nothing for us here.”

They turned back rather reluctantly, all the same; nobody likes going back by the same route. It is, as Paddy had rightly observed, a fundamental predilection of human nature to want to get somewhere, even if most arrivals turn out to be disappointing.

The floor on which they walked had been smoothed in places by stones deliberately laid. Sometimes it was naked rock, sometimes this levelled causeway, and sometimes, especially where the narrow cleft opened out into a broader passage, there was deep, fine grey sand. With a light, the whole half-mile of it was easy, no more than a stony walk; and all these later reaches were dry, for over the entire length the level climbed very gently, and bore away inland from the Dragon’s Hole at a brisk right incline.

“Where do you suppose we are?” asked Paddy as they turned back, playing his light ahead of them on both rough walls. “Half a mile is farther than the neck, we must be right under the high part of the town.”

“I don’t think we’ve borne as far to the right as that,” objected Dominic. “I’d say somewhere just the other side the Head, under the dunes.”

“It’s so straightforward here,” said Tamsin, stepping out merrily in the lead, “you hardly need a light.” And promptly on the word she tripped over a stone that tilted treacherously out of the sandy floor, and went down with a squeak of protest on hands and knees.

Dominic and Paddy both reached solicitous hands to help her up, but for a moment she sat scowling, dusting her hands and examining her nylons. “Damn! Somebody owes me a new pair of stockings.” A ladder was trickling playfully downward from her right knee.

“I’ll buy you some new ones with my guinea,” offered Paddy generously. “That was pretty much how I found it, actually, only I had more excuse, because I didn’t have a light that time. You sure you’re not sitting on a pirate’s hoard?”

“Not unless he hoarded granite sand. But there was something sharp, look, it broke the skin.” She sifted fine sand through her fingers, probed the indentation her knee had made, and raised from beneath the surface a thin ring of yellow wire, with edges that barely met. “That’s the secret weapon. Not a pirate’s hoard, but maybe a smuggler’s ear-ring.” She rubbed it on her sleeve, and it gleamed encouragingly. “I believe that’s what it is. It looks like gold wire.”

They ran the torch carefully over every corner of the sanded floor, but found nothing more. Tamsin pocketed her find, and they resumed their methodical walk back. There were broken bays in the rocks here and there to be explored, but all of them proved to be dead ends; and as they drew nearer to the Dragon’s Hole tiny trickles of water filtered down from the walls and channelled the sand of the floor.

They reached the seaward end of the tunnel, where the low, screened entrance hole shrank to thigh-height, and doubled upon itself midway in an optical illusion of solid rock. They crawled through on hands and knees, and stood upright again in the upper reaches of the Dragon’s Hole.

When they had dropped down the slopes of shale and shell to where the light of the September day penetrated, there were still a few children playing on the sand, but even these were being called away to lunch by parents and elder sisters. The midday quiet was descending on Maymouth’s beaches. Far down the glistening shore the tide had turned, and was beginning to lip its way back towards the town, but it would be two hours yet before it covered the cavern again.

“You could come and have lunch with us,” said Dominic, “if you’d like to. Tamsin’s staying. We could ring up your mother and tell her.” But he made the offer rather hesitantly, and was not surprised when it was politely refused. Paddy hadn’t seen his mother for all of three hours, and there are times when three hours is a long time. Moreover, he had to demonstrate, rather than claim, that he was a responsible person who paid attention to the times of high and low tide, and could be trusted not to take any more chances.

“Thanks awfully, but I think I ought to go home.”

“Well, come and have an ice with us, anyhow.”

Paddy jumped at this offer. They climbed the steep path from the harbour to the Dragon’s Head, and turned in by the first pale cliff- track towards the Dragon Hotel.

“Better put this with your guinea,” said Tamsin, extracting the thin gold ring from her pocket. “I don’t suppose it’s anything much, but hang on to it, and time will show.”

“Do you think we should tell Mr. Hewitt about it? I told him I was coming to have another look at the passage, but he wasn’t much interested.”

“Question of priorities,” said Dominic with courteous gravity. “Tell him about it, but leave it till he’s got time for it. He’s probably got a dozen lines to follow up, and some of ’em more urgent than this. He’ll work his way round to it.”

They were walking close to the grassy edge of the cliff, where it overhung the beach and the harbour. Paddy looked down, from the painted operetta-set of Cliffside Row to the mouth of the blow-hole. The children were all gone now, the whole sickle of moist shore was empty. Only one lance of movement caught his eye.

From the narrow alley behind the cottages darted the figure of a girl, hugging the shadow of the cliff. She had tied a dark chiffon scarf over her candy-floss torch of pale hair, but Paddy knew her all the same, by her fawn-coloured sweater and Black-Watch-tartan legs. She ran head-down, hugging something small and shapeless under her arm. Because of the overhang he lost sight of her for a full minute, then she reappeared close to the deep shadow of the Dragon’s Hole, and darted into it, and vanished.

He opened his mouth to call the attention of his companions to her, and then after all he held his tongue, and walked on with them in silence. But he couldn’t get Rose Pollard out of his mind. And the more he thought of her, the clearer did it seem to him that she had been in the act of launching herself on this same errand earlier this morning, and then had drawn back when she saw them go down the beach ahead of her, and enter the cave. She had watched them every step of the way, he recalled now the stillness and tension of that small figure standing at the edge of the sunlight. The tide had dropped just clear of the entrance then, the beach had been otherwise almost deserted, only they had prevented whatever it was Rose wanted to do. Almost certainly she had watched them emerge again into sunlight and walk back to the harbour steps and the cliff path. Then, with the last of the playing children called home to lunch, she had found the coast clear at last.

For what? He had known her since he was a small boy, she had acted as baby-sitter several times for his mother, and he had liked her because she was kind and pretty and soft, and he could twist her round his finger, stay up as long as he liked, make all the mess he wanted in his bath, and ignore the finer points of washing. She wouldn’t have the resolution to do anything dangerous or underhanded, and she wouldn’t have the wits to cover it up for long even if she tried it. Unless, perhaps, for Jim she could rise to things she wouldn’t dare attempt for herself? It
was
her father who was dead, and she hadn’t liked her father any better than anyone else had, and Jim had detested him, because of her. But they couldn’t have done anything bad, he wouldn’t believe it. They were both too open, not for darkness and secrecy. Not for caves! Rose was frightened of the dark. What
was
she doing there?

Mute and abstracted, he ate his way through a cassata, and made his farewells. But once he was out of sight of the hotel terrace and back on the cliff path, it was towards Maymouth that he turned. He slid recklessly down the whitening, late-summer grass to the harbour, clattered down the steps, and homed like a racing pigeon into the gaping mouth of the Dragon’s Hole.

She wasn’t in the open part of the cave, he knew that intuitively as soon as he crept into the dark interior. There were no echoes, only the very faint and ubiquitous murmur of water, that was inaudible when there were voices and movements to drown it. She might have gone right through into the haven at Pentarno, which would still be dry at this hour; but he scrambled purposefully straight through until the daylight met him again, and the great waste of the beach and the dunes lay within sight, and there was no Rose to be seen crossing the sands.