Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (22 page)

‘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.’

[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

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