by Ellis Peters
There were interesting implications here, if Orrie wasn’t imagining the prying fingers; as why should he? He wasn’t the imaginative kind, and a man does know how he puts down his own tools. The orchard lay well back from the riverside, and the wealth of old and well-grown trees between isolated it from the house. Gerry Boden had last been seen alive strolling negligently along the garden hedge, and somewhere along the course of that hedge he had vanished. Now if there should be a hole, or a thin place, inviting him through into the plenteous cover of the orchard, and the solitary shed in its far corner…
‘You don’t lock that shed?’
‘It’s got no lock. I keep thinking I’ll put a padlock on, but I never get round to it. Him,’ he said, with a jerk of his head towards Paviour’s house, ‘he’s always scared of having things pinched, but the stuff in there’s mine, no skin off his nose. Folks are pretty honest round here, I’m not worried. I do me own repairs—make me own spares when I need ’em.’
‘And there’s nothing missing this time?’
‘Not a thing, far’s I can see. Just somebody was in there, poking around, shifting things, passing the time nosing into everything, and thinking he’d put it all back the way it was before. Which you can’t do. Not to kid the one who uses the place regularly.’
‘You didn’t say anything about this to Detective-Sergeant Price.’
‘I didn’t know, did I? I hadn’t been back here. I only went into the place twenty minutes ago.’
‘Fair enough,’ said George. ‘How about coming down there with me now? No need to disturb the household, if we can come round to it from the other side.’
There was a navigable track that circled the perimeter, and brought the car round to the other side of the curator’s house and garden by inconspicuous ways. The shed was of wood, a compact, dark, creosoted building tucked into the corner of the shrubbery. Inside it smelled of timber and peat and wood-shavings. Various small packets and bottles and tins lay neatly but grimily along shelves on one side, folded sacks were piled in a corner, and full sacks stacked along the base of the wall. Under the single window was Orrie’s work-bench, a vice clamped to the edge of it, and a rack of tools arranged under the window-sill. He was comprehensively equipped—power drill, sets of spanners, sets of screwdrivers, planes, even a small modern lathe. In the fine litter of sawdust and shavings under the bench the morning light found a few abrupt blue glitters of metal.
George advanced only just within the doorway, and looked round him. There was dust and litter enough on the concreted floor to have preserved the latest traces of feet, though it was clearly swept reasonably often. And if Orrie had not already tramped all over it this morning, since his discovery, nosing out the signs of trespass, there just might be something to be found.
‘Did you move about much in here when you came in and realised you’d had an intruder?’
‘Didn’t have time. I never went no further than you are now, all I come for was my little secateurs, and they were on the shelf here inside the door. I reckoned I’d come back midday and have a look over everything, but I don’t think there’ll be anything missing. Yes, I did go a bit towards the window and had a quick glance round. That’s all.’
‘Then what made you so sure somebody’d been in? You were talking about something more than just a feeling.’
‘That!’ said Orrie succinctly, and pointed a large brown forefinger at the top right corner of the window, where his periodic cleaning had not bothered to extend its sweep.
He wasn’t clairvoyant, after all; he hadn’t even needed the tidy workman’s hypersensitive unease over his tools. In the small triangle of dust the tip of a finger had written plainly GB, and jabbed a plump round fullstop after the letters. The human instinct to perpetuate one’s own name at every opportunity, whenever more urgent occupation is wanting, had made use even of this mere three square inches of dusty glass. The act cast a sharp sidelight of acute intelligence upon Orrie’s remark about passing the time.
‘There’s the way things are lying, too,’ conceded Orrie, ‘but that was what took my eye right off.’
What had taken George’s eye was that splendidly defined fullstop. With the morning light slanting in here, and showing up every mote of dust and grain of wood-powder, the individual nodules of that fingertip showed even to the naked eye. Almost certainly the right fore-finger, unless Gerry Boden happened to be a southpaw. And he had impressed that print with careful precision—he or whoever it was. It wouldn’t take Sergeant Noble very long to find out.
‘Do any of the others ever come here?’ George asked. ‘Legitimately?’
‘Could happen,’ allowed Orrie indifferently, and shrugged. ‘Not often. Not lately. What for?’
‘Good! Then stay away from here today. Can you do that? If there’s anything you want, take it now.’
‘There’s nothing I want,’ said Orrie. ‘It’s all yours.’
George made two or three telephone calls from the nearest box, handed over the minute inspection of Orlando Benyon’s shed to the appropriate people, made contact with the police pathologist and his own chief at C.I.D. headquarters, left strict instructions about what news and reports should be channelled to his home number immediately, and what could wait, and drove with the exaggerated care and deliberation of sleeplessness back towards the village of Comerford, uncomfortably in transition to a suburban area, where he, and the unhappy parents of the boy Boden, lived within three doors of each other. One more hurdle, the highest, and then he could sleep. Whether the Bodens would be able to sleep was another matter. With sedatives, maybe. But not everyone responds to sedatives. Some people feel them as a kind of outrage and violation, and Boden was a strong-minded and passionate man. George was not looking forward to that interview. On the other hand, he would not for any money have delegated it to anyone else.
‘I hope you didn’t mind,’ said Lesley Paviour blithely, swinging the wheel of the old Morris nonchalantly as they negotiated the sharp turn by the downstream bend of the Comer, not very far from where Gerry Boden’s body had been towed ashore. ‘I had to get away from there for a few hours. Normally I can ride it. I mean, for God’s sake, I took it on, didn’t I? I don’t welch on my bargains, I really don’t! But under pressure, I tell you, it gets tight. But tight!’ She sat back in the driving seat, a neat, competent figure in a deep green spring suit as modest and suave as her own creamy countenance. ‘I’m a placid person,’ she said deprecatingly, ‘I have to be. But I’ve got my limits. I know when to duck out for a breather. Trouble is, I don’t always get such a marvellous excuse. So I know you won’t mind being made use of. Am I making you nervous? Driving, I mean?’
‘Not in the least. You drive well.’ And so she did, with verve and judgment, and certainly with decision. She smiled with quick pleasure at being praised.
‘If I had your friend’s Aston Martin, now, instead of this old thing!’
Charlotte declined to rise to this fly. They had seen nothing of Gus since he had withdrawn, she suspected with reluctance, after delivering her and her luggage at Paviour’s house. He had strung out the conversation, after the chief inspector’s departure, or made an attempt to, but without much backing from anyone else, and failing to get any invitation to remain, had finally taken himself off.
‘He seems to be a gentleman of leisure, that young man,’ Lesley continued thoughtfully. ‘Whatever can he do for a living, if he’s free to ramble about in the middle of the working week in April? Have you known him long?’
‘I don’t know him at all, really,’ said Charlotte. ‘We only met walking round Aurae Phiala yesterday, and then found we were both staying at the same pub. I gathered he’s some sort of adviser on Roman antiques—I’m a little vague about details. Maybe to museums? Or collectors.’ Those things she knew about Gus Hambro which did not fit into this picture, such as his manipulations over the room at the inn, she did not care to mention to anyone until she herself understood them better. ‘He seems to know his
subject,’ she said. ‘At least, I couldn’t fault him, but of course I’m only a beginner.’
‘In spite of having Alan Morris in the family,’ Lesley said, and smiled as she drew into the left traffic lane at the lights on the outskirts of Comerbourne. ‘Have you really never met him? Oh, you must! You don’t know what you’ve been missing.’
‘Nobody’s finding it very easy to meet him at the moment,’ said Charlotte. ‘He seems to have gone off into the wilds of Turkey on some dig or other, and got so interested that he forgot to come back. Nobody’s heard from him for more than a year. As a matter of fact, his solicitor is getting a bit worried about his silence.’ She did not care to make the point any more strongly, or to admit any anxiety on her own part, not even to this impulsively talkative companion whose goodwill and sympathy were already taken for granted. ‘Tell me about him,’ she said. ‘What is he really like?’
Lesley turned smartly left as the lights changed, and wound her way by back-streets to the parking-ground on the edge of the shopping centre, a multi-storey monstrosity of raw concrete, at which she gazed with resigned distaste as she crept slowly up to the barrier and drove in to the second tier. ‘Brutal, isn’t it? In a nice Tudor-cum-Georgian town like this, I ask you! Doctor Morris? Well, I suppose I do know him fairly well, he’s stayed with us a couple of times. But of course Stephen knows him much better, he was at college with him, and they’ve always kept in touch, in a fairly loose sort of way. Don’t think I’m being bitchy if I say that Stephen probably resents him as much as he admires him. They began more or less level, you see, and then the one went on forging right to the top, and the other came labouring along always further and further in the rear. They never were less than friends, though, so admiration must have kept on winning out.’
The car slid neatly into its slot, and she cut the engine and opened her door. ‘Grab the shopping bag, would you mind?—it’s slid over your side. Let’s go and have coffee first, and then I’ve got to call at the bank to get some cash, and dump that package, before we start shopping.’
Charlotte lifted out a large bag of pale, soft leather, so limp as to seem empty, and lifted her eyebrows in surprise at the weight of the small, brown-paper-wrapped box that dragged down one corner of it. And Lesley laughed.
‘Yes, that’s why I want to get rid of it first. It’s something of Orrie’s, actually. Country people are odd! He claims he doesn’t trust banks, he refuses to open an account, yet he doesn’t see anything illogical in asking me or Stephen to put things in our safe-deposit box to keep for him. He’s not so dumb, you know. Quite sharp enough to know all about dodging income tax on the odd jobs he does in his spare time. Cash payments and no account books! And every now and again he probably gets a shade nervous at keeping cash under the floor-boards or wherever he puts it, and starts spreading the load.’
Now that she was away from Aurae Phiala, Leslev had flamed into an almost delirious fluency and radiance, she who was bright enough to dazzle even in her chosen prison. She talked incessantly and joyously over coffee in the feminine precincts of the main dress shop: about Aurae Phiala itself, about Orrie, and the village community of Moulden, about Bill Lawrence and his aspirations. She rejoiced in being free from the place, but she talked of it with comprehension and critical affection. Perhaps she needed this interlude only as the lover needs a rest from loving.
‘Poor Bill, he has ambitions towards scholarship. I mean the real thing. I could be wrong, but I don’t think he has the real thing in him. He’s doing a big thesis on the border sites, that’s why he’s working at our place for a year or so. It doesn’t pay much, so you can imagine he’s in earnest about his aspirations. He’s a nice boy,’ she said tolerantly, and a shade absurdly in view of the fact that she was perhaps two years his senior, ‘but somehow I don’t see him making it to the top. He prowls about the place, you know, on his own, and dreams of springing a dazzling surprise on the archaeological world some day. I don’t know! I see him ending up pretty much like Stephen, half-fulfilled and half-frustrated—a third-rater,’ she said, candidly and regretfully, ‘and knowing it.’
She talked of the limitations of her husband and her acquaintances in a perfectly detached way, quite without personal venom and certainly without any delusions. Charlotte could imagine her discussing her own imperfections, if the subject should arise, with the same critical precision.
The bank was directly across the street from the shop. Lesley rummaged in the depths of her calf handbag for a matching key-case as they crossed at the lights, and flicked out the smallest of the keys on the bunch it contained. ‘You won’t mind waiting a minute for me? They make a thing of this strong-box business, but ours mostly has rather dull securities and family papers in it. And Stephen’s will, I suspect. Not that he ever mentions it, or that I’ve ever asked him, but he’s the type to consider it a sacred duty to have everything in order for every emergency.’
‘It could be a virtue,’ said Charlotte rather drily, reminded of the unimaginably sudden aspect death sometimes assumes.
‘It is a virtue. One I envy but am never likely to possess. I’m an improviser, he’s a method man.’
She disposed of her errand, and armed herself with cash, and they went to shop, the usual duty shopping for the household, the more esoteric lines which were not stocked and delivered locally; and a few items for her own pleasure. Then they loaded the purchases into the car, and went with free hands to view the delectable older parts of Comerbourne. Lesley set herself to be the most enlightening and intelligent of guides. Her knowledge was wide, and her taste was decisive and good.
‘I was born here,’ she said, sensing the question Charlotte had not asked. ‘Not here in the town, but only about four miles away, in a village. I used to be a typist in Lord Silcaster’s estate office. Not a very good one. That’s how I got to know Stephen. We used to do any typing that was needed for the Aurae Phiala publications, and for the few little books and articles Stephen occasionally produced. I was the one who mucked up his texts worse than any of the others, that’s what made him notice me in the first place.’
‘It sounds highly improbable,’ Charlotte said frankly. They were leaning side by side on the stone parapet of the oldest bridge over the Comer, and the same river that scoured so savagely at its banks upstream flowed beneath them here full, strong and smooth, partially tamed by two weirs in between. A few black-headed gulls wheeled headily above the water.
‘No, honestly I wasn’t much good. I wasn’t interested enough. And as I had this urge to correct manuscripts as I went along, and couldn’t read his handwriting, and didn’t know the first thing about Roman Britain, you can imagine he felt obliged to educate me. Looks like being a life-work, doesn’t it?’
There was no being certain how serious she was, or how flippant. Her lips were curved slightly in a mild, private smile. But she did not elaborate anything or withdraw anything, then. She took Charlotte companionably by the arm, and they turned back together towards the car park, and the Morris, and home. Not until they were drawing near to Moulden did she suddenly reopen, more gently and more directly, the subject of herself.
‘You’re wondering about Stephen and me,’ she said; a statement, not a question, and with nothing defiant or defensive about it. ‘Impossible not to wonder, isn’t it?’ And that was a question, and required an answer.
‘Quite impossible,’ said Charlotte, ‘since you ask me.’ It was difficult to feel any tension or embarrassment while Lesley felt none. ‘I do it regularly, about all the interesting people I meet.’
‘Good! So do I. But I know we’re a rather special case. For one thing, you have to realise that even three years ago Stephen was rather a different person—to look at, I mean, and to be with, and all that. Growing and ageing don’t work in a smooth, regular sort of way. A stunted little boy suddenly starts to shoot up like a weed, a plain adolescent turns into a beauty overnight, and well-preserved middle-aged men who reach sixty still looking forty-five sudden
ly make up the deficit and more than overtake their age, all in a few months. For no good reason that I can see. And for another thing, he began to take an interest in me just when I was on the rebound from a very unhappy love affair—the kind of let-down that alters not just your life but even your nature. He was kind, and attentive, and soothing. And I’d gone off passion. I married for safety, and comfort, and consideration. Not to be alone, and not to be vulnerable any more. Maybe a little for reputation, too,’ she said, with a serene air of examining her own motives in the light of a new discovery, and finding them credible, reasonably creditable, and slightly amusing. ‘My own family was pretty undistinguished, and Stephen had at any rate a respectable reputation in his own field—though I probably over-valued it at the time. So I married him. I think it was just as big a gamble for him, perhaps bigger.’
They had reached the rising curve in the road, where the plantation of young trees came into view, fringing Aurae Phiala with delicate pales of green.
‘Insecure young girls,’ said Lesley seriously, ‘are often happiest with much older men. They feel safe.’ And suddenly she laughed, a gay peal, refreshed by a whole day of escape from her selected cage. ‘Doesn’t always work out that way, though. Yes, you really must make the acquaintance of your great-uncle. Now there’s a handsome old dog! He knows it, too! He must have put in some agile footwork at times, to get this far through his life still single, and yet have all the fun he’s had.’
‘I’ve been hearing about his reputation as a lady-killer,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘Everyone tells the same tale about him, so it must be true.’
‘I speak,’ said Lesley feelingly, ‘as one of the many at whom he made charming and—relatively—harmless passes.’
‘I thought you might!’
‘But unfortunately—I suppose it isn’t surprising in the circumstances—Stephen is almost pathologically jealous of me, so it wasn’t much fun. It was pretty innocuous play, but I had to discourage it. Absurd, but even so it could have been dangerous.’