by Ellis Peters
‘Why not tell us about it, Orrie? Six of us saw the attack, and it was pretty determined, wasn’t it? You meant killing. Because you’d already made one attempt, and were afraid he could identify you, now that he’d reappeared? What made you choose that particular pool to dump the Aston Martin? And are you sure you wiped all your prints off the Vespa, Orrie? Because you won’t have the opportunity now, you know. And nobody else but the police has touched it since. Whatever’s there to find we shall find. You might as well make a statement. I’m not holding out any inducements, you know you can’t lose by co-operating.’
Orrie sat in a high-backed chair, his spine taut, his head raised, looked through them with his blue, inimical eyes, gathered his wits inside that monumental head of his like the garrison inside a fortress, and said nothing.
‘And why did you wait so long, Orrie? All those nice, safe hours of darkness, and never a move from you till broad daylight. What were you waiting for? For something that would make it unnecessary for you to take the risk? What did you hope would happen to let you off the hook? Until you realised it wasn’t going to happen, and got desperate.’
Orrie looked through him with eyes like chips of blue-stone, and made not a sound.
‘This is getting boring, isn’t it?’ said George amiably. ‘Perhaps if we enlarge the cast it may get a bit more interesting.’ He turned to Collins, who was sitting unobtrusively beside the door. ‘Ask all the others to come in and join us, will you?’
‘Since Orrie won’t talk about recent events,’ said George, when they were all assembled, ‘I suggest we hear what the other interested party has to say about what happened to him on Saturday night. I’m afraid we rather over-stated Mr Hambro’s condition, as you may have gathered. It’s true he was in an exhausted state, and slept heavily and long, but he was not under drugs, and his memory is not impaired. He did recover enough to talk to me for a few minutes last night, before I left, and he did tell me what I’m now asking him to tell you.’
And Gus told them, beginning tactfully at the point where he had parted from Stephen Paviour and packed his bag to leave Aurae Phiala. He was still slightly grey and drawn, still mildly astonished at being above the ground instead of under it, and his hands were bandaged into white cotton parcels; but otherwise, apart from presenting a mildly odd appearance in Bill Lawrence’s clothes, he was himself again. When he reached the apparition of the helmeted sentry there was an uneasy stir of doubt, wonder and sympathy, as if two at least of his hearers were entertaining the suspicion that he might, after all, be incubating delayed symptoms of concussion. He smiled.
‘Oh, no, it wasn’t any hallucination. I’ve handled it, it’s real enough. And I know exactly where it is, and we shall be recovering it, all in good time.’ All the while he talked he had an eye on Orrie, who sat like a stone demigod, apparently oblivious of them all, but so braced in his stillness that it was plain he missed nothing. ‘The wearer I didn’t see at close quarters. But it wasn’t Orrie. Not big enough. And then, the one who came behind and hit me had to be Orrie.’
He told that, too, the blow and the fall, the rattle of stones and metal as the shaft was filled in over him. ‘The rest you know. I made for the river as the only other way out I knew. It took me all night and all day, because there were a lot of places where I had to dig my way through.’ The details of that marathon crawl were irrelevant at that stage; he left them to the imagination.
‘And could you,’ asked George, ‘identify the man who hit you and tipped you down the shaft? From that one glimpse you had of him? Describe what you did see.’
‘It was dark, but there was fitful light. The man I saw was much taller than me—as tall as Orrie—or Mr Paviour. Though his attitude, leaning and striking, with his arm raised, may have made him look even bigger. He was in silhouette, no chance to see if he had a beard or was cleanshaven. His strength didn’t suggest an old man. To be honest, that’s all I could say.’
‘And could you, then, have identified him positively as anyone you know?’
‘No,’ said Gus with deliberation, his eyes studying Orrie from beneath their long lashes, ‘I couldn’t.’
The bluestone eyes kindled for one instant with a fierce spark of intelligence, and were dimmed again.
‘So that’s why we had to proceed with this obvious invitation to the murderer to try again,’ said George. ‘We had everything to gain, and he couldn’t know that he had nothing. Your mistake, Orrie. There are now no less than seven people who can identify you as the man who made a murderous attack upon Mr Hambro this morning. You’re not asking us to believe, are you, that there are two men around with the same urge—and the same acute need!—to silence Mr Hambro for good?’
Orrie was not asking them to believe anything. By the Comer, with the man he had murdered breaking out of his grave, he had never quivered or uttered a sound. There was nothing worth calling a nerve in his whole great body.
‘But I can’t believe in all this!’ protested Lesley suddenly, pounding her linked hands helplessly against her knee. ‘Look, I know it isn’t evidence, but I’ve known Orrie for years, he’s worked for us, and I thought I knew him so well. I still think so. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why should he do a thing like this? Oh, I know I saw him! I can’t forget it. But to me that means there’s more behind this—or else something’s happened to him, a brainstorm—he isn’t responsible for his actions any more. Why should he want to harm anyone? What motive could he possibly have?’
‘The usual motive,’ said George. ‘Gain. Not, perhaps, to harm anyone. But a very solid motive to get rid of Mr Hambro. Who is, I should mention—though of course you already know it, don’t you, Orrie?—Detective-Sergeant Hambro of the Art and Antiques Squad at Scotland Yard, an authority on Roman antiquities. He came here in the process of following the back-tracks of certain valuable pieces which have been turning up in suspicious circumstances in several parts of the world, and which can only have come from a handful of border sites, of which Aurae Phiala is one. Someone, in fact, has been secretly milking this place of treasure over a long period. And whoever he is, he was implicated deeply enough to kill unhesitatingly when an inquisitive boy accidentally stumbled on one gold coin from his remaining hoard, and unwisely hung around to hunt for more. His curiosity could have blown the whole racket wide-open. He had to go. Gerry Boden was suffocated; the same handy method—if you happen to be about twice as strong as your victim—that Orrie was using on Mr Hambro upstairs.’
‘But you’re not charging him with anything like that,’ protested Lesley. ‘Only with this attack this morning. How could he know anything about what Mr Hambro was doing here? None of us knew. He never told us anything. It seems you can’t even be sure these things came from here. If he’d been helping himself to valuable things like that, and turning them into money, why would he go on working hard for what we pay him here? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘It makes perfect sense,’ George pointed out, ‘as long as he still had treasures to dispose of, and kept them hidden here. Things like that can’t be unloaded on the market wholesale, like potatoes. It has to be done gradually and cautiously, with long intervals between.’
‘I see that,’ she admitted unhappily. ‘But in that case, what on earth has he done with the money he’s already made? He doesn’t spend much, that’s certain. And personally, I simply don’t believe he has much. He doesn’t own a thing but his small-holding, not so much as a second-hand car. He hasn’t even got a bank account. Stephen and I have sometimes changed cheques for him, if he got paid that way for some of the odd jobs he did in the village.’
It was at this point that Charlotte got up from her place and walked out of the room. In the curious peace of having Gus alive again, and his assailant in custody, she had been sitting back and letting these exchanges pass by her as impartially as she might have watched the Comer flowing by, until a few chance words pricked out of the back of her mind a small memory, a minute thing that fitted like a key into the
whole complex of this mystery, and caused it to open like the door of a safe. She closed the door after her, and went purposefully up the stairs to Lesley’s room.
When she came back into the study, as calmly as she had left it, and as quietly, Lesley was still warmly arguing the case for Orrie. And Orrie, though he had not turned his head, now and again turned his stony eyes and let them rest upon her.
‘But you see how Orrie’s behaved throughout, not at all suspiciously, quite the opposite. You agree he told you all about the Boden boy hiding in his shed all that time…’
‘That was a very intelligent move,’ agreed George, ‘and he could well afford it. It didn’t implicate him in the least—quite the opposite—and it did underline his cooperative zeal. It cost him nothing, and made him look good.’
‘And last night,’ she pressed on, ‘Orrie was urging us to have all that slope concreted up, to make it safe. Would he do that, if he had valuables hidden there?’
‘By now,’ said George, ‘he has nothing hidden there. What was left was almost certainly removed on Wednesday night, immediately after the boy was killed.’
‘Then where is it now? If you could find some of these coins and things in his possession, that would go far towards proving it. But I don’t believe in it. I’m certain Orrie wouldn’t at all mind having his cottage searched, but I’m even more certain you wouldn’t find anything guilty there.’
Charlotte leaned forward, and held out in her open palm the smallest of Lesley’s keys.
‘And I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that you’d be equally willing to open your safe-deposit box at the bank, where we went to put in a package last Thursday. A small package, but very heavy. For Orrie!’
They had all turned to stare at her, Lesley wide-eyed and mute, her kitten-face pale and bright in wonder. Charlotte had half-expected to have the key indignantly snatched from her, but Lesley hardly glanced at it, only once in a puzzled way, as if she was too stunned at this moment to connect with her usual aplomb. Her smooth brows contracted painfully, frowning back into past occasions, for the first time with doubt and dread. She looked from Charlotte to Orrie, a blank, bewildered question, more than half afraid of encountering an answer. Then at George, as being in authority here, and deserving some part of her attention.
‘Yes, that’s true, Charlotte and I did go to the bank in Comerbourne. I did have a little box to put in my safe-deposit, Orrie asked me to keep it for him. We’ve done it before, you know—I don’t remember how often, but several times. He lives in rather a lonely place, and these days one hears such… We never thought anything about it, why should we? Just keeping things for him a little while, until he needed them and asked for them out. I know he put an old brooch of his mother’s in there once, when someone told him it might be valuable, and he was thinking of selling it. They didn’t usually stay in long…’
She looked at Orrie again, briefly, and the monolith had certainly stirred, and the blue eyes quickened uneasily for an instant. She looked at George, and her own green eyes were wide and gleaming with realisation and disquiet.
‘Now I don’t know where I am! I don’t know anything! Can it have been that?’
‘If you have no objection to my taking charge temporarily of your key,’ said George, ‘and if you’ll agree to accompany me to your bank and open your safe-deposit, that can be answered, can’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said in a whisper. And even lower, almost to herself: ‘I didn’t know! I didn’t know!’
The key passed into George’s hand. The granite monolith had perceptibly moved, heaving its great head round to stare at the small thing changing hands. If stone can shudder, the brief convulsion that shook Orlando Benyon was just such a movement. But his mouth stayed shut; only now tightly, violently shut, as if at any moment it might break open and breathe fire.
‘Of course,’ said George reasonably, ‘there are difficulties in this theory. Orrie has never in his life been out of England, seldom, I imagine, out of Midshire. Two of the objects recovered in this case surfaced in Italy and Turkey respectively. I don’t doubt even Orrie could sell or pawn a gold coin in a good many places here in England, and get away with it, but he’d hardly have the knowledge or the address to work the trade on a big scale. This is a difficult, specialised market—unscrupulous enough if you know where the fences are, and which collectors don’t care whether they can ever show their collections, but otherwise rather dangerous. There are plenty of enthusiasts who are quite satisfied with gloating in secret. But you have to know where to find them. Somehow it seems to me that Orrie is hardly in that league.’
Orrie’s eyes swivelled again, silently signalling his awareness of every move for and against him, and still reserving his own defence in this defenceless position.
Lesley sat back with a sharp, defeated sigh, seeming for a moment to have relinquished a field that was out of her control. She pondered for a moment in depressed silence, and then suddenly her slight body arched and stiffened, like a cat sighting a quarry or a foe. She seemed to be in two minds whether to speak or hold her peace. Her rounded eyelids, delicately veined like alabaster, rolled back from an emerald stare.
‘Chief Inspector, a day or so ago you said there must be an expert involved. I didn’t believe in it then, now I begin to see what you mean. You even mentioned a name—Doctor Morris. He was here just before he went abroad for this Turkish year of his. He brought the text of his book about this place. We were just about closing up the small dig we had that autumn, it was October already, but it had been a good season. And you know something? I’d never known Doctor Morris to speak disparagingly of Aurae Phiala until then, never. And yet he went away from here, and spent three weeks on that text in Turkey before he posted it to the publishers. And you know what the finished book is like. Deliberately playing down this site! I can’t call it anything but deliberate. Why? Why? There has to be a reason! And that dig—it never produced much—not to our knowledge, that is!—it was still open when he was here. Bill will tell you. He visited then, he knows. Wouldn’t it account for everything, if Alan Morris stumbled on a really rich discovery while he was here, and kept it dark? If he was tempted, if he moved his finds, put them in a secret place, and left them hidden until he could get them away? He went straight from here to Turkey. And Charlotte tells me nobody’s heard from him since.’
She looked at Gus, who was watching her with a guarded face. ‘It’s your case, you know more about this than I do. If you’ve been working in contact with all these other countries, and thinking on these lines—I mean about the need for an expert to run the show—then I can’t believe that you’ve never matched up these times, and considered the possibility of a connection between Doctor Morris’s exit from England and the beginning of these deals in Roman valuables. I say considered the possibility, that’s all.’
‘The police of several countries have made the connection,’ said Gus drily. ‘They could hardly avoid it.’ He carefully refrained from looking at Charlotte.
‘Then you didn’t come here just to look at one of several places that might have been looted—you came here because the connection with Doctor Morris made this the most probable. And you weren’t likely to lose interest and go away again,’ she added, ‘when you ran head-on into Charlotte on the premises, and found out who she was.’
This time Gus did look at Charlotte, fleetingly and rather apprehensively, and even at this crisis he had not lost his engaging ability to produce a blush at will.
‘But will someone tell me,’ said Charlotte, ignoring the phenomenon, ‘why, if my great-uncle found a valuable hoard here and kept his mouth shut about it, he didn’t simply pack the lot up and take it abroad with him then?’
‘It wouldn’t be a practical proposition,’ said Gus simply. ‘He was booked by air, which means a limit on weight, and too much excess baggage might arouse curiosity. Also some of the things—if there were others like the helmet, for instance—might be quite bulky and very fragile, and need care
ful transportation. But mostly just plain caution. Someone who knew the ropes would also know the risks. He wouldn’t try to smuggle out too much in one go. I don’t doubt some of the most precious and most portable things were taken out straight away and disposed of. The rest, we think, were taken from wherever they were found, and hidden in the broken flue of the hypocaust, which seems to have been completely concealed then by the clump of broom bushes. The art of hiding something is to do it decisively, and then go about your business without ever glancing in that direction, as if it wasn’t there. The cache was safe enough until the river rose and brought the bank down.’
‘There’s still another question,’ Charlotte pursued. ‘Being an expert on antiquities come by honestly isn’t the same thing as being expert in disposing of them dishonestly. Would my uncle have had the first idea how to set about it?’
‘One evening while he was staying here,’ said Lesley, ‘we were talking about the shady side of the business. About cases he’d known, and how people went about getting rid of rather specialist stolen property. It was the evening you were here, Bill, do you remember?’
‘I do,’ said Bill unhappily, from the corner where he had sat silent all this time. ‘He seemed to know a good deal about it, he went into a lot of detail. Even names. I didn’t think anything about it then, after all it was interesting, and we were all asking him questions.’