Old Hall, New Hall

by Michael Innes

  Gingrass now produced what was perhaps his most surprising effect of the afternoon. This time, no conflicting emotions were mingled in it. It was a howl of triumph – and of such a volume that the Vice-Chancellor jumped. ‘He’s been baffled – thwarted!’ he yelled. ‘We’re in time! Where’s the Society? Call up the Society! Picks! Spades!’

  There was a disconcerted silence. The Vice-Chancellor and Miss Harlock – who had appeared again, presumably fortified by tea – could be seen hastily conferring, as if some horrid doubt as to their colleague’s sanity had sprung up simultaneously in the mind of each. But such was the effectiveness of Gingrass’ frenzy that several of the young people turned and hurried off to retrieve their implements. It looked as if the digging might really begin all over again. This time, certainly, it would be without the countenance of the Vice-Chancellor, who had turned and was walking firmly away, followed by Gedge. Clout, watching in sombre fascination, became aware of Olivia speaking urgently beside him. ‘Surely this awful Gingrass is right really? Milder didn’t look like a man who is getting away with anything. His people must actually have been interrupted before they had any success. Don’t you think?’

  Clout hesitated. He was at least clear-headed enough to be extremely puzzled. ‘It’s difficult to know what to think,’ he said. ‘I agree that Milder hasn’t got the treasure – if it was the treasure he was really looking for. But I doubt whether Gingrass will get it either.’

  ‘He won’t.’

  The words had been murmured in Clout’s ear, and he swung round towards the speaker. It was Sadie. And she was looking at him strangely. ‘He won’t?’ Clout repeated. ‘And how do you know?’

  ‘He won’t – and you won’t.’ Sadie glanced swiftly at Olivia as she said this. But she spoke only to Clout. ‘If you want to know why – go to your room.’

  ‘My room?’ He stared at Sadie stupidly.

  ‘I’ve left a note there – explaining.’ Suddenly, and very unexpectedly, Sadie put out her hand and touched his. It was the sort of thing Olivia sometimes did – and yet, somehow, it was quite different. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘So long.’ And she turned and walked quickly away.

  Olivia watched her go. ‘Was she serious?’ she presently asked. ‘Did she mean anything?’

  Clout nodded. ‘She meant something. I’d better go.’

  ‘I’ll come too.’

  He nodded, and they walked away together. Even with things all going extremely badly, there was comfort in walking side by side with Olivia. But they didn’t talk. And after only a few paces, something made Clout halt for a moment and turn. One or two people, who must have carried their spades as they ran, were already digging again, and others were hurrying up. The folly that the notion of buried treasure could let loose – he realized – was something appalling to contemplate!

  And then Clout saw something else. It was George Lumb. He couldn’t have accompanied Jerry Jory further than to the park gates. Now he was standing, high above the diggers, on the very spot where the Temple of Diana must have been reared. He was standing quite still. And – more powerfully than ever before – Clout had his nasty feeling about the formidableness of Lumb. And there was no doubt about Lumb’s state now. He was sunk in profound thought.

  Clout turned away. Together, he and Olivia walked quickly to Old Hall.

  5

  ‘What a funny place.’ Olivia looked round Clout’s room. ‘Is this where you give instruction to Miss Sackett?’

  ‘You know very well I don’t teach Sadie. We were contemporaries.’ For the moment, Clout didn’t bother to feel annoyed by this deliberate silliness of Olivia’s. There was an envelope on his table, with ‘CC’ scrawled across it and ‘Private’ in a corner. He picked it up and tore it open. Sadie had written quite a lot – and evidently at top speed.

  Dear Colin, – Olivia Jory was right. She is evidently clever as well as the possessor of a beautiful nature. So how lucky you are. But we (call it George and me) are lucky too, because we have found the treasure. It wasn’t buried – that’s what I mean by that girl being right – but simply stuffed away in that queer tunnel off your attic. You gave me permission to explore, you know, and I did. I’m sorry. At least I think I’m sorry. But all’s fair in this sort of thing. Or is it? Ask her. She’s an acknowledged authority, George says, on fair play.

  It was in a packing-case, well nailed down, and with a label:

  Bound sermons

  Bibles: effects of

  Religious Tracts, etc. E Jory, dec.

  Pretty smart of Joscelyn? And you can see why the stuff was just abandoned when the Jorys left Old Hall. Who’d want to lug away that, if they could leave it quietly staying put?

  I rang up New Hall to see if I could get George. I got Jerry. He said what he said he had said before: that it was just like leaving your wrist-watch when you sold a house, and recoverable. He said he and George would come across and collect. This will have happened by the time you get this.

  ‘Effects of E Jory, dec.’ I give you that, although I think perhaps Jerry J wd. like it kept quiet. It can be read as an acknowledgement by Joscelyn of the validity of the swap. On the other hand, it can be read as just part of a blind. Jerry says that we’d better get the stuff out of the clutches of the University and fight about it afterwards. Possession nine-tenths of the law. Of course it must all come out. I expect I’ll be sacked. That’s something we shall still have in common, Colin old chap.

  Love,

  S.

  When he had read this, Clout handed it to Olivia without a word. She read it through. ‘Well?’ she asked. She didn’t seem to be experiencing much emotion.

  ‘Women.’

  Olivia stared at him. ‘What do you mean – women?’

  ‘Something somebody once said.’ Clout took the letter, tore it in two, and tossed it into a semi-disintegrated waste-paper basket. ‘I don’t appear to have been terribly smart.’

  ‘Well, no – you don’t.’ Olivia was affording him a sort of casual commiseration that he didn’t like. ‘To have been quartered next door to a lot of Jory junk and not to have taken a look at it. I think you’re right. Not smart. Dim.’

  ‘Yes, dim.’ Clout was frowning. ‘You realize it leaves some puzzles?’

  Olivia was slightly impatient. ‘It’s certainly true that just what happened is still a bit obscure.’

  Clout shook his head. ‘One can take a guess, as far as the Caucasian stuff is concerned. We don’t know what Joscelyn did with the treasure that night. But he did return to Old Hall from abroad, and I suppose he never really found out whether there had been any substance behind the Duke of Nesfield’s joke. And Edward was dead – without even having begun to recover from his fright. So Joscelyn adopted this means of stowing the stuff unobtrusively away for the time being. And then he went a bit ga-ga and died. There’s not much difficulty about all that.’

  ‘Then what do you mean by there being puzzles still?’

  ‘I mean that crook Milder, chiefly. He knew pretty well everything that we knew. But that was just nothing at all, so far as any certain notion of the whereabouts of the treasure was concerned. Why did he set Gingrass digging behind the coach-house, which was quite a likely place on the basis of the knowledge we had, and then himself perpetrate that elaborate dig below the Temple of Diana, where there was likely to be nothing but the skeleton of an unfortunate Greek girl?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’ Olivia shrugged her shoulders. It was an unbeautiful gesture to which she contrived to lend all her old, heady charm. It came back to Clout – what, of course, he had always absolutely known – that she was a quite dazzlingly superior person. They had lost – at least for the time being they had lost – the game. And it was a game upon which Olivia had been desperately keen. Yet, now, she was being quite astoundingly philosophic about it. ‘Probably’, she said, ‘that chap Milder is just mad.’

  Clout considered this. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘How can you be sure?’

&n
bsp; ‘Lumb doesn’t think so.’ Clout felt his mind groping after some important truth. ‘When I say there’s still a puzzle I really chiefly mean that Lumb feels there’s still a puzzle.’

  ‘How very odd! You seem to have become uncommonly dependent on the opinions of Lumb.’

  ‘Lumb has a brain.’ Clout uttered this with sober and humble conviction. ‘He and Sadie and that detestable Jerry have got the treasure. And yet Lumb feels there’s still something to think out.’

  ‘However do you know that?’

  ‘Just from the last glimpse I had of him, Olivia. He was standing above all that mess – below the site of the Temple of Diana, I mean – watching Gingrass getting his idiotic dig going again. And he was thinking something out.’

  ‘Well, if there’s something to think out, you can think it out too.’

  ‘That’s perfectly true. I’m not quite a moron, after all.’ Clout felt himself to be announcing this as a surprising discovery. ‘But the business of thought is to prompt and guide action. I wonder who said that?’

  ‘You’d better ask your pupils.’ Olivia pointed, with something of her old, objectionable scorn, to the row of empty chairs along one wall. Suddenly she laughed. ‘No wonder your Sadie was covered in dust and cobwebs. And no wonder she was waving a crowbar. But how did she know about this place off your attic?’

  ‘We hid in it together – from Milder.’ Clout stared at the door behind which he and Sadie had taken refuge such a short time before. ‘It goes on and on. And it’s absolutely crammed with junk. Sadie must have been lucky to come so quickly on what she was after. A thorough search would take ages.’ Rather to his own astonishment, Clout banged his fist on the table. ‘God lord! If I was a fool not to make a thorough search before, surely I’m still a fool not to make it now? For there’s still a puzzle, as I’ve said.’

  ‘Then, search away.’ Olivia’s voice expressed not the slightest interest in his proposal. For a moment Clout thought that she was going to take herself off. But she hesitated , and as she did so her eyes travelled over him. ‘I’ll wait and watch,’ she said.

  ‘Good!’ Her words ought to have filled him with joy – but somehow they made him feel slightly uncomfortable. He must be very tired, he thought – for he was having to repress a shocking sense that Olivia’s interest in him had become, in some indefinable way, wanton. ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and I’ll have a go. If there’s anything that looks interesting, I’ll bring it out.’

  6

  Dusk was falling, and Clout had got himself far more smothered in grime than Sadie had done. On the table in front of him lay a mouldering, leather-bound manuscript volume, the pages of which he was slowly turning over. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I mean, interesting in itself. But too late to interest us. It’s Sir George’s – the last Jory to live here.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ Olivia, who had thrown the window open and was leaning on the sill staring idly out, allowed her attention to be held for the moment. ‘Don’t say it’s copies of letters, like Sophia’s.’

  ‘Nothing like that. I think it would be called the day-book of the estate. Records jobs doing, and to be done, about the place. Materials needed, their likely cost, and so on. Sir George certainly made a big effort to get the place economically on its feet again, before he was forced to quit. I don’t think there’s much point in raking through–’ He broke off, and read silently for some moments. ‘But this is interesting. It’s notes on the demolishing of the Temple of Diana.’

  ‘Bother the Temple of Diana! I’m tired of hearing about it.’

  Clout made no response to this, but turned over a page. ‘Sir George’, he said presently, ‘employed a couple of masons of his own. And it’s as we thought. He got no end of minor building and repairing done with the material that became available.’ He turned over another page. Olivia had gone back to gazing through the window. A minute went by. Then she wheeled quickly – for Clout had uttered a very odd sort of gasp. ‘Asses!’ he said. ‘Utter asses that we’ve been!’ he laughed wildly, and then with a great effort controlled himself. ‘It wasn’t a woman, Olivia. It was a statue.’

  ‘A statue?’ For the first time in their acquaintance – Clout dimly noticed – his marvellous girl looked merely stupid.

  ‘Sir George’s men came on a marble statue – the statue of a goddess. Sir George doesn’t make any ado about it. A statue was of no particular use to him. He just notes that it can be stuck up somewhere…’ Clout paused, and then gave a cry of mingled triumph and mortification that would have done credit to Gingrass himself. ‘Oh, what asses! Olivia, don’t you see?’ He pushed the book away, and buried his head in his arms, as if feeling that he might thereby be assisted to a clearer inward vision himself. ‘Would it be – well, just any old statue?’ He looked up again. ‘No! That wouldn’t fit.’

  If Olivia had looked stupid, she now asked a question which showed a very tolerably swift intelligence. ‘Why did Edward say he was likely to be hanged? Surely that meant he’d as good as committed murder?’

  ‘He said nothing of the sort. He said, if Sophia got it right, “By God, I’ll be hanged.” It was a mere profane exclamation. No, there’s only one solution to the puzzle – and you’ll see it all fits. What Edward brought home was a bit of Greek statuary – and it must have been superb of its kind.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the extent to which Joscelyn was bowled over by it, for one thing. He was quite an aesthete, remember; and he had become disheartened because all his mortuary stuff contained nothing absolutely first-rate – a Medici tomb, or something like that.’

  ‘This must have been something like that?’ Again Olivia’s intelligence flashed out. ‘Something mortuary, as you call it? That does make sense of the whole business of the swap.’

  Clout laughed – this time at a relaxed pressure. ‘It makes it a good deal more decent too. But there’s another reason, you see, why the statue must have been pretty tremendous. There’s not merely the fact that Joscelyn was willing to swap his own top-notch Caucasian treasure for it. There’s the fact that Edward had quite as guilty a conscience as Joscelyn had.’

  Olivia’s eyes suddenly rounded. ‘You mean that this statue would itself be enormously valuable?’

  ‘Of course. Think what the Venus de Milo would fetch, if the Louvre shoved it on the market today. Edward’s statue might conceivably be in that class. But Sir George, who was clearly just a sound, practical landowner, had no notion that his men had tumbled on anything other than a common-or-garden ornament.’

  Olivia in her turn produced an inarticulate cry. ‘That’s it, Colin!’ Her eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘A garden ornament! That’s what Sir George would do with it.’

  They tumbled downstairs and out of the building. Beyond the terrace, the grounds of Old Hall were already shadowy. ‘One doesn’t know where to begin,’ Olivia said.

  ‘No.’ Clout walked forward to the balustrade. ‘Do you see the significance of the fact that Milder knew about both the treasure and the statue – and was determined to get the statue? That gives you a pointer to their comparative value! He must either be a genuine scholar, you know, or in contact with one. What we’ve been up against is a chap – or an organization – concerned to track down some very celebrated vanished work of ancient art. It’s really rather a thrill.’ Clout’s voice was excited – but the excitement was of a fresh sort. He had glimpsed something that really touched the imagination.

  ‘To hell with your thrill.’ Olivia’s voice was harsh. ‘Where’s the statue?’

  Clout looked at her without replying, and in a sudden desolation he couldn’t begin to explain. Only he was falteringly aware of the discovery that they weren’t – Olivia and himself – at all the same sort of person. He had felt tired in his attic; now he felt quite exhausted. He took another step forward and leaned his arm on an empty pedestal. Something queer happened in his stomach. He looked up. Close by, and a mere silhouette in the gathering dusk, loomed a
large, obese Hercules. Beyond that was a gigantic boar. But here…here–’

  ‘Are you l-l-looking f-f-for–’ The voice of George Lumb, gentle and struggling, was in his ear. ‘Are you looking, C-C-Clout, for the Aphrodite Epitumbia? I’m s-s-sorry. B-b-but we’ve got that too.’

  ‘You have?’ It was Olivia who had swung round on Lumb.

  ‘Well, the J-J-Jorys. We’ve t-t-taken it to New Hall.’

  ‘And it’s called what? I never heard of it.’ Olivia seemed quite calm.

  ‘The Aphrodite of the Tomb.’ Lumb’s stammer had taken one of its dives to earth. ‘It’s known to have been at Delphi. The dead were summoned to it to receive libations. One of the really great things. You can imagine what Joscelyn Jory felt he would give for it.’

  ‘And what people would give now?’