Gareth threaded his way through the tables, sat down, handed Matilda her glass of single malt, and swallowed a deep draft of his ale. Then he pulled out his notebook and flipped through several pages of notes.
Matilda rolled the single-malt around her mouth and considered Gareth’s profile, cut as clean as one on a Roman coin. There was nothing quite as rejuvenating as sexual friction. By the time the threads of the case spun themselves out, she and Gareth might find that the friction was sufficient in and of itself. Or it might prove to have been a deliciously prolonged foreplay.
Matilda dropped her eyes as Gareth raised his, not wanting to distract him from the matter at hand.
“Dunning gave me the elbow, too,” he said.
“Dunning knows her clientele, doesn’t she? What about Emma?”
“I took her to lunch and chatted her up. She got the job at the shop through Della Reynolds, but she knows sod-all about history. She says Dunning has a secret boyfriend. Adrian Reynolds, I reckon, getting in a spot of slap-and-tickle along with his antiquities smuggling.”
“Reynolds? He would find Dunning very useful, wouldn’t he? Clapper told us he was exerting his dubious charms on Linda. . . .” Matilda chased some elusive tendril less of thought than of impression through her mind and lost its trailing end in ambiguity. “I still feel I’m missing something. There’s some strand in this tangle that I’m just not seeing. I don’t know why, and that bothers me.”
Doubt glinted in Gareth’s face. With a toss of his brows he discarded it. “Give over, Matilda. It’s not that complicated. Everyone in Corcester can’t be conspiring together.”
“No, I suppose not. But I can’t see Reynolds playing Moriarty, the sole mover in the case.”
“He’s using Dunning to sell the antiquities he looted from his own property,” Gareth insisted. “He has expensive tastes. He needs the money. And Linda caught him out. Maybe she caught Dunning out as well. Linda was no fool, her records say she passed her A-levels but couldn’t afford university. She threatened Reynolds with exposure. He lured her to Durslow Edge and eliminated her. Then Reynolds found Dunning a new shop assistant, one so thick she wouldn’t recognize illegal statuary if she fell over it.”
“That’s logical,” Matilda assured him. “It would also be logical if Linda and Reynolds were conspiring together and fell out over the statuary. Or Dunning and Linda ditto, although I must admit I can’t see Dunning cutting a throat. Too messy. Clapper could be part of the plot. Almost certainly Della knows something. Was the attack on Sweeney and Caterina a misguided attempt at treasure—pretty clumsy, if so—or a warning to us? We can theorize all we want, but finding enough solid evidence to bring someone—anyone—to trial. . . .”
“. . . is another matter entirely. I know that.” Gareth scowled, seeing either justice or his promotion slip through his fingers. “I did once wonder whether Della killed Linda out of jealousy, but she hardly seems capable of jealousy, let alone murder.”
“Mice have a way of roaring.” Matilda glanced again at Ashley.
“. . . and then,” Jennifer was saying, “my dad takes me into the den and says very seriously, don’t get involved with any English men! As though English guys have two heads or something.”
“Or something,” Bryan said with a grin.
Jennifer laughed. Ashley smiled secretly into her lemonade. A local lad, definitely, Matilda thought.
The corners of Gareth’s mouth turned in opposite directions. “A shame you can’t see a re-enactment of the murder and give us some leads, instead of wasting your time on an ancient domestic row.”
“I’m not wasting my time. It’s much easier for me to read ancient events or inanimate objects than living people. The Romans’ actions are carved in time—they’re set pieces now. It’s like going to see ‘Hamlet’ in theaters all over the world. No matter what the production is like, it’s still the same play. Artifacts are finished, completed, things, no matter how resonant with the minds of their makers, while living people are dynamic processes. Simply watching a person often causes him to change direction.”
“That’s a common feature of a murder investigation,” Gareth conceded.
“Of any investigation. Although I’ve never done one quite like this. This is like. . . . Well, my son will sit with the remote control and surf through one TV channel after another, watching each one for only a few seconds. You get a bit of dialogue, a quick image, a burst of music. Nothing in context. It drives me crazy. That’s what this case is like. Because of the murder, probably. The strong emotion.”
“Does your son have the sight—ESP?”
“Not a hint of it.”
“I rather doubted he did.” Gareth rubbed his eyes, squeezed the bridge of his nose, and took another long drink of his ale.
Even Patrick would have sensed Gareth’s annoyance and frustration. The only way Matilda could ease his mind was to solve the case. To help him solve the case, that is. Even if she had to sacrifice the personal attraction to do it. She sipped at her whisky. The room was becoming warm and close.
“Emma might be acting dumb for your benefit. Not that she struck me as terribly bright in the glimpse I had of her. She’s resentful, I think. Feeling life has done her wrong. You asked her about Clive, I assume? Now there’s someone who could well be involved. Even Moriarty had his Colonel Moran, his muscle.”
“Emma said she hadn’t seen Clive in donkey’s years,” Gareth replied.
“Did you ask Emma about Nick?”
“Well now, that’s interesting. Emma and I had our lunch in a Greek caff just outside the Arcade. . . .”
“Oh yes, I ate there, too.”
“Did you now!” Gareth exclaimed, and then lowered his voice to a husky whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me? That’s Nick’s father’s place—it says ‘Veliotes’ plain as a pikestaff on the window. Didn’t you see the snap of the man himself on the wall behind the till?”
“What?” Matilda leaned across the table. “Gareth, I’ve never laid eyes on Nick. And I had no idea what his last name is!”
They stared at each other, appalled. Here she’d been contemplating melding bodies, Matilda thought, when what they needed to do was meld minds. What else did Gareth know that she didn’t, and vice versa? “The café is where Nick met Emma?” she hazarded.
“I doubt it—she didn’t start working at Borley Arcade until February. Clapper says she and Nick were having it off last year and that she keeps throwing herself at him.” Gareth glared at Clapper, who was pulling another pint of beer, his round face perspiring with virtue. “Emma looked at Nick’s photo and said she might have seen him at one of the festivals, that’s all. It’s either a discrepancy in Clapper’s story or in hers.”
“Did you believe Emma’s story?”
“Yes, I did. But then, I believed Clapper’s, too. I don’t have your ESP trick, do I?”
“It’s no trick.”
“No, I don’t think it is,” he said wearily.
Matilda swallowed the rest of her whisky, assessing the play of light and shadow in Gareth’s eyes. She had convinced him of her skills, yes, but it was his own skills he trusted to solve the case. When all the lies were at last scoured away, nothing would be left except belief, and faith, and trust. Ground truth.
“Linda might have met Nick at the caff,” Gareth said. “I’d give a month’s pay to find out if they knew each other.”
“The break between Constantine and Nick could have been quite recent.”
“He does have an eye for the ladies—Nick, that is, not his dad. I saw him with a woman myself, that day the yob cut Caesar.”
“It wasn’t Emma you saw him with?”
“I wasn’t looking at her face.” Gareth drained his glass of beer and looked truculently into its foam-flecked bottom. “I can’t tie the travelers in with any of this.”
“I imagine they’ve done some clandestine digging at the fort, with or without Reynolds. Beyond that, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just
a school of red herrings.” Matilda shook her head. “Tell me everything Emma said. Don’t leave out a word. . . . Oh, hello Mr. Clapper. Business looks a bit off tonight.”
“What do you expect, with them murdering travelers hanging about.” The innkeeper eyed Matilda’s and Gareth’s glasses. “Another round? No? Righty-ho.” He retired to the bar, poured another drink for Sweeney, and laughed perfunctorily at several more of the professor’s jokes.
Gareth reconstructed his conversation with Emma. Matilda tried to draw out his impressions, but other than his admission that he believed what she’d told him, he steadfastly refused to concede he had any. “Then she invited me to a rave-up Friday. Not the loud music sort of rave, I gather. She called it ‘the rites of spring’.”
“Friday night is Beltane,” said Matilda. “Both Clapper and Emma were right about one thing—there is a pseudo-neo-pagan group operating in the area. The group might not have anything to do with Linda’s murder or with the thefts, either, but it’s the only lead we’ve got and I can’t help feeling that it’s important.”
“What?” Gareth asked.
She scooted her empty glass across the table so that it pinged lightly off his. “I went into town at lunchtime and followed two traveler girls, Wendy and Shirl, into that little chip shop. I got them to tell me about what I assume is the same party Emma invited you to—the rites of spring, they used the same words. But they’re not confirmed members of the group—they kept giggling about it. I doubt if the group consists entirely of travelers.”
“It’s a convention of nutters like Nick?”
“The girls kept talking about him. I suppose they meant Nick—they said he liked ‘a bit of skirt’. They called him ‘the Druid’.”
“But Emma didn’t recognize Nick.”
“If he appeared in costume she might not have gotten a very good look at him.”
“Sounds like play-acting to me.”
“It is. So is the Christian rite of communion, if you squint and look at it sideways.”
“Emma said it was ‘the real thing’.”
“To her it is. Reality, like magic, is in the eye of the beholder. You don’t have to actually summon the devil to do devilish things. You don’t have to actually consort with angels to be virtuous.”
“It was real enough to Linda Burkett,” Gareth agreed. “You mustn’t go to the party alone, it might be dangerous.”
Matilda shook her head. “Some groups, the more manipulative ones, can be vile, but those also tend to be very secretive. That we’re able to get into this one so easily is a good sign.” Gareth didn’t seem convinced. Matilda plunged on. “Shirl and Wendy didn’t say where the party was, just that I should come to the camp an hour before sunset. I’m betting it’s at Durslow Edge—a place local people are more likely to know.”
“Nick is local, isn’t he?” Gareth said with a sigh. He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and inspected both sides for nonexistent clues. “Emma gave me her telephone number, said to ring her if I wanted to come to the party. I can just about stick it, I reckon. Anything else?”
“Yes. On the way back from town, I ran into Della and Bodie. I got us an invitation for tea tomorrow afternoon.”
Gareth’s face went lopsided with rue. “I’m glad you decided to work for the law instead of against it. You’d make a brilliant confidence artist.”
“No I wouldn’t. I don’t enjoy lying. My stomach was sick all afternoon, and not from the fish and chips.”
“I became a policeman because I valued honesty, didn’t I? We’re for it now.”
“We’re in over our heads, no doubt about . . .” Matilda’s thumbs pricked. She raised her hand to warn Gareth and looked toward the door. Adrian Reynolds stood there. His black pellets of eyes fell on their cozy corner table and he sauntered toward them.
He started talking while he was still twenty feet away. Every face in the room turned toward him. Ashley ducked. “Hullo, hullo! My wife tells me she invited you to tea tomorrow. I’ll try to be there, she doesn’t know the first thing about my antiquities, she collects these frightfully twee dishes and vases.” He pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Do you have business interests other than Fortuna Stud?” Matilda asked.
“Just a bit of investing here and there,” Reynolds replied. “I say, March, sorry about ticking you off Sunday. Caesar’s a pet of mine, you know. He came close to winning the Grand National, but it just isn’t on to pass the Queen’s horse, is it now?”
“I suppose not,” said Gareth politely.
Sweeney advanced toward the table. So did Clapper, since Reynolds hadn’t ordered anything at the bar. Matilda felt as though her picnic was attracting ants. A trickle of sweat started between her shoulder blades and ran down her spine, making her wriggle uneasily.
“The usual,” Reynolds told Clapper.
The publican turned and trudged away.
“And you,” Reynolds said to Sweeney as the professor took the remaining chair. “Come to tea tomorrow. I’ve some new items in my collection—a Roman glass vial, for one, dreadfully expensive but a one-off, of course, positively unique.”
Except for the one in Dunning’s display case, Matilda told herself. The last thing she wanted was Sweeney absorbing all the air in Reynolds’ sitting room tomorrow. She tried beaming words to him—no, thank you, I can’t come. . . .
“Thank you, no,” Sweeney told Reynolds. “I must run into Manchester after work tomorrow. I have to attend to some laboratory work—you can’t imagine what a trial it is having an incompetent assistant.”
“Quite difficult, isn’t it?” Reynolds returned.
“As a matter of fact, I’m giving the students a holiday on Friday. Let them enjoy all the quaint local festivities, eh?”
This was news to Matilda. Obviously Sweeney included her in the incompetent-assistant category.
Clapper appeared at Reynolds’s shoulder. He set a glass of beer on the table and said to Matilda, “P.C. Watkins is in reception. He says they’ve found the bus what almost ran you off the road, and he needs you to sign a complaint.”
“Certainly.” Matilda extricated herself from her corner seat. Gareth made some excuse about interesting sidelights to his story and followed.
Watkins was waiting in the thankfully cool lobby, his hat tucked beneath his arm. “The bus were found abandoned in a quarry beyond Macclesfield,” he announced. “The fresh scrapings on its drivers’ side wing and wheel arch match the ones we took from your car. It’s a right mess inside, bedding, bits of food, the lot. Probably belonged to some travelers, but which ones, we don’t know.”
“No proof,” muttered Gareth. “There’s never any proof.”
“I finally laid Nick Veliotes by the heels,” Watkins went on. “He’s a greasy one, ain’t he? Says he didn’t cosh Dr. Sweeney and Miss Rossi. He wouldn’t even admit being in Corcester that evening until one of the lads at the bus station said he’d seen Nick snogging a lass in the car park. You’re not going to like this, Dr. Gray—it was one of your American students.”
Matilda’s heart sank. “Blond hair, right?”
“Spot on. Pretty and blond.”
Gareth’s face flushed the color of his hair. Great, Matilda thought. Now he gets protective. “Not Ashley,” he said. “There are other blond girls.”
“She’d been drinking with someone that night,” Matilda told him. “She came walking down the hill from town with the other students and I thought she’d been with Bryan. But her attitude toward Bryan is friendly, not romantic, and he feels she’s way out of his league.”
“Stupid little. . .” sputtered Gareth. “That’s just what Emma Price did to herself, isn’t it?”
“Hardly to herself,” Matilda corrected.
Watkins’s round face settled heavily into a square. “It was Emma’s family put it about that Nick was the father. She never named names. I reckon it was Clive Adcox myself, before he went north. No matter now.”
Matild
a gave Gareth a significant look. Clapper’s testimony about Emma and Nick had been simple transference, then, removing a misdemeanor from a family member and dumping on an annoying stranger.
The flush leached from Gareth’s complexion. “What else did Nick tell you?”
“He says he never met Linda Burkett, he don’t know anything about devil-worshippers, and if he was in Corcester the night Sweeney was coshed it’s no business of mine. Since I couldn’t charge him with anything, I let him go.”
“Nothing for it,” Gareth told Watkins, and stood silent while the constable left the hotel.
“Ashley hasn’t gone overboard with Nick,” Matilda told Gareth. “Not yet.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because she’s still cherishing her romantic illusions.” Matilda left Gareth working that one out and walked back into the bar.
“. . . drugged-out criminals moving about the countryside causing trouble for the law-abiding citizen,” Reynolds was saying. “Like the berk—excuse me, Mrs. Gray—the bloke driving that bus. You could have been killed. There ought to be a law that these layabouts can only draw benefits in the town where they were born. Keep them away from us honest people, eh?”
“Like some of the travelers aren’t local people?” muttered Ashley.
Matilda, slipping back into her seat, heard her. The girl was thinking of Nick. That everyone was speaking against him probably made him all the more attractive. It’d certainly kept her from revealing their acquaintance. And, Matilda supposed, it was only fair that someone took Nick’s side.
There was the classic parental dilemma for you, whether to rush around with a safety net extended or to avert your eyes when the kid comes plummeting past.
Sweeney looked as though he smelled something bad. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m turning in. I have a busy day tomorrow.”
“Haven’t we all?” Reynolds smiled liplessly, like a snake.
Gareth returned to the table just in time to catch that smile. He shot Matilda a told-you-so glance. She started sweating again. The currents of hostility swirling about the room seemed like hot desert winds.
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