Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (16 page)

His impetuous rush had carried him thus far through a silence of stupefaction on one side and desperation on the other, but now, in a subdued way which didn’t carry beyond the walls, hell broke loose. Rose burst into tears and flung herself face-down into a chair. Jim gaped open-mouthed from one to the other of them, and with a muted bellow of rage clouted Paddy on the ear with an open right hand as hard as a spade. The blow slammed him back against the wall, from which one of Rose’s pretty little calendar pictures, a golden-haired tot with a bunch of forget-me-nots, promptly fell and smashed.

“You nasty little brat!” growled Jim through his teeth. “You come here slandering my wife, and see what you’ll get! Who d’you think you’re threatening with the police, you—”

Nobody had ever hit Paddy like that before. Instead of taming him it infuriated him. Clasping his smarting cheek, he shouted back into the menacing face that leaned over him: “I wasn’t threatening her, I wasn’t slandering her, I said—”

“I heard what you said. Accusing her of taking money and jewellery—”

“Don’t be so bloody stupid!” yelled Paddy, blazing with rage. “I never said she took them, I said she
put them back
! Why the hell don’t you listen?”

It was not language of which either his parents or his teachers would have approved, but it stopped Jim, in the act of loosing a damaging left at him, as though the breath had been kicked out of him. His hands dropped. Shades of doubt and consternation and suspicion pursued one another over his candid face. Rose, through her desperate sobs, implored indistinctly: “Don’t hurt him, Jim! He doesn’t mean any harm.”

Her husband turned and looked at her, quaking in the frilly chair. “Now, look! There’s one bloke around here who doesn’t seem to be in any of the secrets, and that’s me. And I’m going to know, and pretty sharpish, so you can both make up your minds to that. Maybe what this kid’s saying has got something in it, after all. The way you’ve been acting the last couple o’ days, there could well be something queer going on, and you mixed up in it. If there is, I want to know. Now!”

His voice had worked its way down from the peak of anger to an intimidating quietness. He plucked Paddy away from the wall by the shoulders, and plumped him down hard in a chair.

“If I went off at half-cock, and you’re being straight with me, I’m sorry, kid. But first I’ve got to know. Come on, let’s have it. The lot. I’ve been trying to get some sense out of her for days, and she’s been putting me off and swearing there was nothing, and going round like a dying duck in a thunder-storm. I’m about sick of it. If you know anything, let’s have it, and know where we are.”

Paddy took a deep breath, and told him everything he knew and everything he guessed. Rose, subsiding into exhausted silence, still hid her face.

“I came to tell you,” said Paddy, with dignified indignation, “that I know very well you can’t have done anything wrong, and it’s dead silly to carry on as if you have. I don’t know what’s behind all this, but I do know you’ll only get yourself into trouble if you go on hiding things. What you ought to do is go straight to the police, and tell them all you know. That’s the only way to help yourself.”

Jim took his hands from the boy, and looked down at Rose’s heaving shoulders. There was hardly any need to ask, but he asked, all the same, his voice baffled and exasperated, and painfully gentle.

“Is that right, Rose, what he says?
Did
you—”

A fresh spurt of tears, but she scrubbed them away with the stoical determination of despair. “I had to get them out of the house. I didn’t want you to know. It wasn’t my fault, but it was even less yours, and I wanted you kept out of it.”

“Go and wash your face and pretty yourself up,” said Jim. “We’re going to the police. Now.” He turned to fix a stern but no longer unfriendly eye on Paddy. “All three of us,” he said with emphasis.

“Yes,” said Rose, bolt upright and pale of face on one of Hewitt’s hard chairs, “it’s true, there is a way in. I’ll show you. If somebody’d leaned against the right edge of the right stone, there in the vault, he’d have found it, only it’s placed so nobody’s likely to, not by accident. It’s one of the facing slabs in the corner. It swivels on an iron bar that runs through it from top to bottom. I reckon they put it all in when the vault was made. It’ll only swivel one way, and you’d have a job to find it from the tunnel side unless you know.

“And it’s true, I did go there, like Paddy told you. I went and put the things back in the poor lady’s grave—but I never took them in the first place. I wanted to give them back, and I didn’t know how else to do it. I was going to put them loose in the vault, because I couldn’t have shifted the stone. But she—she—you’d uncovered her. I saw her—” She put her hands up to her cheeks and drew breath in a single hysterical sob, her eyes fixed and horrified. Jim put his hand on her shoulder, and his index finger stroked her neck surreptitiously above the collar of the smart cotton shift-dress, with a quite unexpected tenderness. It calmed and eased her, reminding her of life. Death was a long way off, and she could make a good fight of it if events threatened her tenure or Jim’s. She stooped her cheek to his hand fleetingly. They all saw it, and could not help being moved.

A nerve of awareness quivered in Paddy, and troubled his innocence, but the sensation was pleasurable and private, and he kept it to remember and ponder afterwards.

“How did you know about the tunnel and the entrance to the vault?” asked Hewitt, in the neutral tone he found so productive.

“My dad showed me.”

“And how did he discover it?”

“I don’t know. Accident, I suppose. He was a questing kind of man, he liked nosing things out. It was going to happen to somebody, sometime, and it just happened to be my dad. He never told me how it happened. But he found it. About three years ago, it would be. He began to bring home little things he hid, and in a small house it isn’t easy to hide that you’re hiding things. And I’m curious, too. I hunted for them, I found some gold buttons. I didn’t know they were gold, not till he told me.”

“You asked him about them then?”

“Yes, I did, but at first he wouldn’t tell me anything. Then he got a bit above himself, and started showing me more things, a ring it was, once, and another time three gold coins. And then one day he made me go with him, and he took me and showed me the tunnel in the rock, and showed me how to get into the vault at the end of it. That was the first time I ever saw the coffins. He told me he’d got the stuff he was bringing out of the smaller one—the lady’s coffin. I didn’t want anything to do with it, I begged him to put them all back and leave them alone, but he never took any notice of anything I said. I was scared, but I didn’t like to tell anyone, not on my own father. Even if there’d been anyone to tell, then,” said Rose, simply, and fondled Jim’s hand on her shoulder. “And there wasn’t. Not close to me.”

“Was he, do you know, disposing of any of these pieces he lifted out of the grave?”

“Yes, he began to. I think he didn’t know how to go about it himself, but after a bit he took up with a fisherman who used to come after me, a queer fellow he was, name of Ruiz. Spanish he was, only way back. I mean, he’d always lived in Cornwall himself, and his folks, too. My dad started encouraging him, and wanted me to be nice to him, but I didn’t like him much. He got to be quite a crony of Dad’s, and that was queer, because he didn’t have many. They used to knock about together quite a bit. I got to thinking maybe this Ruiz chap was shipping some of the things out abroad for him, because he knew a lot of people over there, in France and Spain, and he spoke the languages, too. They went on like that for about six months, and then they fell out. I think this here Ruiz wanted a bigger share, and was threatening to give the show away if he didn’t get it.”

“Did they talk about it in front of you?”

“No, only that one time, when they fell out, and then it wasn’t much, Ruiz flung off out of the house, and my dad went after him, and they made it up. Anyway, they came back together, and they had their heads together all the rest of the evening, as thick as ever. But then a bit later this Ruiz was drowned at sea. I don’t know if you remember, his boat never came back from fishing, one blowy night. His body was washed up on the Mortuary a few weeks later. Then I did hope my dad would give up, not having anyone to sell the things for him, and I think he did for nearly a year. But then he began to bring things again, and started going off sometimes for a couple of days at a time, and wouldn’t tell me where he was going.”

“And where did you think he was going? You must have had some ideas on the subject.”

“Not about where, not exactly. But I did think he’d started selling the things himself where he could, round antique shops, and like that. I tried to get him to stop, but he only told me not to be a fool. And by that time Jim had started coming after me.” She flushed warmly even at the mention of his name. “We had a bit of a fight for it, because Dad didn’t want to lose his housekeeper. But we did it in the end. And was I glad to get away to a home of my own!”

Hewitt turned his pen placidly on the desk, regarding her with his most benevolent and unrevealing face. “But that didn’t end it, did it?”

“It did, until about a week ago.” She thought back, biting her lip. “Last Monday it was—five days ago. Dad came when Jim was out, and brought this whole bag of coins, and some rings and things, all there was left. He said so. He said to hide them and keep them for him. I know I ought to have refused, but I was scared of him. You can’t just stop being scared of somebody,” said Rose, with unexpected directness and dignity, “when you have been all your life. He said he’d take it out of Jim if I didn’t do what he wanted. It seemed the easiest thing then to put them away out of sight till I could see my way. But then,” she said, apprehensive eyes on Hewitt’s face, “you came yesterday and told us he was dead. And I knew you were sending men to ask questions all over about Jim and me. I didn’t know what to do, I was terrified you might search the house, and find those things there. I had to get rid of them, and the only thing that seemed even half-way right was to put them back where he took them from. And that’s what I did. Only she—I never can forget it—seeing her—”

“You should have told me,” said Jim reproachfully, “and not tried to do things by yourself, that way.”

“Jim never knew anything about it until now. He never knew the things were in the house. And I never wanted them. I never wanted anything to do with it.”

“All right, Rose! Now you’ve done what you should have done in the first place, and if ever you find yourself in a spot like that again, don’t you run the risk of putting yourself under suspicion, you just come to me, and bring the whole thing into the open. Now there’s one thing you can do to help us, as well as showing us the entrance into the vault. Can you remember any of the pieces your father brought home in all that time?”

“Yes, some I can,” she said hopefully. “They were all that old, you know, they were different from the sort you see now.”

“Well, when you go home, you try to make out a list of the ones you remember, and describe them as well as you can, so that we can try to find them again. Will you do that?”

“Yes, Mr. Hewitt, I’ll try.”

“And don’t keep secrets from your husband from now on, if you want a peaceful life. All right! I may want to ask you some more questions to-morrow, for now we’ll let you rest and think it over. Jim, I’d like you to go with her, Snaith will drive you down to the old church, and I’ll follow in a few minutes and join you there. After that you can take her home and keep a strict eye on her, see she doesn’t get into any more mischief.”

“She won’t,” said Jim grimly, and twisted a finger furtively in her fair hair, and tweaked it tight.

On the way out, still holding his wife very possessively by the arm, he halted squarely in front of Paddy, and stood looking down dubiously but not particularly penitently at the print of his fingers on the boy’s swollen cheek and ear. The kid looked tired, dazed, battered but content. Large eyes stared back just as appraisingly, withholding judgment but assessing quality. They liked each other. They liked each other very well. True, Paddy did burn for one moment in the dread that Jim would blurt out an apology for the clout, and call everyone’s attention to it; but he should have known better.

“Thanks, mate!” said Jim calmly. “I’ll give you as fair a chance, some day, and we’ll get even.”

“That’s all right, mate,” said Paddy, wooden-faced, and eyeing the precise spot at the angle of Jim’s jaw where ideally he should connect. “And I’ll take it.”

“Come three or four years,” observed Jim, looking him over critically, “I reckon you’ll be about ready, too.” There wasn’t much muscle on the light body yet, but he had a nice long reach, and speed, and spirit enough for an army.

“I reckon so,” said Paddy; and with mutual respect they parted.

A concerted sigh of relaxation and wonder and speculation went round the room as soon as the door had closed, and the sound of feet descending the stairs had ebbed to a distant, lingering echo. They stirred and rose, drawing together round the desk.

“You believe her story?” asked Simon.

“Yes, I believe it. All of it, maybe, most of it, certainly. Maybe Jim’s clever enough to put over an act of knowing nothing about it, but I don’t think so.”

“He didn’t know,” said Paddy, standing up in the middle of events with authority, for hadn’t he precipitated this single-handed? “They were rowing when I got there, before I ever got in the house. She was all nerves and cried if he looked at her, and he was just about frantic trying to get sense out of her. Why should he act when there was nobody else there?”

“I’m prepared to accept that,” agreed Hewitt benevolently. “Rose has cleared up quite a number of things for us, but she hasn’t shed any light on who killed her father. There’s nothing to put Jim out of the running for that, so far.”

“He didn’t know about the tunnel into the vault,” said Paddy doggedly, “so he couldn’t have put him there.”