Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (12 page)

‘All right, you inside there! Leave it at that!’

Indistinct sounds emerged from within the earth, deprived of sense by the complicated acoustics of the soil. There was an interlude of silence, absorbed and intent. Then, without previous movement or sound, only with a sudden gush of closed and graveyard air, the rotten surface above buckled and dimpled, lolling in sagging bubbles of turf, and sending its under-levels of soil cascading down on top of the ancient arc of bricks that upheld it. Those without heard the ceiling yield, with a muffled, sickening grinding of brick against brick and stone upon stone, and the dull, filtering trickle of soil busily winding its way between.

A hollow yell was forced out with the jettisoned air. And George Felse dived forward at the jerking ankles under the archway, felt his way forward towards the knees, and hauled strongly backwards as the roof sagged slowly and ponderously inwards on top of Gus Hambro.

They dug him out with their bare hands, scrabbling like frantic terriers to clear the soil away from his head and shoulders; and within minutes they had him laid out like a stranded fish on one of their plastic sheets in the grass. All the internal filth of generations, cobwebs and dust and soot, had been discharged on top of him as the joints of the roof parted, but an outstretched arm had sheltered his head and face, and he was not only breathing, but spluttering out the dirt that had silted into mouth and nostrils. They had to brush away the layers before they could examine him for worse damage, George on one side of him, Barnes on the other, feeling urgently at a skull that seemed to have escaped all but the loose, light weight of the fall. They drew off his damp, soiled jacket, and felt at shoulders and arms, and could find no breakages. Everyone hovered unhappily. Little rivulets of loose soil trickled capriciously down the slope of raw earth. Somewhere on the sidelines Paviour could be heard protesting that they could not possibly proceed with this excavation in these conditions, that the risks were too great, that someone would be killed.

‘No damage,’ said Barnes, breathing gusty relief. ‘Just knocked silly. He’ll be round and as right as rain in five minutes. All that got him was the loose muck, not the bricks.’

‘I’ll fetch some brandy,’ Lesley offered eagerly. ‘And take this jacket to sponge and dry, he can’t possibly put it on again like this.’

They were two deep round him in any case, nearly a dozen people hanging on the least movement of a finger or an eyelid. She’s right, Charlotte thought, watching dubiously but compulsively like all the rest, one grain of sense is worth quite a lot of random sympathy.

‘I’ll bring one of Stephen’s coats,’ said Lesley, and set off at a light, long stepping run for the house.

Charlotte offered tissues to wipe away the trailing threads of glutinous, dirty cobweb from the victim’s eyes, for his eyelids were beginning to contract and twitch preparatory to opening. He lay for some minutes before he made the final effort, and then unfurled his improbably luxuriant lashes upon a bright, golden-brown stare of general accusation.

‘What in hell do you all think you’re doing?’ he said, none too distinctly and very ungratefully, and spat out fragments of soil with a startled grimace of distaste. ‘What happened?’

It was a fair enough question, considering how abruptly he had been obliterated from the proceedings. His exit had been brief, but absolute, while they, it seemed, were still in possession of their faculties and the facts. He sat up in the circle of George’s arm, seemed to become suddenly aware of his shirt sleeves and the late April chill, and demanded, looking violently round him: ‘Where’s my jacket?’

‘Mrs Paviour’s taken it away to clean and dry it out for you. You were taking a look inside there, and half the roof came down on you,’ said George patiently. All the victim’s limbs seemed to be in full working order, even his memory was only one jump behind.

‘Oh, blimey!’ he said weakly. ‘Was that it?’ And he leaned forward to peer at the spot where two policemen were stolidly clearing away newly-fallen rubble from the mouth of the flue, and a third, well above them on the level ground, was cautiously surveying the crater. ‘You’ll have to dig for that torch of yours,’ he said more strongly, not without a mildly vindictive satisfaction. ‘I let go of it when things started dropping on me. That chap up there had better watch his step, there was a gleam of daylight a good two yards forward from where I got to. He didn’t put one of those beetle-crushers through there while I was inside, did he?’

‘He did not,’ said George tolerantly. ‘The thing just gave. Mea culpa. I shouldn’t have let you do it.’

‘The thing just gave. Did it?’ He was coming round with remarkable aplomb now, it was with the old, knowledgeable eye that he stared at the ruin of the neat archway which had been their entrance to the flue only ten minutes ago. But all he said was: ‘You know what? Either I’m accident-prone, all of a sudden, or else somebody, somewhere, is sticking pins in a wax image of me.’

Some minutes later, when all anxiety on his behalf had ebbed away into renewed interest in the job on hand, when he was sitting hunched with Price’s sportscoat draped round his shoulders, and one of George’s cigarettes between his lips, and not a soul but George within earshot, he said, softly and with intent: ‘Watch it from now on! I’m getting clearer every minute. Somebody’d been hacking at the brickwork inside there. That wasn’t any accident.’

‘You sure?’ asked George in the same tone.

‘I’m sure. I lost your torch—and switched on, at that, you won’t get much mileage back in that battery!—but I know what I’d already seen. Fresh-broken surfaces, high in the wall. The upstream side was what I noticed. A gash in the brickwork, pale and clean. Even if you have to dig out from on top, now, with care you’ll find it. Somebody aimed to bring that flue down.’

‘Nobody,’ said George, gazing ahead of him at the spot where Price was re-deploying his forces on the level of the caldarium floor, ‘can have got into that place ahead of you. Earlier, yes, that I believe. Not since the slip.’

‘They wouldn’t have to. I told you, at least one gleam of daylight ahead there. More than one hole on top. A crowbar down one of those would be all he needed.’ The momentary silence irritated him. He said with asperity, and considering his recent escape with some justification: ‘It worked, didn’t it?’

‘It worked, all right. I’m considering motives. What was the object? To have a second go at you? They couldn’t have known you’d even be available, much less put your head in the trap.’

‘No, that’s out,’ admitted Gus generously. ‘To seal off the flue, more likely.’

‘To hide what’s there?’

‘Not a chance! There’ll be nothing there. To hide the traces of what
was
there.’

Lesley came back from the house with a tweed coat over her arm and a flask in her hand. ‘We can also,’ she said, looking down at Gus with a slightly quizzical smile, ‘offer a bath, if and when you feel equal to it. You can hardly go back to “The Salmon’s Return” looking like that.’

He looked down, slightly startled, at the state of his shirt and his hands, and admitted the difficulty.

‘And you can’t see your face,’ said Lesley helpfully, her friendly, candid eyes dwelling upon the spectacle with detached amusement, but not with any apparent repulsion.

‘That’s immensely kind of you. I’d like to take you up on it, if Mr Paviour will allow me,’ he said, suddenly aware of a little chill in the blood that warned him not to leave out the curator from this or any other exchange on these premises.

‘Of course,’ Paviour said, with prompt but distant courtesy, ‘by all means avail yourself. I can offer you a change of shirt, if the size is right.’

‘And as I’ve got lunch on the way in about three quarters of an hour, hadn’t you better take it easy and join us? You’ll just have time to make yourself presentable. Bill will be staying, too,’ she said, firmly arranging everything to her own satisfaction.

This somewhat drastic rupture in her ordinary routine must in its way, Charlotte thought, be a godsend to Lesley, however deplorable the reason for it. She was also reacting in an understandably female way to having a ready-made casualty of pleasant appearance and attractive manners dropped at her feet. For the second time, too! But on the first occasion, even when deposited half-drowned and battered in the Paviour household, he had belonged by rights to Charlotte, who had pulled him out of the river and demanded shelter for him. This time he was, so to speak, legitimate prey, and Lesley intended to enjoy him.

‘If you feel like walking up with me now, I must go back and keep an eye on lunch. Charlotte, will you come and help me?’

The three of them walked back together, Gus steady enough on his legs, and only slightly exercised in mind at leaving the excavation, which had now been transferred of necessity to the higher level. There could be no more attempts to enter the flues from the slope, they were going to have to take up all that island of rotten ground and expose them from above. A more thorough job, and a safer, but infinitely slower. They were staking out the limits of the subsidence now, and Bill Lawrence was clipping a new sheet of graph paper to his board. One of the plainclothes men was busy with a camera. And Paviour, torn between the instinct to follow his wife and the desire to pursue George Felse and renew his protests, hovered in indecision. Charlotte looked back once, and saw him standing motionless, gazing after them, lean and desiccated as a stick insect, but with a face all too human in its tormented anxiety; not all, perhaps, about his beloved and ravaged city.

Lesley could, she thought, do a little more to placate and reassure a husband she knew to be almost pathologically jealous. It was easy to believe that she had no regrets about her bargain, and no intention of backing out of it, but in the circumstances this was a reassurance that needed to be repeated endlessly. And yet everything she did had an open and innocent grace about it. If she devoted herself to her new guest all through lunch, she did so out of a pleasurable sense of duty, and not at all flirtatiously. It was impossible to associate the word with her; there was nothing sidelong or circuitous about the way Lesley approached anyone, man or woman.

As for Gus, bathed and polished and reclothed in his own beautifully pressed sportscoat, he trod delicately, dividing his attention as adroitly as he could between the two of them, repaying Lesley’s direct friendliness with wary deference, and turning as often as possible to Paviour with leading remarks on Aurae Phiala, to draw him into eloquence on the subject dearest to his heart.

‘I imagine,’ said Paviour, regarding him almost with favour over the coffee, ‘that you’ll be interested in seeing this distasteful invasion limited as much as possible. The damage could be incalculable. I suppose,’ he said, almost visibly writhing at coming so near to begging, ‘you haven’t any influence? The authorities, I believe, do sometimes listen to the opinions of scholars…’ His thin, fastidious voice faded out bitterly on the admission that he was none.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Gus ruefully, ‘that nobody who won’t listen to you, sir, is going to pay the slightest attention to me. But I don’t believe, from what I’ve heard this morning, that the police want to take the dig a yard past where it need go. After all, they do have some evidence, apparently, to connect this boy Boden with the place.’ He added deprecatingly: ‘I think Chief Inspector Felse means to brief us, as fully as he can, this evening.’

‘Will you be staying on to see the job through?’ asked Bill Lawrence.

‘I’d have liked to, but it doesn’t look as if I shall be able to. I got my room at the pub for only two nights. From Friday night on you have to be a fisherman to get in at “The Salmon’s Return”, even in the close season. I’ve got to get out today.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Lesley, aggrieved. ‘What a shame, when you’re being so helpful. Stephen, don’t you think
we
…?’

She had rushed in where angels might have hesitated to set foot, and almost instantly she recognised it, and halted in contained but palpable dismay. And Bill Lawrence put in smoothly, as if the tension had never communicated itself to him, but so promptly that Charlotte, for one, knew it had: ‘Why don’t you move in with me? I’ve got the whole lodge as bachelor quarters, there’s plenty of room for one more, if you don’t mind sharing a room? Two beds,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and acres of storage space. We can run over and pick up your things, if you say the word?’

‘Consider it said,’ Gus said heartily, ‘and thanks! I should have hated to have to go away and miss this chance. I thought I should probably have to go as far as Comerbourne to get a room without notice, and it hardly seemed worth it commuting from that distance. Especially,’ he said, with an engaging smile in Paviour’s direction, ‘as I more or less invited myself to the dig in the first place.’

Lesley had recovered resiliently from her momentary disarray. She sat serenely silent, apparently well content at having Gus’s problem and her own solved so economically. It even entered Charlotte’s mind, watching, that there were moments when Lesley deliberately made use of Bill Lawrence to pull chestnuts out of the fire for her.

Afterwards, in the car on the way to ‘The Salmon’s Return’, Bill said, after too patent deliberation and in too world-weary a voice: ‘Look, it’s easy enough living in this set-up, but you have to know the rules. Be my guest, use my experience and save your own, boy. Rule number one: Never even
seem
to get too close to that lady.’ His tone was lightly cynical, and a little rueful; there was no knowing for certain how deeply he felt about what he was saying.

‘I wondered,’ said Gus, ‘why you got off the mark so fast and so smoothly. Apart from having a generous disposition, of course.’

‘Don’t mistake me, there’s nothing wrong with Lesley. She’s straight, and she means what she offers. It’s her old man. He’s mad jealous of her. Oh, he’d have backed up her invitation, all right, if he’d had to. Very correct, very hospitable. But then he’d have made life hell for you, her, and above all himself, by being suspicious of every glance you gave her. It’s better to keep a nice safe distance, and be a bit of the landscape, like me.’

‘And you’ve experienced that yourself?’ Gus asked mildly.

The voice beside him became even lighter and drier. ‘I didn’t have to. I’ve only confirmed it from my own observations since. I was warned off privately, as soon as I came here. By Lesley herself.’ There was a brief but weighty pause, and then, as if he had felt oppressed by its suggestive possibilities, he made the mistake of adding, with the same airy intonation: ‘Probably she never fancied me, anyhow.’

Gus kept his eyes on the road ahead, and sat stolidly, as though the sharp note of bitterness had passed him by. But from then on he was in no doubt that, whatever this young man felt for Lesley Paviour, it was certainly not indifference.

‘In view of all the circumstances,’ said George Felse, facing the assembled household in Paviour’s study that evening, ‘I think it only fair to give you some idea of how this enquiry is progressing. Your professional proceedings are affected, and you have a right to be told why that’s inevitable. We want your co-operation. We don’t want to upset your routine any longer than we must, or to extend our intrusion a yard beyond what’s necessary.’