Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (19 page)

He came down the rest of the staircase, passed by Lesley with a sympathetic smile and a general goodnight, and walked out to his car.

‘I think,’ said George, ‘we should all leave you now to get what rest you can. I’m assured that Mr Hambro will be all right until morning, and I’ll be in in good time tomorrow to see him.’

‘Do you think we should sit up with him?’ asked Lesley. ‘We would, you know, we’d split the watch. I mean, if he should wake up, and feel lost? After an ordeal like that… and in the dark…’

George shook his head. ‘He won’t wake up. The doctor’s sunk him for twelve hours or so, I assure you. Sleep is what he needs, and what he’s going to get for a while. We shall have to wait. It’s only sense, you know.’

He walked out, too, closing the door gently after him. He was not at all surprised to find, before he reached his car, that Charlotte was there in the darkness beside him, though she certainly had not got there by way of the same door.

‘You can’t do it,’ she said in a rapid, indignant whisper in his ear. ‘You can’t just go away and leave him like this. You’ve just made it clear that he hasn’t said a word yet, but may have plenty to say when he does wake up. Everybody knows it, you’ve made sure of that. And then you go away and leave him to it!’

‘What would you like?’ asked George as softly. ‘A couple of constables with notebooks sitting by his bed?’ He looked at her closely and smiled. ‘So you don’t accept Paviour’s evidence against himself? If the would-be murderer is in hospital at Comerbourne, seriously ill, what is there left to worry about?’

‘I don’t know! It did look like that. It
does
look like that. All I really know is that Gus is in there asleep, the one person who
may
be able to identify the man who tried to kill him, and everybody knows he hasn’t spoken yet, but tomorrow he will. Supposing it wasn’t Mr Paviour, after all? People do have heart attacks. I know what I did, I know I meant it, but after all perhaps he was just the most vulnerable. Then there’s somebody still around with an interest in seeing that Gus never speaks. That he doesn’t live to speak! If it was urgent to kill him last night, it’s twice as urgent now.’

The brief and unprotesting silence shook and enlightened her. Dimly as she could see his face, she knew he was looking at her with respect, with affection, certainly with a very gentle and grave measure of amusement.

‘That’s what you want!’ she whispered. ‘You’ve got him all pegged out for bait, like a goat for tigers, waiting for someone to have another attempt.’

‘In which case,’ said George mildly, ‘you may be sure I don’t intend the event to go unwitnessed—or uninterrupted.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Charlotte, charmed into meekness.

‘Well, if you insist—it isn’t strictly necessary, but it would help. When you’re sure everyone else is in bed, you can go quietly down and slip the catch on the back door.’

‘I will.’ The door at the foot of those well-carpeted back stairs that led to the room where Gus Hambro was asleep; the room, she remembered, with a spacious walk-in wardrobe. ‘And what after that?’

‘After that,’ said George, ‘go to bed. And go to sleep.’

‘I should have to have a lot of faith in you,’ she said, ‘to do that.’

‘Well?’ said George. ‘You have a lot of faith in me, haven’t you?’

George drove as far as the nearest telephone box that worked, and made two calls, the first being to Barnes, who was standing by for orders, the second to the ward sister in the Comerbourne General Hospital. He was lucky; the night sister on duty was an old friend, and though she was slightly disapproving, she knew him well enough to consent to bend her conscience very delicately to oblige him.

Then he went home to bed.

Barnes let himself in gently by the back door when the house was in complete darkness and silence, eased the catch into place after him without a sound, and made himself reasonably comfortable inside the wardrobe that opened out of Gus’s bedroom. Not too comfortable, for fear of drowsiness. He left the door unlatched, but only a hairline open, to admit sound or light should there be either, and adjusted his own line of vision to cover any approach to the bed where the patient still slept, not so much peacefully as rapturously.

He spent a disappointing, even a puzzling night. Nothing whatever was heard or seen to break the serenity. Nothing whatever happened.

Lesley arose very early, to catch the night sister before she handed over duty. She was allowed to ring through to the ward instead of merely making routine enquiries through the office, the case being new and this the first and crucial call.

‘Mr Paviour is still unconscious,’ said the ward sister, in the carefully bracing voice of one trying to make dismal news sound better than it is, ‘but I wouldn’t say he’s lost ground at all. His breathing is very slightly easier, perhaps, but of course he’s very weak. I’m afraid his condition must have been developing for some time without producing warning symptoms. The degeneration is marked. But there’s no need to be too discouraged.’

‘You mean he isn’t really any better?’ said Lesley, irritated and demanding. Why must nurses say so much and mean so little?

‘Well… his condition is much the same. I wouldn’t say he’s
worse
…’

That did convey something, more than it said.

‘Do you think…’ Lesley hesitated. ‘Should I visit this afternoon? If he’s unconscious, it can’t help him…’

‘Well, I don’t think he’s going to
know
you, of course… I’m afraid he probably won’t have regained consciousness. But don’t feel discouraged from coming on that account. I think that you’ll be glad to feel that you did everything possible… In fact, you could arrange to visit briefly at any time that’s convenient to you, if you ask at the office. In the circumstances…’

‘Thank you,’ said Lesley, in a small, thoughtful voice, and put down the receiver in its rest.

There was no point now in going back to bed. The morning was bright, clear and still. From the window she could see the river glittering in the first slanting light, like frost-fire. She went down and made coffee, and sat over it for a long time, staring out at the dawn, and going over the telephone conversation word by word, sorting out the grain from the chaff. ‘In the circumstances…’ Visiting hours at the General were generous but fixed; the circumstances that permitted visiting at any time did not need spelling out. But the sister could be wrong, even doctors can be wrong. People confidently expected to die did sometimes turn their backs on probability and decide to come back again, against all the odds. Still… ward sisters are very experienced in the prognostication of death. Especially night sisters.

She heard one of her guests stirring overhead in the bathroom, and got up to make fresh coffee and prepare the breakfast. She was busy laying the table, here in the bright, cheerful kitchen instead of the sombre dining-room, when Charlotte came in.

‘I’m sorry, I meant to be up before you and start the breakfast, and now you’ve done everything. I hope you managed to get some sleep?’

‘I slept extraordinarily well,’ said Lesley, and meant it. ‘I don’t know how it is. Trust in providence, or what? But I did.’

‘You haven’t called the hospital yet?’

‘I have. I wanted the sister who really knew something, rather than one who’d just come on. She was the one I saw last night, she promised me she’d be standing by for a call from me. His condition is unchanged,’ she said, answering Charlotte’s unasked question. ‘No better. And she insists, no worse. But I’m not sure the lady doesn’t protest too much.’

‘I’m sorry!’ said Charlotte, reading the look more attentively than the words.

‘Darling, I married a man nearly forty years older than I am. I’ve lived all the while with the obvious knowledge that I certainly was going to survive him, probably by many years. All I hope is that I haven’t always been awful to him, and he really did get something out of it. While it lasted. It could hardly last all that long, could it? I was grateful, I was contented and happy, and I hope I made all that clear. In love,’ she said firmly, ‘I never was. Not with him. I don’t feel that that was any failure on my part, I never promised it.’

‘I don’t feel it was, either,’ agreed Charlotte, reassured. ‘Where do you keep the marmalade?’

They finished the cooking together, just in time for Bill Lawrence’s entrance. He was used to breakfasting in pyjamas, unshaven, on the corner of his desk; it did him good to have to face two young women over the breakfast-table. He was scrubbed and immaculate this morning, like the sky, almost arrogantly clean and pure. We must, thought Charlotte, be one of the oddest trios sitting down to coffee in England this morning. How did any of us get here, in Stephen Paviour’s house, in this tragic palimpsest of a city without people? And yet everything felt improbably normal and ordinary, like the extraordinary encountered in a dream.

‘You didn’t look in on Gus?’ asked Lesley, looking up at Bill.

‘I did, as a matter of fact. I thought maybe I should check. He’s still asleep. I’d even say he’s snoring now. I hope that’s a good sign. I went up to the bed, but he never stirred, so I left him to it. He’ll probably sleep until noon.’

It was at that exact moment that the sound exploded above them, somewhere upstairs, remote at the back of the house. A distant, peremptory, wordless bellow of alarm and conflict, curiously like an antique battle-cry. And then a confused thudding and heaving of bodies braced in mute struggle, frightening out of all proportion to its loudness.

They rose as one, strained upright and motionless for the fraction of a second. Then they raced for the doorway, Charlotte first because she had been quivering on the receptive for just such a signal, not only here in the kitchen, but half the night before. They streamed out into the hall and up the stairs in frantic silence.

It was almost over by the time they burst into the rear bedroom where Gus Hambro had been sleeping. Charlotte flung open the door and stood transfixed, a mere witness, with the others brought up short against her braced shoulders.

The sash window stood wide open, the lower half hoisted to its full extent. The top of a ladder projected above the sill; one man was in the act of leaping into the room, a second head loomed just within view behind him. On the bed a large body crouched froglike, leaning with thrusting forearms over an incongruous orange-coloured cushion, which had missed planting itself squarely over Gus Hambro’s sleeping face only because, in fact, he had not been sleeping for an hour or more previously, and had hoisted a sharp knee into his aggressor’s groin and rolled violently to the right at the moment of impact. He heaved and strained still at this moment, but he was too light a weight to shift that crushing incubus, though nose and mouth were safe from suffocation. It was Detective-Constable Barnes, circling behind him for the right hold, who hooked a steely forearm under the murderer’s chin, and hoisted him backwards off his prey with a heave that could well have broken even that bull neck.

The assailant crashed heavily against the wall, and gathered himself as vehemently to battle again; and Barnes and George Felse, one on either side, pinned his arms and wrestled the lunging wrists into handcuffs behind him. He heaved himself to his feet only to find himself bereft of hands. The cushion lay under the chair from which he had lifted it, beside the window; and Constable Collins, climbing in too late to be of more vital assistance, replaced it automatically, and patted it into shape against the wicker back.

‘Orlando Benyon,’ said George, running rather tiredly through the familiar formula, ‘I arrest you on a charge of the attempted murder of Augustus Hambro, and I caution you that you are not obliged to make any statement unless you wish, but that anything you do say will be taken down in writing, and may be used in evidence.’

Interrogating Orrie Benyon was a more or less impossible undertaking from the first, because silence was his natural state, and his recoil into it entailed no effort. He was far from unintelligent, or illiterate, or even inarticulate, for he could express himself fluently enough when he found it expedient, but it was in speaking that the labour consisted for him, not in being silent. Here, finding himself already charged with an offence that could hardly be denied, with so many eye-witnesses, but might very well be whittled away to a lesser charge which he could embrace without more than a shrug, with everything to gain and nothing to lose by keeping his mouth shut, he did what all his nature and manner of life urged, closed it implacably, and kept it closed.

They brought him down into the small study, and cautiously let him out of his handcuffs, for he had ceased to struggle or threaten, and had too much sense to try against a small army what had failed in more promising circumstances. It was too late now, in any case, to kill Gus Hambro. That charge he would have to ride; other and worse he might still fend off by saying nothing. And while George put mild, persuasive questions, argued the commonsense course of admitting what could not be denied, wound about him tirelessly with soft, reasonable assumptions and invited him to confirm one by denying another, nothing was exactly what Orrie said. From the moment that he had been overpowered in the bedroom, he did not unclamp his lips.

‘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.’