Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (20 page)

Orrie’s eyes swivelled again, silently signalling his awareness of every move for and against him, and still reserving his own defence in this defenceless position.

Lesley sat back with a sharp, defeated sigh, seeming for a moment to have relinquished a field that was out of her control. She pondered for a moment in depressed silence, and then suddenly her slight body arched and stiffened, like a cat sighting a quarry or a foe. She seemed to be in two minds whether to speak or hold her peace. Her rounded eyelids, delicately veined like alabaster, rolled back from an emerald stare.

‘Chief Inspector, a day or so ago you said there must be an expert involved. I didn’t believe in it then, now I begin to see what you mean. You even mentioned a name—Doctor Morris. He was here just before he went abroad for this Turkish year of his. He brought the text of his book about this place. We were just about closing up the small dig we had that autumn, it was October already, but it had been a good season. And you know something? I’d never known Doctor Morris to speak disparagingly of Aurae Phiala until then, never. And yet he went away from here, and spent three weeks on that text in Turkey before he posted it to the publishers. And you know what the finished book is like. Deliberately playing down this site! I can’t call it anything but deliberate. Why?
Why
? There has to be a reason! And that dig—it never produced much—not to our knowledge, that is!—it was still open when he was here. Bill will tell you. He visited then, he knows. Wouldn’t it account for everything, if Alan Morris stumbled on a really rich discovery while he was here, and kept it dark? If he was tempted, if he moved his finds, put them in a secret place, and left them hidden until he could get them away? He went straight from here to Turkey. And Charlotte tells me nobody’s heard from him since.’

She looked at Gus, who was watching her with a guarded face. ‘It’s your case, you know more about this than I do. If you’ve been working in contact with all these other countries, and thinking on these lines—I mean about the need for an expert to run the show—then I can’t believe that you’ve never matched up these times, and considered the possibility of a connection between Doctor Morris’s exit from England and the beginning of these deals in Roman valuables. I say considered the possibility, that’s all.’

‘The police of several countries have made the connection,’ said Gus drily. ‘They could hardly avoid it.’ He carefully refrained from looking at Charlotte.

‘Then you didn’t come here just to look at one of several places that might have been looted—you came here because the connection with Doctor Morris made this the most probable. And you weren’t likely to lose interest and go away again,’ she added, ‘when you ran head-on into Charlotte on the premises, and found out who she was.’

This time Gus did look at Charlotte, fleetingly and rather apprehensively, and even at this crisis he had not lost his engaging ability to produce a blush at will.

‘But will someone tell me,’ said Charlotte, ignoring the phenomenon, ‘why, if my great-uncle found a valuable hoard here and kept his mouth shut about it, he didn’t simply pack the lot up and take it abroad with him then?’

‘It wouldn’t be a practical proposition,’ said Gus simply. ‘He was booked by air, which means a limit on weight, and too much excess baggage might arouse curiosity. Also some of the things—if there were others like the helmet, for instance—might be quite bulky and very fragile, and need careful transportation. But mostly just plain caution. Someone who knew the ropes would also know the risks. He wouldn’t try to smuggle out too much in one go. I don’t doubt some of the most precious and most portable things were taken out straight away and disposed of. The rest, we think, were taken from wherever they were found, and hidden in the broken flue of the hypocaust, which seems to have been completely concealed then by the clump of broom bushes. The art of hiding something is to do it decisively, and then go about your business without ever glancing in that direction, as if it wasn’t there. The cache was safe enough until the river rose and brought the bank down.’

‘There’s still another question,’ Charlotte pursued. ‘Being an expert on antiquities come by honestly isn’t the same thing as being expert in disposing of them dishonestly. Would my uncle have had the first idea how to set about it?’

‘One evening while he was staying here,’ said Lesley, ‘we were talking about the shady side of the business. About cases he’d known, and how people went about getting rid of rather specialist stolen property. It was the evening you were here, Bill, do you remember?’

‘I do,’ said Bill unhappily, from the corner where he had sat silent all this time. ‘He seemed to know a good deal about it, he went into a lot of detail. Even names. I didn’t think anything about it then, after all it was interesting, and we were all asking him questions.’

Charlotte looked enquiringly at Gus, and waited.

‘I’m afraid he did know,’ said Gus regretfully. ‘He acted as consultant for us occasionally, and he probably picked up a good deal about the top fences in the business. The problem collectors he knew already. And then, you see, he had the top-weight to work the racket in a big way, as an amateur couldn’t do. His name and reputation would count for as much underground as in the daylight. Collectors would take his word and pay his price.’

‘Well, all right!’ She had a curious feeling that she ought to be experiencing and showing more indignation, that it was all part of some devious and elaborate charade, of which she understood something, but not enough. She had probably made one mistake in timing already, with that key. Writing her part as she went along was not so easy. But at least her voice had the right edge of irritation and challenge. ‘But all you’re describing is an absent master-mind in voluntary exile—or sanctuary—somewhere in Turkey. Whoever prowled about the riverside all day on thorns, waiting for everybody to go home and night to fall, so that he could salvage his last instalment of gold, whoever found that poor, silly boy rifling his cache, and killed him and hid his body until night, it certainly wasn’t Great-Uncle Alan by remote control from Aphrodisias.
If
he’s at the bottom of this affair, then he had an agent here on the spot to keep an eye on the place and feed the remaining stuff out to him gradually—either to him, or wherever he directed. Somebody well-paid and unscrupulous, and once recruited, in for good. They
had
to trust each other, either one of them could destroy the other. So even the assistant was deep enough in to have to kill the boy who blundered into the secret, and try to kill the detective who was getting too close to the truth. Well, at least we all know who made that last murderous attack on Mr Hambro. Do we therefore know who this local agent was? Is that what you’re saying?’

There was a brief, expectant silence, in which everyone looked at Orrie; but he maintained his silence as though nothing that had been said bore any reference to him. However delicate your fingering, it’s difficult to find a sensitive spot in a being who has no nerves.

‘Yes,’ said Lesley, slowly and clearly, ‘we do know. At least,
I
know.’

She had their attention at once, but more, she had Orrie’s. For the first time he turned his whole body, and fixed the sharpening stare of his blue eyes on her, and though the crudely splendid lines of his face never quivered, it was plainly a live human creature who peered through the slits of the mask. She looked back at him for a long moment, steadily and squarely, and it was as if her look was a reflection of his, for her face, too, was motionless and tranquil in its bright purity, but her eyes were alert, uneasy and agitated.

‘There’s something that happened just over a month ago.’ She turned to face George, and addressed herself resolutely to him throughout. ‘I never wondered much about it then, I had no reason to, and until now I’d forgotten it. But I can’t tell you about it without telling you how I came to be… where it happened… where I saw it. And if this case is going to come to court, ever,’ she said, clasping her hands tightly on her knee, ‘this would have to come out in evidence. I can’t even ask you to keep it in confidence.’

‘I can’t promise anything,’ said George. ‘It may not be necessary to make anything public that would hurt or embarrass you, but I can promise nothing.’

‘I know. I’m not asking you to. It’s Stephen who would be hurt, and
he
doesn’t deserve it.’ And after a deeply-drawn breath she said, clearly and steadily: ‘I’ve been Orrie’s mistress for eighteen months. I was actually in love with him. There wasn’t anything he could have asked of me that I wouldn’t have done for him. It was like a disease that turns you blind. I never saw, even for a moment, that he was making a convenience of me, using me as cover while he bled all that gold and treasure out of Aurae Phiala. I didn’t believe it even when you charged him. Now I know it’s true.’

Even then, it was not the bonds of silence that Orrie Benyon broke. They had all been watching Lesley in such fascination that for an instant no one was watching him. It was like the almost silent explosion of a leopard out of its cover, so sudden and so violent that his great hands were not an inch from her throat when Barnes and Collins pinioned both arms and dragged him off, and even then the blunt nails of his left hand drew a thin red thread down the creamy smoothness of her neck, and a drop of blood gathered and spread in the roll collar of her white sweater. But the most impressive thing was that Lesley never shrank or blinked, only turned a blazing, defiant face and stared him out at close quarters until he was hauled off her and thrust back into his chair. She did not even lift a hand to touch the scratch. There was something superb about her confidence that they would not let him harm her.

Then she sat silent, still fronting him unflinchingly, while he broke his silence at last for want of being able to express himself with his hands, which were always more fluent. Wide-eyed, long-suffering, with all the distaste she felt for him and for her own infatuation in her set face, she listened to the names he found for her, and never tried to stem the flood. Neither did anyone else. It would have been useless. He had been containing it in doubt and patience for so long that no banks could have held it now it was loose.

‘Damn you to hell for a lying, swindling whore! Don’t listen to her, she’s lying, she’s nothing but lies right through. Ditch me now, would you, like you ditched him after he’d served your turn? Drop the whole load on me to carry, and you stroll out of it as pure as a lily, you dirty, cheating devil! But it isn’t going to work! Not with me! Deeper than the sea, I tell you, this bitch—look at her, with her saint’s face! And
she
began it,
she
called the tune—not only about the bloody gold, but the sex kick, too. You think she ever wanted that old man of hers, except for cover and an easy meal-ticket? Winding herself round him with that tale about being let down, and her life ruined—poor bloody misused innocent, needing his pity! But she didn’t want any of
his
bed, bargain or no. Kidded him she was a sex-nut-case, a virgin nympho who couldn’t stand being mauled but couldn’t help asking for it! But it didn’t take her long to pick up the clues with a real man, I tell you! With me she was all nympho! You wouldn’t credit all the games that one knows. You think she intended to stick it out here with that old fool for life? Not a chance! We were going to clear up the lot, and then take the money and get out together—the cheating sow,
I thought we were
!—No hurry, we’d got our ways of passing the time while we waited. Every time her old man’s back was turned—in her bed and mine, in the shed, in the orchard, down in the hollow where the bloody Roman jakes was, and that was hell on them stones, but she liked it to be hell sometimes, she’d think up ways to make it hell, ways you’d never dream of. Nails, teeth and all, she knows the lot! Six more weeks, and we’d have been ready for off, somewhere safe and soft for life. And then that bloody river had to come up and start the damned bank slipping…!’

His voice, even in murderous rage, was a deep, melodious thunder, the singing western cadences like a furious wind in strings. Although no one was holding him now, he heaved and strained against his own grip on the arms of the chair, as though he were chained. ‘I’ll fix her, though! I’m going to make a statement that’ll see her off, the dirty, cheating bitch, the way she’s trying to see me. There’s nothing in her but lies, and lies, and lies. You can’t twist fast enough to have her. You can only kill her! I
will
kill her! I’ll…’

The pealing thunder snapped off into abrupt silence. He shut his mouth with a snap, biting off words too dangerous to utter. For he was charged only with the attempt as yet, not the achievement.

‘You shall have your chance to make a statement, all in good time,’ said George, to all appearances unstartled and unmoved. ‘Go on, Mrs Paviour. Say what you were going to say.’ She would not be interrupted again; Orrie had made his point and could bide his time.

‘I realise,’ said Lesley quietly, ‘that it’s my word against his. I realise that my recoil from him now makes him want to drag me down as low as he can. I can only tell the truth. I never knew anything about any thefts from the site, but I do admit the affair with him. I wish I needn’t. It wasn’t even a happiness while it lasted—not for long. My own fault! Yes, I was going to tell you… We did meet in his cottage sometimes. That was what I had to explain, how I came to be there in his bedroom.’ She took a moment to breathe; she was quite calm, even relaxed, perhaps in resignation now that the worst was over. ‘The last time was about a month ago. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was in the last few days of March. He had a letter with a foreign stamp on the table by the bed, and I was surprised, and picked it up to look at the stamp, out of curiosity. I didn’t know he knew anyone abroad. It was a Turkish stamp, and the postmark was the twentieth of March. When he saw me looking at it he took it out of my hand and dropped it into a drawer. But afterwards I kept thinking I knew the handwriting, and couldn’t place it. It was addressed in English style, the lay-out and the hand. I had the feeling that it was familiar in some special way, that some time or other I’d copy-typed from a hand like that. I had. I know now. I happened to turn out some notes I typed up for him while he was staying here. It was Doctor Morris’s handwriting.’