Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (21 page)

‘She lies!’ said Orrie, shortly and splendidly, without weakening emphasis. ‘There never was any such letter.’

‘A month ago?’ said George sharply. ‘Dated the twentieth of March? You’re sure it wasn’t old? From a previous year?’

‘Quite sure. The date was plain. It was March of this year.’

‘Then about six weeks ago Doctor Morris was unquestionably alive and well, and still in Turkey?’

‘He must have been. He addressed that envelope, I’m certain of that.’

‘Where in Turkey? Could you read the postmark? Was there anything to give you a clue to where he could be found now?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t remember anything more. It was the date I noticed—’ She turned and looked full at Orrie. ‘But
he
can tell you. He must know where Doctor Morris is. He’s always known.’

The briefest of glances passed between George Felse and Gus Hambro; and Gus, who had been silent during all these last exchanges, said suddenly, briskly and forcibly:

‘I doubt if he does.
But we do
. We know exactly where Doctor Morris is. He’s down in the flues of the hypocaust, luggage, briefcase, typewriter and all, and he’s been there ever since he left your house to catch his plane, nineteen months ago.’

She had had no warning, none at all; for once her sixth sense had failed her. She came out of her chair with a thin, angry sound, quivering like a plucked bow-string, torn between panic acceptance and the lightning reassertion of her terrible intelligence; and in the instant while the two clashed, she shrieked at him: ‘You’re lying! You can’t have been near where we put hi…’

The aspirate hissed and died on her lip, and that was all, but it was fierce and clear, and just two words too many. She stood rigid, chilled into ice.

‘He wasn’t on the direct route, no,’ agreed Gus softly, ‘but my route was a good deal less than direct. There’s hardly a yard of flue passable in that hypocaust where I haven’t been. Including the near corner where —“
we
”— put him. I left your bronze helmet with him for safekeeping. As soon as you’re in custody we’re going to set about resurrecting them both.’

The deafening silence was shattered suddenly by a great, gusty, vengeful sound, and that was Orrie Benyon laughing. And in a moment, melting, surrendering, genuinely and terrifyingly amused by her own lapse, Lesley Paviour dropped back into her chair and laughed with him, exactly like a sporting loser in a trivial quizz-game.

She laughed again, when she was alone with George in his office at C.I.D. headquarters in Comerbourne, with no shorthand writer at hand and no witnesses, and he asked her, with genuine and unindignant curiosity—since indignation was quite irrelevant in any dealings with Lesley—: ‘Do you always contrive to have not merely one fall guy on hand in case of need, but at least two? And doesn’t it sometimes make things risky when you decide to change horses in midstream?’

‘I never plan,’ she said with disarming candour, ‘not consciously. I just do what seems the clever thing at the moment.’

All too often, he reflected, it not only seemed clever, but was. She had matched every twist until the last, the one she hadn’t foreseen even as a possibility. For some built-in instinct certainly acted to provide her with escape hatches and can-carriers well in advance of need. Why, otherwise, had she gone out of her way to let Charlotte not only see but handle the package still waiting to be reclaimed from the bank? And to tell her guilelessly that it was Orrie’s, and not the first time he had put similar small items into safe-keeping? Thus underlining for future reference his involvement and her own naïve innocence. She had even scattered a few seeds, according to Charlotte, concerning Bill Lawrence’s solitary and furtive prowlings about the site, in case she should ever need yet another string to her bow. Lesley collected potentially useful people, and used and disposed of them like tissues, without a qualm.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘it was so clever to write off Orrie. I wonder at what stage you made up your mind to throw him to the lions? You did allow him the chance to drive you back from the hospital last night. Hadn’t you decided then? He’d been waiting on hot coals for a chance to talk to you alone. He wanted you to do your share, didn’t he? You were in the house, it was your turn to do the necessary killing. Even a delicate little woman could press a cushion over the face of a man fast asleep under drugs after an exhausting ordeal. But you never intended sticking your neck out for him. Why didn’t you tell him so? Obviously you didn’t, or he wouldn’t have left his own attempt so late. He waited all night, hoping you’d do the job for him. And I don’t doubt you slept soundly.’

‘Never better,’ she said.

‘Was it more fun letting him sweat? Was it just to make sure he
would
mistime it and be caught? Or were you afraid you wouldn’t get back alive from the hospital with him if you pushed him too far?’

‘I’m never afraid,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I don’t drive through red lights, but I’m not afraid.’ He believed that, too.

‘And of course,’ he said, ‘it was only going to be your word against his, since your husband was going to die. And if you were winding up the operation and getting out with the proceeds, Orrie was going to be a liability as well as an expense, wasn’t he? But what would you have done if he’d refused to put his neck in the noose, and decided to take a chance on Gus, and sit it out?’

‘I’d have thought of something,’ said Lesley confidently.

‘In the end even you had to make one slip.’

‘I shan’t make another. I knew your thumbs were pricking about me,’ she said without animosity, ‘when you encouraged me to do poor old Stephen out of his alibi for the night. I could hardly do that without pointing out that I hadn’t got one myself, could I? But even now, what are you going to charge me with?’

‘Concealing a death will do to begin with.’

Lesley laughed aloud. ‘You’ll never make even that one stick. Not without Stephen’s evidence, and you’re going to have to go rather a long way to get that, aren’t you?’

‘Just as far,’ said George, ‘as the General. It’s a mistake to be too clever at reading between the lines. Neither Doctor Braby nor Sister Bruce told you any lies, they just didn’t tell you the whole truth. Sister told you repeatedly he wasn’t any worse. She didn’t say he wasn’t any better. He is, very much. Digitalisation is taking effect excellently. He’s out of danger.’

‘But she told me,’ said Lesley, genuinely indignant at such duplicity, ‘that he was dying!’

‘She did nothing of the sort. She told you simply that you could visit any time, even out of visiting hours. What you read into that is your worry. So you can visit, if you’d like to—under escort, of course.’

She made a small, bitter kitten-face, wrinkling her nose. The jolt was shrugged off in a moment; she adapted to this as nimbly as she did to everything. ‘Thanks, but in the circumstances perhaps it wouldn’t be tactful. It certainly wouldn’t be amusing. But even if you do get to talk to him,’ she said, strongly recovering, ‘he won’t say a word against me, you know.’

‘You may,’ said George, rising, ‘find you’ve over-estimated even his tolerance. How will you get round it then?’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Lesley.

It was two days before Stephen Paviour was sufficiently recovered to be visited briefly in hospital, and even then George put off what he really had to tell and ask him for two days more, and consulted his doctors before taking the risk of administering a new shock. By Thursday evening his condition was so far satisfactory as to allow the interview.

In all his life of half-fulfilment, of disappointments and deprivations, of loving without being loved, he had perhaps become accustomed to the fact that no one ever came to break good news. It was better to hear the whole story at once than to put it off, since his forebodings were almost always worse than the reality. And with long experience he had acquired a degree of durability against which even this might break itself and leave him unbroken. All the same, George approached the telling very gently and very simply. Flourishes would only have made sympathy intolerable.

Paviour lay and listened without exclamation or protest. There was offence and pain in it for him, but beneath the surface there was no surprise. When it was over he lay and digested it for a minute or two, and strangely he seemed to lie more easily and breathe more deeply, as though a tension and a load had been lifted from him.

‘They both admit this? It’s been going on—how long?’

‘Since before Doctor Morris’s visit. Perhaps two years. Perhaps even more.’

‘I was rejected,’ he said slowly. ‘I had to respect her morbid sensitivity, and cherish her all the same, and I did it. That I could bear. And all the time she was wallowing with that beautiful draught-horse, that piece of border earth. While she fended me off with those elaborate lies, because I was too dull, too civilised, too old to serve her turn.’ He thought for a moment, and there was colour in his grey face, and a spark in his normally haggard and anxious eyes. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘exactly what happened, though I see now that it was not what happened at all, since there’s no truth in her. This propensity of hers—to provoke men and then recoil from them—this feigned propensity… She used it on Alan Morris, too. You know he was a ladies’ man? But a gentleman, and experienced enough to be able to deal with her. I was not worried at all.’

It was a bad moment to interrupt, but George had thought of one thing he needed to ask. ‘Do you remember one evening during his visit, when young Lawrence came to dinner? Was there a conversation then about the criminal side of the archaeological interest? About how to market stolen antiques?’

Paviour looked faintly surprised, but the intervention did him good by diverting his own too fixed bitterness.

‘I do remember it. I couldn’t understand then why she should be so interested in such things. I understand now. She was picking his brains. I took it simply as her way of engaging his attention. I’m sure it was she who began the discussion.’

She had, George thought, such a housewifely sense of economy. She never threw away a solitary detail that might some day, suitably perverted, turn out to be useful.

‘I’m sorry, I put you off. Please go on.’

‘The last night of Morris’s stay I had a lecture in the village, one of a series the county education office was putting on. When I came back I found Lesley sitting on the steps of the garden-room, in a hysterical condition. She was wet and cold and crying.’

No doubt, thought George, she can cry at will. God help the jury that has to deal with her!

‘She said, ’went on Paviour in a level, low voice, drawing up the words out of a well of anguish, ‘that she had gone out for a walk with Alan by the river, and he had attacked and tried to rape her. And she had fought him off and pushed him into the Comer. It was credible, you understand, I had experience of the violence of her revulsion. She was very convincing in my case! And I loved her, and let her be. With someone who didn’t understand—yes, there could be a tragedy. I didn’t question it. She said she had got him out, but he was dead. She swims very well, you know, she was born by the river. I coaxed her to take me where he was. He was dead. There was no mistake. I knew—
then
, of course!—that exposure of such an affair, however accidental it might be, however innocent she might be, would destroy her totally. Her balance was already so precarious, you see. So I hid his body in the hypocaust. We were in process of closing the small dig we’d managed to finance that year, at the corner of the caldarium. It was pitifully small, and we got almost nothing from it. But it did afford a grave. I did it all myself, by night. I’d kept back his typewriter, and all his documents, and a suit of his that fitted me best. There was nothing to be done but take his place, his flight was booked, and it would account for his leaving. We were much the same build, and of course the same age. That goes a long way towards making a passport photograph acceptable, unless the officers have reason to suspect something, and they had none. I had to shave off my beard, but he wore a moustache, that was a help. He was not really very like me in the face, but the same general type, I suppose. And I was wearing his clothes, his hat, his glasses. It worked quite smoothly. We’d talked about his plans, I knew what was needed. And if I’d forgotten anything, I realise now, she would have prompted me. She did prompt me, many times. I took up his air reservation, his hotel reservation in Istanbul. And I worked over his text there, on his typewriter, and made sure that the manuscript he sent to his publishers on Aurae Phiala should put off all enquirers thereafter. It had to. There must never be a full-scale dig here, never.’

‘The purpose was not, in fact, to conceal any valuable find,’ said George. ‘Just a body.’

‘I never knew of any valuable find until now. No… I was hiding poor Morris. It wasn’t a grave he would have rejected, you know.’

‘We’ve found him,’ said George. ‘The pathologists may still be able to tell us how he died. I very much doubt if it was by drowning. I should guess he walked slap into one of their meetings, and found out what they were doing. In the circumstances, I doubt if he’d hold anything against you.’

‘I hope you’re right. I always envied him, but we were good friends. After I’d posted his book—yes, that he
would
hold against me, wouldn’t he? That must be put right!—I telephoned his friend at Aphrodisias, and apologised for a change of plans, and paid my bill and went to the railway station. I changed to my own clothes in the baths there, and then flew home on my own passport. We’d left the last segment of the hypocaust open on purpose. I put all his other effects underground with him, and covered him in again with my own hands. It was not easy. None of it was easy.’

Very gently and reasonably George asked: ‘Will you, if the issues we have in hand come to trial, testify against your wife? I promise you shall be fully informed of the weight of evidence against her with regard to any charges we prefer.’

‘I’ll testify to the truth, as far as I know it,’ said Paviour, ‘whether it destroys her or no. I realise that I myself am open to certain charges, graver charges than I understood at the time. Don’t hesitate to make them. I have a debt, too. I made her possible.’

‘No wonder the poor soul nearly dropped dead with shock when you came heaving out of the earth,’ said George, two days later, in a corner of the bar at ‘The Salmon’s Return’, with a pint in front of him, and Charlotte and Gus tucked comfortably into the settle opposite him. ‘He took you for his own dead man rising. You’d hardly credit the difference in him now it’s all over, now he doesn’t have to live with his solitary nightmare, and there’s no hope and no horror from her any more. The tension’s snapped. Either he’ll collapse altogether for want of the frictions that have kept him on edge, or else he’ll look round and rediscover an ordinary world, and start living again. Just now I’d say all the odds are in favour of the second, thank God!’

‘Do you think he’ll really testify against her?’ Charlotte wondered. ‘He may feel bitter against her now, but what about when it comes to the point?’

‘He’ll testify,’ said George with certainty. ‘You can’t love anyone that much, and be betrayed as callously as that, and not find out how to hate every bit as fiercely. Not that we know yet who did kill Doctor Morris. If those two decide to talk, of course,
she’ll
say
he
did it, and forced her to trick her husband into covering up for him. What he’ll say I wouldn’t bet on, except that it’s more likely to be true than anything we get out of Lesley.’

‘Who do
you
think actually did it?’ asked Gus.

‘Ordinarily she was the teller and he was the doer. But supposing Doctor Morris really did drown, in this case she may very well have done it herself. If he started taking a suspicious interest because of all her leading questions,
she’s
the one he’d be watching and following. There’s a skull fracture, not enough to have killed him, probably, but it does bring Orrie into the picture. We may get a conviction for murder against both, but at least we can fix her as an accessory. Paviour will see to that.’

‘Did you know when you set your trap,’ asked Charlotte, ‘that it was Orrie you were setting it for?’

‘It wasn’t for him,’ said George simply. ‘It was for
her
. I had a queer hunch about her, even before Gus came round and told me what he could. Two people were involved. And the cast wasn’t all that big, even if I did make soothing noises about the village and the fishermen not being ruled out. And all of them male but Mrs Paviour, and all, somehow, so accurately deployed all round her, like pawns round a queen. If Gus was being stage-managed out of the world, who was more likely to be the stage-manager, the one who initiated that scene in the night, or the one who interrupted it? And if she had an accomplice, who was it likely to be but a lover? I did toy with the idea of young Lawrence. He was obviously jealous, though that could be regarded as evidence either for or against. And the Vespa was his, but his consternation when he heard about it being used rang true. And then, which of them was Lesley more likely to choose? The nice, dull, civilised scholar, her husband in embryo? Not on your life! So I was betting on Orrie, yes, but I didn’t
know
! I was beginning to feel we might make a respectable case against him for Gerry Boden, though it would be mostly circumstantial. The boy had inhaled fibres from a thick, felted woollen fabric. I hope we’ll be able to identify them as coming from Orrie’s old donkey-jacket. His brand of wood-dust, fertiliser and vegetable debris should be pretty unique. And so’s he, in his way. He must have slipped back from the vicarage garden as soon as it began to get dusk, caught the boy grubbing in the hypocaust, killed him and hid his body until it should be dark enough to get it down to the water, collected his aurei, and gone calmly back to his work. He almost certainly had the gold pieces in his pocket when Price called on him at home around nine o’clock to ask about Gerry’s disappearance. And even after that he was cool enough to call in at “The Crown” before he went back to Aurae Phiala to send the body down the river. Not a nerve anywhere in him.’