Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (12 page)

For all his gentle person and distracted ways, there was a hungry gleam in his eye at the thought, a spark of real and possibly lawless passion. Unworldly scholars, as well as sharp antique-dealers, may develop unscrupulous lusts after such treasure as mediaeval manuscripts.

‘No such luck, it seems to have vanished. But thanks for filling in one gap. You didn’t think of volunteering the information as soon as the news of his death went round?’

By this time they were sauntering down the garden path to the gate together, and Evan Joyce turned a sharp glance along his shoulder at the question. ‘Why, you don’t think there could be any significance in this, do you? It never occurred to me. Nothing further had happened about it, and I never gave it a thought.’

Which could well be true, and yet was somehow not entirely convincing.

‘No, I suppose you might not,’ agreed George absently, his eyes on the uneven path before them, paved long ago, and bedded down into irregular hollows. Evan Joyce trod it lightly and surely. Small feet he had, encased in surprisingly capacious shoes, old, loose, trodden down, bulging at the big-toe joint, and showing a pattern of faint cracks in their leather uppers. The shoes of an ageing man who liked his comfort, and cared very little about his appearance, and kept old shoes until they warped past the point of comfort. He had been out here putting in fresh bedding plants round some of the rose-beds when George arrived, the soil was dark and damp where he had watered them in. George halted to admire.

‘Some fine roses you’ve still got.’

‘Trimming the dead ones off regularly is the secret,’ said Joyce heartily. ‘I usually have one or two at Christmas.’

‘That’s a beautiful yellow McGredy. I never seem to get them as perfect as that,’ said George guilefully. The bush was well into the bed, beyond the moist band of soil, and Evan Joyce was a small man. And innocent! It was a shame to trick him.

‘Would you like a buttonhole?’ He hopped gaily over his newly bedded border, and planted his left foot firmly in the darkened soil to clip off the rose; and by sheer luck he turned on his right foot to step back to the path, and left a fine, clear imprint behind him. The right size, with the suggestion of the smaller foot inside, the right tread, down at the outer rim of the heel, unevenly weighted, with a distinct crack at the remembered angle across the sole. George stood gazing at it so steadily and with such intent that his companion, who was proffering the rose in silence, could not choose but follow the fixed gaze and contemplate his own left footprint with the same concentration. He was very astute, things did not have to be laboured for him.

‘You seem,’ he said mildly, and with no particular anxiety, ‘to have seen that before?’

‘I ought to apologise,’ admitted George, ‘for getting a rose on false pretences, though it’s every bit as fine as I said it was, and I’ll accept it gladly if you still feel inclined to part with it. But the fact is, yes, I have seen the print of your left foot before, in this same shoe.’

‘Hardly ever wears any others,’ said Evan cheerfully, ‘and never to walk far. One’s feet do take over at my age, and demand their own way. I have a feeling we might as well go back in, and begin again.’

‘You are not only psychic,’ said George gratefully, ‘but remarkably generous. I do hope you’re not a murderer?’

‘With my physique? I should need firearms, and firearms would frighten me to death before I ever got near firing them. Come on, I’ll make some coffee. If my conscience had been clear, in any case, I should have been at church, but Rainbow was haunting me. I grudged him my choir, you know, not to mention the organ. I don’t claim the idea of murder is so far out of court. But I dream, I don’t do. Everybody around here knows that.’ He sounded regretful, and possibly he really was.

Inside again, across the immense desk and over mugs of strong black coffee, they eyed each other with mutual respect, almost affection. Two ageing men, thought George, though he was at least fifteen years behind Evan Joyce, and both with feet that give trouble at times, and have imposed their own pattern on living.

‘And on staircases,’ said Evan, ‘I do tend to tread well to the outside, spreading the load and the balance. Maybe that was why you got such a good impression. If you want to borrow my left shoe, please do return it as soon as possible, it takes me years now to break a pair in. I can’t think why a sedentary worker should put such a strain on his hooves, but there it is.’

‘I don’t think we need deprive you at all,’ said George, ‘provided you tell me what your shoe was doing up the church tower on Thursday night.’

‘I’ll tell you the whole thing,’ agreed Evan sunnily, sipping his coffee. ‘I can’t think why I didn’t do it right away, because I can hardly have been afraid to. It may have been local solidarity. You understand about that. Or it may, regrettably, have been pure laziness. I’m a martyr to laziness.’

‘That,’ said George ruefully, ‘is a kind of martyrdom I should like to enjoy.’

‘It’s the luxury of retirement. Not for you, not for years yet. Laziness without boredom, the delight of being furiously busy doing nothing. Well, you want to know when and how I came to be in the tower, leaving footprints around. It was the night he was killed, of course, though I didn’t know anything about that until yesterday, believe it or not. Rumour washes my way, all right, but it doesn’t rush, it waits until I crop up, and I don’t believe I was out of the garden, or had a letter or any sort of contact on Friday at all.’

‘Go on,’ said George, avoiding comment.

‘Well, it’s simply that I was dead curious about that membrane, and I wanted to find out where he’d run across it, I dare say I even suspected it might not have been honestly come by, when he was so cagey about it. Anyhow, I reasoned that if it was local it must have come from some source to which he had constant access, and the church was first candidate. So last Thursday I slipped in during choir practice and sat out the session at the back, out of sight. Sundays there are too many people in and out all the time, I reasoned Thursday would give him a better chance for probing, he could easily be the last out, he had keys. The odds against one leaf surviving alone, like that, come pretty high, you know, I reckoned he’d be on the hunt for more, and I didn’t see why he should have the field to himself. And sure enough, he let all the rest go, even the vicar, and went back to playing the organ for about ten minutes. Not more. Then I knew he was up to something. He came down from the organ and made straight for the tower door. And I gave him a start, and then came out of hiding and followed him.’

‘And got – how far?’

‘As far as the limbo above the bell-ringers’ room. Rainbow was already up among the bells. I dare say I should have hesitated, anyhow, but I was just setting foot on the first tread of the next ladder when I heard voices up above—’

‘Voices? There were already two of them up there?’

‘Well, that’s a question. One says voices, because people don’t normally talk to themselves. Especially on clandestine business. What’s certain is that after purposeful silence, suddenly somebody was talking up there above my head. The pitch of the voices was much the same, so I’d say definitely two men, of whom I naturally assumed one was Rainbow.’

‘But nobody’d gone up there while you were in the church? Until Rainbow, I mean?’

‘Nobody. I couldn’t have missed seeing him if he had. But I was only there from about a quarter of an hour before they finished practice, somebody could have walked in just as I did, and been lurking there behind the curtain before I came.’

‘Could you distinguish words? Or even two different intonations?’

‘This is where I fear I prove useless to you,’ said Evan Joyce almost guiltily. ‘Both male, yes, pretty certainly. But words…! You go there, Superintendent! Put a couple of your men up there among the bells, and you stand where I was standing, and listen to them talking. Even full-voiced, and what I heard was muted. The effect is eerie. About five different echoes coming in from all directions, and rolling around off the woodwork and the bells, so that all you hear is a curious, muffled murmur, a distant roar, not even describable, let alone distinguishable. No, I couldn’t even make the wildest guess at what they were saying, or who the second one was. The only impression I can pin down at all, and that dubiously, is that there was no pleasure and a good deal of annoyance reverberating round up there.’

‘We’ll make a few tests,’ said George, but without any great hope of achieving better results. ‘Then what did you do?’

‘I quit. You could say I came to my senses. If that was a snooper up there waiting for Rainbow, here was another down here, and I didn’t much like the character. Besides, butting into a twosome is a bit too much. I’m a retiring sort of chap by nature, I know my limitations. I packed it in and went home.’

Somebody came out from the porch, Bossie had said, not very long after Rainbow stopped playing. Simply walked away out of the lych-gate and went home. That fitted; so did the spot where Evan claimed to have abandoned his climb.

‘After all,’ said Evan reasonably, ‘I’d more or less found out what I wanted to know. What else could have sent Rainbow scurrying up the tower among all that junk and dust? Whatever he’d got had come from somewhere up there. I thought I knew now where to look. But I let well alone for a day or so, and then the news hit me, and you were in possession. I surrender! That is not at all my league. And you never found the membrane?’

George saw no reason to hedge on that point. ‘The fond remembrance of it, and that’s all. I’m as nose-down on the scent as you.’

‘Then whoever killed him has got it,’ said Joyce. His mild elderly voice was sharp and eager, the metaphor of hounds on a trail was no exaggeration. ‘That was why he died. So who was that up there? Somebody else he consulted as he did me? I doubt it. I’d given him the green light, he knew he wasn’t on a total loser. I don’t believe he’d have looked for another expert until he’d done every bit of work on it he could do himself, and made a thorough search for any other connecting leaves there might be to be found wherever this one was found. He wouldn’t want to share the glory or the profit.’

‘I don’t know about the profit,’ said George deliberately, ‘I don’t suppose that bothers you at all. But the glory might.’

‘Oh, it would, George, it would! I’d almost have tossed Rainbow off the tower myself, to get hold of that leaf. Supposing, of course, I could hope to lift a weight half as much again as mine. But I never got the chance. There was somebody there before me, and I went home.’

And clearly that was all that George was going to get out of this interview, apart from one very handsome yellow rose, which Evan Joyce bestowed on him at parting, with a forgiving smile. And it could all be the truth, but the ambiguous quality remained. A passion is a passion, whether for old letters for their own scholarly sake, or for money and kudos, or for a woman like Barbara. And that same old shoe might well have ventured higher, even if it couldn’t be certainly identified above. Naturally, too, Evan Joyce would fail to identify any voice in such circumstances, unless he could be sure it was not that of a native. He was part of the same landscape. That puts us alongside all the rest, Willie the Twig had said cheerfully, even if we do happen to be telling the truth.

In any case, where else would any of them want to be?

At evensong that Sunday the trebles of St Eata’s were unusually circumspect and serious, too thoughtful even to play noughts and crosses. Spuggy Price sang Bossie’s solo as though his heart was not in it. And the only message that passed along the choirstalls during the sermon was a note saying:

‘Deliggation to Bossie’s after serviss. Voluntears sine here.’ Toffee Bill had written it, and spelling was not his strong point.

By the time they foregathered in the furnace room, to the rolling sounds of a Buxtehude prelude played by Miss de la Pole, they had six volunteers, which all agreed was too many to be welcome to Mrs Jarvis at this time of night. In the end, Ginger, Toffee Bill and Jimmy Grocott were deputised to represent all, and report back next day on the school bus.

Jenny was neither surprised nor disconcerted to receive three solemn delegates asking after her son’s progress and requesting to see him. She let them in and sent them trooping up to Bossie’s bedroom, where the casualty sat enthroned, surrounded by books and puzzles, enjoying his notoriety. He looked in remarkably good shape, but for his grazes and the hint of a black eye, and his parents were comfortably sure by then that his constitution had survived the shock without damage, and there was no reason why he should not get up next day, and return to school in another day or two. Bossie himself was expecting as much; school was no penance to him. And the great thing was, as his parents had agreed privately, to go on living as normally as possible, and avoid giving him the idea that anyone was keeping a close eye on in him. Though, of course, they were!

Bossie shoved the accumulation of books into a single pile, and hoisted them to his bedside table to make room for his henchmen on the bed. ‘I thought you’d be along,’ he said complacently.

‘Things can’t very well be left as they are, can they?’ said Ginger emphatically. ‘Because, even if it was only Rainbow, murderers ought to be caught. And anyway, if he isn’t, he’s liable to have another go at knocking
you
off. Because he did, didn’t he?’

‘That’s what I think,’ agreed Bossie firmly, ‘and if you ask me, it’s what the police think, too. I’m sure they believed me.’

‘How much did you tell them?’ asked Toffee Bill.

‘Everything I could, everything that only drops us in the muck – not that anybody seems at all bothered about what we did. But you know I couldn’t tell them how I really got that parchment.’

‘No,’ they agreed, very gravely and resolutely, ‘of course you couldn’t.’

‘So we can’t leave it to the police,’ pointed out Ginger reasonably, ‘because they’ve only got half a tale. Where do you reckon that thing is now? You think
he’s
got it?’

‘Of course he has. Rainbow must have had it on him, he was cagey enough about it, and nobody’s found it since. He’s got it, all right. And by now he’s had time to study it, too.’