Summon the Bright Water (11 page)

‘There you are! Up to you now!’

An embarrassment. He should have left it up in the mistletoe. But he gave me no chance, and there was I with the proceeds of a pointless burglary which had been the major’s idea anyway.

I had no doubt that Marrin was drowned. Thus there was no object – at any rate for the moment – in remaining dead. What I had to do in order to get the full facts and keep in touch with developments was to reappear at Broom Lodge as the spontaneous and sympathetic visitor. So I rearranged my den to look as if some tramp had lived there in the past but not recently, and took the last train back to London. Next day, bathed, respectable and dressed with conventional casualness I drove down to the Forest and paid a casual call at Broom Lodge as if on my way to South Wales. The place was disorganised, the workshops silent, and groups hanging about like listless bees without a queen.

Elsa met me at the front door and told me that her uncle was dead.

‘His body was found yesterday afternoon caught in a salmon weir below Purton. The police telephoned us at once.’

‘Good God! One of his fishing expeditions?’

‘I think so. He drove away the night before last without telling anybody, and I know it’s the river when he does that. It looks as if he must have fallen in. He wasn’t dressed for a dive. I told the police to make enquiries at Bullo Pill. And, Piers, we’ve had a burglary. The police discovered it. All the drawers in the lab had been turned out and I don’t quite know what is missing except that he stole the golden bowl.’

My face must have shown my surprise and horror, but under the circumstances both were natural enough. Had the major lied to me, or, more likely, had one of the damned druidicals slipped in and pinched the sacred totem for the use of the sect?

‘Casket and all?’ I asked.

‘He just smashed the casket and took it. And the police have come back again this morning. They are wondering if there couldn’t be some connection between Simeon’s death and the burglary.’

There could indeed be. Burglar knows Marrin is out and that the lab will be empty. Obvious, and what actually happened. Alternatively and much worse, burglar pushes Marrin into the river to be sure that he can’t interrupt and then returns to Broom Lodge for the gold.

‘The dinghy was picked up by a coaster coming into Sharpness,’ she went on. ‘His diving stuff in its case was on board. People at Bullo confirmed to the police that his boat was missing and said that he must have taken it out the night before last. And somebody saw a man about midnight carrying a bundle and scrambling up the railway embankment instead of taking the lane past the cottages. That looks queer, doesn’t it?’

I asked her what would happen now, and whether Broom Lodge could carry on.

‘I suppose so. I know he’s left everything to the commune.’

‘And nothing to you?’

‘I don’t want anything. It’s all so uncertain. Who owns what? Think of lawyers and the Revenue trying to find out where an alchemist got his gold!’

She had a moment of hysteria, laughing and sobbing at the same time.

‘But, my darling, you know he wasn’t one.’

‘I don’t! He was so many things.’

I asked if the major was about. I hoped he wasn’t. I could imagine him complicating the whole situation with military or esoteric incoherencies.

‘No, I hear he’s spending his time praying in Blakeney church. The return of the prodigal I suppose, now that poor, deluded Simeon isn’t here to influence him. I think he’ll go home.’

A voice materialised from behind us where there had been nobody.

‘Excuse me, Miss Marrin! I wonder if I might have a word with this gentleman.’

A detective-sergeant in plain clothes identified himself. This, I thought, could be the end, but it was only a beginning. He had been informed that the late Mr Marrin had taken me diving with him at the Guscar Rocks. Could I tell him how experienced he seemed and what his practice was? Did he always change in his dinghy, or on the night of his death would he have been crossing the river with the intention of going in off the land somewhere on the other side?

I found it easy and natural to tell him the little I knew: that I had the impression he always went in off the land and that unless his boat was fairly large and stable he would not have dived from it and returned to it.

Then he turned to the experiment in salmon fishing, of which he had heard from the commune, and to late-night dives which he gathered Mr Marrin seldom spoke of because they had some religious meaning for him. Perhaps I could explain that. The sergeant was evidently relieved to have a chance of talking to a sane outsider.

I made what sense I could of it all, telling him that the commune believed in the transmigration of souls, that service to mankind in this life was what would be remembered in the next and that they trained themselves in simple crafts which could be useful at some future time when the survivors of inevitable disaster – disease, starvation or atomic pollution – had reverted to the same state as neolithic man.

To my surprise he thought there might be something in it.

‘Making a bloody mess of our world we are, Mr Colet, and that’s a fact. But what has it got to do with underwater fishing?’

‘I think you’d be on safe ground in describing Mr Marrin as a keen naturalist,’ I said, ‘but with an original point of view of his own. He was not interested in description or discovery, but what you and I and the fish have in common. All life is one and that sort of thing.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Colet. You make it all much clearer than those poor … er, yes. And I can’t get anything very exact about the missing objects.’

‘Which of them?’ I asked, feeling that I was now accepted as a friend and confidant of the late Simeon Marrin.

‘Some small objects of gold. And according to members of the commune a golden bowl of great value. It was in a casket which was smashed.’

‘Oh, he made them. That was his hobby. He wasn’t a very experienced goldsmith but he enjoyed it. He once told me that his work had only the value of the gold.’

‘You don’t know, I suppose, where he bought it?’

I replied that I had never asked him, and then thought that I ought to try to conform to the evasive and contradictory answers which he would have got from the more credulous members of the commune.

‘I’ve heard some nonsense about mining and also that he had a process for extracting gold from sea water.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Yes, but I believe it would cost far more to extract than its worth.’

‘So it would not be possible in his laboratory?’

‘No. If you’re thinking of all that lead, mercury and other stuff in the lab I’m pretty sure it was for experiments with alloys.’

‘Would you say it was widely known that he had so much gold on the premises?’

‘I don’t know. Not widely, I should think. But you had better ask the members of the commune that. They gave hospitality freely. It looks to me as if someone knew he had fallen out of his boat and drowned and then made a dash across country to get at the gold.’

‘He may not have been drowned, sir. It could have been a blow at the back of the skull which killed him.’

I wondered whether an autopsy could tell whether he drowned after being knocked out by the blow and falling in, or whether it came by accident while he was still just alive. There couldn’t, I think, be conclusive evidence either way after eighteen hours at the mercy of the tide and tangling with a salmon weir.

I could guess what had happened. Marrin had tumbled out of the dinghy, rigid with terror, and though the lias below Hock Cliff is softish rock there are chunks of hard stone imbedded in it. If he had crashed his head on one, that accounted for the swiftness with which the ebb had carried his body away.

‘And where can we find you, Mr Colet, if there is any point on which we think you might be able to help us?’

I gave him my London address, saying that I was on my way to South Wales but would be keeping in touch with Miss Marrin since I should like to be present at the funeral.

Elsa had disappeared while we were talking and I now went to find her. She seemed to be distraught rather than mourning her uncle and begged me to keep in touch with her. I promised to do so. Her last words as I returned to my car were a whisper:

‘Dear, dear Piers, get me out of here!’

I shall, and please God I shall not be taken away from you or you from me.

I drove away to the silent brink of Severn, rippling with the wind against the tide, and considered my position. If the police ever began to suspect me, they would then want to know where I was staying after I left Broom Lodge and where I was on the night that Marrin died. I can’t account for my movements, and if I were a magistrate I should commit for trial this now-elegant economist with his pretended interest in ancient history by which he gained the confidence of the late Simeon Marrin. But, after all, why should the police investigate my movements? I was a respected and respectable academic, the understanding friend of the commune and eager to help them.

So, with luck, it should appear quite natural if I resumed occasional appearances at Broom Lodge as a casual visitor. That allowed me to keep our love alive and to whisk Elsa out of there if the commune dissolved into anarchy. Meanwhile she could relay to me as much as the police chose to tell her.

The only disquieting thought was that my life and liberty depended on the major, who alone knew of my secret movements. So long as he stayed in the district I had to keep in close touch with him. He was an admirable burglar – provided that he had worn gloves as he intended – but he was not a man to talk himself out of trouble.

So there it was! I still had no clue to the site of the hoard which Marrin had been robbing while putting up his smoke screen of alchemy, apart from the very valuable information that it was on the other side of the river. Also it was essential to get the cauldron out of the hands of the tonsured long enough for an expert examination. That should not be impossible. For example, there might well be an In Memoriam ceremony for Marrin which I could surprise. But if the wolf were to pad through the darkness behind those unsuspecting druidicals, the den was indispensable as his headquarters.

It was then that a compromise occurred to me: to adopt a dual personality. Outwardly I should remain the economist attracted by Elsa, which would explain visits to Broom Lodge. At the same time and chiefly at night I should be the secret investigator on the part of history and the public. Personality No. 1 would be Piers Colet, an innocent bystander whose life of learning and travel had been beyond reproach. Personality No. 2 would be the wolf hidden in its forest den, ready to track and to spring.

So I have returned to the den, where the major’s damned bag of golden bits and pieces is safely hidden. Elsewhere I keep the diving equipment together with a suitcase containing the clothes of Personality No. 1. Details of changing back to him have proved more difficult than I foresaw – for example, access to my car, neatness, telephoning Elsa supposedly from South Wales. Meanwhile I have been out every night – without any result – and during the day have written this simple and factual account of the events leading to Simeon Marrin’s death which, if it should ever have to be used in my defence, will not, I hope, be rejected as an ingenious fabrication. As I have said, his death was the last thing I wanted. What I do want is to recover the cauldron and manage a clear run so that I can take it to the British Museum for a verdict. After that can begin the search for what remains of Marrin’s find.

All this and no nearer to the source of the gold! A week ago I was beginning to feel that Personality No. 2 and his precious den were quite unnecessarily dramatic, that there was nothing to prevent me carrying off Elsa to London and that the site of the burial where Marrin had found the bowl might be better investigated by archaeologists who were personal friends and knew me well enough to accept as much of my story as I chose to tell them.

But circumstances took over, such simple circumstances starting from my curiosity about charcoal and leading so rapidly to – well, among other things, another unfortunate accident. But I can’t deny that I intended the merciless hunting and haunting of these druidicals and that Elsa’s mention of sacrifice merely increased my contempt for them.

Her uncle had kept her very much in the dark. After all, church servants have more to do with dusting the pews than with doctrine. She thinks that Uncle Simeon joined this esoteric sect before Broom Lodge came into being and that it was to the sect that its former owner, the retired and heretical parson, left the place. The handful of druidicals was too small to run it, so Marrin hit on the fashionable idea of a working commune, the members of which would be sympathetic to reincarnation, meditation and fairly unorthodox Buddhism, and easily take him as their guru. These industrious and estimable innocents accepted that there was a higher state of spirituality into which one might be initiated when found worthy, but few were interested. I see an almost exact parallel, not religious but financial, in the machinations of a company promoter who registers a small company with nominal capital destined to act as the majority shareholder in a much larger concern to which an unsuspecting public has contributed the funds.

The druidicals had of course nothing in common with the Order of Druids which makes a nuisance of itself at Stonehenge and has no more to do with the original Druids than the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes has to do with buffaloes. Their religion was the real goods, so far as it could be reconstructed, combining the little we know of the supposed wisdom of the Celtic priesthood, reincarnation and all, with the natural animism of forest dwellers. Spirits were everywhere – under the earth, under the trees, under the tides of the Severn – and at the command of man if approached with the proper respectful mumbo-jumbo. Among them could be the spirit of a hero, not unlike a Graeco-Roman god, who had done great service to his fellows and remained in race memory. Above the divine spirits were archangels and above them, at the point where all religions merge, the absolute and eternal.