by Ellis Peters
After one stunned instant, for which she could hardly blame him, he reacted with admirable promptitude. The door opened wider than ever. ‘Come inside!’ he said. ‘I’ll call my colleague, and we’ll get the poor chap indoors at once.’
‘I could help you carry him in,’ she said. ‘We ought not to lose any time.’
‘Don’t worry, Lawrence is only a couple of minutes away. He has a scooter, he’ll be here in no time. You sit down by the fire, you’re wet and cold. I’ll be back directly.’ And he thrust her briskly into a small, book-lined room, and himself went on along a passage to the hall and the telephone, leaving the door open between them. She heard him dial, and speak briefly and drily, almost as though similar rescue operations landed on his doorstep every night. It might not be the first occurrence, she realised. People who live beside flood rivers are liable to be recruited from time to time. Certainly he wasted no time in calling up his reserves. After the click of the hand-set as the connection was cut, she heard him dial and speak once more.
When he came back into the doorway of the room where she waited, he had a duffle coat over his arm, and was carrying a folding garden-bed with a rigid aluminium frame and a patterned canvas cover printed with brilliant sunflowers. Incongruously festive for a stretcher, but she saw that it would serve the purpose very well.
‘If you wouldn’t mind coming along to light us on the way back? I’ve got a coach-lantern here in the garden room. I called the police, as well,’ he explained. ‘You may not know, but we had an officer here looking for a missing boy, earlier this evening. I hope you may have found him for them.’
‘No,’ said Charlotte quickly, ‘this isn’t the boy. I do know about that, but this is someone else, a man I know slightly. He’s staying at “The Salmon’s Return”, like me.’
‘Oh… I see! A pity… I called the number the chief inspector gave me, I felt sure… Well, never mind, here’s Lawrence! Let’s get this one in, at any rate.’
The busy sputter of a Vespa came rocking round the bulk of the house, and the young man of the custodian’s box put his head in at the open door, gave Charlotte a brief, blank glance, and asked briskly: ‘Where is he?’
‘By the path, just upstream. Here, take this! I’ll lead. And mind how you go,’ he said, heading rapidly out through the garden, the lantern held out beside him to light the steps for Charlotte. ‘That path’s in a very dangerous state until it dries out properly. What was he doing taking a night walk there? A stupid thing to do!’
His voice was detached and impersonal, but she heard very clearly the implication: And what were you doing taking a night walk there? ‘Lucky for him you came along,’ he said, almost as if he had recognised the implication, too, and was making a token apology for it.
‘Listen!’ said the young man named Lawrence suddenly, and checked to strain his ears for the small, recurrent sound that had reached him. ‘Someone else out late, too. This place is getting like Brighton beach.’
They had reached the gate in the box hedge, and froze in the grass for an instant to listen. Slow, irregular footsteps, audible only by reason of the slight sucking of soft mud at the heels of someone’s shoes as he approached along the path.
‘I called the chief inspector,’ said the curator, advancing again to meet the sound. ‘I thought it likely this might be the young fellow he was looking for. But he couldn’t be here yet.’
‘He wouldn’t be coming along here, anyhow. He’ll be driving. Mrs Paviour surely wouldn’t walk this way in the dark, would she?’
‘Lesley’s home, twenty minutes ago, and gone to bed. I hope she’s sleeping through this disturbance.’
They walked towards the unsteady steps, and a figure took shape out of the darkness, weaving as it came and blinking dazedly as the lantern was lifted to illuminate its face. Wet and muddy, but moving doggedly under his own steam, Gus Hambro lurched into the circle of his would-be rescuers, braced his rubbery legs well apart, and stood dazzled, holding his head together with both hands.
‘It’s him!’ said Charlotte, humanly indifferent to grammar at this crisis. ‘He’s walking… he’s all right!’
The young man named Lawrence put her aside kindly but firmly, and took over in her place, drawing Gus’s left arm about his shoulders. ‘Man!’ he said admiringly. ‘Are you the tough one! Here, girl, cop hold of this thing, we don’t need a stretcher for types like this.’
The curator moved to the other side, encircled Gus competently but aloofly, and handed over the lantern. It was Charlotte who led the way back slowly and carefully through the garden. Mounting steps was what Gus found most bewildering at this stage; his feet made manful efforts, but tended to trail, and he was half-carried the last few yards to the door. And yet he had come to himself unaided, clambered to his feet without even the support of a fence to lean on, and made his way some two hundred yards towards the single light of the curator’s open door. A tough one, as Lawrence had observed. Or else his handicap had been rather less than she had reckoned. She was tired by this time, and unsure of her judgement: of stresses, of odds, even of personalities.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gus, quite distinctly but as if from a great distance. ‘I seem to be causing a lot of trouble.’
‘Not to worry, chum!’ said the Lawrence youth benignly, puffing a little on the steps but indestructibly cool and amiable. ‘See that nice, bright hole in the wall? Aim for that, and you’re home and dry!’
The nice, bright hole in the wall stood wide, as they had left it, gleaming with the reflections of white paint within. They bore steadily down upon it. And suddenly the oblong of light was inhabited. A shadowy silhouette materialised, rather than stepped, into the frame, and stood leaning forward slightly, peering understandably into the dimness outside, and curious about the massed group of figures converging upon the doorway. There was an outside light which no one, so far, had thought to switch on. The girl in the conservatory reached out a hand and flicked the switch, lighting them the last few yards, and floodlighting herself at the same time. Appearing magically out of shadow, suddenly she shone there before them, the focus of light and warmth and refuge. She had not the least idea what was going on, and she was smiling into the night in enquiry and wonder, her brows arched halfway to laughter, her lips parted in a whimsical welcome to whatever might be pending.
There was one brief moment while she stood illuminated thus theatrically, and still not at all comprehending that the group which confronted her had had a close brush with tragedy. She had a heart-shaped face, of striking, creamy smoothness, and broader than its length from brow to chin, like the bright, intelligent countenance of a young cat, innocent, assured and inquisitive. Her eyes were so wide-set and widely-opened that they consumed half her face in a dazzling pool of greenish-blue radiance. Her nose was neat, small and short, and her mouth full-lipped and firmly formed above a tapered but resolute chin. She had a cloud of short hair curving in clinging waves about her head, the colour of barley silk, and under the feathery fringe her forehead bulged childishly, with room in it for a notable brain, the one thing about her that was not suavely curved and ivory-smooth.
The details sounded like a collection of attractive oddities. The sum total was a quite arresting beauty. And the most jolting fact about her emerged only by implication. In a nylon jersey house-gown of peacock pattern and iridescent colouring, which clung like a silk glove, she could not possibly be anyone but Mrs Paviour, that same Lesley who walked when the fit took her, last thing at night, and had been home twenty minutes when Charlotte rang the door-bell. Ergo, the wife of this elderly Don Quixote, Great-Uncle Alan’s colleague and contemporary, who must be well into his sixties at the very least, and slightly arid and passé even at that. How old was the girl in the doorway? Not a day over twenty-five, Charlotte reckoned—hardly two years senior to herself. Perhaps even less. What an extraordinary mis-match! And not just because of the tale of years involved. The old man was a cracked leather bottle trying to contain quicksilve
r. She could not feel anything for him! It made no sense. And yet she had not the look of a woman cramped or dissatisfied. She glowed with ease and wellbeing.
At sight of her Gus, stiffening into startled consciousness between his supporters, set foot of his own volition on the last step, and his soiled eyebrows soared into his muddy hair, in reflection of the apparition before him. Very faintly but quite clearly he said: ‘Good God!’ and seemed to have no breath left for anything more explicit.
The moment of charmed stillness collapsed—or more properly exploded—into motion and exclamation. The girl in the Chinese house-coat narrowed her eyes upon the central figure in the tableau before her, and the supple lines of her face sharpened into crystal, and lost their smiling gaiety.
‘My God!’ she said, in the softest of dismayed voices. ‘What’s been happening, Steve?’ And she went on briskly, springing into instant and efficient comprehension: ‘Well, come on, bring him in to the fire, quickly! I’ll get brandy.’
She turned in a swirl of nylon jersey, and flung wide the door to the study, where the subsiding glow of the fire still burned. Her movements, as she receded rapidly along the passage beyond, were silent and violent, a force of nature in action. Only gradually did it emerge that she was rather a miniature whirlwind, perhaps an inch shorter even than Charlotte, but so slender that she escaped looking like a pocket edition. When she came back, with a tray in her hands, they had installed their patient by the fire in a deep chair, and peeled the soggy, wet jacket from him. They were five people in one small room, and hardly a word was said between them until Gus Hambro had a large brandy under his belt, and was visibly returning into circulation. His still dazed eyes followed his astonishing hostess around, measuring, weighing and wondering, in forgetfulness of his own predicament. He said nothing at all, as yet, but very eloquently. Charlotte hung back in a corner of the room, and let them encircle him with their attentions. So far he had not even registered her presence, and she was in no particular hurry to enlighten him.
‘He should have a doctor,’ said Paviour anxiously, standing over him with the empty brandy glass.
‘I don’t want a doctor,’ protested the patient, weakly but decidedly. ‘What could he do for me that you’re not doing? All I’ve got is a headache.’ He looked round him doubtfully, winced abruptly back to his original position, and clapped a surprised hand behind his right ear. ‘What happened?’ he asked blankly.
‘You fell in the river,’ said Paviour patiently. ‘I shouldn’t worry about remembering, if I were you. The main thing is, you’re here, and you’re going to be all right.’
‘Fell in the river?’ repeated Gus like an indignant echo, and stared at the smear of blood staining his muddy fingers. ‘I never did! I was keeping well on the landward side of the path, on the grass. And that’s where I was lying when I came round just now. All I’ve got is a welt on the head here. Somebody jumped me from behind and knocked me out.’ He looked from face to face, questioning and wondering. ‘If I was in the river,’ he said reasonably, ‘what am I doing here now?’
‘This lady,’ said Paviour, stepping aside to allow him to follow the mild gesture that indicated Charlotte, ‘pulled you out. Not only that, she administered artificial respiration and brought you round, and then came here to get help. Why did you suppose we were setting off with a stretcher and torches, at this time of night?’
‘I didn’t know… I never realised…’ He sat forward, staring in outraged recognition at Charlotte. ‘You mean you … it was you who…’ He shut his mouth and swallowed hard, and in the space of about two seconds she saw a whole kaleidoscope of emotions flash in succession through his mind. If she’s here, if she found me, it’s because she followed me! If she followed me, it’s because she doesn’t trust me, and if she doesn’t trust me it’s because she knows something, or has found out something. So far she was sure of her ground. And what followed was neither surprise nor mystery to her. For suddenly Gus Hambro performed a minor miracle, by producing a fiery blush that made itself visible in waves of dubious gratitude and indubitable mortification even through the layers of river mud that still decorated his face. Tales of gallant rescues ought not to go into reverse, and cast the lady as hero and the man as helpless victim. Especially when, whatever other circumstances may hold good, the man has been exerting himself to make an impression on the lady in question. Fate, thought Charlotte, gazing innocently back into his admiring, devoted, humiliated and furious face, has certainly given me the upper hand of you, my boy!
‘The kiss of life, I hope?’ said the young man Lawrence, putting a deliberate finger through the slight tension which was palpably building up within the room.
‘Schafer,’ said Charlotte shortly. ‘The only method I know.’
Gus did not sound at all like a man recently revived from drowning as he said with sharp disquiet: ‘Right, that disposes of how I got out, and I’m duly grateful, believe me. But now will somebody please explain to me how the hell I ever got in?
They were all staring at him in speculative silence when the sound of a car’s engine circled the house, coming to rest in the arc of gravel before the door. After it died, the silence was absolute for a few moments. Then incongruous suburban chimes jangled from the front porch.
‘That must be the police inspector,’ said Paviour. ‘Will you let him in, dear?’
His wife turned without a word, and went to open the door; and presently ushered in Detective Chief Inspector George Felse, mild, grey-haired and ordinary, a tired middle-aged man who would have been inconspicuous and among his peers almost anywhere he cared to materialise.
‘I got a message,’ he said, ‘that you wanted me here.’
He looked round them all as though none of them afforded him any surprise, though two of them did not belong here, and to his certain knowledge had been elsewhere only a short time ago. So short a time, Charlotte realised with a shock, that he could not possibly have returned home in the meantime, since he was a close neighbour of the Bodens, who lived ten miles from Aurae Phiala. The relayed message must have found him somewhere not far from this house. Somewhere by the river, she thought, downstream. Whatever went into the flooded Comer here would fetch up at one of several spots, no doubt well known to the police, where curves and currents tended to land what they had carried down. The chief inspector had just come, case or no case, from setting a close watch on those spots, in expectation—in foreboding, rather—that the flood would bring some unusual freight aground very shortly.
Only then did she fully realise that if she had been five minutes later the watchers keeping a lookout for a stray boy might, tomorrow, have been hauling ashore the sodden body of Gus Hambro.
Washed, warmed, with a shaven patch and an adhesive dressing behind his right ear and a second large brandy nursed gratefully in his hands, Gus told his story; though not, perhaps, quite ingenuously.
‘All I did was come out for a walk before going to bed, and I was about by that place where the bank’s caved in, when somebody jumped me from behind. I never heard a thing until maybe the last two steps he took, I never had time to turn. Something hit me on the back of the head, here, and I went out like a light. I remember dropping. I never felt the ground hit me. But I do know where I was when I fell—in the belt of grass under the bank, and facing straight ahead the way I was walking. And when I came round I was in the same place. I took it for granted I’d just been lying there since I went out, and whoever had jumped me had made off and left me there. When I could make it, I got up and made for the nearest shelter. There was a lighted doorway here, I steered for that. And just outside the garden I ran into this rescue party coming out to find me. Now they tell me,’ he said flatly, ‘that I was in the river, drowning, and Charlotte here pulled me out and brought me round.’ He had used her Christian name without even realising it, so intent was he on pinning down the details of his own remembrance.
‘When I found him,’ said Charlotte, ‘he was lying right across the
path.’
‘Across the path?’
‘Across the path,’ she said firmly, ‘with his feet just touching the grass on the landward side, and his head and shoulders in the river. His face was completely under water.’
She felt them all stiffen in instinctive resistance, not wanting their routine existence to be invaded by anything as bizarre as this.
‘There may be a simple explanation for this discrepancy,’ ventured Paviour hopefully. ‘If there was a fresh fall of earth there—the bank is quite high, and we’ve seen that there’s brickwork exposed there… Perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate attack at all, just a further slip that struck him and swept him across the path. After all, we didn’t go along to have a look at the place.’
‘I was there,’ said Gus drily. ‘There wasn’t any fall.’
‘I was there, too,’ said Charlotte. ‘There’s something else. When you get a blow on the head and fall forward, whether it’s flying stones or a blackjack, you may fall heavily, but even so I don’t think you’d embed yourself as deeply in the mud as Mr Hambro was embedded.’
Chief Inspector Felse sat steadily watching her, and said nothing. It was Paviour who stirred again in uneasy protest. ‘My dear girl, are you sure you’re not recalling rather more than happened? After stresses like that, the imagination may very easily begin to add details.’
‘I’m recognising things I did see, and never had time to recognise then. But the other thing is a good deal more conclusive…’
George Felse asked quietly: ‘How were his arms?’
‘Yes, that’s it!’ she said. ‘How did you know? When you fall forward, fully conscious or not, you put out your hands to break your fall. His arms were down at his sides. Nobody falls like that. Even if you were out on your feet, and fell as a dead weight, your arms wouldn’t drop tidily by your sides. And that’s how his were.’
