by Ellis Peters
Only as the car was crunching softly to a halt in the gravel of the yard did Charlotte ask suddenly, but in a tone so subdued as to suggest that she had been contemplating the question for some time, and refrained from asking it only for fear of the answer:
‘You haven’t found him yet?’
The engine fell silent, and there was a brief and pregnant pause. Then: ‘No,’ said George Felse, equally carefully and constrainedly, ‘we haven’t found him.’
In the first chilly greyness of dawn, before the sun rose, Sergeant Comstock, of the uniformed branch, who came of a long line of native fishermen, not to say poachers, and knew his river as he knew the palm of his own hand, thankfully abandoned what he had always known was a useless patrol of the left bank downstream, and on his own responsibility borrowed one of his many nephews, and embarked with him in the coracle which was his natural means of personal transport on the Comer. They put out in this feather-light saucer of a boat from his nephew’s yard only just below the limits of Aurae Phiala, transport downstream in the spate being rapid and easy—for experts, at least—and the return journey much simpler by portage. This consideration had dictated his choice of nephew. Dick was the one he would really have preferred, but Dick lived well downstream. Jack was not only in the right spot, and the family coracle-builder, but a bachelor into the bargain, so that there was no protesting wife to contend with.
The sergeant had already mapped out in his own mind, with an eye to the wind, the speed of the flow and the amount of debris being brought down, the procession of spits, shoals, curves and pools where a heavy piece of flotsam would be likely to cast up, beginning immediately below the village of Moulden, which lay just below the Aurae Phiala enclosure. Cottages dotted the waterside through the village; and anything which had gone into the water some hours ago must, in any case, either have been brought ashore there already or long since have passed through, before the general alarm went out.
From there they went darting across the boiling surface like a dragon-fly, skimming with the currents where the banks were swept too open and smooth to hold flotsam, swinging aside round the sergeant’s paddle in the marked spots; round the shovel-shaped end of Eel Island, which had scooped up a full load of branches, twigs, uprooted grass, and even more curious trophies, but not what they were seeking; a little way down the sluggish backwater beyond, until motion ceased in stagnant shallows, and still there was nothing; out into the flood again, hopping back on to the current as on to a moving belt that whisked them away; revolving out of the race again where the trees leaned down into the water at the curve by the Lacey farm, acting like a great, living grille to filter out debris; clean across the width of the river at the next coil, to where the long, sandy shallow ran out and encircled a miniature beach. Every junk-heap of the Comer on this stretch they touched at and ransacked. It was a game they could win only by losing; every possibility checked and found empty was a point gained, and with every one discarded their spirits rose towards optimism.
The sun was up, and they were a mile or more downriver, in wider and less turgid reaches, where some of the best fishing pools deepened under the right bank.
‘Looks like we’ve had our trouble for nothing,’ Jack said, with appropriate satisfaction. ‘Anything that’s run that gauntlet without getting hooked has got to be brother to an eel.’
It was one more case of famous last words. In the first dark pool under the hollowed bank the steady, rolling eddies went placidly round and round, smooth as cream, their tension dimpling the centre into a slow, minor whirlpool. And in the middle of the slanting span, circling upon a radius of about three yards, and light enough to maintain its place a foot or so below the surface, something pale and oval went monotonously round and round. First oval and single, then weaving as it span, like a water-lily on a stem, then suddenly seen as articulate in separate petals, a limp magnolia flower.
‘Why don’t you keep your mouth shut?’ said Sergeant Comstock, with deep and bitter resignation, and reached for the boat-hook they’d brought with them. His third nephew Ted had made it to family specifications in his forge in the village of Moulden. ‘Cop hold of this paddle, and move us in slow. And hold us clear of him, or he’ll go down.’
There was a second drifting flower now, deep below, and greenish brown with the tint of the water between. And presently, as Jack held the paddle like a brake and let them in by inches, a third, without petals, a pale disc trailing tendrils of weed. A spreading darkness wove lazily beneath it, keeping it afloat.
The boat-hook reached overside gently, felt its way under the leaves of dark material, was lifted delicately into their folds, and held fast. The three submerged flowers lost their rhythm, jerked into stillness, and hung quivering. A palpable bulk aligned itself beneath them, a fish on a line, but a fish without fight.
‘I’ve got him,’ said Sergeant Comstock gruffly. ‘Better take us down a piece, where the bank levels out. We can get him ashore there.’
The fish floated uncomplainingly with them, down to the gentle slope of grass fifty yards downstream. There they brought the coracle ashore lightly, and drew in, with reluctance and the reverence of finality, what they had been hunting with such assiduity, and so persistently hoped they would not find. To have settled something is always an achievement and, of sorts, a satisfaction. This they would rather not have settled, and yet there was a kind of relief in it.
The body came ashore into the grass with monstrous and majestic indifference, for the first time caring nothing at all what impression it made. A long, young body in correct school uniform, black blazer, white shirt, black tie, dark grey slacks. Very like its living counterpart still, because it had not been in the river very long. The Comer had not managed to loosen the knot of the tie, though its ends floated wide, or to hoist off one of the regulation black shoes. He even had a ball-point pen still firmly clipped to the top of his breast pocket.
‘That’s him,’ said Sergeant Comstock, looking down at the slow rivulets of storm-water trickling down out of clothing and hair to wind their way thankfully through the grass back to the river. ‘Hang on here, Jackie, while I cut up to the farm and ’phone.’
CHAPTER SIX
« ^ »
George Felse telephoned his wife from the Sallows farm somewhat after eight o’clock in the morning. By that time he had not only set in motion all the police retinue that attends on sudden and unexplained death, but also attended their ministrations throughout, seen the body examined, photographed, cased in its plastic shell and removed by ambulance to the forensic laboratory, delegated certain necessary duties, placated the police doctor and the pathologist, come to terms with the inevitable grief and rage which do not reach the headlines, and made dispositions within his own mind for the retribution which is so often aborted.
‘We found him,’ he said. She, after all, had been left holding up the universe over the parents, and in all probability, whatever strict injunctions he issued now, she would, by the time he rejoined her, have relieved him of the most dreadful of all the duties his office laid on him, and somehow, with sense, sedatives and sturdy, unpretending sympathy, have gone part-way towards reconciling the bereaved to their bereavement. ‘Dead, of course,’ he said. ‘Some hours, according to preliminary guesses. Yes, in the river. Drowned? Well, provisionally, yes. Personally, I wonder. Don’t tell them that. They’re almost prepared for the other. I’ll tell them later—when we know.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Bunty Felse. It wasn’t, but he would know what she meant. ‘I was half expecting it. So are they, I know. When will you be home?’
He had been up half the previous night upon a quite different case, and all this night upon this, which had only just become a case, and his, after all.
‘As soon as I can, but it may be three hours or so. I shall take time out to call at Aurae Phiala. They won’t have heard officially. I want to be the one to bring the news. I’ve got to see their faces.’
‘Not the Rossignol g
irl,’ said Bunty. It was a little less than half enquiry, and a little more than half assertion. He had called her shortly after midnight, she already knew something of the personalities involved.
‘I want to see her face, too. But no—you’re right, not the Rossignol girl. On present form,’ he said, his voice warming wearily into a semblance of the voice she knew best, ‘she only pulls people out.’
His timing was good, though it was determined mainly by the exigencies of the situation. When he drove down the gravelled road along the edge of the site to the curator’s house, at half past nine, he found the bronze Aston Martin parked in front of the doorway, and Gus Hambro just handing out Charlotte’s suitcases. Both the Paviours had come out to greet their guest, Stephen Paviour long and sad and constrained as ever, Lesley eager and young and welcoming. Her movements as she ran down the steps had an overflowing grace of energy. Behind her Bill Lawrence appeared in the doorway. So much the better. One was apt to overlook Bill Lawrence, who nevertheless was there on the spot like all the rest, and able to move even more privately, since he lived alone in the lodge cottage, further along the Silcaster road. Probably he rode over here for his meals on most occasions. The Vespa was a handy transport for the mere quarter of a mile involved. He wore his usual air of meticulously contrived casualness, and the shadow of beard round his by no means negligible jaw was a shade more perceptible than on the previous day. Apparently he was setting out to grow whiskers of the latest fashion, for his lips were carefully shaved. Probably he knew and cared, in spite of his cultivated disdain for appearances, that he had a very well-cut and intelligent mouth, too good to be hidden. His lazy, supercilious eyes, too, managed their affectation of aloofness without actually missing a trick. It might be a great mistake to overlook Mr Lawrence.
He had been the first to hear the sound of the car approaching, and the quickest to identify it, for he was the only one who looked completely unsurprised as it rolled gently alongside the Aston Martin, while all the rest had checked momentarily and turned to gaze. Recognition halted their breath for an instant. He was there with intent. With news or with questions.
Lesley came towards him, veering from the advance she had been making upon Charlotte. ‘Chief Inspector Felse! We didn’t expect to see you so early. Is there any news?’ The intense blue of her eyes shaded away into a translucent green in a bright light, burning into emerald in her moments of laughter or animation, clouding over into a ferny darkness when she was grave. She gazed into his face, and they darkened. Unexpectedly but very simply she said, with concern: ‘You haven’t had any sleep!’
‘I’ll catch up on that soon.’ He turned from her to look at Paviour. To him the light was not kind. The contrast with his radiant, vital young wife was blatant almost to embarrassment.
‘You wanted to see us?—some one or more of us,’ he said. ‘If we can help you at all…’
‘Thank you, but this time I needn’t keep you more than a minute. I thought that as I’d involved you all, to some extent, in the enquiries that were launched yesterday, I ought to inform you of the results of our search for the boy, Gerry Boden…’
He was listening very carefully, for any exclamation, any indrawn breath, even, that would single out one person among these five; but they remained anonymous in their concern and foreboding. The issue, after all, was fairly plain. No one is that much of an optimist.
‘One of our sergeants took him out of the river about six o’clock this morning, a mile and a half downstream from here. Dead.’
They stood frozen, all transfixed by the same small, chill frisson of shock, but no one exclaimed. He looked round all their sobered, pitying faces, and registered what was there to be registered, but it was not much; nothing more than was due to any boy of sixteen, suddenly wiped out for no good reason. No use looking for the one who felt no surprise, for after the gradual attrition of hour after hour without word they could none of them feel very much.
‘How awful!’ said Lesley in a resigned whisper. ‘Terrible for his parents. I’m so sorry.’
‘The poor fool kid!’ said Gus. ‘I wish to God now I’d lugged him back to his chain gang by the ear. Can’t say we didn’t half expect it, I suppose, by this time. It began to look… But there’s always the odd chance.’
‘Which in this case didn’t come up. I thought you should be told. Sorry to have ruined your day.’
Paviour moistened his pale lips. ‘Do you think it was here, on our premises, that he fell into the river? I feel to blame. But the path is a right of way, we couldn’t stop it if we tried.’
‘It’s too early yet,’ said George with deliberation, ‘to say where and how he entered the water. The forensic laboratory has a good deal of work to do on his clothes, and the contents of his pockets. And of course there’ll be a postmortem.’
‘A post-mortem?’ The meagre, gallant Don Quixote beard quivered and jutted as though every individual hair had suddenly stiffened to the clenched tension of Paviour’s jaw. He relaxed the convulsive pressure of his teeth cautiously, and drew breath deeply before he resumed with arduous reasonableness: ‘Is that really necessary, in a case like this, I know you have to be thorough, but the distress to the parents… And surely the cause of death isn’t in doubt? A clear case of drowning…?’
‘It would seem so,’ George agreed gently. ‘But double-checking does no harm, and as you say, we try to be thorough. I doubt if it’s an issue that will affect the parents’ distress one way or the other.’ He was turning back towards his car when he looked back with a casual afterthought. ‘By the way, you won’t be surprised or disturbed if you find some of our people patrolling the riverside path or inspecting that slip, will you? A routine precaution, that’s all.’
He did not look back again, except in the rear-view mirror as he drove away. They were grouped just as he had left them, all looking warily after him. And if he had got little enough out of that interview, at least he had lobbed one small, accurate pebble into the middle of the pool of their tranquillity, and its ripples were already beginning to spread outwards.
A young giant working on the flower-beds along the drive straightened his long, lithe back to watch the car go by, without curiosity though with fixed, methodical attention, his senses turned outwards for relaxation while he took a breather. The reddish-fair head, Celtic-Roman, with chiselled features and long, indifferent lapis eyes, belonged to a statue rather than a man. George knew the type locally, a pocket of fossils preserved among these border valleys, though this superlative specimen was not personally known to him. Orrie Benyon, of course. Orlando, who admitted his ghostly ancestors ungrudgingly into his territory by night. Those cropped military curls, that monumental neck and straight nose, would have looked well in a bronze helmet; no doubt he recognised his own kind, and was at home with them. And indeed his stock might well go back to just such stubborn settlers, survivors after the death of this city, the offspring of time-expired legionaries and the daughters of enterprising local middlemen. Deprived of their urban background, they had rooted into the valley earth and turned to stock and crops for a living. And survived. Tenacious and long-memoried, they had not allowed themselves to be uprooted or changed a second time.
George stopped the car at the edge of the drive, and walked back. He stood watching beside the flower-beds; and after a long minute of uninterrupted work, Orrie straightened his long, athlete’s back again, and turned towards his audience the massive, stony beauty of his face, flushed with exertion. At this range the flaws that reduced him to humanity, and a fairly limited humanity at that, were plain to be seen: the stubble of coarse reddish beard he hadn’t bothered to shave, the roughness of his weathered skin over the immaculate but brutal bones, the inlaid indifference of the blue eyes.
‘Good morning!’ said George. ‘Nice show of bulbs you’ve got coming along.’
‘Not bad, I reckon,’ the gardener admitted. ‘Be some tulips out by now if it’d bin a bit warmer. You come round in three weeks or so, they
’ll be a show worth seeing.’
George offered his cigarette case and a light. Both were accepted tacitly but promptly. ‘You take care of all this place single-handed? That’s a lot of work for one.’
‘I manage,’ said Orrie, and looked with quickening curiosity through the smoke of his cigarette into George’s face. ‘You’re police, aren’t you? I saw you once when you picked up that chap who was firing ricks, up the valley.’
‘That’s right. My name’s Felse. You’ll have heard we fished a young fellow out of the Comer this morning?’ Everyone with an ear to the ground in Moulden had heard the news before ever the police surgeon reached the spot. ‘He was here with a visiting school party yesterday. You had to chase him off from where you were cordoning off the slip. That was the last you saw of him?’
‘Last I saw, yes,’ said Orrie, with a long, narrowed glance. ‘I finish here half past four, Wednesdays, I do a bit at the vicarage that night. I was gone before closing time—the vicar’ll tell you where I was. I told your chap, the one who came after me up home, ’bout nine that’d be. Seems there was some others saw him after I did, monkeying about by that cave-in again. But I tell you what,’ he said confidentially, ‘I reckon I know one place he’s been since then. If he hasn’t, someone else has. In my back shed. Not the tool-shed where I keep the mower and all that—the one down behind the orchard. I got a little work-bench in there, and me stores of sprays and weed-killers and potting compost. And I can tell when somebody’s bin moving me stuff around.’
