Rainbow's End gfaf-13

by Ellis Peters

  ‘Then where did he get it? And above all, why won’t he tell us where he got it?’

  He had told them, George was sure, everything else. He might recall a few more details, or points that had escaped his first account, but basically he had come clean. So why this one evasion, when evidently his intent was to be as helpful as he could? Who had better reason? Another child might have accepted what happened to him as a real accident, and emerged merely shaken by the chance hurt, and more cautious thereafter. Bossie had come out of sedation wide-awake to the full implications, decided on confession, and almost certainly taken it to the limit. With this one reservation! Why?

  ‘At least he’ll be in bed for today, and home and watched even tomorrow,’ said Moon. ‘And Sam knows the score now, and we can lend a man now and then, short-handed as we may be, if there should be any need. As long as he’s going to and from school by bus with the whole gang, he’s as safe as houses. Joe Llewelyn will make sure he’s seen home from next week’s choir practice. We’ll manage to keep an eye on him, between us. And I take it there won’t be any headlines from this incident, not unless or until we’ve got our man. Just a random hit-and-run.’

  ‘That’s all it will be. I’ll see to that.’ So the would-be assassin would be left in the dark, assuming, it was to be hoped, that the child had neither dreamed of deliberate harm nor blurted out any reason for it. From which he might, with luck, deduce that his fears were baseless, and this intruding imp had nothing whatever to tell about him.

  Even so, Bossie knew very well that everybody would be conspiring to keep a more or less constant watch on his welfare from now on. The most staggering thing about the whole interview had been his flourish at the end, when he knew his parents were outside the door, and was graciously saying goodbye to his police guard. He had been wide awake and sparking on all cylinders then, stimulated to such an extent that he was riding high above the danger of which he was, none the less, well aware. After all, it was his act that had set off this explosion wasn’t it? And his person that was at risk as a result!

  ‘I say, Mr Felse,’ he had piped after them, when they were halfway to the door, ‘what’s it worth if I let you use me as bait?’

  George had replied without excitement, and without more than a casual turn of his head : ‘A thick ear, I should think, if your dad ever hears about it.’ And had departed, secure in his knowledge of the solidity of the family relationship involved, to relay the facts to Sam and Jenny, and assure them of his support whenever they might feel the need of it.

  All the same, Bossie was a force to be reckoned with, like all unguided missiles, and George was not going to be the one to underestimate him, or take his quiescence for granted.

  And the sooner this case was wound up with the murderer in custody, the better for the peace of mind of the Jarvis household.

  ‘Hang on to everything here,’ said George, making up his mind, ‘and I’ll be back. I’m going to see Mrs Rainbow.’

  It was Sunday morning. The bells of St Eata’s were pealing for the eleven o’clock service, and Spuggy Price would be standing in for the star treble. Only three mornings ago, Arthur Everard Rainbow had been alive and intent, planning his evening’s activities at and after choir practice. And what had seemed worth pursuing to him then was worth pursuing now in fairness to his shade. Arid and unregretted, that ghost cried for consideration and redress. George turned in at the lion-guarded gates, and threaded the nymph-haunted drive.

  He had wondered for a moment if the Land-Rover would still be parked on the gravel in front of the house, but then dismissed the idea, even before he emerged from the screening trees to see that the lunette of gold was empty. Openness might be the order of the day, but somehow he was certain that Barbara and Willie would find it uncongenial and unsuitable to be together here in this house. Up at the lodge, that was another matter. His next thought was that he might have to go there now to find her, but no, she was at home, she opened the door to his ring, and stepped back to welcome him in with evident pleasure.

  ‘How’s the Jarvis boy?’ she demanded at once.

  ‘Flourishing, I’m glad to say. His parents have taken him home. Give him a couple of days and he’ll be fit as a flea. Thanks to you!’

  ‘No word yet on the hit-and-run car?’

  ‘We’ve got a general call out for it, but there’s probably no noticeable damage, and Bossie could give no clear account of it, naturally enough. But there’s something you may be able to help me with.’

  ‘If I can,’ she said at once, and led the way into her small sitting-room. She was wearing slacks and a loose Chinese blouse, no trace today of the splendour she had thought appropriate for dinner in public with Willie the Twig. It was as if she saw the thought pass through George’s mind, for she smiled rather wryly, and said simply: ‘The first time I met him he said to me: “I don’t work my way round, I go straight across!” That’s good enough for me, too. If I had cloth of gold, I’d wear it for him. George – may I go on calling you George? – I’m sorry Arthur’s dead, I didn’t dislike him, and he was never unfair to me. But what we had was a business arrangement, understood if never stated. And my fidelity was not among the things he was buying. Not that I’ve handed it out freely up to now, but it’s mine to give. It was!’ she amended, and glowed briefly. ‘Just to put you in the picture!’

  ‘I begin to think you’re psychic,’ George admitted.

  ‘No, just sharp. I’ve had to be. I don’t mind being misunderstood by outsiders, but I like to get things straight with friends. Without prejudice to your job! You run me in whenever you think it justified. Go ahead, tell me how I can be useful.’ And this time she brought a drink for him without even asking, Scotch and water, to prove the quality of her memory.

  ‘We’ve learned,’ said George, ‘that a week before his death your husband got hold of a document purporting to be a leaf of parchment dating back to around the thirteenth century. Our information indicates that this was a genuine membrane, but deliberately faked up with some new traces of script to indicate re-use after cleaning. Now how capable would he have been of interpreting and valuing a thing like that? How scholarly was he? He knew Latin, for instance?’

  Barbara’s eyebrows had soared into her hair. ‘Well, he’d done Latin, as you might say. I wouldn’t put it much above O level, though.’

  ‘This was a thing in which, I imagine, the surface fraud wouldn’t be hard to spot. At least to suspect. But what was underneath may have been quite another matter. He’d want to be sure before he either pursued or discarded it. For instance again, was he competent in unextended mediaeval Latin? They used a baffling sort of shorthand. Would he be able to fill out a code like that?’

  ‘No,’ said Barbara without hesitation. ‘He’d be interested, all right, he knew things like that could be pure gold, but what he really knew his way about in was pictures, china and furniture. You can’t be expert in everything. What matters is to know just where to go for the expertise in the lines that aren’t specifically yours. If he had got hold of something like that, he’d need help to assess it.’

  ‘And he’d take that risk? Consult someone else who might be fired with ambition at sight of the thing.’

  ‘He’d have to, wouldn’t he? It would be a far worse risk, from his point of view, to stake on it without being sure he was on to something good. He couldn’t risk being made to look a fool. You only have to lose your credibility once in his business.’

  ‘Can you suggest to whom he might go for an opinion?’

  ‘I can suggest to whom he wouldn’t,’ said Barbara with conviction. ‘Not to anyone in his own line. Not within the trade. Two reasons. Those would be the last people he’d risk exposing himself to, in case he was making a fool of himself. And those would be the first people he’d suspect of having designs on his find if it did turn out to be priceless.’

  ‘Who, then? A benevolent scholar, who’d look upon such a thing as an interesting study rather than potential mo
ney?’

  ‘I would say so. Helpful acquaintances like, say, Mr Jarvis, would never think of making capital out of a professional’s confidences.’ The thought made her look again at the possibility, and see more in it than immediately met the eye. ‘You don’t think he really did go to Mr Jarvis?’ She was thinking of Bossie, but of course she didn’t know that the membrane had come from Bossie in the first place. ‘You don’t think there could be any connection, surely, with what happened to that child? This is all getting a bit sinister and suggestive, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said George, ‘he didn’t go to Sam. We know that.’

  Interesting, though, to think he might have done just that, Sam being the last person on earth to suspect of coveting somebody else’s discovery or taking advantage of somebody else’s request for help. ‘But thanks for the advice, I think you’ve put me on the right lines.’

  For with Sam already eliminated, the supply of first-class classical scholars ready to hand in Middlehope, ruling out, possibly, the vicar, who would certainly not have been consulted in the circumstances, was narrowed down to one.

  Professor Emeritus Evan Joyce lived in a rambling stone cottage a little way up the valley, with half an acre of garden, a few old fruit trees, about seven thousand books which lined the walls of all the rooms, and a handsome old desk of enormous proportions, situated in a large window and admirable for spreading out several files of notes, translations and authorities, without actually adding a line to the manuscript about the Goliard poets. The visual effect was impressive, the actual business of rambling among these fascinating properties was ravishing, and the fact that every line he pursued was a digression only added to its charm. He had lived with the fully-realised vision of his magnum opus so long that there was absolutely no prospect of his ever producing it in the flesh. There was no need, it already existed, complete and perfect in his mind.

  ‘Why, yes,’ he said readily, when George put the question to him, ‘he did come to consult me, in confidence. But that was the week before he got killed, on the Saturday evening. He brought a leaf of parchment, as you say, and wanted my views on whether it was of any importance. Somebody’d been monkeying with it, on the face of it it was a simple fake, but I think he knew that, even if he didn’t say so. But the original cleaning had been very cursory, and there was another script below. It looked highly promising. I thought the text could be recovered more or less complete, given a little effort and patience, and I suggested he should leave it with me and give me time to try and work it out.’

  ‘He didn’t, by any chance?’ asked George wistfully, but without much hope. That leaf of parchment was beginning to beckon like the missing link, the key to everything that had happened and was about to happen.

  ‘He did not! The suggestion made him jump, all right, but back, not forward. I must have looked a good deal too interested, and too eager, he changed his mind about trusting me. And from what you say, I suppose I’d told him what he wanted to know. I’d made it plain there was something genuinely promising there. He practically snatched it back, and thanked me, and said he’d like to try it himself first. I tried to get him to tell me where he’d found it, but he turned deaf, and I never did get to know. You haven’t found the membrane among his effects, then, I’m afraid? If you have, I wish you’d let me have a few days to work on it.’

  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, sippi
ng 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.’