by Ellis Peters
‘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.’
‘But there was nothing on it, not really,’ objected Jimmy. ‘Nothing for him to get excited about.’
‘That’s what we thought! But there was, there must have been. Something he could find in that old writing that was on it, even if it was faint. We knew where the parchment came from, he’s had to find out by studying it, but there must have been some clue the
re for him to decypher. I bet you anything he’s got a fair idea now where to look, to see if there’s any more of it to find.’
‘It must be something pretty marvellous,’ said Toffee Bill, staring round-eyed at treasures in his mind. ‘I mean, to make him want to steal the paper in the first place, let alone what he did to Rainbow. There could be a clue in it, couldn’t there, to some place where they buried the church plate, when those chaps came to dissolve the monasteries. Or perhaps where the prior hid all the money that was left, when he was shoved out on to the roads, so he or somebody else could sneak back and collect it. Only maybe they killed him, and he couldn’t come back for it.’
‘We don’t know what it is,’ said Ginger firmly, ‘but we do know it must be something important. What matters is, what do we do about it? We can’t tip off the police! If it was only us it would be all right, but it isn’t only us. And still we can’t just do nothing. So what do we do?’
‘We tackle it ourselves.’ Bossie squinted ferociously through his corrective lenses, and scrubbed at his grazes, which were beginning to itch. ‘Even if he’s found a clue to the general area where he has to look, it’s still a whacking great barracks of a place, unless he knows just where to search he could spend months going over the whole show. But I know exactly where the leaf came from, we can start looking right there. What we’ve got to do is beat him to the treasure, whatever it is, and then, when we’ve got something to show, we can hand over to the police, and let them do the rest. We can easily make up a cover story for how we happened to hit on the right spot. It could be just plain luck, we don’t have to split on anybody. If we simply say: Just look what we found, and look where we found it – all innocent! – they’d have to accept that.’
‘All right,’ said Ginger, unimpressed but willing. ‘When, and how, and how many of us? You’ve been thinking it out, now let’s hear it.’
‘It’s got to be safety in numbers, or I don’t get to go anywhere for a bit,’ said Bossie, displaying a comprehension of his elders’ states of mind which would not have surprised his parents to any great extent. ‘So look, as soon as I’m back at school we work this together, the whole gang of us…’
He leaned forward and sank his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, and all the young heads drew together over the quilted coverlet in profound session.
They were just about clear and agreed when Jenny, almost excessively discreet, tapped at the door before entering, and opened it slowly to give them time to take in the invading vision.
‘You’ve got another visitor, Bossie. Mrs Rainbow’s enquiring how you’re progressing. I don’t suppose you ever had time to thank her for rushing you into hospital. Now’s your chance!’
Bossie shot upright against his pillows, rushed a fist rapidly over his fell of hair, and put on his most adult face. It squinted rather more than was now usual with him, out of pure excitement, but happily he was unaware of that. His dignity was monumental. He hardly needed to cast a glance at his henchmen. They all said goodnight submissively, and trooped away downstairs as if in response to an order. And Bossie and Barbara were left alone.
‘Hullo!’ said Barbara, in the velvet voice he remembered. ‘Can I sit on the bed?’ She was dressed for a Sunday night up in the forest, but Bossie was not to know that the black and gold silk shirt with the tiger’s-eye cuff-links, and the matching head-scarf, and the tapered black silk slacks, were for another male, not for him. Barbara’s cloth of gold came in all degrees of utility and display. She was particularly beautiful because she was on her way to Willie the Twig, but the largesse was lavished upon everyone along the way. Bossie expanded and matured like a plant in the sun.
‘They wouldn’t let me do this in the hospital,’ said Barbara with pleasure, stretching her long legs and crossing her elegant ankles. ‘I’m glad they let you out of there so quickly, it proves you’re doing all right. What about the bruises? That was quite a crash you took.’
And this was the exquisite creature who had leaped out of her car to rescue him, called the ambulance, and ridden with him to the hospital. Bossie submerged in the profounds of love, and was exalted into airborne fantasies of self-esteem.
He said all the things he’d dreamed of saying to her, that he was fine, that it was thanks to her, that the bruises were nothing. ‘You saved my life,’ he said, and was promptly brought up hard against the realisation that he had been instrumental, however inadvertently, in getting her husband killed, for which her coals of fire seemed a truly crushing return.
Barbara, since her conversation with George that morning, had been thinking much the same thing, but thought it desirable to turn the boy’s mind away from any such consideration. She cast about for a neutral topic, and remembered that the child was musical. By the time Sam came up, a quarter of an hour-later, rather to rescue Barbara than to protect the invalid, they were chatting animatedly about musical boxes, of all things, and Barbara had promised to come again and show him one that played ‘The Shepherd on the Rock’, quite beautifully. Almost, Bossie’s qualms of conscience had been lulled to sleep, almost he had forgotten what he had just been plotting with his fellow-conspirators. Almost, but not quite.
‘Dad,’ said Bossie, after long consideration, when his visitor had departed, ‘do you think she really liked Mr Rainbow?’ He was naïve enough, and had been fortunate enough in his own opportunities of studying a marriage at close quarters, to suppose that husbands and wives must unquestionably like each other. Yet Barbara’s manner, while not suggesting any degree of rejoicing at her widowhood, certainly conveyed no suggestion of conventional mourning.
Watch your step! thought Sam, and took his time about answering. ‘Difficult to say, but I think they got on quite well together. But sometimes people do get married for different sorts of reasons, that seem sound enough at the time, and then find they aren’t really suited. That doesn’t mean they dislike each other. The fire just burns a bit dull, you might say, instead of nice and brightly. He was a lot older than his wife, for one thing.’
‘And that’s bad?’ queried Bossie, reflecting shrewdly how much younger he himself was. ‘Is it bad the other way round, too?’ There had been a time when he’d thought of marrying Miss de la Pole as soon as he was old enough.
‘It complicates things, either way. It’s something to think hard about, before you take any rash steps.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Bossie resignedly, ‘she probably wouldn’t wait, anyhow. And marrying people isn’t as fashionable as it used to be. Lots of lovers get along without it. Even married to other people sometimes, like Tristan and Isolde. Just as long as you don’t think she’s missing him all that much. And I wouldn’t say she is, really, would you?’
The inquest on Arthur Everard Rainbow duly opened on Monday morning, and was duly adjourned for a week at the request of the police, after evidence of identification and medical evidence had been given. That took care of any immediate leakage of information, anything that might have betrayed to the murderer a suspected connection between his crime and the ‘accident’ to Bossie. Keep him guessing, and keep an eye on the boy. The populace of Abbot’s Bale might be adept at reading between the sparse lines, but they were not talkers, except to trusted neighbours and friends.
The widow attended, austerely dressed in grey, and behaved with gravity and dignity if not with grief. What was more surprising was that she should be escorted by Charles Goddard, large, impressive and protective, though whether his company and attentions were welcome to Barbara was not so clear. Probably he had taken the responsibility upon himself uninvited, George thought, and that in itself was revealing. He was quite a personality in the county, a widower for some years, and not a doubt of it, he was considerably smitten with Arthur Rainbow’s relict. Willie Swayne, of course, worked for his living, and understood that Barbara needed no man to hold her hand on this occasion, and wanted none, either.
The whole procedure took only a short time, and the coroner released the body for burial. The und
ertakers would collect Rainbow and box him decently, and Barbara would never have to see him again.
George drove up the manorial drive once again that same afternoon, and climbed the sweeping staircase to the house.
Nobody let him in, this time. The great front door stood open, and the Land-Rover was parked on the gravel at the foot of the steps. When he rang the bell, Barbara’s voice called from the hall: ‘Come in, George! We saw you coming, we’re in here!’
She was in an old plaid skirt and a roll-necked sweater, her sleeves rolled up, and Willie the Twig was sitting cross-legged on one of the elegant Georgian couches, watching her fold garments into a large suitcase on the central table. He looked like a primitive prince supremely calm in his right and his authority, and Barbara had imbibed his certainty, and went about her leisurely preparations in placidity and fulfillment. They were graciously pleased to see George, but would have been perfectly content without him.
‘I’m glad you came, I was thinking I ought to give you official notice,’ said Barbara serenely. ‘I’m moving in with Willie. Regularising the situation. Or irregularising it, maybe? Anyhow, I never did like this house, and who needs so many things for living? It’s all right, I can’t officially touch anything here yet, I know that, except my own clothes and things. I’m locking the place up and turning the keys over to Arthur’s solicitor, and there’s a second set you can have, if you’re going to need them.’
George acknowledged that it might be an idea. ‘Have you talked to Bowes yet?’
‘About the will?’ She smiled, detached and untroubled. ‘He did call me, by way of an off-the-record bulletin, so that I’d have some idea where I stood. But actually I already knew, you see. I will say for Arthur that he was quite open about it. Fair, too! Everything he offered me, explicitly or implicitly, he delivered, and everything I was supposed to do for him I did. No complaints! Yes, I know just what I’m to get, and I know she gets all the rest. I dare say she earned it, just as honestly, in a way, as I did. I shan’t keep the house, or anything out of it.’
