A Nice Derangement Of Epitaphs Part 8

"I should be betting you Paddy, shouldn't I?" she said, gently and quietly. "What more do you want?"

Paddy opened his eyes and stretched delightedly, and then remembered why everything felt and looked different to-day. Not necessarily better or worse, not yet; just different. And as if in answer to a call which had certainly never been uttered except, perhaps, in his mind, Phil was suddenly there in the room, bringing him a clean pair of slacks and a s.h.i.+rt from the airing cupboard.

"Good morning, mudlark! How do you feel this morning?"

He felt strange; larger than usual, more responsible, and more subdued. Big with all the things he had to think about. But beyond all question, he felt good. Good, in a state of well-being; and good, virtuous.

"I feel fine. Is it really that time? And I've got to go to the police station, haven't I?" He sat up, solemn-faced, remembering.

"Mummy!" The sudden charged softness of his voice warned her what was coming, but he was longer about framing it than she had expected, and the end-product, when it emerged, was a revelation.

"Mummy, who was I who was I?"

Her heart gave a leap of joy and triumph. She thought: Poor Simon! She laid Paddy's clean clothes on a chair, and came and sat down on the edge of his bed. Flushed and bemused from long sleep, he faced her earnestly and trustingly, and waited for an answer. It mattered, just to the private thinking he had to do about himself; but it couldn't affect what they had between them now.

"You know," he said, "what I mean."

"Yes, I know. Your mother was a very nice girl, a good friend of ours, Paddy. She was only twenty-one when she died, from some illness that came on after you were born. And her husband-your father-You know him, Paddy. You know him very well, and he's very fond of you. You know him as Uncle Simon."

He didn't exclaim, his face didn't show surprise, or consternation, or relief, or pleasure, or anything else but the same charged gravity. He accepted it, and sat digesting it.

"His wife died," said Phil, "and left you on his hands. He was just beginning to be well-known then, and he had a contract for his first big tour. He couldn't take a baby with him. And I'd lost one only a few months before, and the doctors said I couldn't have another. So you mustn't blame him too much. He loved his wife very much, and he was wretched about losing her, and wanted to get away. It wasn't just fear of losing his big opportunity."

Since she had invited this single combat, she felt obliged to conduct it scrupulously; and besides, one should never allow a child to contemplate the possibility that he may have failed to make himself loved. But was this a child facing her? The fluffy crest and slender neck and unformed forehead said yes; the grave eyes and something in the set of the face suggested that this juvenile image was already a little out of date.

"It doesn't mean he didn't love you," said Phil firmly. But he didn't, she thought honestly; he wasn't a person to whom babies were quite human beings at all, and he isn't alone in that, it's something he couldn't help. "Well, you've got to know him pretty well, this visit. He hasn't shown any want of affection, has he?"

Paddy received the revelation in silence, and continued to ponder with an almost forbidding concentration.

"O.K., Mummy, I see. Thanks for telling me. Now we're all straight." He slid his legs out of bed. "I'd better get a move on, or Mr. Hewitt will be sending an escort for me. But I don't know that I'm going to be much use to him, am I? I mean, my little trek isn't going to tell him who knocked old Trethuan on the head and tossed him in the sea, is it?"

"That reminds me," said Phil, glad of the distraction. "Do you know what I found in your pocket last night?" She brought the little gold com, and displayed it triumphantly in her palm.

"Oh, that!" he said, rather disappointingly. And then, as his eyes took in the design and the colour of it, which seemed to be totally unfamiliar: "Gosh, is that that what it turned out to be? But it looks really something." He took it and turned it about curiously, examining it with astonished delight."What is it? Do you know?" what it turned out to be? But it looks really something." He took it and turned it about curiously, examining it with astonished delight."What is it? Do you know?"

"You're a fine one!" said Phil, amused. "First you say 'Oh, that!' Then you start goggling at it as if you'd never seen it before."

"But, silly," he said, laughing, "I never have seen it before. It was pitch dark in there, I told you, that's why I had to give up and turn back in the end. I've felt felt it before, though." it before, though."

"You found it in this pa.s.sage in the cave?"

"Yes, way along it as far as I went. I fell over a bit of rock and went down on my hands, and this thing was sticking in my palm. Well, I could tell it was a coin, but all I thought was, somebody else exploring must have had a hole in his pocket, and I was a s.h.i.+lling up. It looks like gold gold," said Paddy disbelievingly. "Could it be?"

"I think it could, you know. Guineas and half-guineas were minted in gold, and this seems to be a Queen Anne guinea. You could show it to somebody at the museum, to make sure."

"You mean it's really worth a guinea?" His eyes were wide with visions of wealth, and had lost for a moment their look of solemn preoccupation.

"More, I should imagine, if it's genuine, and I can't think of a reason why it shouldn't be. But it might be treasure trove, technically, we should have to find out about that."

"I thought there'd be a catch in it." He grinned at her cheerfully enough, still having at least the thrill of discovery. "But there might be more of them, did you think of that? Smugglers might have hidden them somewhere there." She could feel him suddenly planning, and checking, and contemplating a barrier he might have to get round before he could proceed. Moments of crisis boil up so abruptly out of nowhere. "Mummy!"

The careful, gentle, tentative voice nerved itself, moving in on her. Here it comes, Phil, she thought, and whatever you do there mustn't be any hesitation.

"Mummy, you don't mind if I go back there and take another look? With a torch, of course, this time."

It was a stiff fence for both of them. Knowing he'd frightened her half to death once, and she'd hardly had time yet to get over it, terrified of being babied, but aware that it might be hard for her to give him his head to frighten her in the same way again, he couldn't quite manage the right easy tone. But that was something she mustn't let him realise she had noticed.

"No, of course I don't mind, darling. Take Daddy's big torch, there's a new battery in it. Don't want to risk getting left in the dark again. Do I get a commission, if the h.o.a.rd turns out to be legally yours?"

After a brief, blank instant of astonished relief and admiration, shaken to the heart at finding himself trusted without even a caution, he said gruffly: "You bet you do! We'll go halves."

"Low tide's about a quarter to twelve. You'll be able to get in any time after ten. So hurry and get up to Mr. Hewitt, and then you'll have time enough before lunch." Blessed rea.s.surance, he wouldn't risk missing his lunch, not on a day when he was happy, not for all the guineas Queen Anne ever minted.

"I'll be careful," he volunteered even more gruffly, and dug his toes hastily into his slippers and headed for the door.

There he checked, ears suddenly p.r.i.c.ked, catching the unmistakable sound of Simon's Porsche starting up in the yard. Phil saw him stiffen, and the resolute shade of thought came down again upon his face. There was a relations.h.i.+p still to be adjusted somehow, and it wasn't going to be easy.

She wished she could guess what was going on in his mind, but the set of his face told her nothing. All that charm and glamour and excitement suddenly his for the claiming, and more than ready to fall into his lap-if only he would say something to give her a clue! But when he did make his one pregnant comment, it wasn't much help to her.

"I suppose I'm more fun now," said Paddy bafflingly, and whisked away to the bathroom.

"I'm sorry," he was saying, three-quarters of an hour later, in Hewitt's office overlooking the square, "I don't seem to have been much help. But I really didn't look up at the Dragon's Head at all, and I didn't see a soul until Dominic came yelling at me. It isn't as if I'd seen anyone fall from up there, you see. I don't even know anything accurate about times, because I ran down in my trunks, like I always do, and I didn't have my watch. I'm sorry!"

"Well, there it is," agreed Hewitt, no more nor less lugubrious than usual, but distinctly more loquacious, solid and fresh behind his shabby desk, with George Felse and Simon Towne in silent attendance, one on either side. "Can't be helped, laddie. Don't you worry about it any more."

"And you don't think my pa.s.sage in the cave, and that guinea-if it really is a guinea?-you don't think they're anything to do with Treverra?"

"I didn't say that, Paddy, my boy. I think it's unlikely, but I didn't say I wasn't interested. But I've no time to investigate that to-day."

"Well, is it all right if I go and explore there again myself? I haven't got much time left, you see, I go back to school Monday." School was the boarding-house of the best local grammar school, twelve miles inland. Its shadow cast a light cloud over the last week of his holidays, but promised escape, at least, from his present difficulties. He hadn't once seemed to look at Simon since he balked in the office doorway on finding him there, but he hadn't missed a single shade of expression that crossed the somewhat drawn and sombre face. He saw it tighten now, saw the quick flash of uneasy brown eyes in George's direction.

"My mother's given me permission," said Paddy, with immense dignity.

"I've no objection, laddie," said Hewitt heartily. "You go ahead, and good luck. Let me know if you find out where the treasure's buried." He saw Paddy's eloquent eyes rest calculatingly upon the small gold coin that lay before him on the desk, and palmed and tossed it to him so smoothly that the act seemed spontaneous. "Here, better keep your sample by you. You'll let me see it again if necessary, I'm sure."

Paddy's smile blazed like the sun. The little glitter of metal vanished into his ready palm and into his pocket. "Yes, of course course!"

"Why don't you show the place to Dominic?" suggested Simon, lightly and quickly. "You just about owe him that."

And Mr. Felse, equally easily: "He'd certainly be glad to come with you. I look like being busy for a while, and he won't want to go souvenir-shopping with his mother, that's sure. Give him a ring, Paddy."

"I will," said Paddy politely. "Thank you." He was pretty quick on the draw, was Mr. Felse, but of course a detective-inspector would have to be. He got Uncle Simon's message as fast as I did, thought Paddy, withdrawing aloofly from the room. He didn't want me to go back in the cave alone. Mummy still trusts me, but he doesn't. He's afraid something may happen to me.

And in the instant he saw it in reverse, and was dazzled. Uncle Simon, who can do everything better than anyone else, who goes everywhere, and ventures everything, and doesn't know what it is to be afraid for himself, he's afraid for me me. He does does care about me. Uncle Simon that was. Now I don't know what to call him. I don't know what he is. care about me. Uncle Simon that was. Now I don't know what to call him. I don't know what he is.

I know what I am, though. I know who who I am. And Mummy cares about me, too, and maybe she was just as afraid-more, because she's a woman. But all the same, she trusted me, and didn't even say: Take Dominic with you. I am. And Mummy cares about me, too, and maybe she was just as afraid-more, because she's a woman. But all the same, she trusted me, and didn't even say: Take Dominic with you.

Meantime, it was hardly Dominic's fault, and you could see their point of view, and all that. So he'd do just what he'd said he'd do, and call him and invite him to come along. He was a little bit prefect-type, to be honest, but it was difficult not to be at that age; and he'd been jolly decent last night, and had the tact to vanish into the background as soon as the fussing began. He deserved to be rescued from souvenir-shopping.

"Well, that didn't get us much forrarder," observed Hewitt, when the door had closed and Paddy's feet were clattering down the stairs. "No surprise, really, I didn't think it would. So here we still are with two bodies that shouldn't have been there, and-don't forget this little detail-minus one that should.

"With the older body we still haven't got much to go on. The first job is to identify him. According to the reports so far he was about thirty years old, about six feet tall, and a pretty husky specimen. His ears were pierced, and there's a thin gold ring still in one of 'em. The body shows no injuries except to the skull, and those were clearly the cause of death. It looks as if he was bashed on the head from behind, maybe two or three blows, with a solid and probably jagged object, such as a lump of rock. The fragments of cloth suggest he was a seaman, most likely a fisherman."

"Which means probably a local man," said Simon intently.

"It doesn't necessarily follow, but everything rather indicates it as a probability. He's been dead between two and three years-certainly not two centuries. The one really good lead for identifying him is in his jaws. He's got a lot of very good dental work, most likely all done in one series of treatments after a long period of neglect. Whoever did that job on him will have it on record, and he'll know his own work again. It means we've got to get on to every dentist here and maybe up and down the coast, but it's only a matter of time, and we'll find him. And then, with any luck, we'll know who we've got down there.

"Now the other one, he's a very different matter. Here we have a fellow everyone knows, who was seen alive as late as four o'clock last Wednesday, and according to the medical evidence and the set of the tides must have been dead before ten o'clock the same night. The blow or blows that left that mark on his face didn't do more than knock him out, which seems to have been the object. He's otherwise more or less undamaged. He drowned in salt water, and was then put in the Treverra vault. And though Miss Rachel's key was in your possession during the material time, Mr. Towne, we now know that another key exists, and was kept in a place where anyone who had a little inside knowledge or a bit of luck could get at it. That leaves us a pretty wide field. It may have occurred to you, as a limiting factor, that surely only somebody who didn't know the vault was about to be opened could think of it as a good hiding-place for a murdered man. But even if we accept that-and I wouldn't put too much reliance on its importance-the field's still wide enough.

"Now here we've got an unfriendly man who kept himself very much to himself, and usually managed to grate on other people so much that they were glad to let him. Obviously we're obliged to make a pretty thorough check on the movements of his son-in-law, because it's no secret that young Jim had a good many breezes with Trethuan before he got Rose away from him, and relations have been strained, to say the least of it, ever since. I'm not saying I think Jim Pollard makes a very likely murderer, but he's got a temper, and these things happen without much warning sometimes. There are holes in Jim's alibi that won't be easy to fill. He was down to the yard at the south end of Maymouth, Wednesday afternoon, for some timber for a little repair job at home, and then he did one or two more errands for paint and stuff round the town, and ended up working late on an old boat he's got beached in Pentarno haven, so he says. Which makes him mobile and at large but for the times of his various calls, and leaves plenty of time between for an unexpected brush with Rose's dad, supposing he met him in a nasty mood.

"However, he's just one possibility among many. If I should ask you, now, what's the oddest thing about Trethuan's own behaviour in the last days of his life, what would you say?"

He had looked at Simon, but Simon held his tongue. When the guileless stare turned upon George he responded promptly: "Why was he so insistent that the vault must not be opened?"

"Exactly! Why? Religious objections? Superst.i.tion? That would account for anyone in his position criticising and prophesying evil, yes. But by all accounts this was more than that. He was desperate about it. Is that too strong, Mr. Towne?"

"No," said Simon shortly, "that's how he struck me."

"So what was it that made it so urgent? Now I hear most of what goes on around here, and I don't mind telling you openly, I know all about your sporting warning issued in the Dragon bar on Wednesday night, Mr. Towne. And I saw-and so did Mr. Felse, if you didn't-the signs that the vault had been artistically swept and garnished and sanded over again before I got to it, and presumably before you did, on Friday. It's an old and time-honoured profession, is smuggling. You know it still goes on, I know it still goes on. I doubt if there's a licensee along this coast who doesn't get a drop of the real stuff that way. We know the vault was used as a liquor store, we know there was a nice, handy key, the one Sam Shubrough came by as an innocent child. And we know they won't use the same place again, if it's any rea.s.surance to you-not since they cleared out their contraband, whenever they did. There wasn't any sense of desperation there. They They didn't care a toot when you tipped 'em the wink, they just took the tip, and s.h.i.+fted their store to a safer place. And slipped you one on the house as an acknowledgment, I shouldn't wonder. Only one person was really concerned, and that was Trethuan. A lone wolf who wouldn't be wanted in any such confraternity, and who wouldn't want to be in it, anyhow. didn't care a toot when you tipped 'em the wink, they just took the tip, and s.h.i.+fted their store to a safer place. And slipped you one on the house as an acknowledgment, I shouldn't wonder. Only one person was really concerned, and that was Trethuan. A lone wolf who wouldn't be wanted in any such confraternity, and who wouldn't want to be in it, anyhow.

"So I'm telling you, I don't believe smuggling or contraband had anything whatever to do with Trethuan's death, and I don't think you need worry about any of the otherwise law-abiding chaps around here who don't feel it any sin to slip a few kegs of brandy past the preventives. They're not my job. Murder is. And we're left with Trethuan and the something that made it absolutely vital to him that Treverra should rest in peace. Always supposing he'd been resting there at all, which as it turned out he wasn't. Did Zeb have something private and dangerous of his own that came over with the brandy? I doubt it. No, more likely his preoccupation was about something quite separate from theirs. There's only one certain thing we know about it. It was somewhere in the vault. Why else should he be so desperate to stop you from opening it?"

"And why couldn't he move it," said George, "since apparently he could put it there in the first place?"

"And where is it?" added Simon. "The place is as bare as the palm of your hand but for those two stone coffins. One of those we've exhausted already. There's nowhere left but Mrs. Treverra's coffin."

"And that's exactly it, Mr. Towne. You represent Miss Rachel's interest in this matter. I'm going to suggest to you that we ought to open the second coffin, too. The Vicar thinks he can justifiably sanction it, on the strength of the permission already given for her husband. If you're prepared to join me and come along down to St. Nectan's right now, we can at least see if there's anything there to account for Zeb Trethuan's acting like a desperate man."

"For the record," said Simon, his eyes kindling golden-brown with curiosity, "maybe we should. If it turns out to be full of Swiss watches that have never paid duty, then we shall be getting somewhere."

"According to precedent to date," said George dryly and ruefully, as they went down the stairs, "the one thing that certainly won't be in it is Mrs. Treverra!"

But that was where George was wrong. For when they had carefully lowered Jan Treverra's coffin-lid with slings to the floor of the vault, and prised the smaller stone lid beneath it, with its fine, defiant flourish of cryptic verse, out of its seating, when they had levered it clear and lowered it to rest beside its fellow, when they stood staring into the coffin, it was plain to be seen that the lady was all too surely there.

The shadow slid from over her almost reluctantly. A gush of fine dust ascended into the beam of their lanterns, and a dry, dead, nostalgic scent, as though pressed flowers, long since paper-fine and drained of nature, had disintegrated into powder at a touch. The outer air spilled in upon her, flowing over the broken and displaced lid of the wooden coffin that had once held her, and the frozen turbulence of silks and woollen cloth that overflowed from the box, stirred by the displacement of air, billowed for one instant buoyant and stable in their sight, and then collapsed together with a faint, whispering sigh, crumbling away at hems and folds into fragmentary rags.

A subsiding drift of dust and tindery cloth settled and fluttered down into the grave, disclosing the small, convulsed bones of hands and arms and drawn-up knees that thrust vainly and frenziedly upward, a shapely skull arched back in anguished effort among a nest of crumbling silks and laces, and the withered black of once-luxuriant hair, powdered over with the drab of perished silk and the fine, incorruptible dust of death.

Morwenna did not rest in peace. Contorted, struggling, fighting to force her way out, she seemed for a moment to be about to rise and reach her fragile, skeleton hands to them. Then even her bones began to rustle and crumble stealthily, settling lower and lower before their eyes into the stone tomb in which she had quite certainly been buried alive.

CHAPTER VII.

SAt.u.r.dAY NOON.

OH, IT'S YOU at last, miss, is it?" said Miss Rachel into the telephone, in her most belligerent tones, for fear she should be suspected of even the least shade of penitence. "And about time, too! What do you think you are doing, absenting yourself in this undisciplined way, and where, may I ask, are you doing it?"

"I'm at the Dragon. You told me not to bother to come back, remember? But as a matter of fact, I did 'phone Alice, pretty late, after we found Paddy. I beg his pardon, after he came back, I should have said. He wasn't lost, he knew only too well where he was. And all your fault, in case n.o.body else has raised enough courage to tell you. Me? What have I got to lose? You as good as fired me."

"I did nothing of the sort! But if you're not back here pretty quickly, miss, I will! You can't leave without giving me a month's notice, and even if you did, I wouldn't take it, so don't be so uppish. Is Paddy there? I thought I heard his voice a minute ago."

"Yes, he's here." He was giggling like a girl in the background, but a little conscience-stricken, too. "He came up to ask Dominic to go out somewhere with him, and if you want to know, I'm going, too. I like handsome young escorts, and now I've got two of 'em. Don't expect me back before lunch, and I'll be late for that. What? No, don't be silly. We were just rather late, and I was very dirty and hungry, so I accepted Mrs. Felse's offer to come here with them for dinner and borrow some clothes from her. Then I called Alice, and she said you knew Paddy was O.K., and you were just about exhausted with worry and then relief, and had gone to bed. So I thought I might as well stay here overnight, as Bunty was kind enough to lend me everything I needed. O.K., so you weren't worried. Then why were you carrying on like a broody hen? Well, tell Alice you weren't, she told me. Half-way up the wall, she said-Yes, sure you were right, cleared the air like a thunderstorm. All right, I'll be home this afternoon. Yes, he's all right. Do you want a word with him?"

Paddy smoothed her in one breathless sentence: "Hallo, Aunt Rachel, I'm terribly sorry about the rest of the apricots, it was all a mix-up, I meant to come back. Would some of them be all right to-morrow? Mummy's making jam with those. No, I don't mind, really I don't. I'm glad. Yes, I do mean it. Can we keep Tamsin for to-day? She was the one who found me last night-one of the two, that is, Dominic was the other. 'Ess, me dear, I'll be up-along soon as I can. To-morrow for sure, because I'm going back to school Monday, you know. O.K., I'll tell her. 'Bye, Aunt Rachel!"

He hung up, grinning. "She says to tell you Alice has instructions not to keep lunch hot for you."

"Good!" said Tamsin, linking her other arm in Dominic's. "That means I've got the whole day off. Come on, let's go and pan gold in Paddy's cave."

They went down the steep path from the Dragon, where Simon had risked his neck on Paddy's cycle, three abreast, linked and light-hearted. At the edge of the harbour they halted to buy three immense cones of candy-floss, and went down the harbour steps in single file, flouris.h.i.+ng them like torch-bearers in a procession, and nibbling the fringes like fire-eaters. They paid no attention to anyone or anything but their own mid-September holiday happiness, reprieved from yesterday's shadow. But a girl who was just hurrying out of the narrow, rocky alley behind the six colour-washed cottages of Cliffside Row checked and drew back at sight of them, and stood in the shadow of the rocks, watching them recede, linked and hilarious, down the slate-coloured sands.

The tide was nearing its lowest ebb, and beyond the pebbly stretches the finer sand gleamed moist and bright in a watery sun. The three young people, the taller boy, the visitor, on the right, young Paddy Rossall on the left, Tamsin Holt in the middle with her arm about Paddy's shoulders and the other boy's arm about hers, bore steadily sidelong into the cliff face, and halted to finish their hectic pink torches before they vanished into the black mouth of the Dragon's Hole.

Paddy looked back up the beach towards the coloured cardboard stage set, the impossibly charming and gay toy theatre of the harbour and the town. He saw another flare of candy-floss, primrose-gold, burning at the corner of the dark alley behind the cottages, and recognised Rose Pollard, a round, soft, appealing doll in neutral Shetland sweater and tartan trews, standing there braced and alert. She seemed-he couldn't be sure, but that was how it struck him-she seemed to be watching them, and wondering, and hesitating. And when she moved at last, it was to draw back softly into the shadow; but his eyes, following movement rather than colours, a.s.sured him that she had not gone away, and his intuition, already sharpened beyond ordinary this morning, warned him that she had not stopped watching.

"I can't believe it," said Tamsin disgustedly. "We've walked how far?-more than half a mile underground, and suddenly the whole thing folds up in a blank wall. And you said yourself the stone's been worked with tools in places, so somebody was interested in improving the pa.s.sage for use. Why would it just stop, without arriving anywhere?"

Dominic's eyes followed the beam of Paddy's torch from stone ceiling to stone floor. To call it a blank wall that faced them was simplifying things; it was a rough confusion of broken planes, sealing off the small chamber into which the pa.s.sage had opened. But quite certainly there was no cleft nor hole in it through which they could pa.s.s. This was the end of the journey.

"Maybe the pa.s.sage was an end in itself," he said. "There's room among some of these side-pockets we've pa.s.sed to store any amount of contraband. The whole complex could be a pretty good hiding-place. And they may have taken steps to hide the entrance even better, when it was in use."

"But, look," said Paddy acutely, "if the pa.s.sage was to be the cache, they didn't need half a mile of it, a hundred yards would have done. They could have got a s.h.i.+p-load of stuff in that first bulge. You don't chip your way along half a mile underground unless you're aiming to get get somewhere." somewhere."

"I have to admit," agreed Tamsin thoughtfully, after pondering this for a minute, "that he's got something there."

"Do you suppose we've missed a turning somewhere? It may go on in another direction."