A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

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 passage 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!”

“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. He does 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 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?”