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? Superstition? 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 reassurance to you—not since they cleared out their contraband, whenever they did. There wasn’t any sense of desperation there.
“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 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
SATURDAY 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 nobody 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?”
