They had a cottage down the south end of the sea front. After she died he lived alone, kept himself to himself, and bothered nobody. The excise people did have their suspicions of him, though not, I think, over the occasional drop of brandy. He was never actually caught out over anything. Just another lone wolf. If he needed hands he took on casuals, and dropped them again afterwards. Nobody ever worked with him regularly. Nobody was ever in his confidence.”
“That was your local paper?” Local papers are formidable institutions. They may ignore national events, but they must get every name right, and every date, and every detail, within their own field. “Proprietor? Editor? Or both?”
“Both. Henry still lives above his own offices, he won’t be long looking it up, his files are kept in apple-pie order. I could,” admitted Hewitt, “have got the same information at least three other ways, but not so quickly.”
It was barely a quarter of an hour before the telephone rang. Hewitt lifted it out of its cradle before it could cough out a second call. He listened for a moment with an unreadable face. “Thank you, Henry! That’s exactly what I wanted to know. I’m very grateful. Good-bye!” he replaced the instrument, and sat looking at George.
“The body that came up on the Mortuary and was buried as Walter Ruiz was identified, by the man who was considered to be his closest, maybe his only, friend. Zebedee Trethuan.”
It accounted for everything. They sat and looked at it, and details of Rose’s story fell into place like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, filling in what had seemed, until this morning, the most mysterious third of the whole picture.
“Well, I know now which identification I’d trust,” said Hewitt with curious mildness, pacing the room again, but with a longer, easier stride. “A handy and unrecognisable corpse turns up on the Mortuary, and you have need of just that to lay a ghost. The ghost of someone known to have been associated with you, and now missing, supposedly drowned at sea. How nice and easy to say this is it, and get it put away under a stone with your man’s name on it, so that no one will ever start asking awkward questions. Walter Ruiz is dead and buried respectably, and everybody knows it. Everything beautifully tidy and safe. And then this interfering Simon Towne comes along, and puts it into the old lady’s mind, of all crazy things, to
A cool voice from the doorway said deprecatingly: “I’m afraid he’s interfering again. I’m sorry, I did knock.”
They both swung round in surprise. So intent had they been on their revelation and its implications that they had failed to hear Simon’s light feet climbing the stairs. He stood in the doorway, eyebrows cocked obliquely, smiling a little. “The desk sergeant told me I could come up. Don’t blame him, I told him I had something that might be relevant to tell you. I really did knock, but you didn’t hear me. And I was just in time to hear no good of myself. Would you rather I waited downstairs?”
“No, that’s all right, Mr. Towne, come in. You might as well hear the context as well,” said Hewitt good- humouredly. “I wasn’t calling you interfering on my own account, it was what you might call an imaginative projection. Come in, and close the door.”
“I seem to have missed a lot.” Simon hitched a knee over the corner of the desk, and looked from one to the other of them, frowning. “Did I hear you talking about Ruiz? That’s the fellow Rose Pollard talked about last night, the one who was shipping pieces of jewellery abroad for her father? What’s he got to do with the Treverra tomb? I thought he was buried in St. Mary’s churchyard.”
“So did everybody else, Mr. Towne, except one person, the one who knew he was somewhere very different. In Jan Treverra’s coffin, where we found him.”
“
“Someone did. He came up practically naked and featureless, after six weeks in the sea. What could be better? The man who’d put the real Walter Ruiz in Treverra’s coffin, where he hoped he’d lie uninvestigated till doomsday, jumped at his chance when it offered, and got another body buried as Ruiz, publicly and decently. And that would have been the end of it, if you hadn’t conceived this notion of finding out whether Treverra really did have his poems buried with him. Imagine how this fellow would feel when he heard it! Wasn’t it enough to make him frantic? Wasn’t it enough to account for his threatening you, pestering you, trying to frighten you off? Anything to get you to go away and leave well alone.”
Open-mouthed, eyes huge and blank with astonishment, Simon whispered: “Trethuan?”
“Who else? Doesn’t it make sense of everything? He got Ruiz to help him dispose of the valuables he’d been steadily lifting from Mrs. Treverra’s coffin, they were partners for about six months, so Rose says. Then they quarrelled, and she thinks Ruiz was demanding a bigger share of the proceeds, maybe threatening to make trouble if he didn’t get it. And shortly after that Ruiz’s boat vanished one night, and never came back and Ruiz was presumed drowned. And the next possible and unidentifiable body that came up on the Mortuary—Trethuan identified it as Ruiz. Isn’t it plain what his reason must have been?”
“It looks,” said George, “as if Trethuan killed him either actually in the vault, or very close to it, maybe in the rock tunnel. Why else hide him there? He was a big man. Admittedly Trethuan was a pretty powerful person, too, but he wouldn’t want to move the body any farther than necessary. The sea was close, but the sea was no good. Ruiz had a skull fractured by repeated blows. No passing that off as the work of the sea. A drowned man, like Trethuan himself later, is another matter.”
“I see two possibilities,” said Hewitt. “Either Ruiz pretended to be reconciled, and then spied on Trethuan on his next trip, confronted him in the act, and was killed—for you can bet your last bob a man like Trethuan would want to keep the source entirely to himself and Rose, he’d never willingly let his partner into the secret. Or else— and perhaps this is the more likely—Trethuan pretended to agree to whatever Ruiz wanted, offered to prove his good faith by showing him where their profits were coming from, and took him there with the fixed intention of killing him and hiding him there. If he’d looked in the lady’s coffin, he’d looked in Treverra’s, too, he wouldn’t miss anything. He knew the coffin was empty. He supplied it with a body.”
“Could it be done by one man alone?” asked George, and turned his head and looked at Simon.
“Yes, it could. One man couldn’t possibly get either of the stones off and replace it again unbroken. But he could prise it sidelong, all right. Enough to probe inside. Enough to dump a man inside, and cover him again—”
He drew breath in a deep gasp, realising the full implications of what he was saying. He sat voiceless and motionless, his eyes blank and colourless as glass, staring inward at his own imaginings.
“It could be done, all right,” said Hewitt. “Trethuan did it repeatedly, didn’t he? Morwenna’s stone is lighter than the other, that one he must have shifted whenever he went back for another raid, enough to get his arm down into the poor thing’s belongings. The other, presumably, he moved only twice, once when he made his assay and
