He had been up half the previous night upon a quite different case, and all this night upon this, which had only just become a case, and his, after all.
‘As soon as I can, but it may be three hours or so. I shall take time out to call at Aurae Phiala. They won’t have heard officially. I want to be the one to bring the news. I’ve got to see their faces.’
‘Not the Rossignol girl,’ said Bunty. It was a little less than half enquiry, and a little more than half assertion. He had called her shortly after midnight, she already knew something of the personalities involved.
‘I want to see her face, too. But no—you’re right, not the Rossignol girl. On present form,’ he said, his voice warming wearily into a semblance of the voice she knew best, ‘she only pulls people out.’
His timing was good, though it was determined mainly by the exigencies of the situation. When he drove down the gravelled road along the edge of the site to the curator’s house, at half past nine, he found the bronze Aston Martin parked in front of the doorway, and Gus Hambro just handing out Charlotte’s suitcases. Both the Paviours had come out to greet their guest, Stephen Paviour long and sad and constrained as ever, Lesley eager and young and welcoming. Her movements as she ran down the steps had an overflowing grace of energy. Behind her Bill Lawrence appeared in the doorway. So much the better. One was apt to overlook Bill Lawrence, who nevertheless was there on the spot like all the rest, and able to move even more privately, since he lived alone in the lodge cottage, further along the Silcaster road. Probably he rode over here for his meals on most occasions. The Vespa was a handy transport for the mere quarter of a mile involved. He wore his usual air of meticulously contrived casualness, and the shadow of beard round his by no means negligible jaw was a shade more perceptible than on the previous day. Apparently he was setting out to grow whiskers of the latest fashion, for his lips were carefully shaved. Probably he knew and cared, in spite of his cultivated disdain for appearances, that he had a very well-cut and intelligent mouth, too good to be hidden. His lazy, supercilious eyes, too, managed their affectation of aloofness without actually missing a trick. It might be a great mistake to overlook Mr Lawrence.
He had been the first to hear the sound of the car approaching, and the quickest to identify it, for he was the only one who looked completely unsurprised as it rolled gently alongside the Aston Martin, while all the rest had checked momentarily and turned to gaze. Recognition halted their breath for an instant. He was there with intent. With news or with questions.
Lesley came towards him, veering from the advance she had been making upon Charlotte. ‘Chief Inspector Felse! We didn’t expect to see you so early. Is there any news?’ The intense blue of her eyes shaded away into a translucent green in a bright light, burning into emerald in her moments of laughter or animation, clouding over into a ferny darkness when she was grave. She gazed into his face, and they darkened. Unexpectedly but very simply she said, with concern: ‘You haven’t had any sleep!’
‘I’ll catch up on that soon.’ He turned from her to look at Paviour. To him the light was not kind. The contrast with his radiant, vital young wife was blatant almost to embarrassment.
‘You wanted to see us?—some one or more of us,’ he said. ‘If we can help you at all…’
‘Thank you, but this time I needn’t keep you more than a minute. I thought that as I’d involved you all, to some extent, in the enquiries that were launched yesterday, I ought to inform you of the results of our search for the boy, Gerry Boden…’
He was listening very carefully, for any exclamation, any indrawn breath, even, that would single out one person among these five; but they remained anonymous in their concern and foreboding. The issue, after all, was fairly plain. No one is that much of an optimist.
‘One of our sergeants took him out of the river about six o’clock this morning, a mile and a half downstream from here. Dead.’
They stood frozen, all transfixed by the same small, chill frisson of shock, but no one exclaimed. He looked round all their sobered, pitying faces, and registered what was there to be registered, but it was not much; nothing more than was due to any boy of sixteen, suddenly wiped out for no good reason. No use looking for the one who felt no surprise, for after the gradual attrition of hour after hour without word they could none of them feel very much.
‘How awful!’ said Lesley in a resigned whisper. ‘Terrible for his parents. I’m so sorry.’
‘The poor fool kid!’ said Gus. ‘I wish to God now I’d lugged him back to his chain gang by the ear. Can’t say we didn’t half expect it, I suppose, by this time. It began to look… But there’s always the odd chance.’
‘Which in this case didn’t come up. I thought you should be told. Sorry to have ruined your day.’
Paviour moistened his pale lips. ‘Do you think it was here, on our premises, that he fell into the river? I feel to blame. But the path is a right of way, we couldn’t stop it if we tried.’
‘It’s too early yet,’ said George with deliberation, ‘to say where and how he entered the water. The forensic laboratory has a good deal of work to do on his clothes, and the contents of his pockets. And of course there’ll be a postmortem.’
‘A post-mortem?’ The meagre, gallant Don Quixote beard quivered and jutted as though every individual hair had suddenly stiffened to the clenched tension of Paviour’s jaw. He relaxed the convulsive pressure of his teeth cautiously, and drew breath deeply before he resumed with arduous reasonableness: ‘Is that really necessary, in a case like this, I know you have to be thorough, but the distress to the parents… And surely the cause of death isn’t in doubt? A clear case of drowning…?’
‘It would seem so,’ George agreed gently. ‘But double-checking does no harm, and as you say, we try to be thorough. I doubt if it’s an issue that will affect the parents’ distress one way or the other.’ He was turning back towards his car when he looked back with a casual afterthought. ‘By the way, you won’t be surprised or disturbed if you find some of our people patrolling the riverside path or inspecting that slip, will you? A routine precaution, that’s all.’
He did not look back again, except in the rear-view mirror as he drove away. They were grouped just as he had left them, all looking warily after him. And if he had got little enough out of that interview, at least he had lobbed one small, accurate pebble into the middle of the pool of their tranquillity, and its ripples were already beginning to spread outwards.
A young giant working on the flower-beds along the drive straightened his long, lithe back to watch the car go by, without curiosity though with fixed, methodical attention, his senses turned outwards for relaxation while he took a breather. The reddish-fair head, Celtic-Roman, with chiselled features and long, indifferent lapis eyes, belonged to a statue rather than a man. George knew the type locally, a pocket of fossils preserved among these border valleys, though this superlative specimen was not personally known to him. Orrie Benyon, of course. Orlando, who admitted his ghostly ancestors ungrudgingly into his territory by night. Those cropped military curls, that monumental neck and straight nose, would have looked well in a bronze helmet; no doubt he recognised his
