the caldarium floor, ‘can have got into that place ahead of you. Earlier, yes, that I believe. Not since the slip.’
‘They wouldn’t have to. I told you, at least one gleam of daylight ahead there. More than one hole on top. A crowbar down one of those would be all he needed.’ The momentary silence irritated him. He said with asperity, and considering his recent escape with some justification: ‘It worked, didn’t it?’
‘It worked, all right. I’m considering motives. What was the object? To have a second go at you? They couldn’t have known you’d even be available, much less put your head in the trap.’
‘No, that’s out,’ admitted Gus generously. ‘To seal off the flue, more likely.’
‘To hide what’s there?’
‘Not a chance! There’ll be nothing there. To hide the traces of what
Lesley came back from the house with a tweed coat over her arm and a flask in her hand. ‘We can also,’ she said, looking down at Gus with a slightly quizzical smile, ‘offer a bath, if and when you feel equal to it. You can hardly go back to “The Salmon’s Return” looking like that.’
He looked down, slightly startled, at the state of his shirt and his hands, and admitted the difficulty.
‘And you can’t see your face,’ said Lesley helpfully, her friendly, candid eyes dwelling upon the spectacle with detached amusement, but not with any apparent repulsion.
‘That’s immensely kind of you. I’d like to take you up on it, if Mr Paviour will allow me,’ he said, suddenly aware of a little chill in the blood that warned him not to leave out the curator from this or any other exchange on these premises.
‘Of course,’ Paviour said, with prompt but distant courtesy, ‘by all means avail yourself. I can offer you a change of shirt, if the size is right.’
‘And as I’ve got lunch on the way in about three quarters of an hour, hadn’t you better take it easy and join us? You’ll just have time to make yourself presentable. Bill will be staying, too,’ she said, firmly arranging everything to her own satisfaction.
This somewhat drastic rupture in her ordinary routine must in its way, Charlotte thought, be a godsend to Lesley, however deplorable the reason for it. She was also reacting in an understandably female way to having a ready-made casualty of pleasant appearance and attractive manners dropped at her feet. For the second time, too! But on the first occasion, even when deposited half-drowned and battered in the Paviour household, he had belonged by rights to Charlotte, who had pulled him out of the river and demanded shelter for him. This time he was, so to speak, legitimate prey, and Lesley intended to enjoy him.
‘If you feel like walking up with me now, I must go back and keep an eye on lunch. Charlotte, will you come and help me?’
The three of them walked back together, Gus steady enough on his legs, and only slightly exercised in mind at leaving the excavation, which had now been transferred of necessity to the higher level. There could be no more attempts to enter the flues from the slope, they were going to have to take up all that island of rotten ground and expose them from above. A more thorough job, and a safer, but infinitely slower. They were staking out the limits of the subsidence now, and Bill Lawrence was clipping a new sheet of graph paper to his board. One of the plainclothes men was busy with a camera. And Paviour, torn between the instinct to follow his wife and the desire to pursue George Felse and renew his protests, hovered in indecision. Charlotte looked back once, and saw him standing motionless, gazing after them, lean and desiccated as a stick insect, but with a face all too human in its tormented anxiety; not all, perhaps, about his beloved and ravaged city.
Lesley could, she thought, do a little more to placate and reassure a husband she knew to be almost pathologically jealous. It was easy to believe that she had no regrets about her bargain, and no intention of backing out of it, but in the circumstances this was a reassurance that needed to be repeated endlessly. And yet everything she did had an open and innocent grace about it. If she devoted herself to her new guest all through lunch, she did so out of a pleasurable sense of duty, and not at all flirtatiously. It was impossible to associate the word with her; there was nothing sidelong or circuitous about the way Lesley approached anyone, man or woman.
As for Gus, bathed and polished and reclothed in his own beautifully pressed sportscoat, he trod delicately, dividing his attention as adroitly as he could between the two of them, repaying Lesley’s direct friendliness with wary deference, and turning as often as possible to Paviour with leading remarks on Aurae Phiala, to draw him into eloquence on the subject dearest to his heart.
‘I imagine,’ said Paviour, regarding him almost with favour over the coffee, ‘that you’ll be interested in seeing this distasteful invasion limited as much as possible. The damage could be incalculable. I suppose,’ he said, almost visibly writhing at coming so near to begging, ‘you haven’t any influence? The authorities, I believe, do sometimes listen to the opinions of scholars…’ His thin, fastidious voice faded out bitterly on the admission that he was none.
‘I’m afraid,’ said Gus ruefully, ‘that nobody who won’t listen to you, sir, is going to pay the slightest attention to me. But I don’t believe, from what I’ve heard this morning, that the police want to take the dig a yard past where it need go. After all, they do have some evidence, apparently, to connect this boy Boden with the place.’ He added deprecatingly: ‘I think Chief Inspector Felse means to brief us, as fully as he can, this evening.’
‘Will you be staying on to see the job through?’ asked Bill Lawrence.
‘I’d have liked to, but it doesn’t look as if I shall be able to. I got my room at the pub for only two nights. From Friday night on you have to be a fisherman to get in at “The Salmon’s Return”, even in the close season. I’ve got to get out today.’
‘Oh, no!’ said Lesley, aggrieved. ‘What a shame, when you’re being so helpful. Stephen, don’t you think
She had rushed in where angels might have hesitated to set foot, and almost instantly she recognised it, and halted in contained but palpable dismay. And Bill Lawrence put in smoothly, as if the tension had never communicated itself to him, but so promptly that Charlotte, for one, knew it had: ‘Why don’t you move in with me? I’ve got the whole lodge as bachelor quarters, there’s plenty of room for one more, if you don’t mind sharing a room? Two beds,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and acres of storage space. We can run over and pick up your things, if you say the word?’
‘Consider it said,’ Gus said heartily, ‘and thanks! I should have hated to have to go away and miss this chance. I thought I should probably have to go as far as Comerbourne to get a room without notice, and it hardly seemed worth it commuting from that distance. Especially,’ he said, with an engaging smile in Paviour’s direction, ‘as I more or less invited myself to the dig in the first place.’
