The Detective Omnibus: 'City of Gold and Shadows', 'Flight of a Witch' and 'Funeral of Figaro'

Lesley had recovered resiliently from her momentary disarray. She sat serenely silent, apparently well content at having Gus’s problem and her own solved so economically. It even entered Charlotte’s mind, watching, that there were moments when Lesley deliberately made use of Bill Lawrence to pull chestnuts out of the fire for her.

Afterwards, in the car on the way to ‘The Salmon’s Return’, Bill said, after too patent deliberation and in too world-weary a voice: ‘Look, it’s easy enough living in this set-up, but you have to know the rules. Be my guest, use my experience and save your own, boy. Rule number one: Never even seem to get too close to that lady.’ His tone was lightly cynical, and a little rueful; there was no knowing for certain how deeply he felt about what he was saying.

‘I wondered,’ said Gus, ‘why you got off the mark so fast and so smoothly. Apart from having a generous disposition, of course.’

‘Don’t mistake me, there’s nothing wrong with Lesley. She’s straight, and she means what she offers. It’s her old man. He’s mad jealous of her. Oh, he’d have backed up her invitation, all right, if he’d had to. Very correct, very hospitable. But then he’d have made life hell for you, her, and above all himself, by being suspicious of every glance you gave her. It’s better to keep a nice safe distance, and be a bit of the landscape, like me.’

‘And you’ve experienced that yourself?’ Gus asked mildly.

The voice beside him became even lighter and drier. ‘I didn’t have to. I’ve only confirmed it from my own observations since. I was warned off privately, as soon as I came here. By Lesley herself.’ There was a brief but weighty pause, and then, as if he had felt oppressed by its suggestive possibilities, he made the mistake of adding, with the same airy intonation: ‘Probably she never fancied me, anyhow.’

Gus kept his eyes on the road ahead, and sat stolidly, as though the sharp note of bitterness had passed him by. But from then on he was in no doubt that, whatever this young man felt for Lesley Paviour, it was certainly not indifference.

‘In view of all the circumstances,’ said George Felse, facing the assembled household in Paviour’s study that evening, ‘I think it only fair to give you some idea of how this enquiry is progressing. Your professional proceedings are affected, and you have a right to be told why that’s inevitable. We want your co-operation. We don’t want to upset your routine any longer than we must, or to extend our intrusion a yard beyond what’s necessary.’

They were all there, including the young men from the lodge, invited by Lesley to dine at the house. Not an invariable favour, Gus had gathered. Not much doubt that Bill attributed it cynically to his guest’s presence.

‘Let me substantiate,’ said George, ‘our claim to move in on your ground. In the first place, the post-mortem on Gerry Boden has shown that he did not drown. There is no penetration of water into his lungs. He died of suffocation, most probably while still stunned by a blow on the head. The time of death, while it’s always somewhat more problematical fixing it than is usually supposed, was considerably earlier than the time when, as we have several reasons to believe, he was put into the water. Provisionally, his death occurred somewhere between six and eight in the evening. In other words, about midway between the time when he was last seen, and the time when Mr Hambro was attacked. It’s a fair assumption that the attempt on Mr. Hambro’s life took place because the murderer believed he had seen the boy’s body committed to the river. Seen, or heard, or at any rate become aware of something queer going on, something that might make sense to him and be reported later, even if it made no sense then.’

Paviour licked bluish lips, and ventured hesitantly: ‘But if there was such an interval, the boy may have been anywhere during that time, not here in Aurae Phiala at all.’

‘Oh, yes, he was here. We know that he hid himself in order to stay here and have the free run of the place when everyone else had gone. We know where he hid. And we know where he was hidden, after his death. From under the clump of broom bushes we removed this morning we recovered, as perhaps you noticed, certain small bits of evidence. One was the broken cap of a red ball pen, fellow to the black one he still had on him when found. It was trodden into the turf, underneath those bushes. They were dragged together and heaped over him after he was killed. Another, from among the broom roots, was a sample of hair, which I think will certainly turn out to be Boden’s. He was concealed there on the spot, because at the time of his murder it was barely dusk, and the whole of your river-shore is only too plainly visible from the other side. Therefore, that is where he was killed—right there beside the cave-in.’

‘But after you came enquiring for him,’ protested Paviour feverishly, ‘the enclosure of Aurae Phiala was searched. Surely he would have been found?’

‘I’d hardly call it searched. We did walk over the site. It was then dark, perhaps dark enough for the murderer to have risked getting him down to the river, if we hadn’t been around. But we were not looking for a body then, at least not on dry land. The fact remains, he was there. Further laboratory work should tell us more. His clothes, for instance. They’ve already told us something of the first importance, the reason for his hanging around here until after closing-time.’

He looked round them with an equable, unrevealingg glance, a pleasant, greying, unobtrusive man at whom you would never look twice in the street.

‘Gerry carried a purse for his loose money. Among the coins in it, which the murderer hadn’t disturbed, was a gold aureus of the Emperor Commodus, in mint condition. He can only have found it during the school visit. And he can only have found it there, at that broken flue of the hypocaust.’

‘That’s an impossibility,’ said Paviour hoarsely. ‘You’ll find this is some toy of his own, a fake, a copy… How could you account for such a thing? A freshly-minted coin after years in the ground?’

George picked up the cue, and proceeded to account for it bluntly and clearly, as he had done for Charlotte in the night. He sketched in the figure of the murderer, also waiting for dark, to remove his buried treasure from its perilous position, and his unexpected encounter with the inquisitive boy on the same errand; the instant decision that only the boy’s total removal could now protect his profitable racket; and the immediate execution. He described the items of Roman jewellery turning up with inadequate pedigrees during the past year, and the peculiarities of style which linked them, if not necessarily to this site, at least to no more than four or five, of which this was one.

‘In short, we believe that someone has been systematically milking Aurae Phiala of small pieces, some very valuable indeed, for a year or more.’

There was a long, tight pause, while he eyed them gently again, his glance passing unrevealingly from face to face round the circle. Then Bill Lawrence said, a little too loudly but with admirable bluntness: ‘You mean one of us.’

George smiled. ‘Not necessarily. There are a good many people in the village who’ve been here longer than you have, and known this place just as intimately, some of them before it was organised and shown as it is now. The site could hardly be more open. The riverside path makes access easy for everyone who knows this district, and that includes not only the village, but large numbers of fishermen, too.’