heaved himself to his feet only to find himself bereft of hands. The cushion lay under the chair from which he had lifted it, beside the window; and Constable Collins, climbing in too late to be of more vital assistance, replaced it automatically, and patted it into shape against the wicker back.
‘Orlando Benyon,’ said George, running rather tiredly through the familiar formula, ‘I arrest you on a charge of the attempted murder of Augustus Hambro, and I caution you that you are not obliged to make any statement unless you wish, but that anything you do say will be taken down in writing, and may be used in evidence.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
« ^ »
Interrogating Orrie Benyon was a more or less impossible undertaking from the first, because silence was his natural state, and his recoil into it entailed no effort. He was far from unintelligent, or illiterate, or even inarticulate, for he could express himself fluently enough when he found it expedient, but it was in speaking that the labour consisted for him, not in being silent. Here, finding himself already charged with an offence that could hardly be denied, with so many eye- witnesses, but might very well be whittled away to a lesser charge which he could embrace without more than a shrug, with everything to gain and nothing to lose by keeping his mouth shut, he did what all his nature and manner of life urged, closed it implacably, and kept it closed.
They brought him down into the small study, and cautiously let him out of his handcuffs, for he had ceased to struggle or threaten, and had too much sense to try against a small army what had failed in more promising circumstances. It was too late now, in any case, to kill Gus Hambro. That charge he would have to ride; other and worse he might still fend off by saying nothing. And while George put mild, persuasive questions, argued the commonsense course of admitting what could not be denied, wound about him tirelessly with soft, reasonable assumptions and invited him to confirm one by denying another, nothing was exactly what Orrie said. From the moment that he had been overpowered in the bedroom, he did not unclamp his lips.
‘Why not tell us about it, Orrie? Six of us saw the attack, and it was pretty determined, wasn’t it? You meant killing. Because you’d already made one attempt, and were afraid he could identify you, now that he’d reappeared? What made you choose that particular pool to dump the Aston Martin? And are you sure you wiped all your prints off the Vespa, Orrie? Because you won’t have the opportunity now, you know. And nobody else but the police has touched it since. Whatever’s there to find we shall find. You might as well make a statement. I’m not holding out any inducements, you know you can’t lose by co-operating.’
Orrie sat in a high-backed chair, his spine taut, his head raised, looked through them with his blue, inimical eyes, gathered his wits inside that monumental head of his like the garrison inside a fortress, and said nothing.
‘And why did you wait so long, Orrie? All those nice, safe hours of darkness, and never a move from you till broad daylight. What were you waiting for? For something that would make it unnecessary for you to take the risk? What did you hope would happen to let you off the hook? Until you realised it wasn’t going to happen, and got desperate.’
Orrie looked through him with eyes like chips of blue-stone, and made not a sound.
‘This is getting boring, isn’t it?’ said George amiably. ‘Perhaps if we enlarge the cast it may get a bit more interesting.’ He turned to Collins, who was sitting unobtrusively beside the door. ‘Ask all the others to come in and join us, will you?’
‘Since Orrie won’t talk about recent events,’ said George, when they were all assembled, ‘I suggest we hear what the other interested party has to say about what happened to him on Saturday night. I’m afraid we rather over-stated Mr Hambro’s condition, as you may have gathered. It’s true he was in an exhausted state, and slept heavily and long, but he was not under drugs, and his memory is not impaired. He did recover enough to talk to me for a few minutes last night, before I left, and he did tell me what I’m now asking him to tell you.’
And Gus told them, beginning tactfully at the point where he had parted from Stephen Paviour and packed his bag to leave Aurae Phiala. He was still slightly grey and drawn, still mildly astonished at being above the ground instead of under it, and his hands were bandaged into white cotton parcels; but otherwise, apart from presenting a mildly odd appearance in Bill Lawrence’s clothes, he was himself again. When he reached the apparition of the helmeted sentry there was an uneasy stir of doubt, wonder and sympathy, as if two at least of his hearers were entertaining the suspicion that he might, after all, be incubating delayed symptoms of concussion. He smiled.
‘Oh, no, it wasn’t any hallucination. I’ve handled it, it’s real enough. And I know exactly where it is, and we shall be recovering it, all in good time.’ All the while he talked he had an eye on Orrie, who sat like a stone demigod, apparently oblivious of them all, but so braced in his stillness that it was plain he missed nothing. ‘The wearer I didn’t see at close quarters. But it wasn’t Orrie. Not big enough. And then, the one who came behind and hit me had to be Orrie.’
He told that, too, the blow and the fall, the rattle of stones and metal as the shaft was filled in over him. ‘The rest you know. I made for the river as the only other way out I knew. It took me all night and all day, because there were a lot of places where I had to dig my way through.’ The details of that marathon crawl were irrelevant at that stage; he left them to the imagination.
‘And could you,’ asked George, ‘identify the man who hit you and tipped you down the shaft? From that one glimpse you had of him? Describe what you did see.’
‘It was dark, but there was fitful light. The man I saw was much taller than me—as tall as Orrie—or Mr Paviour. Though his attitude, leaning and striking, with his arm raised, may have made him look even bigger. He was in silhouette, no chance to see if he had a beard or was cleanshaven. His strength didn’t suggest an old man. To be honest, that’s all I could say.’
‘And could you, then, have identified him positively as anyone you know?’
‘No,’ said Gus with deliberation, his eyes studying Orrie from beneath their long lashes, ‘I couldn’t.’
The bluestone eyes kindled for one instant with a fierce spark of intelligence, and were dimmed again.
‘So that’s why we had to proceed with this obvious invitation to the murderer to try again,’ said George. ‘We had everything to gain, and he couldn’t know that he had nothing. Your mistake, Orrie. There are now no less than seven people who
Orrie was not asking them to believe anything. By the Comer, with the man he had murdered breaking out of his grave, he had never quivered or uttered a sound. There was nothing worth calling a nerve in his whole great body.
‘But I can’t believe in all this!’ protested Lesley suddenly, pounding her linked hands helplessly against her knee. ‘Look, I know it isn’t evidence, but I’ve known Orrie for years, he’s worked for us, and I thought I knew him so
