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

well. I still think so. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why should he do a thing like this? Oh, I know I saw him! I can’t forget it. But to me that means there’s more behind this—or else something’s happened to him, a brainstorm—he isn’t responsible for his actions any more. Why should he want to harm anyone? What motive could he possibly have?’

‘The usual motive,’ said George. ‘Gain. Not, perhaps, to harm anyone. But a very solid motive to get rid of Mr Hambro. Who is, I should mention—though of course you already know it, don’t you, Orrie?—Detective-Sergeant Hambro of the Art and Antiques Squad at Scotland Yard, an authority on Roman antiquities. He came here in the process of following the back-tracks of certain valuable pieces which have been turning up in suspicious circumstances in several parts of the world, and which can only have come from a handful of border sites, of which Aurae Phiala is one. Someone, in fact, has been secretly milking this place of treasure over a long period. And whoever he is, he was implicated deeply enough to kill unhesitatingly when an inquisitive boy accidentally stumbled on one gold coin from his remaining hoard, and unwisely hung around to hunt for more. His curiosity could have blown the whole racket wide-open. He had to go. Gerry Boden was suffocated; the same handy method—if you happen to be about twice as strong as your victim—that Orrie was using on Mr Hambro upstairs.’

‘But you’re not charging him with anything like that,’ protested Lesley. ‘Only with this attack this morning. How could he know anything about what Mr Hambro was doing here? None of us knew. He never told us anything. It seems you can’t even be sure these things came from here. If he’d been helping himself to valuable things like that, and turning them into money, why would he go on working hard for what we pay him here? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘It makes perfect sense,’ George pointed out, ‘as long as he still had treasures to dispose of, and kept them hidden here. Things like that can’t be unloaded on the market wholesale, like potatoes. It has to be done gradually and cautiously, with long intervals between.’

‘I see that,’ she admitted unhappily. ‘But in that case, what on earth has he done with the money he’s already made? He doesn’t spend much, that’s certain. And personally, I simply don’t believe he has much. He doesn’t own a thing but his small-holding, not so much as a second-hand car. He hasn’t even got a bank account. Stephen and I have sometimes changed cheques for him, if he got paid that way for some of the odd jobs he did in the village.’

It was at this point that Charlotte got up from her place and walked out of the room. In the curious peace of having Gus alive again, and his assailant in custody, she had been sitting back and letting these exchanges pass by her as impartially as she might have watched the Comer flowing by, until a few chance words pricked out of the back of her mind a small memory, a minute thing that fitted like a key into the whole complex of this mystery, and caused it to open like the door of a safe. She closed the door after her, and went purposefully up the stairs to Lesley’s room.

When she came back into the study, as calmly as she had left it, and as quietly, Lesley was still warmly arguing the case for Orrie. And Orrie, though he had not turned his head, now and again turned his stony eyes and let them rest upon her.

‘But you see how Orrie’s behaved throughout, not at all suspiciously, quite the opposite. You agree he told you all about the Boden boy hiding in his shed all that time…’

‘That was a very intelligent move,’ agreed George, ‘and he could well afford it. It didn’t implicate him in the least—quite the opposite—and it did underline his cooperative zeal. It cost him nothing, and made him look good.’

‘And last night,’ she pressed on, ‘Orrie was urging us to have all that slope concreted up, to make it safe. Would he do that, if he had valuables hidden there?’

‘By now,’ said George, ‘he has nothing hidden there. What was left was almost certainly removed on Wednesday night, immediately after the boy was killed.’

‘Then where is it now? If you could find some of these coins and things in his possession, that would go far towards proving it. But I don’t believe in it. I’m certain Orrie wouldn’t at all mind having his cottage searched, but I’m even more certain you wouldn’t find anything guilty there.’

Charlotte leaned forward, and held out in her open palm the smallest of Lesley’s keys.

‘And I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that you’d be equally willing to open your safe-deposit box at the bank, where we went to put in a package last Thursday. A small package, but very heavy. For Orrie!’

They had all turned to stare at her, Lesley wide-eyed and mute, her kitten-face pale and bright in wonder. Charlotte had half-expected to have the key indignantly snatched from her, but Lesley hardly glanced at it, only once in a puzzled way, as if she was too stunned at this moment to connect with her usual aplomb. Her smooth brows contracted painfully, frowning back into past occasions, for the first time with doubt and dread. She looked from Charlotte to Orrie, a blank, bewildered question, more than half afraid of encountering an answer. Then at George, as being in authority here, and deserving some part of her attention.

‘Yes, that’s true, Charlotte and I did go to the bank in Comerbourne. I did have a little box to put in my safe- deposit, Orrie asked me to keep it for him. We’ve done it before, you know—I don’t remember how often, but several times. He lives in rather a lonely place, and these days one hears such… We never thought anything about it, why should we? Just keeping things for him a little while, until he needed them and asked for them out. I know he put an old brooch of his mother’s in there once, when someone told him it might be valuable, and he was thinking of selling it. They didn’t usually stay in long…’

She looked at Orrie again, briefly, and the monolith had certainly stirred, and the blue eyes quickened uneasily for an instant. She looked at George, and her own green eyes were wide and gleaming with realisation and disquiet.

‘Now I don’t know where I am! I don’t know anything! Can it have been that?’

‘If you have no objection to my taking charge temporarily of your key,’ said George, ‘and if you’ll agree to accompany me to your bank and open your safe-deposit, that can be answered, can’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said in a whisper. And even lower, almost to herself: ‘I didn’t know! I didn’t know!’

The key passed into George’s hand. The granite monolith had perceptibly moved, heaving its great head round to stare at the small thing changing hands. If stone can shudder, the brief convulsion that shook Orlando Benyon was just such a movement. But his mouth stayed shut; only now tightly, violently shut, as if at any moment it might break open and breathe fire.

‘Of course,’ said George reasonably, ‘there are difficulties in this theory. Orrie has never in his life been out of England, seldom, I imagine, out of Midshire. Two of the objects recovered in this case surfaced in Italy and Turkey