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

respectively. I don’t doubt even Orrie could sell or pawn a gold coin in a good many places here in England, and get away with it, but he’d hardly have the knowledge or the address to work the trade on a big scale. This is a difficult, specialised market—unscrupulous enough if you know where the fences are, and which collectors don’t care whether they can ever show their collections, but otherwise rather dangerous. There are plenty of enthusiasts who are quite satisfied with gloating in secret. But you have to know where to find them. Somehow it seems to me that Orrie is hardly in that league.’

Orrie’s eyes swivelled again, silently signalling his awareness of every move for and against him, and still reserving his own defence in this defenceless position.

Lesley sat back with a sharp, defeated sigh, seeming for a moment to have relinquished a field that was out of her control. She pondered for a moment in depressed silence, and then suddenly her slight body arched and stiffened, like a cat sighting a quarry or a foe. She seemed to be in two minds whether to speak or hold her peace. Her rounded eyelids, delicately veined like alabaster, rolled back from an emerald stare.

‘Chief Inspector, a day or so ago you said there must be an expert involved. I didn’t believe in it then, now I begin to see what you mean. You even mentioned a name—Doctor Morris. He was here just before he went abroad for this Turkish year of his. He brought the text of his book about this place. We were just about closing up the small dig we had that autumn, it was October already, but it had been a good season. And you know something? I’d never known Doctor Morris to speak disparagingly of Aurae Phiala until then, never. And yet he went away from here, and spent three weeks on that text in Turkey before he posted it to the publishers. And you know what the finished book is like. Deliberately playing down this site! I can’t call it anything but deliberate. Why? Why? There has to be a reason! And that dig—it never produced much—not to our knowledge, that is!—it was still open when he was here. Bill will tell you. He visited then, he knows. Wouldn’t it account for everything, if Alan Morris stumbled on a really rich discovery while he was here, and kept it dark? If he was tempted, if he moved his finds, put them in a secret place, and left them hidden until he could get them away? He went straight from here to Turkey. And Charlotte tells me nobody’s heard from him since.’

She looked at Gus, who was watching her with a guarded face. ‘It’s your case, you know more about this than I do. If you’ve been working in contact with all these other countries, and thinking on these lines—I mean about the need for an expert to run the show—then I can’t believe that you’ve never matched up these times, and considered the possibility of a connection between Doctor Morris’s exit from England and the beginning of these deals in Roman valuables. I say considered the possibility, that’s all.’

‘The police of several countries have made the connection,’ said Gus drily. ‘They could hardly avoid it.’ He carefully refrained from looking at Charlotte.

‘Then you didn’t come here just to look at one of several places that might have been looted—you came here because the connection with Doctor Morris made this the most probable. And you weren’t likely to lose interest and go away again,’ she added, ‘when you ran head-on into Charlotte on the premises, and found out who she was.’

This time Gus did look at Charlotte, fleetingly and rather apprehensively, and even at this crisis he had not lost his engaging ability to produce a blush at will.

‘But will someone tell me,’ said Charlotte, ignoring the phenomenon, ‘why, if my great-uncle found a valuable hoard here and kept his mouth shut about it, he didn’t simply pack the lot up and take it abroad with him then?’

‘It wouldn’t be a practical proposition,’ said Gus simply. ‘He was booked by air, which means a limit on weight, and too much excess baggage might arouse curiosity. Also some of the things—if there were others like the helmet, for instance—might be quite bulky and very fragile, and need careful transportation. But mostly just plain caution. Someone who knew the ropes would also know the risks. He wouldn’t try to smuggle out too much in one go. I don’t doubt some of the most precious and most portable things were taken out straight away and disposed of. The rest, we think, were taken from wherever they were found, and hidden in the broken flue of the hypocaust, which seems to have been completely concealed then by the clump of broom bushes. The art of hiding something is to do it decisively, and then go about your business without ever glancing in that direction, as if it wasn’t there. The cache was safe enough until the river rose and brought the bank down.’

‘There’s still another question,’ Charlotte pursued. ‘Being an expert on antiquities come by honestly isn’t the same thing as being expert in disposing of them dishonestly. Would my uncle have had the first idea how to set about it?’

‘One evening while he was staying here,’ said Lesley, ‘we were talking about the shady side of the business. About cases he’d known, and how people went about getting rid of rather specialist stolen property. It was the evening you were here, Bill, do you remember?’

‘I do,’ said Bill unhappily, from the corner where he had sat silent all this time. ‘He seemed to know a good deal about it, he went into a lot of detail. Even names. I didn’t think anything about it then, after all it was interesting, and we were all asking him questions.’

Charlotte looked enquiringly at Gus, and waited.

‘I’m afraid he did know,’ said Gus regretfully. ‘He acted as consultant for us occasionally, and he probably picked up a good deal about the top fences in the business. The problem collectors he knew already. And then, you see, he had the top-weight to work the racket in a big way, as an amateur couldn’t do. His name and reputation would count for as much underground as in the daylight. Collectors would take his word and pay his price.’

‘Well, all right!’ She had a curious feeling that she ought to be experiencing and showing more indignation, that it was all part of some devious and elaborate charade, of which she understood something, but not enough. She had probably made one mistake in timing already, with that key. Writing her part as she went along was not so easy. But at least her voice had the right edge of irritation and challenge. ‘But all you’re describing is an absent master- mind in voluntary exile—or sanctuary—somewhere in Turkey. Whoever prowled about the riverside all day on thorns, waiting for everybody to go home and night to fall, so that he could salvage his last instalment of gold, whoever found that poor, silly boy rifling his cache, and killed him and hid his body until night, it certainly wasn’t Great-Uncle Alan by remote control from Aphrodisias. If he’s at the bottom of this affair, then he had an agent here on the spot to keep an eye on the place and feed the remaining stuff out to him gradually—either to him, or wherever he directed. Somebody well-paid and unscrupulous, and once recruited, in for good. They had to trust each other, either one of them could destroy the other. So even the assistant was deep enough in to have to kill the boy who blundered into the secret, and try to kill the detective who was getting too close to the truth. Well, at least we all know who made that last murderous attack on Mr Hambro. Do we therefore know who this local agent was? Is that what you’re saying?’

There was a brief, expectant silence, in which everyone looked at Orrie; but he maintained his silence as though nothing that had been said bore any reference to him. However delicate your fingering, it’s difficult to find a sensitive spot in a being who has no nerves.

‘Yes,’ said Lesley, slowly and clearly, ‘we do know. At least, I know.’