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

am open to certain charges, graver charges than I understood at the time. Don’t hesitate to make them. I have a debt, too. I made her possible.’

‘No wonder the poor soul nearly dropped dead with shock when you came heaving out of the earth,’ said George, two days later, in a corner of the bar at ‘The Salmon’s Return’, with a pint in front of him, and Charlotte and Gus tucked comfortably into the settle opposite him. ‘He took you for his own dead man rising. You’d hardly credit the difference in him now it’s all over, now he doesn’t have to live with his solitary nightmare, and there’s no hope and no horror from her any more. The tension’s snapped. Either he’ll collapse altogether for want of the frictions that have kept him on edge, or else he’ll look round and rediscover an ordinary world, and start living again. Just now I’d say all the odds are in favour of the second, thank God!’

‘Do you think he’ll really testify against her?’ Charlotte wondered. ‘He may feel bitter against her now, but what about when it comes to the point?’

‘He’ll testify,’ said George with certainty. ‘You can’t love anyone that much, and be betrayed as callously as that, and not find out how to hate every bit as fiercely. Not that we know yet who did kill Doctor Morris. If those two decide to talk, of course, she’ll say he did it, and forced her to trick her husband into covering up for him. What he’ll say I wouldn’t bet on, except that it’s more likely to be true than anything we get out of Lesley.’

‘Who do you think actually did it?’ asked Gus.

‘Ordinarily she was the teller and he was the doer. But supposing Doctor Morris really did drown, in this case she may very well have done it herself. If he started taking a suspicious interest because of all her leading questions, she’s the one he’d be watching and following. There’s a skull fracture, not enough to have killed him, probably, but it does bring Orrie into the picture. We may get a conviction for murder against both, but at least we can fix her as an accessory. Paviour will see to that.’

‘Did you know when you set your trap,’ asked Charlotte, ‘that it was Orrie you were setting it for?’

‘It wasn’t for him,’ said George simply. ‘It was for her. I had a queer hunch about her, even before Gus came round and told me what he could. Two people were involved. And the cast wasn’t all that big, even if I did make soothing noises about the village and the fishermen not being ruled out. And all of them male but Mrs Paviour, and all, somehow, so accurately deployed all round her, like pawns round a queen. If Gus was being stage-managed out of the world, who was more likely to be the stage-manager, the one who initiated that scene in the night, or the one who interrupted it? And if she had an accomplice, who was it likely to be but a lover? I did toy with the idea of young Lawrence. He was obviously jealous, though that could be regarded as evidence either for or against. And the Vespa was his, but his consternation when he heard about it being used rang true. And then, which of them was Lesley more likely to choose? The nice, dull, civilised scholar, her husband in embryo? Not on your life! So I was betting on Orrie, yes, but I didn’t know! I was beginning to feel we might make a respectable case against him for Gerry Boden, though it would be mostly circumstantial. The boy had inhaled fibres from a thick, felted woollen fabric. I hope we’ll be able to identify them as coming from Orrie’s old donkey-jacket. His brand of wood-dust, fertiliser and vegetable debris should be pretty unique. And so’s he, in his way. He must have slipped back from the vicarage garden as soon as it began to get dusk, caught the boy grubbing in the hypocaust, killed him and hid his body until it should be dark enough to get it down to the water, collected his aurei, and gone calmly back to his work. He almost certainly had the gold pieces in his pocket when Price called on him at home around nine o’clock to ask about Gerry’s disappearance. And even after that he was cool enough to call in at “The Crown” before he went back to Aurae Phiala to send the body down the river. Not a nerve anywhere in him.’

‘So you were following up his movements all the time,’ said Charlotte, ‘while you hardly ever seemed to look in his direction.’

‘Never let wild creatures know you’re watching them. They tend to go to earth. If you carry on as if you haven’t even noticed them they may emerge and go about their business. Not that it paid off with Orrie. There’d have been gaps in his time-table, if we’d had to proceed on the evidence, but we couldn’t have proved how they were spent. Still, I’d have taken the risk of charging Orrie. On her I had nothing. I hoped—so did Orrie!—that she’d attempt the job herself. Then we’d have had her red-handed. I hoped she’d be frightened enough. He hoped—he believed—she cared enough. But we were both wrong. So I had to bluff it out the hard way, and hope to get through her guard somehow.’

‘And I thought I’d wrecked it,’ Charlotte said ruefully, ‘going off at half-cock like that over her key. I’d only just realised what was going on. I wasn’t very clever.’

‘Not a bit of it! Once I had that key she had her back to the wall. Oh, she could have stuck to her story that she knew nothing about the coins. But she’d have had hard work accounting for the rest of the deposit.’

Stephen Paviour had authorised the opening of the box two days previously, and it had yielded, in addition to the coins, a highly interesting collection of documents concerning Lesley’s buoyant financial situation, though without a word to explain it. She must have made good use of her holidays abroad with her husband, and the few occasions when she had accompanied him to digs in other countries. Nor is it always necessary to go abroad to find the kind of collector who asks no questions, and doesn’t mind keeping his acquisitions to himself, well out of sight.

Charlotte thought of those tormented and tormenting lovers, so unevenly matched except in beauty, who now stood charged jointly with the murder of her kinsman. ‘Would she ever really have gone away with him, as he thought? If their plans had gone on working out, right to the end?’

‘Not a chance!’ said George. ‘Not with a crude, handsome, lumpish piece of earth like Orrie. She had all the money at her disposal, she could vanish and be rich. He’d helped her to put away plenty, mostly in banks in Switzerland. And what a trusting soul he was, everything was in her name! No, he’d given her a lot of pleasure, and been a lot of fun, but she’d have sloughed him off without a qualm. The world is full of men!’

‘Not,’ said Charlotte, torn between satisfaction and unwilling pity, ‘the world where she’s going.’

‘Don’t be too sure!’ warned Gus feelingly, thinking with almost superstitious dread of the kitten’s emerald eyes and sharp, insidious claws. ‘Even if we do fix her, come eight years or so, and she’ll be out on the world again— sooner if the charge is reduced. She isn’t going to deteriorate, she isn’t going to forget anything, only learn new tricks, and never in this world is she going to change. She’ll come out ripe and ready for mischief. Give her half a chance, and she’ll be popping up in another mask to lure another poor sucker to his death. No, my girl, you save your sympathy for me and the world that has to cope with her.’

George finished his beer, collected their glasses, and brought them another round. They had been installed here with Mrs Lane all the week, and they seemed, he thought, to be getting on very satisfactorily together. Gus was involved in the documentation of the case from two angles, and could also claim to be a convalescent, entitled to take his duties at a rather leisurely pace, but it was questionable whether he would have strung out his work locally quite so long if Charlotte had not been still at ‘The Salmon’s Return’. Tomorrow Gus was leaving for London and duty at last; and it could hardly be coincidence that Charlotte was going to town by the same train, to confer with her solicitor and make preparations for the reburial of her great-uncle. He had known even stranger circumstances