bring people together. In a sense, Gus Hambro had been a dead duck from the moment he drew Charlotte after him on his nocturnal rush to have one more look for a missing boy. When you have given someone his life back, it may be magnanimous to give it wholly and go right away and forget the benefit, but it’s very human to keep a thin, strong string attached, and retain a proprietary interest.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said George. And he looked at Charlotte with the private look that had somehow developed between them. ‘It’s a big step, you know. I’d sleep on it, if I were you.’
‘Your wife didn’t,’ said Charlotte.
They halted at the crest of the bowl to look back over the shallow, undulating expanse of Aurae Phiala. The flood water had passed, the weather was settling into the pure, spring-like hush that sometimes comes before a turbulent May. The river ran deeply green and tranquil under its shelving banks. Away to their right, round one corner of the caldarium, tarpaulin screens fenced off the enclosure where the police had dug Doctor Alan Morris out of his grave. The inquest had not yet opened. But there would be no problem of identification there, with all his belongings securely buried round him, like a pharaoh.
‘I wish he could have come out of it alive,’ said Charlotte. ‘But I’m glad he comes out of it with credit. In a sense he was defending the ethics of the profession, if he died because he suspected their thefts and tried to prevent them. For a time you thought I might be here as his agent, didn’t you?’
‘And for a time,’ he said, ‘you thought I might be behind the racket myself, didn’t you?’
‘You knew so much about it, too much. How was I to know which side you were on? I always knew you weren’t what you seemed. And I knew you’d latched on to me after you found out my name, not for my charm.’
‘Only half true,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe you were ever in doubt for a moment how I felt about you.’
Their voices were as tranquil as the evening sky, and they were standing hand in hand.
‘There was a time,’ she owned serenely, ‘a very brief time, though, when I did wonder just what you were feeling for Lesley.’
‘I’d never given her a thought of any kind,’ he said firmly, ‘until she began to make a dead set at me, after she’d whisked my jacket away to dry and brush it, when I got buried that time. She’d begun to have suspicions already, because she seized that opportunity like a pro. And I was fool enough to carry stuff on me that I shouldn’t have done—my passport, with the bill from that Istanbul hotel still in it, and some notes, and even a drawing of that gold triskele brooch from Italy, the one that started me on the case. She couldn’t very well mistake it. She sold the thing in Livorno. After that it was all “do stay to lunch”, and “move in with us, we’ve got plenty of room”. You she wanted under her eye to find out what you were up to, me to dispose of permanently. Not that I realised it then. I just played her shots back to her, to find out what the game was. She’d made up her mind I had to go for good. Underground. I was getting a lot too near to what I was after.’
He remembered with a convulsion of painful rapture and guilt the clinging frenzy of that small body, which this one beside him must some day wipe out of mind. Aloud he said: ‘Those scenes with me were staged for him. She could manipulate him like modelling clay. His job was to interrupt us and very politely, very considerately, ask me to leave. So that she and Orrie could entice me back to the caldarium and dispose of me, with everything accounted for, a farewell note waiting, and no questions asked.’
The moon, a filigree wafer of silver foil, was rising, and the Welsh shore had dimmed into a deep, twilit blue of folded hills. Aurae Phiala was as beautiful as ever, and as pure. No part of this greed, violence and deceit had done more than glance from its present-day surface, which was only illusory. It had outlived all its own tragedies long ago.
‘I went to see Mr Felse at his home on Saturday morning,’ said Charlotte, ‘after he flew that kite about Great- Uncle Alan, and started Lesley thinking what a convenient scapegoat he’d make. And he told me about the Yard enquiries, though not about you, and said they’d led inevitably to considering my uncle as one possibility. And then I asked him again if
‘So that was when you met his wife,’ said Gus, remembering George’s enigmatic valediction. ‘What was that all about, anyhow? What was it his wife didn’t do?’
They had begun to walk back, turning away from the crude tarpaulin shape and the scarred ground. And they forgot all the dead of Aurae Phiala in the blessed conviction of being themselves rather more than usually alive.
‘She didn’t back away and demand time to sleep on it,’ said Charlotte, ‘when she was asked if she’d consider marrying a policeman.’
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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[ Prooflist Group September 21, 2002 - v1, html ]
[A 3S Release— v2, html]
[August 02, 2007]
