carefully, up into the dimly-lit bell-chamber, smelling of clean, dry must, and haunted by monstrous, still bronze shapes in the gloom. A large area of floor here, and only a runged ladder continuing the ascent. There was also a quantity of debris stacked in corners, left behind from the renovations, carved stones so weathered that the carving was almost obliterated, bits of voussoirs half worn away with corrosion but retaining a shape someone hadn’t wanted to throw away. All too massive to provide handy weapons, but the suggestion was there. And there were two huge but sadly decayed wooden chests, one with a disjointed lid propped back against the wall, and layer below layer of discoloured papers spread in some disorder within. George crossed to look more closely, for though age and damp had marked the contents in brownish ripples, only some of them were filmed with a layer of dust, and even that only superficial, and some of those half-uncovered below were perfectly clear of dust. The lid had not been thus open long, the contents had been only recently disturbed. He read titles of Victorian magazines,
‘Somebody was interested,’ said George.
‘Yes, sir, and not so long ago. Maybe more than one, but one very recently indeed. But I doubt if they found much of anything.’
‘Not to interest Rainbow, one would imagine. This stuff might be treasure to a social historian, but not to an antiquarian in it for the money. No great value there. Unless, of course, there was some unusual item among the collection. We’ll have to go through all this in detail, but on the face of it it isn’t his cup of tea. Leave it just as it is. And meantime, we’ll ask the vicar if anyone has been up here, legitimately, in the last few months. There could be occasions when need arose.’
‘Well, above here it’s by ladder. The dust’s been rubbed off the middle of the rungs, as you’d expect, but not much else to be found. No traces of blood, or anything. I’ll lead the way.’
The ladders, built into place, proceeded by four short stages, making the circuit of the square tower, and brought them out by a low and narrow wooden door into daylight on the leads. The doorway, pointed Gothic in relatively new stone, was accommodated in the wall of the single corner turret, rising nine feet above the general level of the parapet, which was breast-high to a man of middle height. And abandoned to weather and moss in the corner by the turret lay the obvious fragments of the old stone voussoirs from the former archway, a few pitted and crumbling strips of moulding, a couple of decorative bosses worn to the fragility of shells.
‘Any indication of where he went over? It would be this side, wouldn’t it?’ After that spiral ascent it took a few seconds to regain a sense of direction, but a glance down over the parapet located the spot where Rainbow’s body had fallen. And even without Brice’s eager demonstration, there were the faint, pale streaks where nails had clawed ineffectively at the crest of the stonework. The embrasures between the merlons of the embattled wall dropped to waist-level. Not so hard, perhaps, to grip a man round the knees and hoist him over the edge. But still improbable for anyone to overbalance and fall. ‘Yes, that’s clear enough. He grabbed for the solid wall on either side of the embrasure.’
‘And there are two or three dark spots here that could be blood.’ Brice showed them, incredibly insignificant to be the only signs of a man’s death-blow, but blood, almost unquestionably. A fast bash and a heave over the edge, as Reece Goodwin had said.
George went back to the pile of stone fragments in the corner, and stood looking down at them attentively. Moss had bound them into a coagulated mass, a few small tufts of grass had found enough soil at the edges to survive. The one long strip of stony pallor, devoid of its thin green covering, showed like a scar. Something about ten inches long and no more than two wide, slightly curved, had been removed from there recently. A broken piece of moulding from the doorway arch? Whatever it was, the bare leads showed no sign of it now.
‘Supposing you had just used a length of stone to break a man’s skull, and tipped him over here into the churchyard,’ said George thoughtfully, ‘what would you do with the weapon? To make it disappear most effectively?’
‘Easy,’ said Moon promptly. ‘I’d throw it off the tower on the other side. Not only because that would separate it as far as possible from the body, in a churchyard which I’ve got to admit is a right tangle, too thickly populated ever to get mown properly – but on that side the congestion is worst and the disintegration most advanced. That’s the oldest part. Looking for a slice of stonework there would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
‘Pity,’ said George with sympathy, ‘because that’s just what you and your boys are going to be doing as from now.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ agreed Moon with equanimity. ‘If there’s a hunk of local stone around with traces of blood, and not native to where it’s lying, we’ll get it for you before the light fails. I know this place better than I’ve ever bothered to get to know the palm of my hand. Mind if I borrow another piece to send after it? One of these bosses – no mistaking that for the one we shall be looking for, I take it?’
He had a way, both reassuring and unnerving, of being entrenched in certainty where the habits and cosmography of his chosen ground were concerned, and of proving right practically all the time. George was not in the least surprised when the sergeant came to him in the parish hall, around seven o’clock, bearing on a fold of paper a ten-inch sliver of stone, very gently curved, easily wielded in one hand by any well-grown person, and retaining a murderously sharp edge of moulding on its clean side, protected by having lain face-down in the discard pile. It had also, impaled upon this sharp edge, palpable traces of blood and matter, and a few short hairs.
‘Sorry I can’t guarantee any guilty prints, George,’ said Moon, easy and unofficial, since they were alone, ‘but I doubt if we’ve got the best field for ’em here. But this is the weapon, all right. We’ve marked the place where it crashed. I was about a couple of yards too far to the left with that boss, but about the same range. You’ve got a pretty hefty bloke to look for. It was a good throw, and he’d be in a hurry.’
There was a mass of statements to be matched up by then, and he sat down and joined in the work as soon as the murder weapon had been despatched to the forensic laboratory. They worked together with maximum placidity and understanding; but the statements were as void as they had both expected.
‘The vicar knows of only one occasion when somebody was up in the bell-chamber legitimately this year,’ George said, when they had been through everything. ‘That was in late May, when a swarm of bees invaded. Bees get in wherever they think they will. Anyhow, they moved in among the woodwork there, and if the Reverend Stephen didn’t want ’em, at least he knew of some who did.’
‘ “A swarm of bees in May…” ’, murmured Moon sententiously.
‘I know! “Worth a load of hay.” And we’re talking in Middlehope terms now. Well, the leading bass, Joe Llewelyn, is a fanatical bee-keeper, and wins prizes with his honey all over Britain. So Joe moved in to take the swarm. Nobody’d laid claim to it, it seems they may well have been wild bees. Joe came twice, once to size up the situation, and the second time with a skip, and an assistant to help him. And the assistant was Bossie Jarvis. I can well believe that if there was anything out of the ordinary going on, Bossie’d be in on it. Joe’s got no complaints. He
