‘And on staircases,’ said Evan, ‘I do tend to tread well to the outside, spreading the load and the balance. Maybe that was why you got such a good impression. If you want to borrow my left shoe, please do return it as soon as possible, it takes me years now to break a pair in. I can’t think why a sedentary worker should put such a strain on his hooves, but there it is.’
‘I don’t think we need deprive you at all,’ said George, ‘provided you tell me what your shoe was doing up the church tower on Thursday night.’
‘I’ll tell you the whole thing,’ agreed Evan sunnily, sipping his coffee. ‘I can’t think why I didn’t do it right away, because I can hardly have been afraid to. It may have been local solidarity. You understand about that. Or it may, regrettably, have been pure laziness. I’m a martyr to laziness.’
‘That,’ said George ruefully, ‘is a kind of martyrdom I should like to enjoy.’
‘It’s the luxury of retirement. Not for you, not for years yet. Laziness without boredom, the delight of being furiously busy doing nothing. Well, you want to know when and how I came to be in the tower, leaving footprints around. It was the night he was killed, of course, though I didn’t know anything about that until yesterday, believe it or not. Rumour washes my way, all right, but it doesn’t rush, it waits until I crop up, and I don’t believe I was out of the garden, or had a letter or any sort of contact on Friday at all.’
‘Go on,’ said George, avoiding comment.
‘Well, it’s simply that I was dead curious about that membrane, and I wanted to find out where he’d run across it, I dare say I even suspected it might not have been honestly come by, when he was so cagey about it. Anyhow, I reasoned that if it was local it must have come from some source to which he had constant access, and the church was first candidate. So last Thursday I slipped in during choir practice and sat out the session at the back, out of sight. Sundays there are too many people in and out all the time, I reasoned Thursday would give him a better chance for probing, he could easily be the last out, he had keys. The odds against one leaf surviving alone, like that, come pretty high, you know, I reckoned he’d be on the hunt for more, and I didn’t see why he should have the field to himself. And sure enough, he let all the rest go, even the vicar, and went back to playing the organ for about ten minutes. Not more. Then I knew he was up to something. He came down from the organ and made straight for the tower door. And I gave him a start, and then came out of hiding and followed him.’
‘And got – how far?’
‘As far as the limbo above the bell-ringers’ room. Rainbow was already up among the bells. I dare say I should have hesitated, anyhow, but I was just setting foot on the first tread of the next ladder when I heard voices up above—’
‘Voices? There were already two of them up there?’
‘Well, that’s a question. One says voices, because people don’t normally talk to themselves. Especially on clandestine business. What’s certain is that after purposeful silence, suddenly somebody was talking up there above my head. The pitch of the voices was much the same, so I’d say definitely two men, of whom I naturally assumed one was Rainbow.’
‘But nobody’d gone up there while you were in the church? Until Rainbow, I mean?’
‘Nobody. I couldn’t have missed seeing him if he had. But I was only there from about a quarter of an hour before they finished practice, somebody could have walked in just as I did, and been lurking there behind the curtain before I came.’
‘Could you distinguish words? Or even two different intonations?’
‘This is where I fear I prove useless to you,’ said Evan Joyce almost guiltily. ‘Both male, yes, pretty certainly. But words…! You go there, Superintendent! Put a couple of your men up there among the bells, and you stand where I was standing, and listen to them talking. Even full-voiced, and what I heard was muted. The effect is eerie. About five different echoes coming in from all directions, and rolling around off the woodwork and the bells, so that all you hear is a curious, muffled murmur, a distant roar, not even describable, let alone distinguishable. No, I couldn’t even make the wildest guess at what they were saying, or who the second one was. The only impression I can pin down at all, and that dubiously, is that there was no pleasure and a good deal of annoyance reverberating round up there.’
‘We’ll make a few tests,’ said George, but without any great hope of achieving better results. ‘Then what did you do?’
‘I quit. You could say I came to my senses. If that was a snooper up there waiting for Rainbow, here was another down here, and I didn’t much like the character. Besides, butting into a twosome is a bit too much. I’m a retiring sort of chap by nature, I know my limitations. I packed it in and went home.’
Somebody came out from the porch, Bossie had said, not very long after Rainbow stopped playing. Simply walked away out of the lych-gate and went home. That fitted; so did the spot where Evan claimed to have abandoned his climb.
‘After all,’ said Evan reasonably, ‘I’d more or less found out what I wanted to know. What else could have sent Rainbow scurrying up the tower among all that junk and dust? Whatever he’d got had come from somewhere up there. I thought I knew now where to look. But I let well alone for a day or so, and then the news hit me, and you were in possession. I surrender! That is not at all my league. And you never found the membrane?’
George saw no reason to hedge on that point. ‘The fond remembrance of it, and that’s all. I’m as nose-down on the scent as you.’
‘Then whoever killed him has got it,’ said Joyce. His mild elderly voice was sharp and eager, the metaphor of hounds on a trail was no exaggeration. ‘That was why he died. So who was that up there? Somebody else he consulted as he did me? I doubt it. I’d given him the green light, he knew he wasn’t on a total loser. I don’t believe he’d have looked for another expert until he’d done every bit of work on it he could do himself, and made a thorough search for any other connecting leaves there might be to be found wherever this one was found. He wouldn’t want to share the glory or the profit.’
‘I don’t know about the profit,’ said George deliberately, ‘I don’t suppose that bothers you at all. But the glory might.’
‘Oh, it would, George, it would! I’d almost have tossed Rainbow off the tower myself, to get hold of that leaf. Supposing, of course, I could hope to lift a weight half as much again as mine. But I never got the chance. There was somebody there before me, and I went home.’
And clearly that was all that George was going to get out of this interview, apart from one very handsome yellow rose, which Evan Joyce bestowed on him at parting, with a forgiving smile. And it could all be the truth, but the ambiguous quality remained. A passion is a passion, whether for old letters for their own scholarly sake, or for
