there.’
‘You come on down after us with Barbara and Willie, then.’ He caught Barbara’s eye, saw the glance she exchanged with Willie, and knew that he was understood. The Land-Rover would be driven down to Mottisham at an unwontedly sedate pace, and parked discreetly away from the main action, in the hope that by that time Bossie would have been hauled out of hiding safe and sound. Not that Jenny was a hysterical type, far from it; but once already her infant prodigy had almost got himself murdered, and parents are apt to overreact to that sort of thing.
‘Come on, then!’ said George, and led the way out to his own car at a run, with Toby and Sam on his heels. The greater their start, the better.
The night was dark, moonless and overcast. Traffic was always light up here at night, and the sense of the border hills closed in even on lighted roads, like the shadow of history, age-old and solitary and quite unmoved.
‘Now suppose you tell me,’ suggested Sam, with arduous calm, ‘just what you know about all this business that we don’t know.’ And Toby told him the reason for Bossie’s misplaced loyalty. Apart from that they were all silent until they turned into the lane that led to the gates of the abbey, when Toby suddenly said aloud: ‘I wish now I’d never touched the bloody thing!’
‘Oh, come off it!’ said Sam comfortingly. ‘I wish I had a quid for every time I’ve said something like that. What makes you think you should be any different?’
There was one police car waiting for them, as well as Sergeant Moon’s ancient Ford. The portion of the drive between the old entrance gates and the ticket-kiosk was still shrouded in its overgrown trees and shrubs, and hid unusual activities very efficiently. Jack Moon came out of the darkness to meet them as they climbed out of the car.
‘I sent a couple of the lads round to look for the place where the kid got in. We’ve got it pinned and covered now, if he slips out that way. We’ve made no other move yet.’
‘And Stubbs still isn’t around?’ The resident warden was no scholar himself, his orders as regards the work in hand came from Charles Goddard, but his responsibility for the site, like his authority within it, was absolute, and he should have been there. ‘What are his free nights, do we know?’
‘We do,’ said Moon flatly. ‘On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday he can be away the entire day if he likes, but he’s responsible for security from six o’clock on. Saturday and Sunday evenings he has a relief to make the evening rounds, so he’s free from closing time. The rest of the week he’s in sole charge, apart from the help he gets during the day, which is voluntary but usually plentiful. This is Tuesday, and he should be here. He may be, but if he is, he’s taking a hell of a time over making the round of the property. It’s big, but not that big.’
‘With or without him,’ said George, ‘we’re going in.’
‘That’s what I thought, so I fetched Grainger along with me.’ Grainger was the best man in the Midshire force on locks, and happened to live in Moon’s territory. ‘The telephone switchboard is in the ticket-office, we’re going to need that, and of course the office is locked. Even if Stubbs is off with the keys to everything in his pocket, there should be a second set in there somewhere. Has he got your authority to break in?’
‘As fast as possible,’ said George without hesitation, and led the way. Authorisation could be legalised afterwards.
‘History repeats itself,’ murmured Toby, following, and shook his shoulders to dislodge a foreboding that was not so easy to jettison. ‘Well,
CHAPTER NINE
« ^ »
Bossie was relieved but vaguely disquieted when he tried the door at the corner of the northern walk, to find that, like the gate, it was still unlocked. But after all, there was nothing here to steal, nothing profitable even from the point of view of an antique dealer, except the tiles in the flooring, and it was doubtful if they carried a great commercial value. Dispersed from their proper site, they were just moderately-priced antiquarian junk.
Once inside, he eased the latch softly back into its cradle, and stood for a moment in the vast darkness, sensible of the shape it took, feeling his hair erected by the soaring of the timbered roof, and his vision channelled into the form of its noble length, closed in on either side, on his left by the eighteenth-century brickwork with its high, small windows that hardly showed at all for relief against the dark, on his right by the huge, decrepit stone wall that had survived at least six hundred years. Under that wall his membrane had been found, lying among the growth of grass and weeds nurtured on years of rubble, dust and moisture. And he was sure now that it had been one among many, very many, and could not by any accident have been winnowed far enough away from its fellows to be discovered in absolute solitude. And nobody else had even made similar finds here, or they would have been written up for everybody to read, and photographed and made much of. No, the secret was here, somewhere, however obscurely hidden. He was certain.
When he had stood still long enough to have his breathing under control, and to be sure he was really alone, he switched on his torch. The long vista of the north walk opened before him, the ancient vaulting gone, the complex timbering of the later roof making a shadowy pattern overhead. The stones of the north wall showed wonderfully jagged and crude in the cross-light, and at their foot the earth flooring, swept bare and trodden hard, looked the least likely hiding-place for secrets that he could imagine. He walked its length, searching the angle of floor with wall, and could see no possible place where anything could have been hidden from those who had done this thorough job of cleaning the ground.
Bossie drew back and viewed the whole. There was a quantity of stuff, old wood, fragments of carved, weathered stone retrieved from various places about the site, rope and twine, all piled in the far corner, together with a handcart and some brushes and brooms. Nothing there to conceal treasure, though they might, if necessary, conceal somebody who wanted to be invisible here. Then there was the area of relaid paving tiles, inside the ropes, and a heap of excavated tiles, some whole, some broken, waiting to be assembled into the pattern, after due repairs.
And outside everything, wherever he turned the tiny beam of his torch, the huge, impersonal darkness, distorted by enormous shadows that dwarfed the little light, and a smell of disturbed earth, like a cemetery. It was getting distinctly chilly, too, he felt himself shivering.
Well, if there had been anything concealed in the upper layers here, in the centre, where they were working on the tiling, they would certainly have found it. No need to disturb anything there. All that remained was the wall itself, and the flooring under it, which was certainly where Toby had found his leaf, even if it didn’t look very promising now.
