"Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Peters Ellis)

GEORGE FELSE SWORE, but with resignation, listened, and came. Dominic was not in the habit of going off at half-cock; he had been a policeman’s son too long for that. If the affair turned out to be a mare’s-nest after all, there was no harm done; and if it didn’t, far better to take a close look at the circumstances as soon as possible, rather than after the scent had gone cold.

“Save it,” he said, cutting off the details. “I’m on my way, we’ll have all that when I come.‘’

It took him twenty minutes to drive from Comerford to the Follymead gates; there wasn’t much on the roads at this hour, and the going was good. The college station wagon was parked just behind the lodge, already turned to point back up the drive, with Dominic and Tossa waiting beside it.

“We thought it might be better if you leave the car here at the lodge,” said Dominic. “Just in case there’s somebody who knows it.”

“In that case,” said George reasonably, “the somebody would be even more likely to know me.”

“Yes, but we hope you’ll be able to stay out of the general view. There’s only a handful of us know what’s happened. If anything has happened. And that way, if it all turns out to be nonsense, there’s no fuss, and nobody’s made to look a fool. It seemed the best thing. It’s this second-in-command, you see, he’s left holding the baby, and he’s terrified of calling the police, and terrified of not calling them. Whatever he does is probably going to be the wrong thing.”

“So I’m the working compromise. He realised that if there does turn out to be anything in it, it becomes an official matter?”

“If there’s anything in it, the fat’s in the fire, anyhow. Yes, of course he understands that. Even Arundale couldn’t help that.” Dominic climbed into the driving seat of the station wagon, and set it rolling up the long, pale drive, bordered now, by fitful moonlight and scurrying cloud, with phantoms of Cothercott ingenuity even more monstrous than by day. “Is Bunty very mad at me? I’m sorry about it, but honestly, this business… I don’t like the look of it.” He had only recently taken to calling his mother Bunty, and it didn’t come quite naturally yet, but using the old, childish form of address had suddenly become as constricting to him as a strait-jacket. He’d never so much as given it a thought until Tossa entered the house; but it still hadn’t occurred to him to work out the implications.

“Not with you. Maybe with your missing folk-singer, for his bad timing. Cold, Tossa?” She was between them on the broad front seat, and shivering a little in spite of the camel-coloured car coat in which she was huddled.

“No, it’s just tension, don’t mind me.” She relaxed against George’s shoulder, reassured by his presence. There were going to be times when Dominic would feel a little jealous of George, who, after all, was only forty-five, and tall and slim, and not that bad-looking as middle-aged men go. “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t like this much, either. There are too many over-developed personalities around, things could happen.”

“Well, let’s hear it.”

Dominic told it, as succinctly as he could, and Tossa added an occasional comment. There was no time for all the background detail now, only for the facts. Nevertheless, glimpses of personalities emerged, and they were seen to be, as Tossa had said, a little distorted, drawn from a world where bizarre and improbable things could happen. The moon came out and silvered the pagoda roof, beyond the heronry where there were no herons, and picked out like a lance-thrust the black entrance of the hermit’s cave, distant in its concrete rocks. Anything was believable here.

“With a house full of about eighty people,” said George, “he thinks he’s going to be able to keep this secret?”

“If it has to be a full-scale investigation, no. But long enough for you to have a look at the set-up and judge, yes, I reckon with luck we might. Because almost everybody was right away from here all afternoon, you see, with these two coach-parties. They left before we saw Lucien Galt go out into the park. And they came back only just on time for tea, and came milling in all together. They’re out of it. They can’t know anything.”

“That leaves how many? More than enough.”

“Not really, because the staff were working indoors as usual, and they’re sure to be O.K. Mostly they’d be in pairs or more all the time, what with washing up after lunch, and then preparing for tea and dinner. We were here, of course, you know about us. Then there’s Felicity, that’s the young one I told you about, Arundale’s niece. And Liri Palmer… she was in the grounds, too, we saw her start off towards that phoney ruin, over that way. And we four, and Mr. Marshall, are the only ones who know about what I found by the river, so far. Then there’s Professor Penrose, he knows about Lucien being missing, but he doesn’t know the rest yet. He’d just got them all into the drawing-room for his after-dinner session when we came back to the house.”

“And you think all that lot can be trusted to keep it dark?”

“We can only try. Yes, I think we might.”

“Even the girl? This Felicity?”

“Yes,” said Tossa positively. She cast a quick glance at Dominic, and went on, encouraged: “She has a special reason for keeping quiet. Dominic didn’t tell you quite all about her afternoon. Oh, he told what we know, but not what we think we know. You see, she’s an odd child. But no, it isn’t odd to be like that, not at her age, it’s not odd at all. She’s awkward and tense and self-conscious, and she’s a sort of poor relation here, and things are pretty much hell for her, even though everybody means well. And this weekend she’s gone right overboard for Lucien Galt, that’s all about it. That’s why she followed him out this afternoon. And when we met her coming back, we felt pretty sure he’d got fed up with having her round his neck, and sent her off with a flea in her ear. So if she seems to be covering up, that’s what she’s covering. And whoever tells more than they need about this afternoon, it won’t be Felicity.”

“I see,” said George, touched by what she had omitted rather than what she had said. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave her her dignity.”

“I know,” said Tossa warmly.

“What about the mere fact that one of the artists has missed two sessions? I suppose he should have appeared in all of them? Aren’t quite a number of people going to wonder about that? Even if they don’t notice your absence from the audience.”

“I don’t think we need worry about that. We sit where-ever we happen to, find a place, it’s liable to be different every time, and if you’re not along there now, why shouldn’t you be somewhere at the back? They won’t wonder about us, among so many. But about Galt it is rather different. We left that to the professor. Unless he saw a need, I don’t suppose he’s told them anything at all, just sailed on as if everything was just as it was meant to be. But if he thought they were beginning to do some serious wondering, I bet he could hand them an absolutely first-class lie.”

“He may have to. Keeping it quiet suits me, too. I don’t want seventy excited people tramping all over the place and getting in the way, any more than the county or the warden want their cherished college to get the wrong sort of advertisement. Will they still be in at the lecture now?”

“Should be. We ought to have half an hour yet.”

“We’ll go down to this grotto of yours first, then. Can we slip in by a back door afterwards, and dodge the house-party?”

“Yes, easily, from the back courtyard, where the garages are. There’s a covered passage to the basement stairs, and the warden’s office is quite near the top of the staircase. The front’s all gilt and carpeting and ashlar, but the back stairs is a little spiral affair. Pity,” said Dominic, “about the light. But there’s a huge torch in the glove-pocket here.”

“I want to take a look at the marks to-night, lift a sample, if possible. It’s going to rain before morning.”

“He covered them,” said Tossa, promptly and proudly.

“I should hope so,” said George; but he smiled.

They swept round the dramatic bend in the drive, and the house rose superb and staggering in the bone-white moonlight to take their breath away. The long range of the drawing-room windows blazed with light, flooding the lowest of the terraces; the class was still in session.

Dominic drove round the wing of the house and into the courtyard, and there they locked the station wagon and left it, taking the torch with them. The whiteness of moonlight on the pale, complex shapes of stone here was hard and dry as an articulated skeleton, the windows glared like empty eye-sockets. Dominic led the way down to the footbridge, and in the spectral, half-fledged woodland he switched on the torch. The great, gaunt gate towered in its inadequate fence, a few yards beyond the redwood tree. They came out on the blanched greensward by the grotto. The noise of the river, more deadly than by day, reached for them, a humming, throbbing, low, ferocious roar, a tiger-cat purring, and just as dangerous and beautiful.

Carefully Dominic circled his ring of rhubarb leaves, and lifted them. The little pool of the torch’s light moved in deep absorption all around the area, an eye of warmer pallor in the cold pallor of the moon.

“All right, cover them again,” said George at length. “Where’s this stuff that may be blood?”

The two heavy drops seemed to have shrunk since early evening, but even by this light they were there, clearly visible. They had no colour now, only a darkness without colour; but they had a clear form. Liquid had dripped, not directly, but in flight from a body in motion. One was flattened on open stone, immovable; but the second was on hard ground. George took a pen-knife to it, patiently and carefully, and pared it intact out of the ground, while Tossa held the torch for him. He had brought pill-boxes with him for such small specimens as this.

“To-morrow morning, early, I’ll go over all this open ground. Maybe Mr. Marshall can find me a tarpaulin, or something to drape over this. Now where was this medal and chain you found? Yes… I see.”

Behind them the river roared as softly as any sucking dove, and they felt it there, and were not deceived into believing it harmless. The sound had a curious property, it seemed to be one with the vast outer silence which contained it. At night, in the grounds of Follymead, Pan and panic were conceptions as modern and close as central heating, though what they distilled was a central chill. Dominic folded his arm and his wind-jacket about Tossa, and felt her turn to him confidingly. She wasn’t afraid; she only shook, like him, with awareness of chaos, braced and ready for it.

“All right,” said George, in a soft, surprised and gentle voice. “Let’s get back to the house and talk to Mr. Marshall.”

“We must have tests made, of course,” said George, installed behind the desk in Edward Arundale’s private office at the top of the back stairs, “but I think I ought to say at once that this is almost certainly blood.” The little pill-box with its pear-drop shape of dull brown on fretted gravel lay in his palm; he shut the lid over it and laid it aside. “I needn’t tell you that blood in that quantity could come from the most superficial of injuries. But we’re faced with the fact that Lucien Galt has not reappeared or sent any message. Those who know him say he wouldn’t cheat on a commitment. I regard this as good evidence. They know what to expect of him; they didn’t expect this, and they don’t accept it. He was regarded as in many ways a fiendishly difficult colleague; but he didn’t give short weight once a bargain was struck. We must also face the fact that the Braide in flood ran a yard or so from where these tell-tale marks were found. If there was a struggle there, as appears to be the case, then the loser may only too easily have gone over the weir and down the river. I am putting, of course, the gravest possible case, because we can’t afford to ignore it. We must take into account all possibilities.”

Henry Marshall licked his dry lips and swallowed arduously. “Yes, I realise that. I… may I take it that you will assume responsibility for whatever inquiries are necessary? I want, of course, to co-operate as fully as possible.”

“I should prefer to keep this inquiry quiet, as long as that’s possible. I gather you feel the same way. Let me have this office for my own use, and keep the course running. Can you do that? I’ve already talked to Professor Penrose, he’s quite willing to work them as hard as possible, and it looks as if they’re enjoying it. Concentrate on helping him, and keep the course afloat between you, and we ought to be able to get them out of here on Monday evening none the wiser about what’s been occupying us. They’ll have enough to think about.‘’

“I shall be very grateful,” said Henry Marshall, in the understatement of the year. “You understand my position… this is the first time I’ve been left to run a course single-handed. It would be disastrous if we allowed our students to panic and the course to disintegrate. Not only for me. I’m worried about myself, naturally, I don’t pretend I’m not. But I’m honestly worried about Follymead, too. We are worth an effort, I give you my word we are.”

He was an honest, decent, troubled young man, not very forceful, not very experienced, but George thought Arundale might have done very much worse.

“I’m sure of that. I want to use discretion, too. But you understand that if there has been a tragedy here, if there has been a crime, that can’t be suppressed. The moment I’m convinced that it’s a police matter, it will become official.”

“I couldn’t, in any case, agree to anything else,” said Marshall simply. “I’m a citizen, as well as an employee afraid for his job. But there’s no harm in hoping it won’t come to that.”

“None at all. I’ve got the list of people who stayed here this afternoon, instead of joining one or other of the sightseeing parties. Tell me if there’s anyone who should be added.” He read off the list. It included four elderly ladies, all local, and therefore all acquainted with the local antiquities, and disposed to vegetate in the Follymead libraries or gardens rather than to clamber over castles; but they had booked in in pairs, and almost certainly had hunted in pairs this afternoon. With luck there would be no need to involve them. A little casual conversation – Tossa might help out here – would eliminate them. “I realise that Mrs. Arundale will have to be told, eventually, about this inquiry. Is there anyone else who stayed here?”

“Yes,” said Marshall. “Mr. Meurice should have gone with my coach this afternoon. He cried off at the last moment. I may be wrong, but I got the impression that he changed his mind because he found that Miss Palmer was staying.”

“It wouldn’t be such an unheard-of thing to do,” agreed George. “No one else?”

“Not that I can think off.”

“Then as time’s getting on, I wonder if you’d get Felicity Cope in to me first. I won’t frighten her. I believe she knows already about Mr. Galt’s disappearance.”

“She knows,” said Marshall, pondering darkly how much, indeed, Felicity did know. “You won’t frighten her. She’s a very precocious young woman.” It sounded like a warning; it also sounded, paradoxically, as if he felt sorry for her. George made a mental note to beware of that attitude; it might, he reflected, be the most demoralising thing in the world to feel that everyone was sorry for you.

“I know I’m difficult,” said Felicity, in a very precise and slightly superior tone. “I have difficulties. I don’t know how much you remember about being my age?” She gave him a sidewise look, and was arrested by the nicely-shaped growth of the grey hair at his temples; it gave him a very distinguished look. He had nice eyes, too, deep-set and quiet; it would be hard to excite him. It must be so restful, she thought, clutching at distant, desirable things to suppress her memories of anguish, to be with people who’ve known nearly everything, and can’t get feverish any more.

“More than you’d think,” said George earnestly. He was on the same side of the desk with her, almost within touch; he knew quite a lot about making contact. “And I have a son – that’s going through it again, you know, only with one experience to build on. Not a daughter, I wasn’t that lucky. My wife couldn’t have any more children. We badly wanted a girl.”

“Really?” said Felicity, side-tracked. “Uncle Edward is terribly unhappy, too, about Aunt Audrey not having any children. He’s extremely fond of her, but it’s always been an awful disappointment to him.” She tightened suddenly, he saw her face blanch. Her eyes, momentarily naked and vulnerable, veiled themselves. No one can be more opaque than a girl of fifteen, when she feels the need to defend herself. Why did she? From what?

“You know Lucien Galt’s gone missing,” said George practically. “It looks as if you were the last person to see him, here at Follymead. He didn’t say anything to you, did he, about running out? After all, something could have happened to call him away.”

“No,” said Felicity, with a fixed, false smile. “He didn’t say anything about leaving. Nothing at all like that.”

“What did you talk about on your walk?”

“Oh, about the course, and the songs we had in the morning session. Just things like that.”

“Miss Barber and my son were a little disturbed about you… did you know? They had a feeling you were unhappy… upset… when they met you this afternoon. They’d have felt better if you’d agreed to go with them. Was there anything the matter? You know, it’s a kindness to confide in people. We do worry about one another, that’s what makes us human. Tossa’s had her difficulties, too, you mustn’t be surprised if she has a feeling for other people’s crises.” Careful, now! She had shied a little at the word he had chosen; her eyes, blankly grey, fended off his too great interest distrustfully. “I’m not being clairvoyant,” he said patiently. “You told me a moment ago you have difficulties. You wouldn’t have mentioned them if they hadn’t been on your mind.”

She looked down into her lap, clasping and unclasping her hands in a nervous pressure. The small, thin, beautifully-boned face was subtle and still, but it was a braced and wary stillness.

“I made my mistake,” she said, in a dry and careful voice, “being born into a clever and distinguished family. It is a mistake, when you turn out to be the plain, dull, nondescript one. Uncle Edward – everybody knows how brilliant he is. And my mother – she’s his sister, you know, – she has an arts degree, and she paints, and sings, and plays, she can do everything. It’s only because of her ill health, and because she happened to make a rather unfortunate marriage, that she didn’t become a scholar and celebrity like him. Aunt Audrey isn’t an intellectual, like them, of course, she doesn’t come from such an intellectual family. Her people were tradesmen who’d just got into the money. She went to a terribly select boarding school, and all that – Pleydells, I expect you’ve heard of it? – but she didn’t get any great distinctions, they took her away before her final exams. I’ve never understood why. Maybe they weren’t interested in academic success, all they wanted was the cachet. But she was everything else, you see. It’s enough to be so beautiful, don’t you think so? She’s beautiful, and she knows how to do everything beautifully, even if she doesn’t do it so terribly well. Me, I’m well-read, and I’m not stupid, but that’s all I’ve got, and in our family it just isn’t enough. Even things I can really do well, I find myself doing so badly… It’s… a personal thing. I try too hard, and over-reach myself. It isn’t easy, being the one without any gifts at all. I can’t see any future ahead of me, except playing second fiddle all my life to someone. I know I have moods! Wouldn’t you have moods?”

Most of which was her mother speaking; and the faithful repetition of the threnody of complaint only went to show the helpless and vulnerable affection she had for her mother. She hadn’t yet turned to doubt any of that, or pick it to pieces as some young people can and do, and find all the flaws in it. There was a lot of undeserved loyalty wrapped up in this rather pathetic package.

She caught his eye, and her pale cheek warmed a little. She liked the thick, strongly marked eyebrows that yet stood so tranquilly apart, with none of the menace of those brows that almost meet over the bridge of the nose. She minded his penetrating glance less than she had expected, and yet she was afraid of it.

“I suppose I’m a psychiatric case, really,” she said rather loftily, “only nobody’s done anything about it, so far.”

“On the contrary, I think you’re a completely normal adolescent who has suffered from rather too much adult companionship,” said George candidly, and smiled at her astonished, even affronted stare. “Abnormalities are the norm, when you’re struggling out of one stage and into another. Let’s face it, Felicity, you’re not grown-up yet, you’re only growing up. I haven’t forgotten how damned uncomfortable it is. I’ve seen it happen to others. You’re not doing too badly. Just don’t take any of your elders too seriously. Above all, don’t take any of them as the gospel. Not even the psychiatrists, some of them need psychiatrists too. Is that what was troubling you, this afternoon?”

He had brought her back to the matter in hand none the less firmly for the gentleness of his manner; but she didn’t hold it against him, she knew she had to face it. The long, fair lashes lay on her cheeks. Her face was set, and she wasn’t going to show him her eyes.

“It makes it worse that I have been so much with grownups. I still am. They expect me to act like an adult, and yet they don’t treat me as one. They get the work out of me, and then expect me to be in bed by ten. I did try to confide. I… I didn’t choose very well. He hadn’t got time to listen to me. I thought… he’s only twenty-three, and women are so much more mature… I thought we could be contemporaries but he… I saw it wasn’t any good,” said Felicity with dignity, “so I went away and left him. But you’ll understand, I didn’t want to talk to anyone after that.”

“I do understand. You left him… where?”

“Just under the redwood tree,” she said firmly, “where the paths cross.”

“You took the path to the bridge? And left him standing there?”

“Yes,” she said, with the flat finality of a slab of stone being laid over a grave.

“Let me be quite certain… he was then at the crossroads, and outside the fence that rails off the riverside enclosure with the grotto?”

“Yes,” she said, with the same intonation.

“You didn’t look round to see where he went from there?”

“I didn’t look round at all. I’d been dismissed, I went,” said Felicity, with completely adult bitterness.

“And that was the last you saw of him? You don’t know where he went from there?”

“I do now,” said Felicity. “I didn’t then. That was the last I saw of him.”

She looked up. Her eyes were enormous in fear and grief, greedy for reassurance. Of this terror and this hope there was no doubt whatever. “Mr. Felse, do you think something happened to him? You don’t… you don’t think he’s…?”

“I don’t think anything yet,” said George. “I hope he’s simply suffered a crisis of his own, and run away from whatever was on his mind. Don’t think he’s exempt at twenty-three. Maybe he was so full of his own problems he couldn’t spare any consideration for yours. If we can find him, be sure we will. Now you go to bed, and leave it to us. If you’ve told me all you know, there’s nothing more you can do.”

“I’ve told you all I know.” She got as far as the door, and looked back. Her face was mute and stiff, but her eyes were full of haunted shadows. “Good night, Mr. Felse!”

“Good night, Felicity!”

And all that, thought George, watching her go, sounds like truth, and nothing but truth. But he still had an uneasy feeling that truth, with Felicity, was an iceberg, with eight-ninths of its bulk under water.

“I’d better tell you at once,” said Dickie Meurice, settling himself at his ease and spreading an elbow on Edward Arundale’s desk, “that of course I’ve realised what this is all about, even if there’s been no official admission that anything’s wrong. Old Penrose has given the impression that everything’s proceeding according to plan, and he had no intention of using Lucien Galt in to-night’s lectures. Without even saying so, which is pretty good going, but then, he’s a deep old bird. But I know too well what Lucifer costs. If they bought him at all, they wanted him on-stage the whole week-end. And I know him too well to miss the moment when he absents himself from among us. He went off, voluntarily or otherwise, between lunch and tea. And you’re here to cover the management, in case it turns out he didn’t disappear voluntarily. Solicitor? Or private trouble-shooter?”

“County C.I.D.,” said George without expression but not without relish, and saw with satisfaction the instant recoil, quickly mastered but not quickly enough.

Dickie Meurice tapped his cigarette on the arm of his chair, and stared, and thought so hard that his blond countenance paled. He said carefully, lightly: “You don’t mean you’ve found him? You’ve got a genuine police case? This is official?”

“Not yet. If everybody co-operates it may not have to be. No, we don’t know yet where Lucien Galt is. Do you, Mr. Meurice?”

“Why should I know?” The smile a little strained now, the voice demonstrating involuntarily its disastrous tendency to shrillness.

“You had, it seems, about the same chance of being the last to see him, this afternoon, as any of the others who passed up the sight-seeing trips and stayed at Follymead. Were you?”

“Look,” said Meurice, persuasively, leaning forward with the look of shining candour that meant he was at his most devious, “if this is on the level, if it’s a police job, of course I’ll co-operate.” He had made up his mind rapidly enough where his interests lay, and that they were already involved; tweak that string occasionally, and he’d cooperate, maybe even a bit too much. “Tell me what you expect of me, ask me whatever you want to know, and I’m with you.”

“I expect you to keep this strictly to yourself until, or unless, publicity becomes inevitable. Only a handful of people know about it, and it’s better for all concerned that it should remain that way. Better for Follymead, better for all these people attending the course, better for the artists involved, and better for me. Publicity may be very good business in your profession, of course, but only the right kind of publicity. And as you happen to be one of those who stayed at home to-day… Though of course, you may be able to account for every minute of your time, and provide confirmation of your account…”

The artless, concerned smile became even more winning and anxious to help. So he couldn’t account for his time; and he would play ball, though perhaps not strictly by the rules.

“I don’t need that kind of publicity, I can’t use it. I’ll keep it quiet, don’t worry. What can I tell you?”

““You were going on one of these coach-trips, I gather, originally. What made you change your mind?”

“I thought I could use my time better here. There’s no chance to talk seriously to anyone at this sort of affair, with seventy or eighty people milling around in a communal spree. And there was someone I wanted to talk to. And she didn’t go, so I didn’t go.”

“Liri Palmer?”

“That’s right. I thought there might be a good opportunity of cultivating her company while the place was virtually empty.” He was being very frank, very open; an honest man would have looked less eager, and sounded a good deal less forthcoming. “I like Liri. She’s wasting herself on a heel like Lucien Galt, whether she loves or hates him. I wanted to tell her so, and get some sense into her. I don’t know whether they’ve told you what’s in the background between those two, or what happened last night?” He didn’t wait to be answered, he told it anyhow; no one could do it better. Maybe he wanted it on record officially that someone, and not himself, had threatened Lucien Galt’s life; if, that is, you cared to take that impromptu revision of a song as a serious threat. He liked Liri Palmer – or did he? – but he liked Dickie Meurice a lot better.

“I see you don’t exactly love Galt, yourself,” observed George.

“That’s no secret. Why should it be? He’s treated Liri badly, and the rest of his profession didn’t christen him Lucifer for nothing. But I didn’t set eyes on him all this afternoon,” he said firmly. “The last time I saw him was at lunch.”

“But you did see Liri?”

“Yes, I hung around in the gallery until she went out, and gave her five minutes start. Just after two o’clock, that would be. She made for that artificial ruin on the hillock across the park, and I came along shortly afterwards and found her there. I tried to get her to write off Galt and spend her attention on something better worth it – me!” A gleam of apparently genuine self-mockery shone in his eyes for an instant; it was the nearest he had come to being likeable, but in all probability he was merely experimenting to find out what attitudes would recommend him to George.

“Was she amenable?” asked George, with a wooden face.

“Metaphorically speaking, she spat in my eye. Nobody was going to put Liri off her grudges or her fancies.”

“And which was this?”

“At that stage, I’d say practically all grudge. She’d been badly hurt, and she can be an implacable enemy. I saw I was getting nowhere, so I gave up and came away. There was hardly anybody about, I’m afraid, I can’t bring witnesses, but I give you my word I was back in the walled garden soon after three o’clock, and I didn’t leave there until I came in to tea. There are archery butts there. I was practising all by myself until four, and then I came indoors to wash. And that’s all. Not a very productive afternoon.”

“And you left Liri there at the tower. When would that be?”

“Maybe about twenty minutes to three. She was sitting there alone, nobody else in sight that I noticed.”

“You wouldn’t see very much of the river’s course from there?”

The winsome blue eyes lit with a flare of intelligence that was not winsome at all. “Well, not from the ground, that I do know. There are tall trees in between, all you see is a gleam of water here and there. But there’s a stairway up that tower,” he added helpfully. “I haven’t been up there, but I should think you’d get a pretty good view with that added height. Not that she showed any signs of making use of it,” he concluded fairly, “while I was there.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Meurice, you’ve been very helpful. If we should have any difficulty in filling in the details of the afternoon, I’m sure you’ll do your best for us again. And you will keep the matter confidential?”

Give him his due, he could take a double-edged hint as well as the next man. He promised secrecy with almost unnecessary fervour, and departed, having done his level best to plant the suggestion that, if something had really happened to Lucien Galt, Liri Palmer had made it happen. Who else, after all, had threatened his life?

George sighed, grimaced, and sent for Liri Palmer.

“Oh, he was there, all right.” Liri crossed her long and elegant legs, and declined a cigarette with a shake of her head. “He was doing his best to make up to me, but I wasn’t having any. What it adds up to is that he was inviting me to join in an all-out attack on Lucien’s professional position. A lot of dirty work goes on in the record business, and popular disc-jockeys have a lot of influence. With a few like-minded assassins as dedicated as himself, Meurice could ruin a man.”

“And you were not interested?”

Her lips curled disdainfully. “If I decide on assassination, I shan’t need any allies. I told him where he could go.”

“Yesterday, I hear, you made what could be considered as being a threat against Galt, about as publicly as possible.”

“Oh, that!” A tight, dark smile hollowed her cheeks, but she was not disconcerted. “Dickie made sure you knew about that, of course. He needn’t have worried, I’d have told you myself. Yes, it’s true. I did that.” She sounded faintly astonished now in looking back at it, as though it had become irrelevant and quite unaccountable in retrospect.

“Did you mean it?” asked George directly.

“Did I mean it… Yes, at the time I probably did. But even then what I really had in mind was not action so much as a declaration of my position. All the rest of them just happened to be there,” she said, with an arrogance Lucifer himself could not have bettered. “It was nothing to do with them.”

“Then you didn’t act on it, this afternoon?”

It was the first direct and deliberate suggestion that Lucien Galt might have suffered a murderous attack, might, in fact, be dead at that moment. She received it fully, thoughtfully and silently, and betrayed neither surprise nor any other emotion. What she thought, what she felt, she kept to herself. Like her private communications in song, they were nothing to do with anyone else. This was a young woman accustomed to standing on her own feet, and asking no quarter from anyone.

“I didn’t see Lucien this afternoon. He never came near me, and I didn’t go looking for him. I sent Dickie Meurice away, and stayed up there at the folly until it was time to come in to tea.”

“Not, I feel, without some sort of occupation?”

Her smile warmed a little, but remained dark and laden. “I was wrestling with an idea for a song. It didn’t work out.”

“Miss Palmer, I’ve gathered – and not only from Meurice – that a little while ago your relations with Lucien Galt were very close indeed. Would you mind telling me the reason for your break with him?”

“Yes,” said Liri, directly, firmly, “I would mind. It’s a private matter between him and me, and I want it to stay that way.”

He accepted that without question. “Then, if you’re good at keeping things private, keep this interview, this whole investigation, between the few of us. This week-end may as well run its course without a general alarm, if it can. And there’s one more thing I’d like to consult you about.”

He laid upon her knee the small box in which he had placed the silver medal and chain. “My son found this at a certain spot by the river. Maybe you’ve already seen it.”

She took up the box in her palm, and touched the little disc gently with one long finger. “Yes, I’ve seen it. Dominic showed it to us – the few of us who knew. It’s Lucien’s. He always wore it.”

“Always? As long as you’ve known him?”

“Yes, from the first time I met him. He said he’d worn it ever since he was a child. It was the one thing he had that belonged to his father.”

“He told you that himself? And how long have you known him?”

“Just over two years now. Yes, he told me himself.” There had been confidences between them then, and confidence. He was not, by all accounts, a person who talked about himself, or indeed much of a talker on any subject. “He wouldn’t have much left from his parents, obviously, after their shop was flattened by a buzz-bomb. You know about the Galts? They had a newsagent and tobacconist business in Islington. It was one of the last bombs of the war that got it. Both his parents were killed. He grew up in a children’s home.”

“I know what’s been published about him,” said George.

“That’s all most of us know. He loved his foster-parents at the home, though, there wasn’t any warping there. He still goes back there pretty regularly.” She looked up suddenly, her face was pale and still. “He did,” she said, and closed the box carefully over the silver medal.

“Mr. Marshall has told me,” said Audrey Arundale in a low, constrained voice, “about this affair, and about your great kindness in coming here privately to help us. We’re very grateful to you. My husband would wish me to thank you on his behalf, as well as my own. I feel – you’ll understand and excuse me – terribly lost without him.”

She stood in her own rose-and-white sitting-room, herself a white rose ever so slightly past her most radiant bloom, fair and frightened and gallant, terribly lost without Edward. She was used only to things that went smoothly; things that went hideously off the rails bewildered and confused her.

“Please sit down, Mr. Felse. I feel so guilty at making use of you in this way, when we have really nothing to go on. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

“As a matter of form, I should like to know how you spent this afternoon, whether you saw anyone, and what time your husband left. I want to form as full a picture as possible of the hours between lunch and tea.”

“I understand, yes. I was indoors all afternoon. Edward was here with me until just before three o’clock, then he went out to the car, to load it for his trip. I can’t say exactly what time he got off, because I didn’t see him go. I think he wanted to pick up some books from the library, but that wouldn’t take long. I should think he was away by a quarter past three. After he left I was in here writing letters.” She made a faint gesture of one hand towards the neat little pile of them, lying on her writing-desk. “I didn’t go down to join the party at tea, I had it in here. I didn’t realise that Mr. Galt was missing, though I noticed, naturally, that he didn’t take part in the five o’clock session. He hasn’t come back, of course.” Her anxious face hoped against hope for reassurance.

“He hasn’t. On the contrary, we’ve found certain traces which suggest that we have a serious matter on our hands.”

“May I know?” she asked hesitantly, “what they are?”

He told her. She turned half aside from the mention of blood, and seemed for an instant to want to withdraw absolutely from this place and these events, which obeyed no rules in her ordered existence, and made chaos of her security. She reached out blindly and briefly with one hand for Edward, who had always been there, but Edward wasn’t there. She said, though with dignity and quietness, exactly what George had felt sure she would say:

“Don’t you think we ought to contact my husband and tell him what’s happened? I wouldn’t think of suggesting it in any normal circumstances, when Harry’s in charge, but these aren’t normal circumstances. This is more than the mere responsibility for the present course, it’s a question of the responsibility for Follymead as an institution. Edward can’t delegate that, not in such a serious matter.” She looked across the room at Henry Marshall, who had sat silent throughout this exchange. “I’m sorry, Harry, I ought to have left it to you even to make the suggestion. I know you would have done.”

No mistake about it, that fancy boarding school of hers had done pretty well by the tradesman’s daughter, even if she hadn’t distinguished herself in examination, like Felicity’s illustrious kin. No wonder Marshall looked at her with something like devotion.

“Mr. Felse and I have already recognised the need to put this matter on a proper footing. Obviously I hoped and believed we should have some word from Mr. Galt, or that he would turn up again with his own explanation, but after so many hours without news it becomes rather a different case. Yes, I think we should call Dr. Arundale.”

“I think perhaps I’d better do it,” said George, “if I may. Where will he be at this hour?”

The clock on the desk said ten-forty. “It’s a guild dinner,” said Audrey. “He’s staying overnight with the chairman afterwards, but they won’t be very early. I should think they’re still at the Metropole. I have the number here.”

George dialled and waited for his connection. It was very quiet in the room; even the clock was almost silent.

“Hotel Metropole? I believe you’ve got the Vintners’ annual dinner there to-night? Is the party still in session? Good! Would you ask Mr. Arundale to come to the phone? That’s right, Edward Arundale – he’s their speaker tonight.” He waited. Audrey felt behind for her for the arm of a chair, and sat down very slowly and silently, never taking her eyes from George’s face. It felt so still that she might have been holding her breath.

“Hullo, is that…? Oh, I see. No, I didn’t know that.” There was a long, curious pause while he listened, and the faint clacking of the distant voice that was, surprisingly, doing all the talking. “At what time was that?” And again: “You’re sure? You’d know the voice? No, that’s all right, I’m sorry to have disturbed you, I’ll contact him there. Thank you! Good-bye!”

He cradled the receiver and held it down in its rest, and over the hand that pinned it in position he looked up gently at Audrey.

“Mrs. Arundale, I’m afraid this is going to be a surprise to you. Even a shock. Mr. Arundale isn’t there. That was a man named Malcolmson speaking to me, the president of the Vintners’ Guild. Mr. Arundale cancelled his engagement, they had to whip up a substitute speaker at a minute’s notice.”

“But… that’s impossible!” she said in a soundless whisper. “Why should he cancel it? He said nothing to me. He took his notes… and the references he needed for tomorrow… everything. I didn’t know anything about this… I didn’t know…”

“All the same, he did it. There’s no doubt at all about this. He says Mr. Arundale rang up to explain and apologise, this afternoon, just about three o’clock. He says he’s known him for eight years, he knows his voice on the telephone too well for any possibility of mistake. It was your husband himself who called. An emergency, so he told him, here at Follymead, that made it impossible for him to leave as planned. Naturally Mr. Malcolmson didn’t question it, however inconvenient it might be for him.” He lifted the receiver again; distant and staccato, the dialling tone fired its dotted line of machine-gun bullets into the silence. “Can you give me the number of someone who’ll know about this conference to-morrow? The secretary?”

She got up from her chair and moved to the pedestal of the desk like a creature in a bad dream. Her fingers fumbled through the pages of a notebook, and found the entry. The secretary was the vicar of a suburban parish, and his voice, when he answered, sounded young and crisp and agile.

“I’m sorry to trouble you at this late hour, but I’m clearing up a few arrears of business for Mr. Arundale, and the notes he’s left me don’t make it clear whether he managed to call you about the conference to-morrow. Have you already heard from him to-day?” No need to sound the alarm yet; this would do better than candour.

“Yes, he telephoned this afternoon,” said the distant voice promptly. “We’re very sorry indeed that we shan’t have him with us to-morrow, after all, it’s a great disappointment. But I know he wouldn’t have called it off if he could possibly have avoided it.”

“No, of course not. About what time did he ring you?”

“Oh, I suppose shortly after three. It might even have been a little earlier.”

“Thank you,” said George, “that’s all I wanted to know.”

The telephone clashed softly in its cradle.

“He telephoned there, too, and cancelled his engagement. Wiped out all his arrangements for the week-end. And yet he took the car and left, at about the time he was expected to leave, and without mentioning to anyone that he’d changed his plans. So where has he gone? And why?”

Marshall let his hands fall empty before him; there was nowhere he could get a hold on this, and no way he could make sense of it. “I don’t know. I don’t understand anything about it.”

Audrey stood motionless, her eyes enormous in shock and bewilderment. In an arduous whisper she asked: “What must we do?”

“I don’t think we have any choice now. We still have no real evidence of anything either criminal or tragic, but we have two unexplained disappearances, occurring at much the same time, and we can’t ignore them, and we can’t afford to delay. Lectures had much better continue as though nothing’s happened. If we can get through the week-end without making this affair public, we’ll do it. There’ll be the least possible obtrusion. But I’ve no alternative now,” said George, “but to inform my chief. From now on, this becomes an official police matter.”