Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (16 page)

“Rio, probably,” said George, and reached for his dressing-gown. “I’ll call you from Follymead.”

“Oh, and George…”

“Hullo?”

“Those blood-samples you brought in earlier, from the ground there. Arundale was an AB, a universal recipient. Your specimens are A. They may be Galt’s, we don’t know his group yet. They’re certainly not Arundale’s.”

Duckett’s police frogman was a wiry Blackcountryman who had dived in these parts before. He barely made the minimum height requirement, and had a chronic cigarette-smoker’s cough, but he was tougher than leather, all the same, and had a lung capacity abstemious athletes might well have envied. He stood at the edge of the bank where Edward Arundale had almost certainly entered the water, and looked down into the black pool above the third weir. The surface water whipped across its stillness so impetuously and smoothly that it appeared still itself, to break in a seethe of white foam over the fall. Beneath the surface it would be mercilessly cold; he was going to need his second skin. The colour of the pool was perhaps more truly olive-green than black, and opaque as the moss-grown flags that floored the grotto.

“Soup!” he said disapprovingly, and trod out his cigarette into the soft ground. “How am I supposed to see through that?”

“That’s your problem. We’ve tried fishing for it with hooks, but it’s deep here, deeper than you’d think.”

“I should have thought anything going in here would be carried over the edge. You’ve got some force running there.”

“That’s what we thought, too, and why we looked for him well downstream. Too far downstream, as it turned out. But what we’re looking for now would go down like a stone, and stay down.”

“Yeah,” said the diver, dabbling a toe thoughtfully, “What is it I’m supposed to be looking for? I might as well know, I suppose.”

George told him. Shrewd, deep eyes set in nets of fine wrinkles in the sharp face visualised it, measured, weighed. “If that went in here, it’s still here, all right. Any idea what the bed’s like?”

“Mucky. Maintenance isn’t what it once was. But there doesn’t seem to be much weed.”

“All right, let’s go.”

It was about half past ten when he lowered himself into the pool, and submerged, plunging promptly beneath the rushing surface water. In the yellow drawing-room at the house the first session of the day was still in progress, and even when the students emerged for mid-morning coffee, at eleven, the interval wouldn’t be long enough to allow them to stray. The operators by the river had the grounds to themselves. Given a less absorbing subject and a less expert persuader, there would have been truants by this time. George had half-expected two truants, as it was, but it seemed that Dominic and Tossa were doing their duty.

So there were none but official witnesses when the diver rose for the third time, breaking the surface tension in a surge of unexpected silver in the day’s first watery gleam of sun. The Braide streamed down his black rubber head and shoulders, and pulled at him viciously. George had insisted on having a line on him, in case of accidents; small river though the Braide was, it could be dangerous even to an expert when it ran as high as this. But in the issue he had needed no help. He hoisted himself ashore, black and glistening, with a lizard’s agility, and pushed up his mask.

“Got it! Half sunk in the muck down there. I hit something else, too, that I’d like to have another go at, but this is your prize.”

He unhitched it from the cord at his belt, and held it up to be seen.

Felicity hadn’t been exaggerating, after all, it was a good three inches longer than the span of her forearm and stretched fingers. The laboratory guesses weren’t far out: half an inch thick, roughly two inches wide at the business end, which still retained traces of its last coat of paint, and possibly traces of haemoglobin, too, in spite of the river water; somewhat thicker and wider where it had rested in the wards, and this central part of it was a dead ancient-iron colour, since paint couldn’t reach it, and nobody had used oil on it for years. And at the other end, a huge, coiled handle to balance its weight, decorated with a flourish of leaves. An ideal handle for grasping to strike a blow edge-on. With a thing like that you could hit out and fell an ox. And there it had hung in the wards of the gate, where Felicity had been the last to drop it home when she walked away from Lucien on Saturday afternoon, and went to set light to the fuse and fire the charge that was to blow Follymead apart. Ready and waiting for the hand that would be next to raise it, the hand that drew it out of the wards to use as a weapon of vengeance. Trees were set round in a screen between the gate and the waterside, thirty yards away; the waiting victim would see nothing.

“That’s it,” said George, “just a gate-latch, right there on the spot, waiting to be used.” The weight of it was formidable, and yet not too great for even a scholar’s arm to be able to swing it effectively. “That fills the gap. Thanks!”

“I’m going down again. Maybe it’s nothing, but I’d like to make sure while we’re on the job.”

He slid down from the bank again, feet-first into the water, and dropped from view. They were left contemplating the length of wrought iron that lay on the slippery turf between them.

“It looks straightforward enough now,” said Lockyer. “Arundale came down here pretty well in a state of shock, without thinking what he was going to do. And when he bore down on the handle, he felt the latch loose in the socket. And took it on the spur of the moment. You could say it was this thing put murder in his mind.”

“And then what?” asked George dispassionately. “It was Arundale who got his head stove in and his body slung into the river.”

“He was up against a much younger and fitter man. There was a hand-to-hand struggle, and this thing changed hands in the fight, and the boy hit out at him with it, and found he’d killed him.”

“A case of self-defence. Could be. He might still panic, get rid of the body and run. People do do such things.”

“Especially as he might not get away with a manslaughter verdict, if his misconduct with Mrs. Arundale was taken into consideration.”

“In any case,” observed George, brooding, “even if you’re being attacked, there are limits to what you’re entitled to do. Getting your enemy’s weapon away from him is one thing, bashing his head in with it when you’ve disarmed him is another. Watch it, here he comes.”

A coil of wet roped surfaced like a languid snake, and Lockyer furled in the slack. The diver broke surface in a fountain of spray, and they eased him in to the bank and leaned to help him ashore. For this time he carried something in his hands. He uncovered his face and drew in air greedily, and held up his prize triumphantly.

“Look at that! Maybe it’s nothing to do with your affair, but don’t tell me it’s proper place is in the slime down there. Or that it’s been there long, either.”

A black walking-cane, with a chased metal knob for a handle; the shaft an appropriate length for a fairly tall man, perhaps rather thicker than pure elegance would have decreed, but tapering away to a fine metal ferrule. The diver balanced it in his hand curiously. “Not so heavy. I’d say if that was just tossed in and happened to fall flat, it would go downstream. It was speared deep into the mud, ferrule down. I kicked the knob, groping for the other thing. What’s the wood – ebony?”

“It looks like it.” George took the stick from him and turned it in his hands. He rubbed with an inquisitive thumb at the metal of the ferrule, and it brightened suggestively under the friction. “I believe this is silver. Looks as if it must have come from the house.”

He took out his handkerchief, and wrapped it about the knob, which was traced all over with coiling leaves. Not much possibility of getting any prints off the thing, after it had been at the bottom of the pool, but the action was automatic. He had the knob lightly enclosed in one hand, and the other hand holding the shaft of the stick, when he felt a slight play between them, as if the handle had worked loose. Gingerly he closed his fingers and tried to move it; it would not turn, but it did shift uneasily in his hand, drawn out a fraction of an inch from its socket.

“Wait a minute! Look… look at this!”

He drew stem and knob apart, and they gave with a slightly gritty resistance. Inch by inch the long, fine blade slid into view, until he drew it completely from its sheath and held it out before them. A blue runnel of light, edged with the dulled rainbow colours of tarnish, ran down the steel like captured lightning and into the ground.

“Good lord,” said Lockyer, fascinated, “what is it?”

“A sword-stick, I suppose they’d call it. Sort of city gimmick the members of the Hellfire Club would carry and use for kicks.”

“That’s me all over,” said the diver, staring admiringly, “always a whole-hogger. You ask me for one weapon, I find you two. All zeal, Mr. Easy!”

“Well, but,” blurted Lockyer, “if Arundale brought
that
with him…”

They looked at each other over the thin blade, that gleamed sullenly in the sun, and down the wind went one plausible theory. The man who had had the forethought to cancel his engagements had also taken care to provide himself with a weapon. And not even a would-be murderer needs a bludgeon in his left hand when he has a sword in his right.

WHY, THAT’S THE SWORD-STICK from the collection in the gallery,” said Marshall, as soon as he saw it. “It always hangs in a display pattern of curios on the wall there. The Cothercotts amassed quite a museum of these things. How could it have got into the river?” It was a silly question; he saw it as soon as he’d spoken, and wished it back again. Who knew better than the warden of Follymead where to find a killing weapon, if he wanted one?

The handsome, deadly thing lay between them on the desk, a bit of fashionable devilment from the eighteenth century, probably never meant to be used. The blade had been sheathed fully before it was thrown into the water, and its point was engraved with fine vertical grooves; it might very well preserve traces of haemoglobin still, if this was what had drawn that blood that was not Arundale’s blood. Another job for the laboratory.

“Was it in its place on Friday evening, when the party assembled and was shown round the house?” George asked.

“I can’t say I noticed particularly. Perhaps someone else may have done. I didn’t comment on it to my group, there are so many things to be seen.”

“And of course, no stranger would have the slightest idea what it was, unless he was told.”

“No, I suppose not.” That brought it still more closely home to the few who were not strangers, and did know what it was. Mr. Marshall went back to his duties a very unhappy man. He cared about this place, he cared about music, he cared passionately about the Cothercott collection of keyboard instruments. Who was going to maintain them properly, as living things for use and pleasure, if the college folded? For them a museum would be a coffin.

It was a quarter to twelve; still three quarters of an hour before the class would come bursting out from the yellow drawing-room, hungry and vociferous, heading for lunch. Better get this thing out of the house now, thought George, while everything was quiet, and let the lab. men worry about it, while he got on with some of the inevitable and tedious routine work that waited for him here in Arundale’s desk.

He rolled the sword-stick in soft paper, and took it down to Lockyer, who was smoking a cigarette in a quiet corner of the stableyard at the home farm, neatly screened from the house by a belt of trees. The tenant farmer was used to seeing overflow cars from the house parties parked here, and took no interest in them. Nor was it unusual for Midshire students, who knew the lie of the land, to go in and out by the back way, and so save themselves a mile or more on the way into Belwardine. Lockyer had his motorcycle tucked away under the stable arch. The sword-stick would be in headquarters at Comerbourne in twenty minutes.

George went back to the warden’s office, and began to turn out the drawers of the desk one by one. In all probability for nothing, but he wouldn’t be sure of that until he’d gone through everything. Extraordinary how one weapon too many could make nonsense of an otherwise perfectly sound theory. The thing could have happened exactly as Lockyer had outlined it, the wronged husband coming to confront his wife’s lover, the heavy instrument presented almost accidentally to his hand, and then the struggle in which the younger and more athletic man wrested the weapon away from him, and struck him with it; the appalled realisation that he had killed him, the disposal of the body and the latch in the river, the opportune recollection that the victim’s car was waiting and ready, and he was due to leave at this very hour, the subsequent flight to London, the abandonment of the car there, everything fitted in. Except this one grotesque thing, this Georgian whimsy that yet was not a toy, this fop’s gimmick that could kill. And this one thing threw everything out of gear.

He had still to find out whether it had been in its usual place on the wall on Friday evening; possibly Dominic could help, there. But whenever it had been taken from its place, one thing was certain, Lucien Galt had not taken it to the grotto. Felicity had been with him from the time he left the house until they parted by the riverside in exasperation and offence; if he had had any such bizarre thing with him then, she would certainly have mentioned it. Nor was there any suggestion that at that time he had been thinking in terms of danger or violence. No, it was not Lucien.

But if Arundale had taken it with him – and if he had, it was one more proof that he went with intent to kill, sanely if not calmly – then what did he want with a heavy iron latch? And if
he
did not take it from its place, who did? Lucien, to defend himself? Rather a clumsy defence against two and a half feet of steel, but better than nothing. But there were considerable objections to that theory. One weapon too many, and nothing fitted snugly any longer. Better, for the moment, concentrate on these personal papers. And nobody ever had them in more immaculate order.

The records of Follymead were here from its inception, press clippings, photographs, a full list of all its courses, concerts, recitals, lectures. And the total was impressive. Music is one of the fundamental beauties, consolations and inspirations of life, a world without it would be unthinkable. This crazy, perverse, slightly sinister house had never in its history served so useful and beneficent a purpose as now. And that was largely Arundale’s work, and it ought to be remembered to him. He had certainly loved it; the proof was here to be seen. For the first time George felt an impulse of personal warmth and pity for that elusive figure, now never to be better known.

He had adored his wife, too, that was to be seen everywhere. Perhaps with the possessive fervour of a husband who looked upon his wife as an extension of himself, but he wasn’t alone there, and the passion was no less real for that. The last drawer of the desk yielded a harvest of photographs of her. George worked backwards through them, and experienced the eerie phenomenon of watching Audrey grow younger and younger before his eyes, dwindling to the nervous young wife, the frozen bride, refrigerated among her trappings of ice, the blooming debutante, the schoolgirl… Here in his private drawer Edward had preserved the complete record, decently hidden from alien eyes, the entire history of a love affair, the passion of a man not given to passions.

Here she was in full evening splendour for some grand event, very beautiful, very austere. And here at some function at Bannerets, being gracious, adequate and charming with parents. Too handsome, perhaps, for a headmaster’s wife, but that air she had of being always at one remove from the world stood her in good stead. It was impossible to suppose that Audrey did not know she was considered beautiful; it was equally impossible to believe that she realised what that meant, what power it gave her, or should have given her. She looked out from her many photographs, a creature manipulated by circumstances, always filling her role well, always withdrawn from it in the spirit. And defenceless. Why should the camera be the eye to discover that quality? If ever there was a sad woman, here she walked, successful, influential, well-off, envied and admired; and always lost, anxious and alone.

He had worked his way back to her younger days now, the twenty-year-old with her new engagement ring discreetly displayed, the fiancée photograph posed specially for her distinguished in-laws. Then an even younger girl, with Arundale in some restaurant booth, the kind where souvenir pictures are taken. Somehow not quite typical of either of them. And then, almost abruptly, the school-girl. Three pictures tied together with a pink tape, the last of the collection, evidently taken during the first year of his acquaintance with her.

The first showed her in school uniform. How old? Sixteen? Surely no more, and already a beauty, indeed perhaps she had never been so beautiful since. No puppy-fat here, a slender, ethereal, glowing girl, not at all awkward or immature, indeed with a lustre upon her like a woman already admired and coveted and glad of her femininity. She must have been a thorn in the flesh of the others at that exclusive school to which her shopkeeper parents had sent her at such cost. On her, adolescence, so often a torment and an affront, hung like an apple blossom splendour, fragrant and joyous.

None of the subsequent pictures of her had this look.

George turned the half-plate portrait, and found the imprint of the photographer in blurred mauve type: