Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (10 page)

“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.”

AS SOON as he was back in Edward Arundale’s office, with the door closed on the distant and cheerful din of the house-party and the close and fearful silence of the warden’s apartments, George telephoned his chief. Detective-Superintendent Duckett was Midshire born and bred, with all the advantages of having come up from the uniformed branch the hard way. It meant he not only knew his job and his own subordinates, but also all the complex social pressures of a conservative county; sometimes, in his less tolerant moments, he called it a feudal county, and nobody had a better right. The first thing he said was: “Thank God your boy was there!” And the second: “Can you still keep this dark?”

“Yes,” said George, with fair certainty that he was telling the truth. “We’ve no body, no proof of a crime, only a very, very fishy situation that still may confound us by coming out blameless. Let’s hope it does. In the mean-time, we’ve every right to behave as if nothing had happened, on the surface, provided we dig like moles underneath. Only seven people know anything about my being here to investigate Galt’s disappearance, though they must all know by now that he’s gone. That can’t be helped. Only Marshall and Mrs. Arundale know that Arundale’s apparently run out.”

“That suits me, and it’ll suit the Chief Constable still better. He’s a prime backer of that outfit at Follymead. The place balances its budget and fends off the tax-payers by luck, faith and act of God. What can we dig for you?”

“It’s going to be pretty sticky,” said George honestly, “in any case. Don’t forget one of the parties concerned is the warden. What we’re going to find is anybody’s guess, but what I’ve got here is a nasty situation in which two people have vanished, one apparently without warning and involuntarily, the other with evidence of premeditation. No bodies, no known motives for any violence, but some evidence that there
was
a struggle, that there
were
injuries. If there’s a link between these two people, I want to know about it. I’m not so simple as to believe that they could both take off into the blue at the same moment, and no connection between the two events. It’s against the law of averages. Now, these two are public persons. I’d like reports on their backgrounds. I want to know if there could be a link between them, and if so, what it is. And brace yourself, in case what comes out goes against Arundale. Because
he’s
the one who planned his departure, not the boy.”

“If he slung the kid in the river,” said Duckett with admirable directness, “neither you nor I can get him out of the resultant mess, George, my boy. With luck we might get Follymead out of it. Knock off fifty per cent for over-enthusiasm, and still the place is worth preserving.”

“I think so, too. All right, at first light I’m going down to look over the ground again, carefully. I hope to have some specimens for the lab boys, and I don’t care if we do have to pull ’em back from their Sunday hobbies.”

“Right, and first thing to-morrow I’ll have Scott turned loose on their histories.” He was silent for one pregnant second. “How’s the flood level?”

“High,” said George. “I reckon anything that went in there would bounce that last weir like a cork, and be out of the grounds long before now. We’re past the fancy curves at that point. The next real check is the bend by Sandy Cliff, the other side of the main road. Anything can happen with this sort of spring flow, but I should start dragging there. That’s where he’s most likely to come ashore.”

George went down to the riverside in the first light of morning. The threatened rain had fallen in the small hours, while he had slept uneasily and briefly in Arundale’s office, declining the bed Marshall had offered him. The dawn sky was tattered with filmy clouds and fitful brightness, and the grass was saturated and silvery against the river’s turgid brown. Slanting light picked out in deep relief the wounds in the turf, still dark, fresh and soft from the protection of Marshall’s plastic car-cover. George went over the ground carefully, inch by inch. There was only one clear print, and that of only the sole of a shoe, stamped into the raw clay, a composition sole cross-cut in saw-tooth grooves for grip. A well-shaped shoe with a good conservative toe, maybe size nine; the kind two-thirds of the men in the house probably wore, half of them in this size. All the rest of the tracks were trampled over, crossed and blurred by the resilience of the grass, but in sum they were there, and their implications unmistakable.

He found one other thing. One of the stamping feet, driving in a heel deeply, had left behind in the print one of last autumn’s leaves from the ride, one of the old ivy leaves, rubbery even in decay, that drop with their naked, angular stems, and lie long after the rest of the woodland loss is mould. This one had been cupped round the edge of the shoe’s heel, and remained so, pressed into the turf; and something that was not water, something hardly visible at twilight against its brown colouring, had splashed into it later, and gathered in the cup. Warm and sheltered under the plastic sheeting, it had remained moist. Not so much of it, maybe, as they take from your thumb for a blood test; but possibly as much as the lab. boys would need in order to group it.

George extracted the moulded leaf gingerly, and found another little box for it, propping its edges with cotton-wool and keeping it upright. There was nothing else here for him. He covered the bruised ground again, and prowled along the very edge of the water; it seemed to him that it had risen a shade higher in the night with the new rain, but he had seen it last night only by moonlight and torchlight. Certainly in this green, moist dawn, full of the drippings and whisperings of water, that concentrated brown flood was impressive. No finding anything in that without dragging, or going down into it; not until chemistry did its work, and it surfaced again, and judging by the force of this current that would be miles downstream. The coiled curve by Sandy Cliff just might bring it ashore, as he had said to Duckett; but even there the water would be over the summer beach and burrowing hard under the cliff, and whatever it carried might continue downstream with it.

George made his way thoughtfully back to the house, mapping this part of the Follymead grounds mentally as he went; and in the warden’s office Dominic was waiting for him.

“Hullo!” said George with unflattering surprise. “Whatever got you up at this hour?”

“I thought of something that may be important. I meant to be up earlier, but I had to be careful. I’ve got the Rossignol twins in my room, and they can hear the grass growing. I didn’t want to bring the whole hunt down on you. But it’s all right,” Dominic said in hasty reassurance, “I left them dead asleep.” He looked from his father’s face to the small box carried so carefully in his hand. He didn’t ask any questions about it, and George didn’t volunteer anything.

“All right, what’s on your mind?”

“It was on my mind, too, half the night. You know how it is when you know you’ve seen something before, and can’t for your life think where or when? I woke up suddenly this morning, and I’d got it. That medal… could we have another look at it, and I’ll show you.”

The pill-box that contained it was locked into the top drawer of Arundale’s desk. George extracted and offered it. Dominic remembered to turn it with the tip of a ball-pen when he wanted to refer to the reverse, as he had remembered not to handle it directly when he first found it. He shivered a little with clinging sleepiness and the chill of the morning.

“You see here, this side, that formalised figure in armour, with a nutshell helmet like the Normans in the Bayeaux tapestry, and a long shield with a sort of spread eagle on it…? I suddenly remembered where I’d seen it before. You can’t mistake it once you do get the idea. That’s Saint Wenceslas. Yes, I’m quite sure. He always looks like that. You ask Tossa, she’ll tell you the same, we got to know the form last year, when we were in Prague on holiday. And the other side…” He turned it delicately to show the lion rampant with a forked tail. “This I
can
show you, right here. I should have known it on sight if it hadn’t been quite so worn. Look! By pure luck I happened to have this still in my jacket.”

He held it out triumphantly, a small badge, questionably silver, unquestionably the same rampaging lion, with feathery fringes like a retriever, and double tail bristling.

“Lieutenant Ondrejov gave me that, before we left Liptovsky Pavol, last year. You see, it
is
the same. This is the Czech lion. And Saint Wenceslas is the chief of their patron saints, and doesn’t belong to anyone else. I bet you anything you like this medal originated in Czechoslovakia.”

George measured the two small heraldic creatures, and found them one. “Now why,” he wondered aloud blankly, “should Lucien Galt be wearing a Czech medal?”

“I wish I knew. But that’s what this is.”

George stared, and thought, and could not doubt it. This was, according to Liri Palmer, the one thing Lucien had that had belonged to his father. That didn’t, of course, determine to whom it might have belonged earlier. It was wartime, Galt could perfectly well have had some chance-met friend among the self-exiled Czechs who formed, at that time, the most articulate, the most reticent, – the two were compatible! – and the most nearly English component of the European armies in Britain. Maybe they swopped small tokens before the unit moved out for D-Day; and maybe the medal acquired value because its giver didn’t come back. There were such things, then, unexpected friendships that went deeper than kith and kin.

“Well, thanks very much for the tip. It’s certainly curious.” George pocketed the trophy along with his other specimens. “And since you are up, how about running me down to the lodge and bringing back the station wagon afterwards?”

“Yes, of course.” He brightened perceptibly at the thought of being useful. “You’re going in to headquarters? Is it official, then?”

“It’s official, but it’s still not for publication.”

“Shall I meet you at the lodge again when you come back?”

“No need. I’ll drive up by the farm road at the back, and put my car in the yard there. I might need to get out and in quickly, later in the day.”

“Is there anything I can be doing?”

“Yes, but you won’t like it much.”

“I still might do it,” said Dominic generously, “seeing as it’s for you.”

“Be on the spot here, then, attend everything, and help to keep everybody occupied and out of our hair. Have a word with Professor Penrose, and ask him to lay on a session after lunch, too, even if it wasn’t in the programme. Keep everybody’s nose hard against this folk-music grindstone, and try to make the whole week-end pass off without anything of this business leaking out. Get the professor to ask Liri Palmer to take part in every session. If the stars back him up, the rank and file won’t want to miss anything.”

“And in the meantime,” Dominic asked soberly, perceiving one answer for himself, and not much liking it, “what
will
they be missing?”

“Maybe nothing. But I don’t want them down by the river. They wouldn’t get to the grotto, anyhow, I shall have a watchdog on duty. But I’d rather they didn’t know that, either, so keep them hard at work here in the house.”

“We can but try. Anything else?”

“Keep your ears open. I’d like to know what sort of comments they’re making. The professor will probably have to tell them some tale about Galt being called away, but, even so they’ll have their own theories. I want to know what they are, and who starts them. And anything else you notice that may be of interest.”

“When shall I see you, then, to report? Hadn’t we better have an arrangement?”

“Come down to the grotto as soon after lunch as you can, and come on the quiet. If I’m not there, Price will know where to find me.”

“There it is, then,” said Duckett, shuffling the typed pages across the table, “and much good it does us.”

And there it was, compressed, bald and completely barren, the fruit of Scott’s interim researches into the past history of Edward Arundale and Lucien Galt. And nothing could be more above-board.

Arundale, only son of an illustrious academic family, one sister, five years younger; father a historian, mother a specialist in Oriental languages, both dead; his school, his college, his degrees, all listed, all impeccable; a distinguished teaching career, culminating in the headmastership of Bannerets, which he held for fifteen years, and after that this appointment as warden of Follymead. Married in 1946 Audrey Lavinia Morgan, only child of Arthur Morgan, of Morgan’s Stores, a chain of groceries covering the south of England. The bride, it seemed, was then twenty years old, and Arundale, thirty-five. Her father’s money was recent and plentiful,
his
father having merely run two modest suburban shops, and limited his ambition to getting elected to the local council. Arthur, or maybe Mrs. Arthur, had bigger ideas for their offspring. Audrey had been sent to Pleydells, a good boarding-school in North London, though evacuated to Scotland during the war years, which must have been Audrey’s period. It seemed that the Morgans were then on the climb, bent on equipping their daughter for an outstanding marriage. Maybe Arundale’s was the kind of lustre they valued and wanted. No university career for Audrey, no mention of any special academic qualifications; just as Felicity had said, quoting, no doubt, her aggrieved mother. Her upbringing had been aimed at marriage, not a career.

Edward supplied all the scholarly distinctions necessary, she provided him with a hostess well-trained, conscientious and lovely to look at. All very satisfactory, and nowhere a shadow on it. Their life at Follymead was constantly in the public eye, and the public eye doesn’t miss much.

That was Arundale. And in the other file, this boy from a children’s home, bright, handsome, aggressive, disdainful, intolerant of adulation, and single-minded about his art. Lucien Galt, born 1943, son of John James and Esther Galt, who kept a small newsagent’s shop in Islington. Parents killed by a V-2, one of the last to fall on London, son taken into public care and brought up in one of a group of cottage homes in Surrey. Good school record, early development of musical ability, apparently well adjusted, never in anything worth calling trouble. Not interested in staying on at school, already set on music. Left at fifteen, and worked as a garage hand and mechanic until he broke into the record business, broadcasting and television, all in the same month, at the age of nineteen. Made a tremendous success as a folk-singer, several European tours behind him, heading for a South American tour very soon. Said to be still on the warmest terms with his former foster-parents at the home, visiting them regularly, and being credited with several gifts to the present household. Considered difficult in the entertainment world because there are songs he won’t sing, engagements he won’t accept, places he won’t go, and indeed nothing he will do except what he wants to do.