Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (8 page)

He saw, and more than she was recommending to his sight. He saw a woman quite prepared to stake her body, somewhat resignedly, against future profits, but rather preferring, if truth were told, the small local bridge four, and the cosy coffee-evenings in city flats, without penalty. Now she could be both respectable and rich.

She went out with him to the street, which was a concession that betrayed her unease, not about her own immunity, which was absolute, but about something more subtle and vulnerable, her whole new situation. She thought she was on the verge of bliss, of fulfillment in riches, and yet some hidden part of her was nervous of the change. In anticipation it was unshadowed gain, now on the threshold she was seeing those little bridge parties shrivelling into ashes, the old friends dropping off, the horizon abruptly extended into frightful distances of challenge? Or was this dread he felt in her only that something might yet loom between her and Rainbow’s money?

‘I suppose there’s bound to be some delay about probate, in the circumstances,’ she said almost wincingly, at parting. ‘But there won’t be any serious difficulties, will there? I mean, I have the business to manage in the meantime, I ought to know how I stand as soon as possible.’

‘I’m sure everything will proceed normally,’ said George with resigned tolerance. ‘Whatever dispositions Mr Rainbow made about his property will be observed. Subject, of course, to the obvious innocence of all legatees in the circumstances leading to his death. The inquest shouldn’t be a great obstacle.’ He could feel her subdued tension sending out ripples through the air, and he understood the passion with which the hardworking poor – for what else was she, with inflation at this level? – look forward to almost unimaginable wealth. He didn’t blame her very much. Pretty obviously she had provided with very limited reward what was now to be repaid in full at last.

But when he took his leave of her and returned to the local police yard where he had left his car, he was wondering at every step whether she was going to be glad or sorry when she received and realised in full the blessing and the burden of her inheritance.

‘Inquest opens Monday,’ said George to Sergeant Moon, across a table littered with files. It was evening, and they were preparing to hand back the parish hall and transfer their enquiries to headquarters in Comerbourne. ‘We can take it as far as murder in one go, or ask for an adjournment and keep them guessing. The Chief Constable will back us whatever we do, luckily, he’s local, and knows what will happen if he brings the Yard in. He doesn’t want border warfare on his hands, any more than we do. I’m going to clam up for a week, and hang on to the options. Miss Lavery will be on hot bricks a week longer, but it won’t hurt her.’

‘And she’s clean,’ mused Moon, almost regretfully, for Miss Lavery was not of the valley, and therefore to a certain extent expendable.

‘In her own person, absolutely. She was where she said she was, and there are three witnesses to prove it. Besides, she isn’t the type.’

‘Too moral?’ enquired Moon, interested.

‘Too limited, unless some other person did it for her. There could, I suppose, be some other fellow around who wants Miss Lavery, and whom she, if truth were told, can’t help preferring to Rainbow. But I suspect all her familiars will turn out to play bridge for low stakes, and give little coffee-parties. Still, you never know. There could be a cheerful, extrovert, over-sexed wholesale butcher around, who likes blondes and resents rivals. Keep an open mind, Jack.’

‘My mind is always open,’ said Moon truthfully. ‘Murder, which unquestionably we have on our hands, requires a motive, and in spite of all the modern complications, the main motives for killing are money and sex. Here, let’s face it, we’ve got a third, local solidarity in the face of an indigestible threat. I know it, you know it. I wouldn’t rule it out. Still – Rainbow had money, and plenty of it, and his wife has sex, and plenty of that, too. By the way, I was interested enough to do some checking this afternoon. She is his wife. I did wonder. She’s got her marriage lines, all right. Nineteen when she married him. I reckon that makes a sort of sense. Barbara Cranmer. Father died in ’fifty-seven of long-delayed illness arising from war injuries. Mother ran a flower shop, not very prosperous, not very efficient, and Barbara helped in it. I bet he was buying flowers for Miss Lavery when he clapped eyes on Barbara.’

‘I marvel,’ said George mildly, ‘how you manage to extract life stories in an afternoon. Where is mother now?’

‘Died, two years ago. Barbara’s on her own. Since the marriage mother’s been living in a very nice residential hotel on the south coast. She died of leukemia in a very expensive nursing home. Oh, yes, I’ve been busy. Still, here we still are, stuck with money and sex. And a set of circumstances, of course.’

‘Quite remarkable circumstances, when you come to think about it. Somebody – potentially Rainbow himself – had certainly been poking around privately among the junk up there in the tower. Very recently, possibly the night he was killed. And Rainbow was a knowledgeable chap in his own line, with a nose for buried treasure. So one of his colleagues and rivals assured me, the night he had his house-warming party. Where he goes, this lad said, it’s worthwhile following, and taking a good sniff around. So had he sniffed out something profitable here in Abbot’s Bale? More precisely, up in the church tower? He took precautions, apparently, to have the place on his own that night. Something really sensational? Worth following him for? Worth killing him for, perhaps? If so, what was it? What is it?’

‘I’ll tell you this,’ said Moon promptly, ‘if he thought he was on to something good there, he never said a word to the vicar or to anyone else. He was keeping it strictly to himself, all right. Looks as though somebody else had got a whiff of what was going on, and was keeping an eye on him accordingly. Two of ’em met up there in the tower.’

Two of them had indeed met in the tower, to deadly effect. The forensic boys had isolated three sets of prints, two of which had definitely reached the leads, one of them Rainbow’s. The second was a long, narrow foot, with an even, springy tread that argued a younger man, with unmangled feet, probably accustomed always to well-made, expensive shoes, certainly wearing new and good leather soles when these prints were salvaged from the leads. A third set of prints could be traced as far as that model impression on the lowest stair of the bell-chamber staircase, but was not distinguishable any higher. Cracked old shoes, trodden askew to favour a probable bunion; an older man’s foot. Not Joe Llewelyn’s, either, nowhere near so big and a good many years older.

‘He’s only been dead approximately forty-five hours,’ said Sergeant Moon, sensibly reducing everything to its true proportion.

‘And we have at least moved, and we have a Chief who’ll stay with us, even when he gets nervous. So come on, let’s get this paper-work into shape for Monday, and trust the Coroner to have a pulse, too.’ The coroner’s officer was a second cousin of Sergeant Moon, shared his kinsman’s sensitivity to local feeling, and exercised a powerful influence over his elderly and irascible but timorous chief. ‘Hand me that file,’ sighed George, clearing the table before him, ‘and get Barnes in here. I’m going for an adjournment.’

Bossie Jarvis had a music lesson on Saturday evenings, and his piano teacher lived in Comerford, down the valley. Comerford was a sometime idyllic village, now beset with invading population from the Midland conurbation, with supermarkets and car-parks, and all the ills of modern living, though it retained a superb setting rimmed with rising hills growing grim and purple towards the west. Bossie took a bus from home about seven o’clock, and trudged along with his music-case to Miss Griffith’s house in Church Street, to embroil himself in mortal combat with her very nice grand for half an hour. He enjoyed the battle, but would never have admitted it. He had his eye on the organ, some day, and dreamed of letting loose those earth-shaking stops, and curbing them at will or letting them split the world apart. And his teacher, though unmarried and therefore an Old Maid, was no more than twenty-three, extremely pretty and spirited, and fought him amicably over the keyboard in a fashion which sent him away fulfilled like a lover. If, of course, he had had the slightest notion how a satisfied lover feels, or, for that matter, an unsatisfied one. All Bossie knew was that he went off finally to catch his minibus home, all the company would furnish at that time of night, feeling fat, and fed, and boss.

But this Saturday evening, though events proceeded exactly as usual, Bossie was not entirely present. He played grimly, but with half his mind on other matters. He had spent an hour of the afternoon in earnest council with his allies and fellow-conspirators, and they had debated anxiously how they should behave in this new and unforeseen situation. Rainbow was dead, and they were in possession of certain knowledge which might be of importance to the police enquiry. Yet they could not possibly tell what they knew. They would even have liked to, to be rid of the responsibility, but in the circumstances it was impossible. They were all firmly agreed about that.

‘If it was only us,’ said Ginger, ‘we could tell. But it isn’t, and we can’t. Anyhow, we don’t know all that much. What somebody else tells you isn’t evidence. You’re the only one who really has anything to tell, and we don’t think you should, and you don’t think so, either, and if you agree we’ve got to stay mum, that’s what we’ll do.’

And since that was exactly what they had instinctively done up to now, it was the easiest thing to go on behaving in the same way. In any case, there was nothing else for it. That did not, however, make them any happier about it. Even Bossie felt less assured of his rightness than usual, though he suppressed the heretical thought firmly.

The minibus made a slower journey than the ordinary daily service buses, since the driver went round in a series of short detours to drop a number of regular passengers at isolated farms on the way. It was past nine o’clock when it turned about by the Church at Abbot’s Bale, and set down Bossie, the last of the load. From there he had a ten-minute walk home, by a side-road not much frequented at night, since it led only to two or three scattered homes before climbing out of the valley over a ridge to the south, narrowing considerably as it went. He knew every yard of it, having walked it regularly every day for years, the darkness did not worry him in the least. It was the almost moonless part of the month, and clouded over into the bargain, and once out of the village lights and away from visible windows it was very dark indeed. The hedges were high, the occasional field-drive came abruptly, but the road was wide enough here for two cars to pass.

Somewhere ahead an engine was heard briefly, the sound emerging and retreating with a curve of the road; it occurred to him at the time that it had the same smooth note of the car that had driven past in this direction just as he got off the bus, but cars were not among the things Bossie studied with any diligence, things mechanical being of no interest to him apart from the mechanics of the organ. Somebody from over the ridge going home, probably, or a visitor to one of the farms.

A faint pallor on the left was, of course, the white gate of the Croppings drive. Just round the next curve, on the right, came the narrow turning into the lane to the Lyons’ farm, shrouded between tall hedges and rising very sharply from the road. Bob Lyons had a way of coasting down that slope at speed, and sailing out silently to the indignation of the unwary. Sergeant Moon had often warned him about it.

That was exactly what the car lying in wait there did now, just after Bossie had passed the end of the lane. Only the otherwise profound silence of the night warned him. He had already tuned out his own light footfalls, and infinitely small though the betraying sounds were, they came to him clearly, if at first inexplicably. The slight crunch of gravel on a hard lane surface, under tyres, the whip and slither of untrimmed leaves along a wing, very soft indeed and yet seeming to bear down upon him at frightful speed. He felt the rushing displacement of air, and sensed a heavy projectile hurtling out upon him.

Instinct did well by Bossie. The sudden gleam of lights cast his shadow on the road ahead, and he realised that the car, engine now running, was sweeping into a right turn after him. To leap to the left would have been to remain in its path a couple of seconds longer. Bossie flung his music-case away from him, and leaped to the right, instead, aiming high into the thick verdure of the autumn hedgerow, clear of the road.

He all but made it to safety, his hands spread to grasp even at thorn to haul himself higher out of range. The front wing of the car struck him glancingly on the left hip, and flung him sprawling aside, short of his aim but clear of the wheels. He hit the road with arms spread, which partially saved his face, but even so his head struck with some force, and his cheek slid jarringly along the tarmac. He lay winded and bruised and half-stunned, feeling the grain of the road coarse as boulders, and groping with wincing finger-tips around him, without the power to prise himself up from the ground and run.

Dazedly he wondered what the red glow was, that was very gradually growing brighter and nearer. Then he knew. The car that had hit him had halted some yards ahead, but no one had got out to run and see what damage had been done. What he was watching with sick fascination, was the rear lights backing gently towards him. Not directly towards him, rather away to the left, carefully and slowly, drawing level with him now. All this time he must have been staring straight at the rear number-plate, only there weren’t any numbers, or any letters, either, only a blank. And the rear wheels were sliding softly past his left shoulder, down to his hip, down towards his knee…

He broke clear of his daze in a frantic heave, and tried to raise himself, and nothing would work, nothing at all, and the car was creeping back, half a minute more and it would be clear of him and behind him, and then he knew what was going to happen, and he scrabbled frantically with nerveless hands and ungovernable toes to scuttle away into the grass, and knew he wasn’t moving so much as an inch.