George was at the head of the tomb, the Vicar in the middle, Simon at the foot. They got their crows started into the well-fitted chink of the stone, and eased it enough to get the first wedges in. After that it was merely a matter of patience. There was a rim to lift free on all sides, but a shallow one, and they got it clear without difficulty.
“It isn’t so massive,” said Tim, surprised. “Two of us could hoist it off in no time if we didn’t have to be so careful about damaging it.”
“True enough, but we do.” Simon felt along the under edge where his crow had prised, and grimaced. “Matter of fact, it has chipped a bit. Hmm, here, too. Not much, but it seems to fret easily.”
The Vicar measured the thickness of the stone slab with an unimpressed eye, and found it thinner than he had supposed. He stooped and set his shoulder under its deep overhang, and hoisted experimentally, and the thing perceptibly shifted.
“We could lift it, Simon. Between the five of us, and taking it steadily together, now she’s out of the socket we could manhandle her over. Try it!”
Simon eyed the stone doubtfully, and added another thickness of felt to the protective covering over Morwenna. “All right, we can but try. One at each corner, and I’ll take the middle here. Everybody set? Here we come, then. Gently—heave!”
The stone moved, slid along in response to their hoist a couple of inches, and disclosed a hair-line of darkness along the near edge of the coffin as the overhanging lip drew clear.
“It’s coming! Right, together—heave!” The hair-line of blackness became a pencil, an ebony ruler. Out of it came a breath of cold and the odour of the sea and of dust. Strange, the two together, as though the inimical elements had settled down together in the grave. “Again, heave!”
“Child’s play!” said Sam cheerfully, and shifted his large feet to brace himself for the next hoist.
“Once more—heave!” The stone slid with their persuasion, and again settled, and this time as they relaxed their efforts it swung in delicate counter-balance, ready at a touch to tilt gently and ponderously, and come to rest against the felt padding on the lady’s tomb. Nine inches of uncovered dark gaped below George’s face, and the odour, faint but persistent, made his nostrils dilate and quiver. A more precisely defined odour now, not just the vague salt tang of the sea. Something more homely, and extraordinarily elusive—he thought, in a sequence of kaleidoscopic images, of sheep in salt pastures, of wire-haired terriers in the rain, of washing Dominic’s woollies sometimes, long years ago, when Bunty had been ill. Damp cloth! Woollen cloth!
“Once more, and let her down gently. Ready—heave!”
Over slid the stone, and nested snugly on top of Morwenna’s coffin, only its edge still propped upon the side of Treverra’s own uncovered grave. The light of the two lamps fell obliquely into the stony space, and they all loosed their hold of the stone and leaned forward eagerly, craning to see what they had unveiled.
Only George, though with equal alacrity and a gasp as sharp as any, lunged back instead of forward. For that last strenuous lift and thrust had brought him up lying across the open coffin, almost face to face with the man who occupied it, as the stone slid from between them. The long, gaunt bony pallor of a lantern face gaped at him open-eyed from the dark, heavy jaw sagging towards a broad, barrel-staved chest in a dark grey pullover. Large, raw-boned hands jutted from the slightly short sleeves of an old black jacket, and lay half-curled against long black-clad thighs. And the smell of damp cloth and damp wool and damp human hair gushed up into their faces and sent them all into recoil after George.
Amazed and aghast, they stared and swallowed.
“If that’s Treverra,” said George with conviction, “I’m a Dutchman!”
The Vicar said: “Lord, have mercy on us all when the day comes! It isn’t Treverra, but it is Trethuan.”
“You know him?” George looked round at them all and saw by their appalled faces that he was, indeed, the only person present who did not know the incumbent of the coffin.
“I should. He’s—he was—my verger at St. Mary’s.”
George stared down at the long, lank body that lay so strangely shallowly in the stone pit, and his mind went back some hours, after an evasive memory, and recaptured it, and was confounded. It seemed Miss Rachel had complained unjustly of the unreliability of the young. Her truant gardener, even if he had not been able to communicate it, had had the best of all reasons for not turning up yesterday. He had picked his last apricot, and scythed his last churchyard. He lay, minus one shoe and sock, and reeking of the clammy, harsh damp of sea-water from feet to hair, stone dead in Jan Treverra’s coffin.
“Lift him out,” said Sam urgently, starting out of his daze. “He may not be dead.”
“He’s dead. Whoever he is, however he got here, he’s dead enough. Don’t touch him.” George looked at Simon, looked at the Vicar across the coffin. Four intent, strained faces stared back at him with stunned eyes. “I’m sorry, but it looks as if this has got out of hand. Out of our hands, anyhow. We’ve got a body here that was apparently alive a couple of days ago, and is very dead now. I’ve got no official standing here. Do you mind if I take charge for the moment? I suspect—I’m pretty sure—it isn’t going to be for long.”
“Whatever you say,” agreed Simon in a shaken voice. “This wasn’t in my brief.”
“Then leave him where he is. Don’t move anything. Tim, bring that lamp over, and let’s have a careful look in here.”
Shocked into silence, Tim brought it, and tipped its light full in upon the dead man. George felt carefully at the well-worn, respectable black suit, the lank, dun-coloured hair, the hand-knitted pullover, the laces and sole of the one remaining shoe. All of them left on his fingers the clinging, sticky feel of salt. He felt down past the bony shoulder, and touched a flat surface beneath the body, not cold and final like the stone, but with the live, grained feel of wood about it.
“I thought he was lying very high. There’s a wooden coffin below him.” He tapped on it, and the small resulting sound was light and hollow. “Not very substantial, just a shell to go inside the stone. That should be Treverra. But this one—”
“There appears to be some injury to his head,” said the Vicar, low-voiced. “Do you think—?”
“I think he drowned in the sea, but the doctors will settle that. Shine the light here, Tim.”
Tim illuminated the bony, dark-skinned face. A darker, mottled stain covered the outer part of the socket of the left eye, the lower temple and the cheek-bone, the mark of a large, broken bruise.
“Could he have got that in the sea?” Sam’s big voice was muted.
“I don’t think so. I think it was done before death. And I think,” he said, looking round them all and stepping back from the coffin, “we’re going to have to turn this over at once to the Maymouth police. They’d better have a look at the whole set-up. Because it looks very much as if they’ve got a murder on their hands.”
There was a moment of absolute silence and stillness; then Simon heaved a cautious breath and dusted the powdering of stone from his hands.
“One of us had better take the car and go and telephone,” he said in the most practical of voices. “Will you go, George, or shall I?”
But the most incomprehensible thing of all about the St. Nectan project came later still, past noon, when the photographers and the experts and the police surgeon had all had their way with the Treverra tomb, and the long, lank body of Zebedee Trethuan, verger and jobbing gardener, had been taken out on a covered stretcher and driven away in an ambulance, watched silently and avidly by a gallery of fishermen, children, respectable housewives and solid townspeople from all the dunes around, and no doubt just as eagerly by all the trebles of St. Mary’s choir, fighting over the Vicar’s binoculars on top of the Dragon’s Head.