They were left with the plain, light wooden coffin on which he had lain; and at the first touch the lid of it gave to their hands, and came away, uncovering—surely, this time?—the last resting-place of Jan Treverra. And there they were, the expected bones.
This body had certainly been there longer than its bedfellow. It was almost a skeleton, shreds of perished clothing drifted about the long bones and the dried and mummified flesh that remained to it. But had it, on closer inspection, really been there for two centuries and more? It had a hasty and tumbled appearance, with no composed, hieratic dignity. The fragments of cloth still had enough nature left in them to show a texture and a colour; a colour which had been very dark navy blue, a texture that looked suspiciously like thick, solid modern woollen, meant to withstand all weathers. And here, about the chest, clung bits of disintegrating knitted stuff.
Among Treverra’s eccentricities it had never been recorded that he wished to be buried in a fisherman’s Meltons and a seaman’s jersey.
By the middle of that Friday afternoon it was all over Maymouth that Jan Treverra’s tomb had yielded not one body, but two; and that, positively though quite incomprehensibly, neither of them was Jan Treverra.
CHAPTER IV
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
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DETECTIVE-SERGEANT HEWITT was pure Maymouth from his boots to his sober utilitarian hair-cut, a stocky, square man of middle age with a vaguely sad countenance, who used few words, but in some curious fashion turned other people voluble. In taking his last look round the Treverra vault before they locked it and left it to its ravished quietness, he said nothing at all. Only his solemn eyes lingered thoughtfully along the propped edge of the stone lid, with its specks of pallor where the iron had bitten into the stone; and Tim, following their reproachful survey, said apologetically: “I know, it’s a pity we had to use crowbars and foul up the possible traces. But we couldn’t possibly have known—” The grieved gaze moved lower, to the trampled patterns in the dust of the floor, and five pairs of feet did their best to appear smaller. “I’m afraid we have rather driven the herds over everything,” said Simon ruefully. “It was dead smooth when we came in, though—just a blown layer of sand, as usual.”
“Yes, well—if you gentlemen will go along with Snaith to the police station, right away, we’d like to have statements from all of you. Your individual observations may help us.” He didn’t sound hopeful, but he probably never did. “Mr. Felse, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to have you along with me for a call on the way. We’ll join the others in half an hour or so.”
“Glad to, if I can be any help,” said George.
“And I’ll take the key, Mr. Towne.” Simon surrendered it, and watched it turned in the great lock, with a soundless efficiency which did not fail to register with the Detective-Sergeant. “I see you’ve been preparing for to-day. This is the key from the Place?”
“Yes, the only one, as far as I know. I’ve had it three days now. Miss Rachel gave it to me when I wanted to bring down some of the gear”
“Yes, I gathered from what you said just now that you’d been in the vault before to-day. How often?”
“Twice. On Wednesday morning—the Vicar was with me that time—we came down to clear the steps and clean and oil the lock, and tried the key to be sure how it worked. But we didn’t go farther then than just inside the doorway.” And that, thought George, was probably when Simon spotted the illicit stores there, hence his discreet withdrawal, and the public declaration of his programme that evening. Nor had he actually said that they had in fact cleaned and oiled the lock, merely that they had come here with that intention. This job at least had proved unnecessary. “Then I came in again yesterday afternoon, and dumped those sheets of felt.” To make sure that the hint had been taken?
“Notice anything at all different then? Or when you came in to-day?”
Simon considered. “Not that I recollect.”
“You didn’t sweep the floor clean of sand?”
“No. Never occurred to me, even if I’d had a broom. I was surprised how dry and clean it was in here, only a blown layer of sand. Just like now—except for our hoof-marks, of course,” said Simon ruefully.
“Ah, well, you’ll have time to think it over. Mr. Felse and I will be with you shortly.”
They climbed the narrow steps on which the sand whisked softly like blown spray, and closed the latchless gate upon the solitude so bewilderingly void of Treverra, and so over-populated with others who had no business there. The Land-Rover and the Porsche set off for the police station in Maymouth, Detective-Constable Snaith, son of a long line of fishermen, ensconced in George’s place beside Simon. Only when the little convoy was well away did Hewitt climb ponderously into his Morris.
“We shan’t be going far out of our way. Just along the quay to where his girl lives. I thought a detached witness might come in handy, if you don’t mind being used. I’ve known Rose since she was first at school. Being this close to a place has its drawbacks, as well as its advantages.”
“I know,” said George, thinking of his own home village of Comerford, where every face was known to him. “Trethuan’s daughter?”
“Yes, only relative, as far as I know. She’s been married a year to a decent young fellow, Jim Pollard. Fisherman, of course, they all are. Lives about three minutes’ walk from where Trethuan lived.”
“Alone, I take it? Now that the girl’s married?”
“Yes, alone. Did for himself most of the time, and Rose did the real cleaning for him. Thought I’d better see her and tell her myself.”
It should have been a daunting prospect, but though he maintained his aspect of professional and permanent discouragement, Hewitt did not, in fact, appear at all daunted. And wasn’t there, perhaps, something in that gaunt, powerful, unprepossessing corpse in Treverra’s tomb that ruled out any harrowing possibilities of family lamentation? There are people it’s almost impossible to love, however the blood may struggle to do its duty.
They drove over the neck of the Dragon, the coastal road rising to its highest point near to the hotel. A fair portion of the juvenile population of Maymouth was still deployed along the cliff paths looking towards Pentarno; no doubt armed with fruit and sandwiches, and with an organised errand-service for ice-cream. Then the road dipped again, and the slate-grey cottages of the upper town closed in upon it, backgrounds for their small, crowded flower-gardens, that blazed with every possible colour. From the steep High Street they could see the harbour below them, locked between the huge bulk of the Dragon’s Head and the crook of the mole, all the invisible streets doddering down towards it, seen only as thread-like channels between the slate roofs. Uniformly grey from this aerial view, the houses flowered into apple-blossom pinks and forget-me-not blues as the car descended, every shade of peach and primrose and pale green, foaming with window-boxes full of geraniums.
In the square, four-sided about an ugly Victorian fountain and embattled with solid shop-fronts, they saw the Porsche and the Land-Rover parked. But Hewitt drove on imperturbably, down towards the harbour, and the clusters of colour-washed houses that clung like barnacles to the rocks along the sea-front.
A row of leaning cottages, six in all, propped their backs against the outlying rocks of the Dragon, and stared out to sea over beached boats and a flurry of gulls. Each was painted its own individual shade, two different pinks, a daffodil yellow, one blue, one green, and one dazzlingly white. Hewitt parked the car on the cobbled shoulder of the quay, and led the way to the second pink house. A little horse-shoe knocker rapped on the jet-black door. The whole row looked like toys in a child’s box.