He scurried down the slope to the thread of water that was gathering in the channel, and clambered hastily through the Hole again, to splash through the first encroaching foam and take to his heels up the Pentarno beach. The remembered vision of Rose Pollard hung before his eyes every step of the way, both aims spread for balance, the glow of the torch flailing in her right hand.
One thing at least was certain. When she came back from her mysterious errand, she had no longer been carrying anything under her arm.
CHAPTER VIII
SATURDAY EVENING
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PHIL WAS WASHING UP after tea when Hewitt called. She put her head in at the door of the living-room to report: “For you, Simon. Mr. Hewitt says the pathologist’s come to have a look at Mrs. Treverra’s body, and if you and Tim would care to be present, he’d be grateful. I suppose he wants to have the family represented, so that there can’t be any complaints or anything later. Shall I tell him you’ll be along?”
All three of them had looked up sharply at the message, Paddy sensitive to the quiver of feeling on the air, and stirred out of his unnaturally subdued quietness. All afternoon Tim and Phil had been exchanging anxious glances over his head, and wondering how long to let him alone, how soon to shake him out of his abstraction. A very dutiful, mute, well-behaved boy who sat and thought was not at all what they were used to.
“How about it, Tim? I don’t say it’s the pleasantest thing in the world to see, but if we can learn anything from it, I think we should.”
“I’ll come, I want to. It’s a hell of a thing,” said Tim soberly.
“Then he says in a quarter of an hour, at St. Nectan’s. They don’t propose to disturb her, not unless there’s absolute need. I’ll tell him you’ll be there.”
Tim looked at Paddy. There was no guessing what was in his head, but it could only be the shocks and readjustments of yesterday that were still preoccupying him. Unless directly addressed, he hadn’t once said a word to Simon, and they had refrained from discussing the inexplicable tragedy of Morwenna in front of him. But sooner or later he had to learn to move and breathe in the same air with Simon again, and find some sort of terms on which he could live with him, and he might just as well begin at once.
“How about you, Paddy?” invited Tim after a moment’s hesitation. “Come along with us for the ride?”
The serious face brightened, wavered and smiled. “I bet that means I don’t get to come in,” he said, but he got up from his chair with every appearance of pleasure.
“I think I’d rather you didn’t. But I’ll tell you about it as we go.”
“O.K., Dad, I’ll come, anyhow.” He hadn’t been with Tim very much during the day, and he found that he wanted to. To sit by him in the front seat of the Mini, and touch shoulders with him now and again, was comfort, pleasure and reassurance. Subdued and amenable, he wasn’t going to ask any favours; if he was required to sit in the car while they went down into the vault, he’d do it, and not even creep to the top of the steps to peer down in the hope of a glimpse of forbidden sights. It was his pleasure to please Tim. You can be demonstrative with mothers, but showing fathers how you feel about them is not quite so simple, you use what offers, and hope they’ll get the idea.
They threaded the sunken lane, halted at the coast road, and crossed it to the track among the dunes. The smell of the evening was the smell of the autumnal sea and the fading grasses.
“I didn’t know they were thinking of opening Mrs. Treverra’s coffin, too. Why did they? Was that this morning?”
Any other time he would have been asking Simon, hanging over the back of the seat and feeding on his looks and words like a puppy begging for cake. Now he sat close and asked Tim, in his quiet, young baritone, touchingly grave and tentative.
“Yes, this morning. After you left, I suppose it must have been. I wasn’t there. Mr. Hewitt thought it necessary to search every possible place in the vault, because it seems there must have been something there to account for Trethuan’s not wanting it opened. And the only place that hadn’t been searched already was Morwenna’s coffin. So they opened that, too.” Tim eased the Mini down into the rutted, drifting sand, and was silent for a moment. “She’s there, Paddy. It isn’t like the other one, she is there. Well, this chap’s going to tell us whether the body that’s there is from the right time, and so on, but I don’t think there’s much doubt. But what’s terribly wrong is that she—well, she isn’t at peace. She’s fully dressed—she was—and she was trying to get out. She—must have been alive when they left her there. It could happen. Sometimes it has happened.”
He had felt the young, solid shoulder stiffen in unbelieving horror, and he wanted to soften the picture, to set it two centuries away, like a dream or a sad song.
“They hadn’t modern methods or modern knowledge. There could be conditions like death. They weren’t to blame. And thank God, they couldn’t have known. Only we know, when it’s all over, two hundred years and more. Like ‘The Mistletoe Bough.’ It wouldn’t be quite like you think. The air would give out on her, you see. She’d only have what was inside the stone coffin, and then, gradually, sleep. It wouldn’t be long.”
Simon might not have been there. There was no one else in the car. Paddy leaned closer by an inch, delicately and gratefully,
“It could look like a struggle, but be only very brief. Very soon she grew drowsy. Only she stayed like that, you see, fighting to lift the lid and get out. She slept like that. And when she was dead—Well, you’ve read her epitaph. This makes me think she wrote it herself. I don’t even know why, but it does.”
Paddy said, in a small but still adult voice, perhaps even a note or two nearer the bass register than usuaclass="underline" “I always thought she was so beautiful.”
“So did I. She’ll find him again, you can bet on that. She wasn’t the sort to let death stop her.”
The Mini turned in to the left among the dunes. The little open lantern of St. Nectan’s stood clear against the sky.
“It wasn’t ugly,” said Simon unexpectedly from the back seat. “A scent, and a puff of air, and a little dust. She was very little, like in her picture, and all muffled up in a travelling cloak with a hood—at least, I think so. She had masses of black hair, and such tiny bones.”
Paddy said nothing more. He sat almost oblivious when they got out of the car and left him there between the shadowy dunes. He woke out of his daze when he heard the strange voices, and turned his head to see them met and greeted by Hewitt, with George Felse in attendance, and a stranger who must be the police pathologist. He watched them unlock the padlock on the gate, and go in single file down the steep staircase. He heard the heavy door below swing wide, but he didn’t move. If the window of the car had not been open, he would not have heard the raised tones of their voices, like gasps of amazement and consternation rising hollowly out of the grave.
Something was wrong, down there. Something, was not as they had expected it to be. Paddy put out a hand to open the door of the car, and then drew it back, shivering, afraid to want to know.
But you can’t turn your back on knowledge, just because it may be uncomfortable. Supposing someone else should need what you know? Someone who belongs to you, and doesn’t know how much you know already?
He slipped out of the car, and crept close to the rail of the vault. The open doorway showed him nothing but a corner of Treverra’s empty tomb, and half of George Felse and all of Tim, hiding from him even the foot of the second coffin. But the voices sailed up to him clearly, roused and brittle, and in signal agreement.
“None of it was there this morning,” said Hewitt. “There was nothing with her in the coffin. All of us but Mr. Rossall were here, we know what we uncovered.”