“We couldn’t possibly have missed seeing this,” said Simon. “Even if we didn’t disturb or touch her, we looked pretty carefully. It’s enough to make you look carefully, isn’t it? Well, she’d none of all this with her then. Nothing!”
“But if you’ve had both keys in your own hands all the time, and you locked up again carefully this morning,” said the one strange voice with dry mildness, “it would seem to be impossible.”
“It is, damned impossible, but it’s happened.” It was the first time Paddy had ever heard Hewitt sound exasperated. “Take a look at this, this is real enough, isn’t it? That wasn’t here, none of this was here spilled round her feet, at eleven o’clock this morning. But it’s here now at six in the evening. And I’m telling you—I’m telling myself, for that matter—this place has been locked all that time, and I’ve had both keys on me. And tell me, just tell me, why should anyone, guilty or innocent or crazy or what, bring this here and leave it for us to find?”
He plunged a hand suddenly into something that rattled and rang like the loose change in a careless woman’s handbag, and brandished across the coffin, for one moment full into Paddy’s line of vision, a handful of coins and small trinkets that gleamed, in spite of all the discolorations of time, with the authentic yellow lustre of antique gold.
He shut himself into the front passenger seat of the car, and held his head, because it felt as if it might burst if he worked the brain within it too hard. One little guinea in the sand of the tunnel, and a fistful of them in Morwenna’s coffin. And the door locked, and both keys in police custody, and the whole thing impossible, unless—it was the last thing he had overheard as he retreated—unless there was yet another key.
Or another door! Nobody had said that, but he couldn’t stop thinking it. Not an ordinary door, a very retiring door, one that wasn’t easy to find.
Under the ground he’d had almost no sense of direction, but Dominic had said—somewhere under the dunes. Paddy took an imaginary bearing from the church towards the blow-hole under the Dragon’s Head, and tried frantically to estimate distances. It was possible. It had to be possible, because there was no other possible way of accounting for everything.
They were down there a long time, nearly an hour. He stayed in the car all the time, because it had dawned on him that if he spied on them, or even asked them questions when they returned, he would have to tell them things in exchange; and he couldn’t do that, not yet, not without other people’s consent. No, there was only one thing to do, and that was go straight to the Pollards, and tell them what he knew, and try to make them see that the next move was up to them.
But there was no reason why he shouldn’t use his eyes to the best advantage when the five men emerged from the deep enclosure of the Treverra tomb. Hewitt climbed the steps only to cross to his car, take a small rug from the boot, and make a second trip down into the vault with it. When he came up again he was carrying the rug rolled into a thick, short bundle under his arm. What was inside it, allowing for the bulk of the rug itself, might be about the size of a three-pound bag of flour, but seemed to be a good deal heavier. Say, a small gunnysack full of coins—or maybe a little leather draw-string bag, such as they used for purse and wallet in the eighteenth century. About the right size, at any rate, to match that small, shapeless bundle Rose had carried under her arm at noon.
Tim got into the car prepared for questions, and there were none. “Don’t you want to know if it is really Morwenna?” he offered, concerned at such uncharacteristic continence.
“Well, yes, of course!” The boy brightened readily. “I thought you’d tell me what I’m allowed to know. I didn’t want to poke my nose past where the line’s drawn.”
“Such virtue!” said Tim disapprovingly. “You’re not sickening for something, are you?”
He started the engine, and the Mini came about gently in the trodden space before the church, and followed the police car back to the road.
“Is Uncle Simon riding with them, this time?”
“Yes, he wanted to talk to the pathologist. We’re pretty sure it’s Morwenna. Right age, right period, right build, no reason to suppose it would be anyone else. There’ll be some work to do on fabric, and all that, but it looks authentic.”
“Where are we going now?”
“Back to the police station. We’ve got a bit of conferring to do, if you wouldn’t mind amusing yourself for an hour or so. Or would you rather I took you home first?”
“No,” said Paddy, almost too quickly and alertly. “I’ll come down into town with you, that’ll suit me fine. While you’re in your official huddle, there’s somebody I want to see.”
He knocked at the front door of the second pink cottage in Cliffside Row just as the church clock was chiming half past seven; and on the instant he recoiled a step or two nervously, almost wishing he had let well alone, for the consequences of the knock manifested themselves before the door was opened. Something—it sounded like a glass—shattered on a quarried floor. A girl’s voice uttered a small, frightened cry, and a young man’s, suddenly sharp with fury and helplessness, shouted: “For God’s sake, girl, what’s up with you to-day? Anybody’d think a gun had gone off. It’s only the door. If there’s something wrong with you, I wish you’d have the sense to tell me. Oh, come out! I’ll go.”
The door, suddenly flung wide, vanished with startling effect, as if Jim Pollard’s large young fist had plucked it off. Levelled brown eyes under a thick frowning ridge of brow stared dauntingly at Paddy.
“Well, what’s up?” The eyes, once they focused upon him, knew him well enough. “Oh, it’s you, young Rossall. What do you want?” Less unfriendly, but as anxious as ever to get rid of him and get back to whatever scene they had been playing between them there in the doll’s-house living-room. The knock on the door had been only a punctuation mark. Paddy felt small, unsupported, and less certain of the sacred harmony of marriage than he had been two minutes ago. But he’d started it, and now there was no backing out.
“I’d like to talk to you and Rose, please. It’s very important.”
“Mrs. Pollard to you, my lad,” said Jim smartly. “All right, come in.”
“I’m sorry! She used to let me call her Rose, but I won’t do it if you don’t like it. It was only habit.”
He stepped over the brightly-Cardinalled doorstep into the pretty toy room, and Jim closed the door behind him. Rose, clattering dust-pan and brush agitatedly in the minute kitchen beyond, was sweeping up the fragments of the glass she had dropped. The door between was open, and Paddy saw her slide a furtive glance at him, and take heart. All the same, her eyes were evasive and her hands unsteady when she came in.
“Hallo, Paddy, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing with me,” he said, making straight for the essential issue, head-down and ready for anything. “It’s you! I came to tell you I know where you went this morning, and what you did. I saw you take something with you into the Dragon’s Hole, and I know where you left it. Don’t you see how silly it is to act as if you’ve done something bad, when you haven’t? Mr. Pollard, you must get her to tell the police everything, it’s the best thing, really it is. I know about the money and the jewellery, you see, I know she put them—”
His impetuous rush had carried him thus far through a silence of stupefaction on one side and desperation on the other, but now, in a subdued way which didn’t carry beyond the walls, hell broke loose. Rose burst into tears and flung herself face-down into a chair. Jim gaped open-mouthed from one to the other of them, and with a muted bellow of rage clouted Paddy on the ear with an open right hand as hard as a spade. The blow slammed him back against the wall, from which one of Rose’s pretty little calendar pictures, a golden-haired tot with a bunch of forget-me-nots, promptly fell and smashed.