Dominic approached cautiously, avoiding setting foot on the scarred place. Close to the water the grass shrank from a bare patch of gravel and stone; and there were two darker spots on the ground, oval and even and small, a dull brown in colour. He stooped to peer at them. It had rained briefly in the morning, but not since. These were therefore more recent than that rain; and they looked to him like drops of blood. He went down on one knee carefully to look more closely, and put his supporting hand on something hard that shifted in the grass. He made an instinctive movement to pick it up, and then took out his handkerchief, and handled his find delicately through the linen. A small silver medal, worn almost smooth, some human figure, maybe a saint, on one side, and on the other what seemed to be a lion rampant. From the ring that pierced it above the saint’s head a thin silver chain slid away like a snake and slipped through his fingers; he caught it in his other hand, and saw that it had not been unclasped, but broken.
He had seen it before, or at least something so like it that in his heart he knew it was the same; round, worn, plain, of this very size, why should there be two such in Follymead at the same time?
This morning, at Professor Penrose’s lecture, Lucien Galt had worn an open-necked sweater-shirt, and several times he had leaned forward to attend to the professor’s record player for him. He had then been wearing this medal round his neck. Dominic had noticed it because it had seemed at first out of character; and then, and more acutely, because it was entirely in character, after all, that he should wear it as he did, without a thought for either display or concealment, as naturally as he wore his eyelashes. And the thing itself had an austerity that made it singularly personal and valid, like a silver identity bracelet round a sailor’s wrist in wartime. Not for show, but not to be hidden, either; something with a right to be where it was.
He stared at it in the fading light, and he knew it was the same. He looked at the sky, which was ragged with broken clouds, and then went and found some large leaves of wild rhubarb from the waterside, and laid them over the drops that were possibly blood, and the trampled ground, in case of rain. He found a sharp stone and drove it into the turf where he had picked up the medal. That was all he could do.
Then he went to find Henry Marshall.
“I’m not sure about the blood,” said Dominic for the fourth time. “I am sure about the struggle. Two people – or more than two, but it looks like two – were fighting there. And this was in the grass, and Liri says it was his, and I say so, too. And that’s all we’ve got, between the five of us.”
They were in the warden’s office, with the door tightly shut. Dinner was over, without them; they had sandwiches and coffee in here, but no one had done more than play with them. Liri sat bolt upright, pale and calm, her mouth tight and her eyes sombre. Felicity, mercifully, had been manoeuvred out of the council by Tossa, and driven in to the evening session, where she would have to mingle and be social and keep her mouth shut. She didn’t even know exactly what Dominic had found, though maybe she guessed more than was comfortable. Someone would have to keep an eye on her, and it looked as if the someone would have to be Tossa. But Felicity had resources of her own, and whatever she couldn’t do yet, she could keep secrets. At fifteen it’s an essential quality; one’s life depends on it. She wouldn’t give anything away.
“We can’t leave it at that,” said Dominic reasonably.
“No, I realise that, of course.” Henry Marshall was barely thirty, none too sure of himself after four months under Edward Arundale’s formidable shadow, and at this moment in an agony of indecision. “But we have no proof at all that anything disastrous has happened, no proof of a crime, certainly. And you must understand that this establishment is in a curiously vulnerable position. If a scandal threatened our reputation it might cut off funds from several sources, as well as frightening away our actual student potential.” He dug his fingers agitatedly into his straw-coloured hair, and his black-rimmed spectacles slid down his long young nose. “A bad period of some weeks could close us down. It would be cataclysmic. As long as we run steadily on a moderate backing we’re perfectly safe. But any interruption of any long duration would finish us. And that would be a real national loss. I know we must follow this up. But I must protect Follymead, too. It’s what I’m here for.”
“I still think we need the police,” said Dominic. “For that very purpose. You want to avoid scandal, of course, but it would be a worse scandal if you concealed what turned out to be a criminal matter. To cover Follymead, I’m afraid you’ve got to hand this job over to the proper people.”
And that was the whole crux of the matter, the thing that was tearing the deputy warden apart. He was terrified of calling in the police, perhaps to find it had all been unnecessary, and even more terrified of bearing the responsibility for not calling them in, should the affair turn out to be serious after all. Above all he was afraid of trying to contact Edward Arundale, and for good reason. Arundale was a man of decision, who would know how to deal with every situation, and he would be highly intolerant of any deputy who couldn’t handle affairs himself in an emergency. Marshall hadn’t been here long, this was his first assignment on his own responsibility; and he wanted, how he wanted, to keep his job.
“We have so little to go on,” he said in agony.
“We’re not competent,” said Liri Palmer tersely, “to say whether it’s little or much. That’s the whole point.”
Dominic looked at Tossa, and found her looking at him, with the clear, trusting, eager look by means of which she communicated her sense of adoption into his family. He knew what she was thinking, and what she wanted him to do and say. It was having lost her own father so early, and suffered such frustrations and vicissitudes with stepfathers since, that had made her attach herself so fervently and gratefully to Dominic’s beautifully permanent, stable and reassuring parents. And especially to George Felse. He wasn’t at all like her adored professor father, but he gave her the same sense of security. She would have taken all her own problems to him, it was natural she should think of him immediately in this crisis. Even if he hadn’t been a policeman, she would have wanted him; but he was, and that was the solution to everything.
An exchange of glances like that, radiant with confidence, could turn Dominic’s bones to water with gratitude and astonishment. He had brought her home in the common agonies every man feels in bringing together two jealous and valued loves; he wasn’t yet used to the staggering bliss and relief of his total success.
“If I could make a suggestion,” he said, with all the more care and delicacy because of his own conviction of undeserved grace, “I could get my father to have a look over the ground.” He caught Tossa’s glowing glance, and trembled; he still couldn’t quite believe in the accumulation of his luck. “He’s a detective-inspector in the county C.I.D. I’m sure he’d be willing to come out here, if you’ll let me call him. Then you’d have covered yourself and the college, in case there is something in this. And we could ask him to treat it as a quite private matter until he’s satisfied that there’s a case for official investigation. In either case, you’d be protected.”
Henry Marshall took his head out of his hands, and gaped unbelievingly but gladly at his salvation. Arundale himself couldn’t do better than this.