“If he slung the kid in the river,” said Duckett with admirable directness, “neither you nor I can get him out of the resultant mess, George, my boy. With luck we might get Follymead out of it. Knock off fifty per cent for over-enthusiasm, and still the place is worth preserving.”
“I think so, too. All right, at first light I’m going down to look over the ground again, carefully. I hope to have some specimens for the lab boys, and I don’t care if we do have to pull ’em back from their Sunday hobbies.”
“Right, and first thing to-morrow I’ll have Scott turned loose on their histories.” He was silent for one pregnant second. “How’s the flood level?”
“High,” said George. “I reckon anything that went in there would bounce that last weir like a cork, and be out of the grounds long before now. We’re past the fancy curves at that point. The next real check is the bend by Sandy Cliff, the other side of the main road. Anything can happen with this sort of spring flow, but I should start dragging there. That’s where he’s most likely to come ashore.”
George went down to the riverside in the first light of morning. The threatened rain had fallen in the small hours, while he had slept uneasily and briefly in Arundale’s office, declining the bed Marshall had offered him. The dawn sky was tattered with filmy clouds and fitful brightness, and the grass was saturated and silvery against the river’s turgid brown. Slanting light picked out in deep relief the wounds in the turf, still dark, fresh and soft from the protection of Marshall’s plastic car-cover. George went over the ground carefully, inch by inch. There was only one clear print, and that of only the sole of a shoe, stamped into the raw clay, a composition sole cross-cut in saw-tooth grooves for grip. A well-shaped shoe with a good conservative toe, maybe size nine; the kind two-thirds of the men in the house probably wore, half of them in this size. All the rest of the tracks were trampled over, crossed and blurred by the resilience of the grass, but in sum they were there, and their implications unmistakable.
He found one other thing. One of the stamping feet, driving in a heel deeply, had left behind in the print one of last autumn’s leaves from the ride, one of the old ivy leaves, rubbery even in decay, that drop with their naked, angular stems, and lie long after the rest of the woodland loss is mould. This one had been cupped round the edge of the shoe’s heel, and remained so, pressed into the turf; and something that was not water, something hardly visible at twilight against its brown colouring, had splashed into it later, and gathered in the cup. Warm and sheltered under the plastic sheeting, it had remained moist. Not so much of it, maybe, as they take from your thumb for a blood test; but possibly as much as the lab. boys would need in order to group it.
George extracted the moulded leaf gingerly, and found another little box for it, propping its edges with cotton-wool and keeping it upright. There was nothing else here for him. He covered the bruised ground again, and prowled along the very edge of the water; it seemed to him that it had risen a shade higher in the night with the new rain, but he had seen it last night only by moonlight and torchlight. Certainly in this green, moist dawn, full of the drippings and whisperings of water, that concentrated brown flood was impressive. No finding anything in that without dragging, or going down into it; not until chemistry did its work, and it surfaced again, and judging by the force of this current that would be miles downstream. The coiled curve by Sandy Cliff just might bring it ashore, as he had said to Duckett; but even there the water would be over the summer beach and burrowing hard under the cliff, and whatever it carried might continue downstream with it.
George made his way thoughtfully back to the house, mapping this part of the Follymead grounds mentally as he went; and in the warden’s office Dominic was waiting for him.
“Hullo!” said George with unflattering surprise. “Whatever got you up at this hour?”
“I thought of something that may be important. I meant to be up earlier, but I had to be careful. I’ve got the Rossignol twins in my room, and they can hear the grass growing. I didn’t want to bring the whole hunt down on you. But it’s all right,” Dominic said in hasty reassurance, “I left them dead asleep.” He looked from his father’s face to the small box carried so carefully in his hand. He didn’t ask any questions about it, and George didn’t volunteer anything.
“All right, what’s on your mind?”
“It was on my mind, too, half the night. You know how it is when you know you’ve seen something before, and can’t for your life think where or when? I woke up suddenly this morning, and I’d got it. That medal… could we have another look at it, and I’ll show you.”
The pill-box that contained it was locked into the top drawer of Arundale’s desk. George extracted and offered it. Dominic remembered to turn it with the tip of a ball-pen when he wanted to refer to the reverse, as he had remembered not to handle it directly when he first found it. He shivered a little with clinging sleepiness and the chill of the morning.
“You see here, this side, that formalised figure in armour, with a nutshell helmet like the Normans in the Bayeaux tapestry, and a long shield with a sort of spread eagle on it…? I suddenly remembered where I’d seen it before. You can’t mistake it once you do get the idea. That’s Saint Wenceslas. Yes, I’m quite sure. He always looks like that. You ask Tossa, she’ll tell you the same, we got to know the form last year, when we were in Prague on holiday. And the other side…” He turned it delicately to show the lion rampant with a forked tail. “This I can show you, right here. I should have known it on sight if it hadn’t been quite so worn. Look! By pure luck I happened to have this still in my jacket.”
He held it out triumphantly, a small badge, questionably silver, unquestionably the same rampaging lion, with feathery fringes like a retriever, and double tail bristling.
“Lieutenant Ondrejov gave me that, before we left Liptovsky Pavol, last year. You see, it is the same. This is the Czech lion. And Saint Wenceslas is the chief of their patron saints, and doesn’t belong to anyone else. I bet you anything you like this medal originated in Czechoslovakia.”
George measured the two small heraldic creatures, and found them one. “Now why,” he wondered aloud blankly, “should Lucien Galt be wearing a Czech medal?”
“I wish I knew. But that’s what this is.”
George stared, and thought, and could not doubt it. This was, according to Liri Palmer, the one thing Lucien had that had belonged to his father. That didn’t, of course, determine to whom it might have belonged earlier. It was wartime, Galt could perfectly well have had some chance-met friend among the self-exiled Czechs who formed, at that time, the most articulate, the most reticent, – the two were compatible! – and the most nearly English component of the European armies in Britain. Maybe they swopped small tokens before the unit moved out for D-Day; and maybe the medal acquired value because its giver didn’t come back. There were such things, then, unexpected friendships that went deeper than kith and kin.
“Well, thanks very much for the tip. It’s certainly curious.” George pocketed the trophy along with his other specimens. “And since you are up, how about running me down to the lodge and bringing back the station wagon afterwards?”