The sagging, shapeless shadow that had been a man lay flattened to the moist earth by his mud-heavy clothes. Lank hair of the universal river-colour plastered the pallor that was his forehead. George said in a voice suddenly sharp and intent. “Give me the torch.”
The cone of light sprang out of the dimness and brought shapes to life again in this twilit world that had no shape. The long body sprawled awkwardly, so weighted down with water that it seemed to be dissolving away from them into the ground. A massive, large-featured face, smooth and austere and once impressive enough, gaped up at them through soiled trails of river-water.
The single muted whimper of a cry came from Tossa. Liri Palmer made never a sound. Dickie Meurice drew in breath with a long-drawn hiss that might have been pure horror and excitement, but sounded horribly like glee.
“But that isn’t…” blurted Lockyer, amazed, and let the sentence trail away helplessly into silence. He had a teenage daughter; in her vicinity there was no possibility of avoiding acquaintance with the features of the current pop and folk idols.
“No,” agreed George grimly, staring into the pool of light at his feet, “no, it isn’t Lucien Galt. It looks as if we’ve got to hunt farther afield for him. No… this is Edward Arundale.”
CHAPTER VIII
« ^ »
PERHAPS,” suggested Lockyer blankly, after a long moment of silence, “they both went into the river.”
“You think so?” George switched off the torch, and the deepening dusk fell on them like a cloak. “And who drove Arundale’s car away? It was there, in the yard, with his overnight case and his books in it, at three. It was gone before four, and nobody else had gone missing. Oh, no, they didn’t both go the same way.’
“They didn’t both go down the river, anyhow,” said Dickie Meurice softly, and they heard and felt him stirring in the darkness, again with that curious suggestion of pleased malevolence. “Because just before Liri came to tell you she’d found this one, she was talking to the other one on the telephone.”
He had his sensation, and it was everything he had hoped it would be. Only Liri herself let the revelation pass without a sound. She had made one sharp movement, however, that did just as well. However stolidly she sat out questioning, after that, he’d know that he’d hit her where it hurt. She’d had her chance to have his goodwill, and done rather more than turn up her nose at the offer. Now she could try it the other way.
“How do you know that?” demanded George, “if you were here keeping an eye on the body?”
“I wasn’t. I had a hunch she was up to something, so I let her get a head start, and then followed her up. If she’d been on the level she’d have come straight in by the terrace, but she didn’t. She went off round the back of the house, to the passage from the yard. So I came in by the front and beat her to the back stairs, and I was there to see exactly what she did. She went straight to the telephone call box under the stairs, and asked for a London number.
“Dear Dickie,” said Liri quite gently, as if neither he nor anything he did could matter to her now, “always so true to form. Where were you? Hiding in the next box?”
“In the presence of the police,” he retorted maliciously, “I shouldn’t be too witty about eavesdropping, if I were you. They have other names for it in the way of duty. I can demonstrate that I heard all right, and I can repeat every word I heard, too. Including the number!”
“And including a name?” asked George dryly.
“No, I didn’t get a name. But the number was Valence 3581. You can check it easily enough, but I wouldn’t mind betting you’ll find it’s the number of Lucien’s London flat. That would be the first place she’d try, even if she didn’t know where he’d be – and maybe she did, at that!”
“And why didn’t you tell me about this at once, as soon as we arrived? Instead of behaving as if you’d been here all the time and had no information to offer?”
“Because I couldn’t make out just what it was all about, not until I realised whose body we’d found. And what mattered first was to get him out. She wasn’t going to run.”
“So in fact you didn’t actually know whose number it was, or to whom she was talking?”
“No, not then. I don’t know, for that matter, but listen to the text, and draw what conclusions you like. I didn’t hear everything, people were just coming chattering along the gallery to dinner. When someone answered her she said: ‘Never mind that, there’s no time.’ And the next I got was: ‘… just get out, fast. The body’s been found… ’ Then whoever was at the other end was doing the talking, until she cut him off. ‘Damn you,’ she said, ‘I’ve told you, forget all that, and go. Good-bye!’ ”
“That was all?”
“Isn’t it enough? I didn’t know whose body she’d found, but she did. She was climbing out on the tree when I came on the scene, she’d had a good look at him. But maybe she’d known all along which of them went into the water. Maybe she even helped in the job, or at least helped Lucien to get away afterwards. Stay here, she says, and keep an eye on him, while I run and tell Mr. Felse! You have to hand it to our Liri, she’s quick on the draw. She couldn’t suppress the discovery, because I happened on her just at the wrong moment. But she could and did run like a hare to warn the murderer, before she gave the alarm. And she found me a job to do that would keep me quiet while she did it, or so she hoped. Only as luck would have it I’d already begun to smell a rat by then.”
He smiled, the well-known smile that charmed the televiewers regularly on Thursday nights, his fair head cocked towards Liri; and though the smile was now invisible, they felt its weighted sweetness probing her.
“But in any case, you don’t have to take my word for it. Ask her! Ask the operator who got her her London number.”
“All in good time,” said George impassively, “we’ll ask everything that needs to be asked, but not, I think, here. I should be grateful if you would all keep this to yourselves, just as you have done until now. Lockyer, stay with him, I must go and telephone. The rest of you, come on, let’s get back to the house.”
They made their way back in single file to the dry pathway and the glow-worm twilight that was left in the park, George lighting them until they were out of the trees. At the end of the line, Dominic and Tossa linked hands and drew close, shivering suddenly with the chill of the river, and the cold oppression of darkness, malice and death. She whispered in his ear, anxiously, that he must go straight up and change. The suggestion, mildly maternal, pointedly possessive, seemed to be left over from another world, but at least indicated the possibility of recovering that world, when all this was over. Dominic, the shivers warmed out of him by her solicitude, pressed her hand impulsively and wondered again at the terrifying diversity of man.
“Come up to the office with me,” George said to Liri as they climbed the steps to the terrace. “I must talk to you.”
“Of course,” said Liri. Her voice was curiously easy now, aloof and contained still, but something more than that. The word that suggested itself was “content.” George understand that. They had their body and their case, a pretty substantial case now, though still circumstantial; but she had done everything she could, and it was no longer up to her. “But it will be you talking,” she said gently. “I’ve got nothing to say.”