He had been the first to hear the sound of the car approaching, and the quickest to identify it, for he was the only one who looked completely unsurprised as it rolled gently alongside the Aston Martin, while all the rest had checked momentarily and turned to gaze. Recognition halted their breath for an instant. He was there with intent. With news or with questions.
Lesley came towards him, veering from the advance she had been making upon Charlotte. ‘Chief Inspector Felse! We didn’t expect to see you so early. Is there any news?’ The intense blue of her eyes shaded away into a translucent green in a bright light, burning into emerald in her moments of laughter or animation, clouding over into a ferny darkness when she was grave. She gazed into his face, and they darkened. Unexpectedly but very simply she said, with concern: ‘You haven’t had any sleep!’
‘I’ll catch up on that soon.’ He turned from her to look at Paviour. To him the light was not kind. The contrast with his radiant, vital young wife was blatant almost to embarrassment.
‘You wanted to see us?—some one or more of us,’ he said. ‘If we can help you at all…’
‘Thank you, but this time I needn’t keep you more than a minute. I thought that as I’d involved you all, to some extent, in the enquiries that were launched yesterday, I ought to inform you of the results of our search for the boy, Gerry Boden…’
He was listening very carefully, for any exclamation, any indrawn breath, even, that would single out one person among these five; but they remained anonymous in their concern and foreboding. The issue, after all, was fairly plain. No one is that much of an optimist.
‘One of our sergeants took him out of the river about six o’clock this morning, a mile and a half downstream from here. Dead.’
They stood frozen, all transfixed by the same small, chill frisson of shock, but no one exclaimed. He looked round all their sobered, pitying faces, and registered what was there to be registered, but it was not much; nothing more than was due to any boy of sixteen, suddenly wiped out for no good reason. No use looking for the one who felt no surprise, for after the gradual attrition of hour after hour without word they could none of them feel very much.
‘How awful!’ said Lesley in a resigned whisper. ‘Terrible for his parents. I’m so sorry.’
‘The poor fool kid!’ said Gus. ‘I wish to God now I’d lugged him back to his chain gang by the ear. Can’t say we didn’t half expect it, I suppose, by this time. It began to look… But there’s always the odd chance.’
‘Which in this case didn’t come up. I thought you should be told. Sorry to have ruined your day.’
Paviour moistened his pale lips. ‘Do you think it was here, on our premises, that he fell into the river? I feel to blame. But the path is a right of way, we couldn’t stop it if we tried.’
‘It’s too early yet,’ said George with deliberation, ‘to say where and how he entered the water. The forensic laboratory has a good deal of work to do on his clothes, and the contents of his pockets. And of course there’ll be a postmortem.’
‘A post-mortem?’ The meagre, gallant Don Quixote beard quivered and jutted as though every individual hair had suddenly stiffened to the clenched tension of Paviour’s jaw. He relaxed the convulsive pressure of his teeth cautiously, and drew breath deeply before he resumed with arduous reasonableness: ‘Is that really necessary, in a case like this, I know you have to be thorough, but the distress to the parents… And surely the cause of death isn’t in doubt? A clear case of drowning…?’
‘It would seem so,’ George agreed gently. ‘But double-checking does no harm, and as you say, we try to be thorough. I doubt if it’s an issue that will affect the parents’ distress one way or the other.’ He was turning back towards his car when he looked back with a casual afterthought. ‘By the way, you won’t be surprised or disturbed if you find some of our people patrolling the riverside path or inspecting that slip, will you? A routine precaution, that’s all.’
He did not look back again, except in the rear-view mirror as he drove away. They were grouped just as he had left them, all looking warily after him. And if he had got little enough out of that interview, at least he had lobbed one small, accurate pebble into the middle of the pool of their tranquillity, and its ripples were already beginning to spread outwards.
A young giant working on the flower-beds along the drive straightened his long, lithe back to watch the car go by, without curiosity though with fixed, methodical attention, his senses turned outwards for relaxation while he took a breather. The reddish-fair head, Celtic-Roman, with chiselled features and long, indifferent lapis eyes, belonged to a statue rather than a man. George knew the type locally, a pocket of fossils preserved among these border valleys, though this superlative specimen was not personally known to him. Orrie Benyon, of course. Orlando, who admitted his ghostly ancestors ungrudgingly into his territory by night. Those cropped military curls, that monumental neck and straight nose, would have looked well in a bronze helmet; no doubt he recognised his own kind, and was at home with them. And indeed his stock might well go back to just such stubborn settlers, survivors after the death of this city, the offspring of time-expired legionaries and the daughters of enterprising local middlemen. Deprived of their urban background, they had rooted into the valley earth and turned to stock and crops for a living. And survived. Tenacious and long-memoried, they had not allowed themselves to be uprooted or changed a second time.
George stopped the car at the edge of the drive, and walked back. He stood watching beside the flower-beds; and after a long minute of uninterrupted work, Orrie straightened his long, athlete’s back again, and turned towards his audience the massive, stony beauty of his face, flushed with exertion. At this range the flaws that reduced him to humanity, and a fairly limited humanity at that, were plain to be seen: the stubble of coarse reddish beard he hadn’t bothered to shave, the roughness of his weathered skin over the immaculate but brutal bones, the inlaid indifference of the blue eyes.
‘Good morning!’ said George. ‘Nice show of bulbs you’ve got coming along.’
‘Not bad, I reckon,’ the gardener admitted. ‘Be some tulips out by now if it’d bin a bit warmer. You come round in three weeks or so, they’ll be a show worth seeing.’
George offered his cigarette case and a light. Both were accepted tacitly but promptly. ‘You take care of all this place single-handed? That’s a lot of work for one.’
‘I manage,’ said Orrie, and looked with quickening curiosity through the smoke of his cigarette into George’s face. ‘You’re police, aren’t you? I saw you once when you picked up that chap who was firing ricks, up the valley.’
‘That’s right. My name’s Felse. You’ll have heard we fished a young fellow out of the Comer this morning?’ Everyone with an ear to the ground in Moulden had heard the news before ever the police surgeon reached the spot. ‘He was here with a visiting school party yesterday. You had to chase him off from where you were cordoning off the slip. That was the last you saw of him?’
‘Last I saw, yes,’ said Orrie, with a long, narrowed glance. ‘I finish here half past four, Wednesdays, I do a bit at the vicarage that night. I was gone before closing time—the vicar’ll tell you where I was. I told your chap, the one who came after me up home, ’bout nine that’d be. Seems there was some others saw him after I did, monkeying about by that cave-in again. But I tell you what,’ he said confidentially, ‘I reckon I know one place he’s been since then. If he hasn’t, someone else has. In my back shed. Not the tool-shed where I keep the mower and all that—the one down behind the orchard. I got a little work-bench in there, and me stores of sprays and weed-killers and potting compost. And I can tell when somebody’s bin moving me stuff around.’