There were interesting implications here, if Orrie wasn’t imagining the prying fingers; as why should he? He wasn’t the imaginative kind, and a man does know how he puts down his own tools. The orchard lay well back from the riverside, and the wealth of old and well-grown trees between isolated it from the house. Gerry Boden had last been seen alive strolling negligently along the garden hedge, and somewhere along the course of that hedge he had vanished. Now if there should be a hole, or a thin place, inviting him through into the plenteous cover of the orchard, and the solitary shed in its far corner…
‘You don’t lock that shed?’
‘It’s got no lock. I keep thinking I’ll put a padlock on, but I never get round to it. Him,’ he said, with a jerk of his head towards Paviour’s house, ‘he’s always scared of having things pinched, but the stuff in there’s mine, no skin off his nose. Folks are pretty honest round here, I’m not worried. I do me own repairs—make me own spares when I need ’em.’
‘And there’s nothing missing this time?’
‘Not a thing, far’s I can see. Just somebody was in there, poking around, shifting things, passing the time nosing into everything, and thinking he’d put it all back the way it was before. Which you can’t do. Not to kid the one who uses the place regularly.’
‘You didn’t say anything about this to Detective-Sergeant Price.’
‘I didn’t know, did I? I hadn’t been back here. I only went into the place twenty minutes ago.’
‘Fair enough,’ said George. ‘How about coming down there with me now? No need to disturb the household, if we can come round to it from the other side.’
There was a navigable track that circled the perimeter, and brought the car round to the other side of the curator’s house and garden by inconspicuous ways. The shed was of wood, a compact, dark, creosoted building tucked into the corner of the shrubbery. Inside it smelled of timber and peat and wood-shavings. Various small packets and bottles and tins lay neatly but grimily along shelves on one side, folded sacks were piled in a corner, and full sacks stacked along the base of the wall. Under the single window was Orrie’s work-bench, a vice clamped to the edge of it, and a rack of tools arranged under the window-sill. He was comprehensively equipped—power drill, sets of spanners, sets of screwdrivers, planes, even a small modern lathe. In the fine litter of sawdust and shavings under the bench the morning light found a few abrupt blue glitters of metal.
George advanced only just within the doorway, and looked round him. There was dust and litter enough on the concreted floor to have preserved the latest traces of feet, though it was clearly swept reasonably often. And if Orrie had not already tramped all over it this morning, since his discovery, nosing out the signs of trespass, there just might be something to be found.
‘Did you move about much in here when you came in and realised you’d had an intruder?’
‘Didn’t have time. I never went no further than you are now, all I come for was my little secateurs, and they were on the shelf here inside the door. I reckoned I’d come back midday and have a look over everything, but I don’t think there’ll be anything missing. Yes, I did go a bit towards the window and had a quick glance round. That’s all.’
‘Then what made you so sure somebody’d been in? You were talking about something more than just a feeling.’
‘That!’ said Orrie succinctly, and pointed a large brown forefinger at the top right corner of the window, where his periodic cleaning had not bothered to extend its sweep.
He wasn’t clairvoyant, after all; he hadn’t even needed the tidy workman’s hypersensitive unease over his tools. In the small triangle of dust the tip of a finger had written plainly GB, and jabbed a plump round fullstop after the letters. The human instinct to perpetuate one’s own name at every opportunity, whenever more urgent occupation is wanting, had made use even of this mere three square inches of dusty glass. The act cast a sharp sidelight of acute intelligence upon Orrie’s remark about passing the time.
‘There’s the way things are lying, too,’ conceded Orrie, ‘but that was what took my eye right off.’
What had taken George’s eye was that splendidly defined fullstop. With the morning light slanting in here, and showing up every mote of dust and grain of wood-powder, the individual nodules of that fingertip showed even to the naked eye. Almost certainly the right fore-finger, unless Gerry Boden happened to be a southpaw. And he had impressed that print with careful precision—he or whoever it was. It wouldn’t take Sergeant Noble very long to find out.
‘Do any of the others ever come here?’ George asked. ‘Legitimately?’
‘Could happen,’ allowed Orrie indifferently, and shrugged. ‘Not often. Not lately. What for?’
‘Good! Then stay away from here today. Can you do that? If there’s anything you want, take it now.’
‘There’s nothing I want,’ said Orrie. ‘It’s all yours.’
George made two or three telephone calls from the nearest box, handed over the minute inspection of Orlando Benyon’s shed to the appropriate people, made contact with the police pathologist and his own chief at C.I.D. headquarters, left strict instructions about what news and reports should be channelled to his home number immediately, and what could wait, and drove with the exaggerated care and deliberation of sleeplessness back towards the village of Comerford, uncomfortably in transition to a suburban area, where he, and the unhappy parents of the boy Boden, lived within three doors of each other. One more hurdle, the highest, and then he could sleep. Whether the Bodens would be able to sleep was another matter. With sedatives, maybe. But not everyone responds to sedatives. Some people feel them as a kind of outrage and violation, and Boden was a strong-minded and passionate man. George was not looking forward to that interview. On the other hand, he would not for any money have delegated it to anyone else.
‘I hope you didn’t mind,’ said Lesley Paviour blithely, swinging the wheel of the old Morris nonchalantly as they negotiated the sharp turn by the downstream bend of the Comer, not very far from where Gerry Boden’s body had been towed ashore. ‘I had to get away from there for a few hours. Normally I can ride it. I mean, for God’s sake, I took it on, didn’t I? I don’t welch on my bargains, I really don’t! But under pressure, I tell you, it gets tight. But tight!’ She sat back in the driving seat, a neat, competent figure in a deep green spring suit as modest and suave as her own creamy countenance. ‘I’m a placid person,’ she said deprecatingly, ‘I have to be. But I’ve got my limits. I know when to duck out for a breather. Trouble is, I don’t always get such a marvellous excuse. So I know you won’t mind being made use of. Am I making you nervous? Driving, I mean?’
‘Not in the least. You drive well.’ And so she did, with verve and judgment, and certainly with decision. She smiled with quick pleasure at being praised.
‘If I had your friend’s Aston Martin, now, instead of this old thing!’
Charlotte declined to rise to this fly. They had seen nothing of Gus since he had withdrawn, she suspected with reluctance, after delivering her and her luggage at Paviour’s house. He had strung out the conversation, after the chief inspector’s departure, or made an attempt to, but without much backing from anyone else, and failing to get any invitation to remain, had finally taken himself off.