She went out with Lesley to the site, but George Felse was not in attendance, only Detective-Sergeant Price superintended the enlargement of the cleared section. It was Sunday morning, and the sound of church bells came pealing with almost shocking clarity through moist, heavy air, and below a ceiling of cloud. It had rained all night since about one o’clock, and the water of the Comer, grown tamed and clearer during the last two days, ran turgid and brown once more. Fitful sunlight glanced across its surface like the thrust of a dagger. The edge of the path, glistening pallidly, already subsided into the river.
‘We always go to church for morning service,’ said Lesley, with perfect indifference, merely stating the routine of the day. ‘If you’d like to come with us, of course, do, we’d be glad. But I rather thought it might not be the right brand for you, if you know what I mean.’
Charlotte had been brought up in a household cheerfully immune from any sectarian limitations, and not at all addicted to churchgoing of any kind, but the opening offered her was too good to miss. She said the right things, and was tactfully left to her own devices about the house when the Paviour car drove away to Moulden church.
As soon as they were gone she rang up George Felse.
It worried her a little that he didn’t seem worried. He listened, he was interested, mildly surprised, but not disturbed at all.
‘Or were you expecting this?’ she challenged suspiciously.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t expecting it, and I don’t know the reason for it. I don’t take this sudden errand very seriously, any more than you do. But there could be a good reason for it, all the same. I think it quite probable that he may have gone off after some lead of his own, something he didn’t want to make public.’
‘He’d still have found a way of communicating with you,’ said Charlotte firmly, ‘or with me.’ She made no comment on the implications of what she was hearing, because time was too precious, and in any case she had had it in mind all along that Gus Hambro was not quite what he purported to be. Indeed, one of the first things she had ever consciously thought about him when he first accosted her was that a face and manner so candid, and eyes so jokingly innocent, marked him out as a man who needed watching. She didn’t attempt to explain or justify her last remark, either, George must take it or leave it. Judging by the brief and thoughtful pause, he took it.
‘There may well have been no time for that before he left. Say, for instance, that he was following somebody. In which case he’ll get in touch as soon as he can.’
‘And if he can,’ she said flatly.
This pause was still briefer. ‘All right,’ said George. ‘No waiting. I’ll be over there later on, I’ve got things to do first. But for public consumption his going is accepted as offered. And in the meantime you can do two things for me. How is it you’re calling from the house?’
‘There’s no one here but me. They’ve gone to church.’
‘Good! Then first, go and tell Detective-Sergeant Price what you’ve told me, and what I’ve said. And second—what happened to this note? Is it destroyed?’
‘No, I’m sure Lesley just crumpled it up and left it on the table. It’s probably been thrown out with the crumbs.’
‘Find it if you can, and hang on to it. Would you know his handwriting?’
‘I’ve never even seen it,’ she said, surprised at the realisation, ‘except a weird scribble on a label tied round the neck of a plastic sack.’
‘Then get the note and hold it for me. I’ll be over before they come out of church.’
Charlotte hung up, and went to turn out the contents of the blue pedal bin in the kitchen, and there was the loosely-crumpled sheet of Bill’s graph paper ready to her hand. Quite certainly nobody was attempting to get rid of the evidence; nor had she really any doubt now that it was Gus who had written this mysterious farewell. Which still left the problem of why.
His senses were beginning to wilt in the earthy, smothering air. Twice in the last hour he had found the passage before him partially blocked, and the outer wall of the flue buckled inwards in a jagged heap of brick and soil, but each time there had been space enough for him to crawl through, with some difficulty and a good deal more terror. The tug of shifting earth at his shoulders brought the sweat trickling down over his closed eyelids, but the clogged space opened again, and brought him sprawling down to the brickwork of the floor, with no more damage than the nausea of fear in his mouth.
But the third time he ran his probing hand against a crumbling wall of earth ahead, there was no way through. The brickwork had been pressed down bodily under the weight of soil, and sealed the flue. His straight run home had been too good to be true from the start. There was nothing to be done but work his way painfully backwards, the flue being too narrow to allow him to turn, until he felt the first cross-flue open at his right elbow. If you can’t go through, go round, and get back on course as soon as an open passage offers.
He turned right, and then, with a premonition of worse to come, halted to consider what he was doing. What use was a sense of direction, down here in limbo? His only salvation was the Roman sense of order, that laid out everything at right-angles. Suppose he had to keep going on this new line past several closed flues? Keep count, Hambro, he told himself feverishly. Never mind relying on your memory, for every blind alley you have to pass, pocket a bit of tile—right pocket—every shard means one more you’ve got to make back to the left.
Into his pocket went one fragment of tile fingered out of the dirt. And at the next left turn another one, because here, too, the wall of earth was solid and impassable. And a third, and a fourth. Then it began to dawn on him that he was beneath the open centre of the caldarium, beneath land which had been cleared of its available masonry for local building purposes centuries ago, and for centuries had been under the plough, with a wagon-road obliquely crossing it. Constant use and the passing of laden carts had packed down the soil and settled everything into a safe, solid mass. No choice but to go where he still could, crossing the rectangle towards its right-hand boundary, where he had no wish to go, where there was no way out, and hope to God that somewhere one of these flues would have held up, and let him turn towards the river again.
The first that offered he tried, and it took him a few feet only to close up on him from both sides, and force him back. The second helped him to gain a little more ground before stopping him, and he pushed his luck a shade too hard in his hope and desperation, and brought down a slithering fall of bricks over his left arm. When he had extricated himself, with thundering pulse and shaken courage, and opened his eyes momentarily to blink the dust away, he saw that the luminous second hand in the comforting bright eye of his watch hung still, and the glass was broken. There, at eleven-thirteen in the morning of Sunday, went all sense of time; there was no measure to his ordeal any more.
Sometimes he put his head down in his arms and rested for a little while, where the going was better: but that was dangerous, too, because only too easily he could have fallen asleep, and the urgency of movement hung heavy upon him like the malignant, retarding weight of the darkness. He even kept his eyes open now, to ward off sleep the better. His gloves were in tatters, his fingers abraded and bleeding. And he must have been crazy to bring a damned awkward thing like that helmet with him on this marathon crawl, slung round his neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, by his tie threaded through its eye-holes; a clumsy lump hampering his movements at every turn, having to be hoisted carefully aside when he lay flat to rest, slowing him up in the bad patches, where it had to be protected from damage even at the cost of knocking a few pieces off his own wincing flesh. Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist. It was one of the finest things he’d ever seen of its kind, even if it had all but killed him, and he’d be damned if he’d leave without it.