‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you waiting, but I wasn’t even properly dressed…’
‘That’s all right,’ said George. ‘I regret having to fetch you over here, but this concerns you as being connected with this site, and I can’t afford to go over the ground twice. Sit down! You all know, of course, that Mr Hambro left here last night at very short notice. You know that he left a note stating definite intentions, though in very general terms. I am here to tell you that because of certain discoveries Mr Hambro is now listed as a missing person, and we have reason to suspect that the account given of his departure, whether by himself or others, is so far totally deceptive. No, don’t say anything yet, let me outline what we do know. He is stated to have left here late in the evening, having received a telephone call asking him to give an opinion on an antique offered for sale on the other side of England. He is understood to have packed all his belongings, loaded his car, left a note to explain his departure and apologise for its suddenness, and driven away at some time prior to half past eleven, when you, Mr Lawrence, arrived home and found his note. Now let me tell you what we also know. His car was driven into a quarry pool on the further side of Silcaster, probably during the night. It is now in process of being recovered, and has already been examined. Mr Hambro was not in it, either dead or alive, nor is there any trace of the suitcase he removed from here last night. We have, so far, no further word of him after he left here. We are treating this as a disappearance with suspicion of foul play.’
The murmurs of protest and horror that went round were muted and died quickly. To exclaim too much is to draw attention upon yourself in such circumstances; not to exclaim at all is as bad, it may look as if you have been aware of the whereabouts of the car all along, and may know, at this moment, where to find the man. Only Charlotte sat quite silent, containing as best she could, like pain suppressed in company, the chill and heaviness of her heart. If she had neither recognised nor even cared to recognise, until now, the extent to which Gus Hambro had wound himself into her thoughts and feelings since he regained his life at her hands, and how simply and with what conviction she had begun to regard him as hers, recognition was forced upon her now. Paviour already looked so sick and old that fresh shocks could hardly make any impression upon his pallor or the sunken, harried desperation of his eyes. Bill sat with his thin, elegantly-shaped, rather grubby hands conscientiously clasped round his knees, carefully posed but not easy. The fingers maintained their careful disposition by a tension as fixed and white-jointed as if they had been clenched in hysteria. Only Lesley, her mouth and eyes wide in consternation, cried out in uninhibited protest: ‘Oh, no! But that’s monstrous, it makes no sense. Why should anyone want to do him harm? What has he ever done…’
She broke off there, and very slowly and softly, with infinite care, drew back into a shell of her own, and veiled her eyes. She did not look at her husband; with marked abstention she did not look at anyone directly, even at George Felse,
‘I shall be obliged,’ said George impersonally, ‘if you will all give me statements on the events of yesterday evening, especially where and how you last saw Mr Hambro. I should appreciate it very much, Mr Paviour, if we might make use of the study. And if the rest of you would kindly wait in here?’
Paviour came jerkily to his feet. ‘I am quite willing to be the first, Chief Inspector.’ Too willing, too eager, in far too big a hurry, in spite of the fastidious shrinking of all his being from the ordeal to which he was so anxious to expose himself. George was interested. Was it as important as all that to him to get his story in before his wife got hers?
‘I should like to see Mrs Paviour first, if it isn’t inconvenient.’
‘But as a matter of fact,’ Paviour said desperately, ‘I believe I was the last person to see Mr Hambro…’
‘That will emerge,’ George said equably. ‘I’ll try not to keep any of you very long.’
It was useless to persist. Paviour sank back into his chair with a twitching face, and let her go, since there was now no help for it.
She was quite calm as she sat in the study, her small feet neatly planted side by side, and described in blunt précis, but sufficiently truthfully, how she had slipped out instead of going to bed, and wilfully staged that brief scene with Gus Hambro.
‘Not very responsible of me, I know,’ she said, gazing sombrely before her. ‘But there are times when one feels like being irresponsible, and I did. There was no harm in it, if there was no good. It was a matter of perhaps three or four minutes. Then my husband came.’ Her face was composed but very still, in contrast to her usual vivacity. It was the nearest he had ever seen her come to obvious self-censorship. ‘My husband,’ she said guardedly, ‘is rather sensitive about the difference in our ages.’
She had not gone so far as to mention the embrace, but her restraint spoke for itself eloquently enough.
‘So he ordered you home,’ said George, deliberately obtuse, ‘and you obeyed him and left them together.’
Her eyes flared greenly for one instant, and she dimmed their fire almost before it showed. Her shoulders lifted slightly; her face remained motionless. ‘I went away and left them together. What was the point of staying? The whole thing was a shambles. I wasn’t going to pick up the pieces. They could, if they liked.’
‘And did they?’ George prompted gently. ‘You know one of them, at least, very well. The other, perhaps, less well? But you have considerable intuition. What do you suppose passed between them, after you’d gone?’
‘Not a stupid physical clash,’ she said, flaring, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I’m thinking nothing, except what your evidence means, and what follows from it. I’m asking what you think happened between those two men. Of whom one, I would remind you, is now missing in suspicious circumstances.’
She shrank, and took a long moment to consider what she should answer to that. ‘Look!’ she said almost pleadingly. ‘I’ve been married to an older man a few years, and I know the hazards, but they’re illusory. I’ve known him jealous before, for even less reason, but nothing happened, nothing ever will happen. It’s a kind of game—a stimulus. He isn’t that kind of man!’ she said, in a voice suddenly torn and breaking, and closed her eyes upon frantic tears. They looked astonishingly out of place on her, like emeralds on an innocent, but they were real enough.
‘You’re very loyal,’ said George in the mildest of voices. Her momentary loss of control was over; she offered him a wry and reluctant smile. ‘So is he,’ she said, ‘when you come to consider it.’
‘And your husband joined you—how much later?’
The voice was still as mild and unemphatic, but she froze into alarmed withdrawal again at the question; and after a moment she said with aching care: ‘We occupy separate rooms. And we don’t trespass.’
‘In fact, you didn’t see him again until this morning?’ In a voice so low as to be barely audible, she said: ‘No.’
‘So he left,’ said George, ‘because you asked him to leave.’
‘I didn’t have to ask him in so many words,’ said Paviour laboriously. ‘I made it clear to him that it was highly undesirable that my wife should see him again. He offered to pack up and go at once, and make some excuse to account for his departure. I told you, I make no complaint against Mr Hambro, I bear him no grudge. I’m aware that the initiative came from my wife.’
There was sweat standing in beads on his forehead and lip. He had had no alternative but to tell the truth, since he had no means of knowing how fully Lesley had already told the same story; but his shame and anguish at having to uncover his marital hell, even thus privately, without even the attendance of Reynolds and his notebook, was both moving and convincing. A humiliation is not a humiliation until someone else becomes aware of it.