Orrie sat in a high-backed chair, his spine taut, his head raised, looked through them with his blue, inimical eyes, gathered his wits inside that monumental head of his like the garrison inside a fortress, and said nothing.
‘And why did you wait so long, Orrie? All those nice, safe hours of darkness, and never a move from you till broad daylight. What were you waiting for? For something that would make it unnecessary for you to take the risk? What did you hope would happen to let you off the hook? Until you realised it wasn’t going to happen, and got desperate.’
Orrie looked through him with eyes like chips of blue-stone, and made not a sound.
‘This is getting boring, isn’t it?’ said George amiably. ‘Perhaps if we enlarge the cast it may get a bit more interesting.’ He turned to Collins, who was sitting unobtrusively beside the door. ‘Ask all the others to come in and join us, will you?’
‘Since Orrie won’t talk about recent events,’ said George, when they were all assembled, ‘I suggest we hear what the other interested party has to say about what happened to him on Saturday night. I’m afraid we rather over-stated Mr Hambro’s condition, as you may have gathered. It’s true he was in an exhausted state, and slept heavily and long, but he was not under drugs, and his memory is not impaired. He did recover enough to talk to me for a few minutes last night, before I left, and he did tell me what I’m now asking him to tell you.’
And Gus told them, beginning tactfully at the point where he had parted from Stephen Paviour and packed his bag to leave Aurae Phiala. He was still slightly grey and drawn, still mildly astonished at being above the ground instead of under it, and his hands were bandaged into white cotton parcels; but otherwise, apart from presenting a mildly odd appearance in Bill Lawrence’s clothes, he was himself again. When he reached the apparition of the helmeted sentry there was an uneasy stir of doubt, wonder and sympathy, as if two at least of his hearers were entertaining the suspicion that he might, after all, be incubating delayed symptoms of concussion. He smiled.
‘Oh, no, it wasn’t any hallucination. I’ve handled it, it’s real enough. And I know exactly where it is, and we shall be recovering it, all in good time.’ All the while he talked he had an eye on Orrie, who sat like a stone demigod, apparently oblivious of them all, but so braced in his stillness that it was plain he missed nothing. ‘The wearer I didn’t see at close quarters. But it wasn’t Orrie. Not big enough. And then, the one who came behind and hit me had to be Orrie.’
He told that, too, the blow and the fall, the rattle of stones and metal as the shaft was filled in over him. ‘The rest you know. I made for the river as the only other way out I knew. It took me all night and all day, because there were a lot of places where I had to dig my way through.’ The details of that marathon crawl were irrelevant at that stage; he left them to the imagination.
‘And could you,’ asked George, ‘identify the man who hit you and tipped you down the shaft? From that one glimpse you had of him? Describe what you did see.’
‘It was dark, but there was fitful light. The man I saw was much taller than me—as tall as Orrie—or Mr Paviour. Though his attitude, leaning and striking, with his arm raised, may have made him look even bigger. He was in silhouette, no chance to see if he had a beard or was cleanshaven. His strength didn’t suggest an old man. To be honest, that’s all I could say.’
‘And could you, then, have identified him positively as anyone you know?’
‘No,’ said Gus with deliberation, his eyes studying Orrie from beneath their long lashes, ‘I couldn’t.’
The bluestone eyes kindled for one instant with a fierce spark of intelligence, and were dimmed again.
‘So that’s why we had to proceed with this obvious invitation to the murderer to try again,’ said George. ‘We had everything to gain, and he couldn’t know that he had nothing. Your mistake, Orrie. There are now no less than seven people who can identify you as the man who made a murderous attack upon Mr Hambro this morning. You’re not asking us to believe, are you, that there are two men around with the same urge—and the same acute need!—to silence Mr Hambro for good?’
Orrie was not asking them to believe anything. By the Comer, with the man he had murdered breaking out of his grave, he had never quivered or uttered a sound. There was nothing worth calling a nerve in his whole great body.
‘But I can’t believe in all this!’ protested Lesley suddenly, pounding her linked hands helplessly against her knee. ‘Look, I know it isn’t evidence, but I’ve known Orrie for years, he’s worked for us, and I thought I knew him so well. I still think so. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why should he do a thing like this? Oh, I know I saw him! I can’t forget it. But to me that means there’s more behind this—or else something’s happened to him, a brainstorm—he isn’t responsible for his actions any more. Why should he want to harm anyone? What motive could he possibly have?’
‘The usual motive,’ said George. ‘Gain. Not, perhaps, to harm anyone. But a very solid motive to get rid of Mr Hambro. Who is, I should mention—though of course you already know it, don’t you, Orrie?—Detective-Sergeant Hambro of the Art and Antiques Squad at Scotland Yard, an authority on Roman antiquities. He came here in the process of following the back-tracks of certain valuable pieces which have been turning up in suspicious circumstances in several parts of the world, and which can only have come from a handful of border sites, of which Aurae Phiala is one. Someone, in fact, has been secretly milking this place of treasure over a long period. And whoever he is, he was implicated deeply enough to kill unhesitatingly when an inquisitive boy accidentally stumbled on one gold coin from his remaining hoard, and unwisely hung around to hunt for more. His curiosity could have blown the whole racket wide-open. He had to go. Gerry Boden was suffocated; the same handy method—if you happen to be about twice as strong as your victim—that Orrie was using on Mr Hambro upstairs.’
‘But you’re not charging him with anything like that,’ protested Lesley. ‘Only with this attack this morning. How could he know anything about what Mr Hambro was doing here? None of us knew. He never told us anything. It seems you can’t even be sure these things came from here. If he’d been helping himself to valuable things like that, and turning them into money, why would he go on working hard for what we pay him here? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘It makes perfect sense,’ George pointed out, ‘as long as he still had treasures to dispose of, and kept them hidden here. Things like that can’t be unloaded on the market wholesale, like potatoes. It has to be done gradually and cautiously, with long intervals between.’
‘I see that,’ she admitted unhappily. ‘But in that case, what on earth has he done with the money he’s already made? He doesn’t spend much, that’s certain. And personally, I simply don’t believe he has much. He doesn’t own a thing but his small-holding, not so much as a second-hand car. He hasn’t even got a bank account. Stephen and I have sometimes changed cheques for him, if he got paid that way for some of the odd jobs he did in the village.’
It was at this point that Charlotte got up from her place and walked out of the room. In the curious peace of having Gus alive again, and his assailant in custody, she had been sitting back and letting these exchanges pass by her as impartially as she might have watched the Comer flowing by, until a few chance words pricked out of the back of her mind a small memory, a minute thing that fitted like a key into the whole complex of this mystery, and caused it to open like the door of a safe. She closed the door after her, and went purposefully up the stairs to Lesley’s room.