When she came back into the study, as calmly as she had left it, and as quietly, Lesley was still warmly arguing the case for Orrie. And Orrie, though he had not turned his head, now and again turned his stony eyes and let them rest upon her.
‘But you see how Orrie’s behaved throughout, not at all suspiciously, quite the opposite. You agree he told you all about the Boden boy hiding in his shed all that time…’
‘That was a very intelligent move,’ agreed George, ‘and he could well afford it. It didn’t implicate him in the least—quite the opposite—and it did underline his cooperative zeal. It cost him nothing, and made him look good.’
‘And last night,’ she pressed on, ‘Orrie was urging us to have all that slope concreted up, to make it safe. Would he do that, if he had valuables hidden there?’
‘By now,’ said George, ‘he has nothing hidden there. What was left was almost certainly removed on Wednesday night, immediately after the boy was killed.’
‘Then where is it now? If you could find some of these coins and things in his possession, that would go far towards proving it. But I don’t believe in it. I’m certain Orrie wouldn’t at all mind having his cottage searched, but I’m even more certain you wouldn’t find anything guilty there.’
Charlotte leaned forward, and held out in her open palm the smallest of Lesley’s keys.
‘And I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that you’d be equally willing to open your safe-deposit box at the bank, where we went to put in a package last Thursday. A small package, but very heavy. For Orrie!’
They had all turned to stare at her, Lesley wide-eyed and mute, her kitten-face pale and bright in wonder. Charlotte had half-expected to have the key indignantly snatched from her, but Lesley hardly glanced at it, only once in a puzzled way, as if she was too stunned at this moment to connect with her usual aplomb. Her smooth brows contracted painfully, frowning back into past occasions, for the first time with doubt and dread. She looked from Charlotte to Orrie, a blank, bewildered question, more than half afraid of encountering an answer. Then at George, as being in authority here, and deserving some part of her attention.
‘Yes, that’s true, Charlotte and I did go to the bank in Comerbourne. I did have a little box to put in my safe-deposit, Orrie asked me to keep it for him. We’ve done it before, you know—I don’t remember how often, but several times. He lives in rather a lonely place, and these days one hears such… We never thought anything about it, why should we? Just keeping things for him a little while, until he needed them and asked for them out. I know he put an old brooch of his mother’s in there once, when someone told him it might be valuable, and he was thinking of selling it. They didn’t usually stay in long…’
She looked at Orrie again, briefly, and the monolith had certainly stirred, and the blue eyes quickened uneasily for an instant. She looked at George, and her own green eyes were wide and gleaming with realisation and disquiet.
‘Now I don’t know where I am! I don’t know anything! Can it have been that?’
‘If you have no objection to my taking charge temporarily of your key,’ said George, ‘and if you’ll agree to accompany me to your bank and open your safe-deposit, that can be answered, can’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said in a whisper. And even lower, almost to herself: ‘I didn’t know! I didn’t know!’
The key passed into George’s hand. The granite monolith had perceptibly moved, heaving its great head round to stare at the small thing changing hands. If stone can shudder, the brief convulsion that shook Orlando Benyon was just such a movement. But his mouth stayed shut; only now tightly, violently shut, as if at any moment it might break open and breathe fire.
‘Of course,’ said George reasonably, ‘there are difficulties in this theory. Orrie has never in his life been out of England, seldom, I imagine, out of Midshire. Two of the objects recovered in this case surfaced in Italy and Turkey respectively. I don’t doubt even Orrie could sell or pawn a gold coin in a good many places here in England, and get away with it, but he’d hardly have the knowledge or the address to work the trade on a big scale. This is a difficult, specialised market—unscrupulous enough if you know where the fences are, and which collectors don’t care whether they can ever show their collections, but otherwise rather dangerous. There are plenty of enthusiasts who are quite satisfied with gloating in secret. But you have to know where to find them. Somehow it seems to me that Orrie is hardly in that league.’
Orrie’s eyes swivelled again, silently signalling his awareness of every move for and against him, and still reserving his own defence in this defenceless position.
Lesley sat back with a sharp, defeated sigh, seeming for a moment to have relinquished a field that was out of her control. She pondered for a moment in depressed silence, and then suddenly her slight body arched and stiffened, like a cat sighting a quarry or a foe. She seemed to be in two minds whether to speak or hold her peace. Her rounded eyelids, delicately veined like alabaster, rolled back from an emerald stare.
‘Chief Inspector, a day or so ago you said there must be an expert involved. I didn’t believe in it then, now I begin to see what you mean. You even mentioned a name—Doctor Morris. He was here just before he went abroad for this Turkish year of his. He brought the text of his book about this place. We were just about closing up the small dig we had that autumn, it was October already, but it had been a good season. And you know something? I’d never known Doctor Morris to speak disparagingly of Aurae Phiala until then, never. And yet he went away from here, and spent three weeks on that text in Turkey before he posted it to the publishers. And you know what the finished book is like. Deliberately playing down this site! I can’t call it anything but deliberate. Why? Why? There has to be a reason! And that dig—it never produced much—not to our knowledge, that is!—it was still open when he was here. Bill will tell you. He visited then, he knows. Wouldn’t it account for everything, if Alan Morris stumbled on a really rich discovery while he was here, and kept it dark? If he was tempted, if he moved his finds, put them in a secret place, and left them hidden until he could get them away? He went straight from here to Turkey. And Charlotte tells me nobody’s heard from him since.’
She looked at Gus, who was watching her with a guarded face. ‘It’s your case, you know more about this than I do. If you’ve been working in contact with all these other countries, and thinking on these lines—I mean about the need for an expert to run the show—then I can’t believe that you’ve never matched up these times, and considered the possibility of a connection between Doctor Morris’s exit from England and the beginning of these deals in Roman valuables. I say considered the possibility, that’s all.’
‘The police of several countries have made the connection,’ said Gus drily. ‘They could hardly avoid it.’ He carefully refrained from looking at Charlotte.
‘Then you didn’t come here just to look at one of several places that might have been looted—you came here because the connection with Doctor Morris made this the most probable. And you weren’t likely to lose interest and go away again,’ she added, ‘when you ran head-on into Charlotte on the premises, and found out who she was.’
This time Gus did look at Charlotte, fleetingly and rather apprehensively, and even at this crisis he had not lost his engaging ability to produce a blush at will.
‘But will someone tell me,’ said Charlotte, ignoring the phenomenon, ‘why, if my great-uncle found a valuable hoard here and kept his mouth shut about it, he didn’t simply pack the lot up and take it abroad with him then?’