‘The organ first,’ said George.
Rainbow’s music-case was still lying on the organ-bench, unfastened, sheet music fanning out from it. George looked round at the demigod’s view of the church from this angle, and up at the correctively awesome vista of pipes. Organs are designed to prostrate the onlooker with humility before their vastness and beauty, and exalt their handlers into daemonic self-glorification. But here everything was neat, placid and undisturbed; here there had certainly been no sudden assault, no life and death struggle. The floor was clean, every surface dustless, everything in order.
‘Right, now the tower.’
Down to the body of the church again, and along to the west end, to the curtained alcove and the narrow stairway that led to the bellringers’ room. This, again, was regularly used and scrupulously cleaned, no dust to trap intruding footprints. The looped ropes of an eight-bell peal dangled motionless, their padded grips striped spirally in red, white and blue cotton, like barbers’ poles. A fair amount of light came in from Gothic lancets. In one corner an open-treaded stairway, broad, solid and safe, slanted upwards into a narrow, dark trap above. George climbed, and emerged into a sort of attic limbo below the still invisible bells. A stout, boarded floor, roughly finished, an enclosing scent of old timber, and a sense of being suspended in half-light between two worlds. In the far corner another step-ladder, still with broad treads, pursued its upward way. Here people seldom came, and very few of them. Here there was dust, moderately thick, peacefully still, with the furred neatness of undisturbed places.
‘Here it gets more interesting,’ said Brice. ‘Look here, on this first stair. More than one set of feet has trodden up the middle, mostly the prints are overlaid and scuffed, but here there’s one left foot that stepped well to the side of the tread, and the mark’s quite clear. We’ve followed all the tracks up. This one just doesn’t seem to occur again, unless he very carefully trod always in the middle where the dust was already disturbed. It looks as if somebody got this far, and then changed his mind.’
‘And there are two sets of tracks beyond?’ asked George.
‘Two detectable. Could be more, but definitely two. But not this one. Or never distinct beyond this point.’
The soft dust, securely settled, had taken an excellent impression. An old shoe, trodden down at the heel, unevenly weighted, and with a distinct crack across the sole. A print that suggested a smallish foot in an over-large shoe, the foot of an older man who liked his comfort, and clung to the old friends that ensured it.
‘You’ve isolated and copied everything above that might be useful? Right, up we go!’ But even so George trod carefully, up into the dimly-lit bell-chamber, smelling of clean, dry must, and haunted by monstrous, still bronze shapes in the gloom. A large area of floor here, and only a runged ladder continuing the ascent. There was also a quantity of debris stacked in corners, left behind from the renovations, carved stones so weathered that the carving was almost obliterated, bits of voussoirs half worn away with corrosion but retaining a shape someone hadn’t wanted to throw away. All too massive to provide handy weapons, but the suggestion was there. And there were two huge but sadly decayed wooden chests, one with a disjointed lid propped back against the wall, and layer below layer of discoloured papers spread in some disorder within. George crossed to look more closely, for though age and damp had marked the contents in brownish ripples, only some of them were filmed with a layer of dust, and even that only superficial, and some of those half-uncovered below were perfectly clear of dust. The lid had not been thus open long, the contents had been only recently disturbed. He read titles of Victorian magazines, Ivy Leaves, Harmsworth Magazine, Musical Bits, and the modest headings of parish magazines. And some older, Gentleman’s Magazine, The Grand, as far back as the late eighteenth century. The floor beside the chest was trodden more or less clear of dust, dappled with treads so that no clear print was visible.
‘Somebody was interested,’ said George.
‘Yes, sir, and not so long ago. Maybe more than one, but one very recently indeed. But I doubt if they found much of anything.’
‘Not to interest Rainbow, one would imagine. This stuff might be treasure to a social historian, but not to an antiquarian in it for the money. No great value there. Unless, of course, there was some unusual item among the collection. We’ll have to go through all this in detail, but on the face of it it isn’t his cup of tea. Leave it just as it is. And meantime, we’ll ask the vicar if anyone has been up here, legitimately, in the last few months. There could be occasions when need arose.’
‘Well, above here it’s by ladder. The dust’s been rubbed off the middle of the rungs, as you’d expect, but not much else to be found. No traces of blood, or anything. I’ll lead the way.’
The ladders, built into place, proceeded by four short stages, making the circuit of the square tower, and brought them out by a low and narrow wooden door into daylight on the leads. The doorway, pointed Gothic in relatively new stone, was accommodated in the wall of the single corner turret, rising nine feet above the general level of the parapet, which was breast-high to a man of middle height. And abandoned to weather and moss in the corner by the turret lay the obvious fragments of the old stone voussoirs from the former archway, a few pitted and crumbling strips of moulding, a couple of decorative bosses worn to the fragility of shells.
‘Any indication of where he went over? It would be this side, wouldn’t it?’ After that spiral ascent it took a few seconds to regain a sense of direction, but a glance down over the parapet located the spot where Rainbow’s body had fallen. And even without Brice’s eager demonstration, there were the faint, pale streaks where nails had clawed ineffectively at the crest of the stonework. The embrasures between the merlons of the embattled wall dropped to waist-level. Not so hard, perhaps, to grip a man round the knees and hoist him over the edge. But still improbable for anyone to overbalance and fall. ‘Yes, that’s clear enough. He grabbed for the solid wall on either side of the embrasure.’
‘And there are two or three dark spots here that could be blood.’ Brice showed them, incredibly insignificant to be the only signs of a man’s death-blow, but blood, almost unquestionably. A fast bash and a heave over the edge, as Reece Goodwin had said.
George went back to the pile of stone fragments in the corner, and stood looking down at them attentively. Moss had bound them into a coagulated mass, a few small tufts of grass had found enough soil at the edges to survive. The one long strip of stony pallor, devoid of its thin green covering, showed like a scar. Something about ten inches long and no more than two wide, slightly curved, had been removed from there recently. A broken piece of moulding from the doorway arch? Whatever it was, the bare leads showed no sign of it now.
‘Supposing you had just used a length of stone to break a man’s skull, and tipped him over here into the churchyard,’ said George thoughtfully, ‘what would you do with the weapon? To make it disappear most effectively?’
‘Easy,’ said Moon promptly. ‘I’d throw it off the tower on the other side. Not only because that would separate it as far as possible from the body, in a churchyard which I’ve got to admit is a right tangle, too thickly populated ever to get mown properly – but on that side the congestion is worst and the disintegration most advanced. That’s the oldest part. Looking for a slice of stonework there would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
‘Pity,’ said George with sympathy, ‘because that’s just what you and your boys are going to be doing as from now.’