‘Flourishing, I’m glad to say. His parents have taken him home. Give him a couple of days and he’ll be fit as a flea. Thanks to you!’
‘No word yet on the hit-and-run car?’
‘We’ve got a general call out for it, but there’s probably no noticeable damage, and Bossie could give no clear account of it, naturally enough. But there’s something you may be able to help me with.’
‘If I can,’ she said at once, and led the way into her small sitting-room. She was wearing slacks and a loose Chinese blouse, no trace today of the splendour she had thought appropriate for dinner in public with Willie the Twig. It was as if she saw the thought pass through George’s mind, for she smiled rather wryly, and said simply: ‘The first time I met him he said to me: “I don’t work my way round, I go straight across!” That’s good enough for me, too. If I had cloth of gold, I’d wear it for him. George – may I go on calling you George? – I’m sorry Arthur’s dead, I didn’t dislike him, and he was never unfair to me. But what we had was a business arrangement, understood if never stated. And my fidelity was not among the things he was buying. Not that I’ve handed it out freely up to now, but it’s mine to give. It was!’ she amended, and glowed briefly. ‘Just to put you in the picture!’
‘I begin to think you’re psychic,’ George admitted.
‘No, just sharp. I’ve had to be. I don’t mind being misunderstood by outsiders, but I like to get things straight with friends. Without prejudice to your job! You run me in whenever you think it justified. Go ahead, tell me how I can be useful.’ And this time she brought a drink for him without even asking, Scotch and water, to prove the quality of her memory.
‘We’ve learned,’ said George, ‘that a week before his death your husband got hold of a document purporting to be a leaf of parchment dating back to around the thirteenth century. Our information indicates that this was a genuine membrane, but deliberately faked up with some new traces of script to indicate re-use after cleaning. Now how capable would he have been of interpreting and valuing a thing like that? How scholarly was he? He knew Latin, for instance?’
Barbara’s eyebrows had soared into her hair. ‘Well, he’d done Latin, as you might say. I wouldn’t put it much above O level, though.’
‘This was a thing in which, I imagine, the surface fraud wouldn’t be hard to spot. At least to suspect. But what was underneath may have been quite another matter. He’d want to be sure before he either pursued or discarded it. For instance again, was he competent in unextended mediaeval Latin? They used a baffling sort of shorthand. Would he be able to fill out a code like that?’
‘No,’ said Barbara without hesitation. ‘He’d be interested, all right, he knew things like that could be pure gold, but what he really knew his way about in was pictures, china and furniture. You can’t be expert in everything. What matters is to know just where to go for the expertise in the lines that aren’t specifically yours. If he had got hold of something like that, he’d need help to assess it.’
‘And he’d take that risk? Consult someone else who might be fired with ambition at sight of the thing.’
‘He’d have to, wouldn’t he? It would be a far worse risk, from his point of view, to stake on it without being sure he was on to something good. He couldn’t risk being made to look a fool. You only have to lose your credibility once in his business.’
‘Can you suggest to whom he might go for an opinion?’
‘I can suggest to whom he wouldn’t,’ said Barbara with conviction. ‘Not to anyone in his own line. Not within the trade. Two reasons. Those would be the last people he’d risk exposing himself to, in case he was making a fool of himself. And those would be the first people he’d suspect of having designs on his find if it did turn out to be priceless.’
‘Who, then? A benevolent scholar, who’d look upon such a thing as an interesting study rather than potential money?’
‘I would say so. Helpful acquaintances like, say, Mr Jarvis, would never think of making capital out of a professional’s confidences.’ The thought made her look again at the possibility, and see more in it than immediately met the eye. ‘You don’t think he really did go to Mr Jarvis?’ She was thinking of Bossie, but of course she didn’t know that the membrane had come from Bossie in the first place. ‘You don’t think there could be any connection, surely, with what happened to that child? This is all getting a bit sinister and suggestive, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said George, ‘he didn’t go to Sam. We know that.’
Interesting, though, to think he might have done just that, Sam being the last person on earth to suspect of coveting somebody else’s discovery or taking advantage of somebody else’s request for help. ‘But thanks for the advice, I think you’ve put me on the right lines.’
For with Sam already eliminated, the supply of first-class classical scholars ready to hand in Middlehope, ruling out, possibly, the vicar, who would certainly not have been consulted in the circumstances, was narrowed down to one.
Professor Emeritus Evan Joyce lived in a rambling stone cottage a little way up the valley, with half an acre of garden, a few old fruit trees, about seven thousand books which lined the walls of all the rooms, and a handsome old desk of enormous proportions, situated in a large window and admirable for spreading out several files of notes, translations and authorities, without actually adding a line to the manuscript about the Goliard poets. The visual effect was impressive, the actual business of rambling among these fascinating properties was ravishing, and the fact that every line he pursued was a digression only added to its charm. He had lived with the fully-realised vision of his magnum opus so long that there was absolutely no prospect of his ever producing it in the flesh. There was no need, it already existed, complete and perfect in his mind.
‘Why, yes,’ he said readily, when George put the question to him, ‘he did come to consult me, in confidence. But that was the week before he got killed, on the Saturday evening. He brought a leaf of parchment, as you say, and wanted my views on whether it was of any importance. Somebody’d been monkeying with it, on the face of it it was a simple fake, but I think he knew that, even if he didn’t say so. But the original cleaning had been very cursory, and there was another script below. It looked highly promising. I thought the text could be recovered more or less complete, given a little effort and patience, and I suggested he should leave it with me and give me time to try and work it out.’
‘He didn’t, by any chance?’ asked George wistfully, but without much hope. That leaf of parchment was beginning to beckon like the missing link, the key to everything that had happened and was about to happen.
‘He did not! The suggestion made him jump, all right, but back, not forward. I must have looked a good deal too interested, and too eager, he changed his mind about trusting me. And from what you say, I suppose I’d told him what he wanted to know. I’d made it plain there was something genuinely promising there. He practically snatched it back, and thanked me, and said he’d like to try it himself first. I tried to get him to tell me where he’d found it, but he turned deaf, and I never did get to know. You haven’t found the membrane among his effects, then, I’m afraid? If you have, I wish you’d let me have a few days to work on it.’
For all his gentle person and distracted ways, there was a hungry gleam in his eye at the thought, a spark of real and possibly lawless passion. Unworldly scholars, as well as sharp antique-dealers, may develop unscrupulous lusts after such treasure as mediaeval manuscripts.
‘No such luck, it seems to have vanished. But thanks for filling in one gap. You didn’t think of volunteering the information as soon as the news of his death went round?’