‘We’ll make a few tests,’ said George, but without any great hope of achieving better results. ‘Then what did you do?’
‘I quit. You could say I came to my senses. If that was a snooper up there waiting for Rainbow, here was another down here, and I didn’t much like the character. Besides, butting into a twosome is a bit too much. I’m a retiring sort of chap by nature, I know my limitations. I packed it in and went home.’
Somebody came out from the porch, Bossie had said, not very long after Rainbow stopped playing. Simply walked away out of the lych-gate and went home. That fitted; so did the spot where Evan claimed to have abandoned his climb.
‘After all,’ said Evan reasonably, ‘I’d more or less found out what I wanted to know. What else could have sent Rainbow scurrying up the tower among all that junk and dust? Whatever he’d got had come from somewhere up there. I thought I knew now where to look. But I let well alone for a day or so, and then the news hit me, and you were in possession. I surrender! That is not at all my league. And you never found the membrane?’
George saw no reason to hedge on that point. ‘The fond remembrance of it, and that’s all. I’m as nose-down on the scent as you.’
‘Then whoever killed him has got it,’ said Joyce. His mild elderly voice was sharp and eager, the metaphor of hounds on a trail was no exaggeration. ‘That was why he died. So who was that up there? Somebody else he consulted as he did me? I doubt it. I’d given him the green light, he knew he wasn’t on a total loser. I don’t believe he’d have looked for another expert until he’d done every bit of work on it he could do himself, and made a thorough search for any other connecting leaves there might be to be found wherever this one was found. He wouldn’t want to share the glory or the profit.’
‘I don’t know about the profit,’ said George deliberately, ‘I don’t suppose that bothers you at all. But the glory might.’
‘Oh, it would, George, it would! I’d almost have tossed Rainbow off the tower myself, to get hold of that leaf. Supposing, of course, I could hope to lift a weight half as much again as mine. But I never got the chance. There was somebody there before me, and I went home.’
And clearly that was all that George was going to get out of this interview, apart from one very handsome yellow rose, which Evan Joyce bestowed on him at parting, with a forgiving smile. And it could all be the truth, but the ambiguous quality remained. A passion is a passion, whether for old letters for their own scholarly sake, or for money and kudos, or for a woman like Barbara. And that same old shoe might well have ventured higher, even if it couldn’t be certainly identified above. Naturally, too, Evan Joyce would fail to identify any voice in such circumstances, unless he could be sure it was not that of a native. He was part of the same landscape. That puts us alongside all the rest, Willie the Twig had said cheerfully, even if we do happen to be telling the truth.
In any case, where else would any of them want to be?
At evensong that Sunday the trebles of St Eata’s were unusually circumspect and serious, too thoughtful even to play noughts and crosses. Spuggy Price sang Bossie’s solo as though his heart was not in it. And the only message that passed along the choirstalls during the sermon was a note saying:
‘Deliggation to Bossie’s after serviss. Voluntears sine here.’ Toffee Bill had written it, and spelling was not his strong point.
By the time they foregathered in the furnace room, to the rolling sounds of a Buxtehude prelude played by Miss de la Pole, they had six volunteers, which all agreed was too many to be welcome to Mrs Jarvis at this time of night. In the end, Ginger, Toffee Bill and Jimmy Grocott were deputised to represent all, and report back next day on the school bus.
Jenny was neither surprised nor disconcerted to receive three solemn delegates asking after her son’s progress and requesting to see him. She let them in and sent them trooping up to Bossie’s bedroom, where the casualty sat enthroned, surrounded by books and puzzles, enjoying his notoriety. He looked in remarkably good shape, but for his grazes and the hint of a black eye, and his parents were comfortably sure by then that his constitution had survived the shock without damage, and there was no reason why he should not get up next day, and return to school in another day or two. Bossie himself was expecting as much; school was no penance to him. And the great thing was, as his parents had agreed privately, to go on living as normally as possible, and avoid giving him the idea that anyone was keeping a close eye on in him. Though, of course, they were!
Bossie shoved the accumulation of books into a single pile, and hoisted them to his bedside table to make room for his henchmen on the bed. ‘I thought you’d be along,’ he said complacently.
‘Things can’t very well be left as they are, can they?’ said Ginger emphatically. ‘Because, even if it was only Rainbow, murderers ought to be caught. And anyway, if he isn’t, he’s liable to have another go at knocking you off. Because he did, didn’t he?’
‘That’s what I think,’ agreed Bossie firmly, ‘and if you ask me, it’s what the police think, too. I’m sure they believed me.’
‘How much did you tell them?’ asked Toffee Bill.
‘Everything I could, everything that only drops us in the muck – not that anybody seems at all bothered about what we did. But you know I couldn’t tell them how I really got that parchment.’
‘No,’ they agreed, very gravely and resolutely, ‘of course you couldn’t.’
‘So we can’t leave it to the police,’ pointed out Ginger reasonably, ‘because they’ve only got half a tale. Where do you reckon that thing is now? You think he’s got it?’
‘Of course he has. Rainbow must have had it on him, he was cagey enough about it, and nobody’s found it since. He’s got it, all right. And by now he’s had time to study it, too.’
‘But there was nothing on it, not really,’ objected Jimmy. ‘Nothing for him to get excited about.’
‘That’s what we thought! But there was, there must have been. Something he could find in that old writing that was on it, even if it was faint. We knew where the parchment came from, he’s had to find out by studying it, but there must have been some clue there for him to decypher. I bet you anything he’s got a fair idea now where to look, to see if there’s any more of it to find.’
‘It must be something pretty marvellous,’ said Toffee Bill, staring round-eyed at treasures in his mind. ‘I mean, to make him want to steal the paper in the first place, let alone what he did to Rainbow. There could be a clue in it, couldn’t there, to some place where they buried the church plate, when those chaps came to dissolve the monasteries. Or perhaps where the prior hid all the money that was left, when he was shoved out on to the roads, so he or somebody else could sneak back and collect it. Only maybe they killed him, and he couldn’t come back for it.’
‘We don’t know what it is,’ said Ginger firmly, ‘but we do know it must be something important. What matters is, what do we do about it? We can’t tip off the police! If it was only us it would be all right, but it isn’t only us. And still we can’t just do nothing. So what do we do?’
‘We tackle it ourselves.’ Bossie squinted ferociously through his corrective lenses, and scrubbed at his grazes, which were beginning to itch. ‘Even if he’s found a clue to the general area where he has to look, it’s still a whacking great barracks of a place, unless he knows just where to search he could spend months going over the whole show. But I know exactly where the leaf came from, we can start looking right there. What we’ve got to do is beat him to the treasure, whatever it is, and then, when we’ve got something to show, we can hand over to the police, and let them do the rest. We can easily make up a cover story for how we happened to hit on the right spot. It could be just plain luck, we don’t have to split on anybody. If we simply say: Just look what we found, and look where we found it – all innocent! – they’d have to accept that.’