Within five minutes more of gentle erosion, using only his hands, he touched something that brought him up short, freezing like a pointer, every nerve taut.
“He’s here. This is cloth I’m fingering. Not just clothes— feels like blanket. Somebody wrapped him up. I can feel bone inside the cloth. You’d better find me a brush, sir, something soft, I don’t want to break him…”
The heat and the rank, earthy smell in the cellar had become unbearable. One young constable had had to withdraw hurriedly, and hadn’t come back, small blame to him, and another was looking so green that George found a reason for sending him aloft before he collapsed. In the centre of the minor hell they created, Barnes sat on his heels, intent and immune, a compassionate man obsessed by his calling, and smoothed away methodically the clinging soil from the folds of a carefully wrapped blanket, now frayed into lace. A long shape, tapering away to the spot just in front of where Barnes crouched and stroked and meditated. With every motion of his hands the swathed body surfaced out of the clinging soil. Not a tall man, not above medium height. Intact enough to yield measurements without trouble, and measurements would show whether the coat could be his coat, the clothes in the suitcase his clothes. And emphatically a man, not a woman; a woman is a different shape, at least until she is merely a bundle of bones, and what was inside this blanket was decidedly more than a skeleton.
“That’s it, sir,” reported Constable Barnes solicitously. “I can rig a couple of slings under him nicely now, and he’ll do fine. I mean, we’ve got to think about burying him again decent, haven’t we? And there’ll be relatives to think about— they wouldn’t like it if we damaged him, and nor would I.”
He ran his hand tentatively beneath the swathed skull, and tender was not too involved and not too personal a word for his touch, and yet his detachment preserved him from passion. George made a note on the most sacred tablet of his mind that he must have Barnes in the plainclothes branch as soon as it could be contrived.
Somewhat after midnight they hoisted out without further damage the body of X, sent for the police van and the pathologist, and settled down to the minute examination of the dead man’s belongings. Continuing, at the same time, the laborious sifting of every ounce of soil that had been excavated from his unofficial grave.
The van came to take away the body at half past two. Reece Goodwin, aggrieved at losing a night’s sleep but gratified by the bizarre circumstances, had already made a preliminary examination of the remains by that time, carefully unwrapping him from the cocoon of blanket which had preserved him to a remarkable extent. The comparative dryness and coldness of the soil had tended to preserve, also. What they had found was partially a skeleton, partially mummified. The skull was a skull, clothed in dried remnants of flesh but nothing more. The clothes tended to crumble at a touch, and had consequently been touched as little as possible, for they still had, in places, texture and even colour, and the best people to draw conclusions from those were the men at the laboratory. But the shoes, almost immaculate, had challenged observation; almost everything the shoes had to tell they had already surrendered, before he was carefully wrapped up again and whisked away.
The mortuary van drove up as quietly as possible to the door, and bore away the remains with the minimum of noise and fuss. But when George closed the front door very softly and turned back towards the cellar stairs, there was Robert in the doorway of the drawing-room, lean, erect and stiff as stone, staring at him.
“Were you looking for me, Chief Inspector?”
“No, Mr. Macsen-Martel. There’ll be no need for me to trouble you anymore until morning. I should go to bed if I were you.”
He wanted to know, of course, desperately he wanted to know not merely what they had found—presumably he knew that already, since he was here and wide awake—but what it meant to them, what they intended, how they viewed his own position. What he did not want was to ask; and yet a man totally innocent of what lay in the cellars of his house would have asked long ago, and he must know it. Perhaps he had made a mistake in not overflowing with questions when the search was proposed, but it was late and difficult to begin now, all he could do was try to precipitate questioning from the other side. And that he wouldn’t do, either, because for some strange reason time meant something to him in this connection, and a part of his mind was surely concentrated even now on conserving every moment he could.
“It would hardly be very easy to sleep, in the circumstances,” he said with the fleeting ghost of a smile.
“I understand that, but it would be well to try. There’s no reason at all for you to stay up. In the morning I shall have some questions to put to you, probably, but not now.”
“You’ve finished for the moment?” He did not believe it, but it was one more try to extract a grain of information without actually asking for it.
“No, we shall be here. There are routine matters to be taken care of, but I need not trouble you with them at this stage.”
For a moment they stood watching each other, both faces polite, controlled and completely closed. Robert was not going to ask, and plainly George was not going to tell him anything.
“I hope Mrs. Macsen-Martel is resting quietly?”
“Thank you, yes—she is asleep.”
There was no need to be in any way uneasy about Robert’s movements. He never had deserted his family and his family house, and he would not desert it now. Whatever happened, he would be here to face it.
“Good night,” said George.
“Good night, Chief Inspector.” He drew back into the inexpressibly forlorn nocturnal emptiness of his drawing-room, and quietly closed the door.
CHAPTER 10
« ^ »
Inevitably, the word had gone round before morning. Sergeant Moon had sometimes been known to claim that people in Middlehope passed the news around in their sleep. The gathering pressmen began to be turned back firmly by a patrol car at the drive of the Abbey, and though Middlehope people never collected in a crowd and stared, or never directly, more than usual of them passed by the site, either on the road or above on the hill, and in their oblique way observed and registered everything there was to be seen, and not a few things that could only be guessed at. It became expedient to make an official statement that a body had been found, before it was made unofficially over every counter and bar and garden hedge in Mottisham. George took care of that job early, to get it over and get the press off his back. The information issued was the minimum possible in the circumstances, simply that the body of a man had been found, in undisclosed circumstances but on the Abbey premises, that investigations had been continuing all night and would continue, and that no further statement could yet be issued, pending full examination of the remains. All other questions he quashed for the moment. That was enough for them to know on his authority, however much they—or at least the natives—might add all too accurately on their own.
So now everyone knew; it had reached the stage of being acknowledged, and would soon be in print. The evening paper normally got its first edition into the shops by noon, today they would probably beat that time.
The village had other news to circulate, a curious corollary to the headlines from the Abbey. The doctor had been early at the house again, as everyone knew, for his had been the only non-police vehicle allowed past the gate. What was more, he was expected to pay a second visit after surgery was finished. Not merely bronchitis now, said the village darkly, but pneumonia. And for all her hardihood, the old lady hadn’t that much strength to fall back on, it was going to be touch and go.
Jenny Pelsall brought the news to the garage when she came at eight to open the office. It was worse than Dinah had ever dreamed possible. The previous evening had been a forewarning, yes, but not of this. They’ll be getting up the floor, Alix had said, and in the dusk and the confusion of her mind of yesterday, Dinah had believed her; but in the security and ordinariness of home it was hard to retain that belief. And now in full daylight, on a surprisingly bright and sunny morning—perhaps too bright to last—the stunning truth appeared monstrously inappropriate and brutal. In particular the old woman’s illness, which evidently had not been diplomatic after all.