“Yes,” he agreed composedly, “I understand.”
“By now I believe you must know, like everyone else, the gist of the statement I’ve issued to the press. But I’ll repeat it for your benefit. Under the floor of your wine-cellar we have found the remains of a man’s body. The press has not, as a matter of fact, been told where we found him, but I am telling you. I am not yet in a position to give more details. You, on the other hand, may be able to tell me a good deal more about him, if you will.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” said Robert. “It’s known, of course, that the abbey had rather a bad reputation in its last years, and there are a number of stories of brawls and stabbings among the few brothers left in the community.” His voice was so laboured and slow that he might almost have been falling asleep there before George’s eyes, and small wonder if he did, for almost certainly he hadn’t closed his eyes all night. “Very regrettable, I admit, to find a body on these premises, but perhaps not all that surprising? The house may even be over a part of the old cemetery that was private to the brothers.”
“I admire your gallantry, but I hardly think you’ve accounted adequately for our find. You think he may be a relic of the final disorders of this house in the sixteenth century, do you?”
“It’s the first thought that occurs to me,” said the weary voice steadily.
“In brown laced shoes, made in Leicester not ten years ago? With a fibre-glass suitcase full of clothes on top of him? Try second thoughts!”
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry!”
“Oh, come, you can do better than that. This is your house. We have been excavating in your cellar. The outside world can hardly break in here to bury its bodies. Very few people have access here.”
Silence.
“Do you know who this man is? And how he got here?”
Silence.
“You can do yourself no good by withholding information, we’ve recovered sufficient personal possessions to identify him ten times over. It’s merely a matter of a few days’ work, why not tell us now?”
“I can’t help you,” said the voice, with carefully husbanded and curiously restored strength, as if George had said something inadvertently encouraging. And maybe he had. A few days, he had said. Maybe a few days was salvation. Or at least the bare hope of salvation.
“We are dealing with a death not many years old, with a man who apparently entered your house bringing a large suitcase of clothes with him, and did not leave again. Are you suggesting that this could happen without your knowledge?”
“I am not suggesting anything. I have nothing to say.”
“Then how do you account for such a discovery as we have made?”
“I don’t account for it. I have nothing to say.”
The voice had found a dead level of stoical endurance from which it did not intend to be moved.
“Very well, we’ll leave it at that for the moment, but I must ask you not to attempt to leave the house.”
Surprised, Robert looked up out of his entrenched and undramatic misery with a sudden gleam of life; he had not expected a respite once the questioning began. “I have no intention of leaving. In any case I couldn’t while my mother is in this state. I spoke with my employers yesterday, they will not be expecting me.” He said “my employers” quite naturally and simply, like any other clerk obliged to request leave of absence because of family illness.
“Please believe me, I sincerely hope your mother’s condition, at least, will soon cease to be any bar to your freedom of movement.”
Robert had turned towards the door, but he halted for a moment and looked back; it seemed that he was about to say something, and by the sudden impulsive movement of his lips something a little less guarded and defensive. But after all he swallowed the words unspoken, and went quietly out of the room.
Sergeant Moon came over to join them at a little before ten. In the antechamber to the cellar they had set up trestle tables and rigged their lights for an on-the-spot examination of suitcase, contents and coat, before they were passed on to the forensic laboratory. Within, Constable Barnes and Detective Constable Reynolds continued to sift the heap of soil doggedly for further treasures, before consigning it again to the depths of the trench. But what they already had, as George saw when the locks of the suitcase had been sprung and the clammy lid carefully raised, was going to be more than enough. The case contained, and in a remarkably good state of preservation though pulpy to the touch and smelling of graveyard clay, everything a man would ordinarily take with him on a journey, a man not overblessed with money or goods, but still sufficiently provided, and in fact rather neat in his packing. The case itself had once been the most imposing item in the collection; it bore all the marks of its burial, but singularly few others, no scratches defacing a surface which was still smooth and dark once the soil was wiped away.
“New,” said Sergeant Moon with admirable brevity, thumbing earth away from the corner of blue. “Bought for his last trip.”
The clothes, however, were not new. The underclothes were mended, the shirts had slightly frayed collars. Shaving tackle, handkerchiefs, sweaters—some of the things bore laundry marks, some makers’ tabs.
“Whoever put him there thought that was the last of him,” said George, “or they’d have had all these off. Still…” He cast a glance at the impregnable cellar, the massive flags of the floor. “Yes, you can see their point. They’d hardly expect him to get out of there again.”
“But no papers,” pointed out the sergeant.
There was not a letter, not a personal document of any kind, anywhere in the case.
“Nothing in the coat, either.” Nor had there been any wallet in the pockets of the rotting jacket; if there had been any leather or plastic object there, something would still have remained of it. “No, somebody cleaned him out of all identification—the quick ways, anyhow.”
George lifted out, layer after layer, the contents of the case, and ran his fingers into the pleated pockets in the back. Nothing there. Well-padded pockets, though. The strong elastication that held the mouths of the compartments closed had still a little spring left in it, and the tough plastic had pulled the cloth lining away from the frame at its outer corners, the adhesive being long ago denatured by damp. Something showed between lining and outer covering, the edge of a wad of paper and a thin rim of black, like the spine of a notebook. George was sliding his finger delicately along the sticky, folded hem of beige cloth to enlarge the opening, when Sergeant Moon leaned down from the hall to announce that Dr. Goodwin was on the line from the hospital mortuary with a preliminary report. George abandoned the suitcase, and went up to take the call.
“I won’t go into clinical details now, George, you’ll be getting the lot in writing as soon as I can get it to you. But in a nutshell—what you’ve got here is an adult male about five feet seven tall, rather lightly built, one or two medical points that may help an identification—a finger-bone in his left middle finger broken at some time, probably before he was fully grown. And his teeth are his own, and show some dental work that could be a clincher if you get a lead on his locality and can trace the right dentist. I’d say somewhere in his late thirties—not above forty. How long dead? That’s rather a hard one, but at least three years. But the upper limit could be as much as eight or nine. There are contradictory factors—or ambiguous ones, anyhow—there always are in these long-distance cases. I may be able to improve on that estimate, though, when I’ve finished with him.”
“And the cause of death?”
“Your sergeant has it in a neat little pillbox, signed and sealed and headed for ballistics. A bullet in the brain, my boy. Entered through the left temple, probably at close range—a few feet at the most. Looks like a .25 to me, one of the vest pocket jobs.”