“Now the other one, he’s a very different matter. Here we have a fellow everyone knows, who was seen alive as late as four o’clock last Wednesday, and according to the medical evidence and the set of the tides must have been dead before ten o’clock the same night. The blow or blows that left that mark on his face didn’t do more than knock him out, which seems to have been the object. He’s otherwise more or less undamaged. He drowned in salt water, and was then put in the Treverra vault. And though Miss Rachel’s key was in your possession during the material time, Mr. Towne, we now know that another key exists, and was kept in a place where anyone who had a little inside knowledge or a bit of luck could get at it. That leaves us a pretty wide field. It may have occurred to you, as a limiting factor, that surely only somebody who didn’t know the vault was about to be opened could think of it as a good hiding-place for a murdered man. But even if we accept that—and I wouldn’t put too much reliance on its importance—the field’s still wide enough.

  “Now here we’ve got an unfriendly man who kept himself very much to himself, and usually managed to grate on other people so much that they were glad to let him. Obviously we’re obliged to make a pretty thorough check on the movements of his son-in-law, because it’s no secret that young Jim had a good many breezes with Trethuan before he got Rose away from him, and relations have been strained, to say the least of it, ever since. I’m not saying I think Jim Pollard makes a very likely murderer, but he’s got a temper, and these things happen without much warning sometimes. There are holes in Jim’s alibi that won’t be easy to fill. He was down to the yard at the south end of Maymouth, Wednesday afternoon, for some timber for a little repair job at home, and then he did one or two more errands for paint and stuff round the town, and ended up working late on an old boat he’s got beached in Pentarno haven, so he says. Which makes him mobile and at large but for the times of his various calls, and leaves plenty of time between for an unexpected brush with Rose’s dad, supposing he met him in a nasty mood.

  “However, he’s just one possibility among many. If I should ask you, now, what’s the oddest thing about Trethuan’s own behaviour in the last days of his life, what would you say?”

  He had looked at Simon, but Simon held his tongue. When the guileless stare turned upon George he responded promptly: “Why was he so insistent that the vault must not be opened?”

  “Exactly! Why? Religious objections? Superstition? That would account for anyone in his position criticising and prophesying evil, yes. But by all accounts this was more than that. He was desperate about it. Is that too strong, Mr. Towne?”

  “No,” said Simon shortly, “that’s how he struck me.”

  “So what was it that made it so urgent? Now I hear most of what goes on around here, and I don’t mind telling you openly, I know all about your sporting warning issued in the Dragon bar on Wednesday night, Mr. Towne. And I saw—and so did Mr. Felse, if you didn’t—the signs that the vault had been artistically swept and garnished and sanded over again before I got to it, and presumably before you did, on Friday. It’s an old and time-honoured profession, is smuggling. You know it still goes on, I know it still goes on. I doubt if there’s a licensee along this coast who doesn’t get a drop of the real stuff that way. We know the vault was used as a liquor store, we know there was a nice, handy key, the one Sam Shubrough came by as an innocent child. And we know they won’t use the same place again, if it’s any reassurance to you—not since they cleared out their contraband, whenever they did. There wasn’t any sense of desperation there. They didn’t care a toot when you tipped ’em the wink, they just took the tip, and shifted their store to a safer place. And slipped you one on the house as an acknowledgment, I shouldn’t wonder. Only one person was really concerned, and that was Trethuan. A lone wolf who wouldn’t be wanted in any such confraternity, and who wouldn’t want to be in it, anyhow.

  “So I’m telling you, I don’t believe smuggling or contraband had anything whatever to do with Trethuan’s death, and I don’t think you need worry about any of the otherwise law-abiding chaps around here who don’t feel it any sin to slip a few kegs of brandy past the preventives. They’re not my job. Murder is. And we’re left with Trethuan and the something that made it absolutely vital to him that Treverra should rest in peace. Always supposing he’d been resting there at all, which as it turned out he wasn’t. Did Zeb have something private and dangerous of his own that came over with the brandy? I doubt it. No, more likely his preoccupation was about something quite separate from theirs. There’s only one certain thing we know about it. It was somewhere in the vault. Why else should he be so desperate to stop you from opening it?”

  “And why couldn’t he move it,” said George, “since apparently he could put it there in the first place?”

  “And where is it?” added Simon. “The place is as bare as the palm of your hand but for those two stone coffins. One of those we’ve exhausted already. There’s nowhere left but Mrs. Treverra’s coffin.”

  “And that’s exactly it, Mr. Towne. You represent Miss Rachel’s interest in this matter. I’m going to suggest to you that we ought to open the second coffin, too. The Vicar thinks he can justifiably sanction it, on the strength of the permission already given for her husband. If you’re prepared to join me and come along down to St. Nectan’s right now, we can at least see if there’s anything there to account for Zeb Trethuan’s acting like a desperate man.”

  “For the record,” said Simon, his eyes kindling golden-brown with curiosity, “maybe we should. If it turns out to be full of Swiss watches that have never paid duty, then we shall be getting somewhere.”

  “According to precedent to date,” said George dryly and ruefully, as they went down the stairs, “the one thing that certainly won’t be in it is Mrs. Treverra!”

  But that was where George was wrong. For when they had carefully lowered Jan Treverra’s coffin-lid with slings to the floor of the vault, and prised the smaller stone lid beneath it, with its fine, defiant flourish of cryptic verse, out of its seating, when they had levered it clear and lowered it to rest beside its fellow, when they stood staring into the coffin, it was plain to be seen that the lady was all too surely there.

  The shadow slid from over her almost reluctantly. A gush of fine dust ascended into the beam of their lanterns, and a dry, dead, nostalgic scent, as though pressed flowers, long since paper-fine and drained of nature, had disintegrated into powder at a touch. The outer air spilled in upon her, flowing over the broken and displaced lid of the wooden coffin that had once held her, and the frozen turbulence of silks and woollen cloth that overflowed from the box, stirred by the displacement of air, billowed for one instant buoyant and stable in their sight, and then collapsed together with a faint, whispering sigh, crumbling away at hems and folds into fragmentary rags.

  A subsiding drift of dust and tindery cloth settled and fluttered down into the grave, disclosing the small, convulsed bones of hands and arms and drawn-up knees that thrust vainly and frenziedly upward, a shapely skull arched back in anguished effort among a nest of crumbling silks and laces, and the withered black of once-luxuriant hair, powdered over with the drab of perished silk and the fine, incorruptible dust of death.

  Morwenna did not rest in peace. Contorted, struggling, fighting to force her way out, she seemed for a moment to be about to rise and reach her fragile, skeleton hands to them. Then even her bones began to rustle and crumble stealthily, settling lower and lower before their eyes into the stone tomb in which she had quite certainly been buried alive.

  CHAPTER VII

  SATURDAY NOON

  « ^ »

  OH, IT’S YOU at last, miss, is it?” said Miss Rachel into the telephone, in her most belligerent tones, for fear she should be suspected of even the least shade of penitence. “And about time, too! What do you think you are doing, absenting yourself in this undisciplined way, and where, may I ask, are you doing it?”

  “I’m at the Dragon. You told me not to bother to come back, remember? But as a matter of fact, I did ’phone Alice, pretty late, after we found Paddy. I beg his pardon, after he came back, I should have said. He wasn’t lost, he knew only too well where he was. And all your fault, in case nobody else has raised enough courage to tell you. Me? What have I got to lose? You as good as fired me.”

  “I did nothing of the sort! But if you’re not back here pretty quickly, miss, I will! You can’t leave without giving me a month’s notice, and even if you did, I wouldn’t take it, so don’t be so uppish. Is Paddy there? I thought I heard his voice a minute ago.”

  “Yes, he’s here.” He was giggling like a girl in the background, but a little conscience-stricken, too. “He came up to ask Dominic to go out somewhere with him, and if you want to know, I’m going, too. I like handsome young escorts, and now I’ve got two of ’em. Don’t expect me back before lunch, and I’ll be late for that. What? No, don’t be silly. We were just rather late, and I was very dirty and hungry, so I accepted Mrs. Felse’s offer to come here with them for dinner and borrow some clothes from her. Then I called Alice, and she said you knew Paddy was O.K., and you were just about exhausted with worry and then relief, and had gone to bed. So I thought I might as well stay here overnight, as Bunty was kind enough to lend me everything I needed. O.K., so you weren’t worried. Then why were you carrying on like a broody hen? Well, tell Alice you weren’t, she told me. Half-way up the wall, she said—Yes, sure you were right, cleared the air like a thunderstorm. All right, I’ll be home this afternoon. Yes, he’s all right. Do you want a word with him?”

  Paddy smoothed her in one breathless sentence: “Hallo, Aunt Rachel, I’m terribly sorry about the rest of the apricots, it was all a mix-up, I meant to come back. Would some of them be all right to-morrow? Mummy’s making jam with those. No, I don’t mind, really I don’t. I’m glad. Yes, I do mean it. Can we keep Tamsin for to-day? She was the one who found me last night—one of the two, that is, Dominic was the other. ’Ess, me dear, I’ll be up-along soon as I can. To-morrow for sure, because I’m going back to school Monday, you know. O.K., I’ll tell her. ’Bye, Aunt Rachel!”

  He hung up, grinning. “She says to tell you Alice has instructions not to keep lunch hot for you.”

  “Good!” said Tamsin, linking her other arm in Dominic’s. “That means I’ve got the whole day off. Come on, let’s go and pan gold in Paddy’s cave.”

  They went down the steep path from the Dragon, where Simon had risked his neck on Paddy’s cycle, three abreast, linked and light-hearted. At the edge of the harbour they halted to buy three immense cones of candy-floss, and went down the harbour steps in single file, flourishing them like torch-bearers in a procession, and nibbling the fringes like fire-eaters. They paid no attention to anyone or anything but their own mid-September holiday happiness, reprieved from yesterday’s shadow. But a girl who was just hurrying out of the narrow, rocky alley behind the six colour-washed cottages of Cliffside Row checked and drew back at sight of them, and stood in the shadow of the rocks, watching them recede, linked and hilarious, down the slate-coloured sands.

  The tide was nearing its lowest ebb, and beyond the pebbly stretches the finer sand gleamed moist and bright in a watery sun. The three young people, the taller boy, the visitor, on the right, young Paddy Rossall on the left, Tamsin Holt in the middle with her arm about Paddy’s shoulders and the other boy’s arm about hers, bore steadily sidelong into the cliff face, and halted to finish their hectic pink torches before they vanished into the black mouth of the Dragon’s Hole.

  Paddy looked back up the beach towards the coloured cardboard stage set, the impossibly charming and gay toy theatre of the harbour and the town. He saw another flare of candy-floss, primrose-gold, burning at the corner of the dark alley behind the cottages, and recognised Rose Pollard, a round, soft, appealing doll in neutral Shetland sweater and tartan trews, standing there braced and alert. She seemed—he couldn’t be sure, but that was how it struck him—she seemed to be watching them, and wondering, and hesitating. And when she moved at last, it was to draw back softly into the shadow; but his eyes, following movement rather than colours, assured him that she had not gone away, and his intuition, already sharpened beyond ordinary this morning, warned him that she had not stopped watching.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Tamsin disgustedly. “We’ve walked how far?—more than half a mile underground, and suddenly the whole thing folds up in a blank wall. And you said yourself the stone’s been worked with tools in places, so somebody was interested in improving the passage for use. Why would it just stop, without arriving anywhere?”

  Dominic’s eyes followed the beam of Paddy’s torch from stone ceiling to stone floor. To call it a blank wall that faced them was simplifying things; it was a rough confusion of broken planes, sealing off the small chamber into which the passage had opened. But quite certainly there was no cleft nor hole in it through which they could pass. This was the end of the journey.

  “Maybe the passage was an end in itself,” he said. “There’s room among some of these side-pockets we’ve passed to store any amount of contraband. The whole complex could be a pretty good hiding-place. And they may have taken steps to hide the entrance even better, when it was in use.”

  “But, look,” said Paddy acutely, “if the passage was to be the cache, they didn’t need half a mile of it, a hundred yards would have done. They could have got a ship-load of stuff in that first bulge. You don’t chip your way along half a mile underground unless you’re aiming to get somewhere.”

  “I have to admit,” agreed Tamsin thoughtfully, after pondering this for a minute, “that he’s got something there.”

  “Do you suppose we’ve missed a turning somewhere? It may go on in another direction.”

  “We could have a more thorough look on the way back. We’ve got time, it’s not much after twelve. And there’s nothing for us here.”

  They turned back rather reluctantly, all the same; nobody likes going back by the same route. It is, as Paddy had rightly observed, a fundamental predilection of human nature to want to get somewhere, even if most arrivals turn out to be disappointing.

  The floor on which they walked had been smoothed in places by stones deliberately laid. Sometimes it was naked rock, sometimes this levelled causeway, and sometimes, especially where the narrow cleft opened out into a broader passage, there was deep, fine grey sand. With a light, the whole half-mile of it was easy, no more than a stony walk; and all these later reaches were dry, for over the entire length the level climbed very gently, and bore away inland from the Dragon’s Hole at a brisk right incline.

  “Where do you suppose we are?” asked Paddy as they turned back, playing his light ahead of them on both rough walls. “Half a mile is farther than the neck, we must be right under the high part of the town.”

  “I don’t think we’ve borne as far to the right as that,” objected Dominic. “I’d say somewhere just the other side the Head, under the dunes.”

  “It’s so straightforward here,” said Tamsin, stepping out merrily in the lead, “you hardly need a light.” And promptly on the word she tripped over a stone that tilted treacherously out of the sandy floor, and went down with a squeak of protest on hands and knees.

  Dominic and Paddy both reached solicitous hands to help her up, but for a moment she sat scowling, dusting her hands and examining her nylons. “Damn! Somebody owes me a new pair of stockings.” A ladder was trickling playfully downward from her right knee.

  “I’ll buy you some new ones with my guinea,” offered Paddy generously. “That was pretty much how I found it, actually, only I had more excuse, because I didn’t have a light that time. You sure you’re not sitting on a pirate’s hoard?”

  “Not unless he hoarded granite sand. But there was something sharp, look, it broke the skin.” She sifted fine sand through her fingers, probed the indentation her knee had made, and raised from beneath the surface a thin ring of yellow wire, with edges that barely met. “That’s the secret weapon. Not a pirate’s hoard, but maybe a smuggler’s ear-ring.” She rubbed it on her sleeve, and it gleamed encouragingly. “I believe that’s what it is. It looks like gold wire.”

  They ran the torch carefully over every corner of the sanded floor, but found nothing more. Tamsin pocketed her find, and they resumed their methodical walk back. There were broken bays in the rocks here and there to be explored, but all of them proved to be dead ends; and as they drew nearer to the Dragon’s Hole tiny trickles of water filtered down from the walls and channelled the sand of the floor.

  They reached the seaward end of the tunnel, where the low, screened entrance hole shrank to thigh-height, and doubled upon itself midway in an optical illusion of solid rock. They crawled through on hands and knees, and stood upright again in the upper reaches of the Dragon’s Hole.

  When they had dropped down the slopes of shale and shell to where the light of the September day penetrated, there were still a few children playing on the sand, but even these were being called away to lunch by parents and elder sisters. The midday quiet was descending on Maymouth’s beaches. Far down the glistening shore the tide had turned, and was beginning to lip its way back towards the town, but it would be two hours yet before it covered the cavern again.

  “You could come and have lunch with us,” said Dominic, “if you’d like to. Tamsin’s staying. We could ring up your mother and tell her.” But he made the offer rather hesitantly, and was not surprised when it was politely refused. Paddy hadn’t seen his mother for all of three hours, and there are times when three hours is a long time. Moreover, he had to demonstrate, rather than claim, that he was a responsible person who paid attention to the times of high and low tide, and could be trusted not to take any more chances.