“Please sit down, Mr. Felse. I feel so guilty at making use of you in this way, when we have really nothing to go on. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

  “As a matter of form, I should like to know how you spent this afternoon, whether you saw anyone, and what time your husband left. I want to form as full a picture as possible of the hours between lunch and tea.”

  “I understand, yes. I was indoors all afternoon. Edward was here with me until just before three o’clock, then he went out to the car, to load it for his trip. I can’t say exactly what time he got off, because I didn’t see him go. I think he wanted to pick up some books from the library, but that wouldn’t take long. I should think he was away by a quarter past three. After he left I was in here writing letters.” She made a faint gesture of one hand towards the neat little pile of them, lying on her writing-desk. “I didn’t go down to join the party at tea, I had it in here. I didn’t realise that Mr. Galt was missing, though I noticed, naturally, that he didn’t take part in the five o’clock session. He hasn’t come back, of course.” Her anxious face hoped against hope for reassurance.

  “He hasn’t. On the contrary, we’ve found certain traces which suggest that we have a serious matter on our hands.”

  “May I know?” she asked hesitantly, “what they are?”

  He told her. She turned half aside from the mention of blood, and seemed for an instant to want to withdraw absolutely from this place and these events, which obeyed no rules in her ordered existence, and made chaos of her security. She reached out blindly and briefly with one hand for Edward, who had always been there, but Edward wasn’t there. She said, though with dignity and quietness, exactly what George had felt sure she would say:

  “Don’t you think we ought to contact my husband and tell him what’s happened? I wouldn’t think of suggesting it in any normal circumstances, when Harry’s in charge, but these aren’t normal circumstances. This is more than the mere responsibility for the present course, it’s a question of the responsibility for Follymead as an institution. Edward can’t delegate that, not in such a serious matter.” She looked across the room at Henry Marshall, who had sat silent throughout this exchange. “I’m sorry, Harry, I ought to have left it to you even to make the suggestion. I know you would have done.”

  No mistake about it, that fancy boarding school of hers had done pretty well by the tradesman’s daughter, even if she hadn’t distinguished herself in examination, like Felicity’s illustrious kin. No wonder Marshall looked at her with something like devotion.

  “Mr. Felse and I have already recognised the need to put this matter on a proper footing. Obviously I hoped and believed we should have some word from Mr. Galt, or that he would turn up again with his own explanation, but after so many hours without news it becomes rather a different case. Yes, I think we should call Dr. Arundale.”

  “I think perhaps I’d better do it,” said George, “if I may. Where will he be at this hour?”

  The clock on the desk said ten-forty. “It’s a guild dinner,” said Audrey. “He’s staying overnight with the chairman afterwards, but they won’t be very early. I should think they’re still at the Metropole. I have the number here.”

  George dialled and waited for his connection. It was very quiet in the room; even the clock was almost silent.

  “Hotel Metropole? I believe you’ve got the Vintners’ annual dinner there to-night? Is the party still in session? Good! Would you ask Mr. Arundale to come to the phone? That’s right, Edward Arundale – he’s their speaker tonight.” He waited. Audrey felt behind for her for the arm of a chair, and sat down very slowly and silently, never taking her eyes from George’s face. It felt so still that she might have been holding her breath.

  “Hullo, is that…? Oh, I see. No, I didn’t know that.” There was a long, curious pause while he listened, and the faint clacking of the distant voice that was, surprisingly, doing all the talking. “At what time was that?” And again: “You’re sure? You’d know the voice? No, that’s all right, I’m sorry to have disturbed you, I’ll contact him there. Thank you! Good-bye!”

  He cradled the receiver and held it down in its rest, and over the hand that pinned it in position he looked up gently at Audrey.

  “Mrs. Arundale, I’m afraid this is going to be a surprise to you. Even a shock. Mr. Arundale isn’t there. That was a man named Malcolmson speaking to me, the president of the Vintners’ Guild. Mr. Arundale cancelled his engagement, they had to whip up a substitute speaker at a minute’s notice.”

  “But… that’s impossible!” she said in a soundless whisper. “Why should he cancel it? He said nothing to me. He took his notes… and the references he needed for tomorrow… everything. I didn’t know anything about this… I didn’t know…”

  “All the same, he did it. There’s no doubt at all about this. He says Mr. Arundale rang up to explain and apologise, this afternoon, just about three o’clock. He says he’s known him for eight years, he knows his voice on the telephone too well for any possibility of mistake. It was your husband himself who called. An emergency, so he told him, here at Follymead, that made it impossible for him to leave as planned. Naturally Mr. Malcolmson didn’t question it, however inconvenient it might be for him.” He lifted the receiver again; distant and staccato, the dialling tone fired its dotted line of machine-gun bullets into the silence. “Can you give me the number of someone who’ll know about this conference to-morrow? The secretary?”

  She got up from her chair and moved to the pedestal of the desk like a creature in a bad dream. Her fingers fumbled through the pages of a notebook, and found the entry. The secretary was the vicar of a suburban parish, and his voice, when he answered, sounded young and crisp and agile.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you at this late hour, but I’m clearing up a few arrears of business for Mr. Arundale, and the notes he’s left me don’t make it clear whether he managed to call you about the conference to-morrow. Have you already heard from him to-day?” No need to sound the alarm yet; this would do better than candour.

  “Yes, he telephoned this afternoon,” said the distant voice promptly. “We’re very sorry indeed that we shan’t have him with us to-morrow, after all, it’s a great disappointment. But I know he wouldn’t have called it off if he could possibly have avoided it.”

  “No, of course not. About what time did he ring you?”

  “Oh, I suppose shortly after three. It might even have been a little earlier.”

  “Thank you,” said George, “that’s all I wanted to know.”

  The telephone clashed softly in its cradle.

  “He telephoned there, too, and cancelled his engagement. Wiped out all his arrangements for the week-end. And yet he took the car and left, at about the time he was expected to leave, and without mentioning to anyone that he’d changed his plans. So where has he gone? And why?”

  Marshall let his hands fall empty before him; there was nowhere he could get a hold on this, and no way he could make sense of it. “I don’t know. I don’t understand anything about it.”

  Audrey stood motionless, her eyes enormous in shock and bewilderment. In an arduous whisper she asked: “What must we do?”

  “I don’t think we have any choice now. We still have no real evidence of anything either criminal or tragic, but we have two unexplained disappearances, occurring at much the same time, and we can’t ignore them, and we can’t afford to delay. Lectures had much better continue as though nothing’s happened. If we can get through the week-end without making this affair public, we’ll do it. There’ll be the least possible obtrusion. But I’ve no alternative now,” said George, “but to inform my chief. From now on, this becomes an official police matter.”

  CHAPTER V

  « ^ »

  AS SOON as he was back in Edward Arundale’s office, with the door closed on the distant and cheerful din of the house-party and the close and fearful silence of the warden’s apartments, George telephoned his chief. Detective-Superintendent Duckett was Midshire born and bred, with all the advantages of having come up from the uniformed branch the hard way. It meant he not only knew his job and his own subordinates, but also all the complex social pressures of a conservative county; sometimes, in his less tolerant moments, he called it a feudal county, and nobody had a better right. The first thing he said was: “Thank God your boy was there!” And the second: “Can you still keep this dark?”

  “Yes,” said George, with fair certainty that he was telling the truth. “We’ve no body, no proof of a crime, only a very, very fishy situation that still may confound us by coming out blameless. Let’s hope it does. In the mean-time, we’ve every right to behave as if nothing had happened, on the surface, provided we dig like moles underneath. Only seven people know anything about my being here to investigate Galt’s disappearance, though they must all know by now that he’s gone. That can’t be helped. Only Marshall and Mrs. Arundale know that Arundale’s apparently run out.”

  “That suits me, and it’ll suit the Chief Constable still better. He’s a prime backer of that outfit at Follymead. The place balances its budget and fends off the tax-payers by luck, faith and act of God. What can we dig for you?”

  “It’s going to be pretty sticky,” said George honestly, “in any case. Don’t forget one of the parties concerned is the warden. What we’re going to find is anybody’s guess, but what I’ve got here is a nasty situation in which two people have vanished, one apparently without warning and involuntarily, the other with evidence of premeditation. No bodies, no known motives for any violence, but some evidence that there was a struggle, that there were injuries. If there’s a link between these two people, I want to know about it. I’m not so simple as to believe that they could both take off into the blue at the same moment, and no connection between the two events. It’s against the law of averages. Now, these two are public persons. I’d like reports on their backgrounds. I want to know if there could be a link between them, and if so, what it is. And brace yourself, in case what comes out goes against Arundale. Because he’s the one who planned his departure, not the boy.”

  “If he slung the kid in the river,” said Duckett with admirable directness, “neither you nor I can get him out of the resultant mess, George, my boy. With luck we might get Follymead out of it. Knock off fifty per cent for over-enthusiasm, and still the place is worth preserving.”

  “I think so, too. All right, at first light I’m going down to look over the ground again, carefully. I hope to have some specimens for the lab boys, and I don’t care if we do have to pull ’em back from their Sunday hobbies.”

  “Right, and first thing to-morrow I’ll have Scott turned loose on their histories.” He was silent for one pregnant second. “How’s the flood level?”

  “High,” said George. “I reckon anything that went in there would bounce that last weir like a cork, and be out of the grounds long before now. We’re past the fancy curves at that point. The next real check is the bend by Sandy Cliff, the other side of the main road. Anything can happen with this sort of spring flow, but I should start dragging there. That’s where he’s most likely to come ashore.”

  George went down to the riverside in the first light of morning. The threatened rain had fallen in the small hours, while he had slept uneasily and briefly in Arundale’s office, declining the bed Marshall had offered him. The dawn sky was tattered with filmy clouds and fitful brightness, and the grass was saturated and silvery against the river’s turgid brown. Slanting light picked out in deep relief the wounds in the turf, still dark, fresh and soft from the protection of Marshall’s plastic car-cover. George went over the ground carefully, inch by inch. There was only one clear print, and that of only the sole of a shoe, stamped into the raw clay, a composition sole cross-cut in saw-tooth grooves for grip. A well-shaped shoe with a good conservative toe, maybe size nine; the kind two-thirds of the men in the house probably wore, half of them in this size. All the rest of the tracks were trampled over, crossed and blurred by the resilience of the grass, but in sum they were there, and their implications unmistakable.

  He found one other thing. One of the stamping feet, driving in a heel deeply, had left behind in the print one of last autumn’s leaves from the ride, one of the old ivy leaves, rubbery even in decay, that drop with their naked, angular stems, and lie long after the rest of the woodland loss is mould. This one had been cupped round the edge of the shoe’s heel, and remained so, pressed into the turf; and something that was not water, something hardly visible at twilight against its brown colouring, had splashed into it later, and gathered in the cup. Warm and sheltered under the plastic sheeting, it had remained moist. Not so much of it, maybe, as they take from your thumb for a blood test; but possibly as much as the lab. boys would need in order to group it.

  George extracted the moulded leaf gingerly, and found another little box for it, propping its edges with cotton-wool and keeping it upright. There was nothing else here for him. He covered the bruised ground again, and prowled along the very edge of the water; it seemed to him that it had risen a shade higher in the night with the new rain, but he had seen it last night only by moonlight and torchlight. Certainly in this green, moist dawn, full of the drippings and whisperings of water, that concentrated brown flood was impressive. No finding anything in that without dragging, or going down into it; not until chemistry did its work, and it surfaced again, and judging by the force of this current that would be miles downstream. The coiled curve by Sandy Cliff just might bring it ashore, as he had said to Duckett; but even there the water would be over the summer beach and burrowing hard under the cliff, and whatever it carried might continue downstream with it.

  George made his way thoughtfully back to the house, mapping this part of the Follymead grounds mentally as he went; and in the warden’s office Dominic was waiting for him.

  “Hullo!” said George with unflattering surprise. “Whatever got you up at this hour?”

  “I thought of something that may be important. I meant to be up earlier, but I had to be careful. I’ve got the Rossignol twins in my room, and they can hear the grass growing. I didn’t want to bring the whole hunt down on you. But it’s all right,” Dominic said in hasty reassurance, “I left them dead asleep.” He looked from his father’s face to the small box carried so carefully in his hand. He didn’t ask any questions about it, and George didn’t volunteer anything.

  “All right, what’s on your mind?”

  “It was on my mind, too, half the night. You know how it is when you know you’ve seen something before, and can’t for your life think where or when? I woke up suddenly this morning, and I’d got it. That medal… could we have another look at it, and I’ll show you.”

  The pill-box that contained it was locked into the top drawer of Arundale’s desk. George extracted and offered it. Dominic remembered to turn it with the tip of a ball-pen when he wanted to refer to the reverse, as he had remembered not to handle it directly when he first found it. He shivered a little with clinging sleepiness and the chill of the morning.

  “You see here, this side, that formalised figure in armour, with a nutshell helmet like the Normans in the Bayeaux tapestry, and a long shield with a sort of spread eagle on it…? I suddenly remembered where I’d seen it before. You can’t mistake it once you do get the idea. That’s Saint Wenceslas. Yes, I’m quite sure. He always looks like that. You ask Tossa, she’ll tell you the same, we got to know the form last year, when we were in Prague on holiday. And the other side…” He turned it delicately to show the lion rampant with a forked tail. “This I can show you, right here. I should have known it on sight if it hadn’t been quite so worn. Look! By pure luck I happened to have this still in my jacket.”

  He held it out triumphantly, a small badge, questionably silver, unquestionably the same rampaging lion, with feathery fringes like a retriever, and double tail bristling.

  “Lieutenant Ondrejov gave me that, before we left Liptovsky Pavol, last year. You see, it is the same. This is the Czech lion. And Saint Wenceslas is the chief of their patron saints, and doesn’t belong to anyone else. I bet you anything you like this medal originated in Czechoslovakia.”

  George measured the two small heraldic creatures, and found them one. “Now why,” he wondered aloud blankly, “should Lucien Galt be wearing a Czech medal?”

  “I wish I knew. But that’s what this is.”

  George stared, and thought, and could not doubt it. This was, according to Liri Palmer, the one thing Lucien had that had belonged to his father. That didn’t, of course, determine to whom it might have belonged earlier. It was wartime, Galt could perfectly well have had some chance-met friend among the self-exiled Czechs who formed, at that time, the most articulate, the most reticent, – the two were compatible! – and the most nearly English component of the European armies in Britain. Maybe they swopped small tokens before the unit moved out for D-Day; and maybe the medal acquired value because its giver didn’t come back. There were such things, then, unexpected friendships that went deeper than kith and kin.

  “Well, thanks very much for the tip. It’s certainly curious.” George pocketed the trophy along with his other specimens. “And since you are up, how about running me down to the lodge and bringing back the station wagon afterwards?”

  “Yes, of course.” He brightened perceptibly at the thought of being useful. “You’re going in to headquarters? Is it official, then?”

  “It’s official, but it’s still not for publication.”

  “Shall I meet you at the lodge again when you come back?”

  “No need. I’ll drive up by the farm road at the back, and put my car in the yard there. I might need to get out and in quickly, later in the day.”

  “Is there anything I can be doing?”

  “Yes, but you won’t like it much.”