Текст книги "Summon the Bright Water "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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That was easy enough. Marrin could reach his dinghy at half-tide, and go down on the ebb when the channel would sweep him away to the opposite bank. There he would have to wait for the flood before returning to Bullo Pill – a matter of anything up to eight hours. What did he do meanwhile? Whatever it was – digging or diving or merely collecting – took place on the other side of the Severn.

There was another useful inference to be drawn. If he wanted to be back at Broom Lodge at or before dawn he would have to choose a night when five or six hours were left in the ebb, wait till the bore had passed and grab the short, favourable tide flowing up behind it.

After a night of dozing rather than sleeping I woke up impatient for action, the more so as there seemed no chance of any at all. The business of staying dead was becoming a bore, and my determination to destroy Marrin one way or another was weakened by the thought of its effect on Elsa. After taking the walk out to the sapling and back in case the major had left a message – sure that if he had it would be crazily impractical – I spent the day like a frustrated housewife, adding twigs to my bed and tying them down, stopping a drip from the iron roof and eating two large meals to make up for a deal of exercise on an empty stomach. A party of campers walked round two sides of my copse but never attempted to enter it, confirming my opinion that it was a safe refuge. But a refuge for what?

Next day at least one mystery was solved, though of little importance. For want of anything better to do I called at Bream post office. It was unlikely that I could already have a reply from the department of zoology, but the letter was waiting for me. Evidently the beast was so well known that my colleague had not needed to refer to library or museum.

‘Your photographs are of a magnificent specimen of glyptodont. Though the solid shell over the back does resemble that of a turtle, the plates over head and tail are segmented. Bones have rotted away, as one would expect, but carapace and armour are largely intact, preserved, I think, by being buried in silt. Microscope will show. When can I see it? Glyptodont is not a reptile but an extinct mammal related to the armadillo and – to judge by the skull – comparatively intelligent. Yours was a young animal, a half-grown glyptodont kitten shall we say? The spiked tail may have been used for smashing into termite nests or as a mace for walloping predators while they tried to get their teeth into the armour. So far as we know, the animal existed only in America and may well have been contemporary with man, like the extinct giant sloth. Where was it found? Come back quickly and tell us. If in this country, the discovery is unique.’

Silt. Another clue to the Severn. When I asked Marrin about the supposed turtle he gave me the unsatisfactory answer that he had set up the remains in his laboratory for fun. He never said that he himself had found it underwater or dug it up. Why not? Probable explanation: because it came from a site which he wished to keep secret.

So off again to the stump of the sapling. The major was there waiting for me, and I was not too pleased to see him, preferring written messages which gave me time to think – very necessary when dealing with a wandering friar, as he had called himself, who was outwardly shrewd but a preposterous visionary inside, so that it was doubtful if even he knew what was going on at the interface where they met.

He had been waiting a couple of hours. His moustache had perked up and his watery blue eyes had dried to a sparkle.

‘Got an idea, Piers!’ he exclaimed. ‘Brilliant! But tell me if you don’t think so. Remember how Simeon left me alone to take those photographs? All stems from that. Shocking breach of trust, but for his own good. And he needn’t know. Make it plain it was burglary.’

Since my mind was running on glyptodonts and tides, I translated these enthusiastic explosions as referring to Marrin’s diving kit or the tools in the back of his van. The object of burglary turned out to be the golden cauldron. The major was proposing to steal it and hand it to me for submission to some authority who could tell us whether it was ancient work or not and, if it wasn’t, whether it had any chance of being sold as such.

‘He’ll be out fishing tonight,’ the major said. ‘So we have to hurry. Last-minute plan. Often effective. Catches ’em on the wrong foot.’

‘How do you know he’ll be out?’

‘Simple. Been watching him. Saw him loading the gear into his van.’

‘But he’s careful not to be observed.’

‘All of them at work except me. After dark I’ll burst in and grab the bowl for you. Then you take the first train up to London and you could be back with it in the afternoon.’

It was very likely that he would be out either on that night or the next. The tide fitted the crossing from Bullo in the late evening and the return before dawn.

However, I doubted my ability to charge into the British Museum, dressed as I was, with a valuable object of gold, and avoid immediate arrest. It depended whether I could get an introduction and a guarantee of good faith in the short time available. I doubted still more if the major could commit a fake burglary without being caught.

‘Nothing to it if I don’t slip up somewhere,’ he said. ‘And if I do, I’ve got a dozen stories to explain what I was up to.’

His scheme as he presented it seemed as if it had been conceived under the round table with an intoxicated Arthur; but the more he spluttered, the more I saw that it was quite likely to work. Burglars, I was sure, had never been seriously considered by the commune. Outsiders knew nothing of Marrin’s products. There were no other valuables, and no burglar would risk breaking in when people were awake and about at all hours.

The lab was at the back of the east wing. Windows were set high up so that no passers-by could see in, and the window at the north end facing the forest was not overlooked by any of the bedrooms. Access was from the estate office by a door which was locked. The key, the major assured me, was kept in a drawer of Marrin’s desk – on the face of it a casual and too confident arrangement, but the hold Marrin had over his colonists must be remembered. None of them would have entered the holy of holies unless invited.

I asked the major how he was going to make such a simple job look like a burglary from outside.

‘Easy! Chap got in by climbing the drain pipe. Pipe passes within a couple of feet of the north window.’

‘But can you climb it?’

‘Of course I can. Always was good at P.T. But I’m not going to. I’m going down it.’

His plan was feasible. Having entered the lab from the estate office, he would open the north window and quietly smash the pane nearest to the catch (he knew about brown paper and treacle) so that the glass fell into the room. Then he proposed to mess up the room in true burglar fashion and break into the casket where the bowl was kept, grab it and leave by the drain pipe so that police or colonists could readily spot the marks of the burglar’s passage. He reckoned he could just about reach the pipe from the open window.

‘One snag,’ I told him. ‘You are leaving the door from the estate office unlocked.’

‘No, I’m not. When I’m safely on the ground, I can nip back to the estate office through the front door, lock the lab and shove the key back in the drawer. Great care all round. Wear gloves. Take cover when in doubt. Never hurry.’

‘Suppose someone pops out of a bedroom when you’re passing.’

‘Don’t care if he does. I’m on the way to have a piss. Some of ’em never waste it indoors. Good for the trees. May be right. Very sensible, some of their beliefs!’

I told him that he would have to take some gold trinkets as well as the cauldron to make the burglary appear convincing.

‘Yes, bothers me how we’re going to put them back,’ he said.

‘We don’t put them or the cauldron back till we have a quiet interview with him. He’ll talk, all right. Just seeing me alive will be enough to break him down.’

‘Suppose he really did make the bowl?’

‘Well if he did and has been buying gold on the market all along, we’ll be left with the problem of how the hell he makes enough profit to keep Broom Lodge running.’

For the major’s sake I hoped the burglary would succeed, but what excited me far more was that Marrin had loaded his diving kit into his van. I no longer had to keep an eye indefinitely on Bullo for him to appear, and then – if my patience lasted – to watch all night for his return.

I pointed out to the major that I could not take the cauldron up to London straightaway and that he would have to hide it for at least twenty-four hours while I rested – if that was necessary – and arranged the next move. I asked him to drive to Gloucester at once and to buy me a pair of fins at the best sports shop. Then he was to meet me at our usual place outside Drybrook at about quarter past nine and take me to Bullo, where Marrin kept his boat.

‘Didn’t know he had one!’

‘Well, he does. And wherever he goes he’ll have to wait for the turn of the tide to get back to Bullo; so you’ll have all night for the burglary and can take your time.’

All went according to plan. When he met me at Drybrook I curled up on the floor of the car, inconspicuous under the rug and the life jacket and slid out at the little lane to Bullo. Denzil was to drive on up-river and then make a detour to Broom Lodge so that there would be no chance of Marrin passing him on the road and recognising his car.

It was a warm, still evening, overcast, with not a sound but the lapping of the ebb against the stonework at the entrance to the pill. I lay down at the beginning of the avenue of hawthorn, where I could watch all movement on the banks. Marrin turned up about ten in the last of the light, on foot and carrying all his diving kit in a case made to fit, rather than my own untidy bundle. When he had gone down out of sight, I trotted along the avenue to the bank of the baby pill so that I could keep him in sight as long as possible. He was bound to set off downstream, for no little outboard motor could make way against the speed of the ebb.

All this while I had assumed that he meant to land at Arlingham and then walk along the bank until he arrived at his destination. I could not follow him, but I could intercept him on his return. But what good would that do unless he was actually carrying a gold bracelet or some other object from the hoard? I might not be able to bluff him into confessing where he had found it and I should lose all the advantage of being dead.

It was then that I had the wild idea of following him. I could come to no great harm so long as I stayed on or near the surface. I could never catch him up but I should not be far behind; and wherever he landed or anchored I should be able to make out the empty dinghy. Any success depended on his destination. The tide would carry him down the channel on the left bank for some three miles and then, swinging round the great bank of the Noose would take him back again for about the same distance to the right bank opposite Blakeney. I hardly dared to follow him as far as that through the twirlings and suckings of the yellow ebb, but on second thoughts I decided it would not be necessary. If his destination were on the right bank he had no reason to take a boat from Bullo; he had only to leave his car at any crossing of the railway, walk over the even Severn meadows and dive. Anyway that didn’t make sense. There could be no finding treasure under the mud.

It was far more likely that he intended to reach some point on the left bank without being carried round the Noose. Hock Cliff, which I had visited on the first day of my Severn ramblings, at once suggested itself. Unlike the red cliffs of the Severn, it was made of low lias clay and had been eaten back by the tides, leaving a flat terrace of rock at the edge of the shore. It was certainly easy to land there, but what for? However, leaving out the inexplicable diving equipment, Hock Cliff was a very possible site for treasure buried long ago on good, solid dry land well above the highest level of the river but now exposed by erosion. It was a theory which could be proved or disproved immediately.

I put on suit, life jacket, mask and aqualung and dropped into the mouth of the baby pill, being careful to keep my feet off the bottom. Marrin put-putted out of Bullo and passed close inshore, but could not possibly see me in the gathering darkness. I slipped out and followed, swimming well clear of the Box Rock, of which only a small part was showing above water. The dinghy was now far ahead of me, but occasionally I caught a glimpse of it when it bounced on the vicious wavelets of the ebb and the wake showed white. The sound of the engine told me that he was bound straight down-channel and not bearing a little to port as he would if he intended to land below Arlingham. I was about to give up and make for the Arlingham shore myself when the engine stopped and I thought I heard the splash of his heavy anchor; sound travelled half a mile over the sleeping Severn. So I kept on swimming until I could make out the dinghy anchored below the wood at the top of Hock Cliff. There seemed no reason why he should stop there. He still had his clothes on. I think now that he had arrived earlier than he intended and was waiting for the tide to fall a foot or two further. There turned out to be a handy little inlet in the rock terrace where the dinghy could safely lie when he left it, but he could not yet be sure of its position because the whole terrace was still awash, with the ebb dancing over it fast enough to hole or swamp the dinghy if he made a mistake.

I was in danger of being carried past him but managed to reach the edge of the terrace underwater and clung there by my fingers, as if I were a climber on a rock face, until I found a cleft which enabled me to relax and lift my head to watch the dinghy and Marrin. The ebb spat its silt at me and I remembered my agony in the quicksand. Then came disgust at the ceremony I had witnessed for the propitiation of my soul. Well, it wasn’t propitiated. Far from it! I was suddenly exasperated by all this folly – the silly side of them as Elsa had called it. Marrin, I had told the major, would break down as soon as he knew I was alive. And he’d break down worse still if he had a little additional evidence that I was dead.

Looking back I think that I myself was possessed by a devil which knew exactly what it was about. Blood sacrifice and fireworks are unnecessary when there is an eager human spirit ready to give a temporary home. To break him at any cost was what I wanted, to have him gibbering the truth of the gold and his reason for murder.

The dinghy was nearer in than I thought, riding just off a peninsula of the terrace. Marrin had anchored none too soon. I swam along the angle between rock and mud like a Severn lamprey seeking blood to suck until with two good kicks I could reach the mooring. The mysterious jerk on the rope produced some startled movement on board which then quietened down.

With hands and knees grasping the stem and out of sight, I put head and shoulders over the bows dressed exactly as I was when he tried to kill me and remained perfectly still. He was standing in the stern looking for the inlet. When he turned round and saw me, he stared, frozen. Then he tried to fend off this motionless phantom with movements of the arms as if he were swimming or clearing a mist of smoke before the eyes. Not surprisingly the dinghy tipped – if I helped it at all it was accidental – and he went overboard with a coughing yell, crashing his head on the outcrop of rock, just underwater, which had allowed my approach. The ebb caught him and swept him away from the boat, and he was on his way down-channel with any carcases and timber which the Severn had gathered to itself since morning.

I heard no more of him and saw nothing. I should have expected Marrin, considering his intimacy with spirits, at least to try to talk to my uneasy ghost instead of panicking. I hoped he would be swept ashore on the sands of the Noose. God knows I did not want him dead, for you cannot interrogate the dead.

My first intention was to swim ashore below Hock Cliff regardless of the difficulty of ever regaining the opposite bank till daylight, and to leave the dinghy as it was and at anchor; but the speed with which Marrin had been swept away was terrifying and only my hand on the gunwale prevented me from following. So I climbed on board, shipping a good deal of water, and started the engine which would not hold us against the tide but allowed me to ease the boat into the shore of the Noose not too far down. Then I gave it a shove and sent it spinning on its way to the sea. I wished there to be no awkward mystery about Marrin’s death. More charitably, I hoped the dinghy might be of use to him if both were stuck on the same sandbank.

I now had to return to Bullo and recover my clothes. It was a long and wearisome plod over the Severn’s special mixture of mud and sand until I reached the seawall of the Awre peninsula. I was not as cold as on the night of my escape, but it was essential not to be seen. Fortunately it was near midnight in a world emptied of men and I disturbed nothing but sheep while walking along the river to the copse and my baby pill. When I had changed I did not take the lane under the embankment, which was much too close to the cottages, but climbed directly up and over the railway. There, carrying my bundle, I must have been seen against the skyline by some gardener or fisherman trying to forecast the next day’s weather by inspecting the sky instead of going to bed.

After I had crossed the main road, the journey was easy enough: up a farm track and then a footpath with only a mile to go before I was safely under the oaks in one of the thickest parts of the Forest. There I became hopelessly confused, for there were rides and tracks in all directions and few visible stars to help. I should have been out till dawn if I had not crossed my usual path to Broom Lodge at a spot where I could recognise it.

I entered my den at first light, dead tired and unable to start out again if I had wished. I ate whatever was handy and turned in. News of the major’s burglary could wait. It seemed likely to fail and was futile. Even if the cauldron were proved to be of great antiquity I had no longer any hope of finding the barbaric hoard from which it had come.

In the late afternoon I set out for an evening visit to the sapling stump, keeping up my usual precautions since the hasty gulpings of the Severn might have rejected Marrin as indigestible and thrown him up on shore. I did not expect any message at all from the major. The pessimism of melancholy inclined me to believe that by this time he would have been handed over to the police or – if the commune wished to keep the scandal in the family – be locked up in disgrace pending Marrin’s return.

Half an hour after I was settled in cover a very thoughtful Denzil appeared. He had evidently made several visits in the hope of finding me.

‘At last! At last!’ he exclaimed.

‘Did you pull it off?’

‘Yes, yes!’ – success no longer seemed to interest him – ‘Simeon has disappeared. I hope … I hope … What did you see?’

‘I saw him leave Bullo Pill in his dinghy and go down on the ebb. That was all. Hasn’t he come back?’

I was keeping the full story to myself. The major knew too much already and was naturally apprehensive.

‘Not like him! Never missed a day!’

‘He might be stranded on the opposite bank,’ I suggested tentatively.

‘Would have telephoned. You’re sure you … well, I mean he was all right when you left him?’

‘I didn’t leave him. I watched him arrive and after that all I saw was the wake of the dinghy when he started out. So you got the cauldron?’

‘I could have. No trouble. No trouble at all.’

‘But you didn’t take it?’

‘Got in all right, made a mess of the place. Turned out the drawers and stole a few trinkets. But I hadn’t got the key of the casket. I think Simeon keeps it on him.’

‘You could have taken the whole thing.’

‘Too heavy, Piers. Couldn’t go down the drain pipe with that. I’d have had to throw it out of the window. Crash! Wake somebody.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you break it open?’

‘Hadn’t the heart. All that ivory work. And the bowl? What is it? We don’t know, do we? Could be … could be sacrilege.’

It wasn’t difficult to guess the cause of the inhibition. The major had no hesitation in burgling the sanctum of alchemy, which he knew to be partly play-acting, but when it came to violating the golden bowl his illusions, reaching all the way back to the Dark Ages and Arthur, Champion of Christendom, prevented possible sacrilege.

‘Don’t tell me you think that crazy murderer is the Guardian of the Grail?’

‘What makes you say that?’

My remark, more a spark of exasperation than serious, had struck home. I could have disclosed that I had witnessed the pagan ceremony which was far from a proper use of the Christian Grail, but I didn’t. The swings and roundabouts of his own heretical funfair were much too unpredictable.

‘Because I don’t see Marrin as Perceval. The thing was probably the favourite drinking bowl of some Saxon or Dane, or older still and the property of Nodens. Blood from his enemy or wine from his vineyard, depending on how civilised he was.’

‘You believe he existed before he became a god?’

‘Marrin does. And you said yourself that there is always a truth behind legend.’

All side issues of no immediate importance. I asked him if anyone had been in the laboratory since the burglary.

‘Unlikely. I locked it all up again.’

‘And the broken window – has nobody noticed it?’

‘I don’t think so. Too high up. Eyes down. Meditation. Work.’

Wearily I demanded what he had done with the swag. He marched off into the open order of the trees, beckoning me to follow as if any speech were an indiscretion. At first he could not find the right oak, though it was the only one which had a low branch close to the ground. He climbed from that into a much higher fork – he must, as he said, have been good at P.T. – and recovered a small bag well hidden by a bunch of mistletoe.

‘There you are! Up to you now!’

An embarrassment. He should have left it up in the mistletoe. But he gave me no chance, and there was I with the proceeds of a pointless burglary which had been the major’s idea anyway.

I had no doubt that Marrin was drowned. Thus there was no object – at any rate for the moment – in remaining dead. What I had to do in order to get the full facts and keep in touch with developments was to reappear at Broom Lodge as the spontaneous and sympathetic visitor. So I rearranged my den to look as if some tramp had lived there in the past but not recently, and took the last train back to London. Next day, bathed, respectable and dressed with conventional casualness I drove down to the Forest and paid a casual call at Broom Lodge as if on my way to South Wales. The place was disorganised, the workshops silent, and groups hanging about like listless bees without a queen.

Elsa met me at the front door and told me that her uncle was dead.

‘His body was found yesterday afternoon caught in a salmon weir below Purton. The police telephoned us at once.’

‘Good God! One of his fishing expeditions?’

‘I think so. He drove away the night before last without telling anybody, and I know it’s the river when he does that. It looks as if he must have fallen in. He wasn’t dressed for a dive. I told the police to make enquiries at Bullo Pill. And, Piers, we’ve had a burglary. The police discovered it. All the drawers in the lab had been turned out and I don’t quite know what is missing except that he stole the golden bowl.’

My face must have shown my surprise and horror, but under the circumstances both were natural enough. Had the major lied to me, or, more likely, had one of the damned druidicals slipped in and pinched the sacred totem for the use of the sect?

‘Casket and all?’ I asked.

‘He just smashed the casket and took it. And the police have come back again this morning. They are wondering if there couldn’t be some connection between Simeon’s death and the burglary.’

There could indeed be. Burglar knows Marrin is out and that the lab will be empty. Obvious, and what actually happened. Alternatively and much worse, burglar pushes Marrin into the river to be sure that he can’t interrupt and then returns to Broom Lodge for the gold.

‘The dinghy was picked up by a coaster coming into Sharpness,’ she went on. ‘His diving stuff in its case was on board. People at Bullo confirmed to the police that his boat was missing and said that he must have taken it out the night before last. And somebody saw a man about midnight carrying a bundle and scrambling up the railway embankment instead of taking the lane past the cottages. That looks queer, doesn’t it?’

I asked her what would happen now, and whether Broom Lodge could carry on.

‘I suppose so. I know he’s left everything to the commune.’

‘And nothing to you?’

‘I don’t want anything. It’s all so uncertain. Who owns what? Think of lawyers and the Revenue trying to find out where an alchemist got his gold!’

She had a moment of hysteria, laughing and sobbing at the same time.

‘But, my darling, you know he wasn’t one.’

‘I don’t! He was so many things.’

I asked if the major was about. I hoped he wasn’t. I could imagine him complicating the whole situation with military or esoteric incoherencies.

‘No, I hear he’s spending his time praying in Blakeney church. The return of the prodigal I suppose, now that poor, deluded Simeon isn’t here to influence him. I think he’ll go home.’

A voice materialised from behind us where there had been nobody.

‘Excuse me, Miss Marrin! I wonder if I might have a word with this gentleman.’

A detective-sergeant in plain clothes identified himself. This, I thought, could be the end, but it was only a beginning. He had been informed that the late Mr Marrin had taken me diving with him at the Guscar Rocks. Could I tell him how experienced he seemed and what his practice was? Did he always change in his dinghy, or on the night of his death would he have been crossing the river with the intention of going in off the land somewhere on the other side?

I found it easy and natural to tell him the little I knew: that I had the impression he always went in off the land and that unless his boat was fairly large and stable he would not have dived from it and returned to it.

Then he turned to the experiment in salmon fishing, of which he had heard from the commune, and to late-night dives which he gathered Mr Marrin seldom spoke of because they had some religious meaning for him. Perhaps I could explain that. The sergeant was evidently relieved to have a chance of talking to a sane outsider.

I made what sense I could of it all, telling him that the commune believed in the transmigration of souls, that service to mankind in this life was what would be remembered in the next and that they trained themselves in simple crafts which could be useful at some future time when the survivors of inevitable disaster – disease, starvation or atomic pollution – had reverted to the same state as neolithic man.

To my surprise he thought there might be something in it.

‘Making a bloody mess of our world we are, Mr Colet, and that’s a fact. But what has it got to do with underwater fishing?’

‘I think you’d be on safe ground in describing Mr Marrin as a keen naturalist,’ I said, ‘but with an original point of view of his own. He was not interested in description or discovery, but what you and I and the fish have in common. All life is one and that sort of thing.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Colet. You make it all much clearer than those poor … er, yes. And I can’t get anything very exact about the missing objects.’

‘Which of them?’ I asked, feeling that I was now accepted as a friend and confidant of the late Simeon Marrin.

‘Some small objects of gold. And according to members of the commune a golden bowl of great value. It was in a casket which was smashed.’

‘Oh, he made them. That was his hobby. He wasn’t a very experienced goldsmith but he enjoyed it. He once told me that his work had only the value of the gold.’

‘You don’t know, I suppose, where he bought it?’

I replied that I had never asked him, and then thought that I ought to try to conform to the evasive and contradictory answers which he would have got from the more credulous members of the commune.

‘I’ve heard some nonsense about mining and also that he had a process for extracting gold from sea water.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Yes, but I believe it would cost far more to extract than its worth.’

‘So it would not be possible in his laboratory?’

‘No. If you’re thinking of all that lead, mercury and other stuff in the lab I’m pretty sure it was for experiments with alloys.’

‘Would you say it was widely known that he had so much gold on the premises?’

‘I don’t know. Not widely, I should think. But you had better ask the members of the commune that. They gave hospitality freely. It looks to me as if someone knew he had fallen out of his boat and drowned and then made a dash across country to get at the gold.’

‘He may not have been drowned, sir. It could have been a blow at the back of the skull which killed him.’

I wondered whether an autopsy could tell whether he drowned after being knocked out by the blow and falling in, or whether it came by accident while he was still just alive. There couldn’t, I think, be conclusive evidence either way after eighteen hours at the mercy of the tide and tangling with a salmon weir.

I could guess what had happened. Marrin had tumbled out of the dinghy, rigid with terror, and though the lias below Hock Cliff is softish rock there are chunks of hard stone imbedded in it. If he had crashed his head on one, that accounted for the swiftness with which the ebb had carried his body away.