Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (5 page)

But the Reverend Stephen, once he had hung up, immediately began to worry, all the same, and there was nothing to be done but go and look for himself in the church and the organ-loft, to see if by any chance Rainbow had left his music there, or some other sign of his presence. Even healthy-looking men in their prime have been known to succumb to heart attacks without warning. He didn’t really expect anything of that kind. He was not, in fact, expecting to find, as he did, the church door unlocked. Rainbow’s music-case lying unfastened on the organ-bench, and a new voluntary still in place on the stand. That jolted him slightly. It was out of character for Rainbow to leave any of his possessions lying about. But there was no sign of the man himself anywhere in the church.

The vicar hardly knew why he found it necessary to walk all round the paths of his churchyard, since there was no reason whatever why even a Rainbow suddenly overtaken by illness should be lying helpless among the graves, when his music was still withindoors. But the Reverend Stephen was a thorough man, and circled his church conscientiously by the grassy path that threaded its way close to the walls. Under the tower the oldest gravestones clustered like massive, broken teeth, upright headstones leaning out of true, solid table-tombs grown over with moss in their lettering, and deep in long grass bleaching to autumn, because in such a huddle it was almost impossible to mow or even to scythe. The vicar turned the corner of the tower, and clucked mild annoyance, because somebody had thrown down what looked like some old, dark rags among the long grass, or else the wind had blown them there, or some playful pup dragged them in. Dogs were not frowned upon in St Eata’s churchyard. The Reverend Stephen looked upon them as among the most innocent and confiding, if rowdy, of God’s creatures.

He went aside from the path to remove the offence, and froze after two paces. The dark rags had gained a distinct shape, had matter within them, had sprayed the table-tomb and surrounding stones with a sparse, blackened rain. The shape was grotesque, as if someone had loosed a heavy press at speed upon a human form, and squashed it into fragments, as some nut-crackers reduce a walnut to splintered pulp. But there was still a discernible, even a recognisable, head. There was a face, upturned, open-mouthed, open-eyed. The fall that had shattered all other bones had left this identifying countenance unmarked, the back of the skull lolling in the thick verdure beneath it.

Rainbow had had every reason for absenting himself from his somewhat equivocal connubial couch. He stared at the October sky past the Reverend Stephen’s head, and seemed almost immune to the ruin of his body. There was even a look of desperate eagerness left glaring from his fixed features, as though he had died with his eyes upon the crock of gold.

The Reverend Stephen was a conscientious soul who knew all about the citizen’s duty where murder or mayhem were in question, or even the self-violence that could hardly be associated with Rainbow. He drew back from the appalling wreckage among the graves with great care, marking his path in case some other, less innocent, had also trodden here during the night, and went to call the police, whose job this clearly was. But he was so far adopted into the tribal structure of Middlehope that it never occurred to him to call anyone but Sergeant Moon.

Homicide might live in Comerbourne. Here in Middlehope Sergeant Moon was the official guardian of the tribe’s peace, to be trusted absolutely, and turned to in all emergencies. The Reverend Stephen never for one moment entertained the idea of notifying Barbara Rainbow of her husband’s present whereabouts and present state. Nor did it occur to him that he was treating her as a woman of the tribe, not an alien from the outer world. Middlehope had spread a wing over her from that moment, whether she knew it or not.

‘Oh, yes, quite dead,’ said the vicar simply, at ease with the man to whom he spoke. ‘He’s broken to pieces, you see. He must have come off the tower, he couldn’t have been shattered like that any other way. Yes, it was his wife who rang me, fretting about him not coming home. I think he sometimes didn’t, but this time she hadn’t any clues, and she was troubled.’ A good Biblical word, troubled. ‘I haven’t told anyone, and nobody’s likely to go through there, not close. I thought better let well alone rather than mount a guard. No, I haven’t said a word to her.’

‘All right, sir,’ said Sergeant Moon briskly, ‘you go and just keep a discreet eye on the place, and fend people off it if need be, and I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

‘She mustn’t see him, you know,’ said the vicar, and blushed to hear himself giving advice to an old hand like the sergeant. But after all, he had seen what was left of Rainbow, and as yet Sergeant Moon hadn’t. ‘I suppose it’s properly my job to tell the widow…?’

‘We’ll take care of all that,’ said Moon imperturbably, and cleared the line in order to get through direct to headquarters at Comerbourne.

‘Oh, no!’ protested George, confronted with this altogether too apt confirmation of the sergeant’s forebodings. ‘You’ll have to give up prophecy. Jack, you’re too unnerving.’

‘Could be accident,’ said Moon, without much confidence. ‘Sounds as if he fell from the church tower. I’m on my way, and I’ve called the doc.’

‘Right, we’ll be with you in twenty minutes.’

In the event it took the squad a full half-hour to reach Abbot’s Bale, since the morning rush was in full swing, and the roads congested. But within an hour the whole grisly apparatus connected with sudden and suspect death had arrived, and was grouped about all that remained of Arthur Everard Rainbow.

The police doctor, confronted with this wreckage, shrugged his helplessness, testified unnecessarily to the fact that life was extinct, opined that it had been extinct for many hours, almost certainly all night, and left it to the pathologist to go into detail, since this was now obviously his affair. The photographer shot a great deal of film, and the forensic scientist, arriving last, looked down at the body, looked up at the tower, looming close over the spot, and wondered whether he was needed at all.

‘Not much doubt where he fell from, is there?’ he observed mildly. ‘Pretty plain case of accident, wouldn’t you say?’ He had not, so far, taken a close look at the set-up.

‘On the face of it, yes,’ agreed George, ‘except that I don’t much like its face. There are grazes on his palms, and the balls of his fingers, for one thing, white marks of what looks like stone-dust, and the same under his finger-nails, as well as what I think you may find to be fragments of moss. And since he can hardly have done any scrabbling about on the stones here after he hit, if I’m right the debris is from up there.’

‘He’d try to grab hold and save himself if he found himself falling,’ suggested the devil’s advocate, already interested.

‘Why should he find himself falling? There doesn’t seem to be a large chunk of masonry that’s come down with him, or anything like that. And though I haven’t been up there, I wouldn’t mind betting that parapet is breast-high. You don’t overbalance over a barrier like that. Not to mention the question of what he was doing up on top in the first place.’

‘Hmmm, that’s true. They’d hardly keep the organ out on the leads, would they? Well, now, let’s have a look, before the doc takes him away.’ And delicately he began to move round the rim of the scene, looking at grass-blades and the scarred mosses on the stones. Dr Reece Goodwin, a round, bouncing, energetic ball of a man, well into his sixties but looking fifteen years younger, was kneeling beside the body, touching and probing with spatulate fingers.

‘An odd chance, he fell with all the lower part of him on this table tomb and these two headstones, smashed himself to pieces from the waist down, but he came down head and shoulders in this thick tangle of grass and brambles. Nothing but superficial damage, scratches and impact grazes to the head. And yet he’s bled from the back of the skull, and I think we’re going to find there’s an indented wound here resting against nothing but all this cushiony vegetation. And he certainly never moved after he hit.’

‘Interesting!’ said George. ‘It looks as if you’ve got yourself a job this afternoon.’

Dr Goodwin bounded up from his knees, and scrubbed his hands vigorously. ‘So it seems! Right now I wouldn’t give you a precise cause of death, obvious though it may seem. Can I have him now?’

So that was that. A post-mortem was essential, and the shadow of murder was already looming as the shadow of the tower crept round to mark the passing of noon. A man falling by accident may certainly claw at the stones to try to arrest his fall. Even a suicide may change his mind at the last moment, and try to cling to the world he has set out to abandon. But in neither case is he likely to end up with his head the most intact part of him after the fall, cushioned in vegetation, and yet with an indented wound at the back of his skull.

They hoisted the rag-doll remains of Rainbow into a plastic sheet, packed him into a shell, and stowed him away in Reece Goodwin’s van for his journey to the hospital mortuary in Comerbourne. The vicar, hovering unhappily in the background, was almost relieved when he was asked if the police might borrow the parish hall as an incident room, and was left there with Sergeant Moon to make a formal statement, while Detective Sergeant Brice and Constables Reynolds and Collins began a methodical examination of the church from nave to tower, layer by layer, and George, ruefully shouldering the most distasteful duty left, went in person to break the news to Barbara Rainbow.

He was halfway up the drive, among the calculated spaces and tastefully positioned statuary, when it dawned on him that while the widow might be badly shaken by this death, possibly no one in the world would be really sorry. In his own business circles Rainbow appeared to have been watched, respected, envied and copied, but never actually liked. In this valley he had made himself not so much detested as dangerous, and not to be tolerated, like a disease. Middlehope would breathe more freely now that he was gone. And the spectacular Barbara?

She opened the door to him herself, in grey slacks and a silk shirt, her hair down round her shoulders; and her black brows, drawn together over eyes focused somewhere far beyond him, suddenly smoothed out in relief. She recognised him gladly. Recalling the party intimacy, she said: ‘George…!’ and even launched upon a genuine, if anxious, smile, and then she looked more closely, and grew cool and still, and certain of a thunderbolt. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry! That was presumptuous. It’s Superintendent Felse isn’t it? This is official.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said George.

‘Come in! As a matter of fact,’ she said, closing the door upon the world and leading the way into the small drawing-room where Rainbow’s grand piano stood, ‘I’ve just called the police down the valley. Do sit down! But you… you’re C.I.D, aren’t you? How could you be involved?’ The dark eyes were intent and guarded, and she was pale. Hardly any make-up, he realised, and as beautiful as ever. ‘I’ve been calling his shops, and his dealers, and everybody I could think of who might know his movements, ever since I called the vicar, early this morning. Nobody knows anything. So finally I called the police. But just the police. That wouldn’t come straight to you. You must have come into it some other way. And you do know something, don’t you?’

‘The vicar called Sergeant Moon,’ said George, ‘who called me. For sufficient reason.’

‘Yours is the criminal division,’ she said deliberately. ‘Are you suggesting there’s something criminal involved?’

It was an eventuality which had never occurred to him, though all too clearly it had to her. He could not believe that she was acting or prevaricating. The first thing that had occurred to her, when her husband vanished without trace, was that he had excellent reason for doing so. What she dreaded was something that would involve her loyalty. Not her integrity. Not her affection. George was suddenly sure that the news he was actually bringing would be very much easier to bear.

‘Not as you mean. No question of any criminal act on your husband’s part. After your morning call the vicar was naturally worried, and went to see if there was any suggestion to be found in the church. He found a situation which made him call our department at once. Your husband is dead, Mrs Rainbow. It looks as if he fell to his death from the church tower last night. I’m sorry to be the bearer of such news.’

He’d been right to go ahead bluntly with the fact. And the first thing he saw in her, or was almost certain he saw, was that she had never for a moment considered this possibility. Either that, or she was an actress right out of his experience. Her eyes flared wide open, her face blanched with shock, her hands, which had been bunched into doubled fists a moment before, lay loose in her lap. The second thing he saw, as she stirred slowly out of her stillness, was that she had glimpsed a marvellous light at the end of a long and still suspect tunnel.
So that was all
! He was dead, and she hadn’t killed him, or even willed his death. Simply, he wasn’t there any more!

‘Are you sure?’ she said in a muted, wary voice, letting the syllables slide out one by one as if they had to carry passports. ‘Arthur’s dead? But how could it happen? Why should he fall from the tower? Why should he even climb the tower? All he wanted was the organ, and the choir to go with it.’ The single virtue Rainbow had possessed hit her suddenly, she knotted her hands again, and rocked like a genuine widow. ‘He did care for music, you know! Only he never really felt it in his bones.’

His bones were in splinters from the waist down, and he was almost excessively dead. George experienced her brief, guilty, unloving pity, and understood it. She didn’t really owe very much.

‘You’ll want to ask me questions,’ she said reasonably. ‘Where is he? Do you need me to – to identify him, or anything?’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said George. ‘But you’ll understand that his death presents something of a problem, and we shall have to collect all the information possible that can shed any light on it. For instance, it seems hardly likely that he set out to take his own life.’

‘No, he never would,’ said Barbara positively.

‘The idea of an accidental fall presents difficulties, too.’

‘I understand,’ she said bluntly. ‘You can’t rule out the possibility that someone else had a hand in it. It’s all right, I know where I stand now. The marriage partner is normally the first suspect. You’ll want access to all his papers and accounts. You’d better have the key of his office now, everything in it is just as he left it. And you’ll want a statement from me, about his movements yesterday, and mine.’

‘I’ll send someone later to get a formal statement. Now just tell me. Things were as usual yesterday? He went to choir practice at the usual time? There was nothing out of the way in his manner?’

‘Everything was just the same as ever. He always walked to the church, it’s not far by the side gate. He went out at the usual time, and he told me he’d be late back, because he wanted to get in some practice after the choir left. That’s why I wasn’t worried until around midnight. He could easily have stopped in at the vicar’s afterwards, and sat talking about his plans for the season’s music. He intended some drastic changes. They weren’t too popular with the choir. Some modern music is very ungrateful stuff for voices. I was here alone all the evening, and went to bed without waiting for him. Even when I woke up later, and found he still hadn’t come in, I can’t say I was really worried. He didn’t invariably consult me, or even warn me, before taking off on business at a moment’s notice. And besides, nobody could have started much of a hunt for him in the middle of the night. But when there was no telephone call this morning, and his car was still in the garage, I thought I’d better make some discreet enquiries. That was when I called the vicar, and since then I’ve called everyone I could think of, half a dozen dealers, both the shops, even Charles Goddard in Comerbourne, and John Stubbs down at Mottisham. And then you came. And that’s all. Oh, and I’ll give you his solicitor’s name and number. As far as I know, they hold his will.’

She was perfectly in command of herself and her situation now, and her composure in speaking of such details as her husband’s will was completely detached and impersonal, as though the disposal of his worldly goods had nothing to do with her, and could hardly affect her.

‘And what happens about the funeral arrangements? I suppose there has to be an inquest. And then will they release his body? I suppose I ought to call in a firm to take responsibility, in any case.’

‘It would be wise,’ George agreed. ‘I’d like the addresses of the shops. And I will take the office key, with your permission. We shall probably have to disturb you occasionally during the next few days, but we’ll try not to upset your life more than we have to. You have no servants living in the house?’

‘To vouch for my movements last night?’ she said with a faint, grim smile. ‘No, I’m afraid you’ll have to take, or doubt, my word for it. There are two girls who come in, mornings, and help out if I have a dinner-party. And a woman who comes in twice a week to clean. All from the village. I’ll give you their names, too.’