Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs by Ellis Peters Page A

charge for the moment? I suspect—I’m pretty sure—it isn’t going to be for long.”
    “Whatever you say,” agreed Simon in a shaken voice. “This wasn’t in my brief.”
    “Then leave him where he is. Don’t move anything. Tim, bring that lamp over, and let’s have a careful look in here.”
    Shocked into silence, Tim brought it, and tipped its light full in upon the dead man. George felt carefully at the well-worn, respectable black suit, the lank, dun-coloured hair, the hand-knitted pullover, the laces and sole of the one remaining shoe. All of them left on his fingers the clinging, sticky feel of salt. He felt down past the bony shoulder, and touched a flat surface beneath the body, not cold and final like the stone, but with the live, grained feel of wood about it.
    “I thought he was lying very high. There’s a wooden coffin below him.” He tapped on it, and the small resulting sound was light and hollow. “Not very substantial, just a shell to go inside the stone. That should be Treverra. But this one—”
    “There appears to be some injury to his head,” said the Vicar, low-voiced. “Do you think—?”
    “I
think
he drowned in the sea, but the doctors will settle that. Shine the light here, Tim.”
    Tim illuminated the bony, dark-skinned face. A darker, mottled stain covered the outer part of the socket of the left eye, the lower temple and the cheek-bone, the mark of a large, broken bruise.
    “Could he have got that in the sea?” Sam’s big voice was muted.
    “I don’t think so. I think it was done before death. And I think,” he said, looking round them all and stepping back from the coffin, “we’re going to have to turn this over at once to the Maymouth police. They’d better have a look at the whole set-up. Because it looks very much as if they’ve got a murder on their hands.”
    There was a moment of absolute silence and stillness; then Simon heaved a cautious breath and dusted the powdering of stone from his hands.
    “One of us had better take the car and go and telephone,” he said in the most practical of voices. “Will you go, George, or shall I?”
     
    But the most incomprehensible thing of all about the St. Nectan project came later still, past noon, when the photographers and the experts and the police surgeon had all had their way with the Treverra tomb, and the long, lank body of Zebedee Trethuan, verger and jobbing gardener, had been taken out on a covered stretcher and driven away in an ambulance, watched silently and avidly by a gallery of fishermen, children, respectable housewives and solid townspeople from all the dunes around, and no doubt just as eagerly by all the trebles of St. Mary’s choir, fighting over the Vicar’s binoculars on top of the Dragon’s Head.
    They were left with the plain, light wooden coffin on which he had lain; and at the first touch the lid of it gave to their hands, and came away, uncovering—surely, this time?—the last resting-place of Jan Treverra. And there they were, the expected bones.
    This body had certainly been there longer than its bedfellow. It was almost a skeleton, shreds of perished clothing drifted about the long bones and the dried and mummified flesh that remained to it. But had it, on closer inspection, really been there for two centuries and more? It had a hasty and tumbled appearance, with no composed, hieratic dignity. The fragments of cloth still had enough nature left in them to show a texture and a colour; a colour which had been very dark navy blue, a texture that looked suspiciously like thick, solid modern woollen, meant to withstand all weathers. And here, about the chest, clung bits of disintegrating knitted stuff.
    Among Treverra’s eccentricities it had never been recorded that he wished to be buried in a fisherman’s Meltons and a seaman’s jersey.
    By the middle of that Friday afternoon it was all over Maymouth that Jan Treverra’s tomb had yielded not one body, but two; and that, positively