Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows by Ellis Peters

angles, like a lesser Don Quixote put together out of scrap iron. A well-shaped grey head leaned to peer at her out of concerned hollow eyes, whose colour she could not determine. By this light they had no colour, only an engraved darkness in his ivory face. He had a small, pointed, elusive beard like the Don, and wispy grey moustaches drooping to join it.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ said a high tenor voice, soft and mild in surprise, and apologising even for the surprise, ‘but we don’t normally use this door, and especially at night. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.’
    With distant astonishment at her own efficiency, she heard her voice saying very clearly and reasonably: ‘I do beg your pardon, but I came to you as the nearest house. I’ve just pulled a man out of the river, two hundred yards or so upstream. I’ve been giving him artificial respiration, and I think he’s going to be all right, but we ought to get him into shelter as quickly as we can. Can you help me? Could we bring him here?’
    After one stunned instant, for which she could hardly blame him, he reacted with admirable promptitude. The door opened wider than ever. ‘Come inside!’ he said. ‘I’ll call my colleague, and we’ll get the poor chap indoors at once.’
    ‘I could help you carry him in,’ she said. ‘We ought not to lose any time.’
    ‘Don’t worry, Lawrence is only a couple of minutes away. He has a scooter, he’ll be here in no time. You sit down by the fire, you’re wet and cold. I’ll be back directly.’ And he thrust her briskly into a small, book-lined room, and himself went on along a passage to the hall and the telephone, leaving the door open between them. She heard him dial, and speak briefly and drily, almost as though similar rescue operations landed on his doorstep every night. It might not be the first occurrence, she realised. People who live beside flood rivers are liable to be recruited from time to time. Certainly he wasted no time in calling up his reserves. After the click of the hand-set as the connection was cut, she heard him dial and speak once more.
    When he came back into the doorway of the room where she waited, he had a duffle coat over his arm, and was carrying a folding garden-bed with a rigid aluminium frame and a patterned canvas cover printed with brilliant sunflowers. Incongruously festive for a stretcher, but she saw that it would serve the purpose very well.
    ‘If you wouldn’t mind coming along to light us on the way back? I’ve got a coach-lantern here in the garden room. I called the police, as well,’ he explained. ‘You may not know, but we had an officer here looking for a missing boy, earlier this evening. I hope you may have found him for them.’
    ‘No,’ said Charlotte quickly, ‘this isn’t the boy. I do know about that, but this is someone else, a man I know slightly. He’s staying at “The Salmon’s Return”, like me.’
    ‘Oh… I see! A pity… I called the number the chief inspector gave me, I felt sure… Well, never mind, here’s Lawrence! Let’s get this one in, at any rate.’
    The busy sputter of a Vespa came rocking round the bulk of the house, and the young man of the custodian’s box put his head in at the open door, gave Charlotte a brief, blank glance, and asked briskly: ‘Where is he?’
    ‘By the path, just upstream. Here, take this! I’ll lead. And mind how you go,’ he said, heading rapidly out through the garden, the lantern held out beside him to light the steps for Charlotte. ‘That path’s in a very dangerous state until it dries out properly. What was he doing taking a night walk there? A stupid thing to do!’
    His voice was detached and impersonal, but she heard very clearly the implication: And what were
you
doing taking a night walk there? ‘Lucky for him you came along,’ he said, almost as if he had recognised the implication, too, and was making a token apology for it.
    ‘Listen!’ said the young man named Lawrence