The Camelot Caper, page 19
One of the men was her cousin, and again Jess was moved to something resembling pity, for John had, as usual, the hardest part of the job. He was the stone carrier. The activities of his partner—who must be the objectionable Algernon—were hidden from her, but she was willing to bet they were easier than stone carrying. The blocks were massive things; after ten minutes her cousin was staggering and clutching the stones to his
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manly chest as if he were afraid of dropping them—which he probably was; if one had landed on his foot it would have smashed half the bones. Yet even in his gasping exhaustion and general misery, he had not lost all his insouciance; dropping the last block on the edge of the trench, he wiped perspiration from his face with his sleeve, and did two steps of a popular dance.
“That’s the lot,” he said, without troubling to lower his normally low-pitched voice. “Think it’s enough?”
“For now. Tomorrow night we’ll start on the gate.”
Jess heard a suppressed snort from David. The expression on her cousin’s face when he heard this depressing news was so disgusted that she wanted to laugh too. He contemplated his muddy, bleeding hands with fastidious disgust, wiped them on the seat of his trousers, and sat down on the ground.
“For the love of God, Freddie, must we have a gate?
I thought you said archaeologists never have enough money to dig everything up.”
“You ass, we don’t know what parts they’ll want to dig, and we can hardly limit them without arousing suspicion.” A head appeared at the lip of the trench; it was followed by the rest of THE CAMELOT CAPER / 281
Freddie. He was the second man, Algernon—the one who had twice flattened David. Jessica’s amusement went up in smoke. She never had liked Algernon, and she didn’t like Freddie—what a name, almost as bad as Algernon—any better.
Her cousin had collapsed at full length on the ground, and did not see his ally’s face; which, Jess thought, was perhaps just as well, for Freddie gave his sensitive associate a look which could have scorched rock.
“You know I’ve been against this from the start,” he grunted, sitting down crosslegged. “Give me a fag, will you?”
An arm and hand, graceful even in their battered state, rose up from the grass and extended a cigarette.
Freddie took it and went on with what was evidently a long-standing argument.
“We can drop the whole damned business so far as I’m concerned. It’s not too late to go back to my scheme.”
“But, dear old boy,” said Cousin John’s lazy voice from the grasses, “we lose so much lovely, lovely money that way. You don’t think the professionals will detect any little errors in our wall, do you?”
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The other man shrugged and blew out smoke.
“Some may do. But their criticisms will be denounced by other experts, who will defend us for the sheer fun of attacking their professional rivals. That’s precisely the trouble with the lot of them, none of the old fools ever agrees with one another. They’re petty-minded, jealous old devils. And gullible! They can make themselves believe anything they want to believe. Look at Piltdown man; the whole bloody scientific world fell hook, line and sinker for a bad fake.”
“You ought to know,” said Cousin John, in that tone of sweet malice which Jess knew so well.
The comment stung, as he had known it would; Freddie looked at him with a face so ugly that Jess recoiled, even behind the shelter of the wall.
“I’ve told you that was a lie. That swine Barton kept me from my degree out of pure professional jealousy.”
“Professional?” murmured the sly, sweet voice. “Dear Mrs. Barton; how charmingly she administered tea and sympathy. But the rest of us were courteous enough to be discreet.”
Jess bit back an exclamation as Freddie’s hand darted toward the handle of the pickax which THE CAMELOT CAPER / 283
lay next to the ditch. She knew her cousin must have seen the gesture; but his long limbs never moved, and after a second or two, Freddie’s fingers loosed their hold.
“You’re going to bait someone into murdering you one day,” he said.
“Not while I can give that someone his share of half a million pounds,” was the contemptuous reply.
“Freddie, you have absolutely no sense of humor. You must learn to laugh at yourself, old boy. Now, then, how much more is there to be done here? We’ve got to let it cook for months, perhaps a year; the sooner we finish the sooner it begins to pay off.”
There was another, louder snort of amusement from David, and Jess popped her head down out of sight, poking at him warningly.
“What was that?” asked Freddie; Jess heard a rustle of grass.
“An owl. Sit down, you exhaust me.”
“Couldn’t be anything else, I suppose.” Freddie sat down, producing more rustling noises. “Well, I think we’ll stop when we’ve built the gate. And the grave, of course.”
“Look here, damn it all, I thought we’d decided not to have a grave. I mean—one can’t have a grave without a body.”
“We can have a skeleton easily enough,” said 284 / Elizabeth Peters
his ally contemptuously. “But bones are difficult to fake properly, with the new scientific tests. And they’d have to fit the traditional descriptions—size, age, and that.
No, we shan’t have a body, but we must have a grave if we’re to explain the treasure. I’ve got it all worked out. An empty grave, robbed in antiquity—a cache of objects, secreted by the thieves in panic as their crime is detected…. It makes a lovely tale.”
A weary groan from Cousin John was the only response, and Jess felt that it was safe to take another look. She was beginning to understand now; but she still couldn’t believe it.
“We’ll finish up tonight by planting the ring,” Freddie said briskly. “Before you lose it again.”
“That’s not fair, I’ve never actually lost it.” Cousin John rose up, stiffly, like a warrior’s effigy from a tomb.
“The ring, yes. What did I do with it?”
“I shouldn’t have given it to you,” said Freddie. “After all, I was the one who took the risk of retrieving it.”
“Yes, and I have a smallish bone to pick with you on that,” Cousin John said. He stood up and began to investigate his pockets.
“That bone’s been overly picked. You’re too THE CAMELOT CAPER / 285
squeamish, Johnny boy. At your insistence, I didn’t even damage the fellow much.”
“All that blood,” said Cousin John. “Nasty. Ah, here it is.”
Freddie took the ring and dropped back into the trench. Muffled scrapes and bangs issued from the depths. Standing on the edge, Cousin John balanced himself and peered down.
“I say, don’t plant it too far down. That’s one item we do want them to find.”
“They’ll find it.” Freddie’s head reappeared. “We’re going to leave our bits of stone protruding here, remember? The ring will be found at the base of the wall, where it might have been dropped by a panicky thief climbing over.”
“Very nice,” said John appreciatively. “I can see the Observer pulling out all the stops on that one.”
For some minutes Jess had been seriously alarmed by the ominous quaking movements her companion was making. The last comment was too much. He burst into a shout of laughter.
Jess couldn’t have run if she had wanted to; her muscles were too stiff from squatting in the damp. And she had come to share David’s unworried assessment of the situation; it was too ludicrous to be frightening.
She began to
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suspect that they had both misjudged the problem when Freddie’s hand dived into his pocket and came out with a small black object. The sight of it alarmed John as much as it did Jess.
“Here, now,” he exclaimed, snatching at it.
Freddie hopped nimbly to one side.
“Stop it, you bloody fool, or I’ll shoot you as well.
Come out from behind that wall, whoever you are.”
David straightened himself to his full height; he was grinning broadly, and both hands were in his pockets.
“It’s all right, Jess, he’s just playing villain. He wouldn’t dare use that gun.”
He leaned negligently against the wall, which was about waist high. Jess had to admit that his casual pose and his grin were probably annoying. But the reaction was far more violent than she had cause to expect; she didn’t believe what was happening even after she saw the spurt of flame from the muzzle of the gun and heard the report.
The sharp short sound was like the snap of a magician’s fingers, that turned them all to stone. Jess saw the two men through a sudden fog that dimmed her eyes: Freddie with his dark face twisted in a snarl and his arm half extended;
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John frozen in the middle of an abortive attempt to snatch at the weapon.
David too stood motionless, leaning slightly forward against the wall’s support. Very slowly his head fell back. His elbows slid out across the top of the wall.
Then he fell.
TEN
The affair had turned from farce to tragedy too quickly for Jess to accept its reality. She didn’t need to look at David, sprawled face down in the weeds, to be convinced that he was dead; but the thought short-circuited her brain, and for the following minutes she operated on sheer, unreasoning instinct. She got over the wall with the neat movements of an experienced climber, and ran toward Freddie and his gun.
She probably would have ended her brief career then and there if it had not been for her cousin, who came out of his horrified paralysis in time to complete the movement he had begun. The bullet struck the ground, not too far from Freddie’s foot, and Freddie made a brief, pungent remark. He added viciously, “Grab her, then, you fool. If she goes haring off into the night screaming, I swear I will plug her.”
Cousin John made a lunge for Jess and
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caught her just before she could claw at Freddie’s face.
They wrestled. Jess’s strength was intensified by extreme mental anguish and John was restrained by the code of his class from clobbering a lady, though she was in no state to appreciate his forbearance. Freddie, watching the struggle with cynical amusement, suggested, “Slug her. Or I shall.”
“If you must talk…like an American gangster film,”
said Cousin John, between gasps, “please try to…ugh!…bring your slang…up to date. Jess, stop it.
I don’t want…ooooh, you nasty young woman!”
The comment ended in a howl of pain as Jess sank her teeth into his hand. Carried away, he swung a useful fist, and Jess saw stars. Draped limply over her cousin’s arm, she heard him say, “Take a look at him, Fred. If you’ve killed the fellow…”
“I haven’t,” said Freddie. He sounded regretful. “He’s breathing.”
“Thank God. Is he badly hurt?”
“Can’t tell,” said Freddie, with supreme indifference.
“Well, find out! If he needs a doctor…”
“He’s not going to get a doctor.”
Jess was in a peculiar state, not so much from THE CAMELOT CAPER / 291
the effect of her cousin’s sock on the jaw, which had not been very hard, but from shock. Her numbed brain had accepted the fact of David’s breathing with the same lack of reaction with which it had accepted his supposed demise; she could feel her heart banging frantically around inside her rib cage, and knew that she was incapable of resistance or flight. In her confusion she missed part of the discussion, and only stirred feebly when she felt herself being lifted.
“It’s a good job she’s small,” her cousin remarked.
“Even so, I’m not sure I can carry her the whole distance.”
“You’ll have to. I can’t leave him, he might wake up.
Bring a mattress, or stretcher, or something to carry him on.”
Jess had been carried before, but only by male acquaintances anxious to show off their muscles. The position was surprisingly uncomfortable when head and limbs were left dangling. She made croaking noises, and tried to lift her head.
“She’s coming round,” said Cousin John, alarmed.
“Then put her out again, you incompetent ass,” said Freddie. “Oh, Christ, you’re hopeless. Here…”
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Incompetence was not one of Freddie’s vices. What he did, he did well. She felt a brief, sharp flash of pain, and then nothing.
Waking up was far more painful. Noises beat at her head; rough hands jabbed her face and neck. There was light somewhere, nasty dirty gray light like the pale luminosity of fungi grown in a damp cellar….
The first thing she saw was David’s face, enormous, and out of focus, hovering inches from her eyes. The upper part of his face was disfigured by dried blood; the lower part by a dark growth of beard. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips were cracked. A more beautiful sight she had never seen.
Jess sat up, ignoring the twinge of pain that shot through her head. She had been lying on a pile of dusty rags laid on a bare wooden floor. The light was not as intense as she had thought; it filtered through glass panes so black with dust that they looked translucent, and the bars set across them further obscured the light.
The windows were small and high, set in cold stone walls whose austerity was softened only by enormous swinging swaths of gray spiderwebs. The walls were curved. That fact, she knew, ought to mean something, but at the moment
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she could not think what. She could comprehend only basic ideas—stone walls, bars—a prison, and nuts to Lovelace’s definition. And David—still alive, and conscious, but not being very convincing about either one.
“They shot you,” she exclaimed, clutching at him.
“Where did they shoot you?”
“Shoulder, of course. Where else do heroes get shot?” He grinned at her. The effect was indescribably horrible.
“Leg,” Jess said.
“My legs weren’t exposed. When you stop to think about it, shoulders are logical places in which to be shot. They take up quite a lot of area. With a hand weapon, at any distance, it’s not easy to hit—”
“Oh, David, you fool, can’t you ever stop talking?”
Her embrace was, under the circumstances, too fer-vent. Still smiling, David folded up and fell over backward. She snatched at him, trying to keep his head from banging on the floor; and found herself down, hands pinned between black hair and dusty wood, body hard against what had to be his injured shoulder.
She looked down into his face, which was sicken-ingly white under its varied scars, and took a grip on herself.
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“So long as I’ve got you helpless,” she said, and kissed him thoroughly. Then she untangled herself, sat up, and inspected their quarters.
She had already absorbed most of the information in that first glance; there was very little in the room.
A cot, made up with rough blankets, which had, from its relative cleanliness, been recently moved into the abandoned chamber; a small inlaid table, whose polished elegance was distinctly out of place—these were the only articles of furniture. There was a single wooden door, which Jess didn’t even bother to try.
On the table stood a thermos, a pitcher of water, and two glasses, long-stemmed, fragile crystal wine glasses.
Jess recognized the touch. It was apparent as well in the only other article the room contained, besides cobwebs: a round white vessel, placed discreetly behind the cot and painted, chastely, with blue forget-me-nots.
“I’m going to put you on that cot,” said Jess. First things first, she thought.
“I’ve been on it.” David tried to help; it took their combined efforts to land him on the cot, with a jolt that left him limp.
“What happened? Do you remember anything?”
Jess searched her pockets. She had no handkerchief.
She took off her sweater and her blouse, replaced the sweater—the room was
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dank and chilly—and tore a piece out of the blouse.
She soaked it in the water and mopped David’s brow.
“Not a thing, between the time that crook shot me and the moment when I woke up in this chamber of horrors with you flat on the floor beside me. I thought the worst; that’s why you caught me babbling and pawing at you. I’m not my usual phlegmatic self.”
“You certainly aren’t yourself. Didn’t they even try to bandage you? Damn them. What a pair of cold-blooded—”
“They probably had other things on their minds,”
David said reasonably. “No, Jess, leave it alone. At least it’s stopped bleeding, and if you start mucking around with it…Do you know where we are?”
“Only one place we can be. The house.”
“Right. One of the tower rooms, obviously. I know you feel pretty rotten yourself, but do you think you can reach that window?”
She could, by standing on tiptoe, but she could see very little. The bars were several inches from the glass and too closely set to permit the insertion of anything larger than a finger, so she couldn’t wipe any of the encrusted grime from the glass.
“I can see the courtyard,” she reported, 296 / Elizabeth Peters
squinting. “It’s one of the back towers. David, it’s dawn. We’ve been here all night.”
“No way out through the windows?”
Jess tried to shake the bars. They didn’t stir.
“Well, try the door, just for laughs.”
The door was definitely locked. Jess couldn’t hear a sound outside, even when she put her ear against the panels. The floor, though old, was equally impervious to attack, and the stone walls she didn’t even try.
She went back to the cot, wrung out her shirt-tail, and wiped David’s face again. He made no sound, but the relaxation of his tight mouth as the cool water touched his face made Jess sick with rage and pity.
“We may as well face the facts,” he muttered. “We’re caught good and proper, darling. Even if you could break the glass in those windows, we’re at the back of the house, where visitors never come; no use yelling for help. And I’m in no condition to overpower the villains when they enter. I rather doubt if I can stand up.”
