It was something out of another world, mad and marvellous and exhilarating in its desperation, something that happens only once in a lifetime. Toby thought of all those short legs twinkling behind him, and all those enlarged hearts pumping adrenalin like crazy, enough to flood the old fish-ponds and overflow into the river.
The twin poles of the ladder hit the target dead-centre, with six translated personalities for motor. The check was merely momentary, no more than a slight jolt, before the points sheered on with only slightly retarded momentum, exploding into the light beyond in an avalanche of flying stones. Through a quivering, quaking gap three yards wide the victorious team with their battering-ram burst into Bossie’s prison. From the doorway George Felse, Sergeant Moon and two or three constables, closely followed by Barbara Rainbow, exultant, with streaming hair, surged in to meet them.
Through a stifling acrid dust-storm, thick as old-fashioned fog, George dived headlong for Colin Barron’s half-buried body, and fell on his knees to dig like a terrier at the litter of stones and rubble that covered him. Praise God, at the instant of total, deafening shock he had done the instinctive thing, dropped his captive to throw up both arms to cover his head. Not too successfully; there was blood as well as dirt in the thick fair hair, and he was stunned, but the damage looked relatively trivial. Concussion, probably, but no fractures. Like so many of the mediaeval walls that look so irreproachably solid, this one had been rubble-filled within the stone shell. But the point of impact had been barely six feet from his left ear, and the heavier ammunition had sprayed at that level, and effectively knocked him out. Bossie, held closely in front of him and shielded by his body, was somewhere there underneath, and with any luck no worse than winded.
George on one side and Moon on the other were still scooping away debris and lifting Barron’s weight aside, as Willie the Twig and Toby Malcolm came clambering in recklessly through the gap they had made, four dusty choirboys-errant hard on their heels, and all in a state of awe and exaltation at the wreckage they had produced, and total euphoria at its successful result. Minor avalanches still slid and muttered along the wall, where a tattered area of sky appeared, its shape changed every few seconds by the belated fall of one more precariously balanced stone. Coughing and spitting out gritty particles, they plunged enthusiastically into the work of rescue.
Thankfully they extracted Bossie, temporarily winded but without much more than a scratch on him, unwound him from rope and gag, retrieved his glasses unbroken, cleaned them, and stood him on his feet, as good as new. Doubtless he should have been in a state of nervous collapse, but there were no signs of it. As soon as he had any breath, he was as voluble as ever.
‘Aren’t you going to put handcuffs on him?’ he demanded, surveying his prostrate enemy. ‘It is him! He’s the one I saw the night Mr Rainbow was killed. When he locked the door I saw the light flash off that flat stone in his ring, and I remembered it. And I bet he’s got my parchment on him, too.’
Reaction might come later, but Bossie was Bossie yet, and not to be swept away immediately into Jenny’s arms, not before his vindication was complete. It was, in any case, an idea that was worth considering. With so great a cloud of witnesses, less than half of them police, just as well to lift the evidence on the spot, if it really was there, before any question of its provenance could arise.
The contents of Colin Barron’s pockets were without special interest, until they came to a deep breast-pocket inside his jacket, and drew forth something rolled up like an oversize stick of cinnamon inside a narrow suede bag.
‘That was Arthur’s,’ said Barbara immediately. ‘He had a set of those made once, when he’d got hold of some very special Georgian silver cutlery, and wanted to carry samples to show. I doubt if there’d be others exactly like them.’
Out of the case slid a rolled, brownish tube faintly marked with traces of faded ink. Unrolled, it also displayed clearly enough the fresh characters of Bossie’s effort, far too positive to be convincing for long.
‘Yes,’ said Bossie triumphantly. ‘That’s it!’ Who should know his own handiwork better?
‘That’s the thing I pinched,’ agreed Toby. ‘Plus my friend’s improvements, of course.’
Several pairs of eyes peered at the unprepossessing relic, between puzzlement and awe, willing to be impressed but unable to see any sane reason why they should be.
‘You mean,’ enquired Spuggy wonderingly, ‘that’s what it was all about? Just that bit of old stuff? Is it that precious?’
‘Two people evidently thought so,’ said George soberly.
‘Well, how about this, then?’ And Spuggy fished in the depths of his own overcrowded pockets, and produced a longish, flat wad of what looked like disintegrating plaster, and on the surface, indeed, was nothing else. ‘It’s that piece I poked out when we went round this afternoon,’ he explained simply. ‘It seemed to make that chap so mad, I’d thought I’d better not leave it lying around, so I slipped it in my pocket. But all the plaster bits started flaking off, and I found this other stuff folded up inside. Look!’
No need to exhort them, they were all looking, with disbelieving eyes, as he thumbed apart the edges of not one, but apparently three or four leaves of something that might very well be vellum. Stiff, inclined to crumble, but very slowly unfolding now to show remarkably clear edges of inner surface, preserved by being pressed together. There were certainly the marks of written characters there, the opening letters of line below even line. Gritty particles of mortar drifted from it as Spuggy held it up to view. ‘It looks like some of the same. And Bossie said it was where the other bit was found. Is this any good?’
For a moment nobody had breath to answer him.
‘Because if it is,’ continued Spuggy practically, ‘there’s some more of it down here among all this muck. I reckon it came down with the wall.’
As one they turned to stare, and then scattered to peer and rake and dig all along the broken area of wall, among the ruin of the north walk, where once the carrels and aumbries of Mottisham Abbey had been ranged, and the monks had both read and written. And first one excited voice, and then another, hailed fresh discoveries. Wherever the wall had weathered and fallen into holes, it seemed, the leaves of parchment had been rolled or folded and wedged into the cracks as filling, to be plastered over and seal the gaps. In the days of penury and decline, when repairs were impossible, something had to stop the holes to keep the wind away! The treasure for which Rainbow had died and Colin Barron had killed lay scattered in dust and rubble at their feet.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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There was precious little sleep for anyone connected with the Mottisham affair that night. Even when Bossie had been restored to parents limp with reaction, but just resilient enough to receive him back with deflationary calm, even when Sergeant Moon and Willie the Twig had ferried all the victorious choirboys back to the bosoms of their families, with flattering accounts of their ingenuity and heroism, calculated to inflame parental pride and disarm parental rage, even when an ambulance had carried away a conscious but incoherent Colin Barron to hospital and strict guard, pending a charge of murder, and a flustered John Stubbs had arrived to complain bitterly about the wanton damage to his wall, the activity within the north walk of the cloister still continued. So momentous a find demanded a police guard until it could be taken over by the proper authorities, and a call after midnight to Charles Goddard, and another to Robert Macsen-Martel, had brought both gentlemen hurrying to view the unexpected windfall. Its value would not be assessed for a long time yet, and even its ownership might produce some problems, though none that could not be agreeably resolved, for the future endowment of the abbey was a cause dear to all the parties concerned.