Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End by Ellis Peters Page A

o’clock, and trudged along with his music-case to Miss Griffith’s house in Church Street, to embroil himself in mortal combat with her very nice grand for half an hour. He enjoyed the battle, but would never have admitted it. He had his eye on the organ, some day, and dreamed of letting loose those earth-shaking stops, and curbing them at will or letting them split the world apart. And his teacher, though unmarried and therefore an Old Maid, was no more than twenty-three, extremely pretty and spirited, and fought him amicably over the keyboard in a fashion which sent him away fulfilled like a lover. If, of course, he had had the slightest notion how a satisfied lover feels, or, for that matter, an unsatisfied one. All Bossie knew was that he went off finally to catch his minibus home, all the company would furnish at that time of night, feeling fat, and fed, and boss.
    But this Saturday evening, though events proceeded exactly as usual, Bossie was not entirely present. He played grimly, but with half his mind on other matters. He had spent an hour of the afternoon in earnest council with his allies and fellow-conspirators, and they had debated anxiously how they should behave in this new and unforeseen situation. Rainbow was dead, and they were in possession of certain knowledge which might be of importance to the police enquiry. Yet they could not possibly tell what they knew. They would even have liked to, to be rid of the responsibility, but in the circumstances it was impossible. They were all firmly agreed about that.
    ‘If it was only us,’ said Ginger, ‘we could tell. But it isn’t, and we can’t. Anyhow, we don’t know all that much. What somebody else tells you isn’t evidence. You’re the only one who really has anything to tell, and we don’t think you should, and you don’t think so, either, and if you agree we’ve got to stay mum, that’s what we’ll do.’
    And since that was exactly what they had instinctively done up to now, it was the easiest thing to go on behaving in the same way. In any case, there was nothing else for it. That did not, however, make them any happier about it. Even Bossie felt less assured of his rightness than usual, though he suppressed the heretical thought firmly.
    The minibus made a slower journey than the ordinary daily service buses, since the driver went round in a series of short detours to drop a number of regular passengers at isolated farms on the way. It was past nine o’clock when it turned about by the Church at Abbot’s Bale, and set down Bossie, the last of the load. From there he had a ten-minute walk home, by a side-road not much frequented at night, since it led only to two or three scattered homes before climbing out of the valley over a ridge to the south, narrowing considerably as it went. He knew every yard of it, having walked it regularly every day for years, the darkness did not worry him in the least. It was the almost moonless part of the month, and clouded over into the bargain, and once out of the village lights and away from visible windows it was very dark indeed. The hedges were high, the occasional field-drive came abruptly, but the road was wide enough here for two cars to pass.
    Somewhere ahead an engine was heard briefly, the sound emerging and retreating with a curve of the road; it occurred to him at the time that it had the same smooth note of the car that had driven past in this direction just as he got off the bus, but cars were not among the things Bossie studied with any diligence, things mechanical being of no interest to him apart from the mechanics of the organ. Somebody from over the ridge going home, probably, or a visitor to one of the farms.
    A faint pallor on the left was, of course, the white gate of the Croppings drive. Just round the next curve, on the right, came the narrow turning into the lane to the Lyons’ farm, shrouded between tall hedges and rising very sharply from the road. Bob Lyons had a way of coasting