No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [131]
Appleton screwed up his face.
“Dust?” Joseph suggested. “Gravel? Mud? Clay? Peat, maybe? Or manure? Tar?”
“Loime,” Appleton said slowly. “There was loime under the wheel arches. Et to wash it off.”
“Lime kilns!” Joseph exclaimed. “He was gone an hour and a half altogether. How fast does the Lanchester go? Forty . . . fifty-five?”
“Mr. Reavley was a very good driver,” Appleton said pointedly, looking at the path where Judith was coming toward them. “More loike thirty-five.”
“I see.”
Judith reached them and looked inquiringly from Joseph to Appleton and back again.
“Appleton found lime on the car,” Joseph said to her. “Where are the nearest lime kilns, close enough to the road that the lime itself would be tracked across, so someone would pick it up?”
“There are lime kilns on the roads south and west out of Cherry Hinton itself,” she answered. “Not east back to St. Giles or Cambridge, or north toward Teversham or Fen Ditton.”
“So what lies south or west?” he said urgently.
“Over the Gog Magog hills? Stapleford, Great Shelford,” she said thoughtfully, as if picturing the map in her mind. “To the west there’s Fulbourn, or Great and Little Wilbraham. Where shall we start?”
“Shelford’s only a couple of miles from here,” he replied. “We could start there and work our way north and west. Thank you, Appleton.”
“Yes, sir. Will there be anything else?” Appleton looked puzzled and faintly unhappy.
“No, thank you. Unless there’s anything he might have said about where he went?”
“No, sir, not that Oi can think. Will you be taking the car out again, Miss Judith? Or shall Oi put it away?”
“We’ll be going straight out, thank you,” she replied firmly, turning back toward the house without waiting for Joseph.
“What shall we say to the people if we find out where he got the document?” she asked when they were on their way out of St. Giles again on the road southward, climbing almost immediately up into the shallow hills. She kept her eyes on the road ahead. “They’ll know who we are, and they have to realize why we’ve come.” It was a question, but there was no hesitation in her voice, and her hands were strong and comfortable on the wheel. If there was tension in her, she masked it completely.
He had not thought of that in detail; all that weighed on his mind was the compulsion to know the truth and silence the doubts.
“I don’t know,” he answered her. “Mrs. Channery was easy enough; it seemed like following Mother’s footsteps. I suppose we could say he left something behind?”
“Like what?” she said with faint derision. “An umbrella? In the hottest, driest summer we’ve had in years! A coat? Gloves?”
“A picture,” he answered, the solution coming to him the instant before he spoke. “He had a picture he was going to sell. Are they the people he was going to show it to?”
“That sounds reasonable. Yes . . . good.” Unconsciously she increased the speed, and the car surged forward, all but clipping the edge of the grass on the side of the road.
“Judith!” he cried out involuntarily.
“Don’t be stuffy!” she retorted, but she did slow down. She had been almost out of control, and she knew it even better than he did. What it took him longer to realize, and he did it with surprise, was that it was exuberance that drove her, the feeling that at last she was able to do something, however slight the chances of success. It was not fear, either of the process or of the discovery of facts she might find painful.
He was looking at the profile of her face, seeing the woman in her and beginning to understand how far behind the child had become, when she turned and shot him a glance and then a quick smile.
He drew breath to tell her to concentrate on the road, then knew it would be wrong. He smiled back and saw her shoulders relax.
They stopped in Shelford and asked, but no one had seen John Reavley on the Saturday before his death, and the yellow Lanchester was a car they would have remembered.
They had sandwiches and a glass of cider on the village green outside the pub at Stapleford.
He was not quite sure what