The post-mortem changed very little. That irritated Eleanor more than if it had changed everything. She wasn't conducting it. She was on leave and had neither authority nor desire to insinuate herself formally into another pathologist's case. But professional acquaintances were professional acquaintances, and by the following afternoon she knew the essentials.
Adrian Bull had sustained a catastrophic head injury consistent with striking the bell frame during his fall. There were no defensive injuries. No evidence that he had been attacked in the conventional sense. No obvious intoxication. Nothing to suggest he had been dragged into the belfry after death. Everything supported Arthur Relf's interpretation. Adrian Bull had entered the belfry alive and apparently uninjured. Then he had fallen.
Eleanor sat at a corner table in a Rye tearoom and read the same paragraph of Doctor Syn four times without absorbing a word. A shadow crossed the page.
"You're doing it again."
Relf sat opposite her.
"Doing what?"
"Not being involved."
"I am reading."
"You've been looking at the same page since I came in."
"You've only just arrived."
"I was outside for five minutes."
"Why?"
"Deciding whether I wanted tea."
"And?"
"I decided I wanted cake."
He signalled to the waitress. Eleanor closed the book.
"What did Bull have with him?"
Relf looked at her.
"No."
"Arthur."
"You're on holiday."
"So you keep telling me."
"So you keep ignoring me."
The cake arrived. Relf examined it approvingly.
"Notebook," he said.
Eleanor waited.
"Wallet. Keys. Pencil. Torch."
"Phone?"
"At his lodgings."
"Why?"
"No idea."
"Anything in the notebook?"
Relf ate some cake.
"Bell inscriptions," Relf said. "Several churches across the Marsh."
"Including the church where he died?"
He nodded and took another mouthful of cake.
"Had he finished copying that one?"
Relf chewed slowly.
"Yes."
"Completely?"
Relf stopped chewing.
"You haven't checked," Eleanor said.
"May I see the notebook?"
"No."
"Is the inscription complete?"
"I don't know."
"Find out."
He stared at her.
"Please."
"That sounded remarkably like an order."
"Arthur, why would a historian climb into a belfry?"
"To look at a bell."
"And what had he been recording?"
Relf put down his fork.
"Bell inscriptions."
"So perhaps we know exactly what he was doing."
"That doesn't make it murder."
"I didn't say it did."
"You were about to."
"No. I was about to say something much more interesting."
Relf waited. Eleanor tapped the cover of Thorndike's book.
"Adrian Bull was an authority on smuggling."
"I know."
"He was researching bell inscriptions in churches across Romney Marsh."
"Yes."
"And he died trying to examine one."
"Possibly."
Eleanor looked through the window towards the distant line of the Marsh.
"What if the question isn't why he fell?"
Relf sighed.
"What, then?"
"What if the question is what he was trying to read?"
Relf telephoned her at nine seventeen that evening. Eleanor was upstairs at Marsh View House with Thorndike open on the bed and an Ordnance Survey map spread across the floor. She answered.
"Well?"
There was a pause. Then Relf said:
"The inscription's incomplete."
Eleanor sat up.
"How incomplete?"
"Bull's notebook gives two lines. Then he's left a space."
"For a third?"
"Looks that way."
"And?"
"After the space he's written four groups of numbers."
Eleanor reached for a pencil.
"Read them."
"No."
"Arthur."
"You're not a police officer."
"I'm aware of that."
"You're also supposed to be on holiday."
"You've mentioned it."
Another pause. Then:
"Why Doctor Syn?"
"What?"
"Why are you reading Doctor Syn?"
"Because I like it."
"Smugglers?"
"Yes."
"Romney Marsh?"
"Yes."
"Secret passages, signals, that sort of nonsense?"
"Among other things."
Relf was silent.
"Arthur?"
"I've got something else here."
"What?"
"A photocopy. Found folded into Bull's notebook."
"Of?"
"Old handwriting. Eighteenth century, according to somebody who knows about these things."
"And?"
"Mostly numbers."
Eleanor drew the notebook towards her. "Are the numbers arranged like the ones Bull wrote beneath the inscription?"
Relf read the first group. Then the second. Eleanor wrote them down. They meant nothing.
Yet.
Outside her window, darkness had swallowed Romney Marsh. She looked at the battered paperback lying beside her. Respectable men. Secret identities. Contraband moving across a landscape whose inhabitants knew when not to ask questions. And somewhere in an old church tower a man had died trying to read words cast into bronze.
"Arthur?"
"Yes?"
"I think we ought to find out who knew what he was looking for."
Relf exhaled.
"Goodnight, Eleanor."
He disconnected. She continued holding the telephone. Then looked at the numbers she had written. And beneath them she wrote one word.
INSCRIPTIONS
After a moment she added another.
KEY?
Far away across the Marsh, in a house less than five miles from the church, a man eased off his boots. His right leg had begun to ache.
He wiped the soles before putting them at the back of the cupboard.