Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (13 page)

“Not that I remember. I can’t say I do remember even glancing toward the well, really. But in the wooded part, just past the dip, there was somebody moving around. Nothing for you, though, I’m afraid. The preserve fence begins about there, and not being a gamekeeper I find it etiquette not to look in the direction of poachers when I hear ’em at work. I took it for granted that was what he was up to, but he was rather a noise of footsteps than anything I saw. Just somebody running lightly in the underbrush, away from me to get deeper in shadow. It was pretty dark; he didn’t have to go far to be lost. But it was a man, all right. Just a blur with a face and hands, and then gone, but a man. It’s happened before on occasions; and as I say, I was tactful, and went right ahead without another look.”

“That’s helpful!” said George glumly. “Nothing else to report at all?”

“No, I think not. Sorry about that, but I couldn’t know it was going to be important. And as a matter of fact, I still think pheasants were all he was after. I know the kind of running, and the place and time were right for it. Still, it’s your manhunt.”

There was no more to be had from him, either directly or by observation. They parted at the junction of the field-paths, and in a few minutes a high hedge hid them from each other. George went very thoughtfully back into Comerford’s deserted green, let himself into the station, and telephoned Inspector Logan at Comerbourne. There was something about Helmut’s tunic that he wanted to confirm; and he thought, after all, he would go over and make certain now, and not risk leaving it until the morning.

Well,” said Selwyn Blunden, settling his considerable bulk well back in the big chair, “that was an experiment that didn’t last long. Poor young devil!—but he was a devil! Pity, it seemed to be beginning rather well, so I heard from the manager fellow down on the site there.” He nodded toward the window which lay nearest to the ravaged valleys of the coal-site, still out of sight and sound, still held at bay from the Blunden fences, but creeping steadily nearer. “Said he was an excellent worker, excellent! Well, nobody’s going to get any more work out of him now—or have any trouble with him, either.”

“Except us,” said George. “My troubles with him seem to be only beginning.”

“Yes, in that way I suppose you’re right. Bad business altogether, bad for the village, unsettles everybody—bad for the boy himself, who after all might have made a decent fellow in the end—bad for your lad, and that young thing with the plaits, too, by God! How did your young man take it?”

“Oh, Dom’s all right. Stood up to it like a professional, but it’s had its effect, all the same, I wish it hadn’t. He’s taking far too proprietary an interest in the case for my liking.”

The big old man looked up under his bushy eyebrows and smiled through the thin clouds of smoke from his cigar. “What, enjoying the sensation, is he? You never can tell with children. These things simply don’t frighten them until some fool of a grown-up goes to the trouble to explain to them that they ought to be frightened.”

“Oh, not that, exactly. Dom’s rather past the stage of having to have these things explained to him. Consequently he’s quite capable of frightening himself, without any help from anyone. No, I wouldn’t say he’s enjoying it. But it happened to him, and he doesn’t want to let go of it until it’s all cleared up. Feels committed to it. Neither soft words nor fleas in his ear discourage him.”

“I see! Bound to admire his spirit, I must say, but damned inconvenient for you, I quite see that. One likes to have one’s family kept rather separate from things like murder.” He sighed deeply, and exhaled smoke like some wholesome old dragon in an unorthodox fairy tale. “Difficult times all round, Sergeant. I do appreciate your troubles. Got some of my own, but nothing to speak of by comparison. Result of that appeal should be through almost any day, and between you and me, win or lose, I’ll be glad to see it. Can’t carry this sort of war of attrition as well as I used to.”

“How do you think it’s going to turn out?” asked George with interest.

“Oh, it’s anybody’s guess—but I think the appeal will be allowed. Yes, I really expect it to go through. Site’s almost an uneconomic proposition as it is, after the run of bad luck they’ve had down there. Well, bad luck!—more likely over-confidence and over-haste, I’d hazard, if the truth be told. Put any amount of machinery out of action in a very short time, crashed one grab clean over and damned nearly killed the lad driving it—too much of it to be simply bad luck. It’s my opinion they were trying to rush this last stretch to make a good case for moving into my ground before the winter closed in, and were in such a hurry they took too many chances, and made a botch of it. But
I
don’t know! Their business, not mine. I’ll abide by the decision, this time, bad or good, but I admit I hope for success. Can’t expect me to enjoy the prospect of having the place torn up by the roots, can you, after all?”

George allowed that it would be rather a lot to expect. He suppressed a grin which would have done no discredit to Dominic, and asked demurely: “How’s the shooting this year? Client of mine tells me the pheasants have done rather well.”

The white moustache bristled for a moment, the bold blue eyes flashed, but he relaxed into laughter before their blueness had quite grown spearlike. “Ah, well, haven’t had too many taken yet, all things considered. And your job’s a bit like the confessional, isn’t it? So I won’t ask you for his name. Yes, they’ve done quite well. With only half a keeper, so to speak, one couldn’t ask more. Briggs is a complete anarchist, of course, won’t be ruled by owner, expert or predecessor, but he does rear the birds, heaven knows how. I’ve stopped interfering.”

“I heard the guns out for the first time yesterday evening. Sounded like autumn!”

“Oh, that would be Charles and a couple of friends he had down. I haven’t been out yet myself, haven’t had time. Perhaps this weekend we may get out together for a few hours—can’t let a whole week of October slip away without a single bird. But there won’t be any big parties this year. I can’t do with the social life, Sergeant Felse, it takes too much out of a man, and I’m not so young as I once was. And then, it needs a woman to take charge of the house, or there’s no heart in it—”

For a fleeting moment his blue eyes glanced upward at the wide, creamy expanse of wall opposite, where the best light in the room gathered and seemed to cluster upon a large, framed photograph. A woman, young but not very young, pretty but not very pretty, somehow too undecided to be
very
anything; and yet she had a soft, vague charm about her, too. A lot of fluffy light-brown hair, a formless yet pleasing face which looked as if it might yet amount to something if every line in it could be tightened up, a soft, petulant mouth, a string of carved imitation stones round her plump neck. Why should so vigorous, hard and arrogant an old man have lost any sleep over the flight of such a wife?

The sight of the picture never failed to astonish George with the same query. But human affections are something over which even the most practical people cannot be logical. Nobody likes to be left naked to laughter, either, even if leaves have fallen and cold winds come, especially if he happens to be the local panjandrum. And since the quick glance was never more than a momentary slipping of his guard, George was no wiser after it than he had been before. Maybe it was love, maybe only outraged dignity, that dug knives into the old man. Or maybe both had worn off long ago.

But to think of a woman with a face like that having the brains and patience to go quietly about from dealer to dealer, selling her jewellery, getting rid of her securities, telling them all—and all in confidence, of course!—that he was sending her to safety in America. If two of them had ever compared notes they would have known that she was collecting together more money than she could possibly be allowed to take out of the country; but of course every deal was private and confidential, and they never did compare notes. In a way, thought George irreverently, the old man ought to have been rather proud of her, she made a thumping good job of it. And he appreciates tactics, as a rule! Maybe, at that, it was from him she learned all she knew.

But this was not what he had come for. He pulled his mind sharply back from this most fascinating sidetrack, and asked: “You’re exhibiting at the Sutton Show, I suppose?”

“Yes, hoping to. Sending some stuff down by road, with Hollins. Pretty good prospects, I think.” He began to talk stock, his eyes kindling, and George let him run for a while, though most of it went past him and left no mark.

“Hollins came to see you about the arrangements, I understand, last Wednesday night. He says he was here about nine. Do you remember it?”

“Yes, of course. Came just after I turned the news on, I remember. Stayed maybe a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. He was away before half-past nine, at any rate. Rather a dull stick, young Chris,” said the old man, looking up suddenly under his thick eyebrows with a perfectly intelligent appreciation of the meaning of these questions, “though a good sheep-farmer. Not at all a likely suspect for murder, one would think.”

“None of ’em are,” agreed George. “All next-door-neighbors, everybody knowing everybody, murder’s an impossibility, that’s all about it. Only alternative to thinking nobody could have done it is thinking anybody could have done it— and that’s a thing one hopes not to have to face.”

“It’s a thing nine out of ten of us couldn’t possibly face. We know enough to shut our eyes tight when it comes along, and keep ’em shut until it’s gone by. It’s that or lose hold of every mortal thing. But still—I’d put Hollins well down the list of possibilities, myself.”

“No one will be more pleased than I shall,” agreed George, “if I can account for every minute of his evening, and put him clean out of it. You’ve accounted for twenty minutes or so, and that’s something. What sort of frame of mind did he seem to be in? Just as usual? Not agitated at all? Not even more withdrawn than usual?”

“Didn’t notice anything out of the way. He talked business in the fewest words that would cover it, as always. He never talked much. Came, and said what he had to say, and went, and that was that. No, there wasn’t anything odd about him. Maybe a bit brisker than usual, if anything. He was a fellow who liked to sit and light a pipe as a sort of formal preliminary to conference, and come to the point briefly, but at his leisure. This time he got off the mark without smoking. That’s positively all there is to be said about the interview, as far as I remember.”

“He didn’t say anything about where he was going when he left you? Nothing about any calls intended on the way home?”

“No, nothing that I remember.”

“Oh, well—thanks for your help, sir.” George rose, and old Blunden’s heavy bulk heaved itself out of the armchair to accompany him to the door. Again he noticed the ageing thrust of the big shoulders, the slight stoop, for all the glint of his eye which had still more devilry in it than Charles could compass in the whole range of his moods.

“I won’t ask you anything,” said Blunden, leading the way through the sudden dimness of a hall which faced away from the morning sun. “But I don’t mind telling you, Sergeant Felse, that I feel very concerned for that poor woman Hollins married. Not much of the truth ever came out, but I gathered what sort of a life young Schauffler had been leading her, all the same. Wish you luck all the more when I think about her. I do indeed! The sooner this case is closed, once for all, the better I’ll be pleased.”

“So will I,” said George with even more fervor; and went away very thoughtfully to find Jim Tugg, who was leaning on one of his hurdles at the lambing-fold down in the bowl of the fields beyond the farm, chewing a grass and contemplating a number of well-grown and skittish Kerry Hill lambs. He appeared to be doing nothing beyond this, but in fact he was calculating the season’s chances, and putting them pretty high, if nothing went wrong with the weather. He was dead sure he’d got the best tup he’d seen for years, and was looking forward to an average higher than last year. He was not thinking of the police at all, and even when he looked up from the black knees and black noses of the fat young ewes to the incongruous navy-blue figure of George, the contemplative expression of his eyes changed only very slowly and reluctantly.

George was nonetheless familiar by now with this change. In most people it happened instantaneously, the brief flare of intensified awareness, and then the quick but stealthy closing of the door upon him, with an almost panicky quietness, so that he should not hear it shut to. In Jim the pace was slower, and only the eyes changed, the rest of the dark face never tightening by one muscular contraction; and in Jim the closing of the door had a deliberation which did not care so much about being observed. The collie stopped bossing the sheep about, and came and stood at his knee, as if he had called it.

“Well, Sergeant?” said Jim. “Thought of some more questions?”

“Just one,” said George, and found himself a leaning-place on the hurdles before he launched it. He wanted more than an answer to it; he wanted to understand the expression that went with the answer, but in the end all he could make of Jim’s face was a mild surprise when he asked at length:

“That green door in the orchard-wall up at the house— Which day did you paint it?”

Gerd Hollins put down the large hen-saucepan she had been about to lift to the stove, put it down carefully with a slow relaxing of the muscles of her olive forearms, and straightened up wiping her palms on the hips of her apron, where they left long damp marks in a deeper blue. She stood for a long minute looking at George without saying a word or moving a finger, quite still and aware, with her big eyes, strangely afraid but more strangely not afraid of him, fixed steadily on his face.

“How did you know?” she said. “Was there someone who saw us? Who was it who told you?” And suddenly the tensions went out of her, ebbing very quietly, and she sat down limply in the nearest chair, and leaned her linked hands heavily into her thighs, as if the weight of them was too much to hold up any longer. But it was odd that she should first ask that. Why should she want to know if someone had told him? Because in that case the same person might have told someone else?

There was only one someone who could count for her in such an affair or at such a moment. Or perhaps two? The second of whom had just manifested nothing but rather scornful surprise at being asked about the newly painted door. But in any case her husband was in all probability the only creature about whom she really cared. Was it safe to conclude, then, that, as far as she knew, her husband was unaware of Helmut’s last visit, and that the fear she felt was of the possibility that, after all, there might have_been someone willing and able to enlighten him?

When she let herself sag like that she was middle-aged, even though her face continued dark, self-contained and handsome. She looked at him, and waited to be answered.

“On Helmut’s tunic-sleeve,” he said, “there were very faint traces of green paint, not much more than a coating on the hairy outside of the pile. The kind of just noticeable mark you get from a quick-drying paint when it’s tacky. It tallies with the new paint on the door in your orchard-wall. Jim painted the door, he says, last Wednesday afternoon.”

She passed her hand across her forehead, smoothing aside a strayed end of her black hair. “Yes,” she said, “he did. He left it unlocked afterwards. Yes—I see! So no one actually told you?”

“No one. I’ve come so that you can do that.”

She looked up suddenly, and said: “Jim—?”

“Jim is still wondering what the devil I meant by the question. He doesn’t know it could have anything to do with Helmut. This is just between me and you.”

She gave a long sigh, and said: “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. It affects no one but me. Chris didn’t know. Jim didn’t know—at least—no, I’m sure he didn’t know about that night, at any rate. He was down in the village before Helmut came near me.”

Yes, she could care about more than one man at a time, it seemed, even if not in quite the same way. A stubborn, deliberate loyalty to Jim Tugg crossed at right-angles the protective love she felt for her husband. Might there not even be some real conflict here in this house, where the two of them went about her constantly, either loving her in his fashion? George caught himself back aghast from this complication of human feeling. Good God! he thought, I’m beginning to see chasms all round me, complexes in the kitchen, rivalries in the rick-yard. Why, I’ve known these people for years! But he was not quite reassured. How many of the people you have known for years do you really know?

“It was the fifth time he’d been up here,” said Gerd, in a level voice, “since he left us. He didn’t come too often, partly because it was a risk—and you know he always liked to have the odds on his side—but also, I think, because he wanted me never to get used to it, always to be able to think and hope I’d seen the last of him, so that he could come back every time quite fresh and unexpected. Twice he came over the fence and through the garden, when both Chris and Jim were off the place. He must have stayed somewhere watching until they went. The third time he found the little door in the wall. That was perfect, because in the evening I have to go there to feed the fowl and shut the pens, and there it’s quite private, right out of sight of the house or the yard. And narrow! I could never pass until he chose to let me. The fourth time was the same. There’d been eight days between, and I almost thought he’d tired of it. Then I had a lock put on the door, and kept it locked until the Wednesday. Jim forgot to lock it again after he finished. It never used to be locked, you see, it was no wonder it slipped his mind.”

She paused, rather as if to assemble her thoughts than in expectation of any comment from George, but he asked her, because it had been mystifying him all along: “But what could he
do
here? What satisfaction did he get, to make the game so fascinating to him? I mean, you’d expect even a Helmut to tire of simply tormenting someone—especially, if I may say so, when the victim was quite beyond being frightened.”

She weighed it and him in the deeps of her appallingly patient eyes, and explained quietly: “Fright is not everything. There may even be a new pleasure to be got out of someone who is not—frightened, exactly. I think Helmut must have got rather bored with people who were just frightened of him, during the war. They seem to have stopped being amusing to him. He liked better someone who was desperate, but couldn’t do anything about it. I was desperate, but there was nothing I could do. Maybe it wouldn’t be easy to make you understand what Helmut was like, those times when he came here after me. Since I’m telling everything, I’ll try to tell you that, too. He very seldom touched me, usually just stood between me and where I was going. Toward the end he began to finger me. Even then it was in his own way. My flesh was only attractive to him because it was in a way repellent, too. He just kept me with him while he talked. He talked about all those places in Germany where my kind of people were herded, and used, and killed. He told me how it must have been for my family. Especially how it must have ended. He told me that all in good time it would be like that for me, that I was not to believe I had finished with these things. He said England would learn, was learning fast, what to do with Jews, niggers, Asiatics, all the inferior breeds. Do not be obvious, and tell me that I am in England, and protected. He was real, was he not? He was there, and he was protected. Oh, I never believed literally in what he said. But I believed in
him
, because every word he said and every thought he had in his mind proved that he was still very much a reality. Things have been so badly mishandled that, after all we’ve done to get rid of him, he’s still one of the greatest realities in the world. In some countries almost the only reality—except poverty. And not quite a rumor in other countries—even here!”

She had regained, as she spoke, the power and composure of her body, and looked at him with straight, challenging eyes, but palely unsmiling.

“I wasn’t afraid of him,” she said steadily, “but I was afraid of the effect he had on me. I’d forgotten it was possible to hate and loathe anyone in that way.”

“I can understand it,” said George somberly. “But did he really get so much satisfaction out of these visits that he went on taking such risks for it?”

“He got the only bits of his present life that made him feel like a Nazi and a demi-god again. What more do you suppose he wanted? And he took very little risk. Almost none at all. He was always careful, he had time to be careful.”

“He could watch his step, yes, but at any moment you chose you could have told your husband the whole story. Why didn’t you? I can understand your keeping quiet at first, but after Jim’s flare-up with Helmut the story was out. Why didn’t you keep it that way? Why go to such trouble to pretend the persecution had ended? If you didn’t lie to your husband, you must have come pretty near it. You certainly lied to me. Why?”

She did not answer for a moment, and somehow in her silence he had a vivid recollection of Helmut’s body lying in the brook, with ripples tugging and twisting at his blond hair. Perhaps, after all, it was a silly question to ask her. With that ending somewhere shadowy at the back of her mind, she had gone to some trouble to ensure that for the one person who mattered there should be no motive. And Hollins was a man for whom she could do such a service successfully, a limited man, a gullible man, a fond man, not so hard to blindfold. A woman like Gerd, experienced in every kind of evil fortune, might easily take it upon herself to shut up his mind from anger, his heart from grief, and his hands from violence. What was another load more or less to her, if he was back in the sun and serenity of his fields, innocent of any anxiety?

“Did you have any suspicion,” said George suddenly, “that this would happen?”

“This?”

“Schauffler’s murder.” He used the word deliberately, but there was no spark.

“Like it did happen—no, I never thought of that. I thought of anger, and fights, and magistrates’ courts, and newspapers, and all the stupidity of these things. I didn’t often think of him dead, and when I did, it was openly, in a fight—some blow that was a little too hard. But that would have been enough, you see.”

Yes, he saw. So perhaps the motive she was so resolute not to let slip into her husband’s hands had only lain waiting and growing and hardening in her own.

“It seems, you understand,” he said carefully, “that, but for whoever killed him, you must have been the last person to see Helmut alive. The last word we had on him was from the boy who saw him leave the lane for the field-path at Markyeat Cross, soon after seven. It was after that, obviously, that he came here, since he seems to have been heading straight for you then. Tell me about that visit. What time did he come in by the green door? How long did he stay?”

She told him as exactly as she could, dragging up details from her memory with a distasteful carefulness. It must have been nearly eight o’clock when she had gone out to the poultry-houses, therefore according to the time when he had passed Markyeat Cross he must have waited for her coming at least twenty minutes, but his savoring patience had not given out. He had left her, she thought, rather before a quarter-past eight. Where he had gone on closing the green door between them she did not know. By eleven o’clock, according to the doctors, he had been dead and in his brook, snugly tucked into the basin of clay under the edge of the Harrow woods and the waste lands. And between the last touch of his pleased and revolted fingers on her bare arm, and the blow that killed him, who had seen him?

“I wish to heaven,” said George suddenly, “that you’d told me the truth long ago!”

“When you questioned me about these things there was already a body to be accounted for. In such a case one lies— rather too easily.”

“I meant long before that, before it ever came to that. If you wanted your husband protected, as I’m sure you did, at least why didn’t you come to me?”

She gave him a long look which made him feel small, young and nakedly useless, and said without any irony or unkindness: “Sergeant Felse, you over-estimate yourself and your office. To the police people simply do not go. Nor to the Church, either. It seems there are no short cuts left to God.”

It was horribly true, he felt as if she had thrown acid in his face. All the good intentions, all the good agencies, seem to have grown crooked, grown in upon themselves like ingrowing toenails, and set up poisoned irritations from which people wince away. In real trouble, unless he is lucky enough to possess that rare creature, a genuine friend, every man retires into himself, the one fortress on which he can place at any rate some reliance. As Gerd had withdrawn into herself and taken all her problems with her, that no one else might stumble over them and come to grief.

The only people who still ask the police for protection, thought George bitterly, are the Fascists. What sort of use are we?

“It sounds impossible,” he said, “that a woman can be persecuted in her own house, like that, and have no remedy she can feel justified in taking. Tell me honestly, had you yourself ever thought of a way out?”

She looked at him impenetrably, and said: “No. Except to go on bearing it, and take what precautions I could to avoid him.”

“Did your husband ever say anything to make you think he had his suspicions? I mean, that Helmut was still haunting you?”

“No, never.”

“Nor Jim, either?”

“No, nor Jim.”

She heard, just as she said it, Christopher’s feet at the scraper outside the scullery door, methodically scraping off his boots the traces of one of the few damp places left in the hollows of his fields, the shrunken marsh pool in the bottom meadows. George heard it, too, a slow, dogged noise like the man who made it. He saw the slight but sudden rearing of Gerd’s head, the deep, perceptible brightening of her eyes, the quickening of all the tensions which held her secret. But not a gleam of welcome for him now, no gladness. Not for the first time, Chris had done the wrong thing. She got up with a quite daunting gesture of dismissal, picked up the hen-saucepan, and put it on the large gas-ring, and resolutely lit the gas under it. But George did not move. Just as the porch door opened he said clearly:

“In that case I hope you realize, Mrs. Hollins, that you seem to be the only person in Comerford who had an excellent motive for wanting him dead, and who knew his movements that night well enough to have followed him and killed him.”