Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (14 page)

Chris Hollins heaved himself into the doorway and stood there looking up under his lowered brows, like a bull meditating a charge. Gerd, turning with the matches in her hand, gave him a look so forbidding that at any other time he would have retired into a dazed silence, following her leads, saying what he believed she wanted of him; but now he stood and lowered his head at her, too, in his male indignation, and demanded menacingly:

“What’s this you’re saying to my wife, Sergeant?”

George repeated it. Not because he was proud of it; indeed, the second time it sounded even cheaper. But it had certainly made Hollins rise, and that was almost more than he had expected. He said it again, almost word for word, with the calm of distaste, but to the other man’s ears it sounded more like the calm of rocklike confidence.

“And what grounds have you got,” he said thickly, “for saying any such thing to her? How do you know a dozen more people didn’t know of his movements, and hadn’t better reason to want him dead than ever she had?”

“There may have been a hundred,” agreed George, “but there’s curiously little sign of even one. You find me the evidence, and I’ll be more than interested.”

Gerd said: “In any case, it’s no desperate matter, so don’t let’s get melodramatic about it. Sergeant Felse has his job to do. I haven’t been accused of killing him, so far, and there’s no need to act as if I have.” Her eyes were large and urgent on her husband now, with no time for George; and for that reason he was able to make more sense of their questioning than ever he had made before. She wanted the subject dropped. She wanted either an end of the interview, or Chris miles away; for it was plain, for one dazzling moment, that she simply did not know what he might be about to say, and feared it as she had never feared Helmut Schauffler. “I’ve told all I know,” she said. “I don’t think he can have anything more to ask you.”

“I might,” said George, “ask him why it doesn’t surprise him to hear that you knew all about Helmut’s movements the night he was killed. After all, yesterday you both denied you’d seen hide or hair of him since he was in court. He seems to take it all as a matter of course that we should have come to a different conclusion today.”

The exchange of glances was fluid and turbulent, like the currents of a river. One minute he thought he had the hang of it, the next it seemed to mean something quite different. They were at cross-purposes, each in fear of what the other might give away, each probing after the other’s secrets. Certainly it seemed that Helmut’s last visit to the farm had been no secret from Hollins, however securely Gerd had tried to hide it. Now she was at a loss how to say least, how to keep him most silent, agonized with trying to understand at every stage before George could understand, and so steer the revelations into the most harmless channel. But Hollins was past giving her any cooperation in the endeavor. Concealment was alien to his nature, and he had had enough of it, if it could end in his wife’s being singled out as a likely suspect of murder. He swung his heavy head from one to the other of them, darkly staring, and said bluntly:

“Well I knew he’d been here, and talked to her, and carried on his old games at her, like before! And well I knew she told you lies when she said the opposite yesterday. Do you wonder she kept as much as she could to herself? If it was a mistake, it was a mistake ninety-nine out of a hundred would have made.”

She stood there staring at him with blank, shocked eyes. When she could speak she said: “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you at least knew nothing about it—I wanted you not to know! But when you found it out, you might have told me!”

“Trying to shut up trouble doesn’t work so well,” he said grimly. “But I thought it was my job to think of something, and not to put the weight of it any harder on you. Not that it came to anything—not even murder. I might as well say, why didn’t you tell me, and not leave me to find out for myself what was going on. But I don’t ask you any such thing.”

“Well, having gone so far,” said George, “you may as well tell me all you know. Look, I don’t pretend to be the children’s friend to any very wonderful extent, but wouldn’t it have been better to trust me a little further in the first place?”

“Maybe it would, but try being in our shoes, and see what you’d do. Not that we’d anything guilty to hide,” he said with quite unwonted violence, as if he were trying to convince himself, “but just the run of events can put you in a bad spot without any help on your part, and it comes natural to play down the awkward bits that don’t mean anything, but have a nasty way of looking as if they do.”

George, with his eyes on Gerd, agreed reasonably that this made perfect sense. “But now let’s have all the facts you’ve got to give, even if they look nothing to you. They help to fill in an evening, and reduce the time about which we know very little. For instance, we know now that Helmut came here, accosted Mrs. Hollins in the orchard at about eight o’clock, made himself as objectionable as usual, and left at about a quarter-past the hour. From then until eleven o’clock, when apparently he must have been dead, we know nothing about him. It seems you knew the persecution was still going on. How long had you known it? Before that night?”

Hollins turned his head from side to side, thrusting at them both as if they might make simultaneous but not concerted attack. After a thick pause he said, quite quietly: “No.”

“You found it out that night?”

“Yes. She was a long time. I had a devil nagging me that there was still something wrong. I went down the garden and looked through the trees there, and saw them. He had her by the arm—”

Gerd cried out suddenly, in a voice too high-pitched for her: “He’s lying! I do not believe it. He’s making up a tale for you, to draw you off from me. Don’t listen to him! He knew nothing, he saw nothing, I am absolutely sure he was not there—”

“I did more than see. It was all I could do not to come out at him and wring his neck on the spot, but if you could keep me out of things for my own good, so could I you. I went back to the house,” he said, breathing hard, “and got my old revolver, and loaded it, and then I went round to the edge of the spinney, where I knew he’d go sneaking away after he left you. Oh, no, Sergeant Felse, my wife wasn’t the only one to know all about his movements that evening. I knew them better than she did. I saw him alive long after she did. When he went off up the mounts and into the wood, I went after him.”

Knotting her hands at her waist into a tight contortion of thin, hard fingers in which the knuckles showed white, she said: “You are a fool! You take the wrong way, the foolish way, to protect me.”

George, looking from one to the other, prompted delicately: “You said, Mrs. Hollins, that he went out halfway through the evening.”

“I was gone before she got back to the house.”

“It’s true, he was gone,” she said, trembling now, “but I knew he was going to Blunden’s, I took it for granted that he should simply leave when he was ready. And he did go to Blunden’s—the old man will tell you so.”

“He has told me so already. But it doesn’t take three-quarters of an hour and more to go from here to the Harrow.”

“On a fine evening, why should he hurry? There was nothing else to claim him. But this other story he has made up, to help me, to make you think that Helmut lived long after he left me, and there can be no suspicion on me—”

“Look!” said George, suddenly going to her and taking her firmly by the elbow. “Take it easy, both of you! You sit down, and don’t rush things before you come to them.” She looked surprised, even, he suspected, a little amused, as he put her into a chair, but she sat there obediently looking up at him, and her face was eased. “Look, I know I started this, and in a not particularly fair way, either. But I’m not trying to get more out of you or anybody than just the plain, stupid truth. Just because you’re anxious to show me that he didn’t kill Helmut, there’s no need in the world to fall over backwards and tell me that
you did
. It’s long odds Helmut
was
seen alive long after he left here, maybe by several people, if only we knew how to find ’em. If your husband can fill in a bit of the missing time, so much the better for both of you in the long run. Only give up the idea that pushing the bits you don’t much like under the rug is going to make things better for anybody. It’s only going to make me mad, and that does nobody any good.”

She began to smile, and then he felt better, even though the smile was faintly indulgent, as to a crazy juvenile. “All right, if it’s understood that you don’t either of you have to talk in a hurry, we can hear the rest.” He looked up at Hollins, but the heavy remoteness of that face had not changed at all. “You followed him. Go on!”

Hollins shook back his shoulders, and went on: “I kept behind him all up the woods, out of sight and hearing of him, but close. The revolver was in my pocket. I don’t know whether I meant to kill him or not. I know I meant at least to half-kill him, maybe I meant more.”

“But it was after nine when he was killed,” cried Gerd, “and at nine—”

“At nine, or a couple of minutes later, your husband was at the Harrow,” said George. “Also, Helmut was not shot. And it does seem a little unlikely that a man with a loaded revolver in his pocket should go to the trouble to use a less certain method for the same job.”

“I didn’t use it for any job, in the end. It’s still fully loaded, it hasn’t even been used to bash somebody over the head. I suppose those fellows of yours who examine these things can tell that by looking at it?”

“They can try, at any rate,” said George. “Go on, where did you leave Schauffler, and at what time?”

“I kept behind him until he came on to the ridge above the river, and sat down there for a while. He was very pleased with himself, humming and singing to himself in German, and grinning as if he’d pulled off something very clever. He sat there quite a time. I had time to think, and I thought better of it.”

George asked, with genuine and personal curiosity: “Why?”

“Well, he wasn’t such big stuff. I meant getting him, and I watched and waited for him to move on; but he got to looking smaller and smaller as it got dark. And I cooled off this much, that I began to think how much trouble I should be laying up for her, as well as myself, with how little use or satisfaction. I knew about him now, and I could put a stop to him as far as my wife was concerned, without starting something worse for her, like murder in the family. She’d gone to a lot of pains to avoid what it looked like I was bent to bring on her. So I went off and left him there. I went to the Harrow—we weren’t two hundred yards from the wicket in the fence—and left him to go to hell for all I cared.”

“Virtually,” said George, “he did. What time did you quit?”

“I’d say about ten to nine. I went straight to Blunden’s, and it wouldn’t take above ten minutes to do it from there.”

“And you didn’t see anything of him on the return journey?”

“Not a sign. I told you the way I came home, and that was all truth, if the rest wasn’t. I took my time over it, to get it all off my mind before I came back where anybody could see me. I needed to walk him out of my system, or
she’d
have known with one look at me. From my point of view, after I turned my back on him up there we were both done with Helmut Schauffler.”

Unfortunately no one was yet done with Helmut Schauffler. That was the devil of it. Not George, not all the spasmodically talkative, suddenly quiet neighbors leaning over Comerford garden fences, not the cheated heroes looking for a world fit for humankind, certainly not these two unquiet lovers. It was plain when their eyes met, drawn together unwillingly, that wells of doubt were opened, within them, never to be filled by any amount of protestations or promises. Only certainty was of any use; nothing else held any peace for anyone in this haunted village.

She looks at him, thought George with pity and horror, as if she believes he’s lying. And he looks at her as if he
knows
she’s told only part of the truth. And yet he could not be sure even of this. “My lad,” said George to himself, “you’d better get a move on, for everybody’s sake!”

I never noticed before,” he said to Bunty, in the late evening, when Dominic was safely in bed and his ears no longer innocently stretched after a solution of problems which were his as surely as anyone’s, “I never realized how opaque people’s looks can be. We read meanings into them every day, but suddenly when it’s a matter of life and death it makes you look again, and start weighing possibilities and separating them from suppositions—and altogether in the end you’re terrified to think anything means anything. For a moment I could have sworn that each of those two was seriously afraid the other had done it. And then I couldn’t be sure if that was really the meaning of the looks they were giving each other, or if it was something shared, or what it was.”

Bunty looked at him with her practical partisan sympathy, and agreed: “That’s a pity. Because if each of them really believed the other had done it, that would mean neither of them had done it, and then at least somebody would be safely out of it.”

“Not quite, because an expression in the eyes isn’t evidence. But at least I could have felt sure of something in my own mind. Now I’m sure of nothing. It’s as open as ever it was— in their direction rather wider open. Because there was an intent to murder, I’m sure of that, and while it’s credible that it should evaporate as suddenly as that—because he’s a sane man with both feet on the ground, and only too deeply aware how much trouble his wife’s been dragged through already— still it’s also a strong possibility
that it didn’t
evaporate.”

Bunty, aware of his hand’s vague undirected searching for something in his pockets, got up and brought him the tired man’s solace, his tobacco pouch and pipe, and the necessary matches. She put them into his lap, and watched his fingers operate them mechanically. Even over the first deep draws he made a face of disappointment. It was his own growing, and he always forgot to be prepared for the shock; but he was too stubborn to admit that it was unsmokeable. Maybe he hadn’t got the knack of curing it properly; anyhow, it was pretty awful. Bunty had never before noticed his distaste quite so clearly, and she made a mental note to buy a tin of his old brand the very next morning, and leave it somewhere for him to find, quite by accident.

“And another eye-opener,” said George fretfully, “is the ease with which well-known citizens can walk about this darned place for hours at a time, and meet nobody. You wouldn’t think it possible.”

“In the dark, in a scattered country district where everybody drops off home by his own particular beeline across the mounts, well, it isn’t really so astonishing as it seems,” said Bunty reasonably.

“Not when you come to weigh up everything, perhaps. But it’s confoundedly inconvenient. Here we’ve got Wedderburn going off in the sulks to walk off a slight load before he goes home to his mother. And Jim Tugg wandering home by devious ways, alone but for his dog—but I grant you, there’s nothing new about that, Jim likes his dog’s company far better than most men’s. And Hollins stalking Helmut, by his own confession, with intent to knock hell out of him at the very least, and then taking his disordered fancy for a walk until the agitation set up by the thought of murder had passed—”

“And Mrs. Hollins,” said Bunty very soberly, “at home by herself all this time, shut up with the thought of Helmut. Nobody to take her mind off it, nobody to see what she did, nobody even to tell us whether she was really there or not.”

George looked through the detestable smoke of his unthrifty crop at her, and found her looking very solemn and rather pale under the ruffled red hair. Awfully like the shivering but acute waif, so pale, so important, so large and scared of eye, who had met him on the clay-flats by the shrunken brook, standing over the blond head of Helmut.

“You don’t really think, do you, that she might have done it?”

“I think
I
might,” said Bunty, “in her place. Especially if I had reason to think that
you
might be thinking of doing it for me. She had a background of desperation. I don’t mean it came naturally to her, but her scope had been rather forcibly widened, you see. And she had, if we come to it in earnest, the finest motive you could wish to see.”

“But the fact that her mind was used to dealing with these awful things would also mean that it was trained and equipped to resist them. I mean, she could not only seriously consider murder, after all she’d experienced—she could effectively reject it, too. I’m not satisfied that it’s the strongest motive we have to look for. People of insignificant balance kill for insignificant things—sometimes almost lightly. And we haven’t quoted the tenth part of Helmut’s enemies. There are dozens of them, more trivial ones but real ones, round this village unaccounted for. There’s at least one good union man who began the ideological feud with him long before young Fleetwood ever opened his mouth. And plenty of others, too. And there’s something about this whole affair that makes me feel it never was planned. It came out of nowhere, out of some man’s mind through his hands so fast he never had time to stop it or even see what it was, until it was done. That’s how it feels to me.”

“It could still have been a woman,” said Bunty, “even that way.”

“It could. Women have murderous impulses, too. But wouldn’t a woman have been—more disastrously subtle about it, afterwards? I don’t know. This was so short and simple. No messy attempts to cover up, but a clean walk-out.”

“And no weapon,” said Bunty, biting her underlip. “I suppose the revolver didn’t show any sign?”

“Not a mark. Nobody’s head was beaten in with the butt of
that
gun recently, that’s certain.”

“If only,” burst out Bunty, speaking for Comerford with authentic passion, “if only it weren’t for all the people whose lives are being bent out of shape now, I’d pray like anything that nobody’d ever solve it. But it’s the village that’s being murdered, not Helmut. Oh, George, isn’t there any way out of it?”

“Only one. Straight ahead and out the other side—one man short or one woman short,” said George, “whichever it turns out to be. And the sooner the better, for everybody concerned!”