Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (16 page)

“Why, what’s the matter with it here? Been in a lot worse places.” Dominic stretched and heaved himself upright by the edges of brickwork, and fragments came away in his fingers and all but tumbled him down again. He groped, and encountered dankness, the caving softness of earth hidden from the sun, cool, dirty, unpleasing opening of one of the holes. Strange how cold! Touch the clay above in the open mounds, and it warmed you even after dusk, but this involuntary contact added to the shock of its recession the shock of its tomblike, dead chill, striking up his wrist, making the skin of his arm creep like running spiders. He was glad that Pussy was busy stamping on his little vaunt, as usual, so that she failed to hear his minute gasp of disgust.

“Oh, yes! Old Tubby’s study this morning, for instance— I heard all about it!”

Half his mind gathered itself to retort, but only half, and that uneasily. How could she have heard all about it? Nobody knew all about it except the headmaster and Dominic himself, and he was jolly sure neither of these two had told her anything. And anyhow, the old boy had been in quite a good mood, and nothing had resulted except a lecture and a few footling lines, which he hadn’t yet done. Oh, hell! Silly old-maid things, lines! The hole went back and back; he stretched his arm delicately, and couldn’t feel any end to it. Filthy the cold earth felt in there. And there was something, his fingertips found it, something suddenly soft, with a horrid, doughy solidity inside it, soft, clinging to his fingers, like fur, perhaps, or feathers. He drew his hand back, and the soft bulk followed it a little, shifting uneasily among the loosened soil. Not alive, not a rat. It just rolled after the recoil of his hand because he had disturbed it, but it was small and dead. Rabbit? But not quite that feel. Spines in the softness, longer here. Feathers— a tapering tail.

“Something in here,” he said, drawing his hand out; and his voice had the small awareness which could stop Pussy in mid-scramble, wherever they happened to be at the time, and make her turn the beam of the suddenly compliant torch upon his face. He was a little streaked and dusty, but not so bad, on the whole; it took a second and longer look to discover how far his mind had sprung from hide-and-seek. He sniffed at his own hand, and wrinkled his nose with shock. A clinging odor of rottenness prodded him in the pit of his vulnerable stomach, but his inquisitiveness rose above that. “Wait a minute! Shine the light this way again. There
is
something there. I believe it’s a bird—”

He was groping again, more deliberately this time, with his eyes screwed up, as if that would prevent his nose from working since he had no free hand with which to hold it, and his teeth tight clenched, as if through their grip was produced the power which propelled him.

Pussy said, sitting firmly halfway up the slope, where she had turned to stare at him: “Don’t be so daft! What would a bird be doing down a hole like that?”

“Daft yourself! He’s just lying there, dead, because someone put him there, that’s what. And why did somebody put him there? Why, because he didn’t want to be caught carrying him— Wait a minute, I can’t— There are two of ’em! What d’you know? A brace!”

“Pheasants!” said Pussy, leaping to catch up with him, and came slithering to his side again, a minor avalanche of clay dust and pine-rubbish accompanying her.

They were not, when he drew them out into the light of the torch, immediately recognizable as anything except a draggled and odorous mess, fouled with cobwebs and earth. He held them away from him, swiveling on his heels to get to windward, even where there was no apparent wind; and his stomach kicked again, more vigorously, but he would not pay attention to it. A nasty, mangled mess, with broken feathers, and soiled down. Rat-gnawed, too, but the wobbling light failed to show Pussy the traces. Dominic’s spine crawled, but the charm was already working, his tightening wits had their noses to the ground. He reared his face, taking a blind line across country, clean over Pussy’s stooped, inquisitive head. The fence only a few yards away, the hole in the fence, the tongue of waste land, the clay bowl under the outflow of Webster’s well. He himself had said, only ten minutes ago: “I never thought it was quite so near.” And how long did it take for birds to get—like these were? In a hole in the earth like this, with rats for company, would—he calculated with lips moving rapidly, tantalizing Pussy unreasonably—would ten, eleven days produce this stage of unpleasantness? He thought it might. He shifted the draggled corpses uneasily, shaking his fingers as if he could get the unclean feeling off them that way. Must tell Dad, as soon as possible. It might not be anything, but then it might, and how was he to be sure? And he hadn’t even been looking for them, they were honestly accidental. Except that he would certainly be told, for Pete’s sake keep away from that place!

“Well, some poacher got disturbed,” said Pussy easily, “and thought it best not to be caught with the goods on him, so he dumped them in here. That’s simple enough. If he used this ground he’d know all about the holes already. Maybe he’s hidden things there before. Anyhow, what’s the song and dance about? Ugh! Put them back, and let’s get out of here. They’re horrid!”

“Well, but,” said Dominic, leaning into the thread of wind which circled the funnel of the pit, and surveying his finds out of the wary corners of large eyes, “well, but if a poacher just put them there because he thought he was going to meet somebody who could get him into trouble—maybe the owner, or the keeper—well, he put them away pretty carefully so they’d stay hidden until he could come and collect them, didn’t he? He wouldn’t want to waste his trouble.”

This she allowed to be common sense, jutting her underlip thoughtfully. They had forgotten the very existence of Sandy and his partner by this time.

“Well, then, why didn’t he collect them afterwards? Look, you can see for yourself, they’ve been there days and days. He must have meant to go back for them when the coast was clear. Why hasn’t he been?”

“I don’t know. There could be any amount of reasons. He may have been ill ever since, or something.”

“Or dead!” said Dominic.

The minute the idea and the word were out of him the darkness seemed a shade darker about them, and the malodorous carrion dangling from his reluctant hand a degree more foul. Dead birds couldn’t hurt anyone, but they could suggest other deaths, and bring the night leaning heavily over the pit-shaft in the wood, leaning down upon two suddenly shivering young creatures who observed with quite unusual unanimity the desirability of getting to some cleaner, brighter place with all haste.

“Outside,” said Pussy uneasily, as if they had been shut in, “we could see them better. It won’t be quite dark yet”

“We don’t want the others to know,” said Dominic, suddenly recalling the abandoned game. “We’ll go the other way, down the little quarry. They’ll soon give us up and go home. Or you could go and tell them I—tell them my mother wanted me, or something—while I go straight home with these.”

Pussy turned at the rim of the pit to give him a hand, because he had only one free for use. She took him by the upper arm in a grip lean and hard as a boy’s, and braced back, hoisted his weight over the edge. Waves of nauseating, faint rottenness came off the drooping bodies. She had no real wish to see them, by this or any light; she reached the open and still kept going, only drawing in a little to be just ahead of Dominic’s other shoulder.

“Oh, they’ll go home, they’ll be all right. I’m coming with you.” As they crawled through the swinging pale she asked: “Do you really think they were that German’s pheasants? Dominic, really do you?”

“Yes, really I do. Well, look down there the way we came, it’s only a few minutes to the path by the well, to the—to where he was. And unless it was someone who was dead, wouldn’t he go back for his birds? Some time before a whole week there
must
be a chance. After he hid them so carefully, too, because they weren’t just dropped in the bushes, he wasn’t in as big a hurry as all that. He just wanted them out of his pockets, because there was someone he heard in the woods, and he wanted to be able to pop through the fence and march off down by the well quite jauntily, nothing on him even if it was the keeper, and if he got awkward.”

“But we don’t know that Helmut had been poaching,” she objected.

“Well, we know he was as near as that to the preserves. And don’t you remember, the lining of his tunic was slit across here, to make an extra-large pocket inside. Why should he want a pocket like that, unless it was to put birds or rabbits in? And where we found him—well, it’s so near.”

They skirted the high hedge, and took the right-hand path down into the small overgrown quarry, instead of bearing left toward the all-significant well. What was left of the light seemed warm and kind and even bright upon them, greenish, bluish, with leaves, with sky, and the soft distant glimmering of stars almost invisible in the milky blue. Not even a hint of frost now, only the cool regretful afterbreath of summer, mild and quiet, ominous with foreshadowings, sweet with memories. Clamor of voices from the slackening game they had left came after them with infinite remoteness.

“He put them there until the coast was clear,” said Pussy, hushed of voice, “and he went slipping back on to the lawful path, bold as brass. What harm am I doing? Because he heard someone coming in the wood, you think? It might have been the keeper? Or it might have been anyone, almost—”

“Yes. But by the well, going along looking all innocent, as you said, he met someone. And that was the person who killed him. So he never had the chance to go back for them.”

Once out of the closed, musty, smothering darkness, where panic lay so near and came so lightly, they could discuss the thing calmly enough, and even step back from it to regard its more inconvenient personal implications. As, for instance, the unfortunate location of the pit where the discovery had been made.

“Of course,” said Pussy, “the very first thing he’ll ask you will be where did you find them? And you’ll have to admit we were trespassing.”

“He won’t have to ask me,” said Dominic, on his dignity. “It’ll be the very first thing I shall tell him.”

“Well, I suppose that’s the only thing to do—but I don’t suppose it’ll get you off.”

“Can’t help that,” said Dominic firmly. “This is more important than trespassing. And anyhow, everybody trespasses sooner or later, you can do it even without knowing, sometimes.” But to be honest, of course, he reflected within himself, that was not the way he had done it. However, he was not seriously troubled. What is minor crime, when every official mind is on a murder case?

They hurried down through the narrow, birch-silvered path which threaded the quarry, and into the edges of the village where the first street-lights were already shining. Horrid whiffs of decay tossed behind them on the small breezes of coolness which had sprung up with the night. They let themselves in unobtrusively by the scullery door of the police-station, and sidled into the office to see if George was there. But the office was empty. George had to be fetched away from his book and his pipe in front of the kitchen fire, and brought in by an incoherent Pussy, almost forcibly by the hand, to view the bodies, which by this time were reposing on an old newspaper upon his desk, under the merciless light of a hundred-watt bulb. The effect was displeasing in the extreme, and Dominic’s self-willed inside began to kick again, even before he saw his father’s face of blank consternation halted on the threshold.

“What in the name of creation,” said George, “do you two imagine you’ve got there?”

Halfway through the explanation, which was a joint affair, and therefore took rather longer than it need have done, Bunty began to be suspicious that she was missing something, and as the parties involved were merely Dominic and Pussy, she had no scruples about coming in to demand her share in their revelations. Besides, there was a chance that someone would be needed to hold the balance between her husband and her son, who on this subject of all subjects still obstinately refused to see eye to eye. The note of appeasement, however, was being sounded with quite unusual discretion as she entered.

“It was an absolute accident,” Dominic said, “honestly it was. We weren’t even thinking about that business, and it was only one chance in a thousand we ever found them. If the pale hadn’t been loose we shouldn’t ever have gone in, and if Pussy’s torch hadn’t been phoney I shouldn’t have grabbed off in the dark for a hold in the grass, and put my hand down the hole. It was just luck. But we couldn’t do anything except bring them to you, once we’d got them, could we?”

“You’d no business there in the first place,” said George, heavily paternal. “Serve you right if Briggs bad caught you and warmed your jacket for you. Next time I hope he does.”

Bunty remembered certain events of George’s schooldays; but she did not smile, or only within her own mind. Dominic grinned suddenly, and said: “Oh, well—occupational risks! But old Briggs isn’t so hot on running.”

“I’m surprised at you, Pussy,” pursued George, not strictly truthfully. “I thought you had more sense, even if he hasn’t.”

There was really no need to argue with him, for his mind was all the time on the dingy draggle of nastiness obtruding its presence from the desk. Thirteen days now! It could be. And the minute fluff they had harvested from Helmut’s tunic-lining came easily back to mind. On his last evening he had been observed on the edge of the preserves, his body had been found not a hundred yards from the fence, and at about ten o’clock, melting into the shadows with the typical coyness of his kind, Chad Wedderburn had caught a glimpse of what he could only suppose to be a poacher. And among the miscellaneous small belongings found in Helmut’s pockets—

“He had a torch, didn’t he?” said Dominic, his eyes fixed insatiably on his father’s face. “A big, powerful one. I remember—”

Yes, he had had a torch on him, big and powerful, dragging one pocket of his tunic out of line. Trust Dom to remember that! Found practically on the spot, equipped for the job, and dead just about as long as these birds; and as the kids had pointed out, what poacher but a dead poacher would leave his bag cached until it rotted on him? He supposed he had better call at the Harrow, instead of making straight for the pit.

“Can we come back with you?” asked Dominic eagerly. “We could take you straight to it—and there are several holes down there, you might not know which it was.”

“It’s almost bedtime now,” said Bunty, frowning upon the idea. “And Io will wonder where Pussy is.”

“Oh, Mummy, there’s nearly half an hour yet, we came away before any of the others. And we’d come straight back, really, it wouldn’t take long.”

“Nobody’ll be worried about me,” said Pussy, elaborately casual. “I’m not expected home till half-past nine.”

“Better have a look on the spot,” said George to Bunty. “I’ll send them straight back as soon as they’ve told their tale.”

The trouble was, of course, that he would and did do precisely that. As soon as they had collected Charles Blunden from the farmhouse, with brief explanations, and led their little party to the pit in the pinewoods, and indicated the exact repellent hollow from which they had removed the pheasants, the adults, of course, had done with them. Pussy expected it, Dominic knew it. In the pitchy, resiny darkness, even with lights, expressions were too elusive to be read accurately, but dismissal was in the very stance of George, straightening up in the heel of the pit to say briskly:

“All right, you two, better cut home now. Unless,” he added unkindly, putting ideas into Charles’s easygoing head, “Mr. Blunden wants to ask any questions about fences before we let you out of it.”

“Eh?” said Charles, with his arm rather gingerly down the dank hiding-hole, and only a corner of his mind on what had been said, just enough to prick up to the sound of his own name.

“Violating your boundaries, you realize—that’s how the thing began. Knock their heads together if you feel like it, I’ll look the other way.”

“It was my fault,” said Dominic, demurely sure of himself. “We only wanted somewhere new to hide, and we didn’t mean to go far or do any harm. And anyhow, we did come straight back and own up to it as soon as we found the birds. You’re not mad, are you, Mr. Blunden?” He daren’t be, of course, even if he wanted to; Pussy wasn’t Io’s young sister for nothing. Io might call her all the little devils in creation on her own account, but it wouldn’t pay Charles Blunden to start the same tune; families are like that. So Dominic trailed his coat gracefully close to impudence, and felt quite safe. They were about to be thrown out of the conference, in any case, so he had nothing to lose.

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Charles, disappointingly not even very interested. “A fence like that asks to be violated. Not that I’m advising you to try it while Briggs is about, mind you, or even to let my father spot you at it. But there’s no harm done this time. Just watch your step, and we’ll say no more about it.”

“And we did right to go straight back and report, didn’t we?” pursued Dominic, angling for a reentry into council through Charles, since George certainly wouldn’t buy it. “I say, do you think it was really like we worked it out? Do you think—”

George said: “Git! We want to talk, and it’s high time you two went home to bed. You’re observant, intelligent, helpful and reliable people, no doubt, in fact almost everything you think you are; but there isn’t a thing more you can do for us here. Beat it!”

“I suppose it’s something to be appreciated,” said Pussy sarcastically, as they threaded their way out of the wood by the slender gleam of the torch, and went huffily but helplessly home.