Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (20 page)

Dominic arrived blown and incoherent at the back door just as the church clock chimed the half-hour, and wondered, as he let himself in with unavailing caution, whether it was half-past nine or half-past ten. It couldn’t really be only half-past nine, though the thought of the later hour made his heart thump unhappily. What on earth had made him forget to put on his watch? But he had a talisman in his pocket, and a tongue in his head; and anyhow, they were always willing to listen to reason.

He had no time to steel himself, for the kitchen door opened to greet him, though he had made no noise at all; and there was George bolt upright in front of the fire looking distinctly a heavy father, with one arm still in the sleeve of a coat which he had just been in the act of putting on, and was now in the act of taking off again, with some relief; and there was Bunty at the door, with a set, savage face like angry ice, and eyes that made him wriggle in his wet clothes, saying as he halted reluctantly: “So you decided to come home, after all! Come in here, and be quick about it!”

Quite ordinary words, but a truly awful voice, such as he had never heard from Bunty in the whole of his life before.

Dominic’s heart sank. Suddenly he was fully aware of every smear of grime on his face, of his encrustations of clay, of his appalling lateness, of the fact that George had been about to come out and look for him, and, into the bargain, of every undiscovered crime he had committed within the year. The scrap of silver clutched in his hand no longer seemed very much to bring home in justification of all these enormities.

He stole in unwillingly, and stood avoiding Bunty’s fixed and formidable eye. In a small, wan voice he said: “I say, I’m frightfully sorry I’m late!”

“Where,” said Bunty, levelly and coldly, “where have you been till this hour? Do you see that clock?”

Now that she pointed him to it so relentlessly, he certainly did, and he gaped at it in consternation. But it couldn’t be true! Half-past ten he could have believed, though even that seemed impossible, but half-past eleven! He said desperately: “Oh, but it can’t be right! It was only seven when I went out, it just
can’t
have been as long as all that—”

“And what
have
you been doing? Just
look
at you! Come here, and show yourself!” And when he hesitated discreetly among the shadows in the doorway, his heart now somewhere in his filthy shoes, she took two angry steps forward and hauled him into the light by the collar of his jacket, and like any other mother gasped and moaned at the horrid sight. “George!” she said faintly. “Did you
ever
—!”

George said blankly: “My God, what an object! How in the world did you get into that state?”

“I’m most awfully sorry,” said Dominic miserably, “I’m afraid I
am
a bit dirty—”

“A bit!” Bunty turned him about in her hands, and stared incredulously, despairingly, from his ruined gray flannels to her own soiled fingers. “Your
clothes
! They’ll never clean again, never! Why, it’s all over you. It’s even in your hair! How on earth did you get like this? And where? Nearly midnight, and you come strolling in as if tomorrow would do. And filthy! I never saw anything like you in my life. And you’re wet!” She felt at him with sudden exasperated palms, and her ice was melting, but into a rage which would need some manipulating. “You’re wet through, child! Heavens!” she moaned, “you’re supposed to be thirteen, not three!”

She usually listened, and tonight she wouldn’t listen. She was always just, yet tonight she didn’t care whether he thought her just or not. She didn’t give him a chance to explain, she just flamed at him as soon as he opened his mouth. It was a shock to his understanding, and he simply could not accept or believe in it.

“But, Mummy, I—yes, I know, I fell in the brook, but it was because—”

“I don’t want to hear a word about it. Upstairs!” said Bunty, and pointed a daunting finger.

“Yes, I’ll go, really, only please, I want to explain about—”

“It’s too late for explanations. Do as you’re told, this minute.”

George, an almost placating echo in the background, said dryly: “Better go to bed, quick, my lad, before something worse happens to you.”

“But, Dad, this is important! I’ve got to talk to you about—”

“You’ve got to get out of those wet things, and go to bed,” said George inflexibly, “and if I were you I’d do it without any arguing.”

“No, honestly, I’m not trying to make any excuses, it’s—” Bunty said, in the awfully quiet voice which indicated that the end of her patience was in sight: “Upstairs, and into that bathroom, without one more word, do you hear?”

It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t like her, and Dominic simply couldn’t believe it. A flash of anger lit for a moment in the middle of his confusion and bewilderment. He burst out, almost with a stamp of his clay-heavy foot: “Mummy, you’ve
got
to listen to me! Don’t be so
unreasonable
!”

Bunty moved with a suddenness which was not natural to her, but an efficiency which was characteristic, boxed both his ears briskly, took him by the scruff of his neck, and ran him stumbling and shrilling out of the room up the stairs, and into the bathroom, quite breathless with indignation. She sat him down upon the cork-topped stool, and swooped down upon the taps of the bath as if she would box their ears, too, but only turned them on with a crisp savagery which made him draw his toes respectfully out of her way as she swept past him.

“Get out of those clothes, and be quick about it.” She stooped to feel the temperature of the water, and alter the flow, and when she turned on him again he had got no farther than dropping his jacket sulkily on the floor, and very slowly unfastening his collar and tie. She made a vexed noise of exasperation, slapped his hands aside quite sharply, and began to unbutton his shirt with a hard-fingered, severe speed which stung him to offended resistance. He jerked himself back a little from her hands, and pushed her away, childishly hugging his damp clothes to him. “
Mummy
! Don’t treat me like a baby! I can do it myself.”

“I shall treat you like a baby just as long as you insist on behaving like one. Do it yourself, then, and look sharp about it, or I shall do it for you.”

She went away, and he heard her moving about for a moment in his bedroom, and then she came back with his pyjamas, and his hairbrush, and gave an ominous look in his direction because he was still not in the bath. The look made him move a little faster, though he did it with an expression of positive mutiny. She was in a mood he didn’t know at all, and therefore anything could happen, especially anything bad; and the bath seemed to him the safest place, as well as the place where she desired him to go. He wanted to assert himself, of course, he wanted to vindicate his male dignity, his poor, tender male dignity which had had its ears soundly boxed, exactly as if it had still been a mere sprig of self-conceit; but she looked at him with a pointed female look, and reversed the hairbrush suggestively in her hand, and Dominic took refuge in the bath very quickly, with only a half-swallowed sob of rage.

The silver shield, which he had fished carefully out of the pocket of his flannels and secreted in his tooth-mug while she was out of the room, must on no account be risked. If it came within her sight she might very likely, in her present mood, sweep it into the waste-bin. But he was in agony about it all the time that she was bathing him. For she wouldn’t trust him to get rid of the clay unaided, even though he protested furiously that he was perfectly competent, and flushed and flamed at her miserably: “Mummy, you’re
indecent
!” She merely extinguished the end of his protest with a well-loaded sponge, and unfairly, when he was blind and dumb, and could not argue, told him roundly that she intended to get him clean, and to see to it herself, and further added with genuine despondency that she didn’t see how it was ever to be done.

The battle was a painful one. Having no other means of expressing his resentment of such treatment, Dominic developed more, and more obstructive, knees and elbows than any boy ever had before. Bunty, retaliating, adjusted his suddenly unpliable body to the positions she required by a series of wet and stinging slaps. The tangled head which would not bend to the pressure of her fingers was tugged over by a lock of its own wet hair, instead. Dominic fought his losing fight in silence, except when her vigorous onslaught on the folds of his ears dragged a squeal of protest from him:

“Mummy, you’re
hurting
!”

“Serve you right!” she said smartly. “How do you suppose I’m ever going to get you clean without hurting? You need scrubbing all over.” But for all that, she went more gently, even though the glimpses he got of her face in the pauses of the battle, between soapings and towelings and the rasp of the loofah, did not indicate any softening in her anger and disapproval. Still, in spite of her prompt: “Serve you right!” so determinedly repeated, she wiped his eyes for him quite nicely when he complained that the soap was in them; and suddenly, when her fingers were so soft and slow with the warm towel on his sore, sulky face, he wanted to give in, and say he was sorry, and it was all his fault, even the bathroom war. But when he got one eye open and glimpsed her face, it still looked dauntingly severe, and the words retreated hurriedly, and left an unsatisfied coldness in his mouth. And then he was angrier than ever, so angry that he determined to make one more attempt to assert himself. The thought of his hardworking evening, the feel of the little shield stealthily retrieved and secretly cradled in his hand as he pulled on his pyjamas, stung him back to outer realities.

He waited until he was padding after her into his bedroom, his hair smugly brushed, his tired mind stumbling with sleep but goaded with hurt self-importance. Bunty laid the brush on his tall-boy, turned down the bed, and motioned him in. He felt the sharp edges of his discovery denting his palm, but she didn’t look any more approachable than before, and there was still no safe ground for him to cross to reach her.

“I’ll bring you up some hot milk,” she said, “when you’re in bed. Though you don’t deserve it.”

But for that fatal afterthought he would have got across to her safely, but as it was he turned back in a passion of spleen, and said ungraciously: “I don’t want any, thank you!” He wasn’t going to want anything she said he didn’t deserve.

He hesitated at the foot of the bed, gazing at her with direct, resentful eyes, his newly washed chestnut hair standing up in wild, fluffy curls all over his head. “Mummy, there’s something I want to talk to Dad about, seriously. I’ve got to tell him—”

It was no use, she rode over him. “You’re not going to talk to anyone about anything tonight. We’ve both had enough of you. Get into bed!”

“But it’s awfully important—”

“Get into bed!”

“But,
Mummy
—”

Bunty reached for the hairbrush. Dominic gave it up. He made a small noise of despair, not unlike a sob, and leaped into the bed and swept the clothes high over him in one wild movement, leaving to view only the funny fuzz of his hair, soft and delicate as a baby’s. Under the clothes he smelled his own unimaginable cleanness, revoltingly scented. “The wrong soap,” he muttered crossly and inaudibly. “Beastly sandalwood! You did it on purpose!”

Bunty stooped over him, and noticed the same error in the same moment. He hated a girl’s soap. She wished she had noticed in time. She kissed the very small lunette of scented forehead which was visible under the hair, and it and all the rest of Dominic’s person promptly recoiled in childish dudgeon six inches lower into the bed, and vanished utterly from view in one violent gesture of repudiation. Unmoved, or at any rate contriving to appear unmoved, Bunty put out the light.

“Don’t let me hear one word more from you tonight, or I’ll send your father in to you,” she warned.

“I wish you would!” muttered Dominic, safely under the clothes. “At least he’d listen to reason.”

When she was gone, he lay clutching his treasure for a few minutes, and then, mindful of the danger of bending its thinness if he fell asleep and lay on it, and so losing perhaps the most vital aspect of his clue, he sat up and slipped it into the near corner of the little drawer in his bedside table. Then he subsided again. He was still very angry. He lay tingling all over with hot water, and scrubbing, and slaps, his mind tingling, too, with offended pride and slighted masculinity. He was too upset to sleep. He wouldn’t sleep all night, he would lie fretting, unable to forgive her, unable to settle his mind and rest. He would get up pale and quiet and ill-used, and she would be sorry—

Dominic fell off the rim of a great sea of sleep, and drowned deliciously in its most serene and dreamless deeps.

When he awoke it was to the pleasant sensation of someone rocking him gently by the toes, and the gleam of full daylight, with a watery sun just breaking into the room. He opened one eye into the rays, and closed it again dazzled and drowsy, but not before he had glimpsed George sitting on the foot of his bed. He lay thinking about it for a moment, trying to orientate himself. Around his snug and blissful sense of immediate well-being there was certainly a hovering awareness of last night’s upsets, but it took him an interval of thought to remember properly. He opened his eyes, narrowly against the glare, and yawned, and stared at George.

“Come on, get out of it,” said George, smiling at him without reserve, but he thought without very much gaiety, either. “I’ve given you a shake three times already. You’ll be late for school.”

“I didn’t hear you,” murmured Dominic, with eyelids gently closing again, and nose half-buried in the pillow.

“You wouldn’t have heard the crack of doom if it had gone off this morning. That’s what you get for staying out till half-past eleven. Remember?”

He did remember, and became instantly a shade more awake; because a lot of uncomfortable trailing ends from yesterday suddenly tripped his comfortably wandering mind, and brought him up sharp on his nose. He sat up, fixing George with a sudden reproachful grin.

“You’re a nice one! Why didn’t you help me out last night?”

“More than my own life was worth,” said George. “I’d have been the next to get my ears clouted if I’d interfered. You be thankful you got off so lightly.” He gave his waking son a nice smile, full of teasing and reassurance in equal measure, the intimate exchange between equals which had always been an all-clear after Dominic’s storms. “Now, come on, get up and get washed.”

“Don’t need washing,” said Dominic, reminded of his many injuries, and looking for a moment quite seriously annoyed again; but the morning was too fine, and his natural optimism too irrepressible to leave him under the cloud any longer. He slid out of bed, and stuck his toes into his slippers. A slightly awed, pink grin beamed sideways at George. He giggled: “If you’d seen what she did to me last night, you’d think I could skip washing for a month. Anyhow, I haven’t got a skin to wash, she jolly well scrubbed it all off.”

“She had to relieve her feelings somehow. If she hadn’t skinned you with washing, I dare say she’d have had to do it some other way. You be thankful she only used a loofah!”

“She didn’t,” said Dominic feelingly, “she used a hairbrush, too.
My
hairbrush, of all the cheek! At least, she threatened me with it. She wouldn’t listen to a word. And I really did have something important to say, because I didn’t go off and stay out all that time and get into all that mess for nothing.
Do
I do things as stupid as that, now, honestly?”

George, thus appealed to, allowed that he did not, that there was, somewhere in that disconcerting head, the germ of a sense of responsibility. Dominic, vindicated, completed the interrupted shedding of his pyjamas, and turned to reach for his clothes in the usual place. A clean shirt, his other flannels, the old blazer; Bunty had laid them there with a severe precision which indicated that some last light barrier of estrangement still existed between them, and it would behove him to set about the process of sweetening her with discretion rather than with audacity. There is a time for cheek and a time for amendment; Dominic judged from the alignment of his clothes upon their chair that this was the time for amendment. He sighed, a little damped. “Is she still mad at me?”

“No madder than you were at her last night,” George assured him comfortably. “Just watch your step for a few days, and be a bit extra nice to her, and it’ll all blow over. Now hurry up! Go and wash the sleep out of your eyes, at least, and brush your teeth. Your breakfast’s waiting.”

“But I want to talk to you. I still haven’t told you about it.”

“You can talk through the door, I’ll stay here.”

Dominic talked, and rapidly, between the sketch of a wash and the motions of cleaning his teeth, and padded back into the bedroom still talking. “It was only a thin chance, but that was the only place we could think of to start. And I know you told me to keep out of it, over and over, but honestly I couldn’t.” He paused in the middle of slithering into his flannels. “
You’re
not mad at me now, are you?”

“What’s the use?” said George. “That wouldn’t stop you. So that’s why you went to such a daft place on a night when it was sure to be sodden with rain!”

“Yes, and honestly, I hadn’t the remotest notion how late it was, it didn’t seem to have been any time at all. I suppose we were just busy, and didn’t notice, but really, I had a shock when I saw the clock. Well, then we were in a bit of a mess already, and I thought of the outflow, and climbed up on the stones. And one of the silly things rolled away and let me down in the water, and that’s when I put my hand on this thing I told you about, right down between the pebbles in the bed of the stream. And that’s what I wanted to tell you about last night, only I couldn’t get a word in for Mummy. Look, it’s here!” He loped across to the drawer, and fished out the shield, and laid it triumphantly in George’s palm. His light, bright hazel eyes searched the judging face anxiously. “You do see what it is, don’t you? It’s off a walking-stick—or anyhow, off something thin and round like a walking-stick. And tapered, too, because look, the curve at the bottom of the shield is a little bit closer than at the top. I was awfully careful not to bend it out of shape at all. And you see, it fitted in with what I’d been thinking so exactly. So I brought it for you. Because how else would a silver plate from a stick get in there under the outflow, except the way I said?”

“How, indeed?” said George absently, staring at the small thing he turned about in his fingers. “Can you show me exactly where this was? The very spot? Oh, I’ll guarantee you absolution this time, even if you fall in the brook again.”

“Yes, of course I can!” He began to glow, because George was taking him seriously, because George wasn’t warning him off. “I made a note—there’s a special dark-colored stone with veins in it. I could put this right back where it was wedged. You
do
think it’s important, don’t you?”

“I think it is, I’m sure it may be. But we shall see if they can find anything interesting in these grooves of the pattern. Can’t expect much of a reaction after a fortnight in the brook, I’m afraid, but with a crumpled edge like this top one you never know.”

“And it was partly silted over,” said Dominic eagerly. “That would protect it, wouldn’t it? And if we could find the stick it came from, there ought to be marks, oughtn’t there? Even if he tried to hide them. The shape of the shield might show, and anyhow, the tiny holes where it was fastened. Dad, before you take it away, d’you mind if I make a tracing of it? In case, I mean, I might see a stick that might be the one.”

George gave him a distracted smile, and said: “Yes, you can do that. But make haste and brush your hair—straighten it, anyhow. Detective or no detective, you’ve got to go to school, and you’d better be in good time. Don’t worry, I won’t shut you out of your own evidence. You shall know if it helps us. Fair’s fair! Now get on!”

“But my copy,” said Dominic agitatedly, through the sound of the brush tugging at the ridiculous fluff of his hair. “I shan’t have time to make it now, and you’ll take it away before I come home.”

“I’ll do it for you. Mind you, Dom, I should like it much better if you’d do as I asked, and stay out of it. It’s not the sort of business for you, and I wish you’d never been brought into it in the first place.” Dominic was very silent indeed, for fear of being thought to have made some response to this invitation. George sighed. “Well, it wasn’t your fault, I suppose. Anyhow, you shall have your copy.”

“If only Mummy had let me speak, I could have told you all about it last night.” The point was still sore, because it was so unlike Bunty to close her ears; and Dominic kept returning to rub incredulously at the smart. “It wasn’t a bit like her, you know. I mean, she’s always so
fair
. That’s what I couldn’t understand. What got into her, to make her like that? I know it was awful to be so late, and all that, but still she always listens to what I’ve got to say, but last night she wouldn’t let me say a word.”

“It’s quite understandable, in the circumstances,” said George. “If I could have been at home with her it wouldn’t have been so bad. But I came home only about ten minutes before you did, and found her frantic, still waiting for you. She’d been along finally to the Shock of Hay, and found that Pussy was missing, too, but nobody’d got a clue where either of you had gone. She’d just finished telling me all about it, and I was putting my coat on again to come out and look for you, when you sneaked in. No wonder you caught it hot, my lad!”

“Well, no, but still— Mummy isn’t like all the others, who fly off the handle for nothing. I mean, she doesn’t
panic
about lateness, and jump to the conclusion that people have been run over, or murdered, or something, just because they don’t come in when they ought to. Not usually, she doesn’t.”

“Not unless there’s a reason,” said George, “but last night was a bit different. She was scared stiff about you, and that’s why you got rather a rough time of it when you did turn up. I may as well tell you,” he said soberly. “You’d hear all about it at school, anyhow, and I’d rather you heard it from me.” Dominic had stopped brushing, with the length of his disorderly hair smoothed down over his forehead, partly obscuring one eye, and in this odd condition was staring open-mouthed at his father. Something made him move close to him, the brush still forgotten in his hand. George took him by the arms and held him gently, for pleasure and need of touching him.

“You see, Dom, last night there was another death. Briggs, the gamekeeper up at the Harrow, rang up soon after eight o’clock from the top call-box, and told me he’d just found Charles Blunden in the woods there, with his own shotgun lying by him, and both barrels in him. He hadn’t dared tell the old man, I had to do that when I got up there. It may have been suicide. It could just, only just, have been an accident. Only people here don’t believe in accidents any more. It went round the village like wildfire. That’s why,” he said, soothing Dominic’s blank white stare with a rather laborious smile, “a late son last night was a son who—might come home, or might not. Like the old man’s son! So don’t hold it against Bunty if she took it out of you for all the hours she’d been waiting. If I’d known you weren’t home I’d have been pretty edgy myself.”

Dominic’s sudden small hand clutched hard at his arm. “Did you say Charles Blunden?” His voice was a queer small croak in moments of stress, already beginning to hint at breaking. “But—when did he find him? And where?”

“He rang up soon after eight. The doctor said Charles hadn’t been dead any time, probably not more than half an hour. It’s by sheer luck he was found so soon, because nobody would have paid the least attention to the shots. There were several guns out all round the village, one report more or less just vanished among the rest. He was up in the top wood, apparently heading toward the house.”

Dominic, with fixed eyes and working lips, made frantic calculations. “I went out a bit before seven, didn’t I? The bus from the green is at five minutes to. Yes, I must have gone out more like a quarter to, because John dawdles so, it would take nearly ten minutes down to the green. And where was it they found him? In the top wood?”

“Yes, lying by the path about two hundred yards in from the stile on to the mounds. You’ll be late, Dom. Go and eat, and we’ll talk about it this evening. After all, the poor devil’s dead, we can’t do anything for him.” George put a rallying arm round his son’s shoulders, and gave him a shake to stir him out of what appeared to be a trance; but Dominic seized him by the lapels, and hung on to him with frantic weight.

“No, no,
please
! This is frightfully urgent, don’t make me go until I’ve told you. You see, I
saw
him! Last night, at the stile! He gave me a half-crown—it’s in my pocket, Mummy must have found it.” Odd, excited tears, such as he had not experienced by Helmut’s body, came glittering uncertainly into his eyes now, and his voice wouldn’t keep steady. Disgusted and distressed, he clung to George, who was solid and large, and held him firmly. “It’s awful, isn’t it? It didn’t seem to matter so much when it was somebody I didn’t know much, and nobody liked. But Mr. Blunden—I was talking to him last night. I think I must have been the last person who talked to him, except— you know—if somebody killed him, the somebody. He gave me half a crown,” said Dominic, with trembling lips. “He was
pleased
with himself, and everything. I’m sure he didn’t do it himself, not on purpose. Oh, I don’t want his half-crown now, I wish he hadn’t given it to me—”

George drew him round to sit on the bed beside him, and shut him in with a large, possessive arm, and didn’t try to hurry him, or even to keep him to the point. School could wait. Indeed, if this meant what it appeared to mean, Dominic would be occupied with other matters than school for most of the morning, and if he seemed in a fit state to benefit by a return to normality he could easily go in the afternoon. Meantime, he leaned thankfully into George’s side, and shook a little at intervals, but with diminishing violence.

“Why shouldn’t he give it to you?” said George reasonably. “And why shouldn’t you spend it? He wanted you to have it, didn’t he? He’d be a bit hurt, wouldn’t he, if he knew you’d let it be spoiled for you. What did he say when he gave it to you?”

“He said: ‘Go and celebrate for me.’ And when I thanked him, he said: ‘That’s all right. Buy your girl a choc-ice.’ ”

“Then that’s what you do, and don’t disappoint him. You don’t have to tell Puss where the money came from, that’s just between you and him, and none of her business.”

“I suppose not.” His voice sounded a little soothed. “I’d better tell you about it, hadn’t I? I wish I’d had my watch, because I can’t be quite sure about all the times. Only I know I started from the green as soon as the bus had gone, and it was on time, and that’s five minutes to seven.”