Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (28 page)

“And do you really think,” asked George, gravely and respectfully, “that even Blunden—about whom I wouldn’t like to say you’re wrong—killed two people and was quite ready to kill a third, simply to preserve twenty acres of land?”

“I suppose so, yes. It was
his
, you see. Whether he even wanted it or not, it was his, and so it was sacred. It might as well have been his blood. It made no difference if it was only twenty acres, or if it was only one. That didn’t have anything to do with it.” He rubbed a tired hand over his eyes. Bunty came and put her hands on his shoulders, and he got up obediently to the touch, and gave her a dazed smile. “Yes, Mummy, I’ll go to bed. I
am
tired.”

George drew his son to him for a moment in his arm. “Goodnight, Dom! Look—don’t waste any regrets on Blunden. You did what you decided you had to do, what seemed to be the right thing, for everybody. Didn’t you?”

“Yes. Well—I thought I did. I thought I was sure about it. Only they’ll kill him, won’t they?”

“He killed, didn’t he? And hurt more people even than he killed. Couldn’t we agree, at least,” he said very gently, “that what you, did was the least wrong thing? In the circumstances?”

“I suppose so,” said Dominic with a pale smile, and went away quietly to bed. But when Bunty went up to him, ten minutes later, he was lying with the light still on, and his eyes wide open, staring into the corner of the ceiling as if he would never sleep. She went to his bedside and leaned down to him without a word; and suddenly he put his arms out of bed and reached up for her, and clung to her desperately. She felt his heart pounding. He said in a fierce, vehement stammer: “Mummy, I’m never going to be a policeman, never, never!” And then he began to cry. “Mummy, don’t tell him! Only I couldn’t—I couldn’t!”

She could have argued George’s side of it, she could justly have told him that in an imperfect world
somebody
has to do the dirty work; but there was an answer to that, too, and she had a feeling that Dominic would put his finger on it. And in any case there would be a lot more days after tomorrow, time enough to get over this and be ready for the next inescapable tangle when it came. So she just hugged and soothed him, and said placidly: “No, darling, no, you shan’t! Of course you shan’t!” and held him gently rocking in her arms until he stopped crying and went to sleep.

He got over it, of course, very quickly, almost as quickly as Comerford did. Only half the story was ever allowed to leak out, but it was enough to cause people to turn and look twice at Dominic in the street, and attract a comet’s-tail of envious boys to trail after him on the way to and from school. Pussy shared his notoriety, but Pussy was a born iconoclast, and delighted in pushing even her own false image off its pedestal. But Dominic could enjoy being idolized, even while he saw through it; and the jealous scorn of Rabbit and his coterie was even sweeter to him than the adoration of the rest. Pretty soon it became necessary to take him down a peg. George had not saved his ammunition for nothing.

Not that there was anything peculiarly displeasing about Dominic on the gloat. He enjoyed it so, and laughed so wickedly at himself and his gallery at the same time, that it needed a serious-minded father to find the heart to burst the bubble. And then it was not an unqualified success.

“You are undoubtedly,” said George, laying down his office pen, “no end of a clever devil, my lad. But let me tell you this, that
coup
of yours was the most barefaced fluke that ever came off to the shame of the really clever. And now I’ll say what I’ve been storing up for you, young man, for a long time. If ever you put your private oar into my affairs again, and put me or anyone else to the trouble of lugging you out of a spot like that, look out for yourself afterwards, that’s all! You’ll be due for the nearest thing to a real hiding you ever had in your life, just as soon as I get you home undamaged. I ought to have done it this time, but next time I won’t make any mistake.”

Dominic, when he could speak, gasped: “Well, I like that! I save you no end of a long, dreary job, and maybe one that would be a failure, anyhow, and solve your beastly case for you, and that’s all the gratitude I get!” But he was laughing even then, at George as well as himself, until hard paternal knuckles rapped at the back of his head, and jolted the grin from his face.

“Better take notice,” said George. “I mean it.”

And he did. One sober look at him, and there was no more question about it. Dominic digested the steadying implications, and went away to think it over; but his spirits were too much for him, and he could not, in his present irrepressible state of gaiety, be put down in this way. Five minutes later he was back. He put his head in at the office door, and said sweetly: “I told Mummy what you said. She says if you try it, you’ll have to deal with her.”

“Tell her from me,” said George grimly, looking up from his work, “that I’ll be delighted to deal with her—after I’ve dealt with you! And if you come barging in here just once more today,” he added, warming, “I’ll start now.”

Dominic laughed, but he went, and he did not come back with any more impudence that day, which in itself was enough to suggest that he had decided to pay a little attention. And presently the exhilaration which had followed on the heels of his first revulsion went the same steady, sensible way into oblivion, so that before Christmas his days had settled again into a beautiful reassuring normality. People didn’t forget. It was rather that events slipped away into perspective, and left the foreground for what was newly urgent, end-of-term examinations, cake-mixing, present-buying, and all the rest of the seasonal trappings. Not even the very young can iron out flat all the unevennesses of the past, but the mountains of today are the molehills of tomorrow.

So Comerford got over the shocks to its nervous system, and the place where Selwyn Blunden and his son had fitted began to heal over even before the winter had set in. He had already ceased to be the main topic of conversation in the village by the time he died in prison in November, before he could be brought to trial. Medically his death was curious. He was old, of course, and parts of his economy were wearing out with over-use; but there seemed no special reason why he should dwindle away and stop living as he did. Bunty said he had died of frustration and cumulative shock at finding that, after all, he was not above the law. He was a bad loser, because he had always used his position and privileges to avoid any exercise in the art of losing gracefully. It seemed seriously possible that spleen should kill him.

So there was never a verdict in either of the Comerford cases, except the verdict which had already been collectively pronounced by the village; but that was all that was required to set the village free to go back to its everyday occupations. The rift in the wall of society closed gently with the closing year. And there were other things to be discussed, other surprises to be assimilated, like Io Hart’s quiet marriage to Chad Wedderburn, at Comerbourne registry office at the end of November. A quick decision, that was, said Comerford, considering the other one wasn’t long dead; but this wasn’t the first knot that had been cut by events when it couldn’t be unraveled by humankind, and maybe it was all for the best.

Pussy confided to Dominic: “You don’t know how much trouble she had with him, even after that night. The time he spent trying to tell her he ought not to let her do it! It would have taken more than him to stop her, once she knew he was only trying to be noble. You men are a silly lot of dopes, if you ask me. But she nagged him so much, he had to marry her in the end to shut her up.”

The more usual interpretation of the affair was that Chad had managed to get Io at last, after infinite trouble, because Charles Blunden was no longer there to be his rival. But Pussy, though prone to sisterly derogations, was nearer the mark. The only thing for which her version did not quite account was the look of extreme and astonished joy on the bridegroom’s face when the little registrar shut the book, smiled at them, and said: “Well, that’s all! You’ve done it now—you’re married!”

Then the rumor started, and proved by Christmas to be no mere rumor, that Gerd Hollins was expecting a baby at last, after nine years of hoping and one of quietly giving up hope. They’d even thought of adopting one, when it began to seem certain that they would have none of their own; but now there was a fair chance of a son coming to the farm in his own right, and good luck to him, said Comerford, and to his mother, too; she’d had more than her share of the bad. A bit late, perhaps, to start a family, but she was a strong woman, and older and less sturdy wives had produced healthy first babies before now.

So what with births and marriages, Comerford could balance a death or two.

A distant cousin came to the Harrow after the old man’s death. He seemed a nice enough young man, and he had a different name, which made things easier; and he came in time to have the last mild word upon the open-cast site. As far as he was concerned, they were welcome to go ahead, and so they did, as soon as the year turned and the mild, lengthening days began. Later surveys stated that the amount of coal to be harvested would be even larger than had at first been supposed, and the project would certainly pay for itself handsomely.

In the first days of the spring, therefore, the red-and-yellow monsters crept over the border of Harrow land, from which so many pains had been taken to exclude them, and began to rip off the tangle of furze and heather and rank grass, to pile up the gathered topsoil, to burrow deep into the entrails of pennystone and clay, and lay bare the old shallow shafts one by one, the unfilled and the shoddily filled together, the ugly debris of last century’s not much comelier civilization.

A worker from the coal site came to the police-station and asked for George. “You’d better come up, Sergeant,” he said. “We’ve found something we’d just as soon not have found. It’s in your line of business more than ours.”

George went up with Weaver, and stood beside the giant excavator, on a broad shelf from which the topsoil had already been stripped, in the heath beyond the Harrow farmhouse, where were dotted the old shafts filled during the war years. Debris of one of them, plucked out wholesale, had spattered down the side of the new mountain where the pennystone and clay was being shot. Old brickwork, half disintegrated, old rotten timber, all the rubbish of a prosperous yesterday. The past had come up the shaft and lay in the sun, slanting above the gouged valleys where the water had drained off to a deep, cliff-circled pool. The hole of the shaft, a ring of brickwork, gnawed by time, filled with rubble, lay open to the noon light. They stood at the rim, and stared into it, and were struck suddenly silent.

“Well, that’s it,” said the manager, kicking at the crumbling bricks and hunching a helpless shoulder. “Your folks’d better come and get it, I suppose. Unless you’d rather we just ploughed it under and forgot it. I’d just as soon forget it, myself.”

Weaver, very large of eye and solemn of face, looked into the pit, looked at George. He said, breathing gustily: “How long do you suppose it—she—” he looked again, and made up his mind “—she’s been down there?”

There was still perceptible cloth, shoes, a handbag; and incomprehensibly there were two large suitcases, burst and gnawed and showing soiled colors of clothes. But the rest was bone. George said: “A few years. Not above ten, I’d say.” For the skirt had a traceable length, the shoes a dateable fashion.

“But this is a skeleton,” said Weaver. He was chalky-white, too shocked to reason very closely. George didn’t like to remind him that the workings were alive with rats. “It must be longer than ten years. I don’t know of anyone going missing, as far back as I can remember. She must have fallen down.”

“Fallen down and taken her luggage with her?” said the manager.

“Then she must have committed suicide—wanted to vanish, I suppose. People do funny things.”

“They have funny things done to them, too,” said George. “Do you see what I see round her neck? Quite a determined suicide, if she strangled herself with a twist of wire, and then carried her cases to a pit-shaft, and jumped down it.”

“My God!” said the sunshine miner blankly. “That’s right! You mean we been and found a new murder?”

“You dug up an old one,” said George. By now he even knew the date of it. Noon sun on covered places brings out a lot of facts in a very little time, and queer things happen when men begin making the rough places plain. There she lay, a short, tumbled skeleton, falling apart here and there in the dirty folds of cloth which had now only slight variations from the universal dirt-color of buried things, among the soil and gravel and brick, jostled by the moldering cases. A few fragments of skin still adhering to the skull, and masses of matted hair. Front teeth touched with distinctive goldwork standing forward in the jaw; and two things round her neck, a necklet of carved imitation stones and a twisted wire. Loose enough now, but once it must have been tight round a plump, soft throat.

“Plenty of identifiable stuff there to hang half a dozen men,” said the sunshine miner, in displeased but deeply interested contemplation.

“Yes,” said George, “but it never will.”

For he’d got the hang of it at last. The cases had jolted him, but it was the necklet of stones that made everything click into place. He’d seen it before, not so long ago, round a soft, plump throat in a photograph. It was all very, very simple once one had the missing bit. A house without servants after six o’clock in the evening, a son away in North Africa, nobody home but a wife with a fair amount of money in jewels and securities, and a husband with his affairs in bad shape, and a position and reputation which rated well above other people’s lives with him. A situation in which she could easily be persuaded to turn everything into cash, and a plethora of pit-shafts round the house, into which she could vanish some night when she had done it, with enough of her personal belongings to give color to the story of her exit in quite another direction. A letter of farewell which didn’t even have to exist, a lover who never had existed except in one proficient imagination. One man’s word for everything, and an ingenious arrangement of circumstances which made it indelicate to probe too deeply. And then a broken, ageing, but reestablished demigod, who touched nothing he did not turn to profit.

Fill in the shafts, in a burst of local benevolence, and what have you left to fear? The war distracts attention from village events which might otherwise arouse too much interest; and Charles, the dumb, worthy Charles, comes home to swallow the story whole, and feel sorry for his father. What can you possibly have to fear?

Except, perhaps, red-and-yellow excavators ripping the bowels out of the secret places of the earth, laying bare the treasures of the mine, turning the soil traitor. For the land turned out to be neutral, after all. That was the one thing you hadn’t bargained for. You were aware of ownership; but the land was not aware of being owned. And you had to fight some unexpected rearguard actions; and there were casualties—a tool that turned in your hand, and a son who innocently went over to the enemy. But you’d gone too far then to turn back or to hesitate. And as for small, inquisitive boys, they should be kept out of the battle area; total war is not selective.

“I always had a feeling,” said George, “that the motive as we knew it was a little thin to account for Charles. Well, now we know! I’m afraid we’ll have to stop your operations here for a few hours. Go down and phone the inspector, Weaver, will you? Tell him we’ve found what’s left of Selwyn Blunden’s wife.”