Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (3 page)

Dominic came in to tea scrupulously washed and tidied, because Aunt Nora was there, and six-year-old Cousin John; but in spite of all his precautions he did not escape from the table again before his mother had observed and interpreted more or less correctly the various small changes in his appearance. It might not have happened but for the brat John, for he was taking care to keep his knuckles as far out of sight as possible. John had so far resisted all attempts to teach him to recognize letters, and was not interested in figures for their own sake, but he could count éclairs on a plate and people round a table as fast as anyone, and make them come out right, too. Having observed by this means that the éclairs outnumbered the people by one, and that he himself was the youngest and most indulged person present, he had assumed that the extra one would be his as of right; and it was a serious shock to him when Dominic’s acquisitive hand shot out and abstracted it from under his nose. He let out a wail of indignation, and seized the offending hand by the wrist as it flicked back again with the prize, and both mothers, naturally, leaned forward to quell the argument before it could become a scrimmage. Maybe Aunt Nora did miss the significance of the skinned knuckles and tender palm, but Bunty Felse didn’t. Her eyes sought her son’s, she frowned a little, and then laughed, whereupon he scowled blackly, relinquished the éclair, and hurriedly put his hands out of sight under the table. But she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t, until the others had gone, and by then, with luck, Dominic himself could be out of the way for an hour or two. Maybe she’d forget, maybe his father wouldn’t notice. Inside an hour he could finish his homework and be off to the kitchen-yard of the Shock of Hay to collect Pussy.

Unhappily in his haste to get rid of his homework he forgot to conceal his hands, and the jut of scored knuckles from a chewed pen was too obvious to escape Sergeant Felse’s notice when he sat back from his late tea. George wasn’t yet so far from his own schooldays that he couldn’t interpret the signs. But George had an inconvenient conscience which moved him occasionally to demand more from his son than he had ever provided for his father. He reached over Dominic’s shoulder, took the inky hand and turned it about in his own palm, and held on to it firmly when Dominic attempted to slide it away again. Dominic, sighing, thought and almost said: “Here it comes!”

“Hm!” said George. “Interesting! Who licked you?”

Dominic fidgeted, and frowned, and said: “Old Wedderburn.”

“Oh, I thought he didn’t go in for violence?”

“This time he did,” snapped Dominic. “Look out, the pen’s going to drip. Mind my algebra!” He wriggled, and was released; he grumbled just above his breath, like a half-grown pup growling, and mopped the small blot in the margin with unnecessary energy, to divert attention from his injuries. But he heard George chuckle.

“What was it all about? Fighting? Oh, don’t trouble to duck, I’ve already seen your eye.”

“Does it show much?” asked Dominic, fingering it rather anxiously.

“Going to be a beauty. Somebody else licked you, evidently, besides old Wedderburn.”

“He didn’t!” said Dominic indignantly. “You just ought to see him, that’s all. I bet he’ll have more than just a black eye to show by tomorrow.” The gleam came back to his eyes readily, brightening them to the color of home-made marmalade. He pushed his chair back from the table to balance it on its two back legs, and wound his own long, flanneled shanks bewilderingly about the front ones, braced on his taut brown arms, suddenly grinning, suddenly gloating, the little devil, about as subdued as a cock robin in the nesting season. Four feet seven of indiarubber and whalebone, with a shock head of dark chestnut hair growing in all directions, and a freckled nose, and an obstinate mouth; a good deal like his mother, only Bunty’s hair was frankly red, and her skin fair and clear of freckles. George’s resolution to be properly paternal, and read the appropriate lecture, went by the board, as it usually did. After all, he spent all his days being serious, even portentous, about minor crimes, he couldn’t quite keep it up after hours with his own boy; and he was well aware in his own heart, though he never admitted it, that while he was more ready to threaten, it was usually Bunty who performed. She had a way of advancing with perfect calm and patience to the limit of what she would stand, and then, only occasionally and with devastating effect, falling on her startled son like a thunderstorm. And George’s conscience, aware of shortcomings, impelled him sometimes to express concern ahead of her, so that he might at least appear to be the seat of authority in the house. She never snubbed him, she only smiled, and said with suspicious sweetness: “Yes, darling, you’re perfectly right!”

Tonight, when he followed her into the scullery and took the teacloth out of her hand, she turned and gave him the too demure smile which made him feel about Dominic’s age; and with a very natural reaction he resolved to be his full thirty-nine years, and be damned to her.

“Our Dom’s been in trouble at school,” he said with gravity.

“So was his father before him,” said Bunty, “many a time. It didn’t make the slightest impression on him, either. Dom’s all right, don’t you worry.” Aunt Nora and John were already down the road and waiting for the bus back to Comerbourne Bridge, and Bunty could laugh at both George and Dominic if she pleased, without hurting either of them. She patted his cheek disconcertingly with her wet hand, and snatched a cup from him just in time to prevent him from dropping it. “You’re so like him, it just isn’t true.”

George took exception to this. “He’s the spitting image of you, and you know it. Try and make him go the way he doesn’t want, and see how far you get with it. But he is a little devil!” He recaptured the paternal frown with some difficulty, for heavier things than Dominic had been on his mind all day, and this was by way of self-indulgence at the end of the common task. Sometimes he thought: “Why did I ever go into this police business, anyway?”

“What was it this time?” asked Bunty serenely.

“He fell foul of Chad Wedderburn over scrapping with some other kid. Seems there are some things that get Chad’s goat, after all. They had to hunt for a long time before they found one of ’em—it took Dom to do it!—but he’s managed it this time. A queer lad,” said George thoughtfully. “Chad, I mean. Would you suppose that his particular red rag would be fighting?”

“I can conceive it,” said Bunty, rinsing the sink. “Hasn’t he had about enough of it to last him a lifetime?”

“That isn’t really any reason, though, why he should grudge our Dom his bash.”

“It’s on the right side, anyhow,” she said comfortably. “Not that Dom usually goes hunting for that particular kind of trouble, to do the little tyke justice. You didn’t ask him anything about it, did you?” A hazel eye very like Dominic’s regarded him sidelong for a flash, and appeared satisfied with his indignant stare; off duty she found little difference between her husband and her son. “Sorry, darling! Of course you didn’t. Neither did I. He looked so on his dignity, I didn’t dare. But he won,” she said positively, “it was sticking out all over him.”

“I wish some of his elders had learned enough sense to quit scrapping,” said George. “Win or lose, it’s a mug’s game, but there are always more mugs than plenty.” He hung up the towel neatly and rolled his shirtsleeves down. “Dealing with kids must be money for jam compared with our job.”

“The child,” murmured Bunty, “is father to the man. I don’t suppose there’s much to choose. Had a bad sort of day, then?”

“Not exactly—just ominous.” He liked to talk to her about his job, at night, when he could kick it out of his mind for a short time if he wished, and therefore with human perversity ceased to wish it. Closer than his skin was Bunty, the partner of partners, and often she could help him to see a little more daylight through the opaque human creatures who vexed and made interesting his days. “I wouldn’t care to say that our D.P.s are any less honest by nature than we are, but their dependent circumstances, or all they’ve been through, or something, has certainly given some of ’em the idea that they’re entitled to be carried for the rest of their days.
And
that all we’ve got is theirs for the taking. Rum, you know, old girl—I could have swallowed that, but they pinch from
one another
. That I just don’t get. Nobody dare leave anything lying around in the camp these days. And how the farm workers do love ’em, to be sure!”

“Cheer up,” said Bunty helpfully, “the knives haven’t been out for three nights, not even at turning-out time.”

“Knock on wood when you say things like that, just to please me. Still, the land’s awake, all right, maybe we’ve got to thank the visitors for that. And I suppose they have had the rough end of it for some years, poor devils—but what we’ll stand from somebody who couldn’t get on with his own country—or hasn’t risked trying it—is nobody’s business. Mind you,” said George scrupulously, “there are some fine chaps among ’em, too. They’re the ones I’m sorry for. There may be some place in the world where they belong, but it certainly isn’t among their fellow-exiles here in Comerford.”

“A man without any national roots,” said Bunty gravely, “is the last person to make a good adopted child in another country.”

“That’s the hell of it. The last person to make any kind of internationalist, either. But we’ve got ’em, and we’ve got to try and digest ’em.”

It was almost invariably at this hour in the evening, when slippers, and pipe, and a drowsy evening with the wireless floated comfortably in George’s mind’s eye, that the office telephone rang. It did so now, and Dominic, already on the doorstep with trunks and towel rolled under his arm, shrieked back unnecessarily to inform them of the call, and ask if he should answer it. Either way he was content; he wanted to go and fetch Pussy out from her tiresome music lesson and go swimming in the pool of the Comer, but it would also be gratifying to listen in to the beginning, at least, of some interesting incident. However, he departed blithely when George came out to the office himself, for trouble would keep, and the golden July evening would not.

“Hell!” said George, reaching for the receiver. “This is what comes of drawing fate’s attention to— Hullo, yes! Felse here!” Bunty saw the official tension settle upon his face, and heaved a resigned sigh. When he hung up she had his cap already in her hands, and was holding it out to him with a comical resignation.

“Who mentioned knives?” said George accusingly, ducking his head into it wrathfully, ducking a little lower still to kiss her as he hooked open the door. “From now on, woman, keep off that line of talk, you’ve got me a real casualty this time.”

“Where?” cried Bunty. “Not the camp?”

“The Lodge—young miner at the hostel copped it from a P.O.W.”

“He’s not badly hurt?” she shrieked after him, leaning forward in the doorway as he flung a leg across his bike and pushed off hard along the empty evening road.

“Be O.K., I think—I hope!” He was gone, and the rest of the story with him. Bunty went back dispiritedly into the kitchen and turned up the radio, but it was not much company. One might almost as well not have a husband; D.P.s, labor rows, neighbors swapping punches over a shared front path or a drying-ground, Road Safety Committee meetings, lectures, drunks, accidents, there was no end to it. And now some poor kid in trouble—maybe two poor kids, since most of the ex-P.O.W. recruits at the miners’ hostel were no more. Say goodbye to that cosy evening with George, he won’t be back until all hours.

“Maybe I should get me a dog,” said Bunty grimly, “or take up fancy-work.”

The Lodge had cost the Coal Board more than it was worth, and more than they need have paid for it if they had had the courage of their convictions; but it was house-room for thirty men. The warden was a decent, orthodox, middle-aged man who expected his troublous family of Welshmen, local boys, Poles, Germans and Czechs to behave in as orderly a manner as children in a preparatory school, and was out of his depth when they did not. The whole setup was too new for him; he preferred an arrangement tried and hardened by use, where the right procedure for every eventuality was already safely laid down in black and white for a simple man to follow. Improvisation was not in his nature. He opened the studded imitation Tudor door to George, and perceptibly heaved all his responsibilities into those welcome navy-blue arms at sight. His wife would be less than useless; she had political convictions but no human ones. If the boy was really hurt they’d better get him out of there, thought George, before she gave him a chill.

“Doctor here?” he asked, halfway up the stairs with the warden babbling in his ear.

“Just ten minutes ahead of you, Sergeant. He’s with the lad now.” There is a certain type of man who persists in using the word lad though it does not come naturally to him; the thing has a semi-clerical ring about it, a certain condescension. You get the feeling that a young male creature of one’s own class would have been a boy, while this person is subtly different.

“Good! No verdict from him yet?”

“There’s scarcely been time, Sergeant. This has been a terrible business, it might so easily have ended in a tragedy. This collier’s lad—” A shade more of definition, and one step down; we’re getting on, thought George.

“Which? You didn’t say who the victim was. Local boy?”

“Young Fleetwood. He’s been here only a month, and really—”

“I know him,” said George. “What about the other party?”

“A young man named Schauffler, Helmut Schauffler. I must say he’s never given me any trouble before. A good type, I would have said. And, to be quite fair, I can’t say he has been altogether to blame—certainly not the only one to blame—”

“Where is he now?”

“Down in my office. My assistant is there with him.”

“You weren’t there when the thing happened?—wherever it did happen? Was anyone?”

“It was in the day-room. Three other men were present. They were playing darts. I don’t know if you—”

“That’s all right,” said George, marching across the landing, which betrayed its period by being lit with a large stained-glass window in improbable armorial bearings, notably of a violent blue. “Let’s see what the damage is, first. Which room?” But the murmur of voices had drawn him before the warden could reply, and he walked in upon the end of the doctor’s ministrations without waiting to be led. There were more people round the bed. The warden’s wife, holding with an expression of reserve and distaste an enamel bowl of water stained darkly red. A scared-looking eighteen-year-old backed up against his bed in the far corner; the rest of him trying to be invisible, but his ears sticking out on stalks. And somebody long and lean, or appearing long by reason of his leanness, standing with his back to the door and talking down to the boy on the bed across the doctor’s bowed shoulder. A quiet, reasonable voice cheerfully advising the kid not to be an ass, because everything would be taken care of, including letting his mother know. The speaker looked round at the small sound the door made in opening, and showed the unexpected face of Chad Wedderburn, the slanting light magnifying his scar. Tonight he had another mark, too, a small punctured bruise upon the same cheek, of which at the moment he seemed completely unaware.

The doctor was a little, grimly gay, middle-aged man with brilliant eyes, and false teeth which slipped at the most awkward moments, and which he plugged testily back into position with a sudden thumb whenever they tripped him. He looked over his shoulder at George, and with a welcoming grin, as who should say: “Ah, trouble!” pulled him directly into consultation. Trouble was the breath of life to him, not because he enjoyed seeing people tormented, but because his energy was tumultuous, and demanded an exhausting variety of interests to employ it through the day.

“There you are, Sergeant!” he said, as if George had been there from the beginning. “What did I tell you? Only a perfectly clean wound, touched a rib, no damage, not the ghost of a complication of any kind. Thinks he’s going to die because he bleeds freely. Thinks I’m going to forbid you to badger him, I dare say. Your mistake, my boy! Put you through it as much as he likes, I’ve no objection. Eat you if he likes! He’d find you tough enough if he tried it!” He was all this time busily finishing a bandage, and buttoning a stained shirt over it again with fingers which flew as fast as his tongue, but more steadily. The boy on the bed looked a little bewildered at the spate of words, but a little reassured, too, and stirred docilely from side to side as the hands directed him. “Good boy! You’re all right, I promise you. Nothing in the world to worry about, so take that scared look off your face, and relax. All you’ve got to do is exactly as you’re told for a few days. Something new for you, eh? Eh?”

Apprehensive but faintly soothed gray eyes flickered from the doctor’s face to George’s, and back again. Young Fleetwood was seventeen, sturdy but small for his age; on his own here now, George remembered, the family had moved south. Clever, idealistic kid, out to save the country and the world, so he bypassed the chance of teaching, and set out to cure what was wrong with the mines. Probably end up as a mining engineer, and maybe that would reconcile his old man, who had been a collier himself and learned to look upon it as something not good enough for his sons. All the more important because there was only this one son now; the elder was dead in the last push into Germany, in 1945.

“I’m taking him into hospital for a few days,” said the doctor briskly. “No great need, but I’d like him under my eye.”

“Best thing for him, I’d say. How bad was it?”

“Quite a gash—sliced wound, but the rib stopped the knife, or it might have been a bad job. The ambulance will be here for him in about ten minutes, but if you need longer—? Let him down easy, he’s had a fright.”

“That’s all right, he wouldn’t know how to start being scared of me,” said George cheerfully. “Known me all his life.” He sat on the edge of the bed, and smiled at the boy until he got a wan smile in return. “Can we have the room to ourselves until the ambulance comes? Let me know when you’re ready for him, doctor.”

Jim Fleetwood let the room empty of everyone else, but turned his head unhappily after Chad Wedderburn, and reached a hand to keep him, but drew it back with a slight flush, ashamed of hanging on to comfort. Chad said quietly: “It’s all right, Jim, I’ll come back.”

“Stay, by all means,” said George, “if he wants you. That’s all right with me. I know the feeling.” The door closed after the others, and it was quiet in the room. “That’s better! How did you get here? Just visiting?”

“Jim asked for me, and his roommate called me on the phone. I was ahead of the doctor. His family are a long way off, you see; I suppose I seemed about as solid a prop as he could think of offhand.” He looked, at that, as if he might be. The broken bruise on his cheek burned darkly; he saw George’s eyes linger on it, and said evenly: “Yes, I walked into it, too. This was a present from the same bloke. The row was barely over when I got here, everybody was arguing, down in the day-room, what happened and what didn’t happen. Schauffler happens to be a kind I know already. He didn’t much like being known. But he’d given up the knife by then, luckily for me. I was turning away from him at the time,” he explained gently, but with a certain tension in his voice which hinted at stresses underneath. “I had Jim in my arms. The Schauffler kind chooses its time.”

“I wish you’d lit into him then,” said Jim, feebly blazing. “I wish you’d killed him.”

“You’re a fine pal, to want me hanged for a Helmut Schauffler!”

The boy paled at the thought, and lost his voice for fear of saying something of equally awful implications with the next breath.

“There isn’t going to be any trouble, is there? I don’t want my people to get it wrong.” He began to flush and shake a little, and George put a hand on his shoulder to quiet him.

“The only trouble you’ve got is a few days in hospital, and the job of getting on your feet again. Just tell us all about it, and then quit worrying about anything except getting well. We’ll see that your parents don’t get it wrong. You can trust us. If I don’t make a good job of it, Wedderburn will. Now, how did this business start?”

“It’s been going on a week or more, ever since I was coming from the showers one day, and saw him just leaving some more German chaps outside. They saluted each other the Nazi way, and said: ‘Heil, Hitler!’—just as if there hadn’t been any war, and our Ted and all the other chaps gone west for nothing. I dare say I oughtn’t to have cut loose, but what can you expect a chap to do? I couldn’t stand it. I suppose I raved a bit—honestly, I can’t remember a damned word I said, but I suppose it was all wrong and idiotic. I should have hit him, only Tom Stephens and some more fellows came, and lugged me away. I didn’t put any complaint in—I couldn’t, because I was ashamed I’d made such a muck of it, and anyhow he hadn’t done anything to me, only stand there and grin. But ever since then he’s picking on me here—nothing you could get hold of, because there never was anyone else around to see and hear—but he’d slip remarks in my ear as he went by—he got to find out about Ted, somehow, I think he’s been prying here in my room. But I can’t
prove
any of it. I’m telling you, but it’s only my word for it. Only, honestly, I haven’t made it up, and I’m not imagining it, either.”

“I wish you’d had the sense to come to me days ago,” said Chad Wedderburn.

“Well, but I didn’t want to make trouble for you, and it was all so slippery. You can see it’s no good now. I only made you take the same sort of nastiness I’ve had.”

“What about tonight?” prompted George.

“He was down in the day-room, playing darts with three of the fellows. They didn’t often invite him in, but I suppose he was there, and they took him on. I didn’t even know. I went down there to borrow a fine screwdriver, because I’d broken the strut of Ted’s photo, and I was putting a new one on it. When I went in he was sitting by the table, and he had a clasp-knife, and was trimming the end of a dart that wouldn’t fly true. I never took any notice of him. I just put the photo on the table—as far from him as it would go, but it’s only a small table—and asked Tom Stephens for his pocket gadget, and he gave it to me, and went on with the game. And I went back to pick up my picture.” He stirred painfully on his pillow, and shut his teeth together hard to stop a rising gulp. “It’s Ted in his uniform—I went and left it down there—”

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that. Go on!”

“He sat there whittling away with the knife, and he looked at me over it, and then he spat—making believe he was spitting on the blade, and then stooping down to sharpen it on the sole of his shoe—but he knew what he was about, all right! He spat on Ted’s photo—spattered it all over the face— He spat on my brother, and grinned at me! A dirty little Nazi like that!”

“So you went for him,” said George equably.

“Of course I did! What would you expect me to do? I dropped the screwdriver—anyhow it was a little pocket thing, all closed up, like a lipstick—and went for him, and hit him in the face, and he started to get up and lunge at me, all in one movement. The knife went into me, and I fell on top of him, and then the other three came and pulled us apart, and I was bleeding like a pig—and—and I was scared like a kid, and started to yell for Mr. Wedderburn, and Tom went and got him—and that’s all.”

Not all, perhaps, that could be told, but all that Jim was capable of telling just then, and it was as full of holes as any sieve. He looked speculatively at Chad’s darkening cheek, and asked: “What about your little incident? If you had the kid in your arms at the time,
you
can hardly have started the rough stuff.”

Chad smiled sourly. “I didn’t even call him rude names. It was all strictly schoolmaster stuff. He was sitting like a damp sack until I turned to go out of the day-room, and then he shot up like a rocket and took a hack at me. I—hadn’t been complimentary, of course. His poor English might have led him to find words there which I never used.”

“Don’t put words in
my
mouth,” said George hastily.

“Just the words you’ll probably find in his. He has them all, there’s been time to find the right ones. But it would hold up an assault charge,” he said simply, “if you’re hard up. Every little helps!”

George thought it might, but discreetly said nothing. He patted Jim with an absent-minded cheerfulness, as he might have done a Dominic smitten with stomachache, bade him do as he was told, like a good chap, and not worry about anything; and with the exchange of a glance committed him again to the surprising care of Chad Wedderburn, who was inexpertly putting together the small necessities of a stay in hospital from the chest-of-drawers. “See him off, and keep him happy. Come along to the station on your way back, will you? I’ll take care of brother Ted, you can be easy, you shall have him back safely.”

He went down, not very well satisfied, to collect three vague and confused statements from the dart-players. An incident only three seconds long is not seen clearly by men whose minds are concentrated on a dart-board placed on the other side of the room. Tom Stephens, who was the most anxious to back up his roommate, said he had seen the blow struck, and didn’t think it was any accident. He had also seen the insult to Ted’s photograph, which still lay on the table with half-dried stains of spittle undoubtedly marking the glass, and his firm impression was that that had been no error of judgment, either, but a deliberate provocation. But the other two were less ready to swear to it. The German had started up to defend himself, and the open knife was already in his hand; what could you expect in the circumstances? Jim had hit him first, and quite possibly on mistaken grounds. They wouldn’t like to say he had meant any harm.