Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (12 page)

When they fell into step on the way up the fields, neither of them was in the least surprised. This was the way home for only a handful of people, and Sergeant Felse was not among them, but Chad Wedderburn merely looked at him along his wide, knife-sharp shoulder, and smiled rather wearily, and left it at that. He said: “Hullo! On business?” Over the hill and beyond the ridge of trees was the small, genteelly kept house which had caused him such a panic of claustrophobia when he first came back to it, and the acidulated gentlewoman whom he had found it so hard to recognize as his mother. The likeness had come back into her unchanging face for him after a while, and they had fitted together the creaking parts of their joint life, and found it not so bad a machine, after all; but there were still times when he suddenly felt his heart fail in him, wondering what she had to do with him. She was so well-bred that she could not embarrass him by any parade of pride in him, nor shatter him by too unveiled a love, and altogether he was grateful to her and fond of her. But it could not be called an ecstatic relationship. She provided the background she thought most appropriate; he appreciated and conformed to it as his part of the adjustment. Only now and again did it pinch him badly, after a whole year of practice, and usually he could put up with these times and make no fuss. More than once in Croatia he had tasted surgery without anesthetics; it was a pity if he couldn’t keep silence now when he got the anesthetic without the surgery.

The brown scar was like a pencil mark down his neck from the ear, a very small earnest of what he bore on his body. It drew his mouth and cheek a little awry, George noticed, a thing which was hardly observable by daylight; but now the twilight of a clouded three-quarter moon plucked his face into a deformed smile even when he was not smiling.

“On business, of course!” he said, answering himself equably. “Don’t bother to be subtle about it, just say it. By now we all know that we’re in it up to the neck—some of us rather above the neck, in fact. I know no reason why you shouldn’t look in my direction rather pointedly. I know no reason why I should go out of my way to deny that I killed this particular man. I can hardly be indignant at the suggestion, can I, considering my history?”

His dark cheek, hollow and frail in the half-darkness, twitched suddenly. He looked as if a little sudden light would have shown dully clean through him; too brittle and thin to be able to beat in a man’s head. And yet he spread his own hand in front of him, and looked at it, and flexed it, as if he stood off to regard its secret accomplishments, with awe that they should repose in such an unlikely instrument. The Fourth Form in their innocence had not wondered more at that than he had in his experience. He shivered in a quiet, inescapable disgust, remembering what was supposed to have been the achievement of his manhood. “It’s almost a pity,” he said, “that I can’t make it easy for you, but I don’t know the answer myself.”

“I’m just beginning to find out,” said George, rather ruefully, “what’s meant by routine investigations. They don’t follow any known routine for more than one yard before running off the rails. But if you want to ask the questions and answer them, too, go ahead, don’t mind me.”

“There was the Fleetwood affair,” said Chad, mentally leaning back to get it in focus, “and I’m not going to try and make that any less than it was. Only an incident, maybe, but it was a symptom, too. And I seem to remember saying something rather rash about not wanting to start anything in case I killed him. Has been heard to threaten the life of the deceased man! And there was even the Jim Tugg affair, too; I was a witness to that if I needed any reminders.”

“I didn’t attach too literal a meaning,” said George, “to what you said about killing him, if that’s any comfort to you.”

“Your mistake, I meant it literally. But you may also have observed that, because I was afraid of how it might end, I took good care, even under considerable provocation, not to let it begin.”

“Granted!” said George. “Why go out of your way to make a case for and against, when nobody’s accused you? I should sit back and wait events, if I were you, and not worry about it.”

“I think you wouldn’t. Haven’t you noticed that that’s the one thing none of us can do? Comerford’s too small, and murder, even so piteous a specimen of the art, is too big. Besides, I find your presence conducive to talk, and I’m interested to see how good a case can be made—for and against.” He was indeed talking to the night, which was no more impersonal than Sergeant Felse to him. “I find the motive angle a little under-supplied, don’t you? The Fleetwood affair passed over safely, one doesn’t kill this week for what one felt last week. A little roundabout, too. People do terrible things on behalf of other people, but things even more desperate for themselves. And what had Helmut ever done to me?”

This was more interesting than what George had foreseen, and he fell in with it adaptably enough, moving unhurried .and unstampeded up the leisurely swell of the darkened field, with the vague black ghosts of the straggling hedge trees marching alongside on his right hand. Not too much attention need be paid, perhaps, to the matter, but the manner had peculiarities. Maybe Chad had drunk a little more than usual even tonight, in pursuit of some quiet place he couldn’t find within his mind when sober. Or maybe he was instinctively putting up a barricade of eccentricity about his too questionable, too potential loneliness, to persuade the paths of all official feet to go round him reverently, as for a madman where madmen are holy. Or maybe he was just fed up, too fed up to be careful, and had set out to heave all the probabilities in the teeth of authority, and dare them to sort everything out and make sense of it.

“Jim Tugg suggested a very apposite motive, I thought,” said George mildly. “It would apply to you just as well. He said he had it against Helmut Schauffler that he was the living, walking, detestable proof of a war won at considerable personal cost by one set of men, and wantonly thrown away by others. If the Helmuts, he said, can sidle about the conquering country, only a few years later, hiding their most extreme nastiness behind the skirts of the law, what on earth did we tear our guts out for? I’m bound to say I find it a better motive than a great many which might seem more plausible on the surface.”

“A motive for anger,” said Chad, his voice slow and thoughtful in the dark, “but not for killing—not unless you could be sure that removing one man would make some difference. And of course it wouldn’t.”

“An angry man doesn’t necessarily stop to work out the effects of what he does.”

“Some do. I do. That’s why I didn’t do it. I had some training in calculating results, and doing it quickly, too. It comes almost naturally to me now.”

“Moreover,” went on George placidly, “the removal of Helmut might have been expected to have a very good effect indeed. He was like a penknife, chipping away industriously at the mortar between the stones of a perfectly good, serviceable wall—picking away at it and prising it apart bit by bit, for no positive purpose in the world, only for the love of destroying things. Nobody likes to feel the roof being brought down over his head, in my experience.”

Chad turned his head suddenly, and looked along his thin shoulder with a small movement of such desperation and pain that even George was startled. “If you mean this damned inadequate society that’s supposed to keep the rain off us, what makes you think I’d be sorry to see it go? What gives you the idea I’ve found it weatherproof, these last few years? Wouldn’t I be more likely to forgive him the rest, if only he could bring this down on the top of us, and force us to put up something better in its place?” He drew a breath that hit George’s consciousness like a blow, and caused him to flinch. No doubt of the hurt here, no doubt of the bitterness. He tried to close the door on it again, but his voice was labored. “Never in my life,” he said deliberately, “did I strike a solitary blow for English society, and make no mistake, I’m never likely to start now.”

“Perhaps not,” said George, clairvoyant, “but for something bigger you might, or for something smaller. For the idea of human decency and dignity, for instance—”

“By reducing something human to an indecent and undignified mess in a ditch?”

“Something which had already offended so far that it had become a sort of renegade from its own kind. Perhaps! More is required to make up humanity than two arms, two legs, and all the rest of the physical catalogue. But far more likely, for the peace of mind of a very small unit of society—about as large as Comerford. I’m not sure that the disintegration of this one little community would leave you so completely cold.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Chad, “that it would. But haven’t you seen already, and don’t you suppose I could have seen in advance, that Helmut dead is a more effective agent of disintegration than he was alive? My God, do you suppose you’re still the same person you were ten days ago? Do you suppose I am? They talk, oh, yes, they shout over the garden fences just as usual, and talk their little heads off, and even enjoy it in a way. But they can all feel the ground quaking under them, just the same, and they can all see, now, that the bloke next door is just about as near to them as somebody from the moon. It’s beginning to crumble apart, faster than one rather nasty young man could have prised it while he was alive. And the only way of stopping it is by catching and hanging some poor devil who probably meant well by all of us. Nobody could possibly deserve to die merely because he smashed Helmut’s head in, but I’m not all sure that he doesn’t deserve it for his damned stupidity, for what he’s done to Comerford. While he was alive, Helmut was never quite real, but, by God, he’s real enough now he’s dead!”

“You have,” allowed George ruefully, “very definitely got something there.”

“I thought by the sound of you that you had it, too. Not a nice job, yours,” he said more quietly, and even smiled in a wry, grudging way. But he had said too much already for his own peace of mind, and the less he added now, the better. He lifted his head with a gesture of putting something from his back, not without effort. “This is all a little in the air. Shall we touch down again? I loathed Helmut Schauffler, but I didn’t kill him. I object to killing, for one thing, and for another, in this case it would have been the worst possible policy, and I think there never has been a moment in my dealings with him when I failed to remember that. But you don’t, of course, have to believe me. Go ahead and ask me things, what you like!”

The voice in which he answered questions, George noticed, was not quite the same voice, but carefully flattened into a level of indifference, a witness-box voice. He had nerves which needed to be steadied by these little extra attentions; one does not drag one’s life suddenly through half a dozen phases of chaos and emerge impervious, it seems one may even come out of it with sensitivities more acutely tuned than before to the vibrations of danger and exasperation.

“You were at the Shock of Hay last Wednesday evening about the usual time for a call. When the nine o’clock news was on you were there. Any idea what time you left?”

“Not exactly. I wasn’t noticing time very much. Well before closing time, though, it was just getting really full—and a bit noisy. I’d say about twenty to ten, but somebody else might know more about it than I do. Charles might—I’d just called him something not very complimentary—and not particularly usual. In certain circumstances I tend to become polysyllabic—especially on brandy.”

“So I’ve heard,” said George. “What time did you get home?”

“You could, of course, get that from my mother. She always knows the time when everything happens, especially if the routine goes wrong.”

“I’m trying,” said George gently, “to get it from you.”

“Clever of you,” said Chad, “to be so sure I should know. She called my attention to it directly I came in. Oh, not in any very censorious manner, merely as you point out a slight error in the pence column to a junior clerk toward whom you are, on the whole, well-disposed. It’s a habit, actually. I suspect she tells the cat when he’s ten minutes late. One isn’t, of course, expected or required to take very much notice of the small reproof. It was twenty-five minutes to twelve.”

“And what happened to the two hours in between?”

“I spent them sobering up, and walking off a pretty evil temper. I bring enough moods home as it is—this one I preferred, to leave somewhere in the Comer.”

“You didn’t go swimming?”

“I did. Half-tight—rather more than half—but I could still swim. It wasn’t a cold night, and the pool’s safe as houses if you know it well. I’m not saying I’d have done it if I hadn’t been rather beyond myself, as a matter of fact—but something had to be done! I didn’t go straight there, just walked; keeping off the roads. Over the mounts, through the larch plantation, down the woods the other side. Went a long way toward the bridge along the water-meadows, then changed my mind and came back to the pool, and bathed. After that I didn’t linger, I was too damned cold, I came back into Comerford the same way, only dropped down from the mounts by the steep path through the quarry. Home—exactly twenty-five to twelve.”

“Meet anybody anywhere along this route?”

“At that hour, along this route, I wouldn’t expect to. And beyond that, I took good care not to meet anyone, that was the last thing I wanted. Nobody who isn’t drunk or in love walks by the river at eleven o’clock at night, and the lovers choose the less exposed bits, even when there are no other people there. I did pass one boy pushing a bike when I crossed the lane on top there—we swapped good-nights, but I didn’t know him, and don’t suppose he knew me from Adam. After that it was fine, I never saw a soul.”

“Might be finer for both of us now if you had,” said George. “Why did you have to choose that night to be difficult? And come to think of it, when you crossed the mounts toward the larches you must have been fairly near to the basin by Webster’s well. That would be about—let’s see!—ten o’clock or soon after, wouldn’t it?”

“About that, I suppose.”

“You didn’t see anyone hanging around there? There’s a place where the ground dips from the high paths, and you can see down into the basin behind the well. Nothing out of the way to be seen there then?”