Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (17 page)

Nothing more there, I’m certain,” said Charles, after twenty minutes of combing the pit and its spidery caverns inch by inch with torches. “Try it again by daylight, of course, but I think there’ll be nothing to show for it. It looks as if the kids weren’t far out.”

“Oh, that was a deliberate cache, all right,” agreed George, frowning round at the queer gaunt shadows and lights of the young tree trunks, erect and motionless, circling them like an audience. “Things don’t fall into sidelong holes like that, even if they were dropped over the edge of the pit in a hurry. They were meant to be well out of sight, and I must say only the merest freak seems to have unearthed them again. There’s only one thing worries me—”

“About the Helmut theory? I thought it was pretty sharp of your boy to have jumped to it like he did, Why, what’s the snag? I can’t see any holes in it.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is a hole. People do such queer things, and do the simplest things so queerly. But in my experience poachers
don’t
go to such elaborate shifts to hide their birds, even when they have to ditch them for safety. This place is isolated enough to begin with, and here’s the pit, ready to hand, what’s wrong with just dropping the birds in one of the hollows under the hang of the grass? Ninety-nine fellows in a hundred would.”

“Just wanted to make doubly sure, I suppose.”

“He didn’t expect to be leaving ’em a week or more, I take it. It’s long odds the things would have been safe as houses like that for the time they’d have had to wait.”

“Still, if he had to scramble down into the pit in any case to find a hiding-place, why not go the whole hog? And anyhow, isn’t the very thoroughness of the thing an extra argument for thinking it was Helmut who planted them? He being a poacher rather out of our experience than in it, and given to habits of Prussian thoroughness? Where another bloke might favor rapid improvisation and a bit of risk, I should think he might easily have proceeded with this sort of methodical mak sikker. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe, if you put it like that. But it still looks farfetched to me! Let’s get out!” he said, digging a toe into the crumbling clay slope. “Nothing more we can do here.”

They ploughed their way to the upper air, which was scarcely lighter by reason of the enclosing trees; and on the rim of the pit George turned to look down once again into the deep, dismal scar. “How far back does this date? It’s not one of your father’s wartime operations—trees are too well-grown for that by—what, ten years? Must be that at least.”

“Oh, yes, this patch is one of the first, though mind you these beastly conifers do give a false impression, they’re such mushrooms. Can’t remember the exact year, but late in the 1920s it must have been. He had all this mound leveled and planted. But you can see it wasn’t a very good job they did on the pit-shafts.” His own voice, regretful and even a little bitter, sounded to him for a moment like an echo of Chad’s. He wasn’t succumbing to Chad’s persuasions after all, was he? But the old man could have made a job of it, while he was about it. And if he was alert enough in the 1920s to level a mound for his own preserves, why couldn’t he see that he owed the village a bit of leveling, too, for all the chaos the get-rich-quick mining grandfather had created? Still, it was easy to be both wise and enlightened twenty years after the event. They were of their kind and generation, no better but anyhow no worse. “With proper protection on replacing and leveling,” he said, almost apologetically, “some of these ruined villages could still have been rich. Why don’t we think in time?”

“Up to a point,” said George dryly, turning on his heel from the unpleasing prospect, “they did.”

“Up to the point of private preserves they did, but not an inch beyond.”

“Strictly on that principle,” said George, “the century proceeded.”

“The old boy’s late operations were all out on the heath patches the other side of the house,” said Charles. “Near the boundary, actually. The opencast gang will be ripping them all up again,
if they
decide it’s worth their while after all these disastrous expenses they’ve run their noses into recently, and
if they
win the dispute.”

He didn’t sound to George as if he cared very much either way about that, or indeed knew very clearly what he did want. They walked singly through the close-set trees, Charles leaning the torch-beam to the ground for George’s benefit. “We didn’t even make a good job of the planting,” he said sadly. “I’m all for mixed woods myself, these quick payoffs with conifers play hell with the soil.” They came out from the warm, cloying stomach of the wood, where the soft darkness beyond seemed almost light by comparison, a striped light through the pales. “This time,” said Charles, “I really think you should leave by the gap in the fence. See for yourself!” He groped along the pales until the loose one swung in his hand. “Here we are! I must get that seen to right away. No need to encourage ’em!”

George, looking through the film of trees beyond the fence, could trace at a little distance the cleared line of the path by which Chad Wedderburn had plotted his angry course that night of the death. Somewhere about here he had heard and glimpsed, if his tale was true, the figure of a man, presumed to be a poacher, withdrawing himself rapidly and modestly into the shadows. Could it have been Helmut Schauffler himself? Last heard of previously at about ten to nine, about five hundred yards from this same spot, very pleased with himself, singing to himself in German. Sitting, waiting for the spirit to move him to the next mischief. Or perhaps for the night to fall.

If the shy figure seen at somewhat after ten had really been his, the time during which his death might have taken place was narrowed to slightly under one hour; and Chris Hollins, marching home at last about half-past ten, was almost certainly absolved from any shadow of guilt. For though it did not, as George had said, take three-quarters of an hour to reach the Harrow from Hollins’s farm, it did take at least twenty-five minutes to do the journey even in the reverse direction, which was mostly downhill. And the time of Hollins’s arrival did not rest solely on his wife’s evidence, for there was the carrier’s cottage at the bottom of his own drive, and the carrier who had leaned over his gate and exchanged good-nights with him. At twenty-past ten, he said, and he was a precise man. If he was right, and if the shadow among the shadows was Helmut, then Chris Hollins could not have killed him.

“Not a very promising line, after all, I suppose,” said Charles, sounding, as everyone did, quite cheerful at this reflection. In a way, no one wanted the wretched case solved; in another way no one would have any peace, and nothing would ever be normal again, until it was solved. “Still, you never know. Some witness may turn up yet who’ll really have something to say. Anyhow, if there’s anything I can do when you come up again, you know where to find me.”

George went home to Bunty very thoughtfully. It was all
if
, whichever way he turned.
If
Chad’s elusive figure at ten had been Helmut, Chris Hollins was out of it.
If
, of course, Chad was telling the truth. And that was something about which no one could be sure. His whole attitude was so mad that it was quite conceivable he had not only seen him, but knocked him on the head and rolled him into the brook, too, and come back to tell half of the tale, when he need have mentioned none. It sounded crazy, but Chad was hurling provocations into the teeth of fate in precisely this bitter-crazy manner. Or, of course, he could be telling the whole truth, in which case it became increasingly desirable to identify his poacher. Most probably some canny regular who had nothing to do with the business, but still he might know something. See Chad again, in case he could add anything to his previous statement. See all the poachers he could think of; business is business, but murder is murder.

And did it necessarily follow from the (hypothetical) clearing of Chris Hollins, that Gerd was equally innocent? George looked at it from all directions, and could only conclude that it did not. Chris had been home shortly before half-past ten, just as he said, because Bill Hayley had seen and talked to him. But there was no proof that Gerd had been there to meet him, except her husband’s word. And what was that worth where her safety was concerned? What would you expect it to be worth?

Exhausted with speculation, George’s mind went back and forth between Hollins’s household, Jim Tugg, Chad Wedderburn, with the uneasy wraiths of Jim Fleetwood and many like him periodically appearing and disappearing between. There was no end to it. And the mere new fact that Helmut had added poaching to his worse offenses did not greatly change the picture. All it did was slightly affect his actual movements on the night of his death, and perhaps give an imperfect lead on the time of his exit, since it argued that he had been alive and active after the darkness grew sufficiently positive for his purposes. In George’s mind the death drew more surely into the single hour between ten and eleven; but stealthily, and he feared unjustifiably.

Bunty met him in the office, and indicated by a small gesture of her head and a rueful smile that Dominic was just having his supper in the kitchen. She closed the door gently in between, and said with a soft, wry gravity: “Your son, my dear George, is seriously displeased with you.”

“I know,” said George. “I don’t blame him, poor little beast. He finds ’em, I appropriate ’em. But this time, as a matter of fact, he isn’t missing a thing, there’s nothing to miss. Only a lot of useless speculations that go round in circles and get nowhere.”

“Then you can afford to talk to him, and at any rate pretend to confide in him a little. Now’s the time, when you can do it with a straight face.” She took his cap from him, laid it aside, and reached up suddenly to kiss him. “I wouldn’t trust you to try it when you really had anything on your mind, because he’d see through you like glass. But if there’s nothing to tell, even you can say so and remain opaque. Let’s go and be nice to him, shall we? Or he’ll only imagine all sorts of lurid discoveries.”

“That’s all I’m doing,” said George bitterly. But he went, and he was nice. Somebody might as well get some satisfaction out of the incident, if it was any way possible; it was precious little George was getting.

It was Constable Cooke who said it, after they had been over and round and through every fact and every supposition they possessed between them. They had it now in positive terms that not only had Helmut’s tunic-lining retained rubbings of down from the pheasants’ feathers, but the pheasants’ feathers had acquired and guarded, through their long repose in the clay of the pit, distinct traces of the fluff from Helmut’s tunic-lining. Leaving no doubt whatever that these were the very birds, and very little that they had been planted in precisely the same way, and probably for the same reasons, as their discoverer had supposed. That was something at any rate, though it led them no nearer to a solution. They were left counting over their possibilities again, reducing them to the probabilities, which seemed to be four, and weighing these one against another to find the pennyweight of difference in their motives and opportunities. And Constable Cooke, who was light of heart because he was less surely involved, said what George had refrained from saying.

“Among four who had equal reasons for wanting him dead, and equal opportunities for killing him,” he said brightly, “personally I’d plump for one of the two who’re known to have had enough experience to be good at it. A sweater, after all, is most likely to have been knitted by someone who can knit.”

George sat looking at him for a moment in heavy silence, jabbing holes in the blotting-pad of his desk with a poised and rapier-pointed pencil, until the over-perfected tip inevitably broke off short. He threw it down, and said glumly: “You may as well elaborate that, now you’ve said it.”

Cooke sat on the corner of the desk, swinging a plump leg, and looking at his sergeant with the bland, blond cheerfulness which filled George sometimes with a childish desire to shock him; like a particularly smug round vase which no right-minded infant could resist smashing. He would have been quite a nice lad, if only God had given him a little more imagination.

“Well, it’s obvious enough, isn’t it? There’s Mrs. Hollins, admittedly she was being pushed to extremes, and you can never be sure then what a person can and can’t do. But I’m not professing to be sure, I’m only talking about probabilities. There’s a woman who never hurt anybody or anything in her life, as far as we know, and never showed any desire to; and even if she got desperate enough to try, it would be a bit of a fluke if she made such a good job of it, the first time, wouldn’t it? And then old Chris, how much more likely is it with him? I bet he never killed anything bigger than a weasel or a rabbit in his life. A more peaceful chap never existed. Not to mention that he had less time for the job than some of the others. But when you come to the other two, my word, that’s a different tale!”

“The other two, however,” said George, “had much less solid motives for murder. I’m not saying they had none, but there wasn’t the urgency, or the personal need. And I’m inclined to think, with Wedderburn, that while people will certainly do desperate things for the sake of other people, when it comes to it they’ll do far more desperate ones for their own sakes.”

“Well, but according to that, even, they had as much motive as Hollins had. More, because they had more imagination to be aware of it. If Hollins might kill for his wife’s sake, so might Tugg, if you ask me, he thinks the world of her. And Wedderburn had a grudge on Jim Fleetwood’s account, as well as a general grudge that a German, and a near-Nazi at that, should be able to live here under protection while he stirred up trouble for everybody in the village.”

“Very natural,‘’ said George, ”and common to a great many other people who’d come into contact with Helmut round these parts. You could count me in on that grudge.”

“Well, yes, most of us, I suppose. But in different degrees. And still you’re left with this great difference, that Tugg and Wedderburn have both had, as you might say, wide experience in killing. They knew how to set about it, easy as knocking off a chicken. And even more, they’d got used to it. Most people, even if they could bring ’emselves to the actual act, would shrink from the idea. But those two lived with the idea so long that it wouldn’t bother them.”

George continued to stare at him glumly, and said nothing. The door of the office, ajar in the draught from the window, creaked a little, naggingly, like a not-quite-aching tooth. It was evening, just after tea, and faintly from the scullery came the chink of crockery, and the vague, soft sounds of Bunty singing to herself.

“Well, it’s reasonable, isn’t it?” said Cooke.

“Reasonable, but not, therefore, necessarily true. You could argue on the same lines that people in London got used to the blitz, and so they did, but the reaction against it was cumulative, all the same. It was in the later stages they suffered most, not from the first few raids. Long acquaintance can sicken you, as well as getting you accustomed to a thing.”

“Yes, but in a way this death was like a hangover from the war, almost a part of it. You can easily imagine a soldier feeling no more qualms about rubbing out Helmut than about firing a machine gun on a battlefield. For years it had been their job, a virtue, if you come to think of it, to kill people like Helmut. And it was a job they were both pretty good at, you know—especially Wedderburn, if all the tales are true.”

George thought what he had been trying not to think for some time, that there was something in it. Not as much as Cooke thought, perhaps, but certainly something. In time of war countries fall over themselves to make commandos and guerrillas of their young men, self-reliant killers who can slit a throat and live off a hostile countryside as simply as they once caught the morning bus to their various blameless jobs. But to reconvert these formidable creations afterwards is quite another matter. Nobody ever gave much thought to that, nobody ever does until their recoil hits the very system which made and made use of them. Men who have learned to kill as a solution for otherwise insoluble problems in wartime may the more readily revert to it as a solution for other problems as desperate in other conditions. And logically, thought George, who has the least right of any man living to judge them for it? Surely the system which taught them the art and ethics of murder to save itself has no right at all. The obvious answer would be: “Come on in the dock with us!”

And yet he was there to do his best for a community, as well as a system, a community as surely victims as were the unlucky young men. And the best might have to be the destruction of one victim for the sake of the others. But he knew, he was beginning to feel very clearly, where the really guilty men were to be found, if Jim Tugg or Chad Wedderburn had committed murder.

“So your vote goes to the schoolmaster, does it?” he asked, stabbing the broken point of the pencil into the wood until powdered graphite flaked from its sides. The door went on creaking, more protestingly because the outer door had just opened, but he was too engrossed to remark it.

“Well, look at his record! It’s about as wild a war story as you could find anywhere, littered with killings.” Cooke, who had not suffered the reality, saw words rather than actualities, and threw the resultant phrases airily, like carnival balloons which could not be expected to do any harm. “He must be inured to it by now, however much he was forced into it by circumstances to begin with. After all, to a fellow like Wedderburn, who’s seen half the continent torn into bloody pieces, what’s one murder more or less to make a fuss about?”

Dominic’s entering footsteps, brisk in the corridor outside the open door, had crashed into the latter part of this pronouncement too late to interrupt it short of its full meaning. Too late Cooke muttered: “Look out! The ghost walks!” There he was in the doorway, staring at them with his eyes big and his mouth open, first a little pale, and then deeply flushed. George, heaving himself round in his chair, said resignedly but testily: “Get out, Dom!” but it was an automatic reaction, not too firmly meant, and Dom did not get out. He came in, indeed, and pushed, the door to behind him with a slam, and burst out:

“Don’t listen to him, he’s crazy, he’s got it all wrong! Chad Wedderburn
isn’t
like that!”

“Now, nobody’s jumping to any conclusions,” said George gently, aware of a vehemence which was not to be dismissed. “Don’t panic because you hear a view you don’t like, it’s about the five hundredth we’ve discussed, and we’re not guaranteeing any of ’em!”

“Well, but you were listening to him! And it’s such a lot of damned rubbish—” he said furiously. His hazel eyes were light yellow with rage, and his tongue falling over the words in its fiery haste.

“Dominic!” said George warningly.

“Well, so it is damned rubbish! He knows nothing about old Wedderburn, why should he go around saying such idiotic things about him? If that’s how the police work, just saying a man was a soldier five years ago, so this year killing somebody comes easy to him—I think it’s
awful
! I bet you hang all the wrong people, if you’ve got many Cookes! I bet—”

“Dominic!” George took him by the shoulders and shook him sharply. “Now, let’s have no more of it!”

“You listened to him,” said Dominic fiercely, “you ought to listen to me. At least I do know Mr. Wedderburn, better than either of you do!”

“Calm down, then, and stop your cheek, and you’ll get a better hearing.” He gave him another small, admonishing shake, but his hands were very placid, and his face not deeply disapproving. “And just leave out the damns,” he said firmly, “they don’t make your arguments any more convincing.”

“Well, all right, but he made me mad.”

“So we gathered,” said Cooke, still complacently swinging his leg from the corner of the desk, and grinning at Dominic with impervious good humor. “I never knew you were so fond of your beaks, young Dom.”

“I’m not! He’s not
bad
! I don’t like him all that much, but he’s decent and fair, anyhow. But I don’t see why you should just draw farfetched conclusions about him when you don’t even know him beyond just enough to speak to in the street.”

“And you do? Fair enough! Go on, tell us what you think about him.”

“Well, he
isn’t
like what you said. It went just the opposite way with him. In the war he got pushed into the position where he had to learn to live like you said, because there wasn’t any other way. And he did jolly good at it, I know, but he
hated
it. All the time! He only got so good at it because he had to—to go right through with it to get out, if you know what I mean. But he just
hated
it! I don’t believe anything could make him do anything like that again. Not for any reason you could think of, not to save his life. It’s because he learned so much about it, because he knows it inside-out, that he wouldn’t ever bring himself to touch it, I’m absolutely sure.”

“He may talk that way,” said Cooke easily, “but that doesn’t necessarily prove anything.”

“He doesn’t talk that way. He acts that way. Well, look what happened when he came home! The British Legion wanted him to join, and he wouldn’t. He said he was only a soldier because he was conscripted, and it was time we forgot who’d been in uniform and who hadn’t, and stopped making differences between them, when they’d most of them had about as much choice as he had. And at school some of the fellows tried to get him to talk about all those things he’d done, and he wouldn’t, he only used to tell us there was nothing admirable in being more violent than the other fellow, and nothing grand about armies or uniforms, and the best occupation for anyone who’d had to fight a war was making sure nobody would ever have to fight another. He said fighting
always
represents a failure by
both
sides. He said that to me, the day I started a fight with Rabbit. He was always down on hero-worship, or military things—any fellows who tried to suck up to him because of his record, he was frightfully sarcastic with them at first, and then he got sort of grave and sad instead, because he isn’t usually sarky. But he always squashes those fellows if they try it on.”

“Some of those who value their own achievements most,” said George, with serious courtesy, and looking him steadily in the eye, “also resent being fawned upon publicly.”

“Yes, but I think not when it’s that kind of achievements, really, because the kind of man who loves being a hero, and getting decorated, and all that—well, don’t you think he has to be a bit
stupid
, too?—kind of blunt in the brain, so he doesn’t see through all the bunk? Mostly they
love
being fussed over, so they must be a bit thick. And old Wedderburn isn’t stupid, whatever he may be.”

George looked at his son, and felt his own heart enlarged and aching in him, because they grow up, because their intelligences begin to bud and branch, to be separate, to thrust up sturdily to the light on their own, away from the anxious hand that reaches out to prop them. Even before their voices break, the spiritual note has broken, odd little rumblings of maturity quake like thunder under the known and guarded treble. Little vibrations of pride and sadness answer somewhere in the paternal body, under the heart, in the seat of shocks and terrors and delights. My son is growing up! Bud and branch, he is forward, and resolute, and clear. It will be a splendid tree. This is the time for all good parents to try their mettle, because the most difficult thing in life to learn is that you can only retain people by letting them go. George looked at Dominic, and smiled a little, and elicited an anxious but confiding smile in return.

“That’s quite a point,” he said. “No, he isn’t stupid, and he doesn’t like adulation, I’m sure of that. D’you want to tell us about that row you had over the fight? It might explain more than a lot of argument.”

“I don’t mind. It was funny, really,” said Dominic with a sudden glimmering grin, “because it was about him, only he didn’t know it. He turned out such a mild sort of beak, you see, old Rabbit started throwing his weight about and saying he didn’t believe he’d done any of the things he was supposed to have done, and it was all a pack of lies about his adventures in the war, and all that. Well, I didn’t care whether old Wedderburn wanted to get any credit for all those things or not, but I didn’t see why Rabbit should be allowed to go about saying he was a liar. Because Wedderburn isn’t sham, anyhow, that’s the biggest thing about him. So we argued a bit about it, and then I hit Rabbit, and we didn’t have time to get any farther because old Wedderburn opened the window and called us in. He never jaws very much, just says what he means. He said what I told you, that fighting never settles anything, it’s only a way of admitting failure to cope with things, and the only thing it proves is who has the most brawn and the least brain. He said it was always wrong short of a life-and-death matter, and anyhow, he just wouldn’t stand for it. And then he said we’d say no more about it, if we’d both give him our word not to start the fight again.”