Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (23 page)

“Very few leads of any kind, more’s the pity,” agreed the old man. “For you, or your father, eh?—see, now, what’s your name? Dominic, is it?”

Never particularly pleased with this admission, the owner of the name sighed that indeed it was.

“Still, you’re an intelligent boy. I hear you’ve been trying, anyhow—doing your best. That night you saw the last of my lad—” The hand on Dominic’s shoulder tightened, just perceptibly, but the pressure sent a quaking shock through him; needlessly, for the old man’s voice was level, spiritless and resigned, and Charles relinquished already, because there was no help for it. Only the old or the cold can resist trying to help what cannot be helped. “That was the occasion of some amateur sleuthing, wasn’t it? Eh, Dominic? And got you into some trouble on the rebound, too, didn’t it? No more late nights for a while, eh?”

To be teased with laughter so mournfully soft was dreadful. Dominic felt himself crimsoning to his hair, and vowed to reproach his mother bitterly for talking to outsiders about what should have remained a private matter between them. It wasn’t like her, either; but that had been a night of near-panic among the households of Comerford, and no doubt all the women had compared notes in the greengrocer’s and the butcher’s afterwards. Maybe she hadn’t really told very much, only that he was out late poking his nose into his father’s business—she wouldn’t have to tell them how angry she had been, that would be clearly visible without any words. Still, he would make his protest. It would be foolish to let one’s parents get out of hand.

“It wasn’t a great success,” he said rather glumly.

“No, there’s been no luck for the police from the beginning. No luck for the village, one could say.” They had reached the gate of the rickyard, and here the hand left his shoulder, and the heavy feet pacing beside him halted. “So you didn’t find anything of interest. Pity, after such a gallant try!” The old, indulgent, sad smile dwelt thoughtfully upon Dominic’s face. He felt the fluttering excitement inside him mounting to speech, possessing his lips. And just for a moment of panic he had not the least idea exactly what he was going to say. Frightened of his instincts, trying with a too belated effort to control them into thoughts, and shape what was already shaped, he heard himself saying in a tight, small voice:

“I
have
got something now, though. I didn’t give it to my father, because—well, it may be nothing at all to do with it, and they’ve had so many false starts, and—well, he doesn’t like me butting in. So I thought, if I could find out first whether it really means anything, then he’d be pleased—and if it’s no good, well, I shan’t have caused him any trouble, or—or—”

“Or got into any yourself,” said Blunden, the smile deepening almost affectionately in his blue, bright eyes. “Well, maybe you’re wise. They’ve certainly got more than enough irrelevant nonsense to sort out, without our adding to it. You do that, Dom, my boy! You make sure of your evidence first!”

Dominic closed the gate between them, and hoisted the bag of pears into the hollow of his left arm. “Yes, sir, I think I will. Only I shall need
somebody’s
help. You see, it’s something I can’t understand myself, it’s—” He hesitated, flushed and smiled, resettling his satchel on his shoulders. “I say, sir, I’m awfully sorry! I didn’t mean to start worrying you with my affairs—and I expect it’s all tripe, really. I’d better get on now. Thanks awfully for the pears!”

“That’s all right, my boy! If there’s anything
I
can do—”

“Oh, I didn’t mean—I say, I
am
ashamed, bothering you, when—” He made to say more, then resolutely turned himself to the drive. “Thanks, sir, all the same! Good-bye!”

“Oh, well, it’s your pidgin! Good-bye, Dominic!”

Dominic went ten yards down the drive, gnawing his knuckles in extreme indecision, and then turned, and called after him: “I say, sir!”

The old man was only a few yards from the gate, moving heavily, and at the call he turned at once and came back. The boy was coming back, too, dragging his feet a little, still uncertain. Big hazel eyes, dark with solemnity, stared over the bitten fingers. “I say, sir, do you really think I might— If you honestly don’t mind—”

“Come on, now, better share it!” said Blunden kindly. “What is it that’s on your mind?”

“I haven’t got it here, but I could bring it to you. You see— can you read German, sir?”

They stared at each other over the gate with wide, conspiratorial eyes, half-hypnotizing each other. Then the old man said, not without some degree of natural bewilderment: “As a matter of fact, laddie, I can. But what’s that got to do with it?”

Dominic drew a deep breath, and came back through the gate.

It was not a nice day for a boy with his mind anywhere but on his work. To begin with, he was late, which made a bad start; and a part of himself, the part with the brains, had been left behind somewhere on the way, to haggle out a worse problem than ever cropped up in algebra. It was a pity that the headmaster now took Fourth-Form maths. He wasn’t a bad sort, and he wasn’t even in a bad temper that day, but he was a man who liked a little application even where there was no natural aptitude, and above all he couldn’t forgive lack of application where the natural aptitude did exist. Dominic suffered from the reputation of having a fairly liberal share of brains; it was usually what went on out of the classroom, rather than what happened in it, that got him into hot water. But today he couldn’t do anything right. He was inattentive, absentminded, dreaming in a distant and rather harassed world where
a
and
b, x
and
y
indicated people, not abstract quantities. In the middle of theorems, Dominic floated. Challenged, he gave frantic answers at random, dragging himself back in a panic from some mysterious place to which he had retired to think. The Head was not convinced that what occupied him there was thought. Chewed to fragments, Dominic did not really seem to mind as much as he should have done, but only to wriggle and circle uneasily, like a dog anxious to get back to a bone from which it has been chivvied wantonly by spiteful children. If the tongue-lash left him unstung for two minutes, he was off again, blank-eyed, into the depths of himself.

It went on like that all day, and by last period in the afternoon, which was Latin, he had even begun to look a little ill with the indigestible weight of his thoughts. Virgil could hold him no better than
x
and
y
, though he had normally a taste for the full, rolling hexameters, which were round in the mouth as a sun-warmed apple in the palm, tactile satisfaction somehow molten into the ear’s delight. He made a stumbling mess of passages which would ordinarily have made his eyes lighten into gold; and Chad, after a succession of rather surprised promptings and patient elucidations, gave him a more searching look, and on the strength of it let him out gently a few lines before he had intended to do so. Dominic retired ungratefully, with bewildering promptness and a single-mindedness Chad could not help admiring, and sank his teeth once again into the throat of his own peculiar problem. Which by then he had almost settled, in so far as it could be settled short of the assay.

Chad set some written work, and perceiving, as he expected, that one pen was loitering after only a few tentative words, called Dominic to him. “The rest of you,” he said almost automatically, as the few inevitably inquisitive heads were raised to follow Dominic’s resigned progress, “get on with your work. We’re no better worth prolonged examination than we were five minutes ago.” The “we,” Dominic thought, was rather decent of him.

The Fourth Form, as always, looked mortally offended at being told to mind their own business, and elevated their eyebrows and looked down their noses in their best style to indicate their total lack of interest in anything so insignificant as Dominic Felse and Chad Wedderburn. And if here and there an ear was flapping a little in their direction, it flapped in vain. Chad had a quiet voice, and leaned forward over his desk to reduce the distance between them so that it might be even quieter and still adequate. He looked, now that Dominic examined him closely, distinctly worn and haggard, and his scar stood out more lividly than usual, though his manner was exactly as they had known it ever since his return, unhurried, calm, past surprise but wryly alert to impressions, and sensitive in response to them. If sleep had largely left him, if he knew as well as they did that the whole village was settling his guilt and seething, with speculations as to his future, he gave no outward sign of it, made no concessions. And he could still see sufficiently clearly to observe that one of his boys had something on his mind. The only mistake he had made was in thinking that it might be something which could be got rid of by sharing it.

“Come on, now,” he said quietly, “what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, sir,” said Dominic, but in a discouraged tone which did not expect to convince.

“Don’t tell me that! Your mind hasn’t been on what we’re doing here for one minute this afternoon. I know your work well enough to know that. What’s wrong? Are you feeling off-color?”

“Oh, no, sir, really I’m all right.”

“Then there’s something worrying you sick. Isn’t there? Don’t you dare hand me: ‘Oh, no, sir!’ again,” he said smartly, warding off another disclaimer, “or I’ll take you at your word, and make you pay through the nose for what you just did to the shield of Æneas. How would you like it if I kept you here for an hour after school, and let you make me a decent translation of the whole passage?”

Dominic’s face woke into sudden alarm and reproach, because his inner world was touched. He breathed: “Oh, but, sir,
please
— You don’t really mean it, do you? Please not today! I’ve got such a lot to do this evening, honestly.”

“I’m sure you have,” said Chad, watching every change of the vulnerable face, and at a loss as yet to account for the success of his pinprick. “Suppose you tell me the truth, then, and talk yourself out of it. Or, of course, you could regard it as merely getting a load off your chest, in strict confidence. Wouldn’t you like to unload?”

Dominic would, as a matter of fact, have liked to very much; but if he couldn’t entirely trust George with it, how could he give it to anyone else? No, as soon as it was shared it was rendered ineffective. He had to carry it through alone, or some ham-handed well-intentioned adult would throw sand in the works. He had it ready now, exactly planned out in his own mind, and no one knew anything about it except himself, and no one was to know except Pussy, who had only a minor part and could in any event be trusted to the death. So nobody could ruin it. And that was the best, the only way.

“It’s only something I have to do,” he said carefully, “and I would like to tell you, but I mustn’t—not yet.”

“Something as anxious as you’ve been looking? Couldn’t you use some help, then? It might not look so bad if you compared notes with somebody else over it.”

“Oh, it isn’t
bad
,” said Dominic, opening his eyes wide. “It’s a bit difficult, but really, it’ll be all right. Only it’s important that I should have this evening free; truly it is. I’m sorry I mucked up the construe, I didn’t have my mind on it.”

Chad looked at him silently and thoughtfully for what seemed a long time; and by the pricking of his thumbs he was warned that the child was most certainly up to something. No light employment, no mischief, no slender personal affair to be squared up in half an hour of getting round someone; but a serious undertaking. Nothing less could account for the odd, withdrawn look of the hazel eyes, which regarded him from beyond an impassable barrier of responsibility. A look at once calm and desperate, resolved and appealing. “I’d like awfully to tell you,” said the eyes, “but I can’t, so don’t ask me. I’ve got to do this myself.” And deep within all the other expressions they held was a bright, still excitement which made him very uneasy.

“You’d rather I didn’t pursue the subject. Well, I can’t press you to tell me, if you don’t want to. But at least remember, Dom,” he said, suddenly flicking a petal of color into Dominic’s cheeks with the unexpected use of his name, “that there’s no need for you to look far for help, if you do want it. If it’s something you don’t want to take home—well, even beaks are capable of listening to something more important than Virgil, on occasion. I hope you’d feel you could come to me, if you ever did need a second judgment.”

Dominic, pink to the temples, but remarkably composed, said: “Thanks awfully, sir! Only I can’t—not yet.”

“All right, leave it at that. You can go back to your desk.”

Somehow the probing of that level, illusionless voice, and its unexpected kindness, had shaken Dominic’s peace of mind, making him turn and look more closely at what he was doing; and he was a little frightened at what he saw, but it was fright without the possibility of retreat. He had started the thing already, and it would have to run.

When he was released from school he ran nearly all the way back into the village, and caught Pussy just biking into the yard of the Shock of Hay, wobbling across the dipping threshold with her eyes alert along the road for him. They retired into the loft, which was their usual conference hall when the cooler weather came; and before he was well out of the trapdoor and into the straw beside her, Dominic had her by the arm in a hard, sudden grip which made her stare at him in astonishment. Pussy saw the excitement, too, and glimpsed, but did not recognize, the desperation. She asked promptly: “What on earth’s the matter? What’s going on?”

“Listen! I’ve got to go, awfully quickly, so listen seriously, and don’t make any mistakes. There’s something you’ve got to do for me, do you understand?
Got
to! If you muff it, goodness knows what will happen.”

“I’m no more likely to muff things than you are,” she said, the hackles of her pride rising instantly. “Have I ever let you down? Have I?”

“No, you never have. You’ve always been fine. And listen, this is the most vital thing you ever did for me, and there’s nobody in it but just us two. So you can see how I’m trusting you.”

“Well, and you know you can. Is it something about the case, Dom? Have you found out something?”

“I don’t know—I think so, but I don’t know. It may turn out wrong, that’s what we have to test. I’m taking a chance on something, and you’ve got to work this end of it, and you’ve got to work it right, or I shall be in a spot. And not only me, because everything may come unstuck, and then we’ll be back where we started, or even worse off. So make absolutely sure for me, Pussy,
please
!”

“You don’t have to go on about it,” she said with spirit “Just tell me what I’ve got to do, I won’t make a mess of it.”

Bright and feverish, his eyes gleamed yellowly in the shadows, burning on her with a frightening light. His hand kept its slightly convulsive hold of her arm. She had never seen him like this before, not even when they found Helmut in the brook.

“You know where the top lane from the station comes up to the gate into the Harrow grounds? The one among the plantations? You’ve got to get hold of my father, tonight, and make him go there with you. Cooke or Weaver, too, if you can get them, but there must be my father, and some other witness, too. You’ve got to get them into hiding in the wood there, near the gate, where they can hear and follow if anyone comes along the path, and you must have them there before nine o’clock. That’s vital. I shall come along there just after nine. I want my father to hear and see everything that goes on, and keep pretty close to me. Is that quite clear?”

“Clear enough! But is that all? What happens then?”

“Nobody knows that yet, idiot!” Dominic’s nerves were a little ragged, and his manners frayed with them; but for once Pussy did not combat the issue. “That’s what we’ve got to find out. That’s what my father’s got to be absolutely sure to see. You’ve got to keep him quiet until something does happen, and you’ve absolutely got to keep him within earshot of us, or I’m wasting my time.”

“But how am I going to do it? What am I to say to him, to make him take me seriously? He may be busy. He may not listen to me.”

“Tell him I’m on to something important. Tell him I’m in a jam— I probably shall be by then,” said Dominic. “If he doesn’t believe I’ve got anything for him, maybe he’ll believe I’ve got myself into a mess, anyhow, trying. But it’s your job. I don’t care what you tell him, provided you get him there. Now I’ve got to go,” he said, wriggling through the straw with a dry rustling, “but Pussy, please, for Pete’s sake don’t let me down. I’m relying on you.” He slid his long legs through the trap, and his foot ground on the rungs of the ladder.

Pussy clawed at his sleeve. “No, wait, Dom! It’s something dangerous you’re doing—isn’t it?”

“I don’t know—I keep telling you, I just don’t know what will happen. It may be!”

“Why not tell him about it, instead of just dragging him about by guesswork in the dark? Wouldn’t it be better? Tell him, and let him help properly, instead of being blindfolded. Think how much better and safer it would be!”

“Oh, don’t be a fool!” said Dominic ill-temperedly. “If I told him, there wouldn’t
be
any experiment. He’d never let me try it. All I’d get would be a flea in my ear, and we’d be no farther forward. And this is something I’ve started already—if he made me give it up we’d be wasting everything we’ve done. That’s why I’ve got to go off tonight and give the thing a push without Dad knowing anything about it. And that’s why you’ve got to look after his end of it, after I’m gone. Do talk sense! This is something the police couldn’t do, it wouldn’t be right for them. But
I
can! And then they’ve
got
to help me finish it, because it’s the only way of getting me out of the mess.” He ended a little breathlessly, and the sick shining of his eyes scared her.

“But can’t you tell
me
? I could be more use if I knew what you were doing. If anything goes wrong, I shan’t know what to do, because I don’t know what you want. I shan’t even know, perhaps, if something does go wrong. And suppose your father wants you at home tonight? How can you make a good enough reason for not doing what he wants? It’s all so sloppy!” said Pussy helplessly. “A lot of dangling strings!”

“No, it isn’t. I’m going to gobble my tea and be out before my father comes home. I’m not staying to ask any questions, or to answer any. Before nine o’clock I’ve got things to do. And if I’m right,” he said, shivering a little in excitement, so that the ladder creaked as he stepped lower, “you’ll all know what to do. And if I’m wrong, it won’t matter, I’ll have made such a mess of everything, nothing can make it any worse.”

Watching him sink slowly through the floor, like a demon in a pantomime, resolutely drawing away from her and leaving her with all the weight of his project in her hands and none of the fun, she began to protest further, and then stopped, because there was nothing more to say. She would do as he asked, no matter how it enraged her to be treated in this fashion, because heaven knew what mess he would get himself into if she did not. And there would be time afterwards to take it out of him for hogging his secret.