Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (26 page)

He didn’t know what was happening, and was too stunned to attempt to follow the sounds he heard, though he knew that someone had screamed, and was dimly and rather pleasurably aware that it had not been with his voice. Confused impressions of a great many people erupting darkly from both sides of the drive cleared slowly into a sharper awareness. Voices regained their individuality. Pussy had screamed, and he thought he had heard his father’s tones in a sudden sharp shout, and then after the crashing of branches and thudding of feet and gasping and grunting of struggle, a heavy fall. He didn’t care much. He was satisfied to be alive, and held with a sort of relentless gentleness hard against a big, hard body, into whose shoulder he ground his face, sobbing dryly, and past caring who heard him.

“All right, all right, son!” Jim Tugg was saying in his ear. “We was by you all the time. If you’d held still I had me hands on you, all ready to lug you backwards out of harm’s way. Never mind, fine you did it your own way. All over now bar the shouting!”

There wasn’t much shouting. It had gone very quiet. Dominic drew calming breaths that seemed to be dragged right down to his toes. “Did they get him? Is it all right?” he managed between gulps.

“We’ve got him all right. Don’t you worry!”

So presently he took his face out of Jim’s shoulder, and looked. Several torches had appeared in a random ring of light about the torn holly-bushes and the scuffled patch of gravel in the drive. Chad Wedderburn and Constable Weaver were holding Selwyn Blunden by the arms, but though all his muscles heaved a little in bewilderment against the restraint, he was not struggling. His big head had settled like a sleeping owl’s, deep into the hunched shoulders, and his face had sagged into a dead, doughy stillness; but the blue, icy eyes which stared hard at Dominic out of this flabby mask were very much alive. They had not hated him before, because he had been only a slight bump in the roadway, but they hated him now because he was the barrier into which a whole life had crashed and shattered. He stared back, and suddenly, though he couldn’t be ashamed, he couldn’t be proud, either. He blinked at the rest of them, at Io just starting toward him a step or two in impulsive tenderness, with Pussy in her arm; at his father just picking up the fallen walking-stick in his handkerchief, hurriedly and without due reverence because his mind was on something else, and thrusting that, too, into Io’s hands. It wasn’t all over bar the shouting, at all; it had only just begun, and it was he who had begun it. He’d had to, hadn’t he? There wasn’t anything else to be done. But he turned his face into Jim Tugg’s patient sleeve, and said:

“I want my father! I want to go home!”

George was by him already, lifting him out of Jim’s arms as by right, hugging him, feeling him all over for breaks and bruises, and finding nothing gravely wrong. George was an inspired comforter. Jim Tugg heard him, and grinned. Dominic heard him, and came to earth with a fine corrective bump that braced his nerves and stiffened his pride indignantly, and did him more good just then than all the sympathy in the world. Having satisfied himself that his son was not a whit the worse, and still holding him tightly:

“You bat-brained little hellion!” said George feelingly. “Just wait till I get you home!”

When they really did get him home, of course, they wanted to put him to bed and keep him quiet, and not let him do any talking until next day. Pussy and Io went straight into the kitchen with him, while the others shut themselves into the office, and presently telephones rang, and cars came and went. Dominic was preoccupied with more immediate things, little ordinary things the charm of which he had not noticed so clearly for a long time, like the coolness of Bunty’s bare arms when she hugged him, and the rough place on her finger where she always pricked it when she sewed, and the skin on top of very creamy cocoa, and the worn place on his favorite velvet cushion. He had been so abstracted at tea that he had eaten scarcely anything, and now he was hungry. Bunty fed him, and didn’t ask him any questions. She didn’t know the half yet, but it was scarcely even late, and he was home, and safe, and apparently in some obscure fashion both a hero and a criminal. Since he was there within sight and touch of her, and eating his head off, Bunty forbore from either scolding or praising him, and waited without impatience for explanations. And when George and Chad and Jim came in, she got them at last in very fair order.

“He’s away to Comerbourne,” said George, answering all the interrogatory eyes which turned upon him as soon as he entered the room. “And the stick’s gone with him. Plenty of work and fuss yet, but virtually, that’s over.” He rubbed a hand over his forehead, and marveled that he felt nothing of satisfaction, little of surprise, only a flatness and a weariness, such as come almost inevitably at the end of tensions. When the cord slackens, and there ought to be a joyous relief, there seems instead to be only a slightly sick indifference. But later things right themselves. You can get used to anything in time, even to the idea that Selwyn Blunden, J.P., the nearest thing to God around Comerford, is a murderer. He looked down at Dominic, half-immersed in cocoa, and said darkly: “I ought to take the hide off you!”

But the tone was reassuring to Dominic’s ears; he knew enough about parents to know that when they begin to talk about it as something they ought to do, the resolution necessary to the act has already left them. “The stick!” he said, emerging from the mug with a creamy-brown moustache, “I forgot about it! It was the one, wasn’t it?” His face was beginning to melt from the slightly stunned immobility of shock to a rather painful excitement, with a patch of hectic rose on either cheek, and snapping yellow lights in his eyes. Bunty, having made room for everyone and given them all coffee, came and sat on the sofa beside him, and put a restraining hand on his arm. He liked the touch, and turned on her a brief, vague smile, but went back instantly to his question. “It
was
the right one, wasn’t it?”

“Not much doubt about it,” said George, eyeing him thoughtfully. “The shield fits, even to the crumpled edge. The place has been stained over to match the rest, and very well done, too, but the holes are there to be seen, and the outline of the shape, too, in a good light. It’s a ridged horn handle, well polished with use, but it has some very deep furrows. Even if it was washed in the outflow, there ought to be some traces to be found in those furrows.”

“And all this time,” said Io, staring fascinated, “he just hid it by carrying it everywhere with him.”

“Can you think of a better way? And he didn’t know actually that anyone was looking for it. The shield was never mentioned; it came too late for the inquest, and nothing was ever published about it even when it did turn up.”

“No, and in any case people had another new sensation then,” said Dominic, paling at the memory of Charles. “But there are lots of things I still want to know—”

“Lots of things I want to know, too,” agreed George, “but frankly, I think you’ve shot your bolt for tonight. It’s time you and Pussy went to bed and slept it off. The urgent part’s over, and well over. We can talk it out properly tomorrow.”

It was not their double grievous outcry that defeated him, but the resigned intercession of Bunty and Io, neither of whom saw any prospect of sleep for her charge if despatched to bed in this state. The crisis was too recently over. The echo of Pussy’s enraged scream as she darted out of the bushes had scarcely ceased to vibrate in their ears, and Dominic was still shaking gently with excitement and erected nerves in Bunty’s steadying arm. If he went to bed too soon he would probably wake up sweating with shock and leaping about in his bed to evade the fall of the terrible old man’s loaded stick. If he talked himself into exhaustion and left nothing unsaid to breed, he would sleep without any dreams.

“Let him talk now,” said Bunty, smiling at George across the room. “He’ll be better.”

“I’m quite all right,” said Dominic indignantly. “I was only scared at the time, and anyhow, who wouldn’t be? But there’s nothing the matter with me now. Only look, it isn’t even my proper bedtime, quite—well, only just a little past it, anyhow.”

“All right,” said George, giving in, “get it off your chest. I want to hear it quite as much as you want to tell it, but it wouldn’t hurt for waiting a day. Still, go ahead! Tell me how you came to that performance tonight, and then I’ll tell you what brought me to the same place. How soon did you start thinking in Blunden’s direction, and what set you off on that tack?”

“Well, it was the dog,” said Dominic, frowning back into the past. “I only started to get the hang of it today, really. I never thought of Mr. Blunden until this morning. I don’t know why, but you know, he was sort of there like the rest of us, and yet not there. When we said everybody was in it, there were still people who weren’t included in the everybody, and he was one of them. Until I saw the dog this morning, and I started to think, and I thought why shouldn’t he be?”

He leaned back warmly into Bunty’s shoulder; it was still rather nice, when he began remembering, to be sure that she was there. “It was Charles dying when he did! It was almost the very minute he made up his mind to let the land be torn up, that’s what made me think. One minute he’d won the appeal, you see, and he was going out shooting in the evening, all on good terms with himself and everybody; and the very next, almost, he was shot dead with his own gun in his own woods. And the only thing that happened in between was that he changed his mind about the land. He saw me, and told me, but that was just luck—nobody was supposed to know yet, he was just on his way home to tell his father. And then inside an hour he was dead. Well, I didn’t think of it quite like that until today, because old Blunden still sort of wasn’t there in the everybody who could have done it. But I did get to thinking awfully hard about the land, and it did seem, didn’t it, that everything that happened round here was something to do with keeping that land from the coal people.”

“Everything? Previous events as well?” asked Chad, from the background.

“Yes, I think so. Only I know there were lots of other things about Helmut, he was just Helmut, almost anyone would have been glad to kill him. But even he fitted in, in a way, because, you see, it was Mr. Blunden who got him the job with the open-cast unit, and then all those things began to happen there, all the machines going wrong, and the excavator falling over the edge, and everything. And Helmut had lots of money that nobody knew anything about, odd-numbered notes that couldn’t easily be traced. And though he wrote down everything, he hadn’t kept any records to account for this extra money. Don’t you remember, we all wondered what his racket could have been, because he wasn’t known to have got into any of the usual ones? So there was he with lots of money, and the unit with lots of trouble, so much that they were thinking of dropping the claim on the Harrow land, and closing the site. And so when I just began to put everything together, today, all this fitted in, too, with the bit about the land. It looked to me as if Blunden had put Helmut into the job just to make it not worth their while to go on. I did tell you, I told Charles Blunden, Wilf Rogers on the site told me those accidents weren’t accidents at all, but somebody pretty clever monkeying with the machines, only they couldn’t get any real proof. You didn’t listen much, I didn’t much believe it myself, really, just because Wilf’s an awful old liar. He
is
an awful old liar, only sometimes he tells the truth.”

Chad, staring down constrainedly at the notebook in his hand, asked: “You don’t think—Charles was in on that deal, too?”

“No, I’m sure he couldn’t have been. He might have backed up his old man in all the usual sorts of monkey business, you know, the legal ones. But I don’t think his father would ever have let him in on anything like that, because he was—sort of honest. Even if he’d wanted to help, I don’t believe he could have put it over.”

Chad’s face warmed into a singularly sweet smile. He looked up at Dominic, and then beyond his shoulder to where Io sat on a hassock by the fire, with Pussy on the rug at her feet, coiled up and purring, the domestic pussy for once. “Thanks, Dom! No, I don’t believe he could.”

“But according to this business of the stick,” said Jim Tugg abruptly, “you’re going to prove that Blunden killed Schauffler. How does that fit in, if he’d put Schauffler in a position where he wanted him for his own purposes? He was doing the job all right, wasn’t he? Then why kill him?”

“Yes, I know it does seem all wrong, until you think a bit further. You think what sort of a person Helmut was. And then, the pheasants, you see, they gave the show away. You know,” said Dominic earnestly, turning his brilliant eyes on Jim, “how it was with Helmut when he came to your place. First he was always as meek as milk, but as soon as he found his feet, and someone treated him well, he began to take advantage. Everybody who was decent to him he thought could easily be afraid of him, because he thought people were only decent because they were too feeble to be beastly.”

“That’s hellish true!” said Jim. “It was him to the life.”

“Well, of course, it was a bit different with old Blunden, because he knew from the start what Blunden wanted with him, and he wasn’t being decent, particularly, he was just getting value for money. But if he hadn’t got that hold over him, he thought he’d got a better. Just think how a man like Helmut would love it if he thought he’d got a local bigwig like Blunden just where he wanted him! It wasn’t only the birds he could poach, or the money he could get out of him, but the pleasure of being able to swagger about Blunden’s land as he liked, and if the old man tackled him about it, well, he’d only got to sneer in his face, and say, one word out of you, and I’ll give the whole show away. Because Blunden had a lot more to lose than Helmut had, if it came out.”

“That’s all good sense,” agreed George. “But now you come to the real snag. Helmut wasn’t trespassing on Blunden land when he was killed, and he hadn’t got the pheasants on him, he’d been careful to dispose of them.”

“Yes, I know that’s what we thought. But when I began to sort everything out today, and got to thinking all this I’ve told you about, of course that didn’t make sense anymore. Because if Helmut was just getting to the stage of being ready to spit in Blunden’s eye, then of course he wouldn’t bother to hide the birds. He wouldn’t need to, and he wouldn’t want to. He’d want to wave them up and down in front of his boss’s nose, and say, want to make something of it? So then for a minute I thought, it’s just coincidence, they can’t have been Helmut’s pheasants, but we know they were, they’d been in the lining of his tunic. So then I thought, of course, we’ve got it the wrong way round, the one who didn’t want them connected with Helmut wasn’t Helmut himself, it was the murderer. And why should the murderer care about giving Blunden a bit of a motive, unless he
was
Blunden? And I worked it all out that way. I think they met down beyond the well that evening, some time after Hollins had left the Harrow, and before Charles came home—between half-past nine and about half-past ten it would be, wouldn’t it? I think Helmut
had
got the pheasants on him, and either Blunden knew he had, or Helmut boasted about it to him. Whoever started it, I think Helmut bragged how he could do as he liked, because he had the whip hand, and there was nothing the old man could do to stop him. Only, you see, they’d both picked the wrong man, but Helmut was even wronger about Blunden than Blunden had been about him. People couldn’t threaten Blunden and get away with it. There
was
one thing he could do to stop it, and he saw he’d have to, sooner or later, and so he did it on the spot. When Helmut turned away from him he bashed him on the head with that walking-stick, just like he tried to bash me, and put him in the brook, and the stick in the outflow of the well, and the pheasants in the pit—so that no one should think his poaching had anything to do with his death.”

He paused, rather for breath than for words, and looked round the circle of attentive faces. “And, of course, it hadn’t, really. It wasn’t for them he was killed, they were only a sign of the way things were going. You can’t have two bosses in a partnership like that. They’d both mistaken their man, but Blunden was the first to see his mistake, and see he had to go all the way to get out of it. And you have to admit he could make up his mind fast, and act on it, too.”

“Oh, yes,” allowed George somberly, “he could do all that.”

“Well, and then things went on, and nobody connected him with the murder; and everything went his way, even the appeal, so he had everything beautifully arranged as he wanted it. Only Charles had to go and tip it all up again. He started to look at the whole question again as soon as he’d got his own way—though it was really his father’s way. And he went out with his dog and his gun, and thought it all out again by himself in the wood, and decided to hand the land over, after all. And going back toward the house he met his father, and told him so. The old man couldn’t know, could he, that Charles had already told me? I mean, why should he? So he’d naturally think no one knew but himself, and it couldn’t appear as a motive. He had to think very quickly that time, too, because Charles said he was going to tell them his decision first thing in the morning. He wasn’t expecting any trouble with the old man, and when you come to think of it, the old man couldn’t make any, because if he did it might all have to come out, the murder, too, and he couldn’t trust Charles to feel the way he did about it. He could try to persuade him to change his mind again, but supposing he wouldn’t? They were both pigheaded, and supposing he finally absolutely wouldn’t? And after the next morning it would be done, too late to do anything about it at all. So he had to choose at once, and he did, and he took the gun from Charles on some excuse or other, to carry it, or to try a shot with it, or something, and he shot him dead.”