Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (9 page)

He couldn’t tell what George was thinking, and his eyes ached with trying to see clearly in a light meant only for seeing earth and sky, comparative shapes of light and darkness. He gave a shivering little yawn, and George tightened his embracing arm in a rallying shake, and laughed gently, but not because there was anything funny to be found in the situation.

“All right, you’ve used your wits enough for one night. Time you went home. I can hear Cooke coming down the path, I think. Want him to come back with you?”

“No, honestly, I’m all right, I can go by myself. Does Mummy know why I’m so late? And I didn’t finish my homework—do you think they might excuse it this once? It wasn’t my fault I went and found a dead body—”

“She knows it’s all on the level. And if you like, you can tell her all about it. Forget about the homework, we’ll see about that. Just go straight to bed. Here, hold the torch a moment, and I’ll give you a note for Bunty.” He scribbled rapidly the message which would launch upon him all the paraphernalia of a murder investigation. Why not call the thing by what was, after all, its proper name? Even if it seemed to fit rather badly here! A lamp flashed from the crest of the ridge, and the incurably cheerful voice of Police-Constable Cooke hallooed down the slope. “Hullo, come on down!” cried George, folding his note; and putting it into Dominic’s hand, he turned him about, and started him up the slope with a gentle push and a slap behind. “All right, now git! Make haste home, and get something warm inside you. And don’t forget to return Pussy’s blazer as you go through the village. Sure you don’t want company? I wouldn’t blame you!”

“No, thanks awfully! I’m O.K.!”

He departed sturdily, swapping greetings with Cooke as they met in the middle of the slope, quite in his everyday manner. George watched him over the brow and out of sight, frowning against the chance which had brought him this particular way on this particular evening. If Comerford had to have a murder case, he would much have preferred that Dominic should be well out of it; but there he was, promptly and firmly in it, with his quick eyes, and his acute wits, and his young human curiosity already deeply engaged; and who was to get him out again, and by what means? George feared it was going to prove a job far beyond his capacity.

Cooke came bounding down the last level to the mud-side, and strode out across the dried flats, to gaze at Helmut Schauffler and whistle long and softly over him. Whereupon he said with no diminution of his customary gaiety: “Well, they say the only good one’s a dead one! Looks like we’ve got one good one, anyhow!” And when he had further examined the motionless figure under its quivering cloudy veil of ocher water: “I wouldn’t say the thing had a natural look, would you?”

“I would not,” said George heavily.

“And I doubt very much if he was the kind to see himself off—whereas he was precisely the kind to persuade somebody else to do the job for him.”

George agreed grimly: “It certainly looks as if Helmut got himself misunderstood once too often.”

“Once too often for him. What d’you suppose happened? Coshed, or drowned, or what?”

“Both, but it’ll need a post-mortem to find out which really killed him.”

“This means the whole works, I suppose!” said Cooke, with a slow, delighted smile. He saw parking offenses and minor accidents and stray dogs suddenly exchanged for a murder case, the first in his experience—for that matter, the first in George’s, either—and the prospect did not displease him. “Makes a nice change!” he said brightly. “Sounds the wrong thing to say, but if he had to turn up in a brook, it might as well be ours. Not that I expect anything very sensational, of course! He certainly went around asking for it.”

George stood looking moodily at Helmut, a trouble-center dead as alive. He saw what Cooke meant. In the books murders are elaborate affairs carefully planned beforehand, and approached by a prepared path, but in real life they are more often sudden, human, impulsive affairs of a simple squabble and a too hearty blow, or a word too many and a spasm of jealousy to which a knife or a stone lends itself too aptly; tragedies which might never have happened at all if the wind had set even half a point to east or west. And the curious result seemed to be that while they were less expert and less interesting than the fictional crimes, they were also more often successful. Since no path led up to them, there were not likely to be any footprints on it.

Consider, for instance, this present setup. Ground baked clear of any identity, no blood, no weapon, no convenient lines to lead back to whoever had met Helmut, perhaps exchanged words with him, and found him, it might be, no nastier than Fleetwood, and Jim Tugg, and Chad Wedderbura, and a dozen more had found him on previous occasions— only by spite or design hit him rather harder. There, but for the grace of God, went half of Comerford! And short of an actual witness, which was very improbable indeed, George couldn’t see why anyone should ever find out who had finished the job.

But unnatural death sets in motion the machine, and it has to run. Even if everyone concerned, except perhaps the dead man, wherever he is, would really rather it refused to start at all.

“I tell you what!” said Cooke. “This is one time when the coroner’s jury ought to bring in the Ingoldsby verdict on the nagging wife—remember? ‘We find: Sarve ’un right!’ But I suppose that would be opening the door to pretty well anything!”

“I suppose so. Among other things, to a final verdict of: Sarve ’un right! on us. Tell me,” said George, “half a dozen people who would have been quite pleased to knock Helmut on the head!”

Cooke told him seven, blithely, without pausing for breath.

“And all my six would have been different,” sighed George. “Yet, believe me, we’re expected to show concern, disapproval, and even some degree of surprise.” All the same he knew as soon as he had said it that the concern and disapproval were certainly present in his mind, even if the surprise was not. For murder is not merely an affair of one man killed and one man guilty; it affects the whole community of innocent people, sending shattering currents along the suddenly exposed nerves of a village; and the only cure for this nervous disorder is knowledge. Censure, when you come to think of it, habits in quite another part of the forest.

The word murder once uttered in Comerford, everyone began to look at his neighbor, and to wonder; not with condemnation, not with fear, only with concern and disquiet. For the crack in Helmut’s head was also a crack in society, through which impulses from the outer darkness might come crowding in; and of disintegration all human creatures are mortally afraid.

When George saw Helmut in the mortuary for the last time, still and indifferent, stonily unaware of the flood he had loosed, he felt even less sympathy for him than on the occasion of their first meeting. Then at least he had been a young, live creature in whom there might yet be discovered, if one dug long enough and deep enough, some grains of usefulness and decency; now he had not even a potential value, he was past the possibility of change. Nasty, devious and unwholesome, he had run true to type right to the end, and dead as alive had turned in the hands of chance, and put his enemy in the wrong; and in his death, as in his life, George suspected that his enemy had been something at least finer and more honest than the victim.

George, in fact, would have been disposed almost to regret that justice must be done, but for the fact that he had realized to whom justice was due in this case; and it was not out of any zeal for Helmut’s cause that he fixed his eyes obstinately on the end and went shouldering toward it by the best ways he could find. It was not even simply because it was his job, though his conscience could have driven him along the same ways with only slightly less impetus. It was the thought of every man turning suddenly to look at his neighbor and wonder; for the sake of everyone who hadn’t bashed in Helmut’s head, for the sake ultimately even of the one who had, George wanted to travel fast and arrive without mishap.

Others were traveling by the same road, and it was by no means certain that they would always be in step. Inspector Logan, for instance, whom Cooke deplored and Weaver resented, and of whose heavy but occasional presence George was glad. He was a decent old stick in an orthodox sort of way, and capable of giving a subordinate his head and a free run over minor matters, but a murder was something with which he couldn’t quite trust even George. And at the other end of the scale of significance there was Dominic. He was very quiet, very quiet indeed, but he was still there, saying nothing, trying to make himself as small as possible, but keeping his eyes and ears wide open. He had been warned, he had been reasoned with, he had been urged to forget about the whole affair and attend to his own business; and when that failed to remove him from the scene of operations, he had been threatened, and even, on one occasion, bundled out of the office by the scruff of the neck, though without any ill-will. The trouble about telling Dominic to get out and stay out was that he couldn’t do it even if he wanted to; he was in the affair by accident, but climbing out of a bog was easy by comparison with extracting his tenacious mind from this mud of Helmut’s making. And George didn’t like it, he didn’t like it at all. That was one more reason for making haste.

The evidence of the body was slim enough. The doctors testified that his fractured skull had been caused by three determined blows with some blunt instrument, but probably something thin and heavy, like a reversed walking-stick or the head of a well-weighted crop, or even an iron bar, rather than a stone or a thick club. What mattered more exactly and immediately was that the injuries could not have been self-inflicted, and could scarcely have been incurred by accident. They were precise, neat and of murderous intention; and the coroner’s jury had no choice but to bring in a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown. In a sense Helmut had been twice murdered, for though the doctors expressed certainty that he had died from his head injuries, he had done so only just in time to avoid death from drowning. He had breathed after he was put into the water, for a negligible amount of it was in his lungs. And though everyone agreed that he had asked a dozen times over for all he finally got, there was still something terrifying about the ferocity with which he had been answered.

On Thursday evening the children had found him; according to the doctors, he had died on Wednesday evening, at some time between nine and eleven. As for the exact spot where he had been attacked, no one could even be sure of that; George and the inspector and all of them had been over the ground practically inch by inch, and found nothing. What could be expected, after such a dry season, and on such adamant soil? There was no sign of a struggle, and it seemed probable to George that there had been none. The blows which had smashed Helmut’s skull had been delivered from behind, and there had been no great or instant flow of blood, according to the medical evidence. Somebody’s clothes, somewhere in Comerford, might bear marks, but probably even those would be slight. And no time had been wasted in carrying or dragging the body at least across the trodden level of clay, and possibly down the slope. By his size and weight, Helmut had not been moved very far to reach the water, and even over a short distance considerable strength must have been needed to carry him. Could one rule out the possibility of a woman? George was very wary of drawing conclusions from insufficient premises. There is very little, when it comes to the point of desperation, that a woman cannot do. A body can be rolled down a steep slope if it cannot be carried. Grass will bend under its passing and return, dust will be disturbed and resettle; and when the body has been in the brook under a strong flow of water for twenty-four hours it will tell you nothing about these things.

So that was all they got out of Helmut or the field or the basin of clay. No weapon, no blood, nothing. His pockets had kept their contents relatively unimpaired, but even these had little to say. His papers, surprisingly well and carefully kept in a leather wallet rubbed dark at the edges with much carrying, but nothing there except the essentials, no letters, no photographs; a disintegrating ten of cigarettes and a paper of matches; a small key, a handkerchief, a fountain pen, the same clasp-knife which had marked Jim Fleetwood; another wallet, with a pulpy mass of notes in it; and a miscellaneous handful of small change. Rather a lot of money for an ex-P.O.W. to be carrying around with him; twelve pound notes, old and dirty notes of widely divided numbers, which pulled apart in rotten folds when separated. And finally, a strong electric torch, heavy enough to drag one coat pocket out of line. There was one more interesting thing; the lining of his tunic on the left side was slit across at the breast, making an extra large pocket within it, but the interior yielded nothing but the usual accumulation of dust, sodden now into mud, and some less usual fluff of feathers, over which the experts made faces because there was not enough of it to be very much use to them.

His lodgings, a single furnished room in the same house with a husky from the coal-site, confirmed the interesting supposition that Helmut’s life had been run on a pattern of Prussian neatness. He had not many possessions, but every one of them had a place, and was severely in it. His actions and thoughts appeared to have been the only things absolved from this discipline. Perhaps he had learned it in the Army, perhaps even earlier—in the Hitler Youth, which he had at one time decorated with his presence and enlivened with his enthusiasm, to judge by the few photographs he had left behind in one drawer of his table. The key they had found in his breast pocket opened this particular drawer, and all his more personal papers were in it, including a diary which disappointed by recording only the dispatch and receipt of letters, and an account of such daily trivia as his laundry, his wages and expenditure, reminders of things he must buy, and small jobs of mending he must do. Of what went on inside his head nothing was set down, of his prim housewifely domestic existence no detail was omitted.

The most interesting thing was that in the table drawer they found another bundle of notes, rolled in an elastic band. Counted, these produced no less than thirty-seven pounds, in notes old and much-traveled, a jumble of any old numbers, like those which had been found on his body. The daily record of income and expenditure in the diary made no attempt to account for any such sum; here were only the few pounds he earned weekly, and the slender housekeeping he conducted with them. Nor, to judge by his records, could he possibly have saved up so much gradually from his pay.

“It looks,” said George, fingering through the creased green edges of the notes, “as if Helmut had got himself a nice little racket on the side. Ever hear of him in any of the regular lines?”

“No,” said Cooke thoughtfully, “but now that I come to think of it, the lads on the site seemed to think he was uncommonly flush with money. None of ’em had anything much to do with him off the job, except maybe the bloke who lodges here with him, and he professes to know nothing.”

“So does the landlady. He was just a fellow who paid for his room, as far as she was concerned.” The house was one of a row built on the outskirts of the first colliery district just outside the village, a bit of industrial England suddenly sprawled into the fields; and the landlady lived on her pension and what she could get for her two small, cluttered rooms, which was every reason why she should accept a good payer thankfully, and ask no further questions about him. “She’s obviously honest. And besides, he’d been here only just over a month; even if she’d been a busybody she hadn’t had time to find out very much about him. And anyhow, how much identity have any of these exiles got? Scarcely anything they have about them goes back to any time before captivity, or any place outside this country. We know no more about them than if they’d fallen from Mars. No more about their origins, their minds—or their deaths, either, as far as I can see yet.”

“He had plenty of enemies,” said Cooke, summing up with extreme but acute simplicity, “and more money than according to all the known facts he should have had. About some people who get themselves murdered we don’t even know as much as that—native English, too.”

But this point, from which they started, seemed always to be the same point where they also finished.

All of this came out at the inquest, and after that airing of their very little knowledge the atmosphere was not quite so oppressive; but the intervening days were bad, because everybody had the word murder in his mind, but was studiously keeping it off his tongue until authority had spoken it. It is not, after all, a word to be bandied about lightly. Conversation until then was a matter of eyes saying one thing and lips another. Suspicion seemed the wrong term for that emotion with which they eyed one another; it was rather an insatiable curiosity, sympathy and regret. The state of mind which had led to the act, the states of mind to which the act had led, these were the wrong and terrible things; the act itself was nothing. By whatever agency, however, the crack in the known world was there, was growing, was letting in the slow, patient, feeling fingers of chaos.

Take just one household, involved in only the safest and most candid way. Dominic hovered on the edge of his parents’ troubled conferences, all eyes and ears, and inadvertently let slip the extent of his knowledge one evening. Pussy was there, or perhaps he would not have been so anxious to cut a figure, and would have had more sense than to interrupt.

“Dad, do you think he could have been making his extra money on the black market? You know some chickens were missed a few weeks ago at the poultry farm down at Redlands.”

“Extra money?” said George, frowning on him abruptly out of the deeps of a preoccupation which had blotted out his existence for the last half-hour. “What do you know about his money?”

“Well, but I heard you say to Mummy that—”

“How many times have I got to tell you to mind your own business? Have you been creeping about the house listening to other people’s conversations?” George was tired, and irritated at the reminder of his worst personal anxiety, or he would not have sounded so exasperated.

“I didn’t listen!” flared Dominic, for whom the verb in this sense involved hiding behind doors or applying his ear to keyholes. Dominic didn’t do these things; he just came quietly in and sat, and said nothing, and missed nothing. “I only heard you say it, I wasn’t spying on you.”

“Well, once for all, forget about the whole business. Keep your nose out of it, and keep from under my feet. This is absolutely nothing to do with you.”

So Dominic cheeked George, and George boxed Dominic’s ears, a thing which hadn’t happened for over three years now. Dominic wouldn’t have minded so much if it had not been done in front of Pussy, but as it had, his feelings were badly hurt, and he sulked all the evening, very pointedly in George’s direction, and was sweet and gentle and obedient with Bunty to mark the difference. Pussy, not caring one way or the other about the actual clout, was enchanted to discover that it gave her such an unexpected hold on him, and preened herself in his tantrums, experimentally teasing him back into resentment whenever his naturally resilient heart threatened to bound back into good-humor. By the end of the evening George’s hands were itching to repeat the treatment upon Dominic, and Bunty’s to duplicate it upon Pussy. It was wonderful what Helmut could do in the way of putting cats among pigeons, even when he was dead.

These stresses seemed slight, and were slight; they seemed to pass, and they did pass; but they also recurred. And what might be the atmosphere up at the Hollinses’ farm, for instance, if it was like this even here, in this scarcely affected family?

Bunty did a little scolding and persuading in two directions, and received a double stream of indignant confidences, all of which she kept faithfully, without even wanting to reconcile them. She said what she thought, and listened to what you thought, and that was the beautiful thing about her.

“I only wanted to help him,” said Dominic. “You’d have thought I was trying to muck things up for him, instead of that. And I
haven’t
listened when I wasn’t meant to—if he didn’t want me to be here when he was talking about it he could have told me to go right away, couldn’t he? He could
see
I was here! I can’t
not
hear, can I, when I’m in the same room? And I can’t help
thinking
about it. Surely it isn’t forbidden to
think
!”