by Ellis Peters
“No!” said Dominic, with quite unexpected violence. “You’re not to! I’ll hit you if you try it!” But before he had dragged her a dozen yards past the well on the homeward path his pallor became suddenly green, his knees quaked, and he leaned helplessly into the long grass and lost all interest in Pussy. She did not wait to hold his forehead, but with a ruthless singleness of mind flew back to bound down the hill like a chamois, and probe the depths where he had seen whatever it was he had seen. Between sympathy and curiosity Pussy plumped for curiosity, though she would not be the first cat it had killed. Dominic, for the moment, was too busy being sick to observe that she had deserted and disobeyed him, and in the circumstances he would not, in any event, have expected anything else. Only in extremity would he have thought of giving orders to Pussy.
By the time he had recovered sufficiently to see and hear again, she was just coming back, at a rather automatic walk, and half her face was a green, scared shining of eyes.
“You would go!” said Dominic with pallid satisfaction.
“Anyhow,” said Pussy, equally malevolent and equally shaken, “I wasn’t sick!”
“I’m sick easily. It’s a ph-physical reaction.”
Pussy sat down in the grass beside him, because her own knees were none too steady. She sat hugging her hands together in her lap, while they looked at each other forlornly, but with the dawning of a steadying excitement deep in their eyes. When you have something to do in an emergency, you are not sick, and you forget to be frightened.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Pussy.
“Yes.” Saying it made it at once more normal; after all, it is normal, there are funerals every week in almost every village, and you hear your parents talking about this one and that one who has died. Not always old, either, and not always naturally. And then, books and films have made the thing a commonplace, even if parents do frown upon that kind of film and that kind of novel. It only takes a bit of getting used to when you suddenly fall over the thing itself in a corner of your own home woods. “Did you see who it was?”
She shook her head, ashamed to admit that she had not waited to look closely, but on recognition of a man’s body in the nearer channel of the brook had turned and run for her life.
“It’s that German fellow—Helmut Schauffler.” His voice quavered hollowly upon the words, for giving the body a name somehow brought the issues of life and death right to his own doorstep.
“He must have fallen in,” said Pussy strenuously, “or fainted, or something.”
“No, he—no, I’m sure he didn’t. What would he be doing down there, leaning over the water, if he felt faint? And besides—” But his voice faded quite away before the details could come tumbling out.
“What have we got to do?” asked Pussy, for once glad to lean on him for guidance; and she drew a little nearer in the grass, to feel the warmth of his shoulder near her, in the sudden chill which was not altogether the fruit of the falling evening. She began to shiver, and to be aware that she was wet and cold.
“We’ve got to get my father here at once. One of us ought to stay here, I think—I’m almost sure—to make sure nothing’s disturbed until he comes.”
“But there’s no one to disturb anything,” protested Pussy, thinking of the long run home alone, or, far worse, the long, chilly wait here in this suddenly unpleasing place.
“No, but there might be before he came. Anyhow, I shall stay here. You go and get Dad—please, Puss, don’t argue this time, do go! You can run, it’s all downhill, nearly, and you’ll get warm if you run. Will you?”
And she did not argue, nor complain, nor tell him frankly that he was no boss of hers, nor do any of the things which might have been expected of her, but with exemplary sweetness suddenly smiled at him, and jumped to her feet.
“He’ll still be lecturing, but you’ll have to interrupt. He won’t care, when he knows why. But don’t let anybody shush you and make you wait, promise!”
She could give him that assurance with goodwill; and indeed, the curative effect of having something definite and essential to do in the matter had brought back the color to her cheeks and the flash to her green eyes. Even the prospect of insinuating herself with shocking news into the middle of the Road Safety Committee’s lecture began to tickle her resilient fancy with suggestions of enviable notoriety. She actually made a spring upon her way, and then looked back and suddenly peeled off her blazer.
“Here, you have this, if you’re staying here in the cold. I shall be warm enough, running. You would come out without a coat of any sort, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, it was quite warm enough then,” said Dominic, startled and recoiling.
“Well, it isn’t now. Don’t be silly, put it on. You look pretty green still.” She thrust it into his arms, and ran, and her white blouse and flying plaits signaled back to him from the rising path until she crossed the crest, and disappeared from view without a glance behind.
Dominic sat where she had left him, hugging the blazer and staring after her. He felt hollow, and queasy and limp, and if he did not actually feel cold, he was nevertheless shivering; and besides, he had given himself inevitably the inactive part which left him nothing to do but think; and thought, at this moment, was no very pleasant employment. He had lived no nearer to this sort of thing than Pussy had, but he knew instinctively rather more of its implications. The first, the worst, shock was that it could happen here; not in someone else’s village, in some other county, but here, less than a hundred yards from where he sat huddled in the grass like a rather draggled bird. Once that had been assimilated, the rest was not so bad. And most potent of all, he had his share of curiosity, too, and curiosity can cure as well as kill.
Something else was in his heart, too, something presumptuous, perhaps, but none the less authentic and strong and full of anxiety. Dominic felt himself to be a piece of his father, accidentally present here ahead of the rest. Every crisis is also an opportunity. And he wanted George to do everything surely and perfectly; he was very fond of George, though he had never bothered to be aware of it. That was the chief reason why he pulled himself up out of the crushed grass, and went back to the hollow of clay behind the well, dragging Pussy’s blazer about his shoulders as he went. And with every step his brand-new, burning zeal to be helpful flamed up a little higher. He needed its warmth badly to take him down the darkening slope, for he felt very empty within, and the air was growing acidly cold, and the silence and loneliness which he had not noticed before hung rather heavily upon his senses now that he had such quiet and yet such unforgettable company.
The light was failing, but it was still sufficient to show him most of what he had seen before. He stepped down to the trodden edges of the water, where the tufts of long grass were powdered with clinging white dust; and climbing out upon the corrugations which the cows had trampled up to bake in the sun, above the small pits of dark, oily, ocherous water, he looked closely and long at the body of Helmut, face downward, composed and straight under the trembling flow of the water.
Pale things at this hour had a lambent light of their own, and the back of the blond head, breaking the surface with a wave of thick fair hair, was the first alien thing he had seen, and fascinated him still. The face he could not see, but the head was just as unmistakable from the back; and the clothes, too, the old Army tunic faded and stripped of its buttons and tabs, the worn gray cord trousers, the soft woolen scarf round his neck, these were familiar enough to identify him. He lay there half-obscured by the cloudy, ocherous quality of the water, which reddened him all over, all but the patch of fair hair. And to Dominic, staring intently with eyes growing bigger and bigger, it seemed, as it had seemed at first, that the arch of skull under the hair was not quite the right shape.
Three
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Pussy sneaked into the chapel schoolroom by the side door, and found the room full of people, and all dauntingly attentive to George, who was in full flood, and doing rather well. I
nterrupting him was not, after all, quite the picnic she had foreseen; the respectful hush of concentration, real or simulated, shut her firmly into the obscure area off-stage for several minutes before she recovered breath and confidence and a due sense of her own importance. The vicar, as chairman, was firmly ensconced between her and her quarry, and hedged about with cardboard models and miniature working traffic lights, George looked as inaccessible as any lighthouseman from the mainland. But he also looked large, decisive and safe, and she wanted this most desirable of reinforcements to reach Dominic with all speed. She edged forward among the cardboard buses, and became for the first time visible to the audience as she plucked the vicar by the sleeve. The audience stirred and buzzed, deflecting its keenest attention with suspicious readiness; the vicar frowned, and leaned down to her to say: “Hush, little girl! You can ask your questions later.” Pussy recoiled into a cold self-confidence which had needed some such spur as that. She said very firmly: “I must speak to Sergeant Felse at once—it’s urgent!”
“You can’t interrupt now,” said the vicar with equal but more indulgent firmness. “Wait ten minutes more, and the sergeant will be closing his little talk.”
This conversation was conducted in stage whispers, more disturbing by far than firecrackers; and its quality, but not its import, had reached George’s ready ear. He looked round at them, and paused in mid-sentence to ask directly if anything was wrong. The vicar opened his lips to assure him confidently that nothing was, but Pussy craned to show herself beyond his stooping shoulder, and said indignantly: “Yes, Sergeant Felse! Please, you’re wanted at once, it’s very serious. Please come!”
And George came. He handed back the meeting to the vicar with the aplomb and assurance of one presenting him with an extra large Easter offering, slithered between the cardboard showpieces, and in a few minutes was down with Pussy in the wings of the tiny stage, and heading for the quiet outside the door, steering her before him with a hand upon her shoulder until they were out of earshot of the audience.
“Now, then! What’s the matter? Where’ve you left Dom?” For it went without saying that Dom was in the affair somewhere. “He isn’t in trouble, is he?” But the excitement he saw in Pussy was not quite of the kind he would have looked for had any accident happened to Dominic.
“No, Dom’s all right. At least—he was sick; and I nearly was, too, only don’t tell him—and besides, he really looked, and I only half-looked—” She threw off these preliminaries, which were supposed to be perfectly clear to Dominic’s father, in one hopping breath, and then took a few seconds to orientate herself among events, and become coherent. “He’s at the brook, just behind Webster’s well. He said when one found something like that one ought to keep an eye on it until the police came, so he stayed, and I came to get you. We found a man in the water there,” she said explicitly at last. “He’s dead.”
“What?” said George, jolted far past the limit of his expectations.
“It’s that German who had the fight with Jim Tugg—Helmut somefhing-or-other. But he’s quite dead,” said Pussy, large-eyed. “He doesn’t move at all, and he’s right under the water.”
“Sure of all that?” demanded George. “Not just something that might be a man who might be that particular man?”
“I didn’t look who it was, but it was a man, all right. And Dom said it was him.”
“Did you come straight down? Any idea what time it was? Did you hang around up there—before or after finding him?”
“I came straight down, as soon as—as we thought what we ought to do. Only a few minutes before we saw him I asked Dom the time, and he said nearly half-past eight.”
“Good girl! Now listen, Puss, you go home, drink something hot, and talk Io and your father silly with all the details, if you want to—get ’em off your mind. Don’t bother about anything else tonight, and I’ll see you again tomorrow. Got it?”
“Oh, but I’m coming back with you!” she said, dismayed.
“Oh, no, you’re not, you’re going straight home. Don’t be afraid you’re missing anything, Dom will be coming home, too, just as soon as I get to him. I’ll see you in the morning. O.K.?”
Pussy was at once displeased and relieved, but he was the boss, and as one accidentally drafted into service she was particularly bound to respect his orders. So she said: “O.K.!” though without any great enthusiasm.
“And go to bed in good time, when you’ve spun your yarn. No wonder you’re shivering, running around without a coat.” He turned her toward the Shock of Hay, and set a rapid course for the bright red telephone box nestling in a corner of its garden wall.
“I had a blazer,” said Pussy, liking the feel of the official hand upon her shoulder, “but I left it with Dom. He hadn’t got a coat at all.”
“He wouldn’t have! Lucky one of you had some sense. He shall bring it over when he comes home. All right, now you cut off home, and forget it.”
She wouldn’t, of course, it wasn’t to be expected; but she went home like a lamb. He thought Io would get the story in full before another half-hour had passed, but with Pussy one could never be quite sure. Io might not be considered sufficiently adult and tough to be entrusted with such grisly secrets.
George called Bunty, and asked her to send Cooke up to Webster’s well after him as soon as he came in, which he was due to do in about a quarter of an hour. Then he called Comerbourne, and passed on the warning to the station sergeant there, so that ambulance, surgeon and photographer could be on tap if required; and these preliminaries arranged, he plucked out his bike from the backyard of the chapel school-room, from which the vicar had not yet released his audience, and rode off madly by the uphill lane out of the village toward the woods.
Dominic was down in the hollow still, prowling up and down the tussocks of grass and ridges of clay carefully with his light weight, as if he might obliterate the prints of telltale shoes at every step; though in fact every inch of ground above the water was baked hard as sandstone, and armies could have tramped over it without doing more than flatten the more thin and brittle ridges. He had searched right from the edge of the field to a hundred yards or so downstream from the body, as closely as he could by the fading light, and had found absolutely nothing except adamant clay, rough strong grass insensitive to any but the heaviest tread, and the old stipplings made by cows coming to water; and all these were now frozen fast into position, and had been unchanged for weeks. He didn’t know quite what he was seeking, but he did know that it wasn’t there to be found, and that was something to have discovered. No one ever picnicked here; there wasn’t even a toffee-paper, or a sandwich bag. There was only the man in the water, lying along the stream’s channel and almost filling it, so that the water made rather louder ripples round him, and a faster flow downstream from him.
Nobody falls into a stream as neatly as that; it fitted him like his clothes. Nobody deliberately lies in a stream in such a cold-blooded, difficult fashion, no matter how fiercely determined he may be upon suicide. Not with the whole of the Comer just over the heath and down the hill! And nobody climbs painfully across twelve yards of crippling lumpy clay in order to faint in one yard of water, either. So there was only one possibility left.
It seemed to him that George took an unconscionable time to get there, and it grew colder and colder, or at any rate Dominic did, perhaps because of the emptiness within rather than the chill without. When he looked at his watch he was staggered to see how short a time he had really been waiting. He knew he mustn’t touch the body, even if he had wanted to; but he went and sat on his heels precariously balanced among the clay ridges, to examine it at least more closely. The light was going, it was no use. And now that he looked up, the light was really going, in dead earnest, and to tell the truth he didn’t like the effect very much.
George appeared rather suddenly on the iris-colored skyline by the well, and Dominic started at the sight of him with a first impulse of fright; for after all, it wasn’t as if Hel
mut had died a natural death. But the same instant he knew it was only his father coming loping down toward him, and the leap of gratitude which his heart made to meet him frightened him almost as much as the momentary terror had done, because it betrayed the state of his nerves so plainly.
To George, springing down the slope with a reassuring hail, his son’s freckled face looked very small and pinched and pale, even by that considerately blind light. He kept his torch trained on the ground, away from the shivering boy who clearly didn’t want to be examined too narrowly just now.
“I thought you were never coming,” said Dominic querulously. “Did Pussy tell you everything?”
“Only the fact,” said George, and balanced forward to pass the light of the torch slowly and closely along the length of Helmut’s body, strangely clothed now in the surface gleam of the water, quivering over him like silver, and stirring the intrusive pallor of his hair like weed in its ripples. “Well, that’s Helmut, all right! No doubt about it.”
“I thought one of us ought to stay here,” said Dominic, at his shoulder as he stooped, and clinging rather close to its comfortable known bulk. “So I told Pussy to come and butt into your meeting, and I’ve kept an eye on things here. That was right, wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely right!” said George, still surveying the busy, untroubled flow of water round the blond, distorted head; but he reached for Dominic with his spare hand, and felt a trembling shoulder relax gratefully under his touch.
“Where is she? Didn’t she come back with you?”
“She wanted to come back, but I sent her home to bed. And that’s where you’re going, my lad, just as soon as you can get there.”
“I’m all right,” said Dominic, promptly stiffening. “I want to stay and help.”