by Ellis Peters
“Trying to shut up trouble doesn’t work so well,” he said grimly. “But I thought it was my job to think of something, and not to put the weight of it any harder on you. Not that it came to anything—not even murder. I might as well say, why didn’t you tell me, and not leave me to find out for myself what was going on. But I don’t ask you any such thing.”
“Well, having gone so far,” said George, “you may as well tell me all you know. Look, I don’t pretend to be the children’s friend to any very wonderful extent, but wouldn’t it have been better to trust me a little further in the first place?”
“Maybe it would, but try being in our shoes, and see what you’d do. Not that we’d anything guilty to hide,” he said with quite unwonted violence, as if he were trying to convince himself, “but just the run of events can put you in a bad spot without any help on your part, and it comes natural to play down the awkward bits that don’t mean anything, but have a nasty way of looking as if they do.”
George, with his eyes on Gerd, agreed reasonably that this made perfect sense. “But now let’s have all the facts you’ve got to give, even if they look nothing to you. They help to fill in an evening, and reduce the time about which we know very little. For instance, we know now that Helmut came here, accosted Mrs. Hollins in the orchard at about eight o’clock, made himself as objectionable as usual, and left at about a quarter-past the hour. From then until eleven o’clock, when apparently he must have been dead, we know nothing about him. It seems you knew the persecution was still going on. How long had you known it? Before that night?”
Hollins turned his head from side to side, thrusting at them both as if they might make simultaneous but not concerted attack. After a thick pause he said, quite quietly: “No.”
“You found it out that night?”
“Yes. She was a long time. I had a devil nagging me that there was still something wrong. I went down the garden and looked through the trees there, and saw them. He had her by the arm—”
Gerd cried out suddenly, in a voice too high-pitched for her: “He’s lying! I do not believe it. He’s making up a tale for you, to draw you off from me. Don’t listen to him! He knew nothing, he saw nothing, I am absolutely sure he was not there—”
“I did more than see. It was all I could do not to come out at him and wring his neck on the spot, but if you could keep me out of things for my own good, so could I you. I went back to the house,” he said, breathing hard, “and got my old revolver, and loaded it, and then I went round to the edge of the spinney, where I knew he’d go sneaking away after he left you. Oh, no, Sergeant Felse, my wife wasn’t the only one to know all about his movements that evening. I knew them better than she did. I saw him alive long after she did. When he went off up the mounts and into the wood, I went after him.”
Knotting her hands at her waist into a tight contortion of thin, hard fingers in which the knuckles showed white, she said: “You are a fool! You take the wrong way, the foolish way, to protect me.”
George, looking from one to the other, prompted delicately: “You said, Mrs. Hollins, that he went out halfway through the evening.”
“I was gone before she got back to the house.”
“It’s true, he was gone,” she said, trembling now, “but I knew he was going to Blunden’s, I took it for granted that he should simply leave when he was ready. And he did go to Blunden’s—the old man will tell you so.”
“He has told me so already. But it doesn’t take three-quarters of an hour and more to go from here to the Harrow.”
“On a fine evening, why should he hurry? There was nothing else to claim him. But this other story he has made up, to help me, to make you think that Helmut lived long after he left me, and there can be no suspicion on me—”
“Look!” said George, suddenly going to her and taking her firmly by the elbow. “Take it easy, both of you! You sit down, and don’t rush things before you come to them.” She looked surprised, even, he suspected, a little amused, as he put her into a chair, but she sat there obediently looking up at him, and her face was eased. “Look, I know I started this, and in a not particularly fair way, either. But I’m not trying to get more out of you or anybody than just the plain, stupid truth. Just because you’re anxious to show me that he didn’t kill Helmut, there’s no need in the world to fall over backwards and tell me that you did. It’s long odds Helmut was seen alive long after he left here, maybe by several people, if only we knew how to find ’em. If your husband can fill in a bit of the missing time, so much the better for both of you in the long run. Only give up the idea that pushing the bits you don’t much like under the rug is going to make things better for anybody. It’s only going to make me mad, and that does nobody any good.”
She began to smile, and then he felt better, even though the smile was faintly indulgent, as to a crazy juvenile. “All right, if it’s understood that you don’t either of you have to talk in a hurry, we can hear the rest.” He looked up at Hollins, but the heavy remoteness of that face had not changed at all. “You followed him. Go on!”
Hollins shook back his shoulders, and went on: “I kept behind him all up the woods, out of sight and hearing of him, but close. The revolver was in my pocket. I don’t know whether I meant to kill him or not. I know I meant at least to half-kill him, maybe I meant more.”
“But it was after nine when he was killed,” cried Gerd, “and at nine—”
“At nine, or a couple of minutes later, your husband was at the Harrow,” said George. “Also, Helmut was not shot. And it does seem a little unlikely that a man with a loaded revolver in his pocket should go to the trouble to use a less certain method for the same job.”
“I didn’t use it for any job, in the end. It’s still fully loaded, it hasn’t even been used to bash somebody over the head. I suppose those fellows of yours who examine these things can tell that by looking at it?”
“They can try, at any rate,” said George. “Go on, where did you leave Schauffler, and at what time?”
“I kept behind him until he came on to the ridge above the river, and sat down there for a while. He was very pleased with himself, humming and singing to himself in German, and grinning as if he’d pulled off something very clever. He sat there quite a time. I had time to think, and I thought better of it.”
George asked, with genuine and personal curiosity: “Why?”
“Well, he wasn’t such big stuff. I meant getting him, and I watched and waited for him to move on; but he got to looking smaller and smaller as it got dark. And I cooled off this much, that I began to think how much trouble I should be laying up for her, as well as myself, with how little use or satisfaction. I knew about him now, and I could put a stop to him as far as my wife was concerned, without starting something worse for her, like murder in the family. She’d gone to a lot of pains to avoid what it looked like I was bent to bring on her. So I went off and left him there. I went to the Harrow—we weren’t two hundred yards from the wicket in the fence—and left him to go to hell for all I cared.”
“Virtually,” said George, “he did. What time did you quit?”
“I’d say about ten to nine. I went straight to Blunden’s, and it wouldn’t take above ten minutes to do it from there.”
“And you didn’t see anything of him on the return journey?”
“Not a sign. I told you the way I came home, and that was all truth, if the rest wasn’t. I took my time over it, to get it all off my mind before I came back where anybody could see me. I needed to walk him out of my system, or she’d have known with one look at me. From my point of view, after I turned my back on him up there we were both done with Helmut Schauffler.”
Unfortunately no one was yet done with Helmut Schauffler. That was the devil of it. Not George, not all the spasmodically talkative, suddenly quiet neighbors leaning over Comerford garden fences, not the cheated heroes looking for a world fit for humankind, certainly not these two unquiet lovers. It was plain when their eyes met, drawn together unwilling
ly, that wells of doubt were opened, within them, never to be filled by any amount of protestations or promises. Only certainty was of any use; nothing else held any peace for anyone in this haunted village.
She looks at him, thought George with pity and horror, as if she believes he’s lying. And he looks at her as if he knows she’s told only part of the truth. And yet he could not be sure even of this. “My lad,” said George to himself, “you’d better get a move on, for everybody’s sake!”
Four
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I never noticed before,” he said to Bunty, in the late evening, when Dominic was safely in bed and his ears no longer innocently stretched after a solution of problems which were his as surely as anyone’s, “I never realized how opaque people’s looks can be. We read meanings into them every day, but suddenly when it’s a matter of life and death it makes you look again, and start weighing possibilities and separating them from suppositions—and altogether in the end you’re terrified to think anything means anything. For a moment I could have sworn that each of those two was seriously afraid the other had done it. And then I couldn’t be sure if that was really the meaning of the looks they were giving each other, or if it was something shared, or what it was.”
Bunty looked at him with her practical partisan sympathy, and agreed: “That’s a pity. Because if each of them really believed the other had done it, that would mean neither of them had done it, and then at least somebody would be safely out of it.”
“Not quite, because an expression in the eyes isn’t evidence. But at least I could have felt sure of something in my own mind. Now I’m sure of nothing. It’s as open as ever it was— in their direction rather wider open. Because there was an intent to murder, I’m sure of that, and while it’s credible that it should evaporate as suddenly as that—because he’s a sane man with both feet on the ground, and only too deeply aware how much trouble his wife’s been dragged through already— still it’s also a strong possibility that it didn’t evaporate.”
Bunty, aware of his hand’s vague undirected searching for something in his pockets, got up and brought him the tired man’s solace, his tobacco pouch and pipe, and the necessary matches. She put them into his lap, and watched his fingers operate them mechanically. Even over the first deep draws he made a face of disappointment. It was his own growing, and he always forgot to be prepared for the shock; but he was too stubborn to admit that it was unsmokeable. Maybe he hadn’t got the knack of curing it properly; anyhow, it was pretty awful. Bunty had never before noticed his distaste quite so clearly, and she made a mental note to buy a tin of his old brand the very next morning, and leave it somewhere for him to find, quite by accident.
“And another eye-opener,” said George fretfully, “is the ease with which well-known citizens can walk about this darned place for hours at a time, and meet nobody. You wouldn’t think it possible.”
“In the dark, in a scattered country district where everybody drops off home by his own particular beeline across the mounts, well, it isn’t really so astonishing as it seems,” said Bunty reasonably.
“Not when you come to weigh up everything, perhaps. But it’s confoundedly inconvenient. Here we’ve got Wedderburn going off in the sulks to walk off a slight load before he goes home to his mother. And Jim Tugg wandering home by devious ways, alone but for his dog—but I grant you, there’s nothing new about that, Jim likes his dog’s company far better than most men’s. And Hollins stalking Helmut, by his own confession, with intent to knock hell out of him at the very least, and then taking his disordered fancy for a walk until the agitation set up by the thought of murder had passed—”
“And Mrs. Hollins,” said Bunty very soberly, “at home by herself all this time, shut up with the thought of Helmut. Nobody to take her mind off it, nobody to see what she did, nobody even to tell us whether she was really there or not.”
George looked through the detestable smoke of his unthrifty crop at her, and found her looking very solemn and rather pale under the ruffled red hair. Awfully like the shivering but acute waif, so pale, so important, so large and scared of eye, who had met him on the clay-flats by the shrunken brook, standing over the blond head of Helmut.
“You don’t really think, do you, that she might have done it?”
“I think I might,” said Bunty, “in her place. Especially if I had reason to think that you might be thinking of doing it for me. She had a background of desperation. I don’t mean it came naturally to her, but her scope had been rather forcibly widened, you see. And she had, if we come to it in earnest, the finest motive you could wish to see.”
“But the fact that her mind was used to dealing with these awful things would also mean that it was trained and equipped to resist them. I mean, she could not only seriously consider murder, after all she’d experienced—she could effectively reject it, too. I’m not satisfied that it’s the strongest motive we have to look for. People of insignificant balance kill for insignificant things—sometimes almost lightly. And we haven’t quoted the tenth part of Helmut’s enemies. There are dozens of them, more trivial ones but real ones, round this village unaccounted for. There’s at least one good union man who began the ideological feud with him long before young Fleetwood ever opened his mouth. And plenty of others, too. And there’s something about this whole affair that makes me feel it never was planned. It came out of nowhere, out of some man’s mind through his hands so fast he never had time to stop it or even see what it was, until it was done. That’s how it feels to me.”
“It could still have been a woman,” said Bunty, “even that way.”
“It could. Women have murderous impulses, too. But wouldn’t a woman have been—more disastrously subtle about it, afterwards? I don’t know. This was so short and simple. No messy attempts to cover up, but a clean walk-out.”
“And no weapon,” said Bunty, biting her underlip. “I suppose the revolver didn’t show any sign?”
“Not a mark. Nobody’s head was beaten in with the butt of that gun recently, that’s certain.”
“If only,” burst out Bunty, speaking for Comerford with authentic passion, “if only it weren’t for all the people whose lives are being bent out of shape now, I’d pray like anything that nobody’d ever solve it. But it’s the village that’s being murdered, not Helmut. Oh, George, isn’t there any way out of it?”
“Only one. Straight ahead and out the other side—one man short or one woman short,” said George, “whichever it turns out to be. And the sooner the better, for everybody concerned!”
VI—Feathers in the Wind
One
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It was odd how all the games which came into season with the autumn, the ranging games which can extend over a whole square half-mile of country, had gravitated this year toward Webster’s well, which sat, as it were, in the midst of a charmed circle of play. The younger boys evacuated their gangs from the village into this particular wilderness out of all the circle of pit-mounds open to them, and files of Indians moved up the shadowed side of the high field hedge there, while the hollows of birch saplings scattered in the clay wastes began to heave with commandos. There had always been cycles of fashion in playgrounds, of course, and usually for the most unsuitable reasons. Once for a whole autumn the favorite place had been the ruined engine-house on the brambly, naked mounds near the station. An elderly man of none too sound mind had been found hanged there, and horrid fascination had drawn all the boys and many of the bolder girls to haunt it for months after, especially at the shadowy hour between evening and night, when it was most terrifying, and lingering there repaid terror well-concealed with the most enviable kudos. Another year a farmer’s horse, grazed in a field with a brook at the bottom, got itself bogged to the neck during the night, and had to be rescued by the inevitable and long-suffering fire-brigade, whose entire working life, in these parts, appeared to be spent in fetching kittens down from telegraph poles, or dogs out of pit-shafts. The rescue lasted all day, and a c
rowd large enough for a fair-ground had gathered to witness the end of it; after which the marshy corner had become haunted ground for at least a month, and all the mothers of Comerford had more than usually muddy children.
But this year it was Webster’s well. Webster’s well and the mounts round it had no rival. Even the older children, past the stage of pretend games, took their elaborate versions of hide-and-seek up there to play. Pussy had a splendid variation of her own, which involved dusk, and pocket torches, and therefore could only be played in the end of daylight, which meant at the extremest end of a thirteen-year-old’s evening, until summertime ended, later in October. Usually they wound up the fine evenings with a bout of it, before they went home to bed. Pussy was trailing a gang at the time. She had her solitary periods and her periods of communal activity, and Dominic, largely independent of his company though willing to cooperate with any numbers, acquiesced in her moods but retained to himself, formidably and irrevocably, the right to secede. He didn’t care how many people she collected about her, if the result continued to entertain him; but if they proved boring, and began to waste too much time in argument and wrangling, he was off. Life, even at thirteen, was too short for inaction.
It was growing dark on this particular early October evening, with the silvery darkness of autumnal, clear nights when frosts have not yet begun. The occasional reports of guns in the preserves had already become so snugly familiar that they fell into the silence almost as softly as drops of dew from the trees. They sounded warm when the warmth of the day ended, prolonging activity long into the inactive hours like an echo; and now with dusk they chimed once or twice more, and ceased upon a stillness. The earth sighed, stretched and relaxed, composing itself for sleep.
At this point even the games grew stealthier, brigandage molten into witchcraft. The fat child with the gym tunic, and the sandy-haired boy with glasses, who were hunters for the occasion, sat in the grass close beside Webster’s well, counting up to two hundred in leisurely, methodical whispers, no longer shouting out the numbers belligerently as by daylight. The flock scattered into the waste woods voiceless and soft of foot. Pussy and Dominic scrambled across the ridges of clay and went up the terraced slope beyond on hands and knees, for it was steep, and it does not take long to count to two hundred. Through the hedge at the top, by enlarged dog-holes which no one bothered to repair, and headlong into a wilderness of furze and birch saplings, tunneling like rabbits among the spiny places, slithering like lizards through the silvery, slippery leaves.