by Ellis Peters
“Come on, get out of it,” said George, smiling at him without reserve, but he thought without very much gaiety, either. “I’ve given you a shake three times already. You’ll be late for school.”
“I didn’t hear you,” murmured Dominic, with eyelids gently closing again, and nose half-buried in the pillow.
“You wouldn’t have heard the crack of doom if it had gone off this morning. That’s what you get for staying out till half-past eleven. Remember?”
He did remember, and became instantly a shade more awake; because a lot of uncomfortable trailing ends from yesterday suddenly tripped his comfortably wandering mind, and brought him up sharp on his nose. He sat up, fixing George with a sudden reproachful grin.
“You’re a nice one! Why didn’t you help me out last night?”
“More than my own life was worth,” said George. “I’d have been the next to get my ears clouted if I’d interfered. You be thankful you got off so lightly.” He gave his waking son a nice smile, full of teasing and reassurance in equal measure, the intimate exchange between equals which had always been an all-clear after Dominic’s storms. “Now, come on, get up and get washed.”
“Don’t need washing,” said Dominic, reminded of his many injuries, and looking for a moment quite seriously annoyed again; but the morning was too fine, and his natural optimism too irrepressible to leave him under the cloud any longer. He slid out of bed, and stuck his toes into his slippers. A slightly awed, pink grin beamed sideways at George. He giggled: “If you’d seen what she did to me last night, you’d think I could skip washing for a month. Anyhow, I haven’t got a skin to wash, she jolly well scrubbed it all off.”
“She had to relieve her feelings somehow. If she hadn’t skinned you with washing, I dare say she’d have had to do it some other way. You be thankful she only used a loofah!”
“She didn’t,” said Dominic feelingly, “she used a hairbrush, too. My hairbrush, of all the cheek! At least, she threatened me with it. She wouldn’t listen to a word. And I really did have something important to say, because I didn’t go off and stay out all that time and get into all that mess for nothing. Do I do things as stupid as that, now, honestly?”
George, thus appealed to, allowed that he did not, that there was, somewhere in that disconcerting head, the germ of a sense of responsibility. Dominic, vindicated, completed the interrupted shedding of his pyjamas, and turned to reach for his clothes in the usual place. A clean shirt, his other flannels, the old blazer; Bunty had laid them there with a severe precision which indicated that some last light barrier of estrangement still existed between them, and it would behove him to set about the process of sweetening her with discretion rather than with audacity. There is a time for cheek and a time for amendment; Dominic judged from the alignment of his clothes upon their chair that this was the time for amendment. He sighed, a little damped. “Is she still mad at me?”
“No madder than you were at her last night,” George assured him comfortably. “Just watch your step for a few days, and be a bit extra nice to her, and it’ll all blow over. Now hurry up! Go and wash the sleep out of your eyes, at least, and brush your teeth. Your breakfast’s waiting.”
“But I want to talk to you. I still haven’t told you about it.”
“You can talk through the door, I’ll stay here.”
Dominic talked, and rapidly, between the sketch of a wash and the motions of cleaning his teeth, and padded back into the bedroom still talking. “It was only a thin chance, but that was the only place we could think of to start. And I know you told me to keep out of it, over and over, but honestly I couldn’t.” He paused in the middle of slithering into his flannels. “You’re not mad at me now, are you?”
“What’s the use?” said George. “That wouldn’t stop you. So that’s why you went to such a daft place on a night when it was sure to be sodden with rain!”
“Yes, and honestly, I hadn’t the remotest notion how late it was, it didn’t seem to have been any time at all. I suppose we were just busy, and didn’t notice, but really, I had a shock when I saw the clock. Well, then we were in a bit of a mess already, and I thought of the outflow, and climbed up on the stones. And one of the silly things rolled away and let me down in the water, and that’s when I put my hand on this thing I told you about, right down between the pebbles in the bed of the stream. And that’s what I wanted to tell you about last night, only I couldn’t get a word in for Mummy. Look, it’s here!” He loped across to the drawer, and fished out the shield, and laid it triumphantly in George’s palm. His light, bright hazel eyes searched the judging face anxiously. “You do see what it is, don’t you? It’s off a walking-stick—or anyhow, off something thin and round like a walking-stick. And tapered, too, because look, the curve at the bottom of the shield is a little bit closer than at the top. I was awfully careful not to bend it out of shape at all. And you see, it fitted in with what I’d been thinking so exactly. So I brought it for you. Because how else would a silver plate from a stick get in there under the outflow, except the way I said?”
“How, indeed?” said George absently, staring at the small thing he turned about in his fingers. “Can you show me exactly where this was? The very spot? Oh, I’ll guarantee you absolution this time, even if you fall in the brook again.”
“Yes, of course I can!” He began to glow, because George was taking him seriously, because George wasn’t warning him off. “I made a note—there’s a special dark-colored stone with veins in it. I could put this right back where it was wedged. You do think it’s important, don’t you?”
“I think it is, I’m sure it may be. But we shall see if they can find anything interesting in these grooves of the pattern. Can’t expect much of a reaction after a fortnight in the brook, I’m afraid, but with a crumpled edge like this top one you never know.”
“And it was partly silted over,” said Dominic eagerly. “That would protect it, wouldn’t it? And if we could find the stick it came from, there ought to be marks, oughtn’t there? Even if he tried to hide them. The shape of the shield might show, and anyhow, the tiny holes where it was fastened. Dad, before you take it away, d’you mind if I make a tracing of it? In case, I mean, I might see a stick that might be the one.”
George gave him a distracted smile, and said: “Yes, you can do that. But make haste and brush your hair—straighten it, anyhow. Detective or no detective, you’ve got to go to school, and you’d better be in good time. Don’t worry, I won’t shut you out of your own evidence. You shall know if it helps us. Fair’s fair! Now get on!”
“But my copy,” said Dominic agitatedly, through the sound of the brush tugging at the ridiculous fluff of his hair. “I shan’t have time to make it now, and you’ll take it away before I come home.”
“I’ll do it for you. Mind you, Dom, I should like it much better if you’d do as I asked, and stay out of it. It’s not the sort of business for you, and I wish you’d never been brought into it in the first place.” Dominic was very silent indeed, for fear of being thought to have made some response to this invitation. George sighed. “Well, it wasn’t your fault, I suppose. Anyhow, you shall have your copy.”
“If only Mummy had let me speak, I could have told you all about it last night.” The point was still sore, because it was so unlike Bunty to close her ears; and Dominic kept returning to rub incredulously at the smart. “It wasn’t a bit like her, you know. I mean, she’s always so fair. That’s what I couldn’t understand. What got into her, to make her like that? I know it was awful to be so late, and all that, but still she always listens to what I’ve got to say, but last night she wouldn’t let me say a word.”
“It’s quite understandable, in the circumstances,” said George. “If I could have been at home with her it wouldn’t have been so bad. But I came home only about ten minutes before you did, and found her frantic, still waiting for you. She’d been along finally to the Shock of Hay, and found that Pussy was missing, too, but nobody’d got a clue where
either of you had gone. She’d just finished telling me all about it, and I was putting my coat on again to come out and look for you, when you sneaked in. No wonder you caught it hot, my lad!”
“Well, no, but still— Mummy isn’t like all the others, who fly off the handle for nothing. I mean, she doesn’t panic about lateness, and jump to the conclusion that people have been run over, or murdered, or something, just because they don’t come in when they ought to. Not usually, she doesn’t.”
“Not unless there’s a reason,” said George, “but last night was a bit different. She was scared stiff about you, and that’s why you got rather a rough time of it when you did turn up. I may as well tell you,” he said soberly. “You’d hear all about it at school, anyhow, and I’d rather you heard it from me.” Dominic had stopped brushing, with the length of his disorderly hair smoothed down over his forehead, partly obscuring one eye, and in this odd condition was staring open-mouthed at his father. Something made him move close to him, the brush still forgotten in his hand. George took him by the arms and held him gently, for pleasure and need of touching him.
“You see, Dom, last night there was another death. Briggs, the gamekeeper up at the Harrow, rang up soon after eight o’clock from the top call-box, and told me he’d just found Charles Blunden in the woods there, with his own shotgun lying by him, and both barrels in him. He hadn’t dared tell the old man, I had to do that when I got up there. It may have been suicide. It could just, only just, have been an accident. Only people here don’t believe in accidents any more. It went round the village like wildfire. That’s why,” he said, soothing Dominic’s blank white stare with a rather laborious smile, “a late son last night was a son who—might come home, or might not. Like the old man’s son! So don’t hold it against Bunty if she took it out of you for all the hours she’d been waiting. If I’d known you weren’t home I’d have been pretty edgy myself.”
Dominic’s sudden small hand clutched hard at his arm. “Did you say Charles Blunden?” His voice was a queer small croak in moments of stress, already beginning to hint at breaking. “But—when did he find him? And where?”
“He rang up soon after eight. The doctor said Charles hadn’t been dead any time, probably not more than half an hour. It’s by sheer luck he was found so soon, because nobody would have paid the least attention to the shots. There were several guns out all round the village, one report more or less just vanished among the rest. He was up in the top wood, apparently heading toward the house.”
Dominic, with fixed eyes and working lips, made frantic calculations. “I went out a bit before seven, didn’t I? The bus from the green is at five minutes to. Yes, I must have gone out more like a quarter to, because John dawdles so, it would take nearly ten minutes down to the green. And where was it they found him? In the top wood?”
“Yes, lying by the path about two hundred yards in from the stile on to the mounds. You’ll be late, Dom. Go and eat, and we’ll talk about it this evening. After all, the poor devil’s dead, we can’t do anything for him.” George put a rallying arm round his son’s shoulders, and gave him a shake to stir him out of what appeared to be a trance; but Dominic seized him by the lapels, and hung on to him with frantic weight.
“No, no, please! This is frightfully urgent, don’t make me go until I’ve told you. You see, I saw him! Last night, at the stile! He gave me a half-crown—it’s in my pocket, Mummy must have found it.” Odd, excited tears, such as he had not experienced by Helmut’s body, came glittering uncertainly into his eyes now, and his voice wouldn’t keep steady. Disgusted and distressed, he clung to George, who was solid and large, and held him firmly. “It’s awful, isn’t it? It didn’t seem to matter so much when it was somebody I didn’t know much, and nobody liked. But Mr. Blunden—I was talking to him last night. I think I must have been the last person who talked to him, except— you know—if somebody killed him, the somebody. He gave me half a crown,” said Dominic, with trembling lips. “He was pleased with himself, and everything. I’m sure he didn’t do it himself, not on purpose. Oh, I don’t want his half-crown now, I wish he hadn’t given it to me—”
George drew him round to sit on the bed beside him, and shut him in with a large, possessive arm, and didn’t try to hurry him, or even to keep him to the point. School could wait. Indeed, if this meant what it appeared to mean, Dominic would be occupied with other matters than school for most of the morning, and if he seemed in a fit state to benefit by a return to normality he could easily go in the afternoon. Meantime, he leaned thankfully into George’s side, and shook a little at intervals, but with diminishing violence.
“Why shouldn’t he give it to you?” said George reasonably. “And why shouldn’t you spend it? He wanted you to have it, didn’t he? He’d be a bit hurt, wouldn’t he, if he knew you’d let it be spoiled for you. What did he say when he gave it to you?”
“He said: ‘Go and celebrate for me.’ And when I thanked him, he said: ‘That’s all right. Buy your girl a choc-ice.’ ”
“Then that’s what you do, and don’t disappoint him. You don’t have to tell Puss where the money came from, that’s just between you and him, and none of her business.”
“I suppose not.” His voice sounded a little soothed. “I’d better tell you about it, hadn’t I? I wish I’d had my watch, because I can’t be quite sure about all the times. Only I know I started from the green as soon as the bus had gone, and it was on time, and that’s five minutes to seven.”
“Well, that’s a good start. You went up the lane to the quarry, did you? That’s the nearest way.”
“Yes. And when I got up to the stile, Charles was sitting on it. How long do you think that would be after I started? I should think it would take me about twenty minutes from the green, because I went as quickly as I could, to have some of the daylight left. But I could walk it again and time it, if you liked. I think it must have been about a quarter-past seven when I got there. He’d been shooting. Did they find any pheasants with him?”
“Yes, Briggs found a brace. Charles spoke to you first, did he? And then you stayed there for a few minutes, talking to him?”
“Yes, I told him I’d heard about the appeal being granted, and then he asked me what I thought about it. I didn’t know what to say, really, because I’d never thought much about it, but I said maybe surface mining was better than shallow mining, anyhow. And then he said that although the appeal had been upheld, it was up to the Coal Board whether the contractors went on working the site, because he was going to tell them tomorrow—that’s today—that they could have the land, after all.”
“What?” George held him off incredulously to stare at him, but the intelligent, slightly stunned hazel eyes stared back firmly, and with an admirably recovered calm. “But they’d been fighting like tigers to keep it, why should he change his mind now? Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand him? That couldn’t have been what he said.”
“Oh, yes, really it was. He said he’d been walking round having another look at the mess his grandfather left behind, the old way. He said you want something like the devil when someone tries to get it from you, but if they give up trying you can see it’s only twenty acres of not very good pasture that’ll have to come up sooner or later, one way or the other, if there’s really that much coal there. So he’d made up his mind to tell them he’d give up his objections, and they could go ahead. I think he wanted to tell somebody quickly, so he wouldn’t get uncertain again, and it was just that nobody happened to come along except me.”
“You mean he hadn’t told anyone else at all?”
“No, he hadn’t. Because I thought there might be a row about it, and like a crumb I said, did his father know? And he laughed, and said no, he didn’t yet, but it was all right, he wouldn’t care, what mattered to him was getting his own way, and after all, he had got that.”
This had a credible sound to George’s ears. And wasn’t it possible that the long arguments with Chad Wedderburn, which had made life we
arisome for so long in the snug of the Shock of Hay, had had some odd, cumulative effect in the end? When, as Dominic had said, the pressure was removed, and Charles could afford to think, instead of merely feeling, in the contra-suggestible way of all his family? The whole thing began to make a circumstantial tale, and the stimulation of telling it had pulled Dominic together valiantly after the shattering shock of learning its ending. He had drawn a little away, leaning easily into the circle of George’s arm, facing him with color in his cheeks again, and animated eyes.
“And then he said this was really hot news, and I was the first to hear it. And he threw me the half-crown, and told me to go and celebrate, and said he was going home to break the news. Then he got over the stile, and picked up his birds and went off along the path toward the Harrow, and I went on to the well to meet Pussy. I don’t think I can have been there at the stile with him more than ten minutes, but that would make it about twenty-five past seven, wouldn’t it? And he only got such a little way along the path. You know,” said Dominic, his eyes getting bigger and bigger, “you go over a ridge there to the well, although it’s not far, and I don’t think the sound would carry so sharply. Especially when there were quite a number of guns going at the time, you know, all round the valley. But I think it must have happened awfully soon after I left him, don’t you?”
“It looks like it. You didn’t see anyone else up there? While you were talking, or after you left him?”
“No, not a soul. I didn’t see anyone else until Pussy came up from the village.”