by Ellis Peters
“You can help better by not staying. Comerbourne are hanging around for my next call, and you can go down and tell your mother to ring them. I’ll give you a note for her.”
“But—”
“No buts!” said George placidly. “You can stay until Cooke comes up, and fill in the time by telling me exactly how you dropped on this affair, and what you’ve been doing while you waited for me.”
Dominic told him, fairly lucidly, even to his own inadequacy. George sat on his heels the while, and passed his fingers thoughtfully through the obtrusive clump of fair hair which now held all the remaining light seemingly gathered into its whiteness. Everything was evening itself out from a chaos into a methodical channel of thought, and the steady flow of probability was certainly carrying both their minds in the same direction.
“He couldn’t have fallen in,” said Dominic. “If you even tried to fall into the bed of the stream just like that, I don’t believe you could do it. And if you did, unless you were stunned you’d get up again. There aren’t any stones just there to stun him. And—and he’s sort of really wedged into position, isn’t he? Like a cork into a bottle!”
George turned his head, and gave him a long, considering and rather anxious look, switching the torch off. “I see you’ve been doing some thinking while you waited. Well, then, go on with it! Get it off your chest.”
“There wasn’t much to do except think,” said Dominic. “I went right back to the hedge there, and all down the stream to the bend, looking for just any kind of mark there might be; but you wouldn’t know there’d been anything here but cows for months. The only bits that could hold tracks now are deep inside these clay holes, where the water’s still lying, and they’re shut in so hard you couldn’t get to them. You might as well look for prints in solid concrete. But the light got so dazzly I couldn’t see anymore, so I stopped. Only I didn’t find even the least little thing. Maybe—on him—you know, there might be something, when you get him out. But even then, that flow of water’s been running over him for— Do you think he’s been there long?”
“Do you?” asked George, neither encouraging nor discouraging him, only watching him steadily and keeping a reassuring hold of him.
“Well, I think it must have happened last night. I mean, this way isn’t used very much, but in the daytime there might always be one or two odd people passing. It was broad daylight still when Pussy and I got here tonight. So I think last night, in the dark—wouldn’t you?”
“It might have been more than one evening ago, mightn’t it?” said George.
“Yes, I suppose so, only then he might have been found earlier. And—they begin to look—different, don’t they?”
The more he talked, and the more staggering things he said, the more evenly the blood flowed back into his pinched, large-eyed face, and the more matter-of-fact and normal became his voice. Thinking about it openly, instead of deep inside his own closed mind, did him good. A rather tired sparkle, even, came back into his eye. Helmut dead became, when discussed, a practical problem, and nothing more; certainly not a tragedy.
“Even if a man wanted to drown himself,” said Dominic, knotting his brows painfully, “he wouldn’t choose here, would he? And even if he did, and lay down here himself, he wouldn’t lie like that—look, with his arms down by his sides— When people lie down on their faces they let themselves down by their arms, and lie with them folded under their chests or their foreheads—don’t they? I do, if I sleep on my front.”
George said nothing, though the grotesque helplessness of the backward-stretched arms, with hands half-open knotting the little currents of water, had not escaped him. He didn’t want to snub Dominic, but he didn’t want to egg him on, either. Just let what was in his mind flow headlong out of it, and after a long sleep he would have given up his proprietary rights in the death of Helmut, and turned his energies to something more suitable.
“Besides,” said Dominic, in a small but steady voice, “he was hit on the head first, wasn’t he? I haven’t touched him— and of course you can’t really see, and there wouldn’t be any blood, after the water had kept flowing over him—but his head doesn’t look right. I think somebody bashed his head in, and then put him here in the water, to make sure.”
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.
IV—First Thoughts
One
« ^ »
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 ha
d 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.
