Fallen Into the Pit gfaf-1

by Ellis Peters

  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!”

  “Now, you understand him a great deal better than that, if you’d be perfectly honest with yourself,” said Bunty serenely. “He’s worried that you should be spending your time thinking about this particular subject, and whether you like it or not, you know quite well it’s on your account he’s worrying. He’d be a great deal happier if you didn’t have to think about it at all—and frankly, so would I.”

  “I don’t have to,” said Dominic. “I want to.”

  “Why? Is it a nice thing to think about?”

  He considered this with some surprise, and admitted: “No, not nice, I suppose. But it’s there, and how can you not think about it? I suppose it might be rather good not to know anything about it; but it’s interesting, all the same. And how can you not know anything about a thing, when you’ve seen it?”

  “It can’t be done,” she agreed, smiling.

  “Well, but he won’t see that. You can see it, why can’t he?”

  “He can,” said Bunty. “He does. That’s what worries him. He wouldn’t be so unreasonable about it if he wasn’t fighting a losing battle.”

  “Well, if I’m not allowed to talk about it,” said Dominic, between a prophecy and a threat, “I shall think about it all the more. And anyhow, he shouldn’t have hit me.”

  “And you shouldn’t have given him that final piece of lip. And the one wasn’t particularly like your father, and the other wasn’t particularly like you—was it?”

  Dominic, aware that he was being turned from his course, but unable to detect the exact mechanism by which she steered him, gave her a long, wary look, and suddenly colored a little, and again as suddenly grinned. “Oh, Mummy, you are a devil!”


  “And you,” said Bunty, relieved, “are a dope.”

  George wasn’t quite so easy, because George was seriously worried. Maybe he would eventually get used to the idea that his son had senses and faculties and wits meant to be exercised, sooner or later, beyond the range of his protective supervision; but at the moment he was still contesting the suggestion that the time for such a development had arrived.

  “It’s sheer inquisitiveness,” he said stubbornly, “and unhealthy inquisitiveness, at that. You don’t want him to grow into a morbid Yank-type adolescent, do you?—lapping up sensation like ice cream?”

  “Not the least fear of that,” said Bunty, with equal firmness. “Dom got pulled into this, whether he liked it or not. Do you think you could just forget about it, if you were in his shoes?”

  “Maybe not forget about it, but I could keep my fingers out of it when I was told, and he’d better, or else—”

  “I doubt very much if you could have done anything of the kind,” said Bunty severely. “The same conscience which makes you try to head him off now would have kept you in it up to the neck then. So for goodness’ sake, even if you feel you must slap him down, at least don’t misrepresent him.”

  George, as a matter of fact, and as she very well knew, already regretted his momentary loss of temper; but he had not changed his mind.

  Two

  « ^ »

  The local inhabitants were left to George because he knew them every one, and they all knew him. Such a degree of familiarity raises as many new difficulties as it eliminates old ones, but at least both sides know where they stand.

  He went up to see Hollins on the day after the inquest. Mrs. Hollins met him in the yard, and brought him into the kitchen and sat down with him there with the simplicity of every day, as if she did not even know that a man she had hated was dead; and yet she had had dealings with the police before, and could certainly recognize the occasion. George began the interview wondering about her calm, and ended understanding it. She had been through such extravagances of persecution, suspicion and compression already that nothing in this line was any longer a novelty to her, and therefore there was nothing to get excited about. It was as simple as that. Her linked hands, rather plump and dark upon the edge of the table, had unusual tensions, but it did not seem to him that they had much to do with his visit; her eyes were certainly wide, luminous and haunted, but he thought by older things than the death of Helmut Schauffler. On the whole it seemed to him that she was not steeling herself up toward a crisis, but relaxing from one.

  “You’ll want to see Chris, I dare say,” she said. “He’ll be in pretty soon now, all being well. Let me make the tea a little early for once. You’d like some, wouldn’t you?”

  He didn’t object. The easier the atmosphere remained, the better pleased he would be; and she had a kind of graciousness which he wished to assist and preserve for her sake and his own, instead of putting clumsy official fingers through it. They sat in the hearth of the big, dark farmhouse kitchen, under the warped black beams stuck with iron hooks; there were seats set into the ingle on either side of the fire, and only the firelight, no daylight, lit their faces here. It was a room looking forward to winter before summer was over the hill; and she was a tired, autumnal woman, content with a retired quietness and a private warmth for the rest of her life. She had seen too much and traveled too far already to have any palate left for wilder pleasures. However, they drank tea together, and blinked at the fire, which she kept rather high for so bright an autumn day.

  “I came to ask you about Helmut Schauffler,” said George. “Your husband, too, of course.”

  “But it’s a month now since he left us. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can tell you about him since then.” She looked up and met his eyes without a smile, but tranquilly. “You know already all about that affair. It was an experiment that failed, that’s all.”

  “I wouldn’t care to say I know all about it,” said George. “I always wondered what made you take him on.”

  “Considerations which ought to have kept him out, I suppose. It was my suggestion.” She gave him a long, clear look, as if she wondered how much she could express and he understand. “I am legally an Englishwoman, perhaps, but I am still German. You can’t get rid of your blood. I lived for years by ignoring mine, but you can’t even do that forever. I hoped to be able to reconcile myself with my race through just one man who should prove to be—at any rate, not altogether vile. It sounds romantic, but it was in reality very practical. I was asking for very little, you see, even an occasional impulse of decency would have done—even the most grudging effort to live at honest peace with me. It would have been like recovering a whole country.”

  “But it didn’t work out,” said George. “I see!”

  “He was what he was. He was satisfied with what he was. You must know it as well as I do by this time.”

  “I doubt if anyone knows it as well as you do,” said George, watching her squarely. “Better tell me exactly what did happen to the experiment. It wasn’t so simple, for instance, was it, as if you had been merely an Englishwoman who took a similar chance on him?—or even any other German woman!”

  “No,” said Gerd, after a long minute of silence, during which her eyes seemed to him to grow larger, darker and deeper in her still face. “My case was that of a German Jewess, exactly as it would have been in 1933. I think, Sergeant Felse, you have wasted your war!”

  “Tell me!” said George. And she told him; from the humble entry of Helmut to the shock of his first expansion, through dozens of similar moments, nightmare moments when she had been left alone with him only by the normal routine of the day, only for seconds at a time, but long enough to look down the dark shaft of his mind into the abyss out of which she had climbed once at terrible cost. “And you think you have changed something, with your war! You think you have drained that pool! It’s only frozen over very thinly. Wait for the first, the very first thaw, and the ice will give like tissue-paper, and you will be swimming for your lives again. And so shall we!” she said, with piercing quietness.

  “You didn’t tell your husband anything about this persecution. Why not?”

  She told him that, too. He believed her. She was accustomed to containing her own troubles rather than make them greater by spreading them further, like ink through blotting paper.

  “But Jim Tugg found out? Or at any rate, suspected!”

  “I never told him anything, either, but he is better acquainted than my husband with people like that boy. He often pestered me with questions, and I tried to put him off. But yes, he knew. Knew, or guessed. There was some trouble between them once or twice, and Jim began to try to stay in between us. It was—sometimes—successful. Not always!”

  “And the night when he attacked Schauffler in the village? He told us as little as possible to account for it, but it was a determined attack, and my impression is that he’d followed him that evening with a very definite purpose. He meant driving him off this farm at least, if not off the face of the earth.” George watched her eyes, but they met his gaze emptily, looking through him and beyond, with a daunting, dark patience. “What happened to bring that on? Something even worse than usual?”

  “Only the last of many scenes like those I’ve described already. But I was tired, and Jim came at the wrong moment, and I said more than I meant. It was a weakness and I was sorry for it. But it was too late then. He went away to find him, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.”

  “Did you want to stop him?” asked George simply.

  Her look remained fixed, and a little strained. “I would sometimes have been very glad to see Helmut Schauffler dead. Why not admit it? I had every reason to dislike him. But I have never quite reached the point of wanting someone to kill him. There has been more than enough killing. Yes, I would have stopped Jim if I could. But if you know him you certainly know he is not an easy man to stop.”

  “And so you got rid of Helmut,” said
George, “without much cost to Jim, as it turned out. But your husband must have had more than an inkling of what was going on, by then? He could hardly miss it, after that, could he?”

  “There was no longer any need to make a secret of it, when the boy was gone. I told Chris all he needed to know—there was no need to dwell upon details. It was over.”

  “Was it?”

  She looked at him with the first disquiet she had shown, and raised her head a little warily. “What do you mean?”

  “He was still in the village. Didn’t he come near you again? It could happen.”

  “After Jim had beaten him like that? Helmut was brave only when he knew the odds were on his side.”

  “But very painstaking and persistent in seeking situations where they were on his side. Remember,” he said, “I’ve seen him in action before, on a boy who was probably much less capable of dealing with him than you were, but in similar circumstances. I know how patient and devious he could be in pursuit of amusement.”

  “He didn’t trouble me again,” she said firmly.

  “He never came here—when you were on your own, for instance?”

  “No, I had no more trouble.”

  “Then you can’t give me any more information about his movements the day he was killed? He was at work as usual during the day, came back to his lodgings at the usual time, about half-past five. In the evening he went out again, the landlady saw him leave the house about a quarter to seven. A boy tinkering with his motor-bike by the side of the road at Markyeat Cross says he saw him pass soon after seven, and climb the stile into the field. Since then no one seems to have seen him until he turned up the following night in the brook. That field-path leads up this way. I just wondered if he’d been here again.”