by Ellis Peters
“I haven’t seen him since he was in court,” she said.
“And Jim? He hasn’t run into him, either?”
“Jim hasn’t seen him,” she said. “Why should he? Jim knows nothing at all about him since they fought, and you know that part already. That’s finished with.”
“I hope so,” said George equably, and watched her for a moment with curious, placid eyes. “But you never know, do you, what’s finished with and what isn’t? How well do you remember that evening? Can you tell me what you were doing here while Helmut was coming up the field-path?”
“Wednesday!” she said, recollecting. “Yes—I was ironing most of the evening. I fed the hens, as usual, about eight o’clock, and collected the eggs, and then finished the ironing. And then I went on making a dress, and listened to the wireless. That’s all!”
“You didn’t go out at all that night?”
She smiled, and said: “No.”
“Nor your husband, either?”
“Oh, yes, Chris went out halfway through the evening, to see Mr. Blunden at the Harrow. They were planning to transport some stock together to some show in the south. But he can tell you all about that, better than I can.”
“What time did he get back?”
“Oh, I suppose about half-past ten—I can’t be sure to a quarter of an hour or so. He’s a little late, but when he comes he can tell you more exactly, I expect.”
And when Chris Hollins came, clumping in a few minutes later from the yard, he did fill in the picture with a few dredged-up details; the time of his call at Blunden’s, about nine o’clock, as he remembered, for the wireless was on with the news; the route of his long and leisurely walk home; his arrival somewhat before half-past ten. He had taken his time coming home, certainly; it was a lovely night, and he’d felt like a walk. But as he had chosen the more obscure heath pathways, and the woodland tracks, he had met hardly a soul after leaving the lane by the Harrow, until he had stopped for a moment to talk to Bill Hayley the carrier almost at the foot of his own drive.
He was not, naturally enough, so accomplished at this kind of thing as his wife, and he exhibited all the signs of guilt which the innocent show when questioned by the police. George in his unregenerate ’teens, coming away from the orchard-wall of this very farm with two or three purloined apples in his pocket, had felt himself going this same dark brick-red color even upon passing close to a policeman. Besides, there are so many laws that there exists always the possibility that one or two of them may have been unwittingly broken. Hollins’s lowered brow, broad and belligerent as the curly forehead of his own bull, did not quicken George’s pulse by a single beat. Yet he was deeply interested. Chiefly in the way they looked at each other, the stocky, straight, blustering, uneasy, kind husband and the dark, quiet, relaxed wife. After every answer, his eyes stole away to hers, seemed to circle her, looking for a way into that calm, to bruise their simple blueness against it and withdraw to stare again. And she met them with her dark, self-contained gentleness, closed and inviolable, and did not let him in. However often he scratched at the door, she did not let him in. Like a fireguard, fending him off, she spread the grieving glance of her black eyes all around her to keep his hands out of the fire. But deep within her head those eyes were watching him, too, more inwardly, with less of composure and quiet than she had in keeping her own counsel.
George did not know nor try to guess what was going on between them in this absence of communication; but at least he knew that something was going on, and something in which they both went blindfolded as surely as he did.
“You didn’t see anything of Schauffler, then, on the day he was murdered?” said George, choosing his words with deliberation. He added, snapping away the pencil with which he had noted down the scanty details of Hollins’s walk home: “Either of you?”
She didn’t turn a hair. She had lived with the reality of murder, why should she start at the word? But her husband drew in his head as if the wall had leaned at him.
“No, we didn’t. Why should you think we had, any more than anybody else around the village? He’d left here a month before. He hasn’t been up here since. Why should he?”
“Why, indeed?” said George, and went away very thoughtfully from between the two fencing glances, to let them close at last.
But for some reason he did not go down the drive. He turned aside when he left the yard, and went along the field-path by the remembered orchard-wall. There was a narrow door in it, almost at the end, he recalled. It had just been painted, bright, deep green paint, maybe a few days old.
Three
« ^ »
Jim Tugg was quite another pair of shoes, a pair that didn’t pinch at all. He looked at George across the bare scrubbed table in his single downstairs room, as spare and clean and indifferent as a monk’s cell, and stubbed down tobacco hard into the bowl of a short clay pipe which ought to have roasted his nose when it was going well, and made a face as dark as thunder in contempt of all subtlety.
“Turn it up!” he said, bitterly grinning. “I know what you’re after as well as what you do! I’m one of the possibles— maybe the most possible of the lot. God knows I wouldn’t blame you, at that. Too bad for you it just didn’t happen that way!”
“You didn’t have much use for Germans in the lump, did you?” said George thoughtfully, watching the big teak-colored forefinger pack the pipe too full for most lungs to draw it.
“I’m calculable, but I’m not that calculable. Men don’t come to me in the lump, they come singly, with two feet each, and a voice apiece all round. Germans—maybe they rate more rejects than most other kinds, but even they, when they go out go out one at a time. If you mean I hadn’t any use at all for Helmut Schauffler, say it, and I’ll tell you the answer.”
George gave him a light, and said: “I’m listening.”
“I hated his guts! Who didn’t, that ever had anything to do with him at close quarters? I could have killed him and liked it, I dare say. I did bash him, more than once, and I liked that, too, I liked it a lot. I should have liked to bash him again on the twenty-sixth of September, and I wouldn’t have minded even if it had turned out one bash too many, either. Nothing more probable ever happened. Only this didn’t happen. I never saw him that day, or it likely would have done—but I didn’t see him, and it didn’t happen.”
“What had he done to you?” asked George with deceptive mildness.
“Nothing. He was like a leech creeping round me feet, he loved me the way a leech loves you. Until I hit him the first time. Then he kept out of my way all he could, unless there was half a dozen other fellows close at hand.”
“Then what did you have against him so badly?”
“You know already,” said Jim, looking up under his black brows from cavernous dark eyes. “You’ve been to the house, I saw you come round the orchard to my gate. You know what I had against him.”
“Only the persecution of Mrs. Hollins?”
“Only?” said Jim, and small, rose-colored flames spurted up inside the dark pupils of his eyes, burning out the angry center of his being into a hollow, sultry fire.
“Don’t mistake me! Nothing on your own account?”
The flames subsided. He sat leaning forward easily with his elbows on his knees, and his hard, sinewy forearms tapering down strangely into the lean, grave hands which held the pipe between them, ritually still. He thought about it, and thought with him was leisurely on the rare occasions when he let it come of itself, instead of igniting it like explosive gas while it was still half-formed. He narrowed his eyes against the spiral of smoke, and said: “Yes, maybe there was something on my own account, too, growing out of all the rest. Sergeant, we only just finished a war. I don’t kid myself I won it single-handed, but I had my hand in it all right, and what’s more, I knew what it was in there for. I wanted my war used properly. God damn it, didn’t I have a right to expect it? And every time I looked at that deadly, dirty, arrogant, cringing little spew of a N
azi, and knew him for what he was, I knew we’d won and thrown the whole stakes away again, poured it down the drain. Look, Sergeant, I don’t know what other fellows feel, but me, I didn’t much like Arnhem, I didn’t much like any damn part of the whole dirty business. It’s no fun to me, in the ordinary way, to get another chap’s throat between my hands and squeeze—and the hell of a lot of fun it was picking up the pieces of other chaps I knew who didn’t squeeze hard enough. Well, it made some sense while we thought it was for something. But if the Schaufflers can come squirming out of their holes only a few years later, and spit on Jewish women, and tell ’em they’re marked already for the camps and the furnaces—here in our own country, my God, in the country that’s supposed to have licked ’em—will you tell me, Sergeant Felse, what the hell we tore our guts out for?”
George looked somberly between his boot-heels on the bare wooden floor, and said: “Seems to me someone else, though, was due to collect that particular bash on the head—if everybody had his rights.”
Jim grinned. It was like looking down the shaft of a pit, such improbable dark depths opened in his eyes.
“Ah!” he said, “if we only knew where to deliver it! But Schauffler was here under my feet, something I could get at. I could land off at him with some prospect of connecting. Only I didn’t. Don’t ask me why. I let him alone so long as he let her alone; and if he didn’t, I thrashed him—when I was let, but there were too many of your lads about, half the time. He got a bit more careful after the first mistake, but he only went farther round to work, and kept a bit sharper an eye on me. He couldn’t leave her alone, not even to save his life—after all, torturing people was what he lived on.”
“But after all,” said George, arguing with himself as well as with the shepherd, “he couldn’t actually harm or kill her here.”
“No, he couldn’t kill her, he could only sicken her with living. She had a war, too, and it looked as if all her efforts were gone to hell, same as mine. You ought to try it some time,” said Jim acidly, “it’s a great feeling.”
After these daunting exchanges it was none too easy to get back to straight question and answer, to the small beer of where were you on the evening of Wednesday, September 26th. But he was forthcoming enough.
“I was down at my sister’s place, in the village, until about eight o’clock that evening. Mrs. Jack Harness—you know her. Then I went to the Shock of Hay, and I was in the snug there a goodish time. I don’t remember what time I left, except it was well before closing-time. Maybe about half-past nine, maybe not quite that I dare say Io might have noticed, or Wedderburn, or some of the fellows who were there.” He mentioned several names, indifferently, drawing heavily on the packed clay pipe. “I came home up the back way, over the fields. It’s quicker. Didn’t meet a soul, though; you won’t get no confirmation of my movements once I slipped up the lane by the pub.” He looked once around the clean, hard little room, monastically arid in the slanting light of the evening. “Nor you won’t get no confiding woman here to tell you what time I got in that night. I could tell you, roughly—soon after ten. But I can’t prove it. There’s nobody here but me and the dogs, and they won’t tell much.”
Hearing himself mentioned, the collie thumped the floor with his tail for a moment, and lifted his head to look at his master. He was a one-man dog, nobody existed but Jim. He would gladly have deposed for him if he could.
“Then that’s all you can tell me about this business?” said George.
“That’s all I can tell you, and that’s no better than nothing. I never touched him that night. If I had, I’d tell you—but if I had, he wouldn’t have been stuck in the brook to finish him off. My way’d be no better, maybe—but that ain’t my way.”
George looked at him with blankly thoughtful eyes, and asked: “Would you say it was more a woman’s way?”
Jim straightened from his leaning attitude, not suddenly, not slowly, and came to his feet. The scrubbed deal table in between them, blanched and furry with cleanness, jarred out of line as his hip struck against it; and the startled collie rose, too, and growled from between his knees. He stood staring down at George, and his face had not taken fire, but only glowed darker and more savagely self-contained in shadow, averted from the window.
“What do you mean by that? What woman’s way?”
“Any,” said George. “Do you think they haven’t got the same capabilities as you? But they might not have the same strength, or the same knowledge of how to do that kind of thing. And that’s where the water would come in very handy. Wouldn’t it?” He looked up at the gaunt, weathered face looming over him, and smiled, a little wearily. “Sit down, can’t you! Do you think I found Helmut any more pleasing than you did?”
Said Jim, not moving: “You’re on the wrong tack. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.” And it was somehow immediately apparent that he had in no sense been tricked into assuming a particular she. He knew which woman George had in mind, and he saw no point in dissembling his knowledge. All his cards went on the table. Or had he perhaps still one he wasn’t showing, one he was never likely to show?
“Why should she?” said George. “No fly’s been hurting her.”
“I never knew her even feel like being violent to anyone or anything. She wouldn’t know how. I tell you, Gerd Hollins is an angel.”
“For all I know,” said George, “I may be looking for an angel.”
“Then why don’t you stop looking?” asked the dark mouth very softly.
Four
« ^ »
George went into the yard of the Shock of Hay by the private way, and tapped at the scullery door; and there was Io filling a kettle at the tap, and putting it on the gas-ring for the late cocoa on which they usually went to bed. It was getting round to closing-time, and warm, merry murmurs came in from the bar along the passage, the mellowest noise George had heard in Comerford all that day. It took a solid evening of drinking, leisurely but devoted drinking, to get rid of the hag on Comerford’s back these days. There were no individual voices in this noise, it was as communal as the buzzing of a hive of bees, and as contented. He liked to hear it; it soothed his over-active mind, even while he was thinking out the first question for Io, who welcomed him with an unsuspecting smile. Pussy, of course, was in bed already, though it was questionable whether she was sleeping. No one who wanted information would have dreamed of going to the Shock of Hay until after Pussy’s bedtime.
“Come on in!” said Io resignedly. “We’re nearly through, and you don’t have to be official tonight—Dad’s going to be only too glad to get ’em out on time, believe me. Go into the kitchen, will you, Sergeant, and I’ll be with you in a minute. And keep your voice down, or the quiz-child will be out of bed and stretching her ears.”
“Anybody’d think you were expecting me,” said George, ducking his head under the low scullery doorway, where even Joe Hart, who was about five feet seven inches square, had to stoop.
“You’d have hard work to find one person among that gang out there,” she said, nodding briskly in the direction of the murmurous bar, “who isn’t expecting you—any minute. You’re the most expected man in Comerford, bar none.” But he could tell from the serenity of her voice and the undisturbed tiredness of her eyes that the true meaning of what she said had not yet penetrated into her own mind. She looked at him, and he was still human, he had not become a symbol. She smiled at him nicely, following him into the kitchen and patting the back of a chair at him invitingly. “Sit down until I can get Dad for you. I’ll take him off in the bar until ten, it won’t be long.”
“No, stay!” said George. “I’d like to talk to you. In fact, I probably need to talk to you more than to your father—if you were looking after the snug last Wednesday, that is.”
Io had already turned cheerfully away to relieve her father of his duties in the bar, but she swung round in the doorway and looked back at him with eyes suddenly widening and darkening, in a sharpened awareness. She came back slowly int
o the room, and closed the door behind her, one hand smoothing uncertainly at the skirt of her pink cotton frock.
“Me? The night before Pussy came in and—the night before they found him?”
“The night he was murdered,” said George.
“Yes, I see! You know,” she said slowly, “that’s funny! I knew what you’d come about, of course. What else could it be? I guessed that much. And I knew everybody was somehow mixed up in it—I mean, from the impartial view. But the only person I didn’t think of as being involved was me. Do you suppose that’s the same with all those fellows out there? Everybody’s talking about the murder, there isn’t anything else worth talking about in Comerford just now. But how funny if every one of them sees all the rest as actors and himself as the audience!”
“Until I come along,” said George wryly, seeing the first veil of removal drawn between his eyes and hers. He felt himself being geometricized into a totem as she looked at him. The law! An idol which does condescend to wield a certain benevolent guardianship over us; but beware of it, all the same, it exacts human sacrifice.
“Poor George!” said Io, breaking all the rules deliciously. “It isn’t very nice, is it? But you can’t help it. Go on, then, ask me anything you like. I don’t quite see how I can be any good, I didn’t know anything about it until you sent Pussy home, and even then she wouldn’t let on what had happened, the monkey! She had an awful nightmare in the night, and then I found out. By next day it was a great adventure, and she was Sexton Blake and Tinker and Pedro all in one, but it didn’t look quite such a picnic at one o’clock in the morning. I was in the snug as usual that evening—I mean the Wednesday evening. So go ahead, and ask me things. But I can’t imagine I’ll be much help.” She sat down opposite to him, and folded her hands submissively in her lap, and looked at him gravely with her large brown eyes.
“Can you remember who was in, that night? All the regulars? Wedderburn and Charles Blunden? Jim Tugg?”
