by Ellis Peters
Io shut her eyes and recited a list of names, fishing them up out of her memory one by one, the first few readily, including the quarrelsome friends of whose presence she could never go unaware for long, then single names coming out of forgetfulness with distinct pops of achievement, like champagne corks. “And Tugg—yes, he was in some time that evening, I’m sure. I remember his dog having a bit of an argument with Baxter’s terrier. You know what terriers are. Yes, he was here.” She added disconcertingly, suddenly opening her eyes upon doubt and wonder, upon the crack in the wall of Comerford’s peace: “Why did you ask me specially about him? You don’t think that he—?”
“I just collect facts,” said George. “If witnesses can account for every minute of a man’s time between nine and eleven on that evening, so much the better for him. Every one canceled out is one with a quiet mind—at least on his own account. So let’s not look any further for my motives. What time did Jim come in?”
“Oh! Oh, dear, that’s something quite different. I served him, of course, and I know he was there, because of the dogs—but what time he came in, that’s another thing. The news was on when the terrier came in and started the row, I remember that. But honestly, I can’t remember how long he’d been there then.”
“Never mind! You could hardly be expected to keep the lot of ’em in mind.” The news had been on, and Jim Tugg noticeably there at the Shock of Hay. The news had been on, and Chris Hollins talking cattle-transport with Blunden at the Harrow. “What time did he leave? Any clue?”
She shook her head helplessly. “I didn’t notice him go. You know, he isn’t a man who makes a noise about what he does. I think—I’m pretty sure he wasn’t there at ten, when everybody was saying good-night. But he seldom stayed until ten, so perhaps I’m not really honestly remembering that, only taking it for granted. Doesn’t he remember himself?”
“Not exactly. He thinks he left about half-past nine, maybe a little earlier.”
“One of the others might remember properly,” she said, with a sudden warming smile. “Baxter might, after having his dog nipped for its cheek. Only I’m not sure he wasn’t away first himself. I never thought it would be so difficult to answer these questions, but it is. I didn’t have any special reason to take note, you see.”
“Of course not! Don’t strain your memory, or you’ll begin to imagine things and mix days up altogether. If anything flashes back of itself, well and good, but don’t chivvy it. One of the others may have had things fixed in his mind by some little incident.” He met her eyes squarely, and asked without warning: “What about Wedderbum and Blunden? Any clear recollection of their comings and goings?”
As if he needed to ask! Everyone knew that she had no peace from them, that she was forced to take notice of them because they took fierce notice of her, of every word she shed in their direction, and every glance, skirmishing over them like rival center-forwards in a hockey bully. Her pink-and-white face flamed, but she smiled, not too grudgingly, sensing first only his delicate little poke at her own self-esteem. Only then did the second stab reach her. Chad and Charles, they came into it, too. He saw her smile ebb, and her breath halt for an instant as it went home. Nobody is safe! Take care how you speak of one friend to another friend from now on. Take care particularly of every word you say to George Felse. After all, he is the police. And virtually, you’ve got everybody’s life in your hands. Charles’s life among the rest! Or was it Chad’s she thought of first? Comerford would have said Charles’s, but there was no way of being sure until she was sure herself.
George felt her withdraw herself, not stealthily, only delicately, in a shocked quietness, as decisively as if she had walked backwards from him out of the room, to hold him in her eye every step of the way. Her look, which had been as limpid as crystal, grew opaque and shadowy as a thicket of bracken in its covert brownness. Her voice quietened by a distinct degree, answering discreetly: “Well, they were both here, but I didn’t notice exactly when they came in, I was rather busy. Only when they began to fight, as usual, I couldn’t very well help noticing, could I?”
“Literally fight?” asked George, with a smile he was far from feeling.
“No, of course not, it was only the same as it always is.” Her brow darkened, clouding over at their idiocies. “But they were far too busy with each other to be wasting any time thinking of knocking anyone else on the head,” she added firmly.
“They were there when the dogs began to scrap?” asked George again, doggedly ignoring his dismissal from individual personality.
“Yes, I’m sure of that. Charles was nearest, and he caught hold of the collie by the tail to make him break. They were both here before nine.”
“And did they leave together?”
She said rather grudgingly: “No. They—behaved a little worse than most nights—at least, Chad did. Good Lord, wouldn’t you think after all he’s been through he’d have some sense of proportion? Wouldn’t you, honestly? And yet, just because Charles asked me to go to the carnival dance at Comerbourne with him, and I said I would— Why shouldn’t I go to a dance, if I’m asked?” she demanded of George, forgetting for the moment how much of a policeman he had become, and how little of a friend and neighbor. “Oh, not a word about the actual issue, of course, he just quarreled with Charles and with me and with the whole snug about everything else you can think of. Half of it was in Latin, or something; anyhow, I didn’t even know what he was calling us. He got rather tight, and went off in the sulks, before ten o’clock. I can’t be exact about the time, I didn’t look at the clock, but it seems it must have been nearly half an hour before closing-time when he went.”
“They don’t give you much peace between them, do they?” said George, greatly daring.
Io looked at him for a struggling moment between indignation and laughter, and then collapsed without warning into an amused despair somewhere between the two. “Sometimes I’d like to knock their two silly heads together, and see if I could knock any sense into either of ’em. I don’t want to be bothered with them, I’ve something better to do with my time; but I’d like them both, if only they’d let me. When they act like squabbling children, it isn’t so easy.”
Even in her confidences, now, there was a note of constraint, as if she watched him covertly to see how he took every word. Not only the wicked, apparently, flee when no man pursueth, for reach as he would, he could lay no hand on Io.
“Was he very drunk when he went off? That’s most unusual for him, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s hard to describe. He was more drunk than I’ve ever seen him, and he’d been drinking in a more businesslike way than usual, but he was perfectly capable. Walked straight as an arrow. It seemed to make him more and more of a schoolmaster, if you know what I mean. By the time he went I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, it was so high-flown.”
“I take it he was heading straight for home?”
“Oh, you must ask him that, I don’t know.” She brightened at having reached something she honestly did not know, and stretched her small, shapely feet out before her with satisfaction. The murmurs from the bar, coming in only very softly, sounded like bees in lime flowers, drowsy and eased at the end of the day.
“I will. And what about Charles? He stayed till ten?” Why shouldn’t he, reflected George, when he had got rid of his rival for once, and scored a minor triumph with the girl? He wouldn’t go home until closing time that night, of all nights.
“Oh, he was the last out of the snug. He wanted to hang around and talk, even at that hour, but I was tired, and fed up with the pair of them.” She made a wry face which somehow only accentuated the softness and sweetness of her mouth, the brown, harassed gentleness of her eyes. “I didn’t behave so well myself. And he went home. But he was quite pleased with himself, was Charles. And Chad—well, I don’t honestly think either of them had any time to think about anyone but himself that night.”
“Probably not,” agreed George, cocking an ear toward t
he bar, where the clock was just striking, a few minutes ahead of its time. “Is Chad there tonight? I need to talk to him; perhaps I could catch him now.”
Io let him go, watched him go with a grieved, withdrawn face. Chad was certainly there among the regulars stirring in the snug, they had both heard his voice lifted in good-nights just after the clock struck; and certainly he would go home to his rather rigidly retired cottage up the hill, where his mother kept house for him in a chilly, indifferent gentility, by the lane and the fields, on which quiet road one could talk to him very earnestly, and not be observed or interrupted. And of course she was sure that Chad could fill in the details of his better-forgotten evening minute by minute, like a school exercise. In any case, what was Chad to her but an ill-tempered nuisance? Still she watched George’s purposeful exit to the yard and the lane with reluctance and regret, and would have liked to put a few miles between them until someone, someone who knew how to be more wary for Chad than he was likely to be for himself, had pointed out to him how times and people were changed in the village of Comerford.
A hand reached down through the banisters, and tweaked at the topmost of Io’s brown curls. Green eyes shone upon her quietly from the stairs.
“What did I tell you?” said Pussy, dangling her plaits as deliberately as if they had been baited. “He thinks it’s old Wedderburn! Now what are you going to do about it?”
Five
« ^ »
When they fell into step on the way up the fields, neither of them was in the least surprised. This was the way home for only a handful of people, and Sergeant Felse was not among them, but Chad Wedderburn merely looked at him along his wide, knife-sharp shoulder, and smiled rather wearily, and left it at that. He said: “Hullo! On business?” Over the hill and beyond the ridge of trees was the small, genteelly kept house which had caused him such a panic of claustrophobia when he first came back to it, and the acidulated gentlewoman whom he had found it so hard to recognize as his mother. The likeness had come back into her unchanging face for him after a while, and they had fitted together the creaking parts of their joint life, and found it not so bad a machine, after all; but there were still times when he suddenly felt his heart fail in him, wondering what she had to do with him. She was so well-bred that she could not embarrass him by any parade of pride in him, nor shatter him by too unveiled a love, and altogether he was grateful to her and fond of her. But it could not be called an ecstatic relationship. She provided the background she thought most appropriate; he appreciated and conformed to it as his part of the adjustment. Only now and again did it pinch him badly, after a whole year of practice, and usually he could put up with these times and make no fuss. More than once in Croatia he had tasted surgery without anesthetics; it was a pity if he couldn’t keep silence now when he got the anesthetic without the surgery.
The brown scar was like a pencil mark down his neck from the ear, a very small earnest of what he bore on his body. It drew his mouth and cheek a little awry, George noticed, a thing which was hardly observable by daylight; but now the twilight of a clouded three-quarter moon plucked his face into a deformed smile even when he was not smiling.
“On business, of course!” he said, answering himself equably. “Don’t bother to be subtle about it, just say it. By now we all know that we’re in it up to the neck—some of us rather above the neck, in fact. I know no reason why you shouldn’t look in my direction rather pointedly. I know no reason why I should go out of my way to deny that I killed this particular man. I can hardly be indignant at the suggestion, can I, considering my history?”
His dark cheek, hollow and frail in the half-darkness, twitched suddenly. He looked as if a little sudden light would have shown dully clean through him; too brittle and thin to be able to beat in a man’s head. And yet he spread his own hand in front of him, and looked at it, and flexed it, as if he stood off to regard its secret accomplishments, with awe that they should repose in such an unlikely instrument. The Fourth Form in their innocence had not wondered more at that than he had in his experience. He shivered in a quiet, inescapable disgust, remembering what was supposed to have been the achievement of his manhood. “It’s almost a pity,” he said, “that I can’t make it easy for you, but I don’t know the answer myself.”
“I’m just beginning to find out,” said George, rather ruefully, “what’s meant by routine investigations. They don’t follow any known routine for more than one yard before running off the rails. But if you want to ask the questions and answer them, too, go ahead, don’t mind me.”
“There was the Fleetwood affair,” said Chad, mentally leaning back to get it in focus, “and I’m not going to try and make that any less than it was. Only an incident, maybe, but it was a symptom, too. And I seem to remember saying something rather rash about not wanting to start anything in case I killed him. Has been heard to threaten the life of the deceased man! And there was even the Jim Tugg affair, too; I was a witness to that if I needed any reminders.”
“I didn’t attach too literal a meaning,” said George, “to what you said about killing him, if that’s any comfort to you.”
“Your mistake, I meant it literally. But you may also have observed that, because I was afraid of how it might end, I took good care, even under considerable provocation, not to let it begin.”
“Granted!” said George. “Why go out of your way to make a case for and against, when nobody’s accused you? I should sit back and wait events, if I were you, and not worry about it.”
“I think you wouldn’t. Haven’t you noticed that that’s the one thing none of us can do? Comerford’s too small, and murder, even so piteous a specimen of the art, is too big. Besides, I find your presence conducive to talk, and I’m interested to see how good a case can be made—for and against.” He was indeed talking to the night, which was no more impersonal than Sergeant Felse to him. “I find the motive angle a little under-supplied, don’t you? The Fleetwood affair passed over safely, one doesn’t kill this week for what one felt last week. A little roundabout, too. People do terrible things on behalf of other people, but things even more desperate for themselves. And what had Helmut ever done to me?”
This was more interesting than what George had foreseen, and he fell in with it adaptably enough, moving unhurried .and unstampeded up the leisurely swell of the darkened field, with the vague black ghosts of the straggling hedge trees marching alongside on his right hand. Not too much attention need be paid, perhaps, to the matter, but the manner had peculiarities. Maybe Chad had drunk a little more than usual even tonight, in pursuit of some quiet place he couldn’t find within his mind when sober. Or maybe he was instinctively putting up a barricade of eccentricity about his too questionable, too potential loneliness, to persuade the paths of all official feet to go round him reverently, as for a madman where madmen are holy. Or maybe he was just fed up, too fed up to be careful, and had set out to heave all the probabilities in the teeth of authority, and dare them to sort everything out and make sense of it.
“Jim Tugg suggested a very apposite motive, I thought,” said George mildly. “It would apply to you just as well. He said he had it against Helmut Schauffler that he was the living, walking, detestable proof of a war won at considerable personal cost by one set of men, and wantonly thrown away by others. If the Helmuts, he said, can sidle about the conquering country, only a few years later, hiding their most extreme nastiness behind the skirts of the law, what on earth did we tear our guts out for? I’m bound to say I find it a better motive than a great many which might seem more plausible on the surface.”
“A motive for anger,” said Chad, his voice slow and thoughtful in the dark, “but not for killing—not unless you could be sure that removing one man would make some difference. And of course it wouldn’t.”
“An angry man doesn’t necessarily stop to work out the effects of what he does.”
“Some do. I do. That’s why I didn’t do it. I had some training in calculating results, and doi
ng it quickly, too. It comes almost naturally to me now.”
“Moreover,” went on George placidly, “the removal of Helmut might have been expected to have a very good effect indeed. He was like a penknife, chipping away industriously at the mortar between the stones of a perfectly good, serviceable wall—picking away at it and prising it apart bit by bit, for no positive purpose in the world, only for the love of destroying things. Nobody likes to feel the roof being brought down over his head, in my experience.”
Chad turned his head suddenly, and looked along his thin shoulder with a small movement of such desperation and pain that even George was startled. “If you mean this damned inadequate society that’s supposed to keep the rain off us, what makes you think I’d be sorry to see it go? What gives you the idea I’ve found it weatherproof, these last few years? Wouldn’t I be more likely to forgive him the rest, if only he could bring this down on the top of us, and force us to put up something better in its place?” He drew a breath that hit George’s consciousness like a blow, and caused him to flinch. No doubt of the hurt here, no doubt of the bitterness. He tried to close the door on it again, but his voice was labored. “Never in my life,” he said deliberately, “did I strike a solitary blow for English society, and make no mistake, I’m never likely to start now.”
“Perhaps not,” said George, clairvoyant, “but for something bigger you might, or for something smaller. For the idea of human decency and dignity, for instance—”
“By reducing something human to an indecent and undignified mess in a ditch?”
“Something which had already offended so far that it had become a sort of renegade from its own kind. Perhaps! More is required to make up humanity than two arms, two legs, and all the rest of the physical catalogue. But far more likely, for the peace of mind of a very small unit of society—about as large as Comerford. I’m not sure that the disintegration of this one little community would leave you so completely cold.”
