by Ellis Peters
George was nonetheless familiar by now with this change. In most people it happened instantaneously, the brief flare of intensified awareness, and then the quick but stealthy closing of the door upon him, with an almost panicky quietness, so that he should not hear it shut to. In Jim the pace was slower, and only the eyes changed, the rest of the dark face never tightening by one muscular contraction; and in Jim the closing of the door had a deliberation which did not care so much about being observed. The collie stopped bossing the sheep about, and came and stood at his knee, as if he had called it.
“Well, Sergeant?” said Jim. “Thought of some more questions?”
“Just one,” said George, and found himself a leaning-place on the hurdles before he launched it. He wanted more than an answer to it; he wanted to understand the expression that went with the answer, but in the end all he could make of Jim’s face was a mild surprise when he asked at length:
“That green door in the orchard-wall up at the house— Which day did you paint it?”
Two
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Gerd Hollins put down the large hen-saucepan she had been about to lift to the stove, put it down carefully with a slow relaxing of the muscles of her olive forearms, and straightened up wiping her palms on the hips of her apron, where they left long damp marks in a deeper blue. She stood for a long minute looking at George without saying a word or moving a finger, quite still and aware, with her big eyes, strangely afraid but more strangely not afraid of him, fixed steadily on his face.
“How did you know?” she said. “Was there someone who saw us? Who was it who told you?” And suddenly the tensions went out of her, ebbing very quietly, and she sat down limply in the nearest chair, and leaned her linked hands heavily into her thighs, as if the weight of them was too much to hold up any longer. But it was odd that she should first ask that. Why should she want to know if someone had told him? Because in that case the same person might have told someone else?
There was only one someone who could count for her in such an affair or at such a moment. Or perhaps two? The second of whom had just manifested nothing but rather scornful surprise at being asked about the newly painted door. But in any case her husband was in all probability the only creature about whom she really cared. Was it safe to conclude, then, that, as far as she knew, her husband was unaware of Helmut’s last visit, and that the fear she felt was of the possibility that, after all, there might have_been someone willing and able to enlighten him?
When she let herself sag like that she was middle-aged, even though her face continued dark, self-contained and handsome. She looked at him, and waited to be answered.
“On Helmut’s tunic-sleeve,” he said, “there were very faint traces of green paint, not much more than a coating on the hairy outside of the pile. The kind of just noticeable mark you get from a quick-drying paint when it’s tacky. It tallies with the new paint on the door in your orchard-wall. Jim painted the door, he says, last Wednesday afternoon.”
She passed her hand across her forehead, smoothing aside a strayed end of her black hair. “Yes,” she said, “he did. He left it unlocked afterwards. Yes—I see! So no one actually told you?”
“No one. I’ve come so that you can do that.”
She looked up suddenly, and said: “Jim—?”
“Jim is still wondering what the devil I meant by the question. He doesn’t know it could have anything to do with Helmut. This is just between me and you.”
She gave a long sigh, and said: “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. It affects no one but me. Chris didn’t know. Jim didn’t know—at least—no, I’m sure he didn’t know about that night, at any rate. He was down in the village before Helmut came near me.”
Yes, she could care about more than one man at a time, it seemed, even if not in quite the same way. A stubborn, deliberate loyalty to Jim Tugg crossed at right-angles the protective love she felt for her husband. Might there not even be some real conflict here in this house, where the two of them went about her constantly, either loving her in his fashion? George caught himself back aghast from this complication of human feeling. Good God! he thought, I’m beginning to see chasms all round me, complexes in the kitchen, rivalries in the rick-yard. Why, I’ve known these people for years! But he was not quite reassured. How many of the people you have known for years do you really know?
“It was the fifth time he’d been up here,” said Gerd, in a level voice, “since he left us. He didn’t come too often, partly because it was a risk—and you know he always liked to have the odds on his side—but also, I think, because he wanted me never to get used to it, always to be able to think and hope I’d seen the last of him, so that he could come back every time quite fresh and unexpected. Twice he came over the fence and through the garden, when both Chris and Jim were off the place. He must have stayed somewhere watching until they went. The third time he found the little door in the wall. That was perfect, because in the evening I have to go there to feed the fowl and shut the pens, and there it’s quite private, right out of sight of the house or the yard. And narrow! I could never pass until he chose to let me. The fourth time was the same. There’d been eight days between, and I almost thought he’d tired of it. Then I had a lock put on the door, and kept it locked until the Wednesday. Jim forgot to lock it again after he finished. It never used to be locked, you see, it was no wonder it slipped his mind.”
She paused, rather as if to assemble her thoughts than in expectation of any comment from George, but he asked her, because it had been mystifying him all along: “But what could he do here? What satisfaction did he get, to make the game so fascinating to him? I mean, you’d expect even a Helmut to tire of simply tormenting someone—especially, if I may say so, when the victim was quite beyond being frightened.”
She weighed it and him in the deeps of her appallingly patient eyes, and explained quietly: “Fright is not everything. There may even be a new pleasure to be got out of someone who is not—frightened, exactly. I think Helmut must have got rather bored with people who were just frightened of him, during the war. They seem to have stopped being amusing to him. He liked better someone who was desperate, but couldn’t do anything about it. I was desperate, but there was nothing I could do. Maybe it wouldn’t be easy to make you understand what Helmut was like, those times when he came here after me. Since I’m telling everything, I’ll try to tell you that, too. He very seldom touched me, usually just stood between me and where I was going. Toward the end he began to finger me. Even then it was in his own way. My flesh was only attractive to him because it was in a way repellent, too. He just kept me with him while he talked. He talked about all those places in Germany where my kind of people were herded, and used, and killed. He told me how it must have been for my family. Especially how it must have ended. He told me that all in good time it would be like that for me, that I was not to believe I had finished with these things. He said England would learn, was learning fast, what to do with Jews, niggers, Asiatics, all the inferior breeds. Do not be obvious, and tell me that I am in England, and protected. He was real, was he not? He was there, and he was protected. Oh, I never believed literally in what he said. But I believed in him, because every word he said and every thought he had in his mind proved that he was still very much a reality. Things have been so badly mishandled that, after all we’ve done to get rid of him, he’s still one of the greatest realities in the world. In some countries almost the only reality—except poverty. And not quite a rumor in other countries—even here!”
She had regained, as she spoke, the power and composure of her body, and looked at him with straight, challenging eyes, but palely unsmiling.
“I wasn’t afraid of him,” she said steadily, “but I was afraid of the effect he had on me. I’d forgotten it was possible to hate and loathe anyone in that way.”
“I can understand it,” said George somberly. “But did he really get so much satisfaction out of these visits that he went on taking such risks for i
t?”
“He got the only bits of his present life that made him feel like a Nazi and a demi-god again. What more do you suppose he wanted? And he took very little risk. Almost none at all. He was always careful, he had time to be careful.”
“He could watch his step, yes, but at any moment you chose you could have told your husband the whole story. Why didn’t you? I can understand your keeping quiet at first, but after Jim’s flare-up with Helmut the story was out. Why didn’t you keep it that way? Why go to such trouble to pretend the persecution had ended? If you didn’t lie to your husband, you must have come pretty near it. You certainly lied to me. Why?”
She did not answer for a moment, and somehow in her silence he had a vivid recollection of Helmut’s body lying in the brook, with ripples tugging and twisting at his blond hair. Perhaps, after all, it was a silly question to ask her. With that ending somewhere shadowy at the back of her mind, she had gone to some trouble to ensure that for the one person who mattered there should be no motive. And Hollins was a man for whom she could do such a service successfully, a limited man, a gullible man, a fond man, not so hard to blindfold. A woman like Gerd, experienced in every kind of evil fortune, might easily take it upon herself to shut up his mind from anger, his heart from grief, and his hands from violence. What was another load more or less to her, if he was back in the sun and serenity of his fields, innocent of any anxiety?
“Did you have any suspicion,” said George suddenly, “that this would happen?”
“This?”
“Schauffler’s murder.” He used the word deliberately, but there was no spark.
“Like it did happen—no, I never thought of that. I thought of anger, and fights, and magistrates’ courts, and newspapers, and all the stupidity of these things. I didn’t often think of him dead, and when I did, it was openly, in a fight—some blow that was a little too hard. But that would have been enough, you see.”
Yes, he saw. So perhaps the motive she was so resolute not to let slip into her husband’s hands had only lain waiting and growing and hardening in her own.
“It seems, you understand,” he said carefully, “that, but for whoever killed him, you must have been the last person to see Helmut alive. The last word we had on him was from the boy who saw him leave the lane for the field-path at Markyeat Cross, soon after seven. It was after that, obviously, that he came here, since he seems to have been heading straight for you then. Tell me about that visit. What time did he come in by the green door? How long did he stay?”
She told him as exactly as she could, dragging up details from her memory with a distasteful carefulness. It must have been nearly eight o’clock when she had gone out to the poultry-houses, therefore according to the time when he had passed Markyeat Cross he must have waited for her coming at least twenty minutes, but his savoring patience had not given out. He had left her, she thought, rather before a quarter-past eight. Where he had gone on closing the green door between them she did not know. By eleven o’clock, according to the doctors, he had been dead and in his brook, snugly tucked into the basin of clay under the edge of the Harrow woods and the waste lands. And between the last touch of his pleased and revolted fingers on her bare arm, and the blow that killed him, who had seen him?
“I wish to heaven,” said George suddenly, “that you’d told me the truth long ago!”
“When you questioned me about these things there was already a body to be accounted for. In such a case one lies— rather too easily.”
“I meant long before that, before it ever came to that. If you wanted your husband protected, as I’m sure you did, at least why didn’t you come to me?”
She gave him a long look which made him feel small, young and nakedly useless, and said without any irony or unkindness: “Sergeant Felse, you over-estimate yourself and your office. To the police people simply do not go. Nor to the Church, either. It seems there are no short cuts left to God.”
It was horribly true, he felt as if she had thrown acid in his face. All the good intentions, all the good agencies, seem to have grown crooked, grown in upon themselves like ingrowing toenails, and set up poisoned irritations from which people wince away. In real trouble, unless he is lucky enough to possess that rare creature, a genuine friend, every man retires into himself, the one fortress on which he can place at any rate some reliance. As Gerd had withdrawn into herself and taken all her problems with her, that no one else might stumble over them and come to grief.
The only people who still ask the police for protection, thought George bitterly, are the Fascists. What sort of use are we?
“It sounds impossible,” he said, “that a woman can be persecuted in her own house, like that, and have no remedy she can feel justified in taking. Tell me honestly, had you yourself ever thought of a way out?”
She looked at him impenetrably, and said: “No. Except to go on bearing it, and take what precautions I could to avoid him.”
“Did your husband ever say anything to make you think he had his suspicions? I mean, that Helmut was still haunting you?”
“No, never.”
“Nor Jim, either?”
“No, nor Jim.”
She heard, just as she said it, Christopher’s feet at the scraper outside the scullery door, methodically scraping off his boots the traces of one of the few damp places left in the hollows of his fields, the shrunken marsh pool in the bottom meadows. George heard it, too, a slow, dogged noise like the man who made it. He saw the slight but sudden rearing of Gerd’s head, the deep, perceptible brightening of her eyes, the quickening of all the tensions which held her secret. But not a gleam of welcome for him now, no gladness. Not for the first time, Chris had done the wrong thing. She got up with a quite daunting gesture of dismissal, picked up the hen-saucepan, and put it on the large gas-ring, and resolutely lit the gas under it. But George did not move. Just as the porch door opened he said clearly:
“In that case I hope you realize, Mrs. Hollins, that you seem to be the only person in Comerford who had an excellent motive for wanting him dead, and who knew his movements that night well enough to have followed him and killed him.”
Three
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Chris Hollins heaved himself into the doorway and stood there looking up under his lowered brows, like a bull meditating a charge. Gerd, turning with the matches in her hand, gave him a look so forbidding that at any other time he would have retired into a dazed silence, following her leads, saying what he believed she wanted of him; but now he stood and lowered his head at her, too, in his male indignation, and demanded menacingly:
“What’s this you’re saying to my wife, Sergeant?”
George repeated it. Not because he was proud of it; indeed, the second time it sounded even cheaper. But it had certainly made Hollins rise, and that was almost more than he had expected. He said it again, almost word for word, with the calm of distaste, but to the other man’s ears it sounded more like the calm of rocklike confidence.
“And what grounds have you got,” he said thickly, “for saying any such thing to her? How do you know a dozen more people didn’t know of his movements, and hadn’t better reason to want him dead than ever she had?”
“There may have been a hundred,” agreed George, “but there’s curiously little sign of even one. You find me the evidence, and I’ll be more than interested.”
Gerd said: “In any case, it’s no desperate matter, so don’t let’s get melodramatic about it. Sergeant Felse has his job to do. I haven’t been accused of killing him, so far, and there’s no need to act as if I have.” Her eyes were large and urgent on her husband now, with no time for George; and for that reason he was able to make more sense of their questioning than ever he had made before. She wanted the subject dropped. She wanted either an end of the interview, or Chris miles away; for it was plain, for one dazzling moment, that she simply did not know what he might be about to say, and feared it as she had never feared Helmut Schauffler. “I’ve told all I know,” s
he said. “I don’t think he can have anything more to ask you.”
“I might,” said George, “ask him why it doesn’t surprise him to hear that you knew all about Helmut’s movements the night he was killed. After all, yesterday you both denied you’d seen hide or hair of him since he was in court. He seems to take it all as a matter of course that we should have come to a different conclusion today.”
The exchange of glances was fluid and turbulent, like the currents of a river. One minute he thought he had the hang of it, the next it seemed to mean something quite different. They were at cross-purposes, each in fear of what the other might give away, each probing after the other’s secrets. Certainly it seemed that Helmut’s last visit to the farm had been no secret from Hollins, however securely Gerd had tried to hide it. Now she was at a loss how to say least, how to keep him most silent, agonized with trying to understand at every stage before George could understand, and so steer the revelations into the most harmless channel. But Hollins was past giving her any cooperation in the endeavor. Concealment was alien to his nature, and he had had enough of it, if it could end in his wife’s being singled out as a likely suspect of murder. He swung his heavy head from one to the other of them, darkly staring, and said bluntly:
“Well I knew he’d been here, and talked to her, and carried on his old games at her, like before! And well I knew she told you lies when she said the opposite yesterday. Do you wonder she kept as much as she could to herself? If it was a mistake, it was a mistake ninety-nine out of a hundred would have made.”
She stood there staring at him with blank, shocked eyes. When she could speak she said: “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you at least knew nothing about it—I wanted you not to know! But when you found it out, you might have told me!”
