by Ellis Peters
“Oh, they’ll go home, they’ll be all right. I’m coming with you.” As they crawled through the swinging pale she asked: “Do you really think they were that German’s pheasants? Dominic, really do you?”
“Yes, really I do. Well, look down there the way we came, it’s only a few minutes to the path by the well, to the—to where he was. And unless it was someone who was dead, wouldn’t he go back for his birds? Some time before a whole week there must be a chance. After he hid them so carefully, too, because they weren’t just dropped in the bushes, he wasn’t in as big a hurry as all that. He just wanted them out of his pockets, because there was someone he heard in the woods, and he wanted to be able to pop through the fence and march off down by the well quite jauntily, nothing on him even if it was the keeper, and if he got awkward.”
“But we don’t know that Helmut had been poaching,” she objected.
“Well, we know he was as near as that to the preserves. And don’t you remember, the lining of his tunic was slit across here, to make an extra-large pocket inside. Why should he want a pocket like that, unless it was to put birds or rabbits in? And where we found him—well, it’s so near.”
They skirted the high hedge, and took the right-hand path down into the small overgrown quarry, instead of bearing left toward the all-significant well. What was left of the light seemed warm and kind and even bright upon them, greenish, bluish, with leaves, with sky, and the soft distant glimmering of stars almost invisible in the milky blue. Not even a hint of frost now, only the cool regretful afterbreath of summer, mild and quiet, ominous with foreshadowings, sweet with memories. Clamor of voices from the slackening game they had left came after them with infinite remoteness.
“He put them there until the coast was clear,” said Pussy, hushed of voice, “and he went slipping back on to the lawful path, bold as brass. What harm am I doing? Because he heard someone coming in the wood, you think? It might have been the keeper? Or it might have been anyone, almost—”
“Yes. But by the well, going along looking all innocent, as you said, he met someone. And that was the person who killed him. So he never had the chance to go back for them.”
Once out of the closed, musty, smothering darkness, where panic lay so near and came so lightly, they could discuss the thing calmly enough, and even step back from it to regard its more inconvenient personal implications. As, for instance, the unfortunate location of the pit where the discovery had been made.
“Of course,” said Pussy, “the very first thing he’ll ask you will be where did you find them? And you’ll have to admit we were trespassing.”
“He won’t have to ask me,” said Dominic, on his dignity. “It’ll be the very first thing I shall tell him.”
“Well, I suppose that’s the only thing to do—but I don’t suppose it’ll get you off.”
“Can’t help that,” said Dominic firmly. “This is more important than trespassing. And anyhow, everybody trespasses sooner or later, you can do it even without knowing, sometimes.” But to be honest, of course, he reflected within himself, that was not the way he had done it. However, he was not seriously troubled. What is minor crime, when every official mind is on a murder case?
They hurried down through the narrow, birch-silvered path which threaded the quarry, and into the edges of the village where the first street-lights were already shining. Horrid whiffs of decay tossed behind them on the small breezes of coolness which had sprung up with the night. They let themselves in unobtrusively by the scullery door of the police-station, and sidled into the office to see if George was there. But the office was empty. George had to be fetched away from his book and his pipe in front of the kitchen fire, and brought in by an incoherent Pussy, almost forcibly by the hand, to view the bodies, which by this time were reposing on an old newspaper upon his desk, under the merciless light of a hundred-watt bulb. The effect was displeasing in the extreme, and Dominic’s self-willed inside began to kick again, even before he saw his father’s face of blank consternation halted on the threshold.
“What in the name of creation,” said George, “do you two imagine you’ve got there?”
Two
« ^ »
Halfway through the explanation, which was a joint affair, and therefore took rather longer than it need have done, Bunty began to be suspicious that she was missing something, and as the parties involved were merely Dominic and Pussy, she had no scruples about coming in to demand her share in their revelations. Besides, there was a chance that someone would be needed to hold the balance between her husband and her son, who on this subject of all subjects still obstinately refused to see eye to eye. The note of appeasement, however, was being sounded with quite unusual discretion as she entered.
“It was an absolute accident,” Dominic said, “honestly it was. We weren’t even thinking about that business, and it was only one chance in a thousand we ever found them. If the pale hadn’t been loose we shouldn’t ever have gone in, and if Pussy’s torch hadn’t been phoney I shouldn’t have grabbed off in the dark for a hold in the grass, and put my hand down the hole. It was just luck. But we couldn’t do anything except bring them to you, once we’d got them, could we?”
“You’d no business there in the first place,” said George, heavily paternal. “Serve you right if Briggs bad caught you and warmed your jacket for you. Next time I hope he does.”
Bunty remembered certain events of George’s schooldays; but she did not smile, or only within her own mind. Dominic grinned suddenly, and said: “Oh, well—occupational risks! But old Briggs isn’t so hot on running.”
“I’m surprised at you, Pussy,” pursued George, not strictly truthfully. “I thought you had more sense, even if he hasn’t.”
There was really no need to argue with him, for his mind was all the time on the dingy draggle of nastiness obtruding its presence from the desk. Thirteen days now! It could be. And the minute fluff they had harvested from Helmut’s tunic-lining came easily back to mind. On his last evening he had been observed on the edge of the preserves, his body had been found not a hundred yards from the fence, and at about ten o’clock, melting into the shadows with the typical coyness of his kind, Chad Wedderburn had caught a glimpse of what he could only suppose to be a poacher. And among the miscellaneous small belongings found in Helmut’s pockets—
“He had a torch, didn’t he?” said Dominic, his eyes fixed insatiably on his father’s face. “A big, powerful one. I remember—”
Yes, he had had a torch on him, big and powerful, dragging one pocket of his tunic out of line. Trust Dom to remember that! Found practically on the spot, equipped for the job, and dead just about as long as these birds; and as the kids had pointed out, what poacher but a dead poacher would leave his bag cached until it rotted on him? He supposed he had better call at the Harrow, instead of making straight for the pit.
“Can we come back with you?” asked Dominic eagerly. “We could take you straight to it—and there are several holes down there, you might not know which it was.”
“It’s almost bedtime now,” said Bunty, frowning upon the idea. “And Io will wonder where Pussy is.”
“Oh, Mummy, there’s nearly half an hour yet, we came away before any of the others. And we’d come straight back, really, it wouldn’t take long.”
“Nobody’ll be worried about me,” said Pussy, elaborately casual. “I’m not expected home till half-past nine.”
“Better have a look on the spot,” said George to Bunty. “I’ll send them straight back as soon as they’ve told their tale.”
The trouble was, of course, that he would and did do precisely that. As soon as they had collected Charles Blunden from the farmhouse, with brief explanations, and led their little party to the pit in the pinewoods, and indicated the exact repellent hollow from which they had removed the pheasants, the adults, of course, had done with them. Pussy expected it, Dominic knew it. In the pitchy, resiny darkness, even with lights, expressions were too elusive to be re
ad accurately, but dismissal was in the very stance of George, straightening up in the heel of the pit to say briskly:
“All right, you two, better cut home now. Unless,” he added unkindly, putting ideas into Charles’s easygoing head, “Mr. Blunden wants to ask any questions about fences before we let you out of it.”
“Eh?” said Charles, with his arm rather gingerly down the dank hiding-hole, and only a corner of his mind on what had been said, just enough to prick up to the sound of his own name.
“Violating your boundaries, you realize—that’s how the thing began. Knock their heads together if you feel like it, I’ll look the other way.”
“It was my fault,” said Dominic, demurely sure of himself. “We only wanted somewhere new to hide, and we didn’t mean to go far or do any harm. And anyhow, we did come straight back and own up to it as soon as we found the birds. You’re not mad, are you, Mr. Blunden?” He daren’t be, of course, even if he wanted to; Pussy wasn’t Io’s young sister for nothing. Io might call her all the little devils in creation on her own account, but it wouldn’t pay Charles Blunden to start the same tune; families are like that. So Dominic trailed his coat gracefully close to impudence, and felt quite safe. They were about to be thrown out of the conference, in any case, so he had nothing to lose.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Charles, disappointingly not even very interested. “A fence like that asks to be violated. Not that I’m advising you to try it while Briggs is about, mind you, or even to let my father spot you at it. But there’s no harm done this time. Just watch your step, and we’ll say no more about it.”
“And we did right to go straight back and report, didn’t we?” pursued Dominic, angling for a reentry into council through Charles, since George certainly wouldn’t buy it. “I say, do you think it was really like we worked it out? Do you think—”
George said: “Git! We want to talk, and it’s high time you two went home to bed. You’re observant, intelligent, helpful and reliable people, no doubt, in fact almost everything you think you are; but there isn’t a thing more you can do for us here. Beat it!”
“I suppose it’s something to be appreciated,” said Pussy sarcastically, as they threaded their way out of the wood by the slender gleam of the torch, and went huffily but helplessly home.
Three
« ^ »
Nothing more there, I’m certain,” said Charles, after twenty minutes of combing the pit and its spidery caverns inch by inch with torches. “Try it again by daylight, of course, but I think there’ll be nothing to show for it. It looks as if the kids weren’t far out.”
“Oh, that was a deliberate cache, all right,” agreed George, frowning round at the queer gaunt shadows and lights of the young tree trunks, erect and motionless, circling them like an audience. “Things don’t fall into sidelong holes like that, even if they were dropped over the edge of the pit in a hurry. They were meant to be well out of sight, and I must say only the merest freak seems to have unearthed them again. There’s only one thing worries me—”
“About the Helmut theory? I thought it was pretty sharp of your boy to have jumped to it like he did, Why, what’s the snag? I can’t see any holes in it.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is a hole. People do such queer things, and do the simplest things so queerly. But in my experience poachers don’t go to such elaborate shifts to hide their birds, even when they have to ditch them for safety. This place is isolated enough to begin with, and here’s the pit, ready to hand, what’s wrong with just dropping the birds in one of the hollows under the hang of the grass? Ninety-nine fellows in a hundred would.”
“Just wanted to make doubly sure, I suppose.”
“He didn’t expect to be leaving ’em a week or more, I take it. It’s long odds the things would have been safe as houses like that for the time they’d have had to wait.”
“Still, if he had to scramble down into the pit in any case to find a hiding-place, why not go the whole hog? And anyhow, isn’t the very thoroughness of the thing an extra argument for thinking it was Helmut who planted them? He being a poacher rather out of our experience than in it, and given to habits of Prussian thoroughness? Where another bloke might favor rapid improvisation and a bit of risk, I should think he might easily have proceeded with this sort of methodical mak sikker. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe, if you put it like that. But it still looks farfetched to me! Let’s get out!” he said, digging a toe into the crumbling clay slope. “Nothing more we can do here.”
They ploughed their way to the upper air, which was scarcely lighter by reason of the enclosing trees; and on the rim of the pit George turned to look down once again into the deep, dismal scar. “How far back does this date? It’s not one of your father’s wartime operations—trees are too well-grown for that by—what, ten years? Must be that at least.”
“Oh, yes, this patch is one of the first, though mind you these beastly conifers do give a false impression, they’re such mushrooms. Can’t remember the exact year, but late in the 1920s it must have been. He had all this mound leveled and planted. But you can see it wasn’t a very good job they did on the pit-shafts.” His own voice, regretful and even a little bitter, sounded to him for a moment like an echo of Chad’s. He wasn’t succumbing to Chad’s persuasions after all, was he? But the old man could have made a job of it, while he was about it. And if he was alert enough in the 1920s to level a mound for his own preserves, why couldn’t he see that he owed the village a bit of leveling, too, for all the chaos the get-rich-quick mining grandfather had created? Still, it was easy to be both wise and enlightened twenty years after the event. They were of their kind and generation, no better but anyhow no worse. “With proper protection on replacing and leveling,” he said, almost apologetically, “some of these ruined villages could still have been rich. Why don’t we think in time?”
“Up to a point,” said George dryly, turning on his heel from the unpleasing prospect, “they did.”
“Up to the point of private preserves they did, but not an inch beyond.”
“Strictly on that principle,” said George, “the century proceeded.”
“The old boy’s late operations were all out on the heath patches the other side of the house,” said Charles. “Near the boundary, actually. The opencast gang will be ripping them all up again, if they decide it’s worth their while after all these disastrous expenses they’ve run their noses into recently, and if they win the dispute.”
He didn’t sound to George as if he cared very much either way about that, or indeed knew very clearly what he did want. They walked singly through the close-set trees, Charles leaning the torch-beam to the ground for George’s benefit. “We didn’t even make a good job of the planting,” he said sadly. “I’m all for mixed woods myself, these quick payoffs with conifers play hell with the soil.” They came out from the warm, cloying stomach of the wood, where the soft darkness beyond seemed almost light by comparison, a striped light through the pales. “This time,” said Charles, “I really think you should leave by the gap in the fence. See for yourself!” He groped along the pales until the loose one swung in his hand. “Here we are! I must get that seen to right away. No need to encourage ’em!”
George, looking through the film of trees beyond the fence, could trace at a little distance the cleared line of the path by which Chad Wedderburn had plotted his angry course that night of the death. Somewhere about here he had heard and glimpsed, if his tale was true, the figure of a man, presumed to be a poacher, withdrawing himself rapidly and modestly into the shadows. Could it have been Helmut Schauffler himself? Last heard of previously at about ten to nine, about five hundred yards from this same spot, very pleased with himself, singing to himself in German. Sitting, waiting for the spirit to move him to the next mischief. Or perhaps for the night to fall.
If the shy figure seen at somewhat after ten had really been his, the time during which his death might have taken place was na
rrowed to slightly under one hour; and Chris Hollins, marching home at last about half-past ten, was almost certainly absolved from any shadow of guilt. For though it did not, as George had said, take three-quarters of an hour to reach the Harrow from Hollins’s farm, it did take at least twenty-five minutes to do the journey even in the reverse direction, which was mostly downhill. And the time of Hollins’s arrival did not rest solely on his wife’s evidence, for there was the carrier’s cottage at the bottom of his own drive, and the carrier who had leaned over his gate and exchanged good-nights with him. At twenty-past ten, he said, and he was a precise man. If he was right, and if the shadow among the shadows was Helmut, then Chris Hollins could not have killed him.
“Not a very promising line, after all, I suppose,” said Charles, sounding, as everyone did, quite cheerful at this reflection. In a way, no one wanted the wretched case solved; in another way no one would have any peace, and nothing would ever be normal again, until it was solved. “Still, you never know. Some witness may turn up yet who’ll really have something to say. Anyhow, if there’s anything I can do when you come up again, you know where to find me.”
George went home to Bunty very thoughtfully. It was all if, whichever way he turned. If Chad’s elusive figure at ten had been Helmut, Chris Hollins was out of it. If, of course, Chad was telling the truth. And that was something about which no one could be sure. His whole attitude was so mad that it was quite conceivable he had not only seen him, but knocked him on the head and rolled him into the brook, too, and come back to tell half of the tale, when he need have mentioned none. It sounded crazy, but Chad was hurling provocations into the teeth of fate in precisely this bitter-crazy manner. Or, of course, he could be telling the whole truth, in which case it became increasingly desirable to identify his poacher. Most probably some canny regular who had nothing to do with the business, but still he might know something. See Chad again, in case he could add anything to his previous statement. See all the poachers he could think of; business is business, but murder is murder.
