by Ellis Peters
The same reflection had not escaped either George or Bunty.
“But if I produced some ordinary rubbish,” went on Dominic, stumbling a little in haste to get past a thought which he himself, on reflection, did not like very much, “or even if it was really something, and I obviously didn’t know it, and would take his word for it that it was rubbish—then he was O.K., he could just burn it and forget it, and I could forget it, too. Most likely that’s really what he expected. Only he had to be sure I didn’t know too much about it already, he couldn’t take any chances on me. And I had to be sure, too. It wasn’t any good half-doing it. So I went the whole hog. After school I got on to Pussy. I suppose she told you all that part—”
“I didn’t know what you meant to do,” protested Pussy. “I knew it was something desperate, by the way you looked, but I didn’t know how bad. Or I’d have told your mother, right away, and put a stop to it.”
“You would not! And if you had, you’d have spoiled the whole thing. But you wouldn’t! Well, then I went up to the well, and took my German vocabulary notebook from school—” His eyes strayed rather dubiously toward Chad, who smiled, and laid the wreckage on the table. “I’m afraid it’s rather past it now. Do you suppose we can square it? I had to have something fairly convincing, and with a bit of faking the figures, and then doctoring it in the mud, and drying it again, it made a pretty good show. Anything that came through, you see, was at least German.”
“I dare say we can square it about the notebook,” said Chad gravely, “all things considered.”
“Well, you know everything else, you were there. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded, truly it wasn’t. And I couldn’t think of any other way. I had to make him think I knew too much to be let go, or he wouldn’t have given himself away. I was scared, but it was the best I could do. Mummy, you’re not awfully mad at me, are you?” The reaction was setting in. He was very tired, his eyelids drooping; but he wanted to get rid of all of it, and sleep emptied of even the last dregs of his seething excitement.
“Not tonight,” said Bunty comfortably. “I’m saving that up for tomorrow.”
“But, Dad, if Pussy didn’t bring you there, like I expected, how did you get there? I’m jolly glad you did, but how did you?”
“I followed Blunden,” said George simply. “I’d gone part of the way you went, about Helmut’s murder, about the way the land kept cropping up. But I won’t say I seriously thought of Blunden, until the dog came into the picture, or rather didn’t come into it when he should have done. I smelt the same rat. The spaniel more or less vanished. Nobody exercised him, he was never seen out with the old man. I got the same ideas you had. So I started a close watch on Blunden; and when he suddenly groomed the dog and took it down to the station after the funeral this afternoon, Weaver and I went after him. He went to get rid of it, of course, before anyone else could start noticing things.”
“He didn’t kill the dog, too?” asked Pussy anxiously.
“No, he sold him—to a man who’d made several attempts to buy him from Charles before, for a very good price. Quite a known name in the spaniel world, lives in Warwickshire, right in the country miles from anywhere. We found out all about him quite easily. No, dogs were something it hardly occurred to Blunden to kill. He used them to help him kill other things. It didn’t seem necessary to kill the dog, and it could have been dangerous. But it was quite natural to get rid of him, after what had happened—a gesture to get rid of a bereavement, and give the dog a fresh start, too. Besides, when he had a thing of value, he couldn’t resist getting a price for it. Well, he sold the dog, and he came home, and we were on his heels—just in time to come in on your little scene, and a nice fright you gave us.”
“Do you mean you were close behind us all the time?” asked Dominic, opening his eyes wide.
“As close as was safe.”
“I wish I’d known! I’d have felt a lot better,” He yawned hugely. “And do you mean, then, that you’d have got on to him just the same, without all that performance? I scared myself nearly to death for nothing?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said George, smiling. “I was certain he’d killed Charles. I might have got hold of the stick sooner or later, and got him on that charge. But to date we hadn’t a shred of real evidence. You provided that—at least enough to let us get our hands on him, and the rest followed.”
“I’m glad if I was useful,” said Dominic, “anyway.” He yawned again. Io took the gentle hint which poised on Bunty’s near eyelid, and rose from her hassock.
“It’s time we went home. Dad might be wondering, and we’ll have a lot of explaining to do for him. Come on, Pussy, you can see Dom again tomorrow, he’s had about enough for tonight, and so have you, I should think.” And she turned with equal simplicity to Chad, and gave him the full candid look of her brown eyes, and her hand, too. “Come back with us, Chad! Just for half an hour!”
Jim Tugg’s dog was stretched out on the office rug. He rose at the first sound of his master’s step on the threshold of the room, and fell into his place in the little procession, close at the shepherd’s heel. Subdued good-nights drifted back to Bunty in the doorway, soft, relaxed murmurs of sound, tired, content. She watched them go, and her gratitude went after them down the moist October street, where the lamps were just winking out for half-past eleven. Chad with his hand protectively at Io’s elbow, as if he had had the right for years, Io with her arm round Pussy’s shoulders. A lot of knots had somehow come untied, and when the nine-days’ wonder had passed over, Comerford could sleep easy in its bed. Bless them all, Jim and the collie, too, everyone who had stood by Dominic and brought him back alive.
She went back to the kitchen. Dominic had come down to the fire, and was kneeling on the rag to warm himself, shivering a little from the cold which follows nervous strain. But he was still talking, rather drunkenly but with great determination.
“There was something in it, you see, about the people who get to take killing for granted. Only Cooke had hold of the wrong ones, I think. It isn’t the people like old Wedderburn, who had to do it because there wasn’t any other choice at all. You know, Dad, sometimes things get into such a jam that there isn’t a right thing to do, but only a least wrong one. And that’s how it was with the people like him, in the war. And then, even if you do the best you can, you feel dirty. And you hate it. You don’t know how he’s hated it! But it wasn’t like that with Blunden at all. The only use he had for a lot of things was to kill them. He bred things to kill. He was brought up to it. The little things in the woods, that he could have left alone without missing much, the badgers, and foxes, and crows—anything that took a crumb of his without paying for it double, he killed. And the war didn’t hit him, you see, because he was here, all he had to do was feel the excitement of it, a long way off, and talk about knocking hell out of the beggars. He didn’t have to do it. He didn’t have to feel dirty. Of course it came easy to him. Why shouldn’t it? In a way it wasn’t even real. Nothing was, that didn’t happen to him.”
“And do you really think,” asked George, gravely and respectfully, “that even Blunden—about whom I wouldn’t like to say you’re wrong—killed two people and was quite ready to kill a third, simply to preserve twenty acres of land?”
“I suppose so, yes. It was his, you see. Whether he even wanted it or not, it was his, and so it was sacred. It might as well have been his blood. It made no difference if it was only twenty acres, or if it was only one. That didn’t have anything to do with it.” He rubbed a tired hand over his eyes. Bunty came and put her hands on his shoulders, and he got up obediently to the touch, and gave her a dazed smile. “Yes, Mummy, I’ll go to bed. I am tired.”
George drew his son to him for a moment in his arm. “Goodnight, Dom! Look—don’t waste any regrets on Blunden. You did what you decided you had to do, what seemed to be the right thing, for everybody. Didn’t you?”
“Yes. Well—I thought I did. I thought I was sure about it. Only
they’ll kill him, won’t they?”
“He killed, didn’t he? And hurt more people even than he killed. Couldn’t we agree, at least,” he said very gently, “that what you, did was the least wrong thing? In the circumstances?”
“I suppose so,” said Dominic with a pale smile, and went away quietly to bed. But when Bunty went up to him, ten minutes later, he was lying with the light still on, and his eyes wide open, staring into the corner of the ceiling as if he would never sleep. She went to his bedside and leaned down to him without a word; and suddenly he put his arms out of bed and reached up for her, and clung to her desperately. She felt his heart pounding. He said in a fierce, vehement stammer: “Mummy, I’m never going to be a policeman, never, never!” And then he began to cry. “Mummy, don’t tell him! Only I couldn’t—I couldn’t!”
She could have argued George’s side of it, she could justly have told him that in an imperfect world somebody has to do the dirty work; but there was an answer to that, too, and she had a feeling that Dominic would put his finger on it. And in any case there would be a lot more days after tomorrow, time enough to get over this and be ready for the next inescapable tangle when it came. So she just hugged and soothed him, and said placidly: “No, darling, no, you shan’t! Of course you shan’t!” and held him gently rocking in her arms until he stopped crying and went to sleep.
X—Treasure Trove
One
« ^ »
He got over it, of course, very quickly, almost as quickly as Comerford did. Only half the story was ever allowed to leak out, but it was enough to cause people to turn and look twice at Dominic in the street, and attract a comet’s-tail of envious boys to trail after him on the way to and from school. Pussy shared his notoriety, but Pussy was a born iconoclast, and delighted in pushing even her own false image off its pedestal. But Dominic could enjoy being idolized, even while he saw through it; and the jealous scorn of Rabbit and his coterie was even sweeter to him than the adoration of the rest. Pretty soon it became necessary to take him down a peg. George had not saved his ammunition for nothing.
Not that there was anything peculiarly displeasing about Dominic on the gloat. He enjoyed it so, and laughed so wickedly at himself and his gallery at the same time, that it needed a serious-minded father to find the heart to burst the bubble. And then it was not an unqualified success.
“You are undoubtedly,” said George, laying down his office pen, “no end of a clever devil, my lad. But let me tell you this, that coup of yours was the most barefaced fluke that ever came off to the shame of the really clever. And now I’ll say what I’ve been storing up for you, young man, for a long time. If ever you put your private oar into my affairs again, and put me or anyone else to the trouble of lugging you out of a spot like that, look out for yourself afterwards, that’s all! You’ll be due for the nearest thing to a real hiding you ever had in your life, just as soon as I get you home undamaged. I ought to have done it this time, but next time I won’t make any mistake.”
Dominic, when he could speak, gasped: “Well, I like that! I save you no end of a long, dreary job, and maybe one that would be a failure, anyhow, and solve your beastly case for you, and that’s all the gratitude I get!” But he was laughing even then, at George as well as himself, until hard paternal knuckles rapped at the back of his head, and jolted the grin from his face.
“Better take notice,” said George. “I mean it.”
And he did. One sober look at him, and there was no more question about it. Dominic digested the steadying implications, and went away to think it over; but his spirits were too much for him, and he could not, in his present irrepressible state of gaiety, be put down in this way. Five minutes later he was back. He put his head in at the office door, and said sweetly: “I told Mummy what you said. She says if you try it, you’ll have to deal with her.”
“Tell her from me,” said George grimly, looking up from his work, “that I’ll be delighted to deal with her—after I’ve dealt with you! And if you come barging in here just once more today,” he added, warming, “I’ll start now.”
Dominic laughed, but he went, and he did not come back with any more impudence that day, which in itself was enough to suggest that he had decided to pay a little attention. And presently the exhilaration which had followed on the heels of his first revulsion went the same steady, sensible way into oblivion, so that before Christmas his days had settled again into a beautiful reassuring normality. People didn’t forget. It was rather that events slipped away into perspective, and left the foreground for what was newly urgent, end-of-term examinations, cake-mixing, present-buying, and all the rest of the seasonal trappings. Not even the very young can iron out flat all the unevennesses of the past, but the mountains of today are the molehills of tomorrow.
So Comerford got over the shocks to its nervous system, and the place where Selwyn Blunden and his son had fitted began to heal over even before the winter had set in. He had already ceased to be the main topic of conversation in the village by the time he died in prison in November, before he could be brought to trial. Medically his death was curious. He was old, of course, and parts of his economy were wearing out with over-use; but there seemed no special reason why he should dwindle away and stop living as he did. Bunty said he had died of frustration and cumulative shock at finding that, after all, he was not above the law. He was a bad loser, because he had always used his position and privileges to avoid any exercise in the art of losing gracefully. It seemed seriously possible that spleen should kill him.
So there was never a verdict in either of the Comerford cases, except the verdict which had already been collectively pronounced by the village; but that was all that was required to set the village free to go back to its everyday occupations. The rift in the wall of society closed gently with the closing year. And there were other things to be discussed, other surprises to be assimilated, like Io Hart’s quiet marriage to Chad Wedderburn, at Comerbourne registry office at the end of November. A quick decision, that was, said Comerford, considering the other one wasn’t long dead; but this wasn’t the first knot that had been cut by events when it couldn’t be unraveled by humankind, and maybe it was all for the best.
Pussy confided to Dominic: “You don’t know how much trouble she had with him, even after that night. The time he spent trying to tell her he ought not to let her do it! It would have taken more than him to stop her, once she knew he was only trying to be noble. You men are a silly lot of dopes, if you ask me. But she nagged him so much, he had to marry her in the end to shut her up.”
The more usual interpretation of the affair was that Chad had managed to get Io at last, after infinite trouble, because Charles Blunden was no longer there to be his rival. But Pussy, though prone to sisterly derogations, was nearer the mark. The only thing for which her version did not quite account was the look of extreme and astonished joy on the bridegroom’s face when the little registrar shut the book, smiled at them, and said: “Well, that’s all! You’ve done it now—you’re married!”
Then the rumor started, and proved by Christmas to be no mere rumor, that Gerd Hollins was expecting a baby at last, after nine years of hoping and one of quietly giving up hope. They’d even thought of adopting one, when it began to seem certain that they would have none of their own; but now there was a fair chance of a son coming to the farm in his own right, and good luck to him, said Comerford, and to his mother, too; she’d had more than her share of the bad. A bit late, perhaps, to start a family, but she was a strong woman, and older and less sturdy wives had produced healthy first babies before now.
So what with births and marriages, Comerford could balance a death or two.
A distant cousin came to the Harrow after the old man’s death. He seemed a nice enough young man, and he had a different name, which made things easier; and he came in time to have the last mild word upon the open-cast site. As far as he was concerned, they were welcome to go ahead, and so they did, as soon as the year turned and th
e mild, lengthening days began. Later surveys stated that the amount of coal to be harvested would be even larger than had at first been supposed, and the project would certainly pay for itself handsomely.
In the first days of the spring, therefore, the red-and-yellow monsters crept over the border of Harrow land, from which so many pains had been taken to exclude them, and began to rip off the tangle of furze and heather and rank grass, to pile up the gathered topsoil, to burrow deep into the entrails of pennystone and clay, and lay bare the old shallow shafts one by one, the unfilled and the shoddily filled together, the ugly debris of last century’s not much comelier civilization.
Two
« ^
A worker from the coal site came to the police-station and asked for George. “You’d better come up, Sergeant,” he said. “We’ve found something we’d just as soon not have found. It’s in your line of business more than ours.”
George went up with Weaver, and stood beside the giant excavator, on a broad shelf from which the topsoil had already been stripped, in the heath beyond the Harrow farmhouse, where were dotted the old shafts filled during the war years. Debris of one of them, plucked out wholesale, had spattered down the side of the new mountain where the pennystone and clay was being shot. Old brickwork, half disintegrated, old rotten timber, all the rubbish of a prosperous yesterday. The past had come up the shaft and lay in the sun, slanting above the gouged valleys where the water had drained off to a deep, cliff-circled pool. The hole of the shaft, a ring of brickwork, gnawed by time, filled with rubble, lay open to the noon light. They stood at the rim, and stared into it, and were struck suddenly silent.
“Well, that’s it,” said the manager, kicking at the crumbling bricks and hunching a helpless shoulder. “Your folks’d better come and get it, I suppose. Unless you’d rather we just ploughed it under and forgot it. I’d just as soon forget it, myself.”
