Fallen Into the Pit

Three

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Pussy sneaked into the chapel schoolroom by the side door, and found the room full of people, and all dauntingly attentive to George, who was in full flood, and doing rather well. Interrupting him was not, after all, quite the picnic she had foreseen; the respectful hush of concentration, real or simulated, shut her firmly into the obscure area off-stage for several minutes before she recovered breath and confidence and a due sense of her own importance. The vicar, as chairman, was firmly ensconced between her and her quarry, and hedged about with cardboard models and miniature working traffic lights, George looked as inaccessible as any lighthouseman from the mainland. But he also looked large, decisive and safe, and she wanted this most desirable of reinforcements to reach Dominic with all speed. She edged forward among the cardboard buses, and became for the first time visible to the audience as she plucked the vicar by the sleeve. The audience stirred and buzzed, deflecting its keenest attention with suspicious readiness; the vicar frowned, and leaned down to her to say: “Hush, little girl! You can ask your questions later.” Pussy recoiled into a cold self-confidence which had needed some such spur as that. She said very firmly: “I must speak to Sergeant Felse at once—it’s urgent!”

“You can’t interrupt now,” said the vicar with equal but more indulgent firmness. “Wait ten minutes more, and the sergeant will be closing his little talk.”

This conversation was conducted in stage whispers, more disturbing by far than firecrackers; and its quality, but not its import, had reached George’s ready ear. He looked round at them, and paused in mid-sentence to ask directly if anything was wrong. The vicar opened his lips to assure him confidently that nothing was, but Pussy craned to show herself beyond his stooping shoulder, and said indignantly: “Yes, Sergeant Felse! Please, you’re wanted at once, it’s very serious. Please come!”

And George came. He handed back the meeting to the vicar with the aplomb and assurance of one presenting him with an extra large Easter offering, slithered between the cardboard showpieces, and in a few minutes was down with Pussy in the wings of the tiny stage, and heading for the quiet outside the door, steering her before him with a hand upon her shoulder until they were out of earshot of the audience.

“Now, then! What’s the matter? Where’ve you left Dom?” For it went without saying that Dom was in the affair somewhere. “He isn’t in trouble, is he?” But the excitement he saw in Pussy was not quite of the kind he would have looked for had any accident happened to Dominic.

“No, Dom’s all right. At least—he was sick; and I nearly was, too, only don’t tell him—and besides, he really looked, and I only half-looked—” She threw off these preliminaries, which were supposed to be perfectly clear to Dominic’s father, in one hopping breath, and then took a few seconds to orientate herself among events, and become coherent. “He’s at the brook, just behind Webster’s well. He said when one found something like that one ought to keep an eye on it until the police came, so he stayed, and I came to get you. We found a man in the water there,” she said explicitly at last. “He’s dead.”

“What?” said George, jolted far past the limit of his expectations.

“It’s that German who had the fight with Jim Tugg—Helmut somefhing-or-other. But he’s quite dead,” said Pussy, large-eyed. “He doesn’t move at all, and he’s right under the water.”

“Sure of all that?” demanded George. “Not just something that might be a man who might be that particular man?”

“I didn’t look who it was, but it was a man, all right. And Dom said it was him.”

“Did you come straight down? Any idea what time it was? Did you hang around up there—before or after finding him?”

“I came straight down, as soon as—as we thought what we ought to do. Only a few minutes before we saw him I asked Dom the time, and he said nearly half-past eight.”

“Good girl! Now listen, Puss, you go home, drink something hot, and talk Io and your father silly with all the details, if you want to—get ’em off your mind. Don’t bother about anything else tonight, and I’ll see you again tomorrow. Got it?”

“Oh, but I’m coming back with you!” she said, dismayed.

“Oh, no, you’re not, you’re going straight home. Don’t be afraid you’re missing anything, Dom will be coming home, too, just as soon as I get to him. I’ll see you in the morning. O.K.?”

Pussy was at once displeased and relieved, but he was the boss, and as one accidentally drafted into service she was particularly bound to respect his orders. So she said: “O.K.!” though without any great enthusiasm.

“And go to bed in good time, when you’ve spun your yarn. No wonder you’re shivering, running around without a coat.” He turned her toward the Shock of Hay, and set a rapid course for the bright red telephone box nestling in a corner of its garden wall.

“I had a blazer,” said Pussy, liking the feel of the official hand upon her shoulder, “but I left it with Dom. He hadn’t got a coat at all.”

“He wouldn’t have! Lucky one of you had some sense. He shall bring it over when he comes home. All right, now you cut off home, and forget it.”

She wouldn’t, of course, it wasn’t to be expected; but she went home like a lamb. He thought Io would get the story in full before another half-hour had passed, but with Pussy one could never be quite sure. Io might not be considered sufficiently adult and tough to be entrusted with such grisly secrets.

George called Bunty, and asked her to send Cooke up to Webster’s well after him as soon as he came in, which he was due to do in about a quarter of an hour. Then he called Comerbourne, and passed on the warning to the station sergeant there, so that ambulance, surgeon and photographer could be on tap if required; and these preliminaries arranged, he plucked out his bike from the backyard of the chapel school-room, from which the vicar had not yet released his audience, and rode off madly by the uphill lane out of the village toward the woods.

Dominic was down in the hollow still, prowling up and down the tussocks of grass and ridges of clay carefully with his light weight, as if he might obliterate the prints of telltale shoes at every step; though in fact every inch of ground above the water was baked hard as sandstone, and armies could have tramped over it without doing more than flatten the more thin and brittle ridges. He had searched right from the edge of the field to a hundred yards or so downstream from the body, as closely as he could by the fading light, and had found absolutely nothing except adamant clay, rough strong grass insensitive to any but the heaviest tread, and the old stipplings made by cows coming to water; and all these were now frozen fast into position, and had been unchanged for weeks. He didn’t know quite what he was seeking, but he did know that it wasn’t there to be found, and that was something to have discovered. No one ever picnicked here; there wasn’t even a toffee-paper, or a sandwich bag. There was only the man in the water, lying along the stream’s channel and almost filling it, so that the water made rather louder ripples round him, and a faster flow downstream from him.

Nobody falls into a stream as neatly as that; it fitted him like his clothes. Nobody deliberately lies in a stream in such a cold-blooded, difficult fashion, no matter how fiercely determined he may be upon suicide. Not with the whole of the Comer just over the heath and down the hill! And nobody climbs painfully across twelve yards of crippling lumpy clay in order to faint in one yard of water, either. So there was only one possibility left.

It seemed to him that George took an unconscionable time to get there, and it grew colder and colder, or at any rate Dominic did, perhaps because of the emptiness within rather than the chill without. When he looked at his watch he was staggered to see how short a time he had really been waiting. He knew he mustn’t touch the body, even if he had wanted to; but he went and sat on his heels precariously balanced among the clay ridges, to examine it at least more closely. The light was going, it was no use. And now that he looked up, the light was really going, in dead earnest, and to tell the truth he didn’t like the effect very much.

George appeared rather suddenly on the iris-colored skyline by the well, and Dominic started at the sight of him with a first impulse of fright; for after all, it wasn’t as if Helmut had died a natural death. But the same instant he knew it was only his father coming loping down toward him, and the leap of gratitude which his heart made to meet him frightened him almost as much as the momentary terror had done, because it betrayed the state of his nerves so plainly.

To George, springing down the slope with a reassuring hail, his son’s freckled face looked very small and pinched and pale, even by that considerately blind light. He kept his torch trained on the ground, away from the shivering boy who clearly didn’t want to be examined too narrowly just now.

“I thought you were never coming,” said Dominic querulously. “Did Pussy tell you everything?”

“Only the fact,” said George, and balanced forward to pass the light of the torch slowly and closely along the length of Helmut’s body, strangely clothed now in the surface gleam of the water, quivering over him like silver, and stirring the intrusive pallor of his hair like weed in its ripples. “Well, that’s Helmut, all right! No doubt about it.”

“I thought one of us ought to stay here,” said Dominic, at his shoulder as he stooped, and clinging rather close to its comfortable known bulk. “So I told Pussy to come and butt into your meeting, and I’ve kept an eye on things here. That was right, wasn’t it?”

“Absolutely right!” said George, still surveying the busy, untroubled flow of water round the blond, distorted head; but he reached for Dominic with his spare hand, and felt a trembling shoulder relax gratefully under his touch.

“Where is she? Didn’t she come back with you?”

“She wanted to come back, but I sent her home to bed. And that’s where you’re going, my lad, just as soon as you can get there.”

“I’m all right,” said Dominic, promptly stiffening. “I want to stay and help.”

“You can help better by not staying. Comerbourne are hanging around for my next call, and you can go down and tell your mother to ring them. I’ll give you a note for her.”

“But—”

“No buts!” said George placidly. “You can stay until Cooke comes up, and fill in the time by telling me exactly how you dropped on this affair, and what you’ve been doing while you waited for me.”

Dominic told him, fairly lucidly, even to his own inadequacy. George sat on his heels the while, and passed his fingers thoughtfully through the obtrusive clump of fair hair which now held all the remaining light seemingly gathered into its whiteness. Everything was evening itself out from a chaos into a methodical channel of thought, and the steady flow of probability was certainly carrying both their minds in the same direction.

“He couldn’t have fallen in,” said Dominic. “If you even tried to fall into the bed of the stream just like that, I don’t believe you could do it. And if you did, unless you were stunned you’d get up again. There aren’t any stones just there to stun him. And—and he’s sort of really wedged into position, isn’t he? Like a cork into a bottle!”

George turned his head, and gave him a long, considering and rather anxious look, switching the torch off. “I see you’ve been doing some thinking while you waited. Well, then, go on with it! Get it off your chest.”

“There wasn’t much to do except think,” said Dominic. “I went right back to the hedge there, and all down the stream to the bend, looking for just any kind of mark there might be; but you wouldn’t know there’d been anything here but cows for months. The only bits that could hold tracks now are deep inside these clay holes, where the water’s still lying, and they’re shut in so hard you couldn’t get to them. You might as well look for prints in solid concrete. But the light got so dazzly I couldn’t see anymore, so I stopped. Only I didn’t find even the least little thing. Maybe—on him—you know, there might be something, when you get him out. But even then, that flow of water’s been running over him for— Do you think he’s been there long?”

“Do you?” asked George, neither encouraging nor discouraging him, only watching him steadily and keeping a reassuring hold of him.

“Well, I think it must have happened last night. I mean, this way isn’t used very much, but in the daytime there might always be one or two odd people passing. It was broad daylight still when Pussy and I got here tonight. So I think last night, in the dark—wouldn’t you?”

“It might have been more than one evening ago, mightn’t it?” said George.

“Yes, I suppose so, only then he might have been found earlier. And—they begin to look—different, don’t they?”

The more he talked, and the more staggering things he said, the more evenly the blood flowed back into his pinched, large-eyed face, and the more matter-of-fact and normal became his voice. Thinking about it openly, instead of deep inside his own closed mind, did him good. A rather tired sparkle, even, came back into his eye. Helmut dead became, when discussed, a practical problem, and nothing more; certainly not a tragedy.

“Even if a man wanted to drown himself,” said Dominic, knotting his brows painfully, “he wouldn’t choose here, would he? And even if he did, and lay down here himself, he wouldn’t lie like that—look, with his arms down by his sides— When people lie down on their faces they let themselves down by their arms, and lie with them folded under their chests or their foreheads—don’t they? I do, if I sleep on my front.”

George said nothing, though the grotesque helplessness of the backward-stretched arms, with hands half-open knotting the little currents of water, had not escaped him. He didn’t want to snub Dominic, but he didn’t want to egg him on, either. Just let what was in his mind flow headlong out of it, and after a long sleep he would have given up his proprietary rights in the death of Helmut, and turned his energies to something more suitable.

“Besides,” said Dominic, in a small but steady voice, “he was hit on the head first, wasn’t he? I haven’t touched him— and of course you can’t really see, and there wouldn’t be any blood, after the water had kept flowing over him—but his head doesn’t look right. I think somebody bashed his head in, and then put him here in the water, to make sure.”

He couldn’t tell what George was thinking, and his eyes ached with trying to see clearly in a light meant only for seeing earth and sky, comparative shapes of light and darkness. He gave a shivering little yawn, and George tightened his embracing arm in a rallying shake, and laughed gently, but not because there was anything funny to be found in the situation.

“All right, you’ve used your wits enough for one night. Time you went home. I can hear Cooke coming down the path, I think. Want him to come back with you?”

“No, honestly, I’m all right, I can go by myself. Does Mummy know why I’m so late? And I didn’t finish my homework—do you think they might excuse it this once? It wasn’t my fault I went and found a dead body—”

“She knows it’s all on the level. And if you like, you can tell her all about it. Forget about the homework, we’ll see about that. Just go straight to bed. Here, hold the torch a moment, and I’ll give you a note for Bunty.” He scribbled rapidly the message which would launch upon him all the paraphernalia of a murder investigation. Why not call the thing by what was, after all, its proper name? Even if it seemed to fit rather badly here! A lamp flashed from the crest of the ridge, and the incurably cheerful voice of Police-Constable Cooke hallooed down the slope. “Hullo, come on down!” cried George, folding his note; and putting it into Dominic’s hand, he turned him about, and started him up the slope with a gentle push and a slap behind. “All right, now git! Make haste home, and get something warm inside you. And don’t forget to return Pussy’s blazer as you go through the village. Sure you don’t want company? I wouldn’t blame you!”

“No, thanks awfully! I’m O.K.!”

He departed sturdily, swapping greetings with Cooke as they met in the middle of the slope, quite in his everyday manner. George watched him over the brow and out of sight, frowning against the chance which had brought him this particular way on this particular evening. If Comerford had to have a murder case, he would much have preferred that Dominic should be well out of it; but there he was, promptly and firmly in it, with his quick eyes, and his acute wits, and his young human curiosity already deeply engaged; and who was to get him out again, and by what means? George feared it was going to prove a job far beyond his capacity.

Cooke came bounding down the last level to the mud-side, and strode out across the dried flats, to gaze at Helmut Schauffler and whistle long and softly over him. Whereupon he said with no diminution of his customary gaiety: “Well, they say the only good one’s a dead one! Looks like we’ve got one good one, anyhow!” And when he had further examined the motionless figure under its quivering cloudy veil of ocher water: “I wouldn’t say the thing had a natural look, would you?”

“I would not,” said George heavily.

“And I doubt very much if he was the kind to see himself off—whereas he was precisely the kind to persuade somebody else to do the job for him.”

George agreed grimly: “It certainly looks as if Helmut got himself misunderstood once too often.”

“Once too often for him. What d’you suppose happened? Coshed, or drowned, or what?”

“Both, but it’ll need a post-mortem to find out which really killed him.”

“This means the whole works, I suppose!” said Cooke, with a slow, delighted smile. He saw parking offenses and minor accidents and stray dogs suddenly exchanged for a murder case, the first in his experience—for that matter, the first in George’s, either—and the prospect did not displease him. “Makes a nice change!” he said brightly. “Sounds the wrong thing to say, but if he had to turn up in a brook, it might as well be ours. Not that I expect anything very sensational, of course! He certainly went around asking for it.”

George stood looking moodily at Helmut, a trouble-center dead as alive. He saw what Cooke meant. In the books murders are elaborate affairs carefully planned beforehand, and approached by a prepared path, but in real life they are more often sudden, human, impulsive affairs of a simple squabble and a too hearty blow, or a word too many and a spasm of jealousy to which a knife or a stone lends itself too aptly; tragedies which might never have happened at all if the wind had set even half a point to east or west. And the curious result seemed to be that while they were less expert and less interesting than the fictional crimes, they were also more often successful. Since no path led up to them, there were not likely to be any footprints on it.

Consider, for instance, this present setup. Ground baked clear of any identity, no blood, no weapon, no convenient lines to lead back to whoever had met Helmut, perhaps exchanged words with him, and found him, it might be, no nastier than Fleetwood, and Jim Tugg, and Chad Wedderbura, and a dozen more had found him on previous occasions— only by spite or design hit him rather harder. There, but for the grace of God, went half of Comerford! And short of an actual witness, which was very improbable indeed, George couldn’t see why anyone should ever find out who had finished the job.

But unnatural death sets in motion the machine, and it has to run. Even if everyone concerned, except perhaps the dead man, wherever he is, would really rather it refused to start at all.

“I tell you what!” said Cooke. “This is one time when the coroner’s jury ought to bring in the Ingoldsby verdict on the nagging wife—remember? ‘We find: Sarve ’un right!’ But I suppose that would be opening the door to pretty well anything!”

“I suppose so. Among other things, to a final verdict of: Sarve ’un right! on us. Tell me,” said George, “half a dozen people who would have been quite pleased to knock Helmut on the head!”

Cooke told him seven, blithely, without pausing for breath.

“And all my six would have been different,” sighed George. “Yet, believe me, we’re expected to show concern, disapproval, and even some degree of surprise.” All the same he knew as soon as he had said it that the concern and disapproval were certainly present in his mind, even if the surprise was not. For murder is not merely an affair of one man killed and one man guilty; it affects the whole community of innocent people, sending shattering currents along the suddenly exposed nerves of a village; and the only cure for this nervous disorder is knowledge. Censure, when you come to think of it, habits in quite another part of the forest.