Fallen Into the Pit

Three

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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 narrowed 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.

And did it necessarily follow from the (hypothetical) clearing of Chris Hollins, that Gerd was equally innocent? George looked at it from all directions, and could only conclude that it did not. Chris had been home shortly before half-past ten, just as he said, because Bill Hayley had seen and talked to him. But there was no proof that Gerd had been there to meet him, except her husband’s word. And what was that worth where her safety was concerned? What would you expect it to be worth?

Exhausted with speculation, George’s mind went back and forth between Hollins’s household, Jim Tugg, Chad Wedderburn, with the uneasy wraiths of Jim Fleetwood and many like him periodically appearing and disappearing between. There was no end to it. And the mere new fact that Helmut had added poaching to his worse offenses did not greatly change the picture. All it did was slightly affect his actual movements on the night of his death, and perhaps give an imperfect lead on the time of his exit, since it argued that he had been alive and active after the darkness grew sufficiently positive for his purposes. In George’s mind the death drew more surely into the single hour between ten and eleven; but stealthily, and he feared unjustifiably.

Bunty met him in the office, and indicated by a small gesture of her head and a rueful smile that Dominic was just having his supper in the kitchen. She closed the door gently in between, and said with a soft, wry gravity: “Your son, my dear George, is seriously displeased with you.”

“I know,” said George. “I don’t blame him, poor little beast. He finds ’em, I appropriate ’em. But this time, as a matter of fact, he isn’t missing a thing, there’s nothing to miss. Only a lot of useless speculations that go round in circles and get nowhere.”

“Then you can afford to talk to him, and at any rate pretend to confide in him a little. Now’s the time, when you can do it with a straight face.” She took his cap from him, laid it aside, and reached up suddenly to kiss him. “I wouldn’t trust you to try it when you really had anything on your mind, because he’d see through you like glass. But if there’s nothing to tell, even you can say so and remain opaque. Let’s go and be nice to him, shall we? Or he’ll only imagine all sorts of lurid discoveries.”

“That’s all I’m doing,” said George bitterly. But he went, and he was nice. Somebody might as well get some satisfaction out of the incident, if it was any way possible; it was precious little George was getting.