Fallen Into the Pit

Three

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Pussy and Dominic hunted all the evening, inexhaustible, obstinate, refusing to be discouraged even by the fact that they were hunting what appeared to be a different country. After a night of thunder and heavy rain, the bowl behind the well, the frozen sea of clay, had thawed most alarmingly. It was now a glistening expanse of yellow ocherous slime, indescribably glutinous and slippery, with swollen, devious streams threading it muddily; and the overflow from the back of the well was a tight, bright thrust of water as thick as an arm, jetting out forcibly with a mule’s kick. It was always strong of course, but this was storm pressure, and would soon diminish. In the meantime, they had chosen the worst possible conditions for their search, as they found after the first skid and fall on the treacherous greasy slopes going down into the bowl. Pussy got halfway down, and then her feet went from under her, and down she slid, to rise with the seat of her gym knickers one glazed gray patch of wet clay. Dominic, trying to enjoy the spectacle and pass her at speed at the same time, made a terrifying spin and left long ski-tracks behind him, but merely came down on one hand and arm to the elbow, much to the detriment of his jacket. He had also to work his way sidelong a dozen yards by the current sheep-track to find a tuft of grass big enough and dry enough to wipe his hands fairly clean.

As for their shoes, in a few minutes they were past praying for, clay to the ankles; but at the time they brushed these small catastrophes aside as of no importance. In any case, after the first fall there was not much point in being careful, and they began to stride recklessly about, skidding and recovering, slithering on to their behinds and climbing precariously up again, with their tenacious minds fixed on their objective, and fast shut to all regard of consequences to their clothing or skins. They’d come to look over the ground yet once more, and look it over they would, even if the rain had transformed it overnight and a fortnight of time made the quest practically hopeless in the first place.

The dusk came, and they did not even notice it until they were straining their eyes upon the ground. Then the torches came out, and the dark came, and as their eyes were bent assiduously upon the circles of light upon the trampled ground, it quite startled them to look up suddenly and see that the sky had stars already, and was deeply blue between the clusters of them, fully dark. The gradual brightening of the discs of gold, the gradual darkening of the walls of dark, had passed unnoticed.

“It must be getting late,” said Pussy dubiously.

“Oh, rot, can’t be!” He had not his watch on him, but he was quite confident, because it seemed to him that he had been there no time at all. “It gets dark very quickly, once it starts. But it can’t be past nine o’clock yet.”

“Seems as if it’s hopeless, though,” said Pussy, staring at the well. They were disheveled, tired and unbelievably dirty. Clay even in Dom’s hair, where he had come down full-length once, and slid downhill on his back. Smears of ocher down his face. She had an uneasy feeling that she did not look very much better herself. Now that she came to look at him, the effect was awe-inspiring. She said: “Wait till your mother sees you! My word, isn’t there going to be a row!”

“My mother will listen to me,” said Dominic firmly, “she always lets people explain. If you’re scared, go on home, or anyhow, go on up to the level and wait for me. I’m not afraid of my mother.”

“Well, anyhow, we’ve looked everywhere, and it seems a dead end.”

“I know,” he said, dismally smearing a clay-stiffened eheek. He had not expected much, but he did not admit that, there was no point in making Pussy feel worse than she did already. “And yet if we quit now, there won’t be any chance of finding anything after. We’ve trampled the whole place up, and after a few more rainstorms it’ll be hopeless. But I suppose it was a thin chance—after so long. If we couldn’t find a weapon or any sign of one that first time, we couldn’t very well expect to find it now.” He stared at the back of the well, where the fierce, quiet jet of the outfall poured into a little pebbly hollow, and ran away downhill through boulders and small stones to join the stream. “You know, I always thought—”

“Thought what?” asked Pussy, following his stare and the strong beam of the torch.

“Well, if I’d hit somebody over the head with a club, or whatever it was, close here by the well, I shouldn’t throw it away and leave it to be found. And of course he didn’t, either, or we should have found it. But if—if there was any blood, or anything, I shouldn’t want to carry it away like that, either. They said it was something thin, like a walking-stick or a crop, so if it was you could easily walk away carrying it, even if you met a dozen people on your way home, if it was just clean and normal. But you have to be careful about getting even the smallest drop of blood on your clothes, because they can tell even months after what group it is, and everything.”

“Plenty of water down there,” said Pussy, shivering, “where he put the body. He could wash it.”

“Yes, but that’s the stream, and it’s ocher water; I should think if there were any grooves, or if there was a plaited thong, like in some crops, or anywhere that dirt could lodge, that fearful yellow stuff might get left behind. Enough to be traced, they don’t need much. But here,” he said, jerking his solemn head at the muscular arm of the outflow, and gnawing at his knuckles forgetful of their coating of clay, “here’s clean water, and with a kick on it that ought to wash anything off anything if you just stood it in it firmly for a few minutes. Very nearly wash the paint off, too. Only, of course, it wasn’t quite so strong as this then. But it was pretty hefty, all the same. Remember, we were mucking about with it that next night, throwing jets around, and it was all you could do to keep your hand still in it.”

Pussy drew a little nearer to him at the stirring of that memory, steadying herself by his arm. “Yes, that’s right! I remember, just before you found him—”

“If I’d had to get a stick cleaned up after a job like that,” said Dominic, “I should have wedged it in among the stones there so that it stood in the outflow. I should think if you left it there just while you dragged the body down and put it in the stream, and then came back for it and walked right on into the village, or wherever you were going, there wouldn’t be even a hair or a speck left on it to show. Anyhow, that’s what I should have done. Like anybody who had a drop of blood on his hands here would just run there and wash them. It stands to sense.”

She agreed, with a shiver, that it seemed reasonable. Dominic climbed up the slope and pulled a stick out of the lush foot of the hedge, and scrambled with it up into the stony fringes of the outflow. “Like that!” He planted it upright, digging the point deep between the stones and into the soft underneath of the bed, and it stood held and balanced in the direct jet of the water, which gripped it solidly as in ice. “You see? It couldn’t be simpler.”

The spray from the tiny basin spattered him, and, shifting a precarious foothold, he stepped backward to one unluckily more precarious still. A rounded, reddish stone rocked under his foot, and slid from its place, bringing down in one wet vociferous fall Dominic and a large section of the stony bank together. He yelled, clawing at the boulders, and tumbled heavily on one hip and shoulder into the descending stream below the outfall. His hands felt for a firm hold among the stones under the water, to brace himself clear of it and get to his feet again; and sharp under his right palm, deep between the disturbed pebbles, something stung him with a sharp, metallic impact, denting but not breaking the skin.

Pussy, slithering along to help him out, sensed his instant excitement in his sudden quietness. She had reached for his arm, but he was grubbing instead in the bed of the brook, bringing up some small muddy thing which was certainly not the weapon with which anyone had been killed; and until he had it washed clean of encrustations of silt he was not even interested in getting out of the water. He scrambled backwards to his feet, and dipped the thing, and rubbed it on his handkerchief, which in any case was already soaking wet and smeared with clay.

“What have you got?” asked Pussy, craning to peer over his shoulder with the torch.

“I don’t know. We’ll have a look at it in a minute, when you can see it for muck—but it’s something queer to find in a brook. Look, it’s beginning to shine. I believe it’s silver.”

“Tin, more likely,” said Pussy scornfully.

“No, tin would have rusted away in no time, but this was so covered in mud it must have been there some time, and you can see it’s only sort of dulled. If one edge hadn’t stuck in me I wouldn’t have known there was anything there at all.”

He climbed out of his stony bath, shivering a little in the chill night air, but too intent on his find to pay much attention to his own state. It was Pussy who observed the shiver.

“Dom, you’re terribly wet. You’ll catch cold if we don’t get home double-quick.”

“Yes, all right, we’ll go in a minute. But look—now look!”

In the light of the torch they examined, large-eyed, a small irregular oval of silver, mottled and discolored now, but showing gleams of clean metal; a little shield for engraving, but never engraved, dinted a little, very thin, apparently from long use and sheer old age, for all the lines of its pattern were worn smooth and shallow. Round the outline of the shield curved decorative leaves, the flourish of the upper edge buckled and bent a little. It bore five tiny holes for fastening it to a surface, and by the strong round curve of its shape they could guess what kind of a surface.

“It’s like on that walking-stick we gave to old Wilman when he left school two years ago,” said Dominic in a hushed voice, “only a different pattern, you know. And a bit smaller, not so showy. But you can see it is off a stick. I can’t think of anything else that would make it curve like that.”

“Or an umbrella,” said Pussy. “It could be.”

“Yes, only people don’t often give umbrellas for that sort of present, and put names on them, and all that. They’re such stupid things it would look too silly. But lots of walking-sticks have these things on. And—we were looking for something that might belong to a walking-stick.” He looked up at her across the tarnished glimmer of his treasure, and his eyes were enormous with gravity. She stared back, and asked in an almost inaudible whisper:

“But how did it get there?”

“I think it was like I said. He did shove the weapon in there to wash off the traces. And this plate had worn very thin, and the top edge was bent up, like you see, so the water had something to press against there, and it tore it right off and washed it down among the stones there, and it lodged tight. And when he grabbed up the stick again to make his getaway—because he wouldn’t want to hang around, when for all very few people do come here, somebody easily might—he was in too much of a hurry to notice that the shield was gone. Or if he did notice it, he didn’t think it safe to stay too long looking for it, and so there it stayed. Well, it’s reasonable, isn’t it? How else should a silver plate off a stick get in a place like that?”

How else indeed? Pussy said with awe: “Then we have found it! After all, we didn’t come out for nothing. And now if we can find the stick this shield came off—” She shivered in her turn, remembering the strange pale island of Helmut’s hair in the center of the brook’s channel; and suddenly she didn’t at all like this place by night, and wanted to be anywhere out of it. She clutched urgently at Dominic’s arm with a thin, strong, dirty hand, and besought him in a low voice: “Let’s go, Dom! We’ve found it, now let’s get home. You ought to get it to your father, quickly—and anyhow, it’s awfully late, I’m sure it is.”

He could not tear himself away too easily, now that he had something to show for it, something to advance as sure proof that he had real ideas about the case which they wouldn’t allow to be his, that he wasn’t just being inquisitive in a totally aimless way. He was torn two ways, for he had an uneasy feeling that he had let time slip by more rapidly than he had realized, and it would be well for him to make all haste to placate his parents. But also he wanted to pursue success while he had hold of her skirt. What more he could expect was not certain. He knew only that he was on, an advancing wave, and to turn back seemed an act of folly.

“And you’re terribly wet,” said Pussy. “You will catch cold if we don’t run for it.”

So they ran, taking hands over the rough places, he with the little shield clutched fiercely in his left palm in his damp trouser-pocket, she with the beam of the torch trained unsteadily on the path ahead of them. Halfway down the mounds, Dominic remembered the other item of information he had to pass on to his father, the odd decision of Charles Blunden to reverse his policy toward the Coal Board. Not, of course, that that had anything to do with the Helmut affair, or could compete in importance with the silver plate; but still it was, in its way, interesting.