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.”
