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
“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.”
