evidence. Somebody’s clothes, somewhere in Comerford, might bear marks, but probably even those would be slight. And no time had been wasted in carrying or dragging the body at least across the trodden level of clay, and possibly down the slope. By his size and weight, Helmut had not been moved very far to reach the water, and even over a short distance considerable strength must have been needed to carry him. Could one rule out the possibility of a woman? George was very wary of drawing conclusions from insufficient premises. There is very little, when it comes to the point of desperation, that a woman cannot do. A body can be rolled down a steep slope if it cannot be carried. Grass will bend under its passing and return, dust will be disturbed and resettle; and when the body has been in the brook under a strong flow of water for twenty-four hours it will tell you nothing about these things.
So that was all they got out of Helmut or the field or the basin of clay. No weapon, no blood, nothing. His pockets had kept their contents relatively unimpaired, but even these had little to say. His papers, surprisingly well and carefully kept in a leather wallet rubbed dark at the edges with much carrying, but nothing there except the essentials, no letters, no photographs; a disintegrating ten of cigarettes and a paper of matches; a small key, a handkerchief, a fountain pen, the same clasp-knife which had marked Jim Fleetwood; another wallet, with a pulpy mass of notes in it; and a miscellaneous handful of small change. Rather a lot of money for an ex-P.O.W. to be carrying around with him; twelve pound notes, old and dirty notes of widely divided numbers, which pulled apart in rotten folds when separated. And finally, a strong electric torch, heavy enough to drag one coat pocket out of line. There was one more interesting thing; the lining of his tunic on the left side was slit across at the breast, making an extra large pocket within it, but the interior yielded nothing but the usual accumulation of dust, sodden now into mud, and some less usual fluff of feathers, over which the experts made faces because there was not enough of it to be very much use to them.
His lodgings, a single furnished room in the same house with a husky from the coal-site, confirmed the interesting supposition that Helmut’s life had been run on a pattern of Prussian neatness. He had not many possessions, but every one of them had a place, and was severely in it. His actions and thoughts appeared to have been the only things absolved from this discipline. Perhaps he had learned it in the Army, perhaps even earlier—in the Hitler Youth, which he had at one time decorated with his presence and enlivened with his enthusiasm, to judge by the few photographs he had left behind in one drawer of his table. The key they had found in his breast pocket opened this particular drawer, and all his more personal papers were in it, including a diary which disappointed by recording only the dispatch and receipt of letters, and an account of such daily trivia as his laundry, his wages and expenditure, reminders of things he must buy, and small jobs of mending he must do. Of what went on inside his head nothing was set down, of his prim housewifely domestic existence no detail was omitted.
The most interesting thing was that in the table drawer they found another bundle of notes, rolled in an elastic band. Counted, these produced no less than thirty-seven pounds, in notes old and much-traveled, a jumble of any old numbers, like those which had been found on his body. The daily record of income and expenditure in the diary made no attempt to account for any such sum; here were only the few pounds he earned weekly, and the slender housekeeping he conducted with them. Nor, to judge by his records, could he possibly have saved up so much gradually from his pay.
“It looks,” said George, fingering through the creased green edges of the notes, “as if Helmut had got himself a nice little racket on the side. Ever hear of him in any of the regular lines?”
“No,” said Cooke thoughtfully, “but now that I come to think of it, the lads on the site seemed to think he was uncommonly flush with money. None of ’em had anything much to do with him off the job, except maybe the bloke who lodges here with him, and he professes to know nothing.”
“So does the landlady. He was just a fellow who paid for his room, as far as she was concerned.” The house was one of a row built on the outskirts of the first colliery district just outside the village, a bit of industrial England suddenly sprawled into the fields; and the landlady lived on her pension and what she could get for her two small, cluttered rooms, which was every reason why she should accept a good payer thankfully, and ask no further questions about him. “She’s obviously honest. And besides, he’d been here only just over a month; even if she’d been a busybody she hadn’t had time to find out very much about him. And anyhow, how much identity have any of these exiles got? Scarcely anything they have about them goes back to any time before captivity, or any place outside this country. We know no more about them than if they’d fallen from Mars. No more about their origins, their minds—or their deaths, either, as far as I can see yet.”
“He had plenty of enemies,” said Cooke, summing up with extreme but acute simplicity, “and more money than according to all the known facts he should have had. About some people who get themselves murdered we don’t even know as much as that—native English, too.”
But this point, from which they started, seemed always to be the same point where they also finished.
All of this came out at the inquest, and after that airing of their very little knowledge the atmosphere was not quite so oppressive; but the intervening days were bad, because everybody had the word murder in his mind, but was studiously keeping it off his tongue until authority had spoken it. It is not, after all, a word to be bandied about lightly. Conversation until then was a matter of eyes saying one thing and lips another. Suspicion seemed the wrong term for that emotion with which they eyed one another; it was rather an insatiable curiosity, sympathy and regret. The state of mind which had led to the act, the states of mind to which the act had led, these were the wrong and terrible things; the act itself was nothing. By whatever agency, however, the crack in the known world was there, was growing, was letting in the slow, patient, feeling fingers of chaos.
Take just one household, involved in only the safest and most candid way. Dominic hovered on the edge of his parents’ troubled conferences, all eyes and ears, and inadvertently let slip the extent of his knowledge one evening. Pussy was there, or perhaps he would not have been so anxious to cut a figure, and would have had more sense than to interrupt.
“Dad, do you think he could have been making his extra money on the black market? You know some chickens were missed a few weeks ago at the poultry farm down at Redlands.”
“Extra money?” said George, frowning on him abruptly out of the deeps of a preoccupation which had blotted out his existence for the last half-hour. “What do you know about his money?”
“Well, but I heard you say to Mummy that—”
“How many times have I got to tell you to mind your own business? Have you been creeping about the house listening to other people’s conversations?” George was tired, and irritated at the reminder of his worst personal anxiety, or he would not have sounded so exasperated.
“I didn’t listen!” flared Dominic, for whom the verb in this sense involved hiding behind doors or applying his ear to keyholes. Dominic didn’t do these things; he just came quietly in and sat, and said nothing, and missed nothing. “I only heard you say it, I wasn’t spying on you.”
“Well, once for all, forget about the whole business. Keep your nose out of it, and keep from under my feet. This is absolutely nothing to do with you.”
So Dominic cheeked George, and George boxed Dominic’s ears, a thing which hadn’t happened for over three years now. Dominic wouldn’t have minded so much if it had not been done in front of Pussy, but as it had, his feelings were badly hurt, and he sulked all the evening, very pointedly in George’s direction, and was sweet and
