“Then you can’t give me any more information about his movements the day he was killed? He was at work as usual during the day, came back to his lodgings at the usual time, about half-past five. In the evening he went out again, the landlady saw him leave the house about a quarter to seven. A boy tinkering with his motor-bike by the side of the road at Markyeat Cross says he saw him pass soon after seven, and climb the stile into the field. Since then no one seems to have seen him until he turned up the following night in the brook. That field-path leads up this way. I just wondered if he’d been here again.”
“I haven’t seen him since he was in court,” she said.
“And Jim? He hasn’t run into him, either?”
“Jim hasn’t seen him,” she said. “Why should he? Jim knows nothing at all about him since they fought, and you know that part already. That’s finished with.”
“I hope so,” said George equably, and watched her for a moment with curious, placid eyes. “But you never know, do you, what’s finished with and what isn’t? How well do you remember that evening? Can you tell me what you were doing here while Helmut was coming up the field-path?”
“Wednesday!” she said, recollecting. “Yes—I was ironing most of the evening. I fed the hens, as usual, about eight o’clock, and collected the eggs, and then finished the ironing. And then I went on making a dress, and listened to the wireless. That’s all!”
“You didn’t go out at all that night?”
She smiled, and said: “No.”
“Nor your husband, either?”
“Oh, yes, Chris went out halfway through the evening, to see Mr. Blunden at the Harrow. They were planning to transport some stock together to some show in the south. But he can tell you all about that, better than I can.”
“What time did he get back?”
“Oh, I suppose about half-past ten—I can’t be sure to a quarter of an hour or so. He’s a little late, but when he comes he can tell you more exactly, I expect.”
And when Chris Hollins came, clumping in a few minutes later from the yard, he did fill in the picture with a few dredged-up details; the time of his call at Blunden’s, about nine o’clock, as he remembered, for the wireless was on with the news; the route of his long and leisurely walk home; his arrival somewhat before half-past ten. He had taken his time coming home, certainly; it was a lovely night, and he’d felt like a walk. But as he had chosen the more obscure heath pathways, and the woodland tracks, he had met hardly a soul after leaving the lane by the Harrow, until he had stopped for a moment to talk to Bill Hayley the carrier almost at the foot of his own drive.
He was not, naturally enough, so accomplished at this kind of thing as his wife, and he exhibited all the signs of guilt which the innocent show when questioned by the police. George in his unregenerate ’teens, coming away from the orchard-wall of this very farm with two or three purloined apples in his pocket, had felt himself going this same dark brick-red color even upon passing close to a policeman. Besides, there are so many laws that there exists always the possibility that one or two of them
George did not know nor try to guess what was going on between them in this absence of communication; but at least he knew that something was going on, and something in which they both went blindfolded as surely as he did.
“You didn’t see anything of Schauffler, then, on the day he was murdered?” said George, choosing his words with deliberation. He added, snapping away the pencil with which he had noted down the scanty details of Hollins’s walk home: “Either of you?”
She didn’t turn a hair. She had lived with the reality of murder, why should she start at the word? But her husband drew in his head as if the wall had leaned at him.
“No, we didn’t. Why should you think we had, any more than anybody else around the village? He’d left here a month before. He hasn’t been up here since. Why should he?”
“Why, indeed?” said George, and went away very thoughtfully from between the two fencing glances, to let them close at last.
But for some reason he did not go down the drive. He turned aside when he left the yard, and went along the field-path by the remembered orchard-wall. There was a narrow door in it, almost at the end, he recalled. It had just been painted, bright, deep green paint, maybe a few days old.
Three
« ^ »
Jim Tugg was quite another pair of shoes, a pair that didn’t pinch at all. He looked at George across the bare scrubbed table in his single downstairs room, as spare and clean and indifferent as a monk’s cell, and stubbed down tobacco hard into the bowl of a short clay pipe which ought to have roasted his nose when it was going well, and made a face as dark as thunder in contempt of all subtlety.
“Turn it up!” he said, bitterly grinning. “I know what you’re after as well as what you do! I’m one of the possibles— maybe the most possible of the lot. God knows I wouldn’t blame you, at that. Too bad for you it just didn’t happen that way!”
“You didn’t have much use for Germans in the lump, did you?” said George thoughtfully, watching the big teak- colored forefinger pack the pipe too full for most lungs to draw it.
“I’m calculable, but I’m not that calculable. Men don’t come to me in the lump, they come singly, with two feet each, and a voice apiece all round. Germans—maybe they rate more rejects than most other kinds, but even they, when they go out go out one at a time. If you mean I hadn’t any use at all for Helmut Schauffler, say it, and I’ll tell
