in the brook, with ripples tugging and twisting at his blond hair. Perhaps, after all, it was a silly question to ask her. With that ending somewhere shadowy at the back of her mind, she had gone to some trouble to ensure that for the one person who mattered there should be no motive. And Hollins was a man for whom she could do such a service successfully, a limited man, a gullible man, a fond man, not so hard to blindfold. A woman like Gerd, experienced in every kind of evil fortune, might easily take it upon herself to shut up his mind from anger, his heart from grief, and his hands from violence. What was another load more or less to her, if he was back in the sun and serenity of his fields, innocent of any anxiety?
“Did you have any suspicion,” said George suddenly, “that this would happen?”
“This?”
“Schauffler’s murder.” He used the word deliberately, but there was no spark.
“Like it did happen—no, I never thought of that. I thought of anger, and fights, and magistrates’ courts, and newspapers, and all the stupidity of these things. I didn’t often think of him dead, and when I did, it was openly, in a fight—some blow that was a little too hard. But that would have been enough, you see.”
Yes, he saw. So perhaps the motive she was so resolute not to let slip into her husband’s hands had only lain waiting and growing and hardening in her own.
“It seems, you understand,” he said carefully, “that, but for whoever killed him, you must have been the last person to see Helmut alive. The last word we had on him was from the boy who saw him leave the lane for the field-path at Markyeat Cross, soon after seven. It was after that, obviously, that he came here, since he seems to have been heading straight for you then. Tell me about that visit. What time did he come in by the green door? How long did he stay?”
She told him as exactly as she could, dragging up details from her memory with a distasteful carefulness. It must have been nearly eight o’clock when she had gone out to the poultry-houses, therefore according to the time when he had passed Markyeat Cross he must have waited for her coming at least twenty minutes, but his savoring patience had not given out. He had left her, she thought, rather before a quarter-past eight. Where he had gone on closing the green door between them she did not know. By eleven o’clock, according to the doctors, he had been dead and in his brook, snugly tucked into the basin of clay under the edge of the Harrow woods and the waste lands. And between the last touch of his pleased and revolted fingers on her bare arm, and the blow that killed him, who had seen him?
“I wish to heaven,” said George suddenly, “that you’d told me the truth long ago!”
“When you questioned me about these things there was already a body to be accounted for. In such a case one lies— rather too easily.”
“I meant long before that, before it ever came to that. If you wanted your husband protected, as I’m sure you did, at least why didn’t you come to me?”
She gave him a long look which made him feel small, young and nakedly useless, and said without any irony or unkindness: “Sergeant Felse, you over-estimate yourself and your office. To the police people simply do not go. Nor to the Church, either. It seems there are no short cuts left to God.”
It was horribly true, he felt as if she had thrown acid in his face. All the good intentions, all the good agencies, seem to have grown crooked, grown in upon themselves like ingrowing toenails, and set up poisoned irritations from which people wince away. In real trouble, unless he is lucky enough to possess that rare creature, a genuine friend, every man retires into himself, the one fortress on which he can place at any rate some reliance. As Gerd had withdrawn into herself and taken all her problems with her, that no one else might stumble over them and come to grief.
The only people who still ask the police for protection, thought George bitterly, are the Fascists. What sort of use are we?
“It sounds impossible,” he said, “that a woman can be persecuted in her own house, like that, and have no remedy she can feel justified in taking. Tell me honestly, had you yourself ever thought of a way out?”
She looked at him impenetrably, and said: “No. Except to go on bearing it, and take what precautions I could to avoid him.”
“Did your husband ever say anything to make you think he had his suspicions? I mean, that Helmut was still haunting you?”
“No, never.”
“Nor Jim, either?”
“No, nor Jim.”
She heard, just as she said it, Christopher’s feet at the scraper outside the scullery door, methodically scraping off his boots the traces of one of the few damp places left in the hollows of his fields, the shrunken marsh pool in the bottom meadows. George heard it, too, a slow, dogged noise like the man who made it. He saw the slight but sudden rearing of Gerd’s head, the deep, perceptible brightening of her eyes, the quickening of all the tensions which held her secret. But not a gleam of welcome for him now, no gladness. Not for the first time, Chris had done the wrong thing. She got up with a quite daunting gesture of dismissal, picked up the hen-saucepan, and put it on the large gas-ring, and resolutely lit the gas under it. But George did not move. Just as the porch door opened he said clearly:
“In that case I hope you realize, Mrs. Hollins, that you seem to be the only person in Comerford who had an excellent motive for wanting him dead, and who knew his movements that night well enough to have followed him and killed him.”
Three
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Chris Hollins heaved himself into the doorway and stood there looking up under his lowered brows, like a bull meditating a charge. Gerd, turning with the matches in her hand, gave him a look so forbidding that at any other time he would have retired into a dazed silence, following her leads, saying what he believed she wanted of him; but now he stood and lowered his head at her, too, in his male indignation, and demanded menacingly:
“What’s this you’re saying to my wife, Sergeant?”
George repeated it. Not because he was proud of it; indeed, the second time it sounded even cheaper. But it had certainly made Hollins rise, and that was almost more than he had expected. He said it again, almost word for word, with the calm of distaste, but to the other man’s ears it sounded more like the calm of rocklike
