confidence.
“And what grounds have you got,” he said thickly, “for saying any such thing to her? How do you know a dozen more people didn’t know of his movements, and hadn’t better reason to want him dead than ever she had?”
“There may have been a hundred,” agreed George, “but there’s curiously little sign of even one. You find me the evidence, and I’ll be more than interested.”
Gerd said: “In any case, it’s no desperate matter, so don’t let’s get melodramatic about it. Sergeant Felse has his job to do. I haven’t been accused of killing him, so far, and there’s no need to act as if I have.” Her eyes were large and urgent on her husband now, with no time for George; and for that reason he was able to make more sense of their questioning than ever he had made before. She wanted the subject dropped. She wanted either an end of the interview, or Chris miles away; for it was plain, for one dazzling moment, that she simply did not know what he might be about to say, and feared it as she had never feared Helmut Schauffler. “I’ve told all I know,” she said. “I don’t think he can have anything more to ask you.”
“I might,” said George, “ask him why it doesn’t surprise him to hear that you knew all about Helmut’s movements the night he was killed. After all, yesterday you both denied you’d seen hide or hair of him since he was in court. He seems to take it all as a matter of course that we should have come to a different conclusion today.”
The exchange of glances was fluid and turbulent, like the currents of a river. One minute he thought he had the hang of it, the next it seemed to mean something quite different. They were at cross-purposes, each in fear of what the other might give away, each probing after the other’s secrets. Certainly it seemed that Helmut’s last visit to the farm had been no secret from Hollins, however securely Gerd had tried to hide it. Now she was at a loss how to say least, how to keep him most silent, agonized with trying to understand at every stage before George could understand, and so steer the revelations into the most harmless channel. But Hollins was past giving her any cooperation in the endeavor. Concealment was alien to his nature, and he had had enough of it, if it could end in his wife’s being singled out as a likely suspect of murder. He swung his heavy head from one to the other of them, darkly staring, and said bluntly:
“Well I knew he’d been here, and talked to her, and carried on his old games at her, like before! And well I knew she told you lies when she said the opposite yesterday. Do you wonder she kept as much as she could to herself? If it was a mistake, it was a mistake ninety-nine out of a hundred would have made.”
She stood there staring at him with blank, shocked eyes. When she could speak she said: “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you at least knew nothing about it—I wanted you not to know! But when you found it out, you might have told me!”
“Trying to shut up trouble doesn’t work so well,” he said grimly. “But I thought it was my job to think of something, and not to put the weight of it any harder on you. Not that it came to anything—not even murder. I might as well say, why didn’t you tell me, and not leave me to find out for myself what was going on. But I don’t ask you any such thing.”
“Well, having gone so far,” said George, “you may as well tell me all you know. Look, I don’t pretend to be the children’s friend to any very wonderful extent, but wouldn’t it have been better to trust me a little further in the first place?”
“Maybe it would, but try being in our shoes, and see what you’d do. Not that we’d anything guilty to hide,” he said with quite unwonted violence, as if he were trying to convince himself, “but just the run of events can put you in a bad spot without any help on your part, and it comes natural to play down the awkward bits that don’t mean anything, but have a nasty way of looking as if they do.”
George, with his eyes on Gerd, agreed reasonably that this made perfect sense. “But now let’s have all the facts you’ve got to give, even if they look nothing to you. They help to fill in an evening, and reduce the time about which we know very little. For instance, we know now that Helmut came here, accosted Mrs. Hollins in the orchard at about eight o’clock, made himself as objectionable as usual, and left at about a quarter-past the hour. From then until eleven o’clock, when apparently he must have been dead, we know nothing about him. It seems you knew the persecution was still going on. How long had you known it? Before that night?”
Hollins turned his head from side to side, thrusting at them both as if they might make simultaneous but not concerted attack. After a thick pause he said, quite quietly: “No.”
“You found it out that night?”
“Yes. She was a long time. I had a devil nagging me that there was still something wrong. I went down the garden and looked through the trees there, and saw them. He had her by the arm—”
Gerd cried out suddenly, in a voice too high-pitched for her: “He’s lying! I do not believe it. He’s making up a tale for you, to draw you off from me. Don’t listen to him! He knew nothing, he saw nothing, I am absolutely sure he was not there—”
“I did more than see. It was all I could do not to come out at him and wring his neck on the spot, but if you could keep me out of things for my own good, so could I you. I went back to the house,” he said, breathing hard, “and got my old revolver, and loaded it, and then I went round to the edge of the spinney, where I knew he’d go sneaking away after he left you. Oh, no, Sergeant Felse, my wife wasn’t the only one to know all about his movements that evening. I knew them better than she did. I saw him alive long after she did. When he went off up the mounts and into the wood, I went after him.”
Knotting her hands at her waist into a tight contortion of thin, hard fingers in which the knuckles showed white, she said: “You are a fool! You take the wrong way, the foolish way, to protect me.”
George, looking from one to the other, prompted delicately: “You said, Mrs. Hollins, that he went out halfway through the evening.”
“I was gone before she got back to the house.”
“It’s true, he was gone,” she said, trembling now, “but I knew he was going to Blunden’s, I took it for granted that he should simply leave when he was ready. And he did go to Blunden’s—the old man will tell you so.”
“He has told me so already. But it doesn’t take three-quarters of an hour and more to go from here to the Harrow.”
“On a fine evening, why should he hurry? There was nothing else to claim him. But this other story he has made up, to help me, to make you think that Helmut lived long after he left me, and there can be no suspicion on me—”
“Look!” said George, suddenly going to her and taking her firmly by the elbow. “Take it easy, both of you! You sit down, and don’t rush things before you come to them.” She looked surprised, even, he suspected, a little
