Fallen Into the Pit

amused, as he put her into a chair, but she sat there obediently looking up at him, and her face was eased. “Look, I know I started this, and in a not particularly fair way, either. But I’m not trying to get more out of you or anybody than just the plain, stupid truth. Just because you’re anxious to show me that he didn’t kill Helmut, there’s no need in the world to fall over backwards and tell me that you did. It’s long odds Helmut was seen alive long after he left here, maybe by several people, if only we knew how to find ’em. If your husband can fill in a bit of the missing time, so much the better for both of you in the long run. Only give up the idea that pushing the bits you don’t much like under the rug is going to make things better for anybody. It’s only going to make me mad, and that does nobody any good.”

She began to smile, and then he felt better, even though the smile was faintly indulgent, as to a crazy juvenile. “All right, if it’s understood that you don’t either of you have to talk in a hurry, we can hear the rest.” He looked up at Hollins, but the heavy remoteness of that face had not changed at all. “You followed him. Go on!”

Hollins shook back his shoulders, and went on: “I kept behind him all up the woods, out of sight and hearing of him, but close. The revolver was in my pocket. I don’t know whether I meant to kill him or not. I know I meant at least to half-kill him, maybe I meant more.”

“But it was after nine when he was killed,” cried Gerd, “and at nine—”

“At nine, or a couple of minutes later, your husband was at the Harrow,” said George. “Also, Helmut was not shot. And it does seem a little unlikely that a man with a loaded revolver in his pocket should go to the trouble to use a less certain method for the same job.”

“I didn’t use it for any job, in the end. It’s still fully loaded, it hasn’t even been used to bash somebody over the head. I suppose those fellows of yours who examine these things can tell that by looking at it?”

“They can try, at any rate,” said George. “Go on, where did you leave Schauffler, and at what time?”

“I kept behind him until he came on to the ridge above the river, and sat down there for a while. He was very pleased with himself, humming and singing to himself in German, and grinning as if he’d pulled off something very clever. He sat there quite a time. I had time to think, and I thought better of it.”

George asked, with genuine and personal curiosity: “Why?”

“Well, he wasn’t such big stuff. I meant getting him, and I watched and waited for him to move on; but he got to looking smaller and smaller as it got dark. And I cooled off this much, that I began to think how much trouble I should be laying up for her, as well as myself, with how little use or satisfaction. I knew about him now, and I could put a stop to him as far as my wife was concerned, without starting something worse for her, like murder in the family. She’d gone to a lot of pains to avoid what it looked like I was bent to bring on her. So I went off and left him there. I went to the Harrow—we weren’t two hundred yards from the wicket in the fence—and left him to go to hell for all I cared.”

“Virtually,” said George, “he did. What time did you quit?”

“I’d say about ten to nine. I went straight to Blunden’s, and it wouldn’t take above ten minutes to do it from there.”

“And you didn’t see anything of him on the return journey?”

“Not a sign. I told you the way I came home, and that was all truth, if the rest wasn’t. I took my time over it, to get it all off my mind before I came back where anybody could see me. I needed to walk him out of my system, or she’d have known with one look at me. From my point of view, after I turned my back on him up there we were both done with Helmut Schauffler.”

Unfortunately no one was yet done with Helmut Schauffler. That was the devil of it. Not George, not all the spasmodically talkative, suddenly quiet neighbors leaning over Comerford garden fences, not the cheated heroes looking for a world fit for humankind, certainly not these two unquiet lovers. It was plain when their eyes met, drawn together unwillingly, that wells of doubt were opened, within them, never to be filled by any amount of protestations or promises. Only certainty was of any use; nothing else held any peace for anyone in this haunted village.

She looks at him, thought George with pity and horror, as if she believes he’s lying. And he looks at her as if he knows she’s told only part of the truth. And yet he could not be sure even of this. “My lad,” said George to himself, “you’d better get a move on, for everybody’s sake!”

Four

« ^ »

I never noticed before,” he said to Bunty, in the late evening, when Dominic was safely in bed and his ears no longer innocently stretched after a solution of problems which were his as surely as anyone’s, “I never realized how opaque people’s looks can be. We read meanings into them every day, but suddenly when it’s a matter of life and death it makes you look again, and start weighing possibilities and separating them from suppositions—and altogether in the end you’re terrified to think anything means anything. For a moment I could have sworn that each of those two was seriously afraid the other had done it. And then I couldn’t be sure if that was really the meaning of the looks they were giving each other, or if it was something shared, or what it was.”

Bunty looked at him with her practical partisan sympathy, and agreed: “That’s a pity. Because if each of them really believed the other had done it, that would mean neither of them had done it, and then at least somebody would be safely out of it.”

“Not quite, because an expression in the eyes isn’t evidence. But at least I could have felt sure of something in my own mind. Now I’m sure of nothing. It’s as open as ever it was— in their direction rather wider open. Because there was an intent to murder, I’m sure of that, and while it’s credible that it should evaporate as suddenly as that—because he’s a sane man with both feet on the ground, and only too deeply aware how much trouble his wife’s been dragged through already— still it’s also a strong possibility that it didn’t evaporate.”

Bunty, aware of his hand’s vague undirected searching for something in his pockets, got up and brought him the tired man’s solace, his tobacco pouch and pipe, and the necessary matches. She put them into his lap, and watched his fingers operate them mechanically. Even over the first deep draws he made a face of disappointment. It was his own growing, and he always forgot to be prepared for the shock; but he was too stubborn to admit that it was unsmokeable. Maybe he hadn’t got the knack of curing it properly; anyhow, it was pretty awful. Bunty had never before noticed his distaste quite so clearly, and she made a mental note to buy a tin of his old brand the very next morning, and leave it somewhere for him to find, quite by accident.

“And another eye-opener,” said George fretfully, “is the ease with which well-known citizens can walk about this darned place for hours at a time, and meet nobody. You wouldn’t think it possible.”

“In the dark, in a scattered country district where everybody drops off home by his own particular beeline