Fallen Into the Pit

him.

“Not a very promising line, after all, I suppose,” said Charles, sounding, as everyone did, quite cheerful at this reflection. In a way, no one wanted the wretched case solved; in another way no one would have any peace, and nothing would ever be normal again, until it was solved. “Still, you never know. Some witness may turn up yet who’ll really have something to say. Anyhow, if there’s anything I can do when you come up again, you know where to find me.”

George went home to Bunty very thoughtfully. It was all if, whichever way he turned. If Chad’s elusive figure at ten had been Helmut, Chris Hollins was out of it. If, of course, Chad was telling the truth. And that was something about which no one could be sure. His whole attitude was so mad that it was quite conceivable he had not only seen him, but knocked him on the head and rolled him into the brook, too, and come back to tell half of the tale, when he need have mentioned none. It sounded crazy, but Chad was hurling provocations into the teeth of fate in precisely this bitter- crazy manner. Or, of course, he could be telling the whole truth, in which case it became increasingly desirable to identify his poacher. Most probably some canny regular who had nothing to do with the business, but still he might know something. See Chad again, in case he could add anything to his previous statement. See all the poachers he could think of; business is business, but murder is murder.

And did it necessarily follow from the (hypothetical) clearing of Chris Hollins, that Gerd was equally innocent? George looked at it from all directions, and could only conclude that it did not. Chris had been home shortly before half-past ten, just as he said, because Bill Hayley had seen and talked to him. But there was no proof that Gerd had been there to meet him, except her husband’s word. And what was that worth where her safety was concerned? What would you expect it to be worth?

Exhausted with speculation, George’s mind went back and forth between Hollins’s household, Jim Tugg, Chad Wedderburn, with the uneasy wraiths of Jim Fleetwood and many like him periodically appearing and disappearing between. There was no end to it. And the mere new fact that Helmut had added poaching to his worse offenses did not greatly change the picture. All it did was slightly affect his actual movements on the night of his death, and perhaps give an imperfect lead on the time of his exit, since it argued that he had been alive and active after the darkness grew sufficiently positive for his purposes. In George’s mind the death drew more surely into the single hour between ten and eleven; but stealthily, and he feared unjustifiably.

Bunty met him in the office, and indicated by a small gesture of her head and a rueful smile that Dominic was just having his supper in the kitchen. She closed the door gently in between, and said with a soft, wry gravity: “Your son, my dear George, is seriously displeased with you.”

“I know,” said George. “I don’t blame him, poor little beast. He finds ’em, I appropriate ’em. But this time, as a matter of fact, he isn’t missing a thing, there’s nothing to miss. Only a lot of useless speculations that go round in circles and get nowhere.”

“Then you can afford to talk to him, and at any rate pretend to confide in him a little. Now’s the time, when you can do it with a straight face.” She took his cap from him, laid it aside, and reached up suddenly to kiss him. “I wouldn’t trust you to try it when you really had anything on your mind, because he’d see through you like glass. But if there’s nothing to tell, even you can say so and remain opaque. Let’s go and be nice to him, shall we? Or he’ll only imagine all sorts of lurid discoveries.”

“That’s all I’m doing,” said George bitterly. But he went, and he was nice. Somebody might as well get some satisfaction out of the incident, if it was any way possible; it was precious little George was getting.

Four

« ^ »

It was Constable Cooke who said it, after they had been over and round and through every fact and every supposition they possessed between them. They had it now in positive terms that not only had Helmut’s tunic-lining retained rubbings of down from the pheasants’ feathers, but the pheasants’ feathers had acquired and guarded, through their long repose in the clay of the pit, distinct traces of the fluff from Helmut’s tunic-lining. Leaving no doubt whatever that these were the very birds, and very little that they had been planted in precisely the same way, and probably for the same reasons, as their discoverer had supposed. That was something at any rate, though it led them no nearer to a solution. They were left counting over their possibilities again, reducing them to the probabilities, which seemed to be four, and weighing these one against another to find the pennyweight of difference in their motives and opportunities. And Constable Cooke, who was light of heart because he was less surely involved, said what George had refrained from saying.

“Among four who had equal reasons for wanting him dead, and equal opportunities for killing him,” he said brightly, “personally I’d plump for one of the two who’re known to have had enough experience to be good at it. A sweater, after all, is most likely to have been knitted by someone who can knit.”

George sat looking at him for a moment in heavy silence, jabbing holes in the blotting-pad of his desk with a poised and rapier-pointed pencil, until the over-perfected tip inevitably broke off short. He threw it down, and said glumly: “You may as well elaborate that, now you’ve said it.”

Cooke sat on the corner of the desk, swinging a plump leg, and looking at his sergeant with the bland, blond cheerfulness which filled George sometimes with a childish desire to shock him; like a particularly smug round vase which no right-minded infant could resist smashing. He would have been quite a nice lad, if only God had given him a little more imagination.

“Well, it’s obvious enough, isn’t it? There’s Mrs. Hollins, admittedly she was being pushed to extremes, and you can never be sure then what a person can and can’t do. But I’m not professing to be sure, I’m only talking about probabilities. There’s a woman who never hurt anybody or anything in her life, as far as we know, and never showed any desire to; and even if she got desperate enough to try, it would be a bit of a fluke if she made such a good job of it, the first time, wouldn’t it? And then old Chris, how much more likely is it with him? I bet he never killed anything bigger than a weasel or a rabbit in his life. A more peaceful chap never existed. Not to mention that he had less time for the job than some of the others. But when you come to the other two, my word, that’s a different tale!”

“The other two, however,” said George, “had much less solid motives for murder. I’m not saying they had none, but there wasn’t the urgency, or the personal need. And I’m inclined to think, with Wedderburn, that while people will certainly do desperate things for the sake of other people, when it comes to it they’ll do far more desperate ones for their own sakes.”

“Well, but according to that, even, they had as much motive as Hollins had. More, because they had more imagination to be aware of it. If Hollins might kill for his wife’s sake, so might Tugg, if you ask me, he thinks the world of her. And Wedderburn had a grudge on Jim Fleetwood’s account, as well as a general grudge that a German, and a near-Nazi at that, should be able to live here under protection while he stirred up trouble for everybody in the village.”

“Very natural,‘’ said George, ”and common to a great many other people who’d come into contact with Helmut round these parts. You could count me in on that grudge.”