Three
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When they really did get him home, of course, they wanted to put him to bed and keep him quiet, and not let him do any talking until next day. Pussy and Io went straight into the kitchen with him, while the others shut themselves into the office, and presently telephones rang, and cars came and went. Dominic was preoccupied with more immediate things, little ordinary things the charm of which he had not noticed so clearly for a long time, like the coolness of Bunty’s bare arms when she hugged him, and the rough place on her finger where she always pricked it when she sewed, and the skin on top of very creamy cocoa, and the worn place on his favorite velvet cushion. He had been so abstracted at tea that he had eaten scarcely anything, and now he was hungry. Bunty fed him, and didn’t ask him any questions. She didn’t know the half yet, but it was scarcely even late, and he was home, and safe, and apparently in some obscure fashion both a hero and a criminal. Since he was there within sight and touch of her, and eating his head off, Bunty forbore from either scolding or praising him, and waited without impatience for explanations. And when George and Chad and Jim came in, she got them at last in very fair order.
“He’s away to Comerbourne,” said George, answering all the interrogatory eyes which turned upon him as soon as he entered the room. “And the stick’s gone with him. Plenty of work and fuss yet, but virtually, that’s over.” He rubbed a hand over his forehead, and marveled that he felt nothing of satisfaction, little of surprise, only a flatness and a weariness, such as come almost inevitably at the end of tensions. When the cord slackens, and there ought to be a joyous relief, there seems instead to be only a slightly sick indifference. But later things right themselves. You can get used to anything in time, even to the idea that Selwyn Blunden, J.P., the nearest thing to God around Comerford, is a murderer. He looked down at Dominic, half-immersed in cocoa, and said darkly: “I ought to take the hide off you!”
But the tone was reassuring to Dominic’s ears; he knew enough about parents to know that when they begin to talk about it as something they ought to do, the resolution necessary to the act has already left them. “The stick!” he said, emerging from the mug with a creamy-brown moustache, “I forgot about it! It was the one, wasn’t it?” His face was beginning to melt from the slightly stunned immobility of shock to a rather painful excitement, with a patch of hectic rose on either cheek, and snapping yellow lights in his eyes. Bunty, having made room for everyone and given them all coffee, came and sat on the sofa beside him, and put a restraining hand on his arm. He liked the touch, and turned on her a brief, vague smile, but went back instantly to his question. “It
“Not much doubt about it,” said George, eyeing him thoughtfully. “The shield fits, even to the crumpled edge. The place has been stained over to match the rest, and very well done, too, but the holes are there to be seen, and the outline of the shape, too, in a good light. It’s a ridged horn handle, well polished with use, but it has some very deep furrows. Even if it was washed in the outflow, there ought to be some traces to be found in those furrows.”
“And all this time,” said Io, staring fascinated, “he just hid it by carrying it everywhere with him.”
“Can you think of a better way? And he didn’t know actually that anyone was looking for it. The shield was never mentioned; it came too late for the inquest, and nothing was ever published about it even when it did turn up.”
“No, and in any case people had another new sensation then,” said Dominic, paling at the memory of Charles. “But there are lots of things I still want to know—”
“Lots of things I want to know, too,” agreed George, “but frankly, I think you’ve shot your bolt for tonight. It’s time you and Pussy went to bed and slept it off. The urgent part’s over, and well over. We can talk it out properly tomorrow.”
It was not their double grievous outcry that defeated him, but the resigned intercession of Bunty and Io, neither of whom saw any prospect of sleep for her charge if despatched to bed in this state. The crisis was too recently over. The echo of Pussy’s enraged scream as she darted out of the bushes had scarcely ceased to vibrate in their ears, and Dominic was still shaking gently with excitement and erected nerves in Bunty’s steadying arm. If he went to bed too soon he would probably wake up sweating with shock and leaping about in his bed to evade the fall of the terrible old man’s loaded stick. If he talked himself into exhaustion and left nothing unsaid to breed, he would sleep without any dreams.
“Let him talk now,” said Bunty, smiling at George across the room. “He’ll be better.”
“I’m quite all right,” said Dominic indignantly. “I was only scared at the time, and anyhow, who wouldn’t be? But there’s nothing the matter with me now. Only look, it isn’t even my proper bedtime, quite—well, only just a little past it, anyhow.”
“All right,” said George, giving in, “get it off your chest. I want to hear it quite as much as you want to tell it, but it wouldn’t hurt for waiting a day. Still, go ahead! Tell me how you came to that performance tonight, and then I’ll tell you what brought me to the same place. How soon did you start thinking in Blunden’s direction, and what set you off on that tack?”
“Well, it was the dog,” said Dominic, frowning back into the past. “I only started to get the hang of it today, really. I never thought of Mr. Blunden until this morning. I don’t know why, but you know, he was sort of there like the rest of us, and yet not there. When we said everybody was in it, there were still people who weren’t included in the everybody, and he was one of them. Until I saw the dog this morning, and I started to think, and I thought why shouldn’t he be?”
He leaned back warmly into Bunty’s shoulder; it was still rather nice, when he began remembering, to be sure that she was there. “It was Charles dying when he did! It was almost the very minute he made up his mind to let the land be torn up, that’s what made me think. One minute he’d won the appeal, you see, and he was going out shooting in the evening, all on good terms with himself and everybody; and the very next, almost, he was shot dead with his own gun in his own woods. And the only thing that happened in between was that he changed his mind about the land. He saw me, and told me, but that was just luck—nobody was supposed to know yet, he was just on his way home to tell his father. And then inside an hour he was dead. Well, I didn’t think of it quite like that until today, because old Blunden still sort of wasn’t there in the everybody who could have done it. But I did get to thinking awfully hard about the land, and it did seem, didn’t it, that everything that happened round here was something to do with keeping that land from the coal people.”
“Everything? Previous events as well?” asked Chad, from the background.
“Yes, I think so. Only I know there were lots of other things about Helmut, he was just Helmut, almost anyone would have been glad to kill him. But even he fitted in, in a way, because, you see, it was Mr. Blunden who got him the job with the open-cast unit, and then all those things began to happen there, all the machines going wrong, and the excavator falling over the edge, and everything. And Helmut had lots of money that nobody knew anything about, odd-numbered notes that couldn’t easily be traced. And though he wrote down everything, he hadn’t kept any records to account for this extra money. Don’t you remember, we all wondered what his racket could have been, because he wasn’t known to have got into any of the usual ones? So there was he with lots of money, and the unit with lots of trouble, so much that they were thinking of dropping the claim on the Harrow land, and closing the site. And so when I just began to put everything together, today, all this fitted in, too, with the bit about the land. It looked to me as if Blunden had put Helmut into the job just to make it not worth their while to go on. I did tell you, I told Charles Blunden, Wilf Rogers on the site told me those accidents weren’t accidents at all, but
