Fallen Into the Pit

me, are you?” The reaction was setting in. He was very tired, his eyelids drooping; but he wanted to get rid of all of it, and sleep emptied of even the last dregs of his seething excitement.

“Not tonight,” said Bunty comfortably. “I’m saving that up for tomorrow.”

“But, Dad, if Pussy didn’t bring you there, like I expected, how did you get there? I’m jolly glad you did, but how did you?”

“I followed Blunden,” said George simply. “I’d gone part of the way you went, about Helmut’s murder, about the way the land kept cropping up. But I won’t say I seriously thought of Blunden, until the dog came into the picture, or rather didn’t come into it when he should have done. I smelt the same rat. The spaniel more or less vanished. Nobody exercised him, he was never seen out with the old man. I got the same ideas you had. So I started a close watch on Blunden; and when he suddenly groomed the dog and took it down to the station after the funeral this afternoon, Weaver and I went after him. He went to get rid of it, of course, before anyone else could start noticing things.”

“He didn’t kill the dog, too?” asked Pussy anxiously.

“No, he sold him—to a man who’d made several attempts to buy him from Charles before, for a very good price. Quite a known name in the spaniel world, lives in Warwickshire, right in the country miles from anywhere. We found out all about him quite easily. No, dogs were something it hardly occurred to Blunden to kill. He used them to help him kill other things. It didn’t seem necessary to kill the dog, and it could have been dangerous. But it was quite natural to get rid of him, after what had happened—a gesture to get rid of a bereavement, and give the dog a fresh start, too. Besides, when he had a thing of value, he couldn’t resist getting a price for it. Well, he sold the dog, and he came home, and we were on his heels—just in time to come in on your little scene, and a nice fright you gave us.”

“Do you mean you were close behind us all the time?” asked Dominic, opening his eyes wide.

“As close as was safe.”

“I wish I’d known! I’d have felt a lot better,” He yawned hugely. “And do you mean, then, that you’d have got on to him just the same, without all that performance? I scared myself nearly to death for nothing?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said George, smiling. “I was certain he’d killed Charles. I might have got hold of the stick sooner or later, and got him on that charge. But to date we hadn’t a shred of real evidence. You provided that—at least enough to let us get our hands on him, and the rest followed.”

“I’m glad if I was useful,” said Dominic, “anyway.” He yawned again. Io took the gentle hint which poised on Bunty’s near eyelid, and rose from her hassock.

“It’s time we went home. Dad might be wondering, and we’ll have a lot of explaining to do for him. Come on, Pussy, you can see Dom again tomorrow, he’s had about enough for tonight, and so have you, I should think.” And she turned with equal simplicity to Chad, and gave him the full candid look of her brown eyes, and her hand, too. “Come back with us, Chad! Just for half an hour!”

Jim Tugg’s dog was stretched out on the office rug. He rose at the first sound of his master’s step on the threshold of the room, and fell into his place in the little procession, close at the shepherd’s heel. Subdued good- nights drifted back to Bunty in the doorway, soft, relaxed murmurs of sound, tired, content. She watched them go, and her gratitude went after them down the moist October street, where the lamps were just winking out for half- past eleven. Chad with his hand protectively at Io’s elbow, as if he had had the right for years, Io with her arm round Pussy’s shoulders. A lot of knots had somehow come untied, and when the nine-days’ wonder had passed over, Comerford could sleep easy in its bed. Bless them all, Jim and the collie, too, everyone who had stood by Dominic and brought him back alive.

She went back to the kitchen. Dominic had come down to the fire, and was kneeling on the rag to warm himself, shivering a little from the cold which follows nervous strain. But he was still talking, rather drunkenly but with great determination.

“There was something in it, you see, about the people who get to take killing for granted. Only Cooke had hold of the wrong ones, I think. It isn’t the people like old Wedderburn, who had to do it because there wasn’t any other choice at all. You know, Dad, sometimes things get into such a jam that there isn’t a right thing to do, but only a least wrong one. And that’s how it was with the people like him, in the war. And then, even if you do the best you can, you feel dirty. And you hate it. You don’t know how he’s hated it! But it wasn’t like that with Blunden at all. The only use he had for a lot of things was to kill them. He bred things to kill. He was brought up to it. The little things in the woods, that he could have left alone without missing much, the badgers, and foxes, and crows—anything that took a crumb of his without paying for it double, he killed. And the war didn’t hit him, you see, because he was here, all he had to do was feel the excitement of it, a long way off, and talk about knocking hell out of the beggars. He didn’t have to do it. He didn’t have to feel dirty. Of course it came easy to him. Why shouldn’t it? In a way it wasn’t even real. Nothing was, that didn’t happen to him.”

“And do you really think,” asked George, gravely and respectfully, “that even Blunden—about whom I wouldn’t like to say you’re wrong—killed two people and was quite ready to kill a third, simply to preserve twenty acres of land?”

“I suppose so, yes. It was his, you see. Whether he even wanted it or not, it was his, and so it was sacred. It might as well have been his blood. It made no difference if it was only twenty acres, or if it was only one. That didn’t have anything to do with it.” He rubbed a tired hand over his eyes. Bunty came and put her hands on his shoulders, and he got up obediently to the touch, and gave her a dazed smile. “Yes, Mummy, I’ll go to bed. I am tired.”

George drew his son to him for a moment in his arm. “Goodnight, Dom! Look—don’t waste any regrets on Blunden. You did what you decided you had to do, what seemed to be the right thing, for everybody. Didn’t you?”

“Yes. Well—I thought I did. I thought I was sure about it. Only they’ll kill him, won’t they?”

“He killed, didn’t he? And hurt more people even than he killed. Couldn’t we agree, at least,” he said very gently, “that what you, did was the least wrong thing? In the circumstances?”

“I suppose so,” said Dominic with a pale smile, and went away quietly to bed. But when Bunty went up to him, ten minutes later, he was lying with the light still on, and his eyes wide open, staring into the corner of the ceiling as if he would never sleep. She went to his bedside and leaned down to him without a word; and suddenly he put his arms out of bed and reached up for her, and clung to her desperately. She felt his heart pounding. He said in a fierce, vehement stammer: “Mummy, I’m never going to be a policeman, never, never!” And then he began to cry. “Mummy, don’t tell him! Only I couldn’t—I couldn’t!”

She could have argued George’s side of it, she could justly have told him that in an imperfect world