Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (15 page)

Heute blau und Morgen blau

Und Übermorgen wieder,

Ich bin dein, und du bist mein,

Und froh sind uns’re Lieder.

Gisela, huddled in a red dressing-gown, was by this time rather less indignant and considerably more uneasy. What was the use of pretending no harm could come to anyone in this house, after Friedl?

‘I have been up to her room. Everything is in order there, her door is locked and her light out. I am sure she is asleep. I tapped gently, but she didn’t answer, and I do not like to disturb her rest.’

But her eyes were round and anxious, even afraid. Bunty understood. Somebody had to take the matter farther, now, but Gisela didn’t want the responsibility. What Miss Tressider’s friend insisted on doing was her own affair.

‘The small light in her bedroom is still burning,’ she said gently. ‘She has a door on the verandah, hasn’t she? Is there a way up from outside?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Gisela jumped at the idea. ‘I will show you. We can go through the house.’ And with luck, if they found the guest in Number One fast asleep, then they could all lock up and go to bed, and no one but themselves would ever be any the wiser about this night alarm.

They passed through the long corridor to the rear of the house, and out by a short passage on to the path from the terrace, and came to the fringe of the trees. A little way along in the darkness was the wooden staircase that led up to the verandah. Bunty felt her way up it by the rough wooden handrail, and half-way up her fingers, sliding along the wood, encountered a jagged knot, and a fragment of something silken soft and fine, like long strands of mohair, that clung to her skin with the live persistence of synthetic fibres convulsed with static. She pulled the strands loose from the rough place where they had caught, and shut them in her palm as they went on up the stairs.

Gisela hung back, quivering. ‘The door… it is open!

The glass door stood wide on the darkness of Maggie’s sitting-room. Through the half-open door that led to the bedroom beyond, the small gleam of the bedside lamp illuminated for them a pillow still covered by a hand-crocheted bedspread. The pillow was dented by the pressure of a head; so, when they put on the light to look round the room, was the bed itself by a light body. But no one was there now. The verandah door must have been open for some time, for rain had blown in… No, that was impossible. The verandah was not completely roofed in, but the jut of the eaves above covered a good half of it, and there had been almost no wind to drive the showers. Yet there was a damp patch just inside the doorway, slightly darkening the scrubbed boards. Everything was tidy, everything was normal, but nothing remained of Maggie Tressider except the score of Mahler’s ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ on the piano, and in Bunty’s palm a small triangle of material woven from one of the more expensive synthetics, printed in a delicate feather pattern of grey and white, like fine lace, with a few long strands of silky nylon fringe trailing from it.

Gisela looked at it and moistened her lips. ‘It is from the girdle of her housecoat. I have seen her wearing it.’

‘Yes,’ said Bunty. ‘I thought it might be. We’ve got no choice now. You can see that, can’t you? Don’t worry, it isn’t your fault, I’ll do the talking. You go down and call the police. And better tell Herr Waldmeister, he’ll have to know. I’ll wait here. Tell them the message is from the wife of Detective-Inspector Felse. They’ll understand.’

They understood and they came, with all the more alacrity because they had already received, some ten minutes previously, Werner Frankel’s call from a mountain inn over the border in Germany. By the time they reached Bunty, waiting for them in Maggie’s sitting-room, there were police patrols out in Germany checking all cars between the border and Felsenbach for a middle-aged light-brown Dodge with a Swiss registration, and Austrian police patrols converging from Langen and Bregenz on Scheidenau, watching for a dark-blue or black Mercedes in a hurry.

It sounded complicated enough without any new complications; but it was becoming quite clear that it was all one case, and too large for taking any chances. First an associate of Miss Tressider was ambushed and abducted on the highroad; and now the girl herself, it seemed, had vanished from her hotel room without warning or explanation.

Not, however, without trace. There were traces enough. A shred torn from her girdle by a knot in the handrail of the staircase. An unimpressive and rapidly drying patch of damp inside her verandah door. And down the slope towards the water, under her windows, search produced a silver chiffon ribbon, still loosely knotted, with one or two dusky gold hairs twined in the knot. It had caught in the fir branches where the half-grown trees grew close, and just at the height of a woman’s shoulders. As if she had run from her room, leaving the door open, and straight down the slope in a frenzy of resolution and despair into the lake.

‘Yes,’ said Bunty, bolt upright on the piano stool, ‘that’s what we were meant to think.’ She stabbed a finger emphatically at the music on the stand. ‘Even this could be part of the picture. She has a recent history of illness, and has been investigating the disappearance of a man who toured with her here when she was just beginning. That’s what it looks like, anyhow. The man in the photograph, yes. And now it seems he’s dead. And here is she running through a song like this, all about the demon lover coming back from the grave to claim his bride. If she drowned herself, people might be shocked, but I don’t suppose anyone would find it incredible.’ She added after a moment’s thought: ‘Except, perhaps, this man Killian. He seems to have got nearer to her than anyone.’

‘And he,’ said the man in charge dryly, ‘has been taken care of at the same time, eh?’

She never got the police ranks of Austria clear in her mind, but his name, it seemed, was Oberkofler. He was probably in the sixties, a tall, rangy mountain man with a wrinkled leather face and shaggy grey hair. He wore whatever had come to hand first when his subordinates got him out of bed, and most of it was non-uniform, but he still had no difficulty in looking like the holder of authority. He was Scheidenau born and bred, and looked the part. Bunty found him impressive. She was glad he was the one among them who spoke English, it gave her an excuse for staying in his vicinity.

‘Four of them to take care of the man,’ he mused, eyeing the damp patch now barely visible on the floorboards, ‘and one to account for the woman. You are sure he did not come back to the lake later?’

Bunty glanced towards the window. The strains of ‘Du kannst nicht treu sein’ were borne bravely across the water. ‘How could he?’ she said simply.

‘Yes… I think first we must make contact with our friends there, and make sure that they remain effective, all night if need be. That will make any drowning “accident” impossible, and any retreat by water, also. From what you tell me it seems that this man must be still somewhere close, perhaps still in the woods. Also, we hope, the lady… And now, Frau Felse, if you would wish to get some sleep…’

‘I’d rather stay,’ said Bunty. ‘At least until we get word from my husband.’ But she meant rather, until we recover those two alive, and find out what this thing is all about. She had begun this hunt, she wanted to see it ended. There were police converging on Scheidenau from all directions, methodically threading the woodland along the lake-shore, a small army mustering because of what George and she had loosed in this quiet village. She intended to see finished what they had begun.

‘Then of course you may stay. Where should we have been without you? You can rest here in your friend’s room, why not?’

But he showed neither surprise nor disapproval when she followed him down to the office where he had set up his headquarters.

The telephone was busy almost every moment for the next hour, but they found no further trace of Maggie Tressider. The revellers on the lake sang and rowed on unflagging, which in its way was as astonishing as it was admirable. It would have been only human to tire and long for sleep as soon as they were officially requested to go on celebrating. Outside among the trees the search proceeded, inside here Oberkofler directed and co-ordinated. The Waldmeister parents, philosophical and phlegmatic, not to say faced with their usual working day in a few hours’ time, accounted for themselves and went back to bed, the sons volunteered their services and went to join in the hunt. And Bunty watched and listened and waited, and harried her memory for any submerged detail or any hopeful idea; and worried now not only about those two hapless people lost, but also about George, from whom there had been no word.

A call from Werner Frankel, over in Felsenbach. The Dodge must have got through before they had an effective block-up. They were getting out a general call on it, and hoped to pick it up somewhere near Regenheim.

Another call from Werner, half an hour later. They had returned now to the scene of the abduction, and found in the ditch where the attack took place a wallet containing the papers of Francis Killian, together with several photographs of a certain gravestone in the cemetery at Felsenbach.

‘Of which,’ said Oberkofler, ‘perhaps you have heard from the Herr Inspektor?’

‘He told me about it yesterday,’ said Bunty. ‘The day before yesterday, I mean.’ She was a little lightheaded with so much waiting and thinking, and so little sleep. ‘But I haven’t seen it. George didn’t have a camera. Our mistake!’

And at last, just before one o’clock, another telephone call which Oberkofler answered in voluble German, to switch suddenly and wonderfully into English.

‘Yes… yes, good, I will send you every man I can, and more as they come in. Yes, your wife is here. Please, only a word…’ He held out the receiver to Bunty with a smile as wide and deep as the sea. ‘Your husband, Frau Felse.’

‘George?’ said Bunty, heaving a deep sigh. ‘Did he tell you? We’ve lost Maggie as well.’

‘Yes, I know. That makes us quits, love, I lost the car they had Killian in. We had a mile of road to comb for whatever hole they dived into, but it turned out there’s only one, apart from farm-tracks. This one’s blind, too, it goes to the lake and stops, so they tell me. Doesn’t even pass anything, except that rubble that used to be Scheidenau Castle. But somewhere up there is where they must be. There isn’t anywhere else. We’re off to hunt for the car now.’

‘George, isn’t there anything I can do to help?’

‘From all I hear you’ve done it,’ said George. ‘They also serve…! If we find him, the odds are we find her, too. This is all one set-up. Keep hoping! Sorry, got to clear this line, it may be wanted.’

‘Yes, of course. See you, then!’

She held out the receiver to Oberkofler, but he shook his head at her and smiled. She hung up. She was suddenly shaking with reaction, and dared not try to guess how the night would end.

Distantly, inexhaustibly, across the lake and in at the window came the thunder of the guns of Helmut’s navy:

Es war einmal ein treuer Hussar,

Der liebt sein Mädchen ein ganzes Jahr,

Ein ganzes Jahr, und noch viel mehr…

Two voices were discussing her above her head. They didn’t know that dead people can hear. Quite dispassionate voices, cool, leisurely and low, discussing her in terms of life and death. Either they had no bodies, or dead people can’t see. She was dangling just below the level of consciousness clinging to the surface tension like the air-breathing nymph of some water creature.

‘
So schön auch
,’ said the first voice critically.

‘Nobody’s beautiful who gets in my way,’ said the second voice in plain English and without overtones; a light, pleasant, untroubled tenor voice without a care in the world.

‘
Aber schön
,’ the first voice insisted with detached approval. ‘She has everything!’

‘Except immortality.’

‘What are you going to do with her?’

The second voice was silent long enough to indicate a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Did I make her wade in here so far out of her depth? She had a death wish.’

‘Waste of a girl!’ said the first voice with impersonal regret.

‘There are others. Even some with perfect pitch.’ And in a blithe half-tone the second voice began to sing to itself dreamily:

Mein Eigen sollst du werden gewiss,

Wie’s Keine sonst auf Erden ist,

O Lieb… auf grüner Erden
…

Any moment now she would feel the prick of the needle in her thigh, and submerge again. So this must be hell. What could be more absolute hell than to have to go on living and reliving these few weeks to eternity, trying to escape from the net, believing she had escaped, only to find herself back at the beginning and trapped as fast as ever? Everything to do again, everything to suffer again, everything to lose again. No, not quite a duplication, this time the dialogue had changed. The decision last time had been for life. This time it was for death.

Then, in the moment that she broke surface and knew herself conscious, miraculously the burden was gone. Last time she had awakened alone, oppressed and appalled by the horror of guilt without a source. Now that the verdict was for death she awoke to the calm and lightness of deliverance. She had not been deceived, after all, her guilt had been only a delusion, a sickness of which she was healed at last. Even if she died now, it would be as a whole, a sane person.

For this second voice she knew very well, and it belonged firmly in this world and no other. It was no poor injured ghost that had come to fetch her away, but a living and dangerous man, and he had come not because she owed him a death, but because she was a threat to him alive. Her probing had begun to uncover him of the carefully cultivated invisibility of years, he could not afford to let her go on with it. Grave or no grave, memorial or no memorial, Robert Aylwin was alive. She had neither killed him nor done him any wrong; and even if he killed her, she would never again be truly in his power, never his victim as she had been all these years. Neither living nor dead would Robin ever stand between her and love again.

She opened her eyes upon low stone vaulting that had a worn and monumental grandeur, like a feudal hall before luxury came into fashion. She was lying on a rough grey blanket spread upon a stone settle built all along one wall, and in the wall itself she saw the round fretted grooves left by the ends of barrels. The flagged floor was sifted with fine sand, the accumulated dust of wind erosion and time. The air felt moist and cool. There was a dim light from one heavily shaded electric bulb, that showed her only the side of the room where she lay, and a glimpse of a door in the corner, a door not worn at all, but surely almost new and very solid.

‘
Achtung
!’ said the first voice very-softly. ‘She’s coming round. Shall I…?’

‘No, let her! Company will help to pass the time until those fools go home to bed.’

She could see the pair of them only up to the shoulders, for the dark shade over the light obscured their faces. One of them stepped back accommodatingly into the shadows, the other came forward and sat down on one hip on the edge of the settle beside her feet. He saw that her eyes were wide-open and fixed upon his face, and turned the lamp deliberately to let it illuminate him fully.

‘Allow me! Is that better?’

He no longer glistened and streamed, the fall of wavy hair was nearly dry, only the unruly way it curled round his forehead showed that he had recently been out in the rain. He must have stood outside her room under the dripping trees all the while she was singing, waiting for the appropriate moment. He must, she thought, have been amused by the Mahler; a little Gothic horror would appeal to his sense of humour. He was dressed to go invisibly in the dark, in clerical grey slacks and a thick black sweater with a polo neck; the same, perhaps, in which he had prowled the woods that night he throttled and drowned Friedl.

Looking at him now, she found nothing surprising in that. He sat smiling at her, a cigarette held delicately between forefinger and thumb, narrowing his eyes slightly against the smoke that drifted towards his face in a light draught. The same boyish, regular features, the same full, mobile, strongly curling lips for ever on the edge of laughter. He laughed a great deal, always, at everything. For years she had forgotten the colour of his eyes, lowered in Friedl’s photograph, closed in that dead faun’s face over his grave. Perhaps it had cost her an extra effort to forget them, and she had managed it only because it was essential. They watched her now steadily, curiously, pale greenish-gold eyes, round and bold, a goat’s eyes, intelligent, inscrutable, malicious. The eyes laughed, too, almost without cease, but at some private joke that was not for ordinary humans. He was hardly older than he had been thirteen years ago, when she had last seen him. Why should he be, when he lived—it was to be seen in the debonair face and the cool, bright eyes—immune from all feeling and all responsibility?

She drew herself up with an effort to sit upright, her back—how appropriately!—against the wall. Never for a moment did her eyes leave his face.

‘It
is
you,’ she said at last, ‘it was
you
behind everything!’ She braced her hands against the cold stone to take fast hold of reality. She knew her situation now, and her enemy. She had marvellously recovered the fullness of life only just in time to lose it again, and feel the loss double. But also she had now a double stake for which to put up a fight. ‘So you
are
alive,’ she said.

‘Dear Maggie,’ he said, lazily smiling, ‘I believe so.’

‘Then what
was
it I heard, that night?
What was it that went into the lake
?

She thought for a moment that he was not going to answer her, but with a captive audience, and all the cards and all the strings in his own hands, and time to kill—
but how did it happen that he had time to kill
?—why not talk? After all, she wasn’t going anywhere, was she, to repeat anything he might let fall? He could indulge his fancy with no risk to himself.

‘Just one of old Waldmeister’s stacked logs,’ he said serenely. ‘The whole clearing down by the water was full of them, he surely couldn’t grudge me one in a good cause.’

‘But
why
?’ she said almost inaudibly, wrenching at the wanton shaft that had broken off short in her spirit as in wounded flesh, and festered ever afterwards. ‘Why play me such a trick? Why did you have to
die
at all? And even if you had your reasons for wanting to vanish, why stage a scene like that with me first? Why pretend you loved me? Why ask me…’ She drew breath slowly, and flattened her shoulders warily against the wall; the chill pierced her like a gust of cold air, and every such minute shock of reality helped to calm her senses and clear her mind. She, too, could talk; words were there to be used for her purposes as well as his. The more attention he gave to her, to impressing and subduing her, even to amusing himself with her, the less he would have left for imagining any counter-attack. ‘Just think,’ she said, eyeing him narrowly from under the fall of her loosened hair, ‘I might even have accepted you! What would you have done then?’

He found the recollection of that night rather flattering, she thought; maybe his memory even embroidered it. But be careful of believing that. Conceit is only a discardable toy to a man without feelings.

‘I should have married you, of course,’ he said sunnily. ‘It wouldn’t have been too great a hardship. You’d have turned out quite a profitable investment, the way things have gone. And as my wife, you wouldn’t have been asked to give evidence against me, either—would you?’

So that was one more piece of the puzzle falling into place. He had flicked it into her lap deliberately, she knew that. Nevertheless, record it, Maggie! He’s quite sure of his security, but there are things even he doesn’t know. He may yet live to regret dropping these small golden apples to distract you into running about at his will.

‘I see,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But what was I supposed to be able to tell? I never knew there
was
anything to be told against you.’

He leaned back to prop himself against the wall by one wide, lean shoulder, and grinned at her amiably through the smoke of his cigarette.

‘Do you remember the spring trip we made that year with the Circus?’

‘Well, well!’ she said. ‘You’ve still got the terms pat, after all this time.’

‘Dear Maggie, I have as near as damn it total recall. I remember the whole ramshackle set-up, and you so dedicated and earnest, and such an easy touch. You remember carrying some expensive cosmetics through Customs for me, that spring? A girl could get by with declaring those jars, when a man would automatically get charged on them. And it turned out that way, didn’t it? And a friend of mine met us at the boat-train, and I handed the whole works over as a present for his sister. Dear Maggie, you can’t have forgotten that kind deed? After all, what did you ever have to declare, except sheet-music and gramophone records?’

What money had she ever had, in those days, to buy any but the most vital necessities, all of which were comprehended in music? But all she said was: ‘I remember.’

‘Well, they picked up my anonymous friend later that year with rather a lot of heroin on him. Yes, that’s what was in the jars, sealed below about an eighth of an inch of cream and stuff. We were in Basel on the autumn tour when I got word, so I had to make up my mind quickly what to do. There was no knowing for sure that he’d keep his mouth shut about me, and even if he did, there might still be something they could hook up to me. And if ever they had found their way to the Circus, you’d soon have told them how those cosmetics came into England, wouldn’t you? It all boiled down to a choice between marrying you to close your mouth, and going home and chancing my luck, or staying here and turning professional. They’d been inviting me to do that for a year or more.’

‘
They
?’ said Maggie gently.

‘What good would it do you if I named names, my dear? The whole set-up has changed since then. Just one organisation among many, until I made it over to my taste. Call it what you like.
Cosa mia
…’

Yes, clearly anything into which he entered would soon have to become ‘
his thing’;
he wasn’t interested in being a subordinate. Perhaps that was why he’d never bothered to work at music, because even the disciplined approach necessary was only going to get him into the third, or at best the second, rank. ‘So you’d been smuggling for them for some time,’ she said, ‘under cover of Freddy’s respected name.’

‘Every trip. You’d helped me once before. Oh, not always hard drugs, in fact, very seldom. Anything light and profitable, precious stones, lenses, passports, medicines, even watches when other fields were dull. Once I went into England with two medieval manuscripts among my sheet music. We had a customer waiting for those, of course. Miniatures, rare coins, stamps, small art items—anything portable enough and expensive enough. We provide a world-wide service, moving the goods to where the demand is. Even before the crunch came I’d been thinking of throwing up the Circus before it threw me up, and going into the business full-time. It looked as if my career with Freddy was nearly up in any case. I let
you
make up my mind for me.
You
turned me down,
they
got me. You even provided me with a reason for suicide, if people got too nosy, though I admit the log was an afterthought. I remember taking off down the hillside, and there were these stacks of wood ready for carting, and it was too good to miss. You were so damned confident and secure, it seemed an appropriate gesture to give you something else to think about besides your great future.’

‘It must have been a disappointment to you,’ she said dryly, ‘when I didn’t tell anybody the story you’d so thoughtfully set up for me to tell.’

He leaned his head back against the wall and laughed aloud.

‘I was shocked to find you capable of such duplicity. You didn’t want any scandals or other little stumbling-blocks in the way of your career, did you? But after all, it worked out very well. Friedl kept me informed. If everyone had accepted Freddy’s dark hints, and come to the conclusion that I’d simply run out to avoid minor unpleasantness, that was fine with me. Just so long as nobody started a serious search for me
alive
.’

‘Friedl was your creature? One of the organisation?’

‘Hardly that. Let’s say Friedl became a useful camp follower. One of our ears on the world. One of our tongues, too, though,’ he added candidly, ‘I ought to have known better.’

‘Then it was you who put her up to telling all those lies to Francis and to me, to prove that you were dead?’

‘To Killian, yes. But to you? There she exceeded her orders, she had her own bone to pick with you. Friedl…’ He hoisted one shoulder in a smooth and eloquent gesture. ‘She always preferred to lie rather than tell truth, if not for policy, then for pleasure. Her facility has been useful on occasions, but when she was mad with jealousy—oh, yes, hadn’t you realised that?—she was a menace. She talked altogether too much. When she put you on to the grave, that was the end. She had to go. Probably the grave was a mistake from the beginning, I should have let well alone. But at the time it seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to have a second line of defence ready, in case of need. And then
you
had to get too interested in it, of all people, and of all people
you
would never have swallowed it. Anybody else she might have told, but
you
…’

‘I’ve seen the photographs,’ said Maggie. ‘How did you even manage that affair? Was it you who provided the body?
Is
there really a body there?’

‘Oh, yes, there’s a body, just as she told you. He came down with the snow water in the thaw. No, that wasn’t any master-stroke of mine, he was pure luck. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know who he really was. No, all I did was take the chance when it offered. Then there’d always be a grave to which I could misdirect enquiries if ever I needed to suggest my own death. It was a body, male, near enough my height and build and age, and past being identified. All I needed to do was make the anonymous offer to pay for his burial, as an act of piety, and make sure the death of an unknown young man was recorded and dated. Nothing so crude as a false identification or a name, of course. The portrait was an afterthought, a
jeu d’esprit
. Maybe too impudent, but it amused me.’