Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (6 page)

‘All he seemed to have in mind at dinner,’ said Bunty, disconcertingly remaining grave, ‘was ingratiating himself with Maggie. He’d been paying her special attention for several days, that I do remember. Not that there’s anything remarkable in that. She was… she
is
a most beautiful person. All our boys were a little in love with her.’

He kept his eyes steady and faintly amused on hers, his hands placid on the papers they held, with an effort of will that left him no energy for speech for a moment. And he wondered if she could have hit him so hard and so accurately without knowing exactly what she was doing. Not out of malice, perhaps, just by way of experiment; there are other ways of satisfying one’s curiosity, besides asking direct questions.

‘I’m sure they must have been,’ he said evenly, when he had his voice under control again. Let her wonder, too, by how much she had missed her target. ‘And what about Miss Tressider? Did she respond?’

‘Maggie had other things on her mind by then. She knew what she wanted. She was nineteen,’ said Bunty, ‘she liked being liked, and she was a very nice, patient, quiet girl who would in any case have been kind to him. But she never took her eyes from her objective, for him or anyone.’

Her voice was gentle, deliberate and detached. It was more than time to work his way back unobtrusively to Paul Fredericks for ten minutes or so, and then take himself off, before he gave her more than he was getting out of her. She was altogether too perceptive. He managed his retreat with finesse, but finesse was not enough. Never mind, she had made it clear that she sympathised, and also held it to be no personal business of hers; and he was never going to see her again closer than across a Comerbourne street.

‘Of course,’ said Bunty Felse disconcertingly, seeing him out at the door, ‘after all this time she may have changed.’

It did not occur to her that there was anything to disturb her in this interview, for fully an hour after it was over. Her visitor was presumably what he purported to be, and it was only his misfortune that an aching preoccupation of his own had side-tracked him from the master to the pupil. If there hadn’t been something she had liked about him she might not even have noticed, much less felt obliged to warn him that she had. But after he was gone her mind began to nag at the curious implications of their conversation. Surely everything he had learned from her about autumn, 1955, Maggie already knew at least as well, and he must have known she would need no help in recalling details, supposing that she was serious about this book. No, that probe had been for his own satisfaction. And granted he had his own unhappy reason for wanting to talk about Maggie rather than her teacher, why just that incident, and why with so much controlled intensity? Why dwell so insistently on Robin Aylwin, who was of no significance whatever? Why want a photograph of him? The more she thought of it, the more it seemed to her that their conversation had gathered and fixed upon that enigmatic young man with quite unjustified interest.

She had not been asked to treat the interview as confidential. So she told George about it over tea, as she did about most things that stirred or puzzled her. George, who had had a fairly boring day, listened to her with pleasure and affection, but with only one ear, until a single harmless word unexpectedly caused all his senses to prick into life together. He came erect out of a faint blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘
Scheidenau
?’ he repeated sharply.

‘Scheidenau,’ agreed Bunty, opening her eyes wide. ‘Why? Ring a bell, or something? I must have mentioned it
ad nauseam
at the time, but of course it’s a long time ago. Anyway, it’s only a tiny little resort, nothing special about it. What made you sit up and take notice suddenly?’

‘Who did you say this fellow was? The one who came to see you?’

‘Name of Francis Killian, a sort of private enquiry agent from Comerbourne. I told you, he’s working for Maggie Tressider, collating all this stuff about Freddy, she’s thinking of doing a book about him.’

‘Oh, Killian, yes, I know the name. Never met him, but as far as I know he’s all right. But how did you get on to Scheidenau? I’d clean forgotten you’d ever been near the place.’

‘So had I, until I got the records out to show him. Was that just a jab from your subconscious, when you sat up and barked Scheidenau?’

‘That’s it,’ agreed George amiably, blinking at her through dissolving smoke. ‘It reminds me of a recurrent nightmare—Dom eight years old and in temper tantrums, and you twenty-nine and as pretty as new paint, shaking a loose leg in the Vorarlberg. I had the horrors all the time you were away.’

‘There wasn’t a soul around you need have worried about,’ Bunty assured him scornfully, ‘even if I hadn’t been up to the neck in bills and transport arrangements. Just Freddy, and all those callow young men years younger than me. Not to mention the competition! Only three girls, but two of them were presentable, and the third was a beauty. Still is,’ she said, abruptly recalled to the serious consideration of her afternoon’s entertainment. ‘He’s in love with her.’

‘Killian? With Maggie Tressider? How do you know?’

‘Killian. With Maggie Tressider. And I know, all right. Oh, he wasn’t obvious in any way, but there it was. I liked him,’ said Bunty, who always knew her own mind, and added, relevantly enough: ‘Poor boy!’ That he was her own age, within a year one way or the other, did not invalidate the sentiment. ‘I knew you weren’t listening,’ she said, ‘I told you all this.’

‘I’m listening now. Tell me again.’

She told him, well aware that this was not a game. She had touched some recollection which had nothing at all to do with her own stay in that remote Austrian village.

‘And he never showed up again, this Aylwin chap?’ said George, when she had reached the end of the story.

‘You know, I never once thought of it in those terms. He wasn’t any greenhorn, he spoke three languages, he knew his way around. I would bet he made his own erratic way wherever he was going, and is playing that ’cello of his somewhere around Europe now. But no, I suppose he didn’t show up again anywhere
we
went, at any rate. Why? What makes him suddenly so interesting to everybody?’

‘Just that he disappeared in Scheidenau. That would be how long ago? Twelve years?… thirteen. Because it so happens,’ said George, handing over his cup for a refill, ‘that another young man failed to come home from a continental holiday just a couple of years ago. A Comerbourne young man, which made him our case. An art student named Peter Bromwich. Stepfather works at the power station, mother has a job at the ordnance depot out at Newfield. Twenty-three years old, off on his own with a rucksack. He knew the answers, too, it wasn’t his first trip by several, and he was a bit of a know-all by inclination. But he didn’t come home, and nobody’s heard of him since.’

‘In Scheidenau?’ asked Bunty, now very grave indeed.

‘Not quite, not this time. Bromwich was last seen on the German side of that border, trying to thumb a lift towards Immenstadt. From then on he just vanished. We made pretty wide enquiries at the time, and more police forces than you can imagine got into the act, since so many borders meet around those parts. German, Swiss, Austrian, even Italian. Nobody found Peter Bromwich. What we did find, when we all got our heads together, was that an awful lot of major and minor mysteries had dwindled away into dead ends just where all those frontiers tangle, over the past ten years or so. Some were currency cases, some were drugs, some were stolen valuables, mainly small but first-class stuff, jewellery, antiques, art pieces. Two escaped convicts from an Austrian gaol disappeared off the face of the earth in 1960 after being chased as far as Langen—not the Arlberg one, a little place up there near the border. A suspect wanted for murder in Munich was traced to Opfenbach, and then completely lost. Quite a remarkable collection of loose ends, as if they’d originally tied up neatly into a skein at the eastern end of Lake Constance, and somebody had sheared the knot clean out and got rid of it. And not a thing there to think much about until we got the lot together, because a case or two in one country’s records, that’s not so impressive, but a dozen together begin to look like something above lifesize. But nothing ever led anywhere, and Bromwich never reappeared.’

‘And the case is still officially open?’

‘Very much so. And I’d still be more than interested in closing it. It did emerge that Bromwich was on Cannabis, and may have graduated to the hard drugs, and there were indications that he might have brought the stuff through Customs with him at least a couple of times before when coming back from holidays. It looked rather as if he’d got himself tangled into the fringes of some sizeable organisation. Maybe this time he got a little too cocky? Or too curious about his employers? Now I suppose there wouldn’t be any such indications in the case of your young Aylwin, would there?’

‘In a small way,’ admitted Bunty, ‘there would. Not drugs, though, I’m sure. If Freddy’d had any such suspicion he’d have turned him over to the police like a shot, and my impression is that he just intended to get rid of him and leave it at that. There were
rumours
that Freddy had accused him of taking advantage of his position as one of the Circus—so respectable as we were you see!—to get away with some petty smuggling. I took it to be simply the little personal luxury things everybody’s tempted to try and sneak in once in a while. His real crime—or disability, rather—was that he simply couldn’t take life, or music, or even Freddy seriously.’

She sat back to consider, with a dubious frown, the picture she had just painted, and it did seem to her, on reflection, that there might be a basic similarity between these two troublesome young men.

‘You think
he
may have stumbled into waters too deep for him, too? Chanced his arm with somebody dangerous, and come off worst?’

‘Or blundered into something dangerous by accident, and failed to get clear? There are, of course, other possibilities. Maybe he’s still hitch-hiking his way round the world somewhere at this moment.’

‘That,’ said Bunty, though without conviction, ‘is the ending I prefer.’

‘It’s the ending Peter Bromwich would have preferred, I don’t doubt. But I very much doubt if it’s the end he came to.’

They sat silent for a moment, eye to eye. They could see deeper into each other than most people, and it was often like looking into a glass, their minds moved with such unanimity.

‘But why,’ asked Bunty then, ‘was it the name Scheidenau that brought all this back to you now? Peter Bromwich was some miles away in Germany when he was last seen.’

‘He was. A good point! I told you we turned up, between us, any amount of other queer cases that ended in blanks, all roughly round that eastern end of Lake Constance. It occurred to Duckett once, when he had nothing better to do, to link them all up into a squashy sort of circle and see what he got. And then, just for the hell of it, he plotted the centre. And whether it means anything or not, where do you think it fell?’

‘Scheidenau,’ said Bunty.

‘Scheidenau. A tiny little dot on the map that nobody’d ever heard of, but that’s what he got. Maybe if we plotted the exact centre of the figure described by linking up all last year’s bank raids, it would drop on Windsor Castle. But still my thumbs prick. Scheidenau once may well be a freak, and I might even have had a lurking suspicion that my dear chief didn’t do his sums right. I never checked! But Scheidenau twice, and do you wonder I have the feeling that fate is nudging me?’

‘But this man Killian
is
working for Maggie Tressider,’ Bunty said positively. ‘That’s true enough. He suggested I should go and visit her, he isn’t afraid of his credentials being investigated.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt that. But he may be working for her on something rather different from what he gave you to understand. He seems to have spent more time asking you about the lady herself than about her teacher.’

‘Yes, I know. Though we’d already been talking about Freddy for some time. But it’s natural he should want to talk about Maggie. I told you, he’s in love with her. Even this fixation about Robin Aylwin… I had a feeling even that was a personal thing with him. As if jealousy was eating him alive, and he had to find somebody to bear the burden, somebody round whom he could crystallise it and get rid of it. And when I talked about Robin, good-looking and close to her, and her own age, for the first time—and I’m sure it
was
the first time he’d so much as heard of him—he felt he’d found a possibility. Somebody to resent. Not that it helps,’ said Bunty wryly, ‘but they always think it will.’

‘God forbid, love,’ said George piously, ‘that you should ever feel the urge to psychoanalyse me. I hate to think what you might come up with. No, I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with Killian or with Miss Tressider, I should say it’s very long odds against it. But if her commission, whatever it may be, is turning his attention to the disappearance of a young man in Scheidenau, then I’m very, very interested. It might be well worth while keeping an eye on his moves. Even if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, he may accidentally turn up something interesting to us. I’ll try to get a look at him myself as soon as I can. What’s he like?’

She told him. It appeared that she had been weighing up Francis Killian’s physical attributes as acutely as his state of mind, and the odds were that she was pretty accurate about both.

‘Fortyish, middle height, on the thin side but I think he’s solider than he looks. Dark brown hair and eyes, thick brows, hair a bit grey just at the temples. Quite a good face, clean-shaven, a lot of bone and not much meat, a long, straight nose and a rather high forehead. Daunting way of looking at you, guarded and aloof but critical, too, as if he held you at arms’-length to get a stranger’s view, and didn’t want to get any closer to anyone. Slumps his shoulders a bit, but when he’s on his feet he moves well, so it may be an affectation. Or pure discouragement! He did look rather as if he’d nearly given up, and then suddenly got kicked back into the race. Not quite seedy—he’s physically too trim for that—not so much a shabby elegance as an elegant shabbiness.’