Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (9 page)

“I am speaking from the Hotel Sokolie. Comrade Lieutenant, I think you should know that there is a young English lady here who is asking many questions about the dead man Terrell.”

They drove back to the Riavka at last, drugged with mountain air and bemused with splendour. Even though the highest leap of the funicular to Lomnice Peak had been out of commission—as it so often is by reason of its extreme height and free cable—they would never forget the bleached, pure, bony world of the Rocky Lake, half-way up, and the far-away, sunlit view of the valley five thousand feet below them, or the steely, shoreless waters of the lake with the clouds afloat on their surface, incredibly clear and still in a bowl of scoured rock, its couloirs and crevices outlined in permanent snow. The mirror of winter in the dazzling sunlight of summer remained with them, a picture fixed and brilliant in the mind’s eye, all the way home.

Tossa had taken a great many photographs, and talked rather more than usual. The twins had hopes of her. The time would come, they felt, when they would even cease to think of her instinctively as “poor Tossa!” After all, with a mother like she had, she’d be doing extremely well if she managed to be normal at twenty. Even better, Dominic showed distinct signs of being interested, which was exactly what Christine, at least, had had in mind. And what a day! The stone-pure, sunlit, withering summits, and then this soft but lofty valley to cradle them at the sleepy end of it!

“I have to write to my mother,” said Tossa resignedly, over dinner. “At least a postcard, otherwise there’ll be trouble. Stick around, I won’t be long.”

Whatever she did now, whether she went or stayed, talked or was silent, Dominic couldn’t help finding some hidden significance in it. He was uneasy in her presence, but he had no peace at all when she was absent. After a few minutes he left the others in the dining-room, and went out to the bar to buy stamps. That, at least, was his excuse; what he really wanted was to be where he could keep a silent and unobtrusive guard on Tossa.

He could not quite bring himself to follow her upstairs; things hadn’t reached that pass yet. But from the bar, with the door standing wide open on the scrubbed pine hall, he would hear her if she called. Crazy, he fretted, to be thinking in such terms; and yet she was certainly meddling in something which was of grave concern to other and unknown people, and they were all these miles from home, in territory the orthodox Briton still considered to be inimical.

Dana turned from her array of bottles behind the bar, and gave him his stamps. She looked at him in a curiously thoughtful way, as if debating what to do about him. He was turning away when she said suddenly: “Dominic!”

“Yes?” He turned back to her, shaken abruptly by the recollection that she and her family were directly involved in this mystery of Terrell’s death. Her brother, that tough, stocky young forester, burned to dull gold by the yellowing mountain sun, was the man who had kept the score in the card game at the Hotel Sokolie, and left behind him, apparently quite light-heartedly, a scrap of paper which had drawn Terrell here to his death.

“I do not know,” said Dana very gravely, “what it is that is troubling Miss Barber, but I think I should perhaps tell you that to-day she thought of one more question to ask me.”

“Since we came home?” His choice of phrase astonished him, yet it had come quite naturally; he couldn’t think of any people in Europe with whom he’d felt so quickly at home, if it hadn’t been for this distorted shadow in the background.

“Yes, since then. She asked me which room Mr. Terrell occupied while he was staying here.” Her eyes were searching his face closely; he felt almost transparent before that straight, wide glance.

“And which room
did
he occupy?” His throat was dry and tight with the effort to keep his voice casual.

“The one in which you and your friend are sleeping,” said Dana.

He had a feeling that she knew exactly what he was going to do, and that there was no point whatever in attempting to dissemble it or postpone it. He said: “Thank you!” quite simply, not even defiantly, and walked out of the bar and straight up the stairs. The pale, scented treads creaked; she would know every step he took. Tossa, very busy upstairs, might hear the ascending footsteps, but would not recognise them; he was only too well aware that she hadn’t had any attention to spare for learning things about him. None the less, he approached his own bedroom door very softly, and turned the handle with extreme care, pushing the door open before him suddenly but silently.

Tossa, on her knees at the chest of drawers, the bottom drawer open before her, brushed the lining paper flat and shoved the drawer to in one smooth movement, swinging to face him with huge eyes wary and challenging. He saw in the braced lines of her face excitement and consternation, but no fear, and that frightened him more than anything. Then she saw who it was who had walked in upon her search, and something happened to her courage. It was not, perhaps, fear that invaded her roused readiness, but a trace of shame and embarrassment, and a faint, formidable glimmer of anger.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said, too brightly. “Maybe you know where Toddy’s put the big map. I thought it was here somewhere. I couldn’t remember how to spell some of the names.” Her breathing wasn’t quite in control, but the solid, sensible note was admirable, all the same.

“It’s still in the van,” said Dominic, in a tone to match hers.

She got up and dusted her knees, unnecessarily, for the floor was spotless and highly waxed. “Damn! It would be. Where’s the road map, then, the pocket one?”

There was no way past that solid front. He found the map for her, and let her walk out with it, and with all the honours. But when she was gone he closed the door carefully, and took the room to pieces. For whatever it was she was looking for—and he was reasonably sure of the answer to that—she certainly hadn’t yet had time to find it. If, of course, it was here at all. And if it was, he wasn’t going to miss it.

Nothing under the linings of the drawers; she’d reached the last one, no need to look there again. Nothing under the rugs; the crevices between the pine boards were sealed closely and impermeably. No chimney, of course, except the stack of the tiled stove in the corner. He explored the accessible area inside the metal door, and found nothing. Nothing under the pelmet of the heavy curtains. Nothing in the huge, built-in wardrobe; he examined every hanger, every board of the floor. One side of it was for hanging clothes, the other had six shelves, ingeniously and improbably filled with Toddy’s few belongings. Dominic stood and looked at them glumly for a moment, and then began at the top one, and tested them all to see how tightly and immovably they fitted.

The third shelf, just at shoulder-level, stirred ever so slightly in its place.

With his left hand he eased it carefully out as far as it would go, no more than a fraction of a fraction of an inch, and with the finger-tips of his right hand he felt along the rear edge of it, running his nails deep into the crevice. Two-thirds of the way along, something rustled and stirred, dislodged a centimetre from its place. A corner of something white showed beneath the shelf. He edged it gingerly lower, and drew out a long slip of paper, carefully folded to be narrower than the thickness of the shelf, and perfectly invisible when inserted behind it.

And there it was in his hand, when he had unfolded it; four columns of figures, headed by initials, broken by periodical tottings-up, the score of an unknown card game. Nothing at all odd about it that he could see, until he realised that it was scribbled on good-quality manuscript music paper, and suddenly holding it up to the light, found the upper half of an English firm’s water-mark glowing at him from the close texture.

Even then it took him a full minute to think of turning it over. On the other side was noted down, in slashing strokes by a ball pen, a few bars of music, that rushed across the paper impetuously, only to be scored through impatiently a moment later, and left hanging upon an unresolved chord. Dominic hadn’t worked very hard at his piano lessons when he should have done, but he could decypher enough of this to see that it was the opening of what seemed to be a rather sombre prelude for piano. Maybe a nocturne; or maybe he was merely rationalising from the few lines of verse that were scrawled above the abortive essay, in a passionate hand and in good English:

Come, shadow of mine end, and shape of rest,

And like to death, shine through this black-faced night.

Come thou, and charm these rebels in my breast,

Whose raving fancies do my mind affright.

Dominic stood staring at it for a moment, recognising Dowland, and frozen to a stillness of pure wonder at finding him here in this vehement and impersonal landscape; those poignant, piercing words of loneliness among these aloof and unmoved mountain outlines startled like frost at midsummer.

Then, without stopping to reason or doubt, he marched out of the room with the wisp of paper in his hand, and straight to the room the girls shared. Tossa was feverishly writing her postcard there, to have something to show for her absence. She looked up at him warily and coldly, as at an enemy. Whoever pursued her now was her enemy, and must simply be prepared for the hurt, and contain it, and go on doggedly, if he wanted to help her. Dominic laid the slip of paper on the table in front of her, and said in a flat, detached voice:

“I think this may be what you were looking for.”

She gave him one flaring glance, bright and tense at the edge of panic, and then dropped her gaze to the torn half-sheet of paper, and sat staring at it with painful concentration for a long minute. Once she read through the few scrawled lines of verse and scanned the twenty bars of music without taking in a word or a note. The second time, frowning fiercely, she grasped at least the sense of the words, and in a moment she turned the page, and surveyed the columns of figures. With no change in her expression she looked up at Dominic, and stared him fairly and squarely in the eye.

He expected her to say flatly: “What is this, a joke? I wasn’t looking for anything, except the map. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” For a moment, indeed, she had intended to do just that, but when he stared back at her with that intent and sombre face, waiting for her to lie to him, and disturbed and disappointed in advance, she found that she couldn’t do it. What was the use, anyhow, if she couldn’t be convincing? She couldn’t guess what he knew, but it was enough to make him quite sure of himself. She hadn’t been aware of pursuit until now, and suddenly it seemed as if she had been running to evade him ever since they left England.

“Thank you!” she said, and with a deliberation somewhat spoiled by the unsteadiness of her fingers she folded the paper away into her writing-case. She waited, and there was silence, but he didn’t go away and accept his dismissal; she had never thought he would. “Now I suppose you’re going to ask me why I was looking for it, and what it is?”

“I know what it is,” said Dominic bluntly. “It’s the paper Ivo Martínek happened to have in his pocket the day your stepfather watched him and his friends playing cards in the Hotel Sokolie. He used it to keep the score on. And I know why you were looking for it. Because your stepfather picked it up afterwards in curiosity, and got so excited about it he left the lake and came over here, to find out more about it. Where it had come from, or who owned it, or who wrote those few lines of ‘Come Heavy Sleep’ on it, and the few bars of music. Not Ivo, that’s certain, but somebody Ivo rubs shoulders with pretty casually. Or was it that he
knew
who was involved, as soon as he saw the handwriting?”

Tossa closed her writing-case with a slam. “Have you been spying on me long?” she asked in a viciously sweet tone.

It didn’t hurt as much as he’d expected, because he was ready for it; he knew how she felt, and was even disposed to be on her side. He couldn’t afford to stand on his dignity, since he’d kicked it from under him, perforce, the moment Tossa’s safety and well-being became more important.

“Quite a time, ever since Siegburg, when you first gave yourself away. Call it spying if you want to, I don’t mind. I don’t care what you call it, or how badly you think of me for it, just as long as it’s effective when the pinch comes. Because if you can’t see that you’re running head-down into trouble,” he said urgently, “for God’s sake wake up! Whatever you’ve got on your mind, quit trying to carry it alone. What do you think friends are
for
?”

“I can’t tell you anything,” she said defensively, shaken by the warmth of his tone.

“All right, I’m not asking you to, not yet. I’ll tell you, instead. Ever since your stepfather got killed, you’ve been steering us steadily towards this place. First you suggested a carnet for the van, then Czech visas, then at Siegburg you started talking about coming straight into Slovakia, here, to the Tatras. That was when I began to get the idea, and after that it wasn’t so hard to follow up the later developments. Suddenly you knew about a wonderful little place in Zbojská Dolina, that you’d never mentioned before. And when we were here, you took us off the path up the valley, just at the right place to locate the spot where Terrell fell and was killed. I know, I asked Dana, last night, and she told me just what she’d told you. And then you suggested a trip over into the High Tatras, and took us straight to the right resort, the one where Terrell was staying before he moved here, and even to the right hotel. And that’s something you didn’t get from Dana, because she said she didn’t know, and I believe her. But
you
know. You had it from somebody else, before we ever came here.”

“Dana must have known,” Tossa said involuntarily. “It was her brother who…” She caught herself up too late, jerking her head aside to evade his eyes.

“Who was there playing cards in the Hotel Sokolie, and left behind that bit of paper? Yes, evidently Terrell noticed him, all right, but that doesn’t prove he ever noticed Terrell. He was with three friends, drinking coffee and playing cards, he wasn’t bothered about the foreigner who came and looked on. And in any case, you didn’t ask Dana about the hotel. You didn’t have to, you knew it already.”

“You seem,” said Tossa with a tight smile, “to be pretty well-informed yourself.”

“I listen at windows. Toddy ought to have warned you.”

They were beginning to hate and blame each other for the stone wall between them. He was catching her tone, and that wouldn’t help anyone. He dragged the dressing-table stool across the room and plumped it down close beside her chair, and leaning forward with desperate earnestness, closed his hands hard over hers. She quivered, but she didn’t draw away.

“Look, Tossa, you’ve got to listen to me. We’re not in England now. We’re in Central Europe, in a Communist country. If our people think we haven’t all that much reason to trust the Czechs, how much reason do you think the Czechs have to trust us? Historically, a hell of a lot less! How do you think it would look at home, if a chap with a Czech passport came poking around one of our small towns, asking a lot of nosy questions about a death that was officially accidental, cornering waiters in hotels and trying to pump them, and searching rooms for hidden bits of paper? Just give it a thought! Yes, I
was
listening under the window, I heard you talking to the waiter. That’s the only time, but I don’t give a damn, anyhow, you can call it what you like. What I want is for you to stay out of trouble. The way you’re going on, you’re going to end up in gaol. No, wait a moment!” he checked abruptly. “Let’s have it quite straight. There was one other time when I spied on you. At Zilina, when we were leaving the hotel. I saw you drop your comb-case for that fellow with the MG to pick up and return. You sent him a message that way, didn’t you?”

Tossa’s hands lay still in his. She looked at him helplessly, and shook her head, without vehemence this time, but no less conclusively. “I’m sorry, I can’t answer questions. I can’t tell you anything.”

“No, I beg your pardon, I said I wouldn’t ask. All right, I think you did send him a message. And he sent one back to you the same way. I know you knew him before—or at least that he knew you. Maybe he’s the one who started you on this hunt. The one who told you where your stepfather stayed in Strbské Pleso. The one who told you there was something wrong about the way he died. X with diplomatic plates. And then you begin drawing attention to yourself here by asking questions all over the place! Do you seriously think an English diplomat can make a move in this country without the authorities knowing all about it? It works much the same way in any country, they
have
to know where these people are and what they’re doing. Don’t you see, Tossa, why you frighten me to death? If you have to go on with this, why alone? If we knew what you were after we could try to help you at least, and you wouldn’t have to expose yourself even further, and make yourself more conspicuous, by having to evade us, too. Wouldn’t it be better?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, her voice a little unsteady. “I can’t tell you anything. I haven’t said yes to any of this, you’re only guessing.”

“All right, I’m only guessing, but they’re pretty safe guesses.”

“I’m sorry, I really am sorry… but I can’t tell you. Not won’t—can’t.” Her hands turned suddenly in his, warmly returned his grip for a moment, and then struggled free in outraged shyness. “I don’t admit to anything. You’ll just have to let me take my chance.”

“That’s something I can’t do,” said Dominic, letting her go regretfully but hastily. He caught her eye, and the gleam of a smile passed between them, and foundered in the sea of their gravity. “Not won’t—can’t. I’m sticking close to you, and if you ever do want me, I’ll be around.”

“I shan’t need you. Nothing’s going to happen to me.

Do the others… I mean, they haven’t noticed anything, have they?”

“No, I’m sure they don’t realise there’s anything going on. And I shan’t tell them. Only you can do that.”

The air between them had cleared, they could look at each other again almost hopefully, and with a new curiosity. “There isn’t anything going on,” she said firmly, presenting the formal untruth with the assurance that it would be understood as it was offered. “Thanks, Dominic, all the same.”

“Then, look, is there anything I can do to help you? Without asking any questions? You don’t have to tell me why, just what I have to do.”

She looked up at him intently for a moment, a deep spark kindling in her eyes. Then she ripped open the zipper of her writing-case, and drew out from the rear pocket a four-inch square of newsprint.

“Yes! If you really mean that, there is. You can help me to find this man. He’s here somewhere, in this valley or near it. Take a good look at him, so you’ll know if you do see him around. And if you do, tell me.” She pushed the newspaper clipping across the table to him. “I stole it from the files,” she said, “the day before we left England. It was the best I could find.”

Dominic noted, even before he looked at the face, that the caption had been cut off. It was sharply printed for a newspaper photograph, almost certainly from a studio portrait. A man leaned forward across a desk, his jaw propped on linked hands. He might have been about thirty-five years old; a tapered face, broad across eyes and brow, lean of cheek and long of chin, with a thin, high-bridged sword of a nose, and a cool, long-lipped, sceptical mouth. The hands linked under his chin were large, broad-jointed and calm. They looked capable of anything. Light-coloured hair drew back at high temples, duplicating the arched, quizzical line of his brows. The eyes were deep-set, probing and lonely, and looked out from the page with an aloof, almost a hostile, composure.

Dominic forgot for a moment his promise to ask no questions. “Who is he?” he asked curiously, looking up across the photograph into Tossa’s face.

“By all the indications,” said Tossa, grimly and quietly, “he’s the man who murdered my stepfather.”

Above the chapel on its shelf of rock there were sudden moist meadows, and a wealth of brilliant green pasture. Beyond, again, lay the final great, irregular bowl, green in the base, rimmed round on all sides with paling slopes of grass and ashen slides of scree. Laborious zigzag paths climbed to two cols, where the snag-toothed rim of rocks dipped to let them through; and all the sides of the bowl were circled by contour paths, along which the hill sheep trotted confidently, and sometimes dark-red, handsome goats, chestnut-coloured like Dominic’s hair.

They had probed every corner of the valley itself, and discovered every cottage. They were known, now. One of the herd-boys brought Christine edelweiss from some secret place on the summits, and a woman at the highest cottage below the huts gave them an armful of flowers from her garden. Many of the faces were becoming familiar. But they had never yet caught a glimpse of the face in Tossa’s stolen photograph.

They climbed the more northerly of the two cols, and emerged among high, windy wastes of pale turf, billowing away towards more folded valleys beyond. There were no houses in sight here, only the true open, rolling, rounded crests of the Low Tatras.

They climbed the more southerly col, and beyond the crest the path traversed a broken slope of rocks, and brought them down into a high green bowl not unlike the one they had left, but smaller and more sheltered. There was a single, isolated farm here, too remote to be incorporated in any collective, and therefore still operated privately. There were smoky brown cows in the pasture, and poultry in a paddock behind the house. A handsome old woman, tall as a man, and coiffed elaborately in lace, was scything clover in a meadow. A middle-aged man came striding through the yard with two large milking pails; but he was short and gnarled like a mountain tree. A plump woman shrilled at him from a window of the house. They saw no one else there.

Two of them, of course, were not looking for anyone in particular. Toddy and Christine walked and scrambled and bathed, and sunned themselves, and saw nothing constrained or secretive in their companions. Everything was as open and candid as the day to them.

They were on their way back into the highest bowl of Zbojská Dolina, lunging down the scree, when the first heavy, solitary drops of rain fell. Ten minutes previously the sky had been clear and blue, now a curtain of heavy purple was being drawn slowly over the crests behind them.

“We’re going to get caught,” said Toddy, and paused to look round for the quickest way to shelter. The huts lay nearer to the path from the other col. “Let’s cut a corner. If we traverse from here to the other track we may make it to shelter. There’s a contour path, look—it cuts off a long run in the open.”

The thin grey ribbon danced its way round the side of the bowl, threaded a few clumps of stunted bushes at the edge of an outcrop of rock, and balanced along the rim of a fifty-foot face of sheer, fluted cliff. At the foot of this expanse a shelf of rock jutted out irregularly, some twelve to fifteen feet wide, and below that the level dropped again, though less abruptly, sliding away down open rock and rubble and scree into the bottom of the bowl.

They saw, when they had tramped smartly along the sheep-path in single file, and brushed through the bushes suddenly fragrant with the first spurt of rain, that this whole face of the bowl, the only one scoured clear of vegetation from top to bottom, formed a slightly hollowed channel, a groove not much more than twenty yards wide down the side of the basin. Where they stepped out on the rock itself, the path was solid and not even very narrow but polished and sloping, so that they checked and trod carefully. Looking up on their left hand towards the crests, they could see the reason. Two or three pale slides of rubble and scree, chalk-lines on the greyer rock, converged upon this ledge, and for centuries had been sending the detritus of their weathering slithering down by this route into the valley. The ledge on which the path crossed, too narrow to check the slide, had been honed into steely glossiness by its onward passage. The broader ledge below had collected the rubble as in a saucer, stacking it up neatly in a talus against the cliff.