Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (5 page)

“I’m not Mrs. Terrell,” said the girl, shrinking. “I shouldn’t have opened it, but I thought it might be something I ought to send on. I’m Tossa Barber. Sorry, that won’t mean a thing to you.” She put up her hand dazedly, and pushed back the fall of dark hair from her brow. “I’m Mrs. Terrell’s daughter. I came up to do some shopping for the holidays, and I use her flat when I’m in town.” It was extraordinary that she should feel she had to explain to him, when it was he who had so much to explain, the letter, the implications of the letter, his presence here in such a hurry. Suddenly she was calm for both of them, because it was too late to take back anything, and there was no way to go except forward. “You say here,” she challenged pointblank, “that my step-father was murdered.”

In what he had written he had not, he remembered, used that word. He thought of a hundred ingenious evasions, and confronted by Tossa’s large, unwavering eyes, rejected them all. “Yes,” he said helplessly, “that’s what I believe.”

“Come in,” said Tossa. “You may as well. Now I have to know. You can see that, can’t you? I’ve
got
to know.”

He made one convulsive attempt to extricate himself, even as he was stepping forward into the flat and closing the outer door behind him. He couldn’t possibly confide in a child like this, even if he hadn’t just sworn secrecy under awful warnings; but neither could he stand in an open doorway close to the echoing well of the stairs and the lift-shaft, and make his excuses for all the house to hear.

“Miss Barber, I’m very sorry I’ve alarmed you for nothing. Since I left this note for your mother I’ve had an opportunity to consult the people who’re best-informed about your father’s…” These relationships were confusing him, he didn’t quite know where he was with them. “—about Mr. Terrell’s death. I should be glad if you would try to forget about the whole matter. I did have my suspicions, but they’re not shared by others who should know best, and it may be that I was quite wrong.”

“You just said: ‘That’s what I believe’,” she reminded him, “not: ‘That’s what I
believed’
.” She slipped by him very quickly at the slight movement of retreat he made, and put her back against the door. “No, you can’t! You can’t go away now and leave me like this.”

And he saw that he couldn’t. Not simply because she already understood too much, and could make his escape impossible, but because her face was so desperately resolute and her eyes so full of an acute personal distress for which he was responsible. It was already too late to undo that; all his disclaimers wouldn’t convince her now, all his reassurances wouldn’t restore her peace of mind. His own little indiscretion had trapped him. It wasn’t enough even to plead that he had promised secrecy, since his promise had been breached by accident almost as soon as he had given it. “Miss Barber,” he began earnestly, “I did come here with certain information that disquieted me, and I wanted to consult Mrs. Terrell before I took the matter any further. I’ve now had it impressed upon me that this whole affair is urgently secret, and I’m bound by that. It was foolish of me not to have realised it for myself, and I’m deeply sorry that my mistake has now caused you distress. I wish I could undo it.”

“You can’t,” said Tossa fiercely, “and you can’t leave it like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have read it, but I did, and he was my step-father, even if we weren’t at all close, and do you expect me just to sit back and live with the thought that somebody murdered him, and not do anything at all about it?”

“I sincerely hope there’s going to be no need for
you
to do anything about it. That’s a job for others.”

“No!” she protested passionately. “That isn’t good enough. That doesn’t help me.”

He had already reached the point of knowing that he was going to tell her everything. Maybe he was a good judge of human nature, and maybe he wasn’t, but it seemed to him that there was only one way of ensuring that secrecy should indeed be complete. She had the passion to demand her rights from him, maybe she had also the generosity to meet him half-way when he piled the lot into her arms without reserve.

“Miss Barber, I gave my word. There’s no way I can satisfy you, except by extending that promise to cover you as well as myself. If I tell you everything, then I shall be vouching for you, too. Staking my reputation on you. Maybe my life.”

She opened her eyes wide to stare at him in wonder and doubt, but she could find no hint of anything bogus in his face or his tone. It seemed people still existed who talked in those terms, quite without cant.

“Do you want to know on those conditions? Remember, I shall then be relying upon you absolutely.”

“You can,” she said. “I won’t breathe a word to anyone, I promise. Yes, I want to know.”

“And you understand that it’s a matter of national security that what I tell you should go no further?”

“Yes, I understand. You have my word.” Her face was earnest with the terrible solemnity of youth. Yes, he thought, she had the generosity and imagination even to be able to keep secrets. And he stopped being afraid of her, just when he should have begun to be afraid.

He sat down with her on the antique bench in Chloe’s hall, and told her the whole story, suppressing nothing, not even the significance of the notebooks Alda had smuggled out of the country with him when he vanished.

For a moment, at the end of it, her sceptical mind revolted. Spies, counter-spies, defecting scientists, all exist, of course, but as sordid professionals fumbling grimy secrets of dubious value, for which governments must be crazy to pay out a farthing in bribes or wages. Not like this, not with ideals mixed up in the squalor, and patriotism—whatever that ought to mean, in these days of supranational aspirations—and honest, clean danger. It couldn’t be true! Robert Welland was a romantic who had constructed a romantic’s ingenious theory out of a few chance facts, and all he was going back to was the long, slow let-down into the untidy world of reality. He wouldn’t find anything; there was nothing to find. Herbert Terrell had simply made a mis-step at last, the one that waits for every expert somewhere along the way, and fallen to his death.

Just for a moment she held the facts away from her, and saw them thus distantly and coolly; and then the whole erection of evidence toppled upon her and overwhelmed her, and she believed with all her heart, and was lost. She had no longer any defences against Terrell. He was dead, murdered, killed as the result of something he had undertaken out of his sense of duty to his profession and his country. He was more than she had ever given him a chance to show, and she owed him justice all the more now, because she had denied it to him living.

“So you see that everything possible will be done to find out the truth. And you will be very careful, won’t you, not to let anything out even by accident? Remember I’ve vouched for you as for myself.”

“I won’t forget. I’m very grateful for your trust, I shan’t betray it.” She was staring before her with stunned eyes, seeing herself suddenly drawn, almost against her will, into a world of noble clichés, which she vehemently distrusted, but for which there existed no substitutes.

“And you’ll try to set your mind at rest, and leave everything to us? I’m sorry that I’ve troubled your peace at all.”

“Oh, no!” she said positively. “It’s better to know.”

And to his question, with only the faintest note of reserve:

“I know you’ll do everything possible. And thank you!”

But he hadn’t her personal obligations, and he hadn’t her sense of guilt, and how could he expect her to sit back and let him lift the burden of her conscience and carry it away with him?

The first thing she looked round for, when he was gone, was the large-scale map of Central Europe she had just bought at Hatchards.

“Czech visas,” said Toddy thoughtfully, “cost money.” He sat back on his heels and pondered the delectable roads racing eastwards across the map, and his expression was speculative and tempted. “Not that I’m saying it wouldn’t be a nice thing to do, mind you.” He added ruefully: “Rather a lot of money, if you ask me!”

“I know they do, but look at the tourist exchange rate! We should more than get it back. And if we did decide on it, we could be through France and Germany in a couple of days. Eating in France is damned dear unless you picnic all the time, and who wants to do that? I bet we’d save by running through as quickly as possible, and surely Czechoslovakia would be a whole lot more interesting.”

“I always did think you had a secret urge to live dangerously.” Christine swung her legs from the edge of the table, and drew the crumbling Iron Curtain thoughtfully back into position with one toe. “Quite apart from prison cells, secret police, and all that guff—supposing it is guff, we could be wrong about that, too!—who does the talking?”

“We all do, in English. I’m told the Czechs are marvellous linguists, now’s their chance to prove it. And if we do get out of bounds for English, I bet Toddy’s German would get us by well enough.” Tossa withdrew a little, to leave them with an idea they would soon be able to persuade themselves was their own. “Whatever you think, though, I’m easy. But I’ll write for visa applications if you like. They say it only takes a few days. I’m going to make some G.I.D.,” said Tossa, judging her moment nicely, and left them holding it.

“Maybe it does seem a pity not to use the carnet, now we’ve got it,” said Christine reflectively.

“Quickest route on the map,” reported Toddy, sprawled largely across Europe, “is Cassel—Brussels—Aachen, and straight down the autobahn. It takes you right past Wurzburg now, and part-way to Nuremberg. Might have got a bit farther, too, since this was printed.”

“It’s faster travelling through France than Belgium,” warned Christine. “We could just as easily run through to Saarbrücken, and get on to the southern branch of the autobahn, and then go north to Frankfurt.”

“It’s miles longer.”

“Yes, but hours faster.”

Dominic, who had never yet driven on the Continent, said nothing, but sat back and let them argue it out. So it happened that he was the only one who did not miss the look on Tossa’s face when she re-entered the room with the coffee tray, to find the twins deep in discussion of the various ways of reaching the Czech border quickly, and the possibilities presented once they had crossed it. He saw the small, fevered spark that lit in her eyes, the brief vindicated smile that touched the corners of her mouth, and ebbed again even more rapidly, leaving her fixed and sombre.

Tossa had what she wanted. But what it gave her was not pleasure, it seemed to him, only a brief and perilous sense of accomplishment, as if she had just taken the first step on a very uncertain journey.

They came spiralling down over France at about nine o’clock on a fine Thursday morning, craning to see the bewildering expanses of the blown sand-dunes revolve below them, starred with little salt pools and furry with pines. The estuary of the Canche dipped under one wing and vanished, the bridge and its crawling beetles of cars disappeared. By dazzling glimpses the white, urbane, anglicised villas winked at them from among the trees, and the long beach trailed a golden ribbon along the lacy edge of the sea. Le Touquet would never be so beautiful again.

Twenty-five minutes after they had left England they were creeping gingerly round the snack-bar called “L’Aubette,” and into the groves of pines, round whose braced feet the waves of sand broke like a patient and treacherous sea. The first gendarme eyed them warily as they rolled decorously round his concrete bollard, and bore away towards the golf links. Left turn after left turn, until you cross the bridge over the Canche, and then sharp right. And you’ve started. You’re heading for Montreuil-sur-Mer and the main Paris road; for Brussels and Aachen and the Cologne-Frankfurt autobahn, and all points east.

“We’re in France!” said Dominic, shattered and transported, for the first time relaxing the grim concentration with which he was keeping to the right. “We’re abroad!”

They ran off the autobahn for their first night at the rest-house at Siegburg, and thwarted of a bed there—it seemed one must stop at about four o’clock to be sure of a room anywhere immediately on the motorway—cruised down the hill into the town, under the Michaelburg, and fetched up in an embarrassingly narrow and difficult yard off the glittering main street. Toddy parked the van gingerly in a cramped corner, and hugged himself at the thought of Dominic manipulating it out into traffic next morning. Every man for himself!

They strolled through the surprising glitter of the streets, still lively at past eight in the evening, and climbed the Michaelburg in the dusk to the fortress church.

And out of the blue Tossa made her next move.

“Wouldn’t it be fine to go all the way east into Slovakia?” she said suddenly and fondly, as they sauntered down again through the silent gardens. “As far as the Tatras, anyhow. We
couldn’t
go back without seeing the mountains.”

“If we have time,” agreed Toddy accommodatingly, willing to entertain all suggestions. “We’ve got to see Prague first.”

The twins had known her for years, perhaps that was why their thumbs didn’t prick. They knew her so well they’d stopped being sufficiently aware of her to question her attitudes and motives. What she offered, they accepted at its face value. Dominic had no such insulation. He walked beside her in the deepening dusk, her long, impetuous step almost a match for his, and felt some inexplicable tension drawing her taut as a bow-string.

It was at that moment that Dominic grasped, without any adequate grounds for his certainty, that she was steering this expedition carefully and patiently towards some end of her own. Hadn’t she been the one who had suggested providing the car with a carnet? Wasn’t it she who had thought of the Czech visas? Now, if he was right, she was making the next move, prodding them to hurry on eastwards into the Tatras; and
if
he was right, she would gently but doggedly persist until she got her own way.

“Why don’t we just steam ahead right to the mountains,” said Tossa, in the same brightly eager voice, “and take it easy on the way back? I’ve been had too many times, with the days running out because some gourmand for Gothic couldn’t be dragged away from some cathedral or other. Make sure of the remotest bits first, I say. We know we’ve got to get back, let’s make a point of getting
there
.”

“Toddy!”

“Hallo?” mumbled Toddy sleepily, across the bedroom window silvered down one edge with moonlight. “What’s up?”

“You know you told me Tossa’s stepfather got killed, climbing somewhere?”

“Hmm, yes, what about him?”

“Was she fond of him at all?”

A snort of laughter from the other bed fetched an answering creak out of the pale, scrubbed wood of the bedstead. “Are you kidding? She couldn’t stand him. He was so correct he made her want to throw things. Tossa left home, didn’t even see much of her mother until she left this fellow for good. Why, what about him?”

“Oh, nothing. Just wondering if she had him on her mind, or something.”

“Tossa misses him like you’d miss a rotten tooth. No, that’s a lie, too, because since her mother left him she hasn’t even felt any twinges. Even before he kicked off, he just wasn’t there any more.” A rustle of bedclothes and a lift in the sleepy voice indicated a quickening interest on Toddy’s part: “Hey, Dom, you getting to like our Tossa?”

“She’s all right,” said Dominic sedately. “Bit prickly sometimes. Tod, where did this fellow kick off?”

“Oh, abroad, somewhere. Austria or Switzerland, or somewhere. Didn’t check, actually. Does it matter?”

“Not a lot, I suppose. If you’re dead you’re dead. Good night, Tod!”

“Good night, Dom! That’s final notice!”

“OK! Pass out, I’ve finished.”

Toddy passed out with the aplomb of an exhausted child. They had had to rise in the middle of the night to drive down to the airport. Dominic, however, lay awake and alert. Toddy might not know where this chap Terrell had got himself killed, but according to Dominic’s pricking thumbs Tossa knew. Tossa knew, and stage by stage she was taking them there, to the very region, to the very spot. What did she know of the Tatras, unless that Terrell had dived to his death somewhere round their granite planes? Why mention them, unless of fixed intent?

Dominic’s father was a C.I.D. Detective-Inspector in a county force on the Welsh borders. Maybe there’s something to police parentage that sets you nosing for mysteries wherever you go. Or maybe there was really something about Tossa’s shuddering anticipation that justifiably set his flesh crawling. Whichever it was, Dominic was a long time falling asleep.

They camped the next night, a little way short of the Czech border, in the beautiful, rolling, forest-and-meadow land of the Palatinate. And in the morning they crossed the frontier.

Waidhaus was quiet, efficient and polite, the Customs house poised on the edge of a sharp dip. Beyond the barrier the road curved away into Czechoslovakia, straightened again, and immediately began to climb; and there before them, on either side all youns the way, were the white buildings of the Czech Customs offices; and drawn up in the roadway on the near side of the barriers were at least a dozen cars, buses and caravans, from which at least fifty people had spilled out to flourish carnets and passports at harassed but amiable Czech officials.

It took them an hour to get through. There were more papers to be dealt with here, passports and visas, the carnet, the insurance document, as well as a polite and good-humoured pretence at examining their baggage, and a genuine scrutiny of the car.

“For the first time,” said Christine approvingly, “I feel as if someone cares whether we’ve arrived or not. It got almost insulting, being waved from one country into another like tossing the morning paper over the gate.”

“Not so cynical as the French,” Toddy allowed judicially, in an undertone, distributing their cleared passports. “Not so disdainfully efficient as the Germans. I like to see officials who sweat over the job, and aren’t past getting excited. That immigration chap took a liking to your passport photograph, Tossa—even showed it to his mate at the other table. Come to look at it,” he admitted, studying it impartially, “it isn’t at all bad.”

“Thank you!” said the saturnine young Czech who had been feigning to examine Tossa’s suitcase, without so much as disarranging the one tissue-wrapped party dress she had popped in at the last moment “in case.”

“Everything is in order. You can proceed.”

They piled eagerly into the van again, Dominic at the wheel. The Customs man signalled to the young soldier who held the chain of the barrier, and up went the pole. Gravely they acknowledged the salutes that ushered them through into a new country, and wormed their way through the congestion of cars and under the quivering pole.

“We’re in!” breathed Christine, staggered to find it so easy.

“No iron curtain, no nothing,” agreed Toddy, astonished in his turn. “A bit like crashing the sound barrier, though.”

The van climbed out of the frontier hollow, between slopes of silver birches, under the distant shadow of the first of many castles, a gaunt ruin on a lush, wooded hill. They were surging merrily into full speed, when a second barrier loomed in sight, barring their road, and a tall wooden watch-tower beside it. The very young soldier on guard there glared with a solemnity beyond his seventeen years, as Dominic slowed to a discreet halt before the bar, and waited dutifully to see what was required of him.

With unshaken gravity the boy lifted a telephone from its stand in the box beside him, and consulted some unknown authority.

“No iron curtain?” whispered Christine, between apprehension and the giggles.

“Shut up, idiot!” hissed Toddy. “He’s only doing his job.”

The boy replaced the telephone with deliberation, walked round them, eyeing the girls with a curiosity that brought the transaction down to a completely human level, and hoisted the pole, motioning them through with only the most austere inclination of his head. He was very young, and took his duties seriously.

They saluted this gateman, too, but apart from a quickening spark in his eye he preserved his motionless dignity. Possibly he treasured the girls, acknowledging his services decorously from the rear windows; but if he did, he wasn’t admitting it. Only when they were well away from him, soaring up the slope, did he suddenly lift one arm above his head, in a wave as impersonal as the hills.

They never even saw it; all their attention was fixed eagerly ahead, as Dominic accelerated happily towards the crest of the rise, among the shimmering birch trees.

A man’s figure rose suddenly and joyously out of the ditch beside the road, and stood on the verge, energetically thumbing them to a standstill. A young, round, glowing face under a sunburst of blond hair beamed at them confidently, and had no doubts whatever of its warm and friendly welcome. A small rucksack swung from the cajoling arm that flagged them down. In the other hand he held a large open sandwich, which he balanced expertly as he ran alongside them and signalled, from ingenuous blue eyes and beaming mouth, his pleasure in having hooked so interesting, so rewarding a ride. The GB plate, the number, the girls, one glance and he had them all weighed up.

Dominic wound the window right down, and said: “Hallo!” As an obvious greeting he didn’t see why it shouldn’t do just as well as any other; but in spite of Tossa’s predictions he was hardly prepared to be addressed promptly and fluently in his own language.

“Good morning!” said the beaming young man, tilting his open sandwich just in time to retrieve a slipping gherkin. “Please excuse that I trouble you, but if you go to Prague, may I ride with you? If you have room?” He knew they had room, he had practically measured their cubic content with that one expert flick of a blond eyelash. “I could be of help, if you do not know the road. To work my passage, I shall be the guide, if you permit?”

Toddy not only permitted; he applauded. He enjoyed driving, but to him navigating was a chore. He cast a glance behind him at the empty road, and was out of the front passenger seat like a greyhound from its trap.

“It’s all yours! Here, give me your rucksack, I’ll stow it in the back with our stuff, and you take this seat.”

“But you are sure? The ladies will not mind if I ride with you? I should not like to be a burden, and some people do not approve of auto-stop.”

They assured him that this method of travelling was well-established even in England, and that they had no personal objection to it, had even used it on occasions. They installed the young man, his sandwich, and his rucksack. Christine, rendered thoughtful by the last glimpse of the gherkin as it vanished behind strong white teeth, reached into the food-box and began to compile a mid-morning snack.

“You are also students?” asked their new passenger, as they drove through Rozvadov, a nondescript street-village hardly different from those they had left on the other side of the frontier, except that, lacking the exact German tidiness, it appeared a little shaggier and dustier. “My name is Miroslav Zachar. To my friends Mirek—you will find it easier to remember. I am student of philosophy.”

They told him freely who they were, and what they were reading, and he overflowed with uninhibited questions, produced so naturally and confidently that it was impossible to find any of them offensive. They were on vacation, of course, like him? Was it their first visit to Czechoslovakia? Where were they going to stay in Prague? And where else did they intend to go? He was full of helpful suggestions. Castles, lakes, towns, he knew them all.

“You must do quite a lot of auto-stopping,” said Christine, busy with cheese and crackers. “You seem to have been everywhere.”

“I do it a lot, yes. Every holiday. Sometimes I go with friends, sometimes alone. It is better alone. For one person it is easy to get a lift.”

“And what made you come all the way out here? You
do
live in Prague?”

“I have been walking in these hills of the Bohemian Forest. Now I come back to the road, hoping to get a lift back into Prague quickly. This is a good place, foreign cars coming in here, naturally they rush straight to Prague. But I am lucky to meet some more students. That’s nice! I’m glad I time it so good. No, in Prague I have an uncle and aunt, if you will kindly take me so far I can stay with them, and afterwards stop another car,” he said serenely, “to take me on eastwards. Because of course you will be staying in Prague.”

“Perhaps only for one or two nights,” Tossa said suddenly, in that gruff boyish croak of hers, that could be so disconcerting to the unaccustomed ear.

They were on a stretch of road complicated by many climbing bends among trees, but without forks where Dominic could possibly go wrong. Miroslav Zachar abandoned his navigating for a moment to turn his head and study this dark-brown girl seriously. His amiable moon-face shone upon her approvingly.