Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (17 page)

“Another death?” Alda looked up sharply. “I’ve heard nothing about a death. Surely the police would have contacted me?”

“They haven’t had much time, it only happened last night. And then, the Terrell case would be closed for them, and they only knew the half of it, they wouldn’t connect this with you. And we weren’t as helpful as we might have been, because we didn’t know… we thought that you…”

“That I’d killed Terrell, and might well kill someone else? Yes, I see your point. If you’ve given up that idea now,” he said grimly, “you’d better tell me just what’s happened.”

Dominic told him the story of Welland’s death, and all that had followed it. Alda had risen, and was pacing restlessly and silently across the patterns of sunlight and shadow in the window of the hut, which faced down the valley, away from the doorway and the smooth grey scar of rock.

“So your friend is being held on suspicion? And you came to look for me! As a valuable witness, or as the murderer?”

“How could I know which, then? I hadn’t met you or spoken to you, all we knew was the Terrell version. Didn’t it seem the obvious thing to think at first, that you were picking them off when they got too close? We’d seen you up on the skyline there with the goats, we saw you carried a rifle—”

“A
rifle
?” Alda whirled on him with a face of blank, disdainful astonishment. “
I
carry a
rifle
? I don’t think I’ve ever even had one in my hands. You’re dreaming.”

“But I did see you with it, up on the crests,” protested Dominic, shaken. “A great long stock sticking up over your shoulder, and the barrel…”

He broke off, hopelessly confounded. Alda had flattened his wide shoulders against the shadowy wall of the hut beside the window, and was laughing his heart out.

“I don’t understand.” Dominic was on his feet, his face burning, a little from the conviction that he had somehow made himself foolish, but much more from the
becherovka. “
In any case I’d really stopped believing it was you doing the shooting, before I came up here looking for you, but I know what I saw…”

“But you don’t! That’s exactly what you don’t know, but
I
do, now. This… this is what you saw.” He crossed the dim room in three vehement strides to the corner behind the iron stove, cluttered with tools, and draped with the black felt cloak he had worn in the storm, and disentangled from behind its veiling folds a long object, which he brought forward into the light from the window, and held upright for inspection, laughing still.

It was within three inches as tall as Alda himself, and about as thick as a child’s wrist, a tube of pale wood polished by age and handling. To the back of it, at the upper end, was secured by closely plaited hemp cords a narrower pipe about two feet long, a small round mouthpiece jutting from the back of it at the lower end. It had the conscious irregularity of hand-made things, so that there could never be an exact duplicate. It varied somewhat in thickness from end to end, and was a little bowed and twisted; when Alda lifted it and set the mouthpiece to his lips the double pipe, projecting some fifteen inches above his head, curved very slightly over his left shoulder. He held it with his left hand at waist level, and fingered below at the full stretch of his right arm; and round the finger-holes carved and painted mountain boys circled, dancing.

A gust of breathy, rustling notes came cascading out of the pipe, twining and shaking downwards in an improvised flourish, to settle deeply and sonorously into a slow, plaintive tune. It was hardly louder here, but for the reverberations from the walls, than when they had heard it descending from the hills beyond the col, through a couple of miles of mountain air.

“This is my rifle,” said Alda, taking his lips from the mouthpiece and turning the pipe gently in his hands. “We call it the
fujara
—not very portable, and a little ponderous to play, because of all the over-blowing, but the queen of the pipes, all the same. The nearest thing to a gun I’ve ever possessed, or am ever likely to. Did you never hear it, down in the valley?”

“We heard it, yes.” Dominic stretched out his hand and took the pipe, fascinated. The wood was silken smooth under his fingers. The little bandits, axes brandished above their heads, leaped like deer, legs doubled under them. “But we didn’t know what it looked like, we’d never seen one. How could we guess?” He fitted his fingers to the holes, and held the instrument against him; and it hung lightly enough, for all its bulk. “What did you call it? A
fujara
? It’s beautifully made.”

“My great-grandfather made it. For a
fujara
it’s on the small side, most of them run close to two metres.” He laid it back carefully in its corner, cushioned by the folds of the heavy cloak.

“So it was you,” said Dominic. “I wasn’t imagining things, you
did
play ‘Bushes and Briars’.”

“Very probably. Was that what brought you up here after me?”

“Partly that. A musician who lived somewhere in these hills and knew English songs seemed a fair bet for Karol Alda. And by then I’d begun to think that maybe the whole business wasn’t quite so obvious as it seemed, even before I knew your side of the story. I know now that you hadn’t got anything to fear, or anything to hide, so why should you want to kill Welland? But you see, somebody else
has
got something to hide, somebody else
is
afraid. And I don’t think we were wrong about what he’s afraid of. He’s killed once to keep your case from being dug up again and re-examined, and he may kill again for the same reason.”

“Terrell’s death was not murder,” said Alda, considering him thoughtfully.

“No, I accept that. But it started Welland off on the same trail, and Welland’s death
was
murder. And now that we know where you stand, and there isn’t anything treasonable about co-operating, there’s nothing to prevent Tossa and me from telling the whole truth. Will you come down to Pavol with me, and tell your part of it, too? Between us all, we ought to be able to clear up this case, and get Tossa out of trouble.”

“I’m ready,” said Alda. “We can go whenever you like.”

Dominic was the first to set foot outside the open doorway, on the sunlit stone under the deep overhang.

There was a sharp, small crack. Something sheered into the weathered wall just in front of his face, and flying splinters stung his cheek. He clapped a startled hand to the place, and brought a smear of blood away on his fingers. And in the same instant Alda flung an arm about him and hoisted him bodily back into the hut in one heave, slamming the door to between them and the second bullet, as it thudded into the thick timbers where a split second before Dominic had been standing.

“I brought him here,” said Dominic huskily, coming out of his moment of sickening shock with quickened senses. He wiped at his stinging cheek with the back of his hand, and stared almost disbelievingly at the minute smears of blood that resulted. “I got you to come down out of your clouds to help me, and now look what I’ve done! Led him straight to you.”

“You don’t know that. Does it matter, anyhow?” Alda drew breath cautiously, and looked the boy over in the warm wood-darkness within the closed door. All the lines of his face had sharpened and brightened, in what might have been merely tension, but looked strangely like pleasurable anticipation. He slid past Dominic to the small, single-paned window that let in light on this side of the hut.

“I do know. If he’d known exactly where to find you, he’d have come for you in the first place. It’s
you
he wants suppressed. But he did know where
I
was, to a bit. All I’ve done is fetch you out of cover for him.”

“No, you’ve done something much more useful, brought
him
out of cover. And if he was following you, why didn’t he pick us both off while we were out on the talus?”

Dominic’s mind was groping its way with increasing certainty through shadowy places. “He couldn’t have been following me, not closely. But he knew where I’d gone. I think… I think he was betting on picking me up on the way back, but when I didn’t go back promptly enough he came looking for me. He must have found the van. He’d know I was still up here, somewhere. If he’d arrived while we were exposed out there, we should both have had it. Therefore he didn’t. He didn’t reach these parts until we were inside here. And he didn’t know there was anyone in here until he heard the
fujara
. What else could it be? That would be worth investigating, wouldn’t it? He was looking for a musician. He only had to wait and see who emerged, to find out if he was wasting his time. Now he knows he wasn’t. He knows we’re both here. He’s seen us.”

“You’re taking it for granted,” said Alda equably, his lean cheek flattened against the wall beside the dusty pane, “that he’s someone who’ll know me on sight.”

“He’ll know you. I’m sure.”

“And that I’m critically dangerous to him. But I swear I know of no reason why I should be.”

“I don’t understand why, either, but I’m sure I’m right. Welland was killed because he was determined to find you, and he looked like succeeding. Tossa and I are marked down because Welland might have told us what he knew. But you’re at the heart of it. There’s something in your past, in your connection with England, that can ruin somebody, and if he can silence you, the urgency’s over. And I brought you and pinned you here for him!”

“Up to now,” said Alda, “we are still alive. If he knows where we are, let’s see if we can find out where he is. He must be on this side, since he has the doorway neatly covered.” He reached a hand out of shelter to rub away the dust from the window-pane. There was no shot. “The sun probably reflects from the glass, it’s directly on it. So much the better. Come here!”

Dominic came, slipping along the wall and pressing intently at his shoulder, to peer out at the pale corduroy hillside curving away from them round the side of the bowl, until it reached the talus. He looked down the broken, scoured, almost grassless fall below to the bottom of the basin, and again up from the talus by the bare, polished funnel to where the level of firm rock conducted the path across it. The whole bowl seemed, at first glance, to be void of cover, but when he considered it in more detail there was scattered and meagre cover everywhere.

“I am supposed,” said Alda serenely in his ear, “to be somewhat of a prodigy at mathematics. Let’s see how precisely I can calculate. I don’t propose to open the door again simply to try and examine the bullet-hole, but I estimate that he was shooting obliquely into the doorway. The angle I should judge to be something like thirty degrees. And he’s certainly on a higher level than we are. The scar makes things easier—at least we can write off the areas where he can’t possibly be.” He was silent for a moment, his eyes roaming the exposed stretch of country intently, his hand on Dominic’s shoulder. “I make him approximately on the level of the rock path up there. Draw a line along from the distant end of it, say twenty yards. Somewhere within ten yards above or below that line, according to my estimate, he should be. You have that area fixed?”

“Yes.” There were low clumps of bushes there, and some irregularities in the folded ground; it looked a possible hide.

“Keep it fixed. Watch for the slightest movement there, when I give you the word. I’ll see if I can draw him.”

It was extraordinary; his voice sounded gay, his step was elastic, there was no doubting his pleasure now. Dominic, faithfully fixing the oblong of ground he had marked down, longed to turn and look at his companion. Maybe it was true that they were all born Janosíks, venturers by instinct, even the artists.

“A hat wouldn’t be convincing,” mused Alda cheerfully, somewhere behind him. “A shirt-sleeve, perhaps. You’re ready?”

“I’m ready,” he said huskily, his eyes already aching with concentration.

The shot made him leap and shrink inside his skin all the more violently because he was waiting for it with so much passion. Alda made a small, echoing sound on the heels of the impact, half hiss, half laugh, drawing in breath through his teeth. And in the low bushes at the very edge of the rock path, that were quivering faintly and constantly in the breeze, there was a sudden tiny convulsion for which the wind was not responsible.

“He’s there! I’ve got him!” He could turn his head now, and he did, in a frenzy of anxiety, reaching a hand for Alda’s arm as he came slipping back to him. “You’re all right? He didn’t touch you?”

“I’m all right.” He was laughing to himself, a small, inward rhythm like a cat purring. “Where was he?”

“Right at the edge of the scar, a yard or so above the path. It’s all still there now, but I’m sure. I saw him move. Only he may not stay there,” he said, his heart contracting ominously. “If we don’t return his fire soon, he’ll know we’re unarmed. If once he gets the idea, he can come down at leisure and get us. We’d have to cross open ground every way if we ran for it.” He had got his companion into this, and he must get him out. “Even if we could kid him we had a gun here,” he said, “we might keep him frozen where he is.”

And suddenly it occurred to him that they were not totally defenceless. One man with a gun here on the door side of the hut, and the enemy would have to keep cover, and fix his attention upon that danger. There was the window at the back, and a sporting chance of reaching cover from it, and escaping into the valley. That fellow up there couldn’t look everywhere at once.

He turned his head again and looked at Alda, who was scanning the rifleman’s hide with narrowed, eager eyes.

“Would you mind terribly if I borrowed your
fujara
?”

Alda started, shortened his ardent stare, and looked with amusement and delight at his ally. He was very quick on the uptake.

“You won’t take in a Slovak that way,” he warned indulgently.

“No, I know that,” acknowledged Dominic, gazing back at him with eyes wide and steady. “But I haven’t got to—have I?”

They understood each other perfectly. In some incomprehensible way they had borrowed from each other, and even words had become almost superfluous, so companionably did their minds confer.