Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (18 page)

“You know the lie of the land here better than I do. You speak the language, I don’t. And you’re the more essential witness now. I don’t understand why, either, but you are. Let me hold his fire here, and you get out by the window and run for help. I’m awfully sorry,” said Dominic, picking his words as fastidiously as a drunk in his anxiety, “to be cornering the safe job for myself, but it’s quicker and easier this way. If you’ll let me try to use the
fujara
for camouflage, I shall be safe enough. He won’t dare rush me, if he thinks I have a gun.”

It was perhaps the most important speech of his life, up to that moment, and he had to get it right. He licked sweat from his lips. All that mattered now was Tossa, safe for a little while in Ondrejov’s care, and safe for ever, even from baseless regrets for that bird-of-prey, her stepfather, once Karol Alda reached Liptovsky Pavol.

There was a brief and pregnant silence; then Alda said, with a soft ripple of contented laughter: “A good idea! All right, I’ll go. Take the
fujara
.”

Dominic didn’t at first recognise the chill that budded so curiously in his heart. It wasn’t fear; he was too excited to be afraid. Fear comes more leisurely and deliberately, and grips the corner of your consciousness that isn’t keyed up to resist it. It was a full minute before he recognised it as disappointment. He had what he’d wanted, but somehow he hadn’t expected to get it so easily, without question. He took the
fujara
in his hands, the smooth, pale, polished, painted wonder that had to do duty for a gun.

“Say when you’re ready, and I’ll try to cover you.”

He heard the harsh sound of a rusty hasp yielding, the creak of the window-frame.

“When you like. I’m ready.”

“Good! Now!”

Dominic opened the door violently, took one rapid step out upon the stone, and on the instant recoiled, stiffening against the jamb. The shot smacked with unnerving aplomb into the opposite door-post; he stared at the hole in dreadful fascination. At least he knew the angle now. If the marksman had been at the opposite end of the rock crossing, Dominic Felse would have been as good as dead.

Vaguely, at the back of his mind, he heard the soft thud of Alda’s feet on the ground outside the window, and their light, fleet running. This was the most desperate of all the moments left to him. He might have a long siege to withstand, but Karol Alda must get away safely. Dominic skinned off his red sweater, and swung it before him across the threshold.

Five! Another hole in the timbers of the wall, terrifyingly close, and two holes through his sweater at the shoulder. He leaned against the jamb of the door, and his knees felt like jelly. How many shots could there be in the magazine? And all he was armed with was a
fujara;
a beautiful, strange, mysterious musical instrument, the antithesis of every known instrument for killing, a whispering pipe that made itself heard over ten miles of country like a melody dreamed rather than heard, and other-worldly even in a dream.

The running footsteps were quite lost now. He strained his ears, and could hear nothing but the last light sighing of the wind under the eaves of the hut.

He pushed the door to carefully, leaving only a narrow chink open; and tenderly he raised his long weapon, and slid it forward through the crack, drawing a bead upon the bushes at the end of the rock path.

After that there was silence. Even the wind had dropped in the height of the afternoon hush.

He watched the clump of bushes where the enemy lay hidden, and lost count of time. He had no attention to spare for any other spot in all that arena of grass and rock and scree. That was why he failed to see Karol Alda until he lay some twenty yards above and behind the rifleman in the bushes, at the rim of the circle round which Dominic’s feverish attention patrolled steadily and dutifully, all senses at strain. He froze, helpless and appalled.

So that was why Alda had accepted his role with such deceptive placidity, Alda with his adventurer’s face and his far-sighted eyes, the bandit-artist out of the lawless past, with the old brigand-songs ready on his tongue. He had never had the slightest intention of going for help. He was patiently, calmly, happily circling round above his enemy, unarmed as he was, dropping now into the perimeter of Dominic’s charmed circle, behind the gunman in the bushes.

And there was nothing, nothing at all, that Dominic could do to help him. Except, perhaps, show himself again outside the door, and that he could hardly do with conviction until the crucial moment. It couldn’t go on being convincing indefinitely, he had to save it as his trump-card. He held his breath, watching. The muzzle of the
fujara
sagged a little, and he jerked it back guiltily, his heart lurching and recovering in an instant.

How could he ever have thought that a man like Karol Alda would leave the sticky end to him? He might have known. He should have known.

The sun was still high, and shadows still short and black. There was only one way of moving in undetected from the south-west, and that was flat to the ground. Alda had a gift for this game, Dominic had to grant him that. He must have made a large circle to reach the place of vantage where he now lay. From the hut he looked as obtrusive as a lizard spread out in the heat on a sunlit wall, though he had rolled up the wide white sleeves of his shirt to his sunburned shoulders; but from where the enemy lay, equally flat to the ground in his thicket of gnarled bushes, Alda would be quite invisible. From here, too, cover looked pitifully thin between them; but he knew to his comfort that there was more of it than there seemed.

But the one man had a gun, and the other had only his hands, and the odds were crazy. He shouldn’t have done it. He should have made off down the valley to get help, as fast as he could. Dominic gnawed his knuckles and dripped sweat in an agony of helplessness. Even if he propped up the
fujara
here and made a run for it from the rear window now, he couldn’t possibly reach either the nearest cottage or Alda in time to affect the issue. All he could do was stare until his eyes glazed, and wait for the single decisive moment when he ought to draw the enemy’s fire again. It might all depend on his timing yet.

Another yard gained. Dominic caught the rapid, smooth movement as Alda flowed through the grass. Fifteen yards now between them, not more, and this afternoon hush over everything, not even a breath of wind to rustle the bushes and cover his advance. Nobody could be so silent as to leave that stillness undisturbed at only a few yards distance. The mystery was how he had got so close without betraying himself.

The bushes stirred stealthily, up there at the edge of the scar. A streak of brown slid out of cover beneath the silver-green branches, articulated, deliberate, grotesque, a man’s body. The man with the rifle had caught that last movement, and awakened to the near and perilous presence of his stalker. He was leaving his hide, slithering downhill flat on his belly, with the clump of bushes between him and his pursuer, feeling his way backwards to the edge of the rock slide, and cautiously over it.

Of course! He didn’t know whether his antagonist was armed or not, and he was taking no chances. He wanted rock, not bushes, between himself and Alda. He was easing himself down to a tenable hold, some five feet or so below the edge, where the stray boulders that fringed the broken ground would cover him.

The distant figure, featureless and anonymous, had turned its back now on the hut below, and paid no attention when Dominic, grasping with a revulsion of horror what was to come, flung the door wide and ran out into the open. He was no longer interested in any target but the unseen enemy in the grass above him, closing in coolly and patiently on the abandoned bushes, and gathering himself now for the final long leap downhill.

Dominic made a trumpet of his hands and yelled wildly aloft. And at the same moment Alda made his leap, beautifully and vainly gauged to drop him upon the very spot from which the other man had so silently withdrawn.

The rifle, its barrel a bluish gleam in the sun, was already braced and waiting for him. Dominic saw it flung up to meet the hurtling body, felt the tension of the firing arm like a pain transfixing his own flesh, and set his teeth and held his breath, steeled for the shot. A small, distant, dry, bright sound. The slopes took it up and tossed it among them in innumerable echoes, ripple on ripple, to die in the depths of the valley below.

The bushes threshed beneath Alda’s falling body, swallowing him from sight. Dominic drew breath in a wail of despair, and stood staring numbly, so sick with his own impotence that he saw what happened next only as an illogical sequence experienced in a dream, and for several seconds could make no sense of it in this disastrous daylight world.

The man braced on the rough run of the rock chute hung quite still for a long moment. Then slowly his arms sank and spread apart, and the rifle slithered from his hold, and drifted away from him almost languidly, to lodge in a tuft of grass ten feet below, and hang there gently rocking. His outspread hands clutched at the rock and the thinning soil beneath him, and found no purchase, or no strength to maintain their hold. His knees sagged gently under him, and his body began to slide, first with unbelievable slowness, then with gathering momentum, until it struck a projecting knuckle of rock, and was flung abruptly outwards towards the centre of the chute. It struck again, and rebounded, and came spinning and turning and bouncing downwards like a stone.

In the dwarf bushes above, Karol Alda gathered himself up nimbly, and slid hastily down the few yards to where the rock path began. He reached the edge just in time to see the rag-doll form strike the piled stones of the talus on the ledge below. A sudden convulsion shuddered through the whole laborious erection, running like a ripple from the shock, outward to either end. Particles of stone shifted, toppled, re-settled, and set their new neighbours shuddering in their turn. Then, with a sudden grinding roar, the whole unstable mass burst from its shaky moorings and exploded violently outwards over the valley, spitting rocks like chaff, and hurtled down with the body, in an earth-shaking thunder and a cloud of pallid dust, into the bottom of the bowl.

Down from the recesses of the northerly col Ondrejov came bouncing and rolling, that lumpy elderly body of his marvellously deft and rapid in movement, his rifle bumping vigorously at his hip as he ran. Hard on his heels came Miroslav Zachar, still in his leather motor-cycling jacket, and sweating profusely, and two young policemen in uniform. They descended upon the hut, where Dominic stood dazed and appalled, staring down into the cauldron below him, from which a thick, choking smoke of dust rose, and the last muted rumblings of the thunder.

Ondrejov turned him about by the shoulders, looked him over for damage, and found nothing worse than a scratched cheek.

“Well for you two,” he bellowed, clouting him boisterously behind in his relief, “that I’ve kept my hand in with a rifle. And well for you I had Mirek on your trail. He was waiting for you below, and you never came. You cost him a fine hunt before he found the van, and a fine fright I got when he rang up to tell me. If you youngsters would only do as you’re told! I had the road well covered for your sake, but we had to reorganise in a hurry. There’ll be two of us on their way up the valley now, and the rest of us came over the quickest way from Král’s inn. And lucky for you the first shot gave us our bearings. You’re all right?”

“Yes. Thank you! I’m all right,” said Dominic, still staring down into the boiling eddies of dust below, beneath which the wreckage of the talus still slid and settled with sluggish, sated movements. He thought of a body buffeted and ground and slashed in that titanic disintegration, and the body became live, and his own. He would never play with those things again! He felt sick, but he was alive. For the moment that was all he could feel, and it was enough.

“Mr. Alda…” he said. His tongue was slow and stupid, and his mouth dry with dust. “Mr. Veselsky, I mean…”

“Mr. Veselsky is on his way down, look! Like one of his own goats! Does he look damaged?
Nie
, there was only one shot—mine.”

Alda was dropping down the grass slope on the far side of the scar in long, sure-footed bounds, balanced like a dancer. They saw that he carried a rifle in his hands.

“Good!” said Ondrejov. “The gun at least we have, if we can’t have the man.” He laid his arm warmly about Dominic’s shoulders, and turned him towards the descent into the bowl. “Come on, let’s go down. Let’s see what we have there.”

What they had was a wilderness, a new desolation. They foregathered in silence in the safe, hollowed heart of the bowl, where nothing could fall any farther, and ranged the scattered fringes of a desert of tumbled stones, through a pall of acrid dust that still silted down thickly on every blade of grass between the rocks, until there was no green left. Somewhere under those piled cairns the body of Robert Welland’s murderer was buried.

“There won’t be much to identify,” said Ondrejov grimly, “but I suppose we shall have to dig him out. We shall need heavy equipment on the job. You didn’t, by any chance, get a proper look at him?”

“No, nothing. I saw only the end of his fall.”

“And we had no field-glasses. No telescopic sights, not even a diopter. Our best shots were covering the road.” Ondrejov nodded sombrely, looking down at the rifle in his hands, on which the dust was settling pale and fine as talc. “He had, though. A Zbrojovka Brno gun, of course. ZKM 581 small-calibre rifle. Automatic. Light to carry, not too bulky to hide, and a man could run into them by the thousand here. That tells us nothing till we find out who applied for the permit to buy it. As we shall.” He shook himself like an experienced old dog making ready for action, and turned towards the downhill path, coughing. “Let’s get back where we can breathe. We’ll work this out in Pavol.”

“Then we still don’t know who he is,” said Dominic, swept along in Ondrejov’s arm, shaky with reaction now.

Ondrejov hoisted an eloquent shoulder. “We soon shall. We’re in no hurry now.” He looked back once, briefly, at the murky desolation where the murderer lay buried. “Neither is he,” he said laconically. “Even for him, the emergency’s over.”

“I’m officially off-duty,” said Ondrejov smugly, “but as Major Kriebel is at Liptovsky Mikulás, examining Mr. Welland’s baggage at his hotel there, and enquiring into his movements, I shall take the liberty of presiding until he returns.”

And he did, and the wires hummed. First, the salvage operations in Zbojská Dolina; then a dutiful call, naturally, to Major Kriebel, so worded that he would, with luck, feel it incumbent upon him, in defence of his dignity, to go to survey the devastation in the valley before he came back to Pavol; and lastly, calls to the two hotels at Mikulás where Freeling, Blagrove and Sir Broughton Phelps had installed themselves, and across the square to the Slovan, where Paul Newcombe had taken a room. None of them was actually in his hotel to be contacted personally, which was hardly surprising on a lovely August afternoon; it was a question of leaving a message in each case, asking them all to report at Ondrejov’s office, in person or by telephone, as soon as possible.

That done, Ondrejov assembled his cast for the last act, the Mather twins from their forlorn and fruitless councils of war at the Slovan, Tossa from a long and blissful sleep on her solitary cot downstairs. And they all talked at last, fully and freely.

After that, Ondrejov talked.

“When Mr. Terrell was found dead,” he said, “I was already in possession of the facts about that death, but not of the background. I therefore knew from the beginning that this was not a case of murder. But there were certain curious features about it that interested me. And when you, Miss Barber, applied for a visa, with your friends, the authorities, who were also on the alert, contacted me. We supplied you with Mirek as an escort, and waited to see what would follow. And it was known to me, before the death of Mr. Welland brought things into the open, that you were making enquiries about your stepfather’s movements. Movements which we already knew, but to which your anxiety gave significance. You even uncovered some points which were not known to us. For instance, at the Hotel Sokolie—you remember the waiter who spoke English? He was a very worried man, Miss Barber, very worried. He had thought nothing of the small matter of the card-game, and the paper on which Ivo Martínek kept the score, until you became excited about it.”

Tossa, refreshed and radiant, sat by Dominic’s side, and smiled back at Ondrejov with all her heart. She had never looked younger, and never in Dominic’s experience half so light-hearted. She was clear of suspicion, clear even of her suspicions of herself. Terrell had not been a hero or a patriot, but only an ambitious schemer bent on climbing in his profession, if necessary over other people’s faces. She was free of him, she had her life back fresh and new, and she had Dominic tightly by the hand. She knew now, though imperfectly, how nearly she had lost him.

“Naturally I questioned the Martíneks about that incident; so already I had a picture of another kind of case, with its roots somewhere in the past, even before Mr. Welland was killed. I knew from Mr. Veselsky—shall I call him Mr. Alda, for our purposes?—I knew from Mr. Alda that he had known Terrell, and worked in the same enterprise with him in England. I knew from your activities that you suspected Terrell had been hunting for someone or something in the neighbourhood of Zbojská Dolina, and I knew from Ivo the nature of the lead he—and you after him—had found. Of Welland I knew only that he had known Terrell, and that he, too, was returning with marked persistence to the place where Terrell had died, also plainly in search of something there. It was as evident to me as it was to you that every thread led into the heart of that one valley, and that the person to whom all those threads were leading must be Mr. Alda. The man who had known and worked with Terrell, and reported his death, the man who had an English past of some importance. Which, naturally, we, too, investigated.

“Now you, Miss Barber, have been so kind as to fill in all the gaps. It is very lucky for me, that Mr. Welland was forced by circumstances to confide in you. I had not this detailed knowledge then, but I had enough to show me that certain persons,
all English
, were very much interested in locating Mr. Alda, and that after the death of the first of them those of you who were continuing the search obviously held that same death to be murder. I knew it was not; but it was interesting to think that there was somewhere, known to someone, a reason why it
could
have been murder. And the second death
was
murder. I was not altogether prepared for that, never having taken it quite seriously. Your secret agent game became real, quite suddenly, because it appeared there
was
someone who was desperate to prevent you from finding Mr. Alda, someone who had killed and would kill again to keep the facts about his departure from England from being re-examined, or the case re-opened in any way.

“But where I had the advantage of you, of course, was in knowing beforehand that it
could not
be Mr. Alda himself. We preserve his quietness here, but that is not the same thing as keeping his secrets. He lives a life in which not even an Englishman could find anything underhand or controversial, he has nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and he would not care how many English people came investigating him, provided they didn’t hinder his work. For the same reasons,
it could not be any other Czech or Slovak
, official or unofficial.”

He
had reached this point, when there was a knock on the outer door. Mirek got up from his place and looked enquiringly at his chief.

“Let him in,” said Ondrejov, settling his solid body more complacently in his wooden arm-chair, and his chin more contentedly into his chest. “Let’s see who’s the first.”

Every head turned to watch the doorway; and into it, all the more belligerently for his considerable inward disquiet, marched Paul Newcombe. He looked quietly round the circle, caught the excitement that burned in them all, and was alarmed, caught the glow and animation of Tossa’s face, and was reassured. He halted, uncertain what to make of them.

“You left a message for me at the hotel. I was only out for a walk.”

“Come in, Mr. Newcombe, come in. Mirek, find Mr. Newcombe a chair. You’re just in time,” pursued Ondrejov amiably, “to hear me conclude that the only person who could possibly have an interest in preventing an Englishman from finding Mr. Alda was someone connected with the circumstances in which he left England, someone who had gained by that case, and stood to lose by any reappraisal. In fact,
another Englishman
.”

“I know absolutely nothing about this affair,” Paul said loudly and aggressively, his bull head lowered in an instant. “I came from Vienna only because of Tossa, and that’s all I care about. But I can account for every minute I’ve spent in this country.”

“Ah, but you need not, Mr. Newcombe. Sit down, and be easy. You were never a very likely suspect. Now if it had been Terrell’s murder, I might have wondered… But in any case you have accounted for yourself quite adequately,” said Ondrejov, grinning like a happy demon, “simply by being here—and alive.”

“We have, then, our hypothetical Englishman. Can we give him any distinguishing features? A face? Not exactly, but an office or a status, perhaps, yes. He was connected with Mr. Alda’s life and work in England. He gained by his leaving England. That, at least, was my theory.

“Now, thanks to Miss Barber, I know much more about Welland, how he came into the case, what his motives were, what sort of man he was. We know that he went to the Marrion Institute, and proposed that he, being here on the spot, should investigate what he believed to be Terrell’s murder. He saw it as something they owed to the dead man, and to justice itself. Now I ask you, how could any of those in authority openly deprecate his zeal? They could not. In any case it seems he would not have agreed to drop his quest. I invite you to look closely at Mr. Welland, for I think he is worth it. There is every sign that he was a good, conscientious and honest man. And what follows? He would have insisted on investigating to the bitter end, and I think he would have made the truth known, no matter what that truth turned out to be. Which would not have suited X at all, for X alone knew exactly what was there to be uncovered.”

“I hope,” said Alda drily, “that you can make that good. For I tell you plainly,
I
am still in the dark.”

“Well, let me theorise, it was all I could do then, and what Miss Barber has told me since fits in with my theory. As for you, you do not know only because you do not care. You will see!

“Given, then, a devoted avenger who means to know the truth, and will not be stopped by persuasion, and cannot for shame’s sake be stopped by a prohibition, what is to be done? Use him! Let him find Alda, and then both he and Alda can be eliminated, and there’s an end of it. Let him find Alda, yes, but only if it can be ensured that he shall report his whereabouts only in the right quarter. It seemed to me that X must be in a position to know all about that interview at the Institute, and also to give orders to Welland concerning this case, to say in effect: ‘You will preserve absolute secrecy, reporting only to me’, and be trusted and obeyed. ‘Security’ is such a useful word, and can blanket so many personal meannesses.

“Now see what Miss Barber has told us about the last words Welland ever spoke to her. ‘He couldn’t have known…’
He
? Obviously the expected he, the defecting scientist, the one who was thought to have things to hide, and had nothing, except his personal privacy. ‘—
no one else
knew…’ No one else but the one, or the ones, to whom he had already reported, the ones who had the right to know! He said it himself, and then he understood what it meant, and he cried: ‘Impossible!’ Impossible that his superior, the person, or one of the persons, for whom he was working, could also be his murderer. But he knew then that it was not impossible, that it was the truth.

“Such was my theory. And if this was true, then both Miss Barber and Mr. Felse were in danger after that death, simply because they had been present, and he might have confided something to them. Fortunately the circumstances made it possible for me to place Miss Barber in safety by holding her on suspicion. You would have made things much more difficult for me if you had told the truth the first time, but luckily you did not. And this, again, enabled me to inform the British Embassy that she was being held. You will surely understand how very curious I was to see exactly who would turn up to take charge of her…”