Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (10 page)

‘I ought to point out,’ he said, in a voice almost as dry as the desert he saw ahead of him without her, ‘that what I’ve reported and what you may have remembered is not enough to prove what actually became of this man Aylwin. You yourself know that there were completely logical reasons for believing, as Dr. Fredericks certainly did, that he had simply walked out. Granted that you have additional knowledge, you still have no proof that Dr. Fredericks’ version is not the correct one. For all the real evidence anyone possesses, Aylwin may be very much alive and perfectly well. If you won’t allow me to follow up the possibilities for you, at least remember that.’

Did he for one moment believe what he had said? Certainly she did not. Perhaps now she knew more than he did. She remained marble-still, the notes extended gravely in her hand.

‘Thank you, you’re very kind. Please believe that I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but there’s no need to follow it up any farther. And now, I’m a little tired…’

He could not keep her waiting any longer. He took the money without a glance, and thrust it into his pocket.

‘May I know… what you intend to do?’

‘I have no plans,’ she said.

‘If there should be anything further to tell you, can I rely on finding you here?’

‘For a while, yes. I don’t know how long.’

‘If you should need me, you know where to reach me.’ She did not offer him her hand, and he did not expect it. He walked to the door without looking back. ‘Good-bye, Miss Tressider!’

‘Good-bye, Mr. Killian!’

The trouble was that he didn’t mean it, and she did. Wherever she looked for help, out of friendship or for hire, never in this world would she turn to Francis Killian again. She had crossed him out of her experience, buried him as deep as the body he’d dug up for her. After the compromising intimacy of what they’d just done to each other, he thought grimly as he walked down the stairs, it was either that or marriage.

He had taken her money, because he had had no right to refuse it, but now that he had it, it was his business what he did with it. He walked into the church opposite the hotel, and cast a sullen eye over all the almsboxes, but the combating of dry-rot and death-watch beetle and the financing of overseas missions in countries arguably more moral and likeable if not more Christian than England did not appeal to him as a job for Maggie’s money. He went down to the Salvation Army shelter by the embankment, where they had a permanent collecting-box on the wall outside, in the form of a giant tambourine, with his favourite appeal written across it in large, cheerful characters: HELP UP THE DOWN-BUT-NOT-OUTS. He pulled out the untidy wad of notes from his pocket, and stuffed them anyhow through the slot.

A disinterested-looking man sauntering past with his eyes apparently on the river took in this surprising act, and loitered to lean on the rail and the embankment and think it over, as Francis stalked away.

George Felse had been following him ever since he had shouldered his way through the revolving doors of the Lion Hotel and butted savagely through the traffic into the church opposite. It was a chance meeting only, in fact George was on his way to the car-park where he had left his car. But the apparition of Bunty’s visitor, back from Austria and striding stony-faced and hot-eyed away from an encounter with his principal, had lured him out of his course. Everybody knew from the local evening paper that Maggie Tressider had taken a suite at the Lion; and by this time George had studied Francis Killian’s photograph too thoughtfully to miss that face when he saw it cross the pavement in front of him. First the almsboxes in the church, and now this startling treatment of a fistful of money. And the desolation and rage in the worn, illusionless face. It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions. It takes a touch of madness to make most people throw money away.

George walked to his car slowly and thoughtfully. Whatever Maggie Tressider’s commission had been, it looked as if it was over. And there at the Salvation Army shelter her agent had jettisoned his pay, in anger and offence. Was it possible that Bunty had been right about him? Had he a far larger stake at risk?

And might it not be well worth while, so far as other duties allowed, continuing this unofficial watch upon him? In fact, upon both of them?

It was on Saturday, the fourteenth of September, that Laura Howard telephoned from the B.E.A. office.

‘Bunty? Something rather intriguing—if you’re still interested in your party? He looked in yesterday afternoon, and asked me to do exactly what
you
asked me to do! He wants to know if
Maggie Tressider
books a passage anywhere. He knows I shouldn’t do it but he was in dead earnest. And of course, I didn’t promise, not exactly, but remembering what you said last time… Well, I didn’t say I wouldn’t, either. I thought I’d better consult you, and see what was on. Because, you see,
she has
! This morning! She rang up and wanted a passage to Zurich next Wednesday, and I’ve got one for her on the 16.10 from Heathrow.’

Bunty had waved George over long before this point, and his head was inclined intently beside her own, listening to the distant clacking with ears stretched.

‘Well, I mean,
Maggie Tressider
! But he seems on the level, and he says he’s been working for her. Has he?’

‘Yes,’ said Bunty, ‘that’s right, he has.’

‘Then what do I do? Should I let him know?’

‘Ask her,’ hissed George, ‘if there’s another flight to Zurich the same day.’

‘Hallo… Laura? Is there another flight that same day?’

‘Lots… 10.10, 10.50, 14.10… and tourist night flights, of course…’

‘Tell him,’ breathed George, ‘and a thousand to one he’ll be on one of ’em if there’s a vacancy.’

‘Yes, Laura, tell him. He’s O.K. And Laura… let me know if he books a crossing for himself, will you?’

‘Oh, well,’ said Laura philosophically, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound. O.K., I’ll call him. And I’ll call
you
, double-quick, if there’s any trouble.’ She rang off.

Bunty cradled the ’phone, and gazed, round-eyed at George over it. ‘
Now
what’s going on? It doesn’t make sense for him to be peering round corners and suborning B.E.A. employees to find out what his own client’s up to. He can’t have been lying about working for her, because he wasn’t at all worried about the possibility that I might pop out and buy some flowers and go round to the Royal to visit her. In fact he suggested it. And plenty of people would have, especially after being told she’d remembered them. Now it seems he’s expecting her to go running out there herself, and not to say anything to him about it. So what
is
going on?’

‘I rather think,’ said George, ‘that they’ve parted brassrags.’ He recounted the incident of the Salvation Army shelter. ‘It looks as if he brought
something
back with him, and something that got him paid off and sent about his business. And somehow I don’t think it was book material about Paul Fredericks, do you? Anyhow, he wasn’t a bit happy about the result, you should have seen his face! And he certainly got rid of her money so fast it might have been scalding him. But now it does seem that he hasn’t exactly accepted his dismissal, doesn’t it? Far from it, he’s still going to be bloodhounding along after her wherever she goes, unless I miss my guess. Only this time unknown to her, and unpaid.’

‘I told you,’ said Bunty, ‘he’s in love with her. If she’s going to walk head-on into trouble, he’s going to be on the spot to pull her out of it.’

‘And you think she is going to be walking into trouble?’ demanded George, of himself at least as much as of his wife.

‘It looks as if
he
thinks so. And after all, he’s the only one who knows what he found there, isn’t he?’

‘You’re so right,’ agreed George ruefully. ‘I only wish he wasn’t. I’d give a good deal to be in the know myself.’ He sat mute for a few moments, his eyes fixed on Bunty in bright speculation; she knew him so well that she could almost see him making up his mind. ‘Bunty, how would you like a few days in the Vorarlberg?’

‘Us?’ she said, startled. ‘You and me? You mean follow them over and keep an eye on them?’

“
If
he decides to go after her. Yes, you and me—why not? I’ve still got a week of leave to take, some time, why not now and why not in Scheidenau? If nothing comes of it, we’ve lost nothing and had a holiday. And if something does come of it, if he’s turned up something about the disappearance of your young Aylwin… Well, who knows? If we roll one more stone over we may find Peter Bromwich, too. I’d give a good deal to close that case.’

‘We couldn’t travel on the same flight with either of them,’ pointed out Bunty. ‘
He’d
know me, for certain. And
she
just might.’

‘I was thinking rather of hopping over with one of the tourist night flights, ahead of them. They won’t all be fully booked not in September. And it would give us time to lay on a car from Zurich, ready to trail those two as soon as they land. Train or road, we can tag along once we’ve got them in our sights. What do you say?’

Bunty reviewed her responsibilities, and could find nothing against it. Dominic and his Tossa wouldn’t be home from their student trek in Yugoslavia for a fortnight yet, just in time to head back to Oxford.

‘I say yes, let’s!’ said Bunty with enthusiasm. ‘
If
he follows her, of course,’ she conceded with a sigh.

It was late afternoon when the telephone rang again.

‘Bunty? Laura here! How did you know? He’s booked on the 14.10, two hours ahead of her!’

Second Cousin Gisela, of the mini-skirt, the blonde ponytail and the white wool knee-stockings, heard the car drive through into the courtyard of the Goldener Hirsch, and whirled her stool round to see who was arriving. The French couple from the second floor had left this morning, and most of the currency-starved English were already gone. The slight chill of approaching autumn fingered thoughtfully at the roofs of Scheidenau. A new arrival was not only profit, but entertainment, too.

The driver, a frequent visitor here during the season, brought in two cases of modest size but excellent quality, and his manner indicated that he had been more than adequately tipped. Gisela reviewed the accommodation she had to offer, and looked up with hopeful brightness as the new arrival came into the hall. English, a lady alone, very beautiful, very pale, very fragile. She wore a fashionably simple little tube of a dress in fine wool jersey, printed in rich warm tones of rust and amber and peach that did their best to reflect some colour into her face, but Gisela could see that without that reflected glow she would have been ashen, with lavender hollows in her cheeks and deeper violet shadows under her eyes. Her clothes, from the narrow black shoes to the small, gold-rimmed halo of a black hat, spoke of money. Her face, white, remote and abstracted, seemed not to belong to the picture, even though everything she wore had been carefully chosen to set it off at its best. Gisela had the feeling that she had seen that face before in magazines, and that it was famous and ought to be recognized, but the firmament of opera and the concert platform was not her world, and she had no memory for the stars that revolved in it.

The voice which asked for a room was very quiet and a little husky with fatigue, yet it was the most vital, vigorous and live thing about the visitor, as if it used and drove everything else. A voice that would make you prick up your ears and turn round to see if the face matched it, even if you heard it simply ordering beer in the bar.

‘How long will the lady be staying?’

‘I don’t know… several days. If I’m not asking for impossibilities, I should like to have a piano to myself somewhere. I have to practise,’ she explained with the shadow of a smile, ‘and I don’t want to disturb anyone.’

Gisela was eager. ‘If you would like it, there is a suite on the first floor which has a large sitting-room. To-morrow they could bring up a piano for you from the dining-room, there are two there. Only an upright, but it is a good tone, and in tune.’ The suite was the dearest apartment in the house, and someone who wanted a piano as part of the amenities could well afford to pay for it.

‘Upstairs?’ said Maggie doubtfully. ‘I shouldn’t like to put them to so much trouble. Won’t it be very heavy and difficult?’

‘The stairs are so wide and so shallow, there is no difficulty. Like a castle, you will see. And the suite is very nice, it looks over the lake, and has a verandah with steps down to the grounds. I will show you.’ And she whisked open the flap of her desk, picked up the two suitcases like handfuls of feathers, and started sturdily up the length of the vaulted hall.

Maggie followed the straight young back and twinkling white wool legs to the vast rear stairs, and along a broad, echoing corridor on the first floor. She had no conscious memory of anything here, yet she knew where something was changed. It was like revisiting the place of a dream, or perhaps even more like dreaming of a place so uncannily familiar as to convince her she had dreamed it before. On those long-past visits with Freddy she had slept far up on the third floor, in rooms appropriately cheap for aspiring young performers. This large blue and white room, with its verandah blazing with geraniums, the airy bedroom opening from it, the bright hand-made cover on the old, carved bed, these she had never seen before. She went out into the open air and leaned over the flowering rail, and the scent of the trees came up to her, and the glimmer of the lake refracting light to her invisible, in small, broken darts of paler green launched through the deep green dusk.

‘Dinner is over,’ said Gisela, ‘but if you would like something to eat I will tell them. You are very tired, shall we not bring you something here?’

Maggie sat down on the edge of the bed, and its firm softness drew her like a magnet. ‘I am tired. Yes, if you would be so kind, it would be very nice to eat here.’

‘And you like the room? It will do?’

‘It will do very well. But I haven’t signed, or filled in a card for you.’

‘To-morrow,’ said Gisela cheerfully. ‘And in the morning they will bring up your piano. Everything to-morrow!’ And she went darting along the corridor, in small, light thumps like a terrier running on the naked boards, and skittered down the stairs back to her switchboard.

Maggie undressed, her movements clumsy with exhaustion, wrapped herself in a housecoat, and lay down on the bed. The feather coverlet billowed round her, cool and grateful, closing her in from the world. There were no thoughts left in her at all, only this terrible weariness suddenly eased and cradled, and sleep leaning heavily on her eyelids the moment she lay down.

Only this morning she had left Comerbourne for London, picked up fresh clothes at her flat, and taken a taxi out to Heathrow in time for her flight. Then the train journey on to Bregenz, and the car to bring her up here to the border. And ever since Zurich, places and scenes familiar to her throughout the years of her fame had taken on a different, a remote familiarity, as though the nineteen-year-old Maggie had come back to savour them with another palate. A bitter taste, perhaps of poison. I am not yet well, she told herself, I see, hear, feel with distorted senses. But in her heart she knew that it was because all these places were populated now by one more person, many years forgotten.

It was five days now since she had remembered Robin living, and been brought face to face with Robin dead. Five days in which he had kept her company every step of the way.

She was discharged to her own care, she could go where she chose and take the responsibility for herself. None the less, she had gone gently and gradually about this pilgrimage, concentrating her forces to satisfy her doctors that she was fit to travel, and assuring them that her intention was to take a leisurely, convalescent holiday at a resort she already knew well, where she would be comfortable and well-cared-for, a complete rest that would set her up to tackle life again. Turning her head on the pillow and catching sight of her own drawn face in the glass, she felt certain she had not looked like this when they agreed to let her go. She must remember to send Mr. Rice a card full of reassurances to-morrow. Everything to-morrow!

She had done certain other things during those five days: cancelled a few more forward engagements, answered all her letters, arranged a transfer of money to the accounts of Alec and Dione, in case they found themselves in difficulties while she was absent.

‘While she was absent’ was how she phrased it in her own mind; but before she left England she had also made her will.

Across the water, in a room on the second floor of the Alte Post, Bunty Felse lowered the field-glasses from her eyes with a crow of satisfaction, and turned to meet George as he came into the doorway behind her.

‘She’s here, all right,’ he reported. ‘Came up in a car from Bregenz not a quarter of an hour ago, and turned up towards the Goldener Hirsch.’

‘I know,’ said Bunty, ‘I’ve just seen her. Those are her windows, almost opposite to us, see? With the flowers and the balcony. The curtains are drawn now, but when the girl brought her up and put the lights on they were open. It was the lights that made me look there. I might have mistaken the face at this distance, even with glasses, but I couldn’t mistake that hat.’

She had never been quite easy in her mind since they had taken their eyes off that hat, a thin gold halo in the back window of the taxi, on the road from Zurich airport, and allowed Maggie to be carried away towards the town without them. George had had to make a snap decision which of the two to follow, for the middle-aged hired Dodge with Francis Killian at the wheel had swung unhesitatingly north-east on the fast road to Winterthur.

‘He knew where she was heading, all right,’ said George, focusing the glasses on the pattern of lights over the water. ‘And which hotel she’d make for when she got here. Lucky we followed him in by road or we wouldn’t have known which one he’d picked for himself. As it is, you’ll be able to keep out of his sight here without any trouble.’

‘I wonder why he did choose the Weisses Kreuz, when this one is so well-placed for keeping an eye on her?’

‘He couldn’t know she’d have that room, could he? And the Weisses Kreuz is on the corner where all the roads meet, all traffic going up to the Goldener Hirsch has to pass it. He was there on the terrace,’ said George, ‘waiting for her to arrive. When the car went by, he paid and strolled off in the same direction.’

‘You think he’ll try to see her?’

‘No, I think he’ll want to see without being seen himself. He won’t want her to know he’s spying on her, not if you’re right about his feelings for her.’

‘So we wait for him to move,’ said Bunty, ‘and
he
waits for
her
. And
she
, I shouldn’t be surprised, waits for somebody else, I wonder who?’

Maggie, on her way down to breakfast, met a woman on the broad white spiral of the back stairs, a tall woman in traditional dress, with black hair plaited into two great, shining braids and coiled high on her head. She was carrying two heavy cases as she climbed, so that her head was bent, and that tower of glistening hair was the first thing about her to catch Maggie’s attention. She drew aside to where the steps were narrowest, to let the burdened woman by, and because she was still a little shaky and hesitant from the fatigue of the previous day, she halted and held by the wall rather than risk proceeding on the tapering treads. The woman’s eyes travelled upwards steadily from the narrow, elegant black shoes to the smooth russet-amber hair. Her head came up like the head of a deer scenting man. For a moment she halted, motionless and silent, and the sidelong light from a window accentuated the cleft in her lip, scoring the shadow there cruelly deep.

Maggie and Friedl stood mute and intent, gazing at each other. Thirteen years is a long time, but a hare-lip on an otherwise good-looking girl is bitterly memorable, and to be world-famous is to have one’s photograph penetrate everywhere, if any reminder was needed. And even more surely, there stood between them the shadow of an absent third, at once a link between them and an impassable barrier.

‘You are the lady from Number One?’ said Friedl, with a gaunt smile in which her eyes played no part. ‘Franz and Joachim will bring up the piano for you this morning.’

‘Thank you!’ Maggie hesitated for a moment only. ‘You are Fraulein Friedl?’

‘How kind of the gracious lady,’ said Friedl, ‘to remember me.’ The smile, returning, hollowed her brown cheeks and raised a hungry gleam in her eye that was neither gracious nor kind. ‘It is a long time ago.’

‘I must speak to you,’ said Maggie.

‘Not here. Not now.’ Friedl watched the colour ebb and flow on the too-prominent cheekbones, and slow, burning resentment gathered about her heart and ached insatiably. This was the woman who had and did not value the devotion of every man who set eyes on her, while she, Friedl, beautiful of body but marred of face, provided a passing interest for such men as had nothing better to do, but was never noticed, never regarded, as a woman in her own right. Wait, she thought, there is always a price on everything, and you’ve had so much and paid so little yet! ‘I have my work to do,’ she said. ‘I am not a daughter of the house.’

The tone was mild and even servile, but the eyes were inimical, and even the note of self-abasement had its implicit reverse of smouldering arrogance. Maggie shrank. If she could have turned back now she would have done it, but there was no way of turning back. It was even possible that this woman knew no more than she had told Francis; but if she did, Maggie had to know it. There might be no comfort in knowing, but not to know was to be balked of her own identity. She had come here, tidying up her affairs behind her, and leaving no dependent of hers unprovided, simply in the determination to know; there was no other thought or ambition left in her mind.

‘When may I have a talk with you?’ she asked patiently.

‘I am not free until after dinner. And even then, if we wish to be undisturbed, better it should not be in the house.’

‘I will come wherever you choose.’

‘This evening, when I am free, I will go along the path to the wood, under your verandah. Come out by that way, please, after me. They do not like it if I mix too much with the guests.’ It was a lie, but so well did it fit into the picture she was composing of an oppressed poor relation that she almost felt it to be true. I will make you follow me, she thought, as I followed him. I will take you where I took him, and make use of you as he made use of me. And I’ll hurt you as he hurt me, and with interest. When I’m done with you, you shall have one man round your neck for life, and go the rest of your way ringing him like a leper’s bell to keep every other man off, for fear of bringing him to the same end. I know your kind!

‘Very well,’ said Maggie. ‘I shall be watching for you. I’ll come.’

‘What more do you want?’ said Friedl harshly. ‘
He
told you all this, didn’t he? That man you sent here. Here in this very place he asked me what you have asked me, and I told him. And what did you need with either of us to tell you? Who knew better than you what sent Robin rushing down the slope there and into the lake? Yes, you had the right to refuse him, if you didn’t want him, yes, you could tell him to go away—am I blaming you? What was it to you if somebody else loved him, and wanted what you didn’t want? But you cannot have it both ways. If you think you did him no wrong, why do you come weeping back like a penitent, asking to be forgiven for killing him? If you did nothing shameful to him, why are you ashamed?’

In the half-circle of bushes, with the night deepening round them, all colours on the landward side had become an opaque wash of olive green. Against the faintly luminous shimmer of lake and sky, thinly veiled by a lace of branches, Friedl in her black dress prowled restlessly. The slight rustle of her feet in the grass frayed at the silence when her voice ceased. Somewhere a twig cracked. She reared her head to listen, frozen in mid-stride. The moment she was still the ultimate silence flooded in and possessed the world.