Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (7 page)

She had closed her eyes, the better to see the man who was not there. When she opened them they were bright, thoughtful and clear. ‘How’s that?’

‘Strictly for the fiction shelves,’ said George rudely, and tucked away mentally every word of it. ‘Now supposing—just supposing—you wanted to get to Scheidenau quickly, and money was no object. How would you go? Air to Munich… Zurich…?’

‘Zurich,’ said Bunty promptly. ‘Could do it either way, but Zurich would be quicker and easier.’ She sat looking at him wide-eyed, a shining mirror reflecting his thoughts back to him. ‘I happen,’ she said cautiously, ‘to be on rather good terms with Laura Howard in the B.E.A. office in Comerbourne. I could have a word with her. Very discreetly, of course. What did you mean about money being no object? He didn’t look as if it would be no object to him.’

‘If she’s retained him to do a job for her,’ said George, ‘Miss Tressider will be paying the expenses. And
if
he takes off for Austria after your long-lost ’cellist, the quick, expensive way, that should clinch one thing, at least: he’ll be following up this line on
her
business, not his own.’

‘But we,’ said Bunty, now with unmistakable regret, ‘shan’t be able to follow him there.’

‘Too true we shan’t. But we just might, with a lot of luck, get an inkling of what, if anything, he brings back with him.’

The violinist who had shared Robert Aylwin’s room at the Goldener Hirsch in Scheidenau, thirteen years ago, lived now in Birmingham, and played in the City of Birmingham Orchestra. Bunty’s working papers of the tour had proved very useful indeed, supplying the names Maggie had forgotten, and even such day-to-day details as room accommodation. Charles Pincher and Robert Aylwin had been roommates throughout, so they must, if not friends, have been reasonably congenial companions. Why should Maggie remember the one, apparently the less memorable, and forget the other?

Mrs. Felse had said clearly and kindly that Maggie had not been interested in Aylwin or in any man, and probably never would be. But Mrs. Felse might be mistaken. And still Francis saw, or thought he saw, the shadowy outline of a person round whom his bitterness could gather corrosively, a man who must have meant something to her, probably much, perhaps everything, if she hadn’t disastrously mistaken her own heart, and kicked away love too hastily from trammelling her feet on the climb to the heights. Why else should she fasten so suddenly and hungrily on fame, why come back changed, unless she had not merely turned her back on the alternative, but herself destroyed it?

So he went to see Charles Pincher. And Charles Pincher, tall, stooped, balding and cheerful, remembered the Scheidenau affair very well.

‘There was one rather odd thing about it, you know. He didn’t take anything with him when he lit out.’

Slowly Francis closed his notebook on his knee. ‘He didn’t…? You mean he just walked out empty-handed? But Mrs. Felse said nothing about that…’

‘No, well, I don’t suppose she ever realised. But his suitcase and his ’cello were there in the room still, after he’d gone. Freddy left them in old Waldmeister’s charge when we left, he said he’d be sure to come back and collect them as soon as he knew we’d gone, and the bill was paid.’

‘And did he
?’

‘I suppose so, old boy, but I was never there again. I had the chance of a good job, so I quit the Circus. I expect he did, you know. We all knew he’d fallen out with Freddy. He’d just keep out of sight until we were on the move, and then stroll back and pick up his traps at leisure.’

The sensible thing to believe, of course. The only question left was whether it had actually happened like that. Whether, in fact, there had been some sound reason why it couldn’t happen like that. And there was only one infallible way to find out, and find out quickly.

‘We were right,’ said Bunty over the telephone to George. ‘Zurich! Laura booked him in on the two o’clock Trident flight from Heathrow to-morrow. Open return. Took him a day and a half to make up his mind.’

‘Now I wonder,’ said George at the other end of the line, ‘I do wonder to whom he talked yesterday, and what they told him, to make his journey really necessary?’

The little Scheidenauersee, a silver-blue pear-shape three-quarters of a mile long, lay in green folded hills under a late summer sky, smooth as a looking-glass and brushed clean with feather dusters of cloud. Its narrow end, where the tiny Rulenbach flowed into it, pointed south into the foothills of the Vorarlberg, and round this southern tip the village of Scheidenau lay, three short streets arranged in a Y shape, the cup of the Y filled with the water of the lake as with silver-blue wine. The northern end of the lake widened and overflowed from the cup, mirroring two or three tiny islands, and at the north-eastern corner the Rulenbach flowed gaily out again, twice its former size and bouncing down a crumpled, stony bed, to make an unexpected six-mile detour through Germany, owing to the complicated contours of the land, before returning into Austria in a series of right-handed twists, to empty itself into the Bregenzer Ach, and eventually into Lake Constance south of Bregenz. Where the three streets met there was the usual village square, with a well-head and a modest Trinity column in the middle, and on all three sides—for in fact the square was an irregular triangle, dwindling towards the south into the stem of the Y—the beautiful, exuberant housefronts and shopfronts, the overhanging eaves, the mellow dark wood and virtuoso wrought iron that makes almost any small Austrian settlement look like a stage set for operetta. There was a baroque church, of no particular merit but of pleasing appearance, one restaurant that was not also an inn and two that were, and a confectioner’s noted for its rum babas. All the down-to-earth shops like the butcher’s and the baker’s and the ironmonger’s, lined the landward street. The two roads that embraced the end of the lake, and dwindled later into footpaths along its undulating shores, found room for the villas and gardens of the better-off, for a small public park nestling in the base of the Y like the dregs of the wine, and for the two larger of Scheidenau’s three hotels, which peered into each other’s windows across the placid surface, just where the arrow-straight clay-blue line of the Rulenbach’s inflow, coloured by mountain water, foundered and became invisible in the deeper, calmer blue. The third and smallest hotel, the Weisses Kreuz, faced the church across the broader end of the square.

Outside the village the farms and fields began, rolling, heaving, foothill fields white with the shaven stubble from which the harvest had been taken, and upland pastures scalloped like fish-scales from the marks of the scythe. The highest point visible from the square was the abrupt hummock of the castle hill just to the west of the lake, with its snaggle-toothed ruin on top, meanly reduced now to its last few feet of broken wall and a tangle of overgrown rubble, useless as a tourist attraction. Outcrops of bedrock and outcrops of masonry spattered the sides of the hill over an area of a square mile or so, and because of the rich rooting of trees and bushes it was sometimes difficult to tell which was which. In parts of the forlorn shell the practical natives had dumped rubbish, and there were rats as the only inhabitants; but still that scattered rash of worked stone erupting everywhere among the grass bore witness to the formidable extent of the place in its hey-day. The Waldmeisters, who owned the Goldener Hirsch, and had been there now for seven generations, took their name from an ancestor who had once been head forester to the Lords of Scheidenau.

The Goldener Hirsch, sprawled along the lake-shore on the western arm of the Y, with its shoulder turned solidly to the remnant of old splendours on the castle mound, was in a curious state of suspension between village
gasthaus
and tourist hotel. To the huge traditional house, with its beetling eaves, strongly battered walls, built-on cattle-byres and carved wood verandahs, had been added a new wing in brick and stone, in an austere modern style that did not offend. Two Waldmeister daughters, still unmarried, and the wives of the three Waldmeister sons, continued to run the place with a couple of poor relations and almost no outside staff; but there was a smart little reception desk in the hall, with a smart little Austrian blonde in a mini-skirt seated behind it, darting like a humming-bird between her typewriter and adding machine on one side, and the telephone switchboard on the other.

It was already September, and the high season dwindles away very rapidly when August ends. Yes, she had a room and a smile for the unexpected Englishman who had made no reservation. But the woman who showed Francis up to his room wore the full, flowered skirt, embroidered apron and laced bodice of old custom, and had her mane of black hair coiled on her head in the old heavy bun, and to judge by the waft of warm milk and cattle-flesh that drifted from her skirt as she walked ahead of him up the scrubbed wooden stairs, she had just come in from the cows.

The first-floor corridor was wide enough for a carriage and pair, the door she flung open for him broad enough to admit them two abreast. All-white, high ceiling, spacious walls, huge billow of medium-weight autumn feather-bed on the creamy-white natural wood bedstead. He was in the old part of the house; so much the better. The window looked sidelong on a large, ebullient, untidy garden, and only a sliver of the lake winked in at him. No room in the world could have been more at peace.

‘The gentleman is English?’ His German had been hesitant, and in any case the unmistakable stamp is always there, for some reason. He owned to his Englishness; he might as well.

‘The room will do?’ Her voice was low, abrupt and vibrant, curiously personal in uttering impersonal things.

‘The room will do beautifully, thank you.’ He dropped his bag on the luggage-stand, and felt for the keys of the hired car in his pocket, and the loose change under them.

‘A moment! I will open the window.’ The scent of her as she passed near to him was like the wild air from outside, part beast, part garden, part earth, part late summer foliage ripening towards its decline. She turned her head suddenly as she passed, so close that her sleeve brushed his, and he saw her face full, olive-dark and olive-smooth, and the great, bold, sullen, inviting eyes for once wide-open and glowing. But the next moment she was looking round the room with the glow veiled, and the faint, dutiful frown back on her brow.

‘No towels. I will bring.’

She was, he realized, a very striking woman, her tall figure as lithe as an Amazon, her features good, her hair splendid. Until he had looked at her so closely he had failed to notice that there was a flaw, for her articulation was so clear that there seemed to be no malformation in her palate. Only that small, vicious botch put in to spoil the pattern and embitter her life; her upper lip was split like a hare’s. The effect was not even ugly, prejudice aside; but prejudice is never very far aside from the hare-lip in an otherwise handsome woman.

She came with the towels, and he took them from her at the door. Her fingers touched his in the act. He was sure then that it had not been by accident that her breast, braced high by the black bodice, had brushed his sleeve as he had stepped past her into the room on entering.

‘If you should need anything, please call for Friedl. I shall be working below. I shall hear.’

‘Thank you, Fraulein Friedl. I’ll remember.’

Her eyelids rolled back for an instant, and again uncovered, so briefly that he could believe in it or not, as he chose, the buried volcano. Probably she had not much hope, but as a gesture of defiance against the world she persevered and deployed what little she had.

‘You are Herr Waldmeister’s daughter?’

The hare-lip quivered in what was not quite a smile. ‘His niece,’ she said, and walked away along the great, scrubbed corridor with her long stride, and left him there. But the slow, swaying walk, the erect back, the beautifully balanced head with its sheaf of black hair, all were still quiveringly aware of him until the moment when she passed from sight.

So that was one of the amenities, and one that wouldn’t be in the brochure, nor, he thought, available to everyone. Some special kind of chemistry had elected him. One cast-away hailing another, perhaps, for company in a huge and trackless sea. One insomniac welcoming another in the long, lonely, sleepless night.

He washed, and went down into the bar. There were voices in the garden and boats on the lake. Across the shining water the windows of the Alte Post blinked languidly in the sun. There were still plenty of visitors to keep the natives looking like deliberate bits of folklore—which emphatically they were not—but in a couple of months the stone-weighted roofs, the beetling eaves, the logs stacked beneath the overhang ends-outwards, all up the courtyard walls, would no longer look like window-dressing, but a very practical part of the seriousness of living. Soon the stocky, old-gold cattle with their smoky faces would come clanging down from the high pastures to their home fields for the winter.

The scrubbed boards of the floors were almost white in the guest-rooms. It was early afternoon, the quietest hour of the day in the bar, but there were a couple of obvious French guests sipping coffee and
kümmel
in one corner, and a bearded mountain man with a litre pot before him was conducting a conversation with the woman behind the bar, clear across the width of the room in the booming bass-baritone of the uplands. The woman was middle-aged, grey-haired and solid as a wall, and could be no one but Frau Waldmeister.

Francis ordered an
enzian
, and went straight to the point. She heard him broach his business, smiling at him a benevolent, gold-toothed smile, but as soon as legal matters were mentioned she did exactly what he had expected her to do, and referred him to her man. That saved him from having to go through the whole mixture of fact and fiction twice, and got him installed in a quiet corner of the empty dining-room, across a table from the master of the house. Old Waldmeister was something over six feet tall, with shoulders on him like a cattle-yoke, and a wind-roughened leather face decorated with a long, drooping, brigand’s moustache. Courteous and impassive, he listened with no sign of surprise or suspicion at being suddenly asked to think back thirteen years.

‘Herr Waldmeister, my name is Killian. I am representing a firm of solicitors in England, who are looking for a certain young man. A relative of his family resident in New Zealand has left the residue of his small property to him. The dead man had been out of touch with his cousins in England for some years, and we find now that the legatee parted company with his parents some time ago, and they have no idea where he is at the moment. We have advertised for him without result, at least so far. We therefore began to make enquiries in the hope of tracing him. The last record we have of him, strangely enough, terminates here, in your hotel, thirteen years ago.’

He waited to elicit some sort of acknowledgment, and what he got was illuminating. The first thing old Waldmeister had to say was not: ‘What was his name?’ but: ‘How much is it, this legacy?’

‘When cleared it should be in the region of fifteen hundred pounds.’ Not so great as to turn out the guard in a full-scale hunt for him, but great enough to pay the expenses of a solicitor’s clerk as far as Scheidenau, in these days of off-peak tourist bargain travel.’ The old man nodded weightily. Property is property, and the law is there to serve it.

‘How is he called, this young man?’

‘His name is Robert Aylwin.’

‘I do not remember such a name.
The last record
of him, you say? It is a long time ago. To remember one visitor is impossible.’

‘You will remember this one, when I recall the circumstances.’ And he recalled them, very succinctly and clearly. There were names enough to bolster everything he had to say. Fredericks had regularly used this inn on those tours of his; neither he nor his students would be so easily forgotten. ‘I understand from a man called Charles Pincher, who shared a room here with him, that Aylwin left his suitcase and his ’cello in the room when he went away, and that Dr. Fredericks gave them into your charge, expecting the owner to come back to collect them. Is that so?’

‘It is so,’ said the old man without hesitation. ‘The name I had forgotten, but this of the cases and the Herr Doktor, that I remember.’

‘In that case I’m hoping that you can help me to the next link in the chain, that he gave you at any rate a forwarding address, when he came back for them.’

‘He did not come back for them,’ said Waldmeister, and volunteered nothing more.

‘He didn’t? Then in all these years you’ve had no word from him?’ The chill at the back of his neck, like icy fingers closing there, made Francis aware that he had never believed in this. Considered it, yes; believed in it, no.

‘No word. That is right.’

‘Did you… expect to?’ What he meant was, did you know of any reason why it would be no use expecting it.

‘I expected, yes. People do not just go away and leave their belongings. You understand, it is a very long time since I have thought of this matter. No, he did not come, and I knew no way to find him. I kept the things for him, that was all I could do. But he did not fetch them.’

‘Then… you still have them?’

‘Come with me!’ said the old man, and rose and led him from the room, out to the broad stone passage-way with its homespun rugs and its home-carved antique chairs and spinning-wheels and boot-jacks, over which a London dealer would have foamed at the mouth. Up the uncarpeted, scrubbed, monumental back stairs, spiralling aloft with treads wide enough at the wall end for a horseman to negotiate. One flight, a second, a third, and they were up among the vast dark rafters, in a series of open attics that hoarded rubbish and treasure together in the roof.

‘Here,’ said Waldmeister simply, and pointed. The ’cello-case, leaning sadly against a scratched wooden box, might have been covered in grey felt, but when Francis drew a dubious finger along its surface the blanket of dust came away clean from a finely-grained black leather. Of good quality, expensive, and surely almost new when the owner abandoned it here. A medium-sized black suitcase, its upright surfaces still almost black because it was of glossy, plastic-finished fibre-glass, stood beside the ’cello.