Silent Witness (Dr. Patrick Grant)

by Margaret Yorke

  ‘You look so funny without your specs,’ she told him. ‘Rather indecent, really.’

  He stretched out a hand and pressed her head firmly so that she submerged. Spluttering, she swam away from him; he would never grow up, she decided.

  ‘Now we’re going to walk to the forbidden area on the Kramms road,’ he said when they were once again dry and clothed. ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘We’ll catch our deaths, walking through the snow after a swim,’ she grumbled. She had hoped for an expensive, luxurious tea at the Grand.

  ‘Not at all. You’re well wrapped up. Step out smartish,’ Patrick instructed.

  It was much colder now, and the snow that was still falling stung their faces. As they set out, Liz tied her scarf more tightly round her head to protect her ears from the icy air. They walked through the village, past the bridge and the shops and the chair- lift terminus, and on to the fork in the road. Here the snow was deep and it was quite hard going, though there were plenty of tracks where others had been.

  They reached the barrier and Patrick went past. Liz followed, and they walked on until they came to the cutting in the bank of snow at the side of the lane. Patrick led the way along it. It had been cleared since his earlier visit and only a couple of inches of new snow covered it. He stopped at the footbridge, and Liz halted, too. On the further side of the river she could see the chalet among the trees.

  ‘Who lives there, I wonder?’ she said.

  ‘I wonder the same thing,’ said Patrick.

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t found out.’

  ‘At the appropriate time, I will,’ he replied. He moved closer to the bridge. It, too, had been cleared since the morning. A single set of tracks, lightly marking the fresh snow, led across it.

  ‘This is where Bernard was lying, I’m convinced,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s close to the hotel, yet away from the beaten track. Debris from here flows very quickly down to the bridge without getting unduly caught up on the way. Stay where you are a minute.’ He stepped off to the side and moved a few yards down the bank; as she watched him seeking footholds Liz thought she would see his words proved in a moment; he seemed set for a second and colder swim.

  Balanced on a stone off which he had kicked most of the snow, he peered into the water intently. Then he came back to her.

  ‘What were you looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘Tell you later. Let’s get back and wait for our friend to return,’ said Patrick. ‘Go back to the lane, will you, Liz?’

  She obediently turned about. When they reached the lane he took her arm and led her further along the road towards Kramms, until they were out of sight of the cutting.

  ‘We’ll wait for a little while to see if the visitor returns,’ he said. ‘It may be someone we know. You stay here. If you get too cold, whistle Annie Laurie and I’ll come back.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To the edge of the cutting, so that I can see if anyone’s coming. When he appears I’ll get out of sight, and we’ll follow to see who it is.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a man?’

  ‘Man-sized prints, or else a very large lady,’ said Patrick.

  ‘The banks of the Isis were better than this,’ muttered Liz, but Patrick was already gone.

  Left alone, she jumped about and stamped up and down to keep warm. Darkness would, she supposed, ultimately bring their vigil to an end. Pride would not let her admit too quickly to physical defeat, but her teeth had begun to chatter when Patrick reappeared, motioning her to keep quiet. He stood beside her, holding her hand, for a few seconds; then he gave her a little tug and they walked back along the road.

  A figure moved ahead of them, indistinct through the falling snow. Patrick strode out, gaining slightly on the person in front, and Liz struggled to keep level. She was too busy clambering through the snow to watch their quarry closely, but when they got to the barrier the going was easier, for the road was clearer. One glance was all she needed to recognise Francis.

  Patrick took her to Ferdy’s and bought her a very large, very hot grog.

  ‘He wasn’t behaving suspiciously,’ she insisted, still shivering. ‘He must have seen our tracks in that cutting and leading to where we waited. He didn’t even look round.’

  ‘If he’s innocent, seeing our tracks wouldn’t worry him. If he’s guilty we’ll soon know, for he’ll take some action,’ said Patrick. ‘You must make an effort now, old thing. Swig as much of this stuff as you like before you go back to the hotel, but carry on with your flirting just as before. We want everything normal.’

  ‘Oh, God, how I hate you, Patrick Grant,’ Liz said, emptying her glass. ‘You can do your own damned detecting in future.’

  VI

  That evening it grew much colder. Undaunted despite everything, Penny, who, true to her threat, had arranged a snowfight that morning with the Snopranx courier, had combined again with the rival organisation to run a dance at the Silvretta, where there was a three-piece band. She would allow no defaulters, and accordingly after dinner her flock from the Gentiana set forth.

  ‘We may as well go,’ Sue said. ‘We can’t go to bed at half-past eight, and there’s nothing else to do.’ She, in fact, was eager enough to obey Penny’s injunction, for Jan was staying at the Silvretta and was, therefore, certain to be at the dance.

  Even Barbara Whittaker favoured the plan.

  ‘Let’s invite Frau Hiller to come with us,’ she suggested. ‘I felt we should have asked her to the fondue last night. She’s on her own, and I think she’s lonely.’

  ‘There are plenty of other Germans staying here,’ said Freddie, shortly. ‘Why doesn’t she pal up with some of them?’

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t like them,’ Barbara answered. ‘Shared nationality doesn’t mean similar tastes. You meet all kinds of people on holiday.’ She looked steadily at Freddie as she spoke, and he stared back at her boldly. This conversation took place in the dining-room, and what Liz described later to Patrick as a great moral victory had taken place, for the Whittakers had abandoned their seclusion and joined the table with the other Hickson’s clients.

  It was generally agreed that Frau Hiller should be included in the evening’s entertainment, and Freddie was overborne. The German woman at first demurred, but she was obviously pleased at being asked, and allowed herself to be persuaded. They all walked down the road together after dinner, with Francis and Sam each giving Frau Hiller an arm.

  After just a few yards, like one man, everyone stopped to gaze at the sky. It was clear and black, dotted with bright stars which none of them had seen since arriving in the mountains.

  Penny sniffed the sharp air.

  ‘It’s freezing hard. It’ll be fine tomorrow,’ she declared.

  They all stepped out, more cheerful than for days past; the cold made them catch their breaths, but all felt stimulated by the change in the atmosphere. Now the village stood out, sharply etched against the night sky, with the windows of the buildings lit by the soft glow of candles, for still the power supply was off. Only the Grand Hotel and the clinic had their own generators.

  At the bridge, Roy left the party to go to the clinic. There was an amazed reaction to this.

  ‘Don’t act so surprised,’ Sue said. ‘It’s what he should have been doing all along.’ She added, sotto voce, to Liz, ‘I doubt if Fiona will mope for long.’

  She was right. Fiona, still on enforced leave from her discotheque, was soon dancing cheek-to-cheek with one of the Snopranx guests. Penny started the evening by watching her like a hawk, but when it seemed that Fiona intended to drink only shandy, and also to stick to the Snopranxter, she relaxed and began to enjoy herself.

  Patrick and the professor had dined at the Silvretta, with Jan, it transpired. The band was rather good; it played catchy tunes with a rhythm that set everyone’s feet tapping. The professor, bowing to her in his courtly way, invited Frau Hiller to dance; she blushed, saying she had not done such a thing for years,
but she waltzed away with him.

  Patrick, dancing with Liz, told her that after they had parted earlier, he had sought out Fiona and taxed her with being the last person to see Bernard alive. She admitted that they had left the nightclub together. They had put on their coats in the hall of the hotel before crossing to the annexe, and got as far as the porch when Bernard said he had forgotten something and must return for it. He had not reappeared. Fiona had looked about in the hotel for him but could not find him, so she had given up.

  ‘She met Roy, in fact,’ Patrick said. ‘While she was blundering about in the snow outside he arrived, looking for her. They’d had an affair of some intensity last year, and he chucked her to marry this girl. She didn’t discover he was coming here till she saw Penny’s list on Saturday morning, hence her getting quietly plastered and making a play for the unfortunate Bernard. Roy must have had a surprise when he saw her.’

  ‘Where did you have this little interview with Fiona?’ Liz inquired.

  ‘In her room. Where else?’

  ‘Well, Master Roy seems to be playing the dutiful husband tonight, anyway,’ Liz commented.

  ‘He is, indeed,’ said Patrick. His tone was smug, and Liz looked at him sharply.

  ‘You’ve talked to him, too,’ she accused.

  ‘I have. I flatter myself I scared the living daylights out of him,’ said Patrick, in an inelegant, un-donnish manner.

  ‘But, Patrick—’ Liz’s voice tailed off.

  ‘I know what you were going to say. Why don’t I mind my own business; leave it alone, and June would eventually pack it in and all that,’ he said. ‘But, Liz, you have an endearing way of endowing everyone else with your own disposition. I agree that someone like you would find it intolerable to be married to Roy Foster, but that girl will be quite content by the time she’s got a few kids to keep her occupied. She won’t even notice he’s unfaithful, which he’s certain to be. Soon she’ll scarcely notice him at all; she’ll have an agreeable ambience – nice house, healthy children, and a position in the district. She’s not capable of achieving the deep relationship which you seek and need; she’s just a rather silly, amiable little girl who’ll turn into a rather silly, amiable mother, and be perfectly happy. If she walks out on this marriage before it goes any further, which is what you think she should do, she’ll be devastated for life – marked as a failure, humiliated beyond recovery, and if she ever took another chance it would inevitably be with a second Roy.’

  Liz was silent.

  ‘How cynical you are, Patrick,’ she said, after they had moved halfway round the room.

  ‘No, just realistic,’ he told her gently. ‘That girl could never stand alone.’

  ‘That’s just what she will have to do, if you’re right.’

  ‘She’ll have her children. That will be enough.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re a devil, Patrick,’ Liz said. And sometimes she thought him the shrewdest person she had ever known.

  ‘What about Bernard? If Roy and Fiona were together, that lets them both out, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not Roy. There was an interval before he met Fiona.’

  ‘Was it long enough?’

  ‘Difficult to say. Fiona wasn’t sure of times.’

  ‘So what’s your theory now? Have you one?’

  ‘Yes. I know who did it,’ Patrick said. ‘But I can’t prove it, and I don’t know why.’

  ‘So you won’t tell me?’

  ‘Not yet, Liz.’

  ‘You could be wrong.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ he conceded. ‘But I don’t think so.’

  He would say no more. Liz’s next partner, to her astonishment, was Sam; and a changed Sam he was, too, from the introverted, silent man who had been their companion for a week. By the time he and Liz had concluded an animated discussion about Shakespeare’s clowns, Liz had convinced herself that he was the murderer: Bernard had threatened him for some reason; now the threat was gone, and with it had disappeared all Sam’s inhibitions. For the murderer thought himself safe: she and Max were the only ones who knew of Patrick’s suspicions.

  Francis was rather attentive to his wife throughout the evening and did not dance with Liz at all.

  PART SIX

  Wednesday

  I

  In the morning it was difficult to believe that Greutz had been the scene of sudden death, or even of the past few weeks of heavy skies and ever-falling snow. The sun rose behind the Wolfberg like a brilliant copper disc, and cast a rosy glow that crept gradually upwards over the slopes of the Schneiderhom. Behind the great mountain the sky was blue, pale at first but darkening swiftly, and with just a few wispy clouds like cotton wool drifting across it. At breakfast in the Gentiana there were rolls once more, and during the night the electrical power had been restored to the village; things were, on the face of it, back to normal.

  By half-past nine, the ski-school meeting place was thrumming with eager people and a queue had already formed at the chair-lift. Everyone in the Gentiana was determined to spend the day on the Schneiderhorn; even Barbara Whittaker said she would go up and have lunch at the restaurant.

  Liz decided to be very brave and ski alone. In fact, there would be plenty of people about; the mountain was likely to be smothered with activity, so that if she met with any disaster someone would be sure to notice. She saw Sue off to meet Jan in the lowest division of class three at the ski-school and lined up at the chair-lift herself. Some way in front of her, sombre in their all-black outfits, she saw the Derringtons, and as she came carefully over the shoulder of the mountain before starting down the White Run, she saw Sam and Francis ahead of her; they took the left turn for the Red Run.

  It was as if the events of the last few days were a hideous dream.

  Liz refused to think of them, and hoped devoutly that she would not meet Patrick. Presumably the pass would be cleared today; there would be no further obstacle to his departure, and good riddance to him and his wild ideas. He was capable of dreaming it all up as a mental exercise: but not the telephone calls to England; even Patrick, trying to provoke thought, would not go that far.

  And she would like to know what Francis had been doing at that chalet over the river.

  She had lunch sitting in the sun outside the restaurant above the chair-lift: thick goulash soup and rough brown bread. Beside her sat a middle-aged woman from Liege; Liz talked to her in French, and felt stimulated by the exchange. After that. she went down the Blue Run. Even the chair held no alarms for her today; it was the best skiing she had ever known, with the snow like dry powder crunching against her skis, and the piste well flattened, first by the snow-cat and then by the tracks of other skiers, and not a trace of ice anywhere. She dared to go fast, knees bent, relaxed in the approved style, and felt she could continue for hours.

  The moment you thought that sort of thing, it was time to stop. At half-past three, prudently, she took off her skis at the bottom of the run and did not go up again. Instead, she wandered through the village, which was almost deserted as everyone took advantage of their liberation.

  In the big car park by the Grand Hotel, a red cross had been marked out on the ground with some sort of cloth. A group of people was gathered at the spot, gazing up the valley, and soon Liz realised the reason for it as she heard the drone of a helicopter far off. She joined the watchers, and saw two blue-clad figures holding mailbags standing at the edge of the area where the helicopter intended to land.

  The machine came gliding in, its rotors cutting the silence of the sky with their sharp, clattery sound. It hovered low over its landing spot and gently came down on its runners like an awkward bird mounting its nest. The rotors continued to whir, and two men inside the machine began handing out bags of mail to their colleagues outside. Presently they got out themselves and stood talking; it seemed incredible that they could hear one another above the din of the engine. After a few minutes, the pilot and his companion climbed back into the helicopter with the bags of outgoin
g mail, the motor accelerated, and the fragile-looking spiderly bubble rose into the air, hovered briefly once more over its temporary resting place, turned, and set off up the valley towards the wider world beyond the mountains.

  The Greutz postmen went back down the road to the post office with their load, and the spectators gradually dispersed after this little burst of excitement. Liz retraced her steps through the village towards the Gentiana.

  Where the road branched, she stuck her skis in the snow and took the fork towards Kramms. She could hear a snow-blower working further down, and she walked on till she came to it; showers of snow came spurning up through its funnel and were added to the huge banks already piled high at the side of the road. The barrier forbidding passage along this way had been removed, and there were other walkers strolling about too; the sun had left this area and it was cold. Eventually, Liz turned back again and took the narrow trench towards the footbridge. It had been swept quite clean.

  There was nothing to indicate that it was a private approach; Liz took a breath and started across. The bridge swayed under her tread, and below the river swirled, still carrying twigs and debris down to the village. Halfway across, she paused and looked downstream; the covered wooden bridge was not far away, though the distance by road was several hundred yards. Patrick’s theory was tenable.

  A path on the further bank climbed up into the trees. Liz followed it, and soon came to the chalet, an old one that must have been built long before the war. Huge eaves covered with snow framed the windows like beetle brows. A sign hung out: Zimmer. It was a guest house. Had Francis been researching accommodation for another year? It seemed unlikely. Barbara was hardly the sort of woman to enjoy humbler rooms than those at the Gentiana. Wildly seeking a reason for his visit, Liz remembered his daughter: perhaps in some way it was connected with her.

  The theory was unsatisfactory, but Liz could not think of a better one, nor could she devise an excuse to knock on the door of the chalet and pose some question which might lead her to the true answer. In any case, her German was not equal to such a conversation. Before someone saw her loitering about outside, she turned back.