Silent Witness (Dr. Patrick Grant)

by Margaret Yorke

  ‘I know most of the lehrers. There’s Fritz Gruber, I’ll ask him,’ said Francis.

  Fritz Gruber, one of the older instructors, with a lined, weather- beaten face, said at once that he had seen Professor Klocker and a lady travelling up on the anchor drag together, some time before. A lady no longer young, he expanded, upon being questioned further, and by signs, he indicated Frau Hiller’s pear-shaped figure. He had noticed her because she seemed a little nervous on her skis, and he had not seen her skiing earlier.

  ‘We’d better go up. The drag hasn’t stopped yet,’ said Patrick. ‘Come on, hurry.’

  ‘I suppose you know what all this is about?’ said Francis.

  ‘Not altogether. You may be able to fill in some of the gaps,’ said Patrick. They strapped their skis on quickly and stepped up the slope to the foot of the drag. The attendant, who was expecting only the lehrers to go up at this late hour, was in two minds about turning them back, but Francis spoke to him in German, with a quick jest about making the best of the weather, and he waved them on.

  ‘This is the sort of moment where one of us does a fool thing and breaks a leg,’ said Francis, grimly as they were borne upwards, their skis parallel, running in tracks already cut by the day’s activities. ‘Now come on. Fill me in. That professor of yours is a smart operator, isn’t he? I suppose you’re another. What’s behind it all? It’s to do with Walker in some way, I imagine. That’s the only possible explanation.’

  ‘Indirectly. I don’t know how Frau Hiller fits into it. I’m guessing about that part,’ Patrick said. ‘You know her quite well, don’t you? How did you meet her?’

  ‘She spoke to us. She arrived last Wednesday, and on Thursday, she made some remark about the weather and said she wanted to practise her English. She seemed very shy. Barbara is always glad to find someone to talk to when we’re here, as she doesn’t ski; she was quite willing to make friends, and when we found Frau Hiller played bridge it all seemed very easy. She’s a nice old thing. Her German’s funny, though. Absolutely fluent, but a bit like her English, pedantic and old-fashioned. Her English isn’t so marvellous but she understands everything.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed that about her German,’ said Patrick, chagrined. ‘My own isn’t good enough to make such fine distinctions.’

  ‘I think it is pretty good, if I may say so,’ said Francis handsomely. ‘Your accent is better than mine. I speak the local sort of German, rather rough.’

  ‘Frau Hiller came only last Wednesday, you say. How did she arrive?’

  ‘She came in a taxi. She’d had a bad journey and went straight to bed on Wednesday evening. She had some private travelling arrangement, she wasn’t with any agency.’

  While they talked Patrick was once again watching the descending skiers closely, but now he knew that neither Frau Hiller nor the professor would be among them.

  Thinking aloud, he said, ‘Max could have arranged for someone to leave a pair of skis and boots up here for her. He can’t have been working this alone. Maybe Helga helped him. Or his ex-pianist friend in Kramms.’

  ‘I’m not with you at all, I’m afraid,’ said Francis.

  They reached the top of the drag and flung the hook away behind them, skiing from it. Then they stood on the crest of the mountain, staring ahead. There was no one in sight, but there were ski tracks leading off in every direction. Patrick himself had been all over this area with Max that morning. Up here the skiing was easy; it was possible to pick a gentle route not difficult for someone who was out of practice.

  Then they heard it, in the distance, to the west of them, before the setting sun: a helicopter’s engine. Francis, the former soldier, saw it first.

  ‘It’s coming in to land,’ he said.

  It was a long way from them, above a bowl in the mountains, away from any connecting links. Max must have had a job to get her there through the deep snow, Patrick thought; he would have had to cut tracks first for her to follow in.

  ‘What was she interested in? Did she talk about her hobbies ? Frau Hiller, I mean,’ he demanded, suddenly.

  ‘Oh, knitting. She was making that rather drab sweater. Barbara joked about it behind her back. The wool was so poor, she said. She seemed to know a lot about agriculture, wanted to know how the Derringtons fed their mink and had a wide theoretical knowledge of British wild flowers. Rather odd for a native of Frankfurt.’

  ‘I don’t think she is a native of Frankfurt,’ said Patrick. He added slowly, ‘Max must have been worried to risk getting her out like this. I suppose he could have carried her, at a pinch. He’s fit for his age and such a good skier. Would you reckon he could do that?’ he asked Francis.

  ‘If pushed, yes. You or I would find it tough going, but I would guess he could manage it in an emergency.’

  The helicopter note had changed.

  ‘It’s down,’ Francis said. ‘It’s somewhere behind that little peak.’ He pointed into the distance. The hump of a small mountain hid the helicopter from their sight. Almost at once, the engine note picked up again and the machine rose into the air; they saw it hover for a moment; then it faded rapidly away towards the south-west, and Switzerland.

  ‘There was a conference of scientists in Munich last week,’ Patrick said. ‘Not in Frankfurt, in Munich. A colleague of mine from Oxford was attending it. Ecological experts from all over the world were coming to it. By now they’ll all be back at home again, except for one woman.’

  Francis stared.

  ‘And the professor?’ he asked at last. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’ll have made his plans,’ Patrick said.

  There would not be another mistake.

  PART SEVEN

  Thursday

  I

  Patrick spent the night in the professor’s study reading his Marlowe manuscript. He had sent Helga to bed at midnight, when there was still no news of Max. She was distraught, and mystified; his theory that she had been involved in the disappearance of Frau Hiller was perforce discarded; the old pianist in Krammsmust have been Max’s accomplice.

  Early in the evening, Patrick and Liz had gone to Frau Killer’s room at the Gentiana; they had found it almost bare. There was a pile of paperbacks stamped with the hotel’s address, all in English, and a cheap suitcase which contained a few garments, quite new and locally bought. Tidily rolled up in a drawer was the knitting, and an envelope addressed to Frau Scholler which held enough money to pay for the room Frau Hiller had occupied just for a week.

  After Helga had gone reluctantly to bed, Patrick switched on the radio: he heard the announcement that a woman scientist had failed to return to her own country after an international conference in Munich; she was an ecological expert. Her present whereabouts were not revealed but it was thought she was on her way to the United States.

  Between the pages of Max’s book, another text was fixed, in an envelope addressed to Patrick. He had read it several times, and also the manuscript in its entirety, by the time the chair-lift started down early in the morning, bringing Max’s dead, frozen body back to Greutz.

  II

  ‘But why did he have to kill Bernard?’ Liz asked. Another sunny day had passed, not as fine as the one before, for there had been a few flurrying snow showers, but they had not amounted to much and nothing had prevented the arrival of officials by helicopter to unravel the mystery of Max’s last hours. There had been no snowfall in the night to obliterate the tracks on the mountain showing how the professor had climbed and skied back to Obergreutz from the point where Frau Hiller had been taken off by helicopter. By the time he reached Obergreutz, it must have been very late: the chair-lift had long ago ceased, and the restaurant had closed when the last cable-car left for Kramms at nine o’clock. Because they had been cut off for so many days, the family who ran the restaurant had gone down to Kramms, so there would have been no one to hear Max if he had knocked. He had gone to the chair- lift station, perhaps intending to ski down in the fitful light of the waning moon, but needing
a rest first. His skis were still on his feet, but he had automatically closed the bar of the chair he sat in; there he had been, rigidly in position, when the lift had started early in the morning, killed by a heart attack, Dr Wesser thought.

  ‘Bernard overheard Max and Frau Hiller talking on Saturday night, in the ski-room at the Gentiana,’ Patrick answered Liz. He tapped a paper in his hand. ‘It’s all in here.’

  ‘He left that for you?’

  ‘It was in his manuscript. He knew I’d look at what he’d been working on, and find it.’

  ‘So he never meant to come back?’

  ‘Shall we say that he foresaw he might not have the strength to manage it.’

  ‘But it was an accident – Max’s death? He didn’t take anything, pills of some sort?’

  ‘I think it was an accident at that point. He intended to come back and clear up the position about Bernard, once his task was done.’

  ‘But how did you connect Max and Bernard? There was no link between them.’

  ‘On Tuesday morning after Bernard’s body had been found, I went to that cutting in the snow by the river bank leading to the Chalet Edelweiss, and saw Bernard’s glasses in the water. Later that day, when you and I went there together, they had gone. And when you and I came to the chalet for lunch I knew Max had been out, although he never said he had.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’d cleared the snow from the path before breakfast. It continued to snow during the morning, though not heavily. There was about an inch or so of new snow when I left that morning. When you and I got back together at lunch-time, there were no tracks at all. There should have been traces of my footsteps earlier; it wasn’t blowing, and what snow had fallen should have left hollows where I had walked. Also the amount of snow covering the path was very slight, showing it had been cleared again.’

  ‘But Max didn’t know Bernard had been found.’

  ‘He was with me on the balcony when we saw the commotion by the bridge. I said I would go down and see what it was about and then call on you. He could easily have found out what had happened – he must have guessed. He knew I’d be gone some time and he took a chance on meeting someone involved with Bernard on the way. None of his local acquaintances would have wondered at his presence in the village.’

  ‘But how did he know Bernard’s glasses weren’t on his face?’

  ‘He didn’t, specifically. He went to see if there was anything indicating that Bernard had been lying near the river at that point, and saw the glasses, just as I did.’

  ‘But he was a nice man, a plus person. Why do such a terrible thing? Killing Bernard was surely out of character. He wanted to get Frau Hiller away for humanitarian reasons.’

  ‘He didn’t mean to kill Bernard. He didn’t know who he was at first, remember. Frau Hiller – it’s simpler to go on calling her that – wasn’t the first person he’d helped to escape. Other people were involved in the business, he was just a link, but he’d kept people hidden in Greutz before, in a hotel, where they wouldn’t be noticed among the ordinary visitors in the way that a guest staying with Max would be conspicuous. She was safe here when we were all cut off, as long as no one discovered who she was. Don’t forget the telephone was working – anyone breaking her disguise could have made contact with the world outside. It’s the sort of thing any newspaper would have loved, and would have paid well for – imagine if that wastrel Derrington had known about it, for example. In fact, the one person who did discover it was about the most harmless – and he probably didn’t understand what they were talking about anyway, since he knew very little German. If the news had leaked out before she was safely in some sort of sanctuary, the Communists might have managed to snatch her back again. She’s a pretty good prize.’

  Patrick paused to collect his thoughts. Then he continued.

  ‘This thing was all planned a long time ago. Frau Hiller had to find an opportunity to get out from behind the Iron Curtain. Her instructions were to make friends with any English people she might find in the hotel, and I was invited to lecture to Max’s students at this time so that he could ask me here, and fraternise more easily with the English community. The fact that you happened to be here, and I was keen to see you, simply played into his hands. Someone else got Frau Hiller out of Munich and brought her here; Max then had to make contact with her.’

  ‘He used you,’ Liz said.

  ‘He did.’ This was a point Patrick was trying not to dwell on in his mind.

  ‘He talked to Frau Hiller in the ski-room, telling her he’d get her out by helicopter as soon as he could. The bad weather upset their plans, they’d intended that she should lie low for only a few days. She went back into the hotel by the inside route, and Max left by the outer door. As he did so, he came upon Bernard hiding in a corner. He’d gone there presumably to dodge Fiona. Max, almost as a reflex, hit Bernard with his torch. Afterwards he recognised him as the man we’d met in the hall of the hotel, who’d said, “Entschuldigen sie,” and so might have understood all they’d said. At first, Max thought of bringing him up to the chalet, letting me into the plan and holding Bernard a prisoner until it was all safely over. Then he realised that he had hit him too hard and he was in a bad way. Bernard had his galoshes on – even with Fiona sticking to him like a leech he’d put them on – and Max removed them and put them in the cloakroom. Then he put Bernard on a sledge and pulled him down to the cutting. It was the nearest place where he could dump Bernard without being seen, and where he would soon be covered with snow.’

  ‘It was dreadfully callous.’

  ‘Yes. But he had killed before, during the years after the war when he first became involved in this kind of thing. He probably thought subconsciously that anyone skulking like that late at night in the ski-room was expendable if Frau Hiller could be saved.’

  ‘But where were you while all this was going on? You and he left together.’

  ‘He came back with me and waited till I’d gone to bed. Then he slipped out again. I didn’t hear him go. If he’d met anyone, or if I had heard him, he’d have pretended he’d left something at the Gentiana, and come back for it.’

  ‘And all the time Bernard wouldn’t have understood a word they’d said.’

  ‘No. But he’d have thought their meeting mysterious, at the very least.’

  ‘But who was the professor to decide that Bernard’s life was less valuable than Frau Killer’s?’

  ‘Exactly, Liz. But it’s true, you know, that great characters don’t hide at midnight, wearing galoshes. Nevertheless, Max knew that would be my argument, and that I’d hound him as soon as I realised he was responsible. So he had to speed things up and get Frau Hiller away quickly. I trusted him to the extent that I thought he must have a very good reason for being so ruthless. I gave him time. I didn’t know why he had done it, you see, until last night.’

  ‘It’s an extraordinary business,’ Liz said.

  ‘It was an obsession. His wife was Jewish, remember. She was arrested by the S.S. early in the war. Max knew the whereabouts of some other Jews who were in hiding – they lived in Vienna then – and he was persuaded to betray them in exchange for his wife and daughter’s safety. Of course, it was a trick. The other Jews were taken, but Max’s wife and the baby were never seen again. Max has been trying ever since to avenge their deaths – and salve his own conscience.’

  ‘But Patrick, even if Bernard had understood what they were talking about, surely Frau Hiller would have been safe? This is Austria, not Russia.’

  ‘We’re pretty near the Iron Curtain. Even with all Hickson’s clients guarding her night and day I would think the Communists might have got her back – or killed her. They’ve probably got an agent or two not far away.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘We do nothing to indicate Bernard’s death was not an accident. The autopsy will show he struck his head. Let Max’s reputation stay intact. And I’ll see his book through the press, as he has asked.’
/>   After a while Liz said, ‘Perhaps this will stop you interfering another time, Patrick.’

  ‘No, Liz. Bernard had a mother, after all. He might have had a whole family depending on him. His life was his, to live fully, and Max agreed with that. He meant to face the consequences when he returned. As all obsessions tend to, his got out of hand in the end.’

  ‘What about his scholarship?’

  ‘His academic integrity, you mean? That was total. After all, it was one of the things he grew obsessed about – freedom, and the right to express opinions. He developed his work so that he became known internationally, because in that way he could travel and make contact with people who might be seeking freedom. He met Frau Hiller six years ago. It took her all this time to find a legitimate way of leaving her own country.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Liz sighed. ‘I thought it must be one of the others, Freddie, for instance.’

  ‘Or your precious Francis, who was blameless – a pillar, in fact, at the end.’ Patrick debated whether to tell her about Frau Weber and the Edelweiss. Because of Bernard’s death she had avoided deeper involvement, but she might go on wondering. He recounted, very concisely, the conversation in the cable-car.

  Liz listened without interrupting. When he had done she was silent for a time.

  ‘You see, it is best to run away,’ she said.

  'Dr. Patrick Grant' Titles

  (in order of first publication)

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

  1. Dead In The Morning 1970

  2. Silent Witness 1972

  3. Grave Matters 1973

  4. Mortal Remains 1974

  5. Cast For Death 1976

  Other Margaret Yorke Novels

  Published by House of Stratus