by Ellis Peters
‘Who did you say this fellow was? The one who came to see you?’
‘Name of Francis Killian, a sort of private enquiry agent from Comerbourne. I told you, he’s working for Maggie Tressider, collating all this stuff about Freddy, she’s thinking of doing a book about him.’
‘Oh, Killian, yes, I know the name. Never met him, but as far as I know he’s all right. But how did you get on to Scheidenau? I’d clean forgotten you’d ever been near the place.’
‘So had I, until I got the records out to show him. Was that just a jab from your subconscious, when you sat up and barked Scheidenau?’
‘That’s it,’ agreed George amiably, blinking at her through dissolving smoke. ‘It reminds me of a recurrent nightmare—Dom eight years old and in temper tantrums, and you twenty-nine and as pretty as new paint, shaking a loose leg in the Vorarlberg. I had the horrors all the time you were away.’
‘There wasn’t a soul around you need have worried about,’ Bunty assured him scornfully, ‘even if I hadn’t been up to the neck in bills and transport arrangements. Just Freddy, and all those callow young men years younger than me. Not to mention the competition! Only three girls, but two of them were presentable, and the third was a beauty. Still is,’ she said, abruptly recalled to the serious consideration of her afternoon’s entertainment. ‘He’s in love with her.’
‘Killian? With Maggie Tressider? How do you know?’
‘Killian. With Maggie Tressider. And I know, all right. Oh, he wasn’t obvious in any way, but there it was. I liked him,’ said Bunty, who always knew her own mind, and added, relevantly enough: ‘Poor boy!’ That he was her own age, within a year one way or the other, did not invalidate the sentiment. ‘I knew you weren’t listening,’ she said, ‘I told you all this.’
‘I’m listening now. Tell me again.’
She told him, well aware that this was not a game. She had touched some recollection which had nothing at all to do with her own stay in that remote Austrian village.
‘And he never showed up again, this Aylwin chap?’ said George, when she had reached the end of the story.
‘You know, I never once thought of it in those terms. He wasn’t any greenhorn, he spoke three languages, he knew his way around. I would bet he made his own erratic way wherever he was going, and is playing that ’cello of his somewhere around Europe now. But no, I suppose he didn’t show up again anywhere we went, at any rate. Why? What makes him suddenly so interesting to everybody?’
‘Just that he disappeared in Scheidenau. That would be how long ago? Twelve years?… thirteen. Because it so happens,’ said George, handing over his cup for a refill, ‘that another young man failed to come home from a continental holiday just a couple of years ago. A Comerbourne young man, which made him our case. An art student named Peter Bromwich. Stepfather works at the power station, mother has a job at the ordnance depot out at Newfield. Twenty-three years old, off on his own with a rucksack. He knew the answers, too, it wasn’t his first trip by several, and he was a bit of a know-all by inclination. But he didn’t come home, and nobody’s heard of him since.’
‘In Scheidenau?’ asked Bunty, now very grave indeed.
‘Not quite, not this time. Bromwich was last seen on the German side of that border, trying to thumb a lift towards Immenstadt. From then on he just vanished. We made pretty wide enquiries at the time, and more police forces than you can imagine got into the act, since so many borders meet around those parts. German, Swiss, Austrian, even Italian. Nobody found Peter Bromwich. What we did find, when we all got our heads together, was that an awful lot of major and minor mysteries had dwindled away into dead ends just where all those frontiers tangle, over the past ten years or so. Some were currency cases, some were drugs, some were stolen valuables, mainly small but first-class stuff, jewellery, antiques, art pieces. Two escaped convicts from an Austrian gaol disappeared off the face of the earth in 1960 after being chased as far as Langen—not the Arlberg one, a little place up there near the border. A suspect wanted for murder in Munich was traced to Opfenbach, and then completely lost. Quite a remarkable collection of loose ends, as if they’d originally tied up neatly into a skein at the eastern end of Lake Constance, and somebody had sheared the knot clean out and got rid of it. And not a thing there to think much about until we got the lot together, because a case or two in one country’s records, that’s not so impressive, but a dozen together begin to look like something above lifesize. But nothing ever led anywhere, and Bromwich never reappeared.’
‘And the case is still officially open?’
‘Very much so. And I’d still be more than interested in closing it. It did emerge that Bromwich was on Cannabis, and may have graduated to the hard drugs, and there were indications that he might have brought the stuff through Customs with him at least a couple of times before when coming back from holidays. It looked rather as if he’d got himself tangled into the fringes of some sizeable organisation. Maybe this time he got a little too cocky? Or too curious about his employers? Now I suppose there wouldn’t be any such indications in the case of your young Aylwin, would there?’
‘In a small way,’ admitted Bunty, ‘there would. Not drugs, though, I’m sure. If Freddy’d had any such suspicion he’d have turned him over to the police like a shot, and my impression is that he just intended to get rid of him and leave it at that. There were rumours that Freddy had accused him of taking advantage of his position as one of the Circus—so respectable as we were you see!—to get away with some petty smuggling. I took it to be simply the little personal luxury things everybody’s tempted to try and sneak in once in a while. His real crime—or disability, rather—was that he simply couldn’t take life, or music, or even Freddy seriously.’
She sat back to consider, with a dubious frown, the picture she had just painted, and it did seem to her, on reflection, that there might be a basic similarity between these two troublesome young men.
‘You think he may have stumbled into waters too deep for him, too? Chanced his arm with somebody dangerous, and come off worst?’
‘Or blundered into something dangerous by accident, and failed to get clear? There are, of course, other possibilities. Maybe he’s still hitch-hiking his way round the world somewhere at this moment.’
‘That,’ said Bunty, though without conviction, ‘is the ending I prefer.’
‘It’s the ending Peter Bromwich would have preferred, I don’t doubt. But I very much doubt if it’s the end he came to.’
They sat silent for a moment, eye to eye. They could see deeper into each other than most people, and it was often like looking into a glass, their minds moved with such unanimity.
‘But why,’ asked Bunty then, ‘was it the name Scheidenau that brought all this back to you now? Peter Bromwich was some miles away in Germany when he was last seen.’
‘He was. A good point! I told you we turned up, between us, any amount of other queer cases that ended in blanks, all roughly round that eastern end of Lake Constance. It occurred to Duckett once, when he had nothing better to do, to link them all up into a squashy sort of circle and see what he got. And then, just for the hell of it, he plotted the centre. And whether it means anything or not, where do you think it fell?’
‘Scheidenau,’ said Bunty.
‘Scheidenau. A tiny little dot on the map that nobody’d ever heard of, but that’s what he got. Maybe if we plotted the exact centre of the figure described by linking up all last year’s bank raids, it would drop on Windsor Castle. But still my thumbs prick. Scheidenau once may well be a freak, and I might even have had a lurking suspicion that my dear chief didn’t do his sums right. I never checked! But Scheidenau twice, and do you wonder I have the feeling that fate is nudging me?’
‘But this man Killian is working for Maggie Tressider,’ Bunty said positively. ‘That’s true enough. He suggested I should go and visit her, he isn’t afraid of his credentials being investigated.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt that. But he
may be working for her on something rather different from what he gave you to understand. He seems to have spent more time asking you about the lady herself than about her teacher.’
‘Yes, I know. Though we’d already been talking about Freddy for some time. But it’s natural he should want to talk about Maggie. I told you, he’s in love with her. Even this fixation about Robin Aylwin… I had a feeling even that was a personal thing with him. As if jealousy was eating him alive, and he had to find somebody to bear the burden, somebody round whom he could crystallise it and get rid of it. And when I talked about Robin, good-looking and close to her, and her own age, for the first time—and I’m sure it was the first time he’d so much as heard of him—he felt he’d found a possibility. Somebody to resent. Not that it helps,’ said Bunty wryly, ‘but they always think it will.’
‘God forbid, love,’ said George piously, ‘that you should ever feel the urge to psychoanalyse me. I hate to think what you might come up with. No, I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with Killian or with Miss Tressider, I should say it’s very long odds against it. But if her commission, whatever it may be, is turning his attention to the disappearance of a young man in Scheidenau, then I’m very, very interested. It might be well worth while keeping an eye on his moves. Even if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, he may accidentally turn up something interesting to us. I’ll try to get a look at him myself as soon as I can. What’s he like?’
She told him. It appeared that she had been weighing up Francis Killian’s physical attributes as acutely as his state of mind, and the odds were that she was pretty accurate about both.
‘Fortyish, middle height, on the thin side but I think he’s solider than he looks. Dark brown hair and eyes, thick brows, hair a bit grey just at the temples. Quite a good face, clean-shaven, a lot of bone and not much meat, a long, straight nose and a rather high forehead. Daunting way of looking at you, guarded and aloof but critical, too, as if he held you at arms’-length to get a stranger’s view, and didn’t want to get any closer to anyone. Slumps his shoulders a bit, but when he’s on his feet he moves well, so it may be an affectation. Or pure discouragement! He did look rather as if he’d nearly given up, and then suddenly got kicked back into the race. Not quite seedy—he’s physically too trim for that—not so much a shabby elegance as an elegant shabbiness.’
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?’
CHAPTER FOUR
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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 c
onfectioner’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.