by Ellis Peters
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 voluntee
red 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.
‘This is his? May I look? Under your supervision, of course. All I want is to see if there is anything there to suggest a further line of enquiry. Are they locked?’
‘They are not locked.’
Of course, they would be as he had left them in his room, and in a hotel room which is itself normally locked, not everyone bothers to make doubly sure with individual keys. And the keys themselves he must have taken away with him, in his pocket.
The contents of Robin Aylwin’s luggage had little enough to say about him. He travelled light. The slacks, lambswool sweater, shirts, were good but not expensive, and kept about as carefully as most young men of twenty or so keep their clothes. Black dress shoes for concerts, a dinner jacket, shaving tackle, handkerchiefs, a Paisley dressing-gown, pyjamas, a Terylene raincoat, all folded and packed so carefully that Francis detected the hand of some female member of the Waldmeister family.
‘Had he packed these? Or were they simply lying about in his room?’
‘They were in his room, as in use. We packed everything as you see it, to wait for him.’
No passport, no documents, no wallet, no keys, no letters. All those he would most probably keep on him, whatever clothes he was wearing. The dinner jacket being here meant nothing; he almost certainly wouldn’t wear it for the evening here, when resting between engagements. Probably it was only there for the concerts. There were writing materials, a folder of stamps both English and Austrian, two local postcards, unwritten; but not one written word, to him or from him, to help to establish that he had ever really existed at all.
Francis got what he could from the remnants. The shirts were size fifteen and a half, the shoes nine, the slacks were long-legged and small-waisted and made to measure, but from a firm of mass tailors with shops everywhere. The wearer must have been nearly six feet in height, if not an inch or two over, and on the slim side, though by the evidence of the sweater, which was a forty-two inch chest, he had needed accommodation for good wide shoulders. And that was all there was to be discovered about him here. The ’cello, silent in its case, was just a ’cello, and the pockets that filled in its curves contained only resin, strings and a spare bridge in case of damage.
Francis closed the lid again and restored the case to its corner. He dusted his hands and looked at Waldmeister.
‘No, nothing. When he didn’t turn up, I expect you looked through them, too.’
‘I also told it to the Herr Doktor, when he came again. He knew nothing of the young man, either. He said keep them still, so we kept them.’
‘Herr Waldmeister, there is always the possibility that some member of your household may have talked with Aylwin while he was here, and may be in possession of some detail that might help me to find him. It’s a long time ago, and your staff may have changed, of course, but still there may be someone who remembers, and may be able to add to what we know. Will you be kind enough to tell them, all those who were here at that time, that I am trying to trace this man, and for a reason which makes it to his advantage that I should find him?’
The old man’s heavy shoulders lifted eloquently. ‘I will do so. But I do not think, after all this time, they will have anything to tell.’
‘I’m afraid you may be right. But please ask them to come to me if they do remember anything. I shall be here for two or three days.’
‘I will ask them,’ said Waldmeister.
He had reckoned on the force of curiosity to bring them to him even if they had nothing to tell, and would have bet on the women being in the lead. But the eldest Waldmeister son was the first to bring his stein over and join the newcomer in the bar, after dinner that evening. He could surely have nothing to tell about a chance guest in the hotel, since he spent all his time well outside it, running a timber business which was merely one of the multifarious Waldmeister activities. What he wanted was to have a closer look at the English solicitor, and at least offer his desire to be helpful, if he could do no better. Frau Waldmeister and two of her daughters-in-law made roundabout approaches during the next day, to the same effect. None of them knew where Aylwin might have gone, none of them knew why. Francis doubted if they really remembered anything about him at all, beyond that he had left in the attic tangible evidence of his stay. The third daughter-in-law hadn’t then been married to her Johann, and the two youngest Waldmeister girls must have been still at school.
The one person for whom he had trailed the bait held aloof. Friedl, somewhere in her mid-thirties now by his estimate, must have been turned twenty at the time, and not the girl to miss a personable young man. Aylwin had been, by Mrs. Felse’s testimony, of striking and engaging appearance, and even at twenty Friedl, the dowryless niece with the hare-lip, must have been half-way to the hungry, embittered woman she was now. Deprived enough to reach out for whatever man she could, and not yet crushed into acceptance of her lot, and schooled to limiting her reach to waifs like herself. If anyone here knew anything about the good-looking and light-minded young man who laughed a lot, the odds were it would be Friedl.
He knew she would come. She was only biding her time. He had caught her dark, sullen glance upon him several times in passing, but she had made no sign. He understood. Where the Waldmeister family was within earshot or sight, no one would get anything out of Friedl. They were perhaps hardly more the enemy to her than was the rest of the world, but she would make no move where they might get wind of it. It was not a matter of the importance of anything she might have to say, but rather of preserving the integrity of her own secret life, which had nothing to do with them. She might have nothing to tell, but she would come, all the same, given the chance, because he had, and deliberately, offered her a reason for approaching him.
There was no real difficulty. After dinner was cleared away he sat with a kirsch on the verandah that overlooked the tip of the lake, until she came out, off duty at last, to enjoy the luminous air of the evening. He had seen her emerge the previous night at this hour, and he felt reasonably sure that it would be the same to-night. All she had done was to stroll in the garden and talk a little with such guests as were solitary, but she had done it in a smart black wool dress, with a gold chain and cross round her neck, and her great mane of hair coiled in a glossy chignon on her nape; a manifestation at least that sh
e did exist as a human being, like them.
She was a little later in appearing to-night, but she came. As soon as he saw her in the doorway, Francis moved away to the rail of the terrace, where the steps led down into the long slope of trees between the inn and the lake-shore. It was already dusk, but the afterglow had turned the western sky to a pale, glowing green, and its reflection from the lake, calm as a looking-glass laid down among the hills, cast a subtle radiance up through the trees. Without haste and without looking back, Francis went down the path.
The Goldener Hirsch stood on a bluff, higher than the Alte Post on the other side of the lake, but equally close to the thin yellow line of gravel that bordered the water. Sixty yards wide and gradually broadening as he penetrated deeper into it, the belt of trees wound along beneath the balconies and windows of the new wing, and the path, narrowing, wandered diagonally down it to the water. Not there, it would be too light there. Somewhere here in this curious woodland world quivering and swimming in greenish gleams, like a weedy aquarium. He had already left the evening strollers behind. There might be a pair of lovers holed up somewhere in the twilight, but there was room for them. He let the path slip right-handed away from him, towards the dappled, moon-pale water, and took to the grass beyond, moving at leisure among the trees. He didn’t know how far behind she might be, but he knew she would find him.