by Ellis Peters
Thus she saw by pure chance, and was the only one to see, the figure that suddenly lunged forward out of the trees beneath the hotel. A man, tall, curiously top-heavy, bursting straight out of the shadow towards the water. The licking tongue of light found pallor about his shoulders, darkness below, a head bent somewhat forward. It had no time to find features or inform her of details, though her eyes in that instant had photographed more than she realised; for at that same moment Helmut got his motor-boat rocketing into life, and with a huge bass-baritone bellow of triumph shot out across the lake, a torch spearing the air before him and a lantern glowing bravely at the stern,three blonde girls trailing scarves in the slip-stream, and the first three or four rowing boats labouring valiantly after. The figure at the edge of the trees recoiled on the instant, and vanished into cover. Appearing and disappearing were almost one movement, so abruptly was he come and gone. There had been a lift of the head, alert to record the gaily-coloured invasion of his solitude, a glimpse of a regular oval of pallor that told her nothing about his face except that he was clean-shaven. But the vehement movements said young and the aplomb of his responses said he was as quick on the uptake as a wild beast. Bunty ranged the whole rim of the lake there, and tried to penetrate the belt of trees, but she saw no more of him, and no movement to indicate where he passed.
There was, however, nothing about him that could possibly be imaginary, not even in retrospect. Bunty lowered the glasses, and watched the hilarious progress of Helmut’s aquacade towards the very curve of shore where the apparition had emerged and vanished. She was unreasonably disturbed. Who recoils like that from being observed by good-natured, harmless souls bent on nothing but fun? Poachers? Where poachers had the sympathy of most people, barring officials, it seemed far-fetched.
True, now she came to think of it, that top-heavy appearance of his, and the slight stoop, the bending of the head, these were all consistent with the fact that he had been carrying something. Something pale. Why else that pallor there at his shoulder? It wasn’t warm enough to be running around at night in shirt-sleeves. That was it, he had been hurrying head-forward, bent under something he carried… And as soon as she had thought of it in those terms, she was almost certain it could not have been a net, even if night-poachers here used a net. No, something heavier than that. Nets are nylon now, they weigh almost nothing. This man had been carrying a considerable weight. Not too much for him, he had moved freely and forcefully under it. Nevertheless, something heavier than a net.
Heavy and pale, and turning him into an asymmetrical shape. The bulk poised on one shoulder.
A small core of ice seemed to spring to life in Bunty’s heart. For the more she thought about that shape draped upon the stranger’s shoulder, the more did it put on a positive and eloquent form, and confront her, in spite of all her sound, sensible skepticism, with the idea of a girl’s limp body in a light-coloured garment, something long and wide-skirted, a housecoat or a negligee. Her weight nicely balanced on the man’s shoulder, one arm and hand dangling. Nets don’t have hands, whatever they have! Was she imagining it now, after the event?
But why should he start back and hide himself so promptly, so instinctively, if his movements were innocent? And where, come to that, was he heading in such a hurry before Helmut scared him away? For he had started out of the trees at speed, straight towards the water. And there was no boat in all that sweep of shore, no landing stage below the hotel, nothing but the strip of gravel and then dark water.
She reached this point, and the short hairs rose on her neck. What business could he have had with the lake at this hour? What, except the business someone had had with Friedl? Maybe he was still there, somewhere among the trees in hiding, waiting for the revellers to get tired at last, and go home to bed.
And then?
She had a feeling that she was imagining things, probably making the world’s fool of herself. But one girl had been drowned, only two nights ago. And that had been murder.
Bunty made up her mind. There was another girl at the heart of this affair, and where could be the harm in making sure that she was safe in her bed? Midnight or not, there was no sense in waiting; and after all, they had known each other once, however briefly and however long ago. She dropped George’s glasses on the bed, and went straight downstairs to the telephone booth in the hall.
Gisela, startled out of her beauty sleep by the extension ’phone beside her bed, was scandalised at the very suggestion.
‘But Miss Tressider went to her room at nine o’clock, she will have been asleep for a long time. I cannot disturb her. Can it not wait until to-morrow, if you are staying in Scheidenau?’
‘No,’ said Bunty crisply, ‘it can’t. Or at least, that’s exactly what I want to find out, whether it can or not. I tell you what, you have keys, you slip up and have a look if she’s all right, and if she is, I’ll call her to-morrow.’
Though even so, she thought doubtfully, there were other girls who might equally be in danger, supposing Friedl’s killer was a random defective just breaking out after long harmlessness. What mattered was whether she had really seen what she supposed. But always her mind came back to Maggie. Who else stood so hapless and so alone in the storm-centre of all these happenings?
‘I am sorry,’ said Gisela indignantly, ‘I cannot do such a thing.’
‘All right, then,’ said Bunty. ‘I can! I’m coming over.’
Gisela was waiting for her in the vast vaulted lobby of the Goldener Hirsch when she arrived, out of breath, a quarter of an hour later. It would have been quicker to get Helmut to ferry her over, but Helmut was weaving inspired circles round the grouped rowing boats in the centre of the lake, and his massed choir was singing, pleasantly enough but very loudly:
Heute blau und Morgen blau
Und Übermorgen wieder,
Ich bin dein, und du bist mein,
Und froh sind uns’re Lieder.
Gisela, huddled in a red dressing-gown, was by this time rather less indignant and considerably more uneasy. What was the use of pretending no harm could come to anyone in this house, after Friedl?
‘I have been up to her room. Everything is in order there, her door is locked and her light out. I am sure she is asleep. I tapped gently, but she didn’t answer, and I do not like to disturb her rest.’
But her eyes were round and anxious, even afraid. Bunty understood. Somebody had to take the matter farther, now, but Gisela didn’t want the responsibility. What Miss Tressider’s friend insisted on doing was her own affair.
‘The small light in her bedroom is still burning,’ she said gently. ‘She has a door on the verandah, hasn’t she? Is there a way up from outside?’
‘Oh, yes!’ Gisela jumped at the idea. ‘I will show you. We can go through the house.’ And with luck, if they found the guest in Number One fast asleep, then they could all lock up and go to bed, and no one but themselves would ever be any the wiser about this night alarm.
They passed through the long corridor to the rear of the house, and out by a short passage on to the path from the terrace, and came to the fringe of the trees. A little way along in the darkness was the wooden staircase that led up to the verandah. Bunty felt her way up it by the rough wooden handrail, and half-way up her fingers, sliding along the wood, encountered a jagged knot, and a fragment of something silken soft and fine, like long strands of mohair, that clung to her skin with the live persistence of synthetic fibres convulsed with static. She pulled the strands loose from the rough place where they had caught, and shut them in her palm as they went on up the stairs.
Gisela hung back, quivering. ‘The door… it is open!
The glass door stood wide on the darkness of Maggie’s sitting-room. Through the half-open door that led to the bedroom beyond, the small gleam of the bedside lamp illuminated for them a pillow still covered by a hand-crocheted bedspread. The pillow was dented by the pressure of a head; so, when they put on the light to look round the room, was the bed itself by a light
body. But no one was there now. The verandah door must have been open for some time, for rain had blown in… No, that was impossible. The verandah was not completely roofed in, but the jut of the eaves above covered a good half of it, and there had been almost no wind to drive the showers. Yet there was a damp patch just inside the doorway, slightly darkening the scrubbed boards. Everything was tidy, everything was normal, but nothing remained of Maggie Tressider except the score of Mahler’s ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ on the piano, and in Bunty’s palm a small triangle of material woven from one of the more expensive synthetics, printed in a delicate feather pattern of grey and white, like fine lace, with a few long strands of silky nylon fringe trailing from it.
Gisela looked at it and moistened her lips. ‘It is from the girdle of her housecoat. I have seen her wearing it.’
‘Yes,’ said Bunty. ‘I thought it might be. We’ve got no choice now. You can see that, can’t you? Don’t worry, it isn’t your fault, I’ll do the talking. You go down and call the police. And better tell Herr Waldmeister, he’ll have to know. I’ll wait here. Tell them the message is from the wife of Detective-Inspector Felse. They’ll understand.’
They understood and they came, with all the more alacrity because they had already received, some ten minutes previously, Werner Frankel’s call from a mountain inn over the border in Germany. By the time they reached Bunty, waiting for them in Maggie’s sitting-room, there were police patrols out in Germany checking all cars between the border and Felsenbach for a middle-aged light-brown Dodge with a Swiss registration, and Austrian police patrols converging from Langen and Bregenz on Scheidenau, watching for a dark-blue or black Mercedes in a hurry.
It sounded complicated enough without any new complications; but it was becoming quite clear that it was all one case, and too large for taking any chances. First an associate of Miss Tressider was ambushed and abducted on the highroad; and now the girl herself, it seemed, had vanished from her hotel room without warning or explanation.
Not, however, without trace. There were traces enough. A shred torn from her girdle by a knot in the handrail of the staircase. An unimpressive and rapidly drying patch of damp inside her verandah door. And down the slope towards the water, under her windows, search produced a silver chiffon ribbon, still loosely knotted, with one or two dusky gold hairs twined in the knot. It had caught in the fir branches where the half-grown trees grew close, and just at the height of a woman’s shoulders. As if she had run from her room, leaving the door open, and straight down the slope in a frenzy of resolution and despair into the lake.
‘Yes,’ said Bunty, bolt upright on the piano stool, ‘that’s what we were meant to think.’ She stabbed a finger emphatically at the music on the stand. ‘Even this could be part of the picture. She has a recent history of illness, and has been investigating the disappearance of a man who toured with her here when she was just beginning. That’s what it looks like, anyhow. The man in the photograph, yes. And now it seems he’s dead. And here is she running through a song like this, all about the demon lover coming back from the grave to claim his bride. If she drowned herself, people might be shocked, but I don’t suppose anyone would find it incredible.’ She added after a moment’s thought: ‘Except, perhaps, this man Killian. He seems to have got nearer to her than anyone.’
‘And he,’ said the man in charge dryly, ‘has been taken care of at the same time, eh?’
She never got the police ranks of Austria clear in her mind, but his name, it seemed, was Oberkofler. He was probably in the sixties, a tall, rangy mountain man with a wrinkled leather face and shaggy grey hair. He wore whatever had come to hand first when his subordinates got him out of bed, and most of it was non-uniform, but he still had no difficulty in looking like the holder of authority. He was Scheidenau born and bred, and looked the part. Bunty found him impressive. She was glad he was the one among them who spoke English, it gave her an excuse for staying in his vicinity.
‘Four of them to take care of the man,’ he mused, eyeing the damp patch now barely visible on the floorboards, ‘and one to account for the woman. You are sure he did not come back to the lake later?’
Bunty glanced towards the window. The strains of ‘Du kannst nicht treu sein’ were borne bravely across the water. ‘How could he?’ she said simply.
‘Yes… I think first we must make contact with our friends there, and make sure that they remain effective, all night if need be. That will make any drowning “accident” impossible, and any retreat by water, also. From what you tell me it seems that this man must be still somewhere close, perhaps still in the woods. Also, we hope, the lady… And now, Frau Felse, if you would wish to get some sleep…’
‘I’d rather stay,’ said Bunty. ‘At least until we get word from my husband.’ But she meant rather, until we recover those two alive, and find out what this thing is all about. She had begun this hunt, she wanted to see it ended. There were police converging on Scheidenau from all directions, methodically threading the woodland along the lake-shore, a small army mustering because of what George and she had loosed in this quiet village. She intended to see finished what they had begun.
‘Then of course you may stay. Where should we have been without you? You can rest here in your friend’s room, why not?’
But he showed neither surprise nor disapproval when she followed him down to the office where he had set up his headquarters.
The telephone was busy almost every moment for the next hour, but they found no further trace of Maggie Tressider. The revellers on the lake sang and rowed on unflagging, which in its way was as astonishing as it was admirable. It would have been only human to tire and long for sleep as soon as they were officially requested to go on celebrating. Outside among the trees the search proceeded, inside here Oberkofler directed and co-ordinated. The Waldmeister parents, philosophical and phlegmatic, not to say faced with their usual working day in a few hours’ time, accounted for themselves and went back to bed, the sons volunteered their services and went to join in the hunt. And Bunty watched and listened and waited, and harried her memory for any submerged detail or any hopeful idea; and worried now not only about those two hapless people lost, but also about George, from whom there had been no word.
A call from Werner Frankel, over in Felsenbach. The Dodge must have got through before they had an effective block-up. They were getting out a general call on it, and hoped to pick it up somewhere near Regenheim.
Another call from Werner, half an hour later. They had returned now to the scene of the abduction, and found in the ditch where the attack took place a wallet containing the papers of Francis Killian, together with several photographs of a certain gravestone in the cemetery at Felsenbach.
‘Of which,’ said Oberkofler, ‘perhaps you have heard from the Herr Inspektor?’
‘He told me about it yesterday,’ said Bunty. ‘The day before yesterday, I mean.’ She was a little lightheaded with so much waiting and thinking, and so little sleep. ‘But I haven’t seen it. George didn’t have a camera. Our mistake!’
And at last, just before one o’clock, another telephone call which Oberkofler answered in voluble German, to switch suddenly and wonderfully into English.
‘Yes… yes, good, I will send you every man I can, and more as they come in. Yes, your wife is here. Please, only a word…’ He held out the receiver to Bunty with a smile as wide and deep as the sea. ‘Your husband, Frau Felse.’
‘George?’ said Bunty, heaving a deep sigh. ‘Did he tell you? We’ve lost Maggie as well.’
‘Yes, I know. That makes us quits, love, I lost the car they had Killian in. We had a mile of road to comb for whatever hole they dived into, but it turned out there’s only one, apart from farm-tracks. This one’s blind, too, it goes to the lake and stops, so they tell me. Doesn’t even pass anything, except that rubble that used to be Scheidenau Castle. But somewhere up there is where they must be. There isn’t anywhere else. We’re off to hunt for the car now.’
‘From all I hear you’ve done it,’ said George. ‘They also serve…! If we find him, the odds are we find her, too. This is all one set-up. Keep hoping! Sorry, got to clear this line, it may be wanted.’
‘Yes, of course. See you, then!’
She held out the receiver to Oberkofler, but he shook his head at her and smiled. She hung up. She was suddenly shaking with reaction, and dared not try to guess how the night would end.
Distantly, inexhaustibly, across the lake and in at the window came the thunder of the guns of Helmut’s navy:
Es war einmal ein treuer Hussar,
Der liebt sein Mädchen ein ganzes Jahr,
Ein ganzes Jahr, und noch viel mehr…
CHAPTER TWELVE
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Two voices were discussing her above her head. They didn’t know that dead people can hear. Quite dispassionate voices, cool, leisurely and low, discussing her in terms of life and death. Either they had no bodies, or dead people can’t see. She was dangling just below the level of consciousness clinging to the surface tension like the air-breathing nymph of some water creature.
‘So schön auch,’ said the first voice critically.
‘Nobody’s beautiful who gets in my way,’ said the second voice in plain English and without overtones; a light, pleasant, untroubled tenor voice without a care in the world.