by Ellis Peters
‘Aber schön,’ the first voice insisted with detached approval. ‘She has everything!’
‘Except immortality.’
‘What are you going to do with her?’
The second voice was silent long enough to indicate a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Did I make her wade in here so far out of her depth? She had a death wish.’
‘Waste of a girl!’ said the first voice with impersonal regret.
‘There are others. Even some with perfect pitch.’ And in a blithe half-tone the second voice began to sing to itself dreamily:
Mein Eigen sollst du werden gewiss,
Wie’s Keine sonst auf Erden ist,
O Lieb… auf grüner Erden…
Any moment now she would feel the prick of the needle in her thigh, and submerge again. So this must be hell. What could be more absolute hell than to have to go on living and reliving these few weeks to eternity, trying to escape from the net, believing she had escaped, only to find herself back at the beginning and trapped as fast as ever? Everything to do again, everything to suffer again, everything to lose again. No, not quite a duplication, this time the dialogue had changed. The decision last time had been for life. This time it was for death.
Then, in the moment that she broke surface and knew herself conscious, miraculously the burden was gone. Last time she had awakened alone, oppressed and appalled by the horror of guilt without a source. Now that the verdict was for death she awoke to the calm and lightness of deliverance. She had not been deceived, after all, her guilt had been only a delusion, a sickness of which she was healed at last. Even if she died now, it would be as a whole, a sane person.
For this second voice she knew very well, and it belonged firmly in this world and no other. It was no poor injured ghost that had come to fetch her away, but a living and dangerous man, and he had come not because she owed him a death, but because she was a threat to him alive. Her probing had begun to uncover him of the carefully cultivated invisibility of years, he could not afford to let her go on with it. Grave or no grave, memorial or no memorial, Robert Aylwin was alive. She had neither killed him nor done him any wrong; and even if he killed her, she would never again be truly in his power, never his victim as she had been all these years. Neither living nor dead would Robin ever stand between her and love again.
She opened her eyes upon low stone vaulting that had a worn and monumental grandeur, like a feudal hall before luxury came into fashion. She was lying on a rough grey blanket spread upon a stone settle built all along one wall, and in the wall itself she saw the round fretted grooves left by the ends of barrels. The flagged floor was sifted with fine sand, the accumulated dust of wind erosion and time. The air felt moist and cool. There was a dim light from one heavily shaded electric bulb, that showed her only the side of the room where she lay, and a glimpse of a door in the corner, a door not worn at all, but surely almost new and very solid.
‘Achtung!’ said the first voice very-softly. ‘She’s coming round. Shall I…?’
‘No, let her! Company will help to pass the time until those fools go home to bed.’
She could see the pair of them only up to the shoulders, for the dark shade over the light obscured their faces. One of them stepped back accommodatingly into the shadows, the other came forward and sat down on one hip on the edge of the settle beside her feet. He saw that her eyes were wide-open and fixed upon his face, and turned the lamp deliberately to let it illuminate him fully.
‘Allow me! Is that better?’
He no longer glistened and streamed, the fall of wavy hair was nearly dry, only the unruly way it curled round his forehead showed that he had recently been out in the rain. He must have stood outside her room under the dripping trees all the while she was singing, waiting for the appropriate moment. He must, she thought, have been amused by the Mahler; a little Gothic horror would appeal to his sense of humour. He was dressed to go invisibly in the dark, in clerical grey slacks and a thick black sweater with a polo neck; the same, perhaps, in which he had prowled the woods that night he throttled and drowned Friedl.
Looking at him now, she found nothing surprising in that. He sat smiling at her, a cigarette held delicately between forefinger and thumb, narrowing his eyes slightly against the smoke that drifted towards his face in a light draught. The same boyish, regular features, the same full, mobile, strongly curling lips for ever on the edge of laughter. He laughed a great deal, always, at everything. For years she had forgotten the colour of his eyes, lowered in Friedl’s photograph, closed in that dead faun’s face over his grave. Perhaps it had cost her an extra effort to forget them, and she had managed it only because it was essential. They watched her now steadily, curiously, pale greenish-gold eyes, round and bold, a goat’s eyes, intelligent, inscrutable, malicious. The eyes laughed, too, almost without cease, but at some private joke that was not for ordinary humans. He was hardly older than he had been thirteen years ago, when she had last seen him. Why should he be, when he lived—it was to be seen in the debonair face and the cool, bright eyes—immune from all feeling and all responsibility?
She drew herself up with an effort to sit upright, her back—how appropriately!—against the wall. Never for a moment did her eyes leave his face.
‘It is you,’ she said at last, ‘it was you behind everything!’ She braced her hands against the cold stone to take fast hold of reality. She knew her situation now, and her enemy. She had marvellously recovered the fullness of life only just in time to lose it again, and feel the loss double. But also she had now a double stake for which to put up a fight. ‘So you are alive,’ she said.
‘Dear Maggie,’ he said, lazily smiling, ‘I believe so.’
‘Then what was it I heard, that night? What was it that went into the lake?
She thought for a moment that he was not going to answer her, but with a captive audience, and all the cards and all the strings in his own hands, and time to kill—but how did it happen that he had time to kill?—why not talk? After all, she wasn’t going anywhere, was she, to repeat anything he might let fall? He could indulge his fancy with no risk to himself.
‘Just one of old Waldmeister’s stacked logs,’ he said serenely. ‘The whole clearing down by the water was full of them, he surely couldn’t grudge me one in a good cause.’
‘But why?’ she said almost inaudibly, wrenching at the wanton shaft that had broken off short in her spirit as in wounded flesh, and festered ever afterwards. ‘Why play me such a trick? Why did you have to die at all? And even if you had your reasons for wanting to vanish, why stage a scene like that with me first? Why pretend you loved me? Why ask me…’ She drew breath slowly, and flattened her shoulders warily against the wall; the chill pierced her like a gust of cold air, and every such minute shock of reality helped to calm her senses and clear her mind. She, too, could talk; words were there to be used for her purposes as well as his. The more attention he gave to her, to impressing and subduing her, even to amusing himself with her, the less he would have left for imagining any counter-attack. ‘Just think,’ she said, eyeing him narrowly from under the fall of her loosened hair, ‘I might even have accepted you! What would you have done then?’
He found the recollection of that night rather flattering, she thought; maybe his memory even embroidered it. But be careful of believing that. Conceit is only a discardable toy to a man without feelings.
‘I should have married you, of course,’ he said sunnily. ‘It wouldn’t have been too great a hardship. You’d have turned out quite a profitable investment, the way things have gone. And as my wife, you wouldn’t have been asked to give evidence against me, either—would you?’
So that was one more piece of the puzzle falling into place. He had flicked it into her lap deliberately, she knew that. Nevertheless, record it, Maggie! He’s quite sure of his security, but there are things even he doesn’t know. He may yet live to regret dropping these small golden apples to distract you into running about at his will.
&n
bsp; ‘I see,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But what was I supposed to be able to tell? I never knew there was anything to be told against you.’
He leaned back to prop himself against the wall by one wide, lean shoulder, and grinned at her amiably through the smoke of his cigarette.
‘Do you remember the spring trip we made that year with the Circus?’
‘Well, well!’ she said. ‘You’ve still got the terms pat, after all this time.’
‘Dear Maggie, I have as near as damn it total recall. I remember the whole ramshackle set-up, and you so dedicated and earnest, and such an easy touch. You remember carrying some expensive cosmetics through Customs for me, that spring? A girl could get by with declaring those jars, when a man would automatically get charged on them. And it turned out that way, didn’t it? And a friend of mine met us at the boat-train, and I handed the whole works over as a present for his sister. Dear Maggie, you can’t have forgotten that kind deed? After all, what did you ever have to declare, except sheet-music and gramophone records?’
What money had she ever had, in those days, to buy any but the most vital necessities, all of which were comprehended in music? But all she said was: ‘I remember.’
‘Well, they picked up my anonymous friend later that year with rather a lot of heroin on him. Yes, that’s what was in the jars, sealed below about an eighth of an inch of cream and stuff. We were in Basel on the autumn tour when I got word, so I had to make up my mind quickly what to do. There was no knowing for sure that he’d keep his mouth shut about me, and even if he did, there might still be something they could hook up to me. And if ever they had found their way to the Circus, you’d soon have told them how those cosmetics came into England, wouldn’t you? It all boiled down to a choice between marrying you to close your mouth, and going home and chancing my luck, or staying here and turning professional. They’d been inviting me to do that for a year or more.’
‘They?’ said Maggie gently.
‘What good would it do you if I named names, my dear? The whole set-up has changed since then. Just one organisation among many, until I made it over to my taste. Call it what you like. Cosa mia…’
Yes, clearly anything into which he entered would soon have to become ‘his thing’; he wasn’t interested in being a subordinate. Perhaps that was why he’d never bothered to work at music, because even the disciplined approach necessary was only going to get him into the third, or at best the second, rank. ‘So you’d been smuggling for them for some time,’ she said, ‘under cover of Freddy’s respected name.’
‘Every trip. You’d helped me once before. Oh, not always hard drugs, in fact, very seldom. Anything light and profitable, precious stones, lenses, passports, medicines, even watches when other fields were dull. Once I went into England with two medieval manuscripts among my sheet music. We had a customer waiting for those, of course. Miniatures, rare coins, stamps, small art items—anything portable enough and expensive enough. We provide a world-wide service, moving the goods to where the demand is. Even before the crunch came I’d been thinking of throwing up the Circus before it threw me up, and going into the business full-time. It looked as if my career with Freddy was nearly up in any case. I let you make up my mind for me. You turned me down, they got me. You even provided me with a reason for suicide, if people got too nosy, though I admit the log was an afterthought. I remember taking off down the hillside, and there were these stacks of wood ready for carting, and it was too good to miss. You were so damned confident and secure, it seemed an appropriate gesture to give you something else to think about besides your great future.’
‘It must have been a disappointment to you,’ she said dryly, ‘when I didn’t tell anybody the story you’d so thoughtfully set up for me to tell.’
He leaned his head back against the wall and laughed aloud.
‘I was shocked to find you capable of such duplicity. You didn’t want any scandals or other little stumbling-blocks in the way of your career, did you? But after all, it worked out very well. Friedl kept me informed. If everyone had accepted Freddy’s dark hints, and come to the conclusion that I’d simply run out to avoid minor unpleasantness, that was fine with me. Just so long as nobody started a serious search for me alive.’
‘Friedl was your creature? One of the organisation?’
‘Hardly that. Let’s say Friedl became a useful camp follower. One of our ears on the world. One of our tongues, too, though,’ he added candidly, ‘I ought to have known better.’
‘Then it was you who put her up to telling all those lies to Francis and to me, to prove that you were dead?’
‘To Killian, yes. But to you? There she exceeded her orders, she had her own bone to pick with you. Friedl…’ He hoisted one shoulder in a smooth and eloquent gesture. ‘She always preferred to lie rather than tell truth, if not for policy, then for pleasure. Her facility has been useful on occasions, but when she was mad with jealousy—oh, yes, hadn’t you realised that?—she was a menace. She talked altogether too much. When she put you on to the grave, that was the end. She had to go. Probably the grave was a mistake from the beginning, I should have let well alone. But at the time it seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to have a second line of defence ready, in case of need. And then you had to get too interested in it, of all people, and of all people you would never have swallowed it. Anybody else she might have told, but you…’
‘I’ve seen the photographs,’ said Maggie. ‘How did you even manage that affair? Was it you who provided the body? Is there really a body there?’
‘Oh, yes, there’s a body, just as she told you. He came down with the snow water in the thaw. No, that wasn’t any master-stroke of mine, he was pure luck. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know who he really was. No, all I did was take the chance when it offered. Then there’d always be a grave to which I could misdirect enquiries if ever I needed to suggest my own death. It was a body, male, near enough my height and build and age, and past being identified. All I needed to do was make the anonymous offer to pay for his burial, as an act of piety, and make sure the death of an unknown young man was recorded and dated. Nothing so crude as a false identification or a name, of course. The portrait was an afterthought, a jeu d’esprit. Maybe too impudent, but it amused me.’
‘So you have a monumental mason in your pocket, too,’ said Maggie admiringly.
‘We have one of everything we need,’ he agreed calmly.
‘You must have risen rapidly in the organisation.’
‘To the top. Some years ago now. Class tells,’ he said demurely, and his lips curled in the very same private laughter he had allowed the mason to engrave on the tombstone, giving the lie to the depersonalised brow and marble eyelids, turning the dead mask into a living demon.
‘And then,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you had to come along and start looking for me—you, who weren’t going to swallow that grave without gagging. If you hadn’t turned so curious, after all this time, none of this need have happened. For God’s sake, why did you?’
She stared back at him wordlessly for a long minute, herself marvelling to find the landscape of her mind so miraculously changed. ‘I had you on my conscience,’ she said with deliberation. ‘I believed I owed you a life.’
Very softly, and with the most beguiling of smiles, he agreed: ‘And so you do.’
It could hardly be a surprise. She had known all along that she had gone too far to be left alive. Would he be talking to her like this, otherwise? From the beginning she had known at the back of her mind that she was talking chiefly to engage his attention, to make him forget time, to gain minutes as best she could. Because of the one thing he did not know about that Mahler performance of hers tonight, the fact that she had been waiting for the arrival of another visitor.
What if Francis was late in coming? He would come. And whatever others might think at finding her bedroom empty—that she had gone off of her own will, to some appointment in the woods, to somebody else’s bed, to the bottom of t
he lake—Francis would know better. Francis would know that she had been waiting for him, and that nothing would have induced her to leave the appointed place until he came. And whether he called in the police or not, he would begin a search for her on his own account until he found her.
On that one chance she pinned her hope, and saw that it was still a substantial hope. No point in over-estimating it, though. For Robin wouldn’t be killing time with her in this idle way, however enjoyably, if he himself were not waiting for something.
At least go on talking, she thought. At least keep him from deciding not to wait, after all.
‘How do you intend to dispose of me?’ she asked conversationally.
His bright, probing, inscrutable yellow stare was fixed and blinding upon her face, and for once he was not smiling.
‘My dear girl, you set the whole scene yourself. Here are you with a recent record of illness and odd behaviour, and apparently with some sort of obsession about me, a small, sad episode in your distant past. And then your rest-home is invaded by a tragedy—a girl drowned in the lake. Suicide is infectious. Now they’re going to find your verandah door open, and a nice little trail laid down to the shore. I’ve seen to that. And on your piano, just as you left it, that wonderfully appropriate Mahler song about the dead lover returning by night to visit his beloved… Oh, yes, someone will be able to make the connection. With that sort of background, who’s going to be surprised that you finally ran off the rails altogether, and did away with yourself?’
‘Then why didn’t you slip me into the water right away, while you had the chance?’
He laughed gaily. ‘Because there’s a plague of drunken wedding guests holding a regatta all round the lake. And a damned inconvenient moment they chose to embark.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ said Maggie tartly.
‘Granted. But they’ll get sick of it just now, and go home to bed. Don’t worry, to-morrow the police will be dragging for your body.’