by Ellis Peters
‘And of course,’ she said, ‘they’ll find it?’
‘Oh, yes, they’ll find it. Quite definitely death by drowning, there’ll be no injuries to spoil the picture, not even a bruise. A pity I let Friedl make me angry, but what can you do? No, my dear, for a Maggie Tressider they might go on searching too long and too well, if I didn’t make them a present of you. They might find other things, one never knows. No, they shall have you gratis.’
To make a suicide like that convincing, she reasoned with furious coldness, and to ensure that she was found with satisfying promptness, she would have to be put into the water near to the hotel. So they must be somewhere quite close now. Why not go on doing the direct thing, and ask? He had answered some curious questions already, being quite certain of his security here. But if this waiting continued long enough, and every moment counted, what she had gleaned from him might come in useful yet to convict him.
‘Where have you brought me?’ She looked round the dim room as though she had just discovered it. There was a second door in the distant wall, directly opposite the first one, as though this was only one in a series of rooms. Cellars? Not in the hotel, surely? Yet he could not have brought her far. The other man sat silent on the far side of the single lamp, decapitated by the sharp edge of the black shade, unconcernedly breaking, cleaning and loading a gun, a pair of large, dexterous hands with no head to direct them, but remarkably agile and competent on their own.
‘We’re in the wine-cellars of the old castle. There was a whole labyrinth of them originally,but most are blocked up with rubble. We sealed off the safest part of the network as a repository. One of several. With three frontiers so close, we need a safe place handy in each country, where men and things can be got out of sight quickly until the heat is off. No,’ he said grinning, ‘don’t look round for treasure, we’ve cleared everything out. After to-night we shan’t be using this place again, it’s likely to be a little too precarious for our purposes.’
‘And you, where do you pass the—shall we say “unburied”?—part of your life? I suppose you’ve still got an identity somewhere among the living?’
‘Oh, several,’ he assured her merrily. ‘Most respectable ones, and in more than one country. As one frontier closes, another opens. To a new man, of course. You know, Maggie…’ She waited, watching him steadily. He was eyeing her with calculating thoughtfulness, like a sharp trader contemplating an inspired deal. ‘In a way, it’s a pity I couldn’t have both, you and this. Who’d have thought you’d stay in mourning for me all this time?’
She remembered the anguish he had cost her, the obsessive hold he had had upon her, and suddenly it dawned upon her that Francis had made the same mistake about her that this man was making now. Because she had all but wrecked her life on him, they believed she must have loved him, if only in retrospect after he was gone. She opened her eyes wide, and laughed in Robin’s face. It was perhaps the only luxury she had left, and not one that did her any credit, but she could not resist it.
‘In mourning for you? Do you know what you’ve been to me? A nightmare, a curse, and that’s all…’
The man with the gun said: ‘Achtung!’ sharply and clearly, and came to his feet.
Maggie’s laughter broke off in her throat. She crouched against the wall with head reared, ears straining after those small, stony sounds approaching somewhere outside the door. Robin watched the little sparks of hope come to life softly in her eyes, and the smile shattered by her laughter came back to his lips like a reflection in a pool reshaping itself after the dropping of a stone. He slid from the settle and stretched himself contentedly.
‘Too bad, my dear, it isn’t what you think.’
She had already grasped that it could not be. This was someone who knew the way in here, and approached quietly but without stealth. Not what she had been hoping for; merely what Robin had been waiting for.
The man with the gun crossed to the door and drew back the bolts. Maggie lowered her feet quickly over the edge of the stone shelf and stood up, drawing the folds of her soiled housecoat about her, for it seemed that time had run out.
Into the room walked four men, bringing in with them gusts of the chill night air and the green smell of the wet woods. Two of them were big, raw-boned mountaineers, from which side of the border there was no knowing. The third was slim and lightweight and young, and belted into a wasp-waisted raincoat. The fourth, who was thrust in limping heavily, with blood on his face and a gun in his back, was Francis.
Maggie made not a sound, but as if she had cried out to him his gaze flew to her, and fastened on her with such dismay and despair that her heart turned in her; and what he saw in her face was a mirror image of his own anguish. The only grain of consolation he had left was that she was safe in her bed; the only hope she had been able to keep was that he would launch the hunt for her in time. Both bubbles burst and vanished.
Maggie hardly noticed the dwindling of her own small chance of life in the sudden rush of rage and pain she felt for him. She had bought this fairly, but what had he done? She had brought him into this, unarmed and alone against a highly-organised and ruthless gang, and it was because of her actions that they were both going to die. She was to drown, because they wanted her found and accounted for. But Francis… No, better for them if he vanished altogether. What was the good of shutting her eyes? Since they had taken him prisoner somewhere on the road, perhaps well away from Scheidenau, why bring him back to this place if he was ever to leave it again?
Robin and his men were speaking rapid and colloquial German, Robin questioning, the others answering. She was soon lost in the language, but the implications were clear enough. Any trouble? No, no trouble, everything in hand, everything to numbers. There was something about a car—Francis’s car?-—that should be in Klostermann’s yard by now. They were all easy and content, not elated but extracting a certain workmanlike satisfaction out of their efficiency. Maggie stood almost forgotten, trying to understand, straining her senses in case there should be something, anything, at which hope could claw as it went by, and find a hold. For one of them, at least. For Francis! But she knew there would be nothing now. Just a few hours of deferment, and they had lost their chance for ever.
His captors had loosed their hold of him as soon as they had him inside, and the door firmly locked and bolted. Why not? He was battered and unarmed, and they had several guns between them. Even Robin had a gun in his hand now, a tiny, snub-nosed black thing that he dangled on his forefinger like a toy.
Something had been said about her, a question in the other direction. All three of Robin’s men were eyeing her with some concern; no doubt they had expected her to be in the lake by this time.
‘Oh, Maggie!’ said Robin carelessly, giving her a light glance over his shoulder. ‘There was a slight hitch there.’ He had slipped back into English, she thought, not by chance, but so that she should understand. ‘We shall have to keep her now until the Volga boatmen go home to sleep it off. They’re sure to tire sooner or later. Roker’s keeping an eye on them upstairs, he’ll give us the tip when they quit.’ He looked back at Francis, and spun the little gun in his hand, and the butt nestled into his palm like a bird homing. ‘But we may as well get this one underground,’ he said.
Francis had taken out a handkerchief, and was quietly wiping the blood from his cheek. His face,grey and drawn, kept a total, contained silence. Even when he raised his eyes for an instant to take one more look at Maggie, they gave nothing away beyond a kind of distant, regretful salutation. In the presence of these people he had nothing to say to her, not even with his eyes. The burden of longing and self-blame and love was not something he wanted to display for them or pile upon her at this last moment. As long as he had a card to play—and he had one, the last—he might as well play it, and speak to the point. The rest could stay unsaid; she wouldn’t be any the poorer or more unfortunate for ending her life without any declaration from Francis Killian.
‘There’s one
thing you don’t know… Aylwin,’ he said, his voice emerging hoarse and clumsy from a bruised throat, ‘I take it you are Aylwin? Who else? Your boys don’t know it, either, but all the way up that mountain section there was a car following me to-night. It was on my trail yesterday, too, I couldn’t be sure of it then, but I know it now. I thought it was your pack on my heels, till I hit your ambush ahead. There’s only one other thing it could be, you know that, don’t you? A police car keeping an eye on me. They weren’t far behind when this bunch flagged me down. You think they’re blind and deaf? Or do you suppose they’d drop their assignment just when it got interesting? They’ll be hard after us right now, and there’ll be reinforcements on the way. Do you think you’re ever going to get out of here unobserved?’
‘I think,’ said Robin, smiling at him lazily, eyes narrowed and golden, ‘that you are a gallant but hopeless liar, trying the only bluff you’ve got left. But just to be obliging…’ He turned to the three who stood watching and listening, and snapped back briskly into German. They shook their heads in vigorous rebuttal, laughing the story away with absolute confidence. ‘You see? No shadow, no police, no fairy tales. If you had a tail, it got lopped off en route. But I think you never had one.’
‘Your trouble,’ said Francis levelly, ‘is that you have to have too much faith in your understrappers. The usual trouble with businesses that get too big. That Dodge will never get as far as Klostermann’s. If they miss it in Felsenbach, they’ll pick it up before it reaches Regenheim. And in case there’s any doubt about the place where I was waylaid, and about your tie-in with the affair, let me tell you I’ve left them my wallet and papers there on the spot. With the whole set of photographs of your grave.’
The first faint shadow of doubt touched but could not deface Robin’s smiling certainty. He turned his head again to shoot orders at his underlings; and they laid hands urgently on Francis and began to turn out his pockets, though they still poured voluble scorn on his story. He raised his hands out of their way, flinching as they handled him.
‘No wallet, no passport, no driving licence. You think I came out without those, Aylwin? Don’t bother to send a man back to pick them out of the ditch, the police did that long ago. And did you know that there’s an English detective in Scheidenau, co-operating with the locals? He followed me from England. Maybe he’s the one who’s been on my trail all day. He certainly was when we had lunch at The Bear.’
‘All right, so you left your wallet in the ditch. What good is it going to do you? Someone will spend your money and throw the rest away. I’ll believe in your English detective when I see him. And as for your police tail, Max with your hired job would have run head-on into it round the bend, and got word to me long ago.’
‘Maybe he did run into it, and they picked him up on the spot. Ever think of that? Better not write them off so easily, Aylwin, they were there, all right.’ It was his only anchor now, a frail one, but not an illusion. They had been there. God knew what had become of them now, but they might yet find their way where they were needed. ‘You haven’t a hope of getting out of here unseen. Why add more murders to the score? It’s long enough already. You might get away with Friedl. Touch Maggie Tressider, and they’ll hunt you to the end of the world.’
It was breath wasted. Even if he had been subject to intimidation, even if he had believed, Aylwin had gone too far now to turn back. He yawned elaborately in Francis’s face, and smiled, reaching up one hand to turn the shade of the lamp, and direct the light towards the darkest corner of the cellar. The circle of pallor flowed across the flagstones like a silent tide. Against the wall a heap of dark earth reared into view, and the rims of two of the stones showed black and thin as pen-strokes.
‘Get them up!’
They had crowbars and spades propped in the corner. The slanting light cast monstrous shadows from the stooped shoulders and heads of the two mountain men, as they leaned their weight almost languidly on the crowbars, and the thin black line at one end of the nearer stone broadened into a gash, a gaping rectangle of darkness.
For me, thought Francis, not for Maggie; he said they’d have to keep her until the Volga boatmen went home… Boatmen! Yes… so someone’s balking them from going near the lake. At this hour? A grain of hope clung obstinately to life within him, for the police might justify him yet, and come in time for Maggie, though not for him. Bargaining was out of the question, what had he to bargain with? Certainly not his own life, that was already forfeit. No means even of buying time. If he set out to sell his life as high as he could, there would be bullets flying here, and Aylwin might opt to cut his losses and change his plans, and hurry both his prisoners out of the world and into the ground together. No, nothing left to do but count on the Volga boatmen—whoever they were, thank God for them!—and submit without provocation, and pray that they might be police patrols who would never go home until she was found alive.
Robin Aylwin swung one long leg negligently from the edge of the settle, played with his little pistol, and watched his men at work. A job like any other. He paid no more attention to Francis, and Francis, arrived at the bleak conclusion that there was nothing he could do for Maggie but die submissively, had fallen mute. It was Maggie who broke the silence.
‘Francis!’
Never in his life had he heard his name spoken like that. A small, fine-spun, golden, intimate sound, like the marvellous mezza voce she could float clean to the back row of the remotest gallery of any opera house in the world, to pierce the last listener’s heart as if no one existed but himself and the singer. Out of the centre of one being, and aimed with certainty to reach the centre of another. For no one was present here now but Francis and Maggie. She had excised the others from her own consciousness and she banished them from his. There was only one thing left that she could do for Francis, and she was doing it as well as she knew how.
‘Francis, I’m sorry I ever got you into this. Forgive me! But I want to tell you that for my part I’m glad to have known you, even on these conditions. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I don’t have to say good-bye. I shan’t be long after you.’
Robin had turned his head to stare at her. The men leaning hard over the half-open grave froze, and hung watching and listening. And then Robin’s head went back with a toss like an angry horse balking, and he uttered a shout of brief and violent laughter. Something in the sound sent his men scurrying back to work on the second stone in haste. Never had Maggie looked at him like that, never spoken his name with that particular awareness that suddenly bestowed a greatly enlarged identity. Never had she turned on him this starry face, with blazing, recognising eyes wide-open to love. He had gone to the trouble to stage a beautiful declaration of love for her once, and she had not even heard him. A phoney love, of course! Still, by all the rules she ought to have succumbed.
The flagstones were propped back gently against the wall, uncovering the greyish, hard-packed earth, and the long, narrow hole from which the heap of soil had been dug out already in preparation for a new incumbent. Harsh darkness and a sinister bony light, distorted figures stooped over an open grave. Maggie’s mind drifted, recoiling from a present that was unbearable and a future that was non-existent. This was the dungeon scene from Fidelio. But Leonora had at least had a pistol, and here all the pistols were on the other side. She had nothing to fight with, nothing with which to defend her own or attack her enemy. ‘Ich bin sein Weib!’ No, this would be a Fidelio without any ecstatic love duet, without any final triumph for justice…
Robin slid from the settle and spread his feet firmly. She saw his thumb slide back the safety catch of the gun. He had forgotten her again; his attention was fixed on the open grave. Business as usual, he had his own affairs to look after, and no emotion had any part in them, not even offended vanity.
‘You won’t be lonely,’ he said pleasantly, his amber eyes measuring Francis, ‘you’ll be joining the sitting tenant. A fellow-countryman of yours who also got too nosy. The erra
nd-boy always thinks he can run the business better than the managing director.’
He raised his hand without haste, and levelled the gun. The grave-diggers and their colleagues drew off from Francis and stood clear, waiting phlegmatically to fill in the hole again and replace the stones. The long finger on the trigger contracted gently.
Maggie awoke before it tightened to the firing-point. Nothing to fight with? But she had! She had one weapon, the ultimate weapon, not effective to stand off death, but a grenade exploding in Robin Aylwin’s orderly plans. She had a body he needed unmarked for his own purposes, with lungs that could still breathe in lake-water. She gathered it in a convulsion of vengeful energy, and flung it between Francis and the gun.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
« ^ »
The gun went off, a sharp, spiteful waspish sound, lost in Robin’s startled cry. Maggie hung poised in front of Francis with spread arms, and felt him lurch and recover at her back, fending himself off from the wall. There was no pain, no impact, nothing. She had under-estimated the jungle speed of Robin’s reactions. In the instant that she moved he had divined her purpose, and methodical in everything he did, had adhered stubbornly to his own intent. The bullet must have been in motion when he flung up his wrist to let it whine in ricochet from the vault above, and bury itself in the wall. He could not avoid her without avoiding Francis, too. Frantically she reached back a hand to feel for Francis, to assure herself that he was there intact, if only for one instant of communion, and to fasten herself to him indivisibly so that he could not be killed without killing her. His arm groped its way about her waist and lifted her. She felt the hardness of his body, and heard him breathing in heavy, painful groans.
But all she saw was Robin’s face, and that she would never forget, however long she had for remembering. In the very moment that he had deflected his shot, to keep his prize suicide presentable for an autopsy surgeon and an inquest jury, everything in him had suddenly curdled and changed. Intelligence he had, it worked at the speed of light. The whine of the ricochet was still flittering about the vault like a disturbed bat when the true horror hit him, the thing that undid him utterly. He saw in a blinding vision the full significance of what she had done, and for once in a cold life he reacted without calculation, in a frenzy of irrational jealousy. He had never cared a damn for her, nor did he now, nor would he ever, for her or any woman. And yet it was an intolerable outrage to him that she, who felt nothing for him, should toss her life away willingly for another man. How could it matter to him? He had lived very successfully without need or respect or regard for love, and yet all that impressive erection suddenly crumbled to a mouthful of bitter ashes. It mattered, all right! It mattered to the heart, to the bone, to the marrow of the bone. She had tricked him, cheated him out of his whole achievement. She had done what no one else had ever done, made him feel.