The Horn of Roland

by Ellis Peters

‘Good! Stick to that!’ He sounded suddenly a little drunk, but not with alcohol, or with music, either. ‘Would there be any other little thing I could relieve you of?’

  There was, and he took that, too. No one else appeared in the corridor. Or, momentarily, the world.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, emerging dazedly, ‘you’re one of those people who could be described as having taking ways.’

  ‘And what are you? A cheerful giver?’ He kissed her again, very quickly and shyly and kindly, not fooling any longer, not even pretending to be cheeky about it. ‘I’ve got to borrow a motor-bike.’

  ‘Mike – don’t you need money? To hire one?’

  ‘No, it’s all right, I’ve got a friend – up on the fairground.’

  This time it was he who turned back at the last moment to offer her an impulsive gift. ‘You know what? Your old man’s all right! Even just on my own account, now, let alone yours, I wouldn’t allow anything to happen to him.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  She had not asked anything, or doubted anything. It would have been like trying to halt a hurricane, and one that was on her side. When he was gone she waited a little while, standing alone in the white corridor behind the hall, a little numbed with the unexpectedness of it. She had never felt so sure of anyone, or so independent of all others, until now.

  When she slipped back through the glass door, Lucas was already working his way by instinct towards the exit, and looking round for her. She went to his side, composing her face into the daughterly shape required of her, though she no longer felt like a daughter, or certainly not to the exclusion of other and more disturbing identities. They reached the outer door together, and passed through it into the sunlit courtyard.

  They looked at each other along braced shoulders, like friends, not like father and daughter. She had never felt more tender and fond towards him, perhaps because he had just surrendered something, and did not yet realise it. He looked exhausted but relaxed, as though he had just gained something, too, and had not yet had time to assess it.

  ‘Good?’ she said.

  ‘Good. Better than I expected. That boy will be a great horn-player, among the greatest. In five years, perhaps, or six, the world will know about him. I don’t have to tell him, he knows it. Or to warn him, either, he knows the odds against, and the dangers of over-confidence. I’m glad to have heard him,’ he said, withdrawing into his private place, ‘though he was not at his best today, I should guess. Fractured. I wonder why?’

  The big black car was waiting in the shadow across the courtyard. Crista got out of it, and came to meet them.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Mr Corinth, Herr Wehrle is here in Herr Graf’s office, and would like you to look in before you leave.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lucas resignedly, withdrawing his mind from music with the lingering implication of pain; and they followed her along more corridors to a quiet rear room where Wehrle waited for them.

  It was Heinz-Otto Graf who sat squarely behind the big desk, with the light from the window on his left hand; but it was Dieter Wehrle who dominated the conference that followed, without asserting himself, without doing the lion’s share of the talking, without even raising his voice. As usual, he had no attendant officer at his elbow to take notes, and took none himself, but clearly he knew everything that had happened at the Himmelhof since Lucas’s banishment to that delectable prison. Nor would he forget a word of what was said now.

  ‘I had thought,’ he said, when they had been over every circumstance, ‘of having a boat patrol tonight. But apart from being short of men and exciting too much attention from people in the town, I decided against it. It might escape the notice of the public, with care, it certainly could not escape the notice of a person bent on the kind of attack we are trying to prevent. We should succeed only in postponing it. He would be warned off at once, and lie in ambush for a better opportunity. And we should be no nearer finding him. I prefer to rely on the same precautions we have adopted so far. And perhaps one added one.’

  ‘We’ve had a surfeit of warnings,’ Lucas said in a resolutely matter-of-fact voice, ‘but so far nothing has happened. I begin to believe that nothing will happen – that you might just as well withdraw your guard altogether from the island. I’d go so far as to bet that we’re in for a perfectly quiet night.’

  ‘I cannot be sure of that,’ said Wehrle simply.

  Lucas didn’t believe it, either. He had been careful not to say what he actually meant, because Una would not have liked it any better than Wehrle. What was really in his mind was that whatever was going to happen had better happen soon. Neither side could stand this strain for long. If the police could be induced to go away, perhaps Valentine would materialise at last. He was beginning to look forward to that encounter as the only way out of the impasse, the only means by which he could ever discover the true extent of his guilt, or hope for peace for himself or that poor boy. There were times now when he felt closer to Valentine Gelder than to anyone in the world, even Una. His daughter was at his side, watching over him with absolute loyalty; but Valentine’s son was inside him, dissolved into his flesh and spirit. What kind of childhood, what kind of adolescence, had the boy had, if now at the end of it he was poised and dedicated thus entirely to a single hate?

  Lucas, who had loved and pitied himself as tenderly as most men, was being reorientated to love and pity of the enemy who threatened him, and whose case was gradually coming to seem to him so much more tragic than his own.

  ‘I am still responsible for protecting you,’ said Wehrle, ‘and I don’t intend to leave anything to chance. Before tonight I hope to have a further report on Frau Gelder’s movements after she left here. Meantime, I’m afraid you will have to reconcile yourself to being nursed. But at least it seems we can be easy about this young Englishman of yours. There is one more thing we can do.’

  He opened the drawer in the right-hand corner of Herr Graf’s massive desk, and laid upon the leather-faced top between them a small black gun. ‘For you, Mr Corinth. As an additional precaution.’

  Lucas recoiled visibly, shaking his head. ‘No, thank you. I don’t carry a gun.’

  ‘You have done so, I think, on occasion. You were accustomed to them once, no doubt you’re still competent to handle them with responsibility.’

  Yes, Lucas had handled them in his time. Just such a pistol as this he had carried more than once on those mountain journeys, and been prepared to use at need. Had used, at least once. He sat staring at the little, inert thing lying there innocently on the desk. An Austrian-made Steyr .32, to a design originally brought out by the Belgian Pieper gunsmiths. Nearly seven inches long, weighing nearly a pound and a half, and able to put a bullet through from four to five inches of pine board at fifteen to twenty feet. Rather an uncomfortable and unwieldy thing to carry undetected in a well-fitting suit. Even smaller calibre guns can kill, at close quarters. This one was meant to be a killer.

  ‘I won’t carry fire-arms. I appreciate the offer, but I can’t accept it.’

  ‘Why not? You can’t afford to take any risks,’ urged Graf, thinking of his investment.

  No, Lucas couldn’t afford to take any risks with Valentine Gelder’s life. That was precisely the reason why he could not go armed.

  ‘I have a revulsion against them now,’ he said, frowning. ‘I have every confidence in your ability to protect me, if you insist on my retaining the guard. But don’t ask me to use fire-arms myself.’

  He heard the rustle of a skirt behind him, and a hand touched his arm in urgent appeal. He looked round, expecting Una’s reproachful face, and looked into the dark eyes of Crista Lohr.

  ‘Please!’ she said quietly. ‘Take it!’

  The hand at his sleeve was trembling slightly, he felt its vibration in his own flesh. Did it matter so much to her? And why? For his sake, or because she felt herself to be carrying the honour of the town in her hands, and would take it to heart as a personal failure if she let anything happen to him?
She was an advanced case of conscience and professional pride, but there might be a grain of awareness of Lucas as a person, too, mightn’t there? It was she who had touched him this time.

  ‘I’m sorry, Crista, but I can’t.’

  ‘Please!’ she repeated, hardly above a whisper. ‘I should be so much happier.’

  ‘But I shouldn’t,’ he said firmly. ‘No, that’s one thing you mustn’t ask of me.’ He looked up at Wehrle, and from the corner of his eye he saw Herr Graf heave up his massive shoulders in a fatalistic shrug. ‘Put it away. I haven’t touched a gun since I got to England. I don’t want to renew that acquaintance now.’

  Wehrle knew determination – or obstinacy? – when he saw it confronting him. Without argument he opened the drawer and slipped the Steyr back into it. The very heft of it in his grasp conveyed to Lucas that it was loaded. He remembered the balance of such a pistol in his hand, and the slight drag of its weight in his pocket on the way up the Filsertal in the dark, many a time.

  ‘As you please. We shall do our best to make it irrelevant in any case.’

  The car was waiting in the courtyard. Lucas went out to it empty-handed, as he had preferred, and was ferried back to his island in the early evening’s radiant calm, in a placidity and silence which had much of resignation in them, but little of peace.

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ he said suddenly, in the car. ‘It isn’t that I won’t do everything possible to keep my life. But that isn’t the way.’

  ‘No,’ said Una, no less quietly. ‘I understand that. I’m with you.’

  He had not fully realised, until she answered him, that it was to Crista he had been speaking.

  It was a golden twilight. Even after the sun had dropped behind the peaks of the Silvretta, the afterglow lingered in a dazzling sky for longer than usual, and cast an opalescent reflection over the surface of the lake, so that light seemed to be emanating from twin bowls of crystal, one above them and one below. The tips of the mountains deepened to a dusky blue in contrast to the brightness behind them. From the windows on the sheer side of the island they could see the town still bathed in slanting sunlight, and every little motor-boat trail was a silver pencil-mark across the mirror of lilac water.

  They had eaten the dinner the two girls had cooked in partnership, and drunk their coffee, lingering over it. They had washed up and put away the antique china plates and the modern cooking pots that matched so oddly. Geestler was making his evening round of the whole cascade of gardens and pavilions. Richard Schwalbe patrolled close to the house. In only a little over twenty-four hours, this had become normality. And yet Una’s unease grew with every moment.

  It distilled from Lucas. His calm was unnatural and frightening to her. What was the use of Mike Brace scouring the Tyrol on his borrowed motor-bike in search of a possibly unfindable witness, if Lu sat here communing with his own secret mind, and more and more surely reconciling himself to being a sacrifice? Almost as if he did not really want his old friend’s son – his own enemy – to fail of what he had set out to do.

  True, he neither did nor said anything now to suggest that he was even aware of a death hovering over him. He talked sensibly, he ate well, he was – what should one call it? Relaxed? Apathetic? Hypnotised? – at any rate, coherent and equable, with none of the momentary acidities or flares of impatience that were common with him. Considerate with her and with Crista to the point where it began to seem almost unnatural. Rather as though the waiting death had drawn so close to him now that he could not see it, because it was out of focus, though in the core of his mind he knew where it was, and was unconsciously waiting for the hand to be laid on his shoulder.

  Una was leaning with Crista on the crumbling wall of the terrace, their backs turned to the window of the salon, which was not yet lit. Lucas was at the harpsichord, playing from memory morsels of Bach and Mozart and Couperin, playing with complete control and total absorption. Una had a macabre vision of one more in the long mediaeval cycles of the ‘Dance of Death’, a panel none of the artists had ever painted: The harpsichord-player. The man sitting rapt at the keyboard, wholly concentrated on the score before him, and the long, bony hand reaching over his shoulder to turn the page for him.

  ‘If only,’ she said, ‘there was something we could do!’

  ‘They’ve done everything,’ said Crista, ‘everything one can think of.’

  ‘Have they, though? They’ve covered all the obvious approaches, I know, and they’ll be on watch all night, between the two of them. All this face of the house is checked, all the doors and windows – I know. But the place sprawls over so much ground, and there are so many ground-floor windows.’

  ‘They go round them all and shutter them, after dark.’

  ‘Yes, but even the other side, the cliff side … I don’t believe all the shutters are closed – or else some of them have dropped from their hinges. Don’t you remember how the light reflected from glass, when we were looking up from the boat?’

  Now she recalled clearly one or two winking stars, high above the rocks. Rocks so broken that here and there, for all the entire townward face appeared sheer, there might be places where it could be climbed.

  ‘We could check them, if you like,’ suggested Crista. ‘It would be better than doing nothing. We could cover all the other side of the house, see that the windows are fastened, close the shutters, if they’re open – lock the doors of the rooms if there are any where the shutters are broken.’

  ‘A good idea! We can soon do it between us. Start from the central block, and then work outwards both ways along the wings.’

  She had revived at the prospect of having some activity, at least potentially useful, to occupy her hands and her mind. It might be closing only a few insignificant chinks in their armour, but it was something. And from every window, as she went from room to room, she would be watching for the silver pencil-mark that did not curve and return to the town, but sheered straight ahead for the southern point of their island and the landing-stage beyond. He had said he would come, however late, and she had acquired, in one day, a great deal of confidence in Mike Brace.

  ‘We should tell him,’ said Crista.

  ‘Him?’ Una was momentarily lost.

  ‘Otherwise he may miss us and wonder where we are. He might come looking for you. Better he should stay here,’ Crista said.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I’ll tell him.’

  She went into the salon, and suddenly the back view of Lucas at the keyboard stopped her in the doorway, and held her still for a moment, watching him. His spine was long and slender and very straight, the neck and head set elegantly back to continue the erect line. The back of his head was beautiful and young. He had the intense fragility that is made to last, apparently, for ever, every line fine-drawn, with an edge like steel; and suddenly she wondered if Crista would have seen him in the same terms, if she had done this errand instead, and what would have replaced for her the spurt of maternal tenderness which had halted Una in her tracks.

  He finished a Mozart minuet, played with the keys absently for a moment; and then he felt her there, and turned and smiled.

  ‘Lu, Crista and I are going round all the ground-floor rooms over the lake, to make sure everything’s secured.’ She went close to him, and laid a hand experimentally on his shoulder. If death dared do that, why shouldn’t life, too? It might even act as a charm against evil. ‘We won’t be long. Go on playing. We shall hear you, every time we come back to the colonnade.’

  ‘What would you like?’ he asked, picking out single notes for their brief sweetness while he waited for her orders.

  ‘Biber’s “Battle” – all of it.’ It was long and complex and staggeringly original and modern, considering it was nearly three hundred years old, and it had been one of her favourites ever since she had learned to take delight in the more modest harpsichord Lu had acquired at a county auction sale. It had more movements than she could remember, and it should keep him busy, and with at least the illu
sion of an audience, until she came back to him. ‘Don’t forget the drum effects, will you?’

  ‘I won’t,’ he promised. And by the time she had reached the doorway he had squared his shoulders and flexed his memory, and was launched on the first movement of La Battalia.

  Crista walked with her round the colonnade to the main block of the house, with head erect and ears pricked, almost reluctant to withdraw from that lovely, lively, spirited sound.

  ‘He plays so beautifully,’ she said, grieving.

  ‘Yes. I’m not sure,’ said Una with arrogant honesty, ‘that he’s a genius, but I do know he doesn’t fall far short. He likes to think of himself as a composer. And second as a conductor. But I’ve known him best as a performer, and that’s how I think of him.’

  ‘He gives concerts, too? At home?’

  ‘Not often, but very occasionally he does. He likes conducting better. He plays the oboe, too. Well, he can play most things, if he puts his mind to it. It’s his language, you see. Once you know the classic tongue, it’s only like catching up with the dialects.’

  They had reached the end of the curving wing, where the colonnade brought them to a small door that led into the main block. Within, a corridor pierced directly through, bisecting the main hall beneath the great staircase, baroque and dual, its twin arms encircling a statuary group of Venus in her dove-drawn car.

  ‘Do we look upstairs, too? You think we ought to?’

  The empty corridors, arched and encrusted with heavy decorative plaster, rang hollowly to the clicking heels of their sandals. All those dilapidated splendours, the pale blue and gold satins dropping into holes on the chairs and couches, the damask-panelled walls, the crazy, uncomfortable Empire furniture, the elaborate white ceramic stoves crowned with bulging vases and coy nymphs, the ceilings encrusted with chipped putti, all smelted of the past, a cool, damp, faintly spicy smell, as remote from danger as the fierce, heartening smell of breakfast coffee. Effete ghosts might creep in here, but not armed enemies. Even the ghosts would be as flimsy as the china flowers growing in broken profusion round the frames of the mirrors, incapable of harm.