by Ellis Peters
“I’m convinced,” said Welland vehemently, “that they do. The local police know about mountains, they can’t have failed to see what a queer sort of accident it was for an experienced man. Yet within a day they’d closed the case. I think they’ve had their orders.”
“Even if you believed in their honesty,” said the Director drily, “our position would be the same. I can’t impress upon you too strongly, Mr. Welland, that everything to do with this Institute is top secret. In this case or any case that involves us in any way, nothing whatever may be confided to foreign authorities, friendly or otherwise. There can be no overt enquiries.”
“No, sir, I realise that. But I’m there on the spot. I week-end in the mountains quite frequently, they’re used to me. I move about quite freely, I speak the language a little. I could look into it myself, without alerting anyone.”
He offered them a dutiful silence, but neither of them, it seemed, had anything to say. They looked at him narrowly, with unwinking concentration, and he found it unnerving that he had not the least idea what either of them was thinking. They were the product of the closed establishment, closed men, each in his own air-tight, suspicious, ambitious, narrow world, specialising in ever more attenuated expertise. The horrific thought visited him that he might live to be like them. He found it absolutely vital to give utterance again to the realities that still existed in him, while they existed.
“I intend to find out if Terrell was murdered. I can’t help it. If he was killed for activities that seemed to him in line of duty, then I believe we owe it to him to investigate, and to see that justice is done. He’s entitled to justice. Quite apart from the possibility that something is going on there that affects our national interests and security. We can’t just let murder go by default. It isn’t right.”
He produced this final simplicity with an authority that restored its lustre. He said with dignity: “I would much rather proceed with your approval, of course. I hope I have it.”
But he would proceed with or without it. He was committed by his conscience. An interesting survival, but there he was in the flesh, determined and distressed, perfectly conscious of what he was saying and doing, and prepared to be judged by it.
“My dear boy!” said Sir Broughton, for the first time warming into the charming smile that transformed his professionally austere face into something human and likeable. “Proceed with our blessing, of course, but with our warnings, too. One man, according to your theory, has already been killed. I beg you to take care of yourself. That’s the first essential. The second is the preservation of complete secrecy for this establishment. That I can’t over-stress. And the third thing is something I feel I ought to tell you. If you’re going into this at all, you must go with your eyes open. Nobody knows this, outside this Institute and its parent Ministry.”
He came back slowly to his desk, and leaned on his hands there, pondering. For a moment he looked more than his age, an elderly man bowed by his responsibilities.
“When Charles Alder vanished, his current working notebooks vanished with him. They contained all his projects at the experimental stage, and at that stage they were so completely his own brain-children that no one could continue his work on them. No other sketches, no other outlines existed. We don’t know, apart from a few preliminary ideas, what was in them. But he was at the height of his powers, and working like a demon, mainly on problems of aerodynamics. If he’s been pursuing the same lines of research elsewhere, there could be sensational developments. There could be more than enough at stake to invoke murder. You understand that?”
“Yes, sir,” said Welland, weak with relief and gratitude, “I understand.”
“And you understand the absolute need for secrecy? You must not say one word to anyone about this. You haven’t taken anyone into your confidence? The press men, your friends?”
“I didn’t tell them anything, beyond showing curiosity over Terrell’s record. Knowing I’m stationed in Prague, they wouldn’t wonder at that.” He was all eagerness now, dazzled and exhilarated by the Director’s energy.
“And no one else, either?”
If Welland hesitated at all, it was so briefly that the instant passed unnoticed. “No, sir, no one knows anything about this from me.”
“Good! Then go ahead, but take care of yourself. If you do hit upon a lead to Alda, you must report at once to us. Don’t go on alone and take risks, just report back and wait for orders, you understand? I’ll see that the Minister is kept informed, otherwise no one must know of this except the three of us here. I’ll arrange with the embassy in Prague, and have any message from you transmitted direct to us here by telephone. We’ll have a code signal agreed before you leave here. If you locate Alda, then send it. When we receive it, it may be advisable for Mr. Blagrove to come to Prague on some pretext, to be on hand—and to help you,” he said, the human smile reappearing for one abstracted instant, “in case of need. Even you may need help sometimes, Mr. Welland. Who knows?”
“I’ll be very careful, sir. You can rely on me.”
“We are relying on you, my boy. You’ll report to nobody else but this Institute. Not even our people in Prague. You understand? Nobody else!”
He had accomplished all and more than he had hoped for. At the edge of an adventure, with the water cold and mysterious before his plunge, Robert Welland was a vindicated, even a happy, man.
Or he would have been happy, but for one small scruple.
As soon as he left the conference in Sir Broughton’s room he hurried to the Underground station, and made his way back into London, to the Chelsea street where Chloe Terrell had her top-floor flat. It hadn’t, of course, been absolutely honest of him not to tell Sir Broughton about the note he’d dropped through Mrs. Terrell’s letter-box, when he found her out. The note certainly did confide something, more than he should have said, even to the suggestion of murder. But there was no harm done, after all, because Mrs. Terrell was not merely away from home, but out of the country. He had Blagrove’s own word for that. So no one would have read the note he should never have been so indiscreet as to write, and what he had said was not, in fact, a lie. No one knew anything about this affair from him. And no one would.
There wasn’t even any hurry about it, his sense of anxiety and impatience was folly. She was in Czechoslovakia, and she wouldn’t, couldn’t be back yet. He had plenty of time to dig out the porter of the service flats, explain that he’d left a vital paper by mistake, not knowing Mrs. Terrell was out of the country, and must recover it and get word to her elsewhere at once. The porter would have keys, and it wouldn’t be difficult to establish his own good faith. When he’d burned that note he would feel better, because his shadow of a lie wouldn’t exist, then, and there would be no leakages through him. He liked to have everything above-board, and that was how it would be.
All the same, his mind was not quite easy. Better just have a look at the top-floor flat first, before he tackled the porter, and make sure that it was still closed and empty. Just to reassure himself.
The lift was creaking its way slowly upward as he stood in the hall; he had caught a glimpse of the door closing upon a dark, slender girl with her arms full of parcels, and to judge by the time that elapsed before the lift-cable was still and the door clashed open, high up the shaft, she was disentangling her purchases at least four floors up. He pressed the call button, and nothing whatever happened. A woman with both hands full doesn’t stop to close the lift doors after her. He would have to walk up.
He didn’t know why he was hurrying as he tackled the stairs. Hadn’t he already told himself that there was no haste, no possibility that Mrs. Terrell would have returned and read his note? But he began taking the steps two at a time before he reached the second landing, and by the fourth he was running, his heart pounding and his breath short. He came to the corner from which he could see Chloe Terrell’s door, and baulked as if he had run his nose into a brick wall. For the outside door of the flat stood open. A
nd the pretty girl with the parcels stood in the hall with her burdens dropped unceremoniously about her feet, and his letter open and unfolded in her hands.
She was still as a statue until his rush of movement ended in abrupt stillness, and then she was aware of him, and looked up at him over the spread sheet of paper with great dark eyes blank with horror. For a moment they stared at each other in fascination and dread. He didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t know what to think.
She couldn’t possibly be, she wasn’t more than eighteen or nineteen! But women did marry as young as that. How was he to know that the wife would be a mere child? Horrified, he lifted his leaden feet up the last few steps, and moved towards her like a hypnotised rabbit, utterly helpless.
“Mrs. Terrell…?”
She stared back at him as if she had heard nothing, following her own fixed channel of consciousness. She looked down at the sheet of paper in her hand, and back at him.
“You’re Robert Welland? It was you who left this note?”
She had a voice that startled, an octave deeper than anyone would have expected; a gruff whisper, like an adolescent boy not yet used to his new instrument. She took a small step back from him, warily and wildly, and stumbled over her own parcels discarded on the floor.
“Yes, I’m Robert Welland. I didn’t mean….I didn’t realise…. Mrs. Terrell, I must apologise and explain….”
“I’m not Mrs. Terrell,” said the girl, shrinking. “I shouldn’t have opened it, but I thought it might be something I ought to send on. I’m Tossa Barber. Sorry, that won’t mean a thing to you.” She put up her hand dazedly, and pushed back the fall of dark hair from her brow. “I’m Mrs. Terrell’s daughter. I came up to do some shopping for the holidays, and I use her flat when I’m in town.” It was extraordinary that she should feel she had to explain to him, when it was he who had so much to explain, the letter, the implications of the letter, his presence here in such a hurry. Suddenly she was calm for both of them, because it was too late to take back anything, and there was no way to go except forward. “You say here,” she challenged pointblank, “that my step-father was murdered.”
In what he had written he had not, he remembered, used that word. He thought of a hundred ingenious evasions, and confronted by Tossa’s large, unwavering eyes, rejected them all. “Yes,” he said helplessly, “that’s what I believe.”
“Come in,” said Tossa. “You may as well. Now I have to know. You can see that, can’t you? I’ve got to know.”
He made one convulsive attempt to extricate himself, even as he was stepping forward into the flat and closing the outer door behind him. He couldn’t possibly confide in a child like this, even if he hadn’t just sworn secrecy under awful warnings; but neither could he stand in an open doorway close to the echoing well of the stairs and the lift-shaft, and make his excuses for all the house to hear.
“Miss Barber, I’m very sorry I’ve alarmed you for nothing. Since I left this note for your mother I’ve had an opportunity to consult the people who’re best-informed about your father’s…” These relationships were confusing him, he didn’t quite know where he was with them. “—about Mr. Terrell’s death. I should be glad if you would try to forget about the whole matter. I did have my suspicions, but they’re not shared by others who should know best, and it may be that I was quite wrong.”
“You just said: ‘That’s what I believe’,” she reminded him, “not: ‘That’s what I believed’.” She slipped by him very quickly at the slight movement of retreat he made, and put her back against the door. “No, you can’t! You can’t go away now and leave me like this.”
And he saw that he couldn’t. Not simply because she already understood too much, and could make his escape impossible, but because her face was so desperately resolute and her eyes so full of an acute personal distress for which he was responsible. It was already too late to undo that; all his disclaimers wouldn’t convince her now, all his reassurances wouldn’t restore her peace of mind. His own little indiscretion had trapped him. It wasn’t enough even to plead that he had promised secrecy, since his promise had been breached by accident almost as soon as he had given it. “Miss Barber,” he began earnestly, “I did come here with certain information that disquieted me, and I wanted to consult Mrs. Terrell before I took the matter any further. I’ve now had it impressed upon me that this whole affair is urgently secret, and I’m bound by that. It was foolish of me not to have realised it for myself, and I’m deeply sorry that my mistake has now caused you distress. I wish I could undo it.”
“You can’t,” said Tossa fiercely, “and you can’t leave it like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have read it, but I did, and he was my step-father, even if we weren’t at all close, and do you expect me just to sit back and live with the thought that somebody murdered him, and not do anything at all about it?”
“I sincerely hope there’s going to be no need for you to do anything about it. That’s a job for others.”
“No!” she protested passionately. “That isn’t good enough. That doesn’t help me.”
He had already reached the point of knowing that he was going to tell her everything. Maybe he was a good judge of human nature, and maybe he wasn’t, but it seemed to him that there was only one way of ensuring that secrecy should indeed be complete. She had the passion to demand her rights from him, maybe she had also the generosity to meet him half-way when he piled the lot into her arms without reserve.
“Miss Barber, I gave my word. There’s no way I can satisfy you, except by extending that promise to cover you as well as myself. If I tell you everything, then I shall be vouching for you, too. Staking my reputation on you. Maybe my life.”
She opened her eyes wide to stare at him in wonder and doubt, but she could find no hint of anything bogus in his face or his tone. It seemed people still existed who talked in those terms, quite without cant.
“Do you want to know on those conditions? Remember, I shall then be relying upon you absolutely.”
“You can,” she said. “I won’t breathe a word to anyone, I promise. Yes, I want to know.”
“And you understand that it’s a matter of national security that what I tell you should go no further?”
“Yes, I understand. You have my word.” Her face was earnest with the terrible solemnity of youth. Yes, he thought, she had the generosity and imagination even to be able to keep secrets. And he stopped being afraid of her, just when he should have begun to be afraid.
He sat down with her on the antique bench in Chloe’s hall, and told her the whole story, suppressing nothing, not even the significance of the notebooks Alda had smuggled out of the country with him when he vanished.
For a moment, at the end of it, her sceptical mind revolted. Spies, counter-spies, defecting scientists, all exist, of course, but as sordid professionals fumbling grimy secrets of dubious value, for which governments must be crazy to pay out a farthing in bribes or wages. Not like this, not with ideals mixed up in the squalor, and patriotism—whatever that ought to mean, in these days of supranational aspirations—and honest, clean danger. It couldn’t be true! Robert Welland was a romantic who had constructed a romantic’s ingenious theory out of a few chance facts, and all he was going back to was the long, slow let-down into the untidy world of reality. He wouldn’t find anything; there was nothing to find. Herbert Terrell had simply made a mis-step at last, the one that waits for every expert somewhere along the way, and fallen to his death.
Just for a moment she held the facts away from her, and saw them thus distantly and coolly; and then the whole erection of evidence toppled upon her and overwhelmed her, and she believed with all her heart, and was lost. She had no longer any defences against Terrell. He was dead, murdered, killed as the result of something he had undertaken out of his sense of duty to his profession and his country. He was more than she had ever given him a chance to show, and she owed him justice all the more now, because she had denied it to him living.
“So you see that everything possible will be done to find out the truth. And you will be very careful, won’t you, not to let anything out even by accident? Remember I’ve vouched for you as for myself.”
“I won’t forget. I’m very grateful for your trust, I shan’t betray it.” She was staring before her with stunned eyes, seeing herself suddenly drawn, almost against her will, into a world of noble clichés, which she vehemently distrusted, but for which there existed no substitutes.
“And you’ll try to set your mind at rest, and leave everything to us? I’m sorry that I’ve troubled your peace at all.”
“Oh, no!” she said positively. “It’s better to know.”
And to his question, with only the faintest note of reserve:
“I know you’ll do everything possible. And thank you!”
But he hadn’t her personal obligations, and he hadn’t her sense of guilt, and how could he expect her to sit back and let him lift the burden of her conscience and carry it away with him?
The first thing she looked round for, when he was gone, was the large-scale map of Central Europe she had just bought at Hatchards.
“Czech visas,” said Toddy thoughtfully, “cost money.” He sat back on his heels and pondered the delectable roads racing eastwards across the map, and his expression was speculative and tempted. “Not that I’m saying it wouldn’t be a nice thing to do, mind you.” He added ruefully: “Rather a lot of money, if you ask me!”
“I know they do, but look at the tourist exchange rate! We should more than get it back. And if we did decide on it, we could be through France and Germany in a couple of days. Eating in France is damned dear unless you picnic all the time, and who wants to do that? I bet we’d save by running through as quickly as possible, and surely Czechoslovakia would be a whole lot more interesting.”