Flora Mackintosh and The Hungarian Affair

by Anna Reader

  “I promise,” Flora promised, her eyes gleaming with amusement. This paternal side to Bertie was really very endearing.

  “Now where had I got to?” he asked, as he returned to his own seat. “Ah yes - discovering the German. As I was saying, once I’d followed the intruder in to the study I was able to recognise him very quickly as our friend from earlier this evening. He was leaning over your uncle’s desk and rifling through his papers; Lord knows what he was looking for, Flor, but I can tell you that he seemed extremely agitated.

  Well, after our previous encounter I thought that I had better arm myself – so as he was facing the window and had his back to me, I crept over to the fireplace and picked up the poker. We carried on in this way for some minutes –– the German frantically turning out your uncle’s drawers and me standing there with my weapon, feeling like a bit of a lemon – when I decided I ought to intervene; bring the thing to a head, you know. So I cleared my throat and asked the German what he bally well thought he was doing. Obviously I gave the poor fellow quite a shock, because he jumped half way to the ceiling and swore with considerable violence as soon he saw me standing there in the moonlight. I rushed forwards to restrain him, certain that he would have a gun about him somewhere, but I was too slow - he was already drawing out a revolver by the time I reached him. So I’m afraid I knocked him rather hard on the head before he had a chance to pull the trigger.”

  “I think that’s when I must have heard him cry out,” Flora explained.

  “Almost certainly,” Bertie replied. “He did let out quite a yell when he saw the poker descending towards him. I’m surprised Magda hasn’t turned up as well, actually.”

  “Schnapps,” Flora said briefly.

  Bertie seemed to be both highly embarrassed at having killed someone during his first night under Flora’s roof, and also rather proud of himself; it was not every day that one prevented both an assassination and a burglary, after all. For her part, Flora felt that this whole episode raised a number of troubling questions: what had the German been looking for; why did he and his partner want to kill her; and how the devil had he got in to the castle in the first place?

  “Was there any sign of a break-in, Bertie?” she asked, drawing the blanket more tightly around her shoulders as she curled up into the chair and tucked her hands under her feet. “I distinctly remember checking that the front door was locked before we went to bed, and unless we missed something earlier I can’t recall there having been another way into the building.” She paused and pushed a stray curl behind her right ear. “I must say that I cannot like the idea of having murderous Germans waltzing in and out whenever they feel like it; it doesn’t make for a particularly restful evening.”

  “I didn’t notice anything,” Bertie replied, “but then I was so focussed on keeping an eye on the intruder that I didn’t really have time to work out where he might have come from. I rather think that we can deal with that in the morning,” he concluded, very sensibly. “Unless there is an inexhaustible supply of Nazis in Szentendre, I would be very surprised if we were to encounter any more disturbances this evening.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Flora concurred, by now feeling ready for her bed. “What shall we do with the body, though? It would give poor Magda a real shock to stumble across it in the morning - and we already got off to a slightly rocky start, what with me breaking in.”

  “Leave that to me,” Bertie said, getting to his feet and making for the door. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  Flora heard the key in the front door scrape against the lock, and felt a gust of cold air blow into the library as Bertie made his preparations. She burrowed more deeply into her chair, closed her eyes, and waited. He couldn’t have been gone for more than fifteen minutes, yet Flora fell into a heavy sleep in his absence. Alice, who had watched Flora sleep through numerous raucous fire alarms and even once during the school orchestra’s memorably strident (yet woefully inaccurate) performance of The Ride of the Valkyries, would not have been surprised.

  His task complete, Bertie locked the front door once more and returned to the library. “Flora,” he whispered, shaking her very gently, “the thing’s done.” As this didn’t rouse her, and, not wanting to give her a fright by resorting to more energetic tactics, Bertie gathered Flora in his arms for the second time that evening and carried her up the stairs. Once he had tucked her safely into bed, Bertie resumed his watch outside her room and waited for dawn.

  SIX

  Flora awoke the following morning sprawled across the magnificent four-poster bed, feeling remarkably refreshed. For a moment the events of the previous night were forgotten and she was able to enjoy the sensation of waking up in a new place, far from the tedium of school life. She looked about her in amusement at what could only have been a man’s room: there were no ornaments; no cushions or clusters of potions on a dressing table; almost no clothes in the wardrobe and only one token picture of a stag on the wall. As she stretched her limbs and spotted the thick woollen socks on her feet, the image of the dead German leapt back into her consciousness. Flora grimaced, then thought for a moment. It was absolutely essential that she should discover how the man had got into the castle, why it had been so important to him and what on earth he had been hunting for; like all individuals who’ve spent their formative years in a British boarding school she was fiercely protective of her own space, and didn’t take kindly to foreign men snooping about her family home whilst she slept.

  Flora hastily dressed herself and pulled a comb through her hair before making her way downstairs. Trills of laughter filled her ears as she reached the hallway, and to her astonishment she was greeted by the image of Bertie and Magda standing side by side in the study, both wreathed with smiles. Magda, who the previous evening had resembled a kind of pickled Medusa, had clearly made an effort for her male guest: the wild grey curls had been replaced by a neat bun; the baggy socks and shapeless clothes had been exchanged for a smart blouse, ankle length skirt and clean apron; and where the scent of schnapps had reigned the previous evening, a powerful floral perfume now held sway.

  “Morning, Flora!” Bertie cried, “I was just trying to explain to Magda here that I dropped a bottle of red wine all over the carpet last night, hence the stain.”

  Flora looked down at the carpet to find that the corpse had indeed been replaced by an empty bottle of Burgundy, which seemed to have leaked over what had once been a puddle of blood. The smell of fine wine permeated the air, and it would have been very easy to believe that her sighting of the dead German had been nothing but a horrible nightmare. With a small shrug of the shoulders and a rueful smile, Flora explained in her perfect Hungarian that Bertie had had a small accident the previous evening.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Magda replied, smiling up at Bertie in a distinctly flirtatious manner, “Mr Antal is very understanding about these things.”

  “It really seems,” Flora said to Bertie, switching back to English, “as though nobody knows about my uncle’s death but me. Lord only knows where it happened. I don’t know whether I ought to say something.”

  “Perhaps not, for the time being,” Bertie replied thoughtfully. “It would only upset the poor woman – and besides, until someone actually finds his body and reports it, there’s always the hope that it was a false alarm.”

  “I have prepared breakfast,” Magda proclaimed, ushering Flora and Bertie towards the door. “Come – I will show you to the dining room.”

  “I must say, I’m jolly glad you’re here,” Flora said to Bertie out of the side of her mouth, as they walked behind Magda like a pair of naughty children. “There’s no chance she’d be this accommodating if she hadn’t completely lost her head over you.”

  “Well, she’s only human, after all,” Bertie replied with a broad grin.

  Magda led them into a spacious dining room situated at the back of the castle, overlooking the hills beyond. The vast mahogany table in the centre of the room could easily seat thirty pe
ople, and the stone fireplace - in which, Flora was relieved to see, Magda had lit a large fire - was wide enough to house two deer-hounds standing nose to tail quite comfortably. The stone floor was covered in richly coloured rugs, and the morning sun, which was already shining through the tall windows, succeeded in making what could have been rather an austere room look pleasant and welcoming. On the long table standing at the opposite side of the room to the fire-place, Magda had set out a smorgasbord of cold meats, cream cheeses, pâte, breads and scrambled eggs.

  “Magda!” Flora exclaimed. “This is absolutely wonderful! Did you go down to town this morning to get all of this?”

  Magda shrugged and muttered something under her breath about Hungarian hospitality and what Mr Antal would expect.

  “Lord, you’re an absolute treasure, Magda,” Bertie said, advancing on the food with the light of intent in his eyes, “would you tell her, Flora?”

  “Bertie says you are a veritable jewel,” Flora said to the housekeeper, who promptly flushed red to the roots of her hair and left the room.

  The pair piled their plates high, and made themselves comfortable at the end of the table closest to the fire.

  “I tell you what,” Bertie declared, tucking in to his meal with gusto, “if this is what it’s like in Hungary then I will seriously have to consider finding employment in this neck of the woods.”

  “I can see that,” Flora replied with a quick smile. “And I’m sure Magda would be delighted if you could stay a little longer. Are you planning on flying home this morning?”

  “Home?” Bertie cried in disgust, “Good lord, Flora, you can’t think that I would leave now? Abandon you here with Germans skulking around the place? What sort of flat tyre do you take me for? And besides that, there is obviously a first rate adventure to be had!”

  “Certainly not a flat tyre, Bertie,” Flora retorted. “You’ve been an absolute rock, but this is obviously a dangerous enterprise which has nothing to do with you. There’s no reason for you to risk your life on my account. Besides, I don’t think Beatrice would forgive me if anything were to happen to her new model.”

  “Well, I like that,” Bertie said indignantly, letting his knife and fork clatter to his plate, “and here I was thinking we were friends.”

  “Well of course we’re friends,” Flora replied, “but what I’m trying to say is that you needn’t feel as though you were obliged to stay. I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, you know.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a second,” Bertie countered. “However I should very much like to remain for my own sake, as much as anything. I haven’t had so much fun in ages. Of course if you’d rather I leave...”

  “Oh, don’t be so silly, Bertie,” Flora said, dismissing this out of hand. “I’d be delighted if you stayed, but I don’t want you to feel as though you’re obliged to, that’s all. And I certainly don’t want you to get hurt.” This final admission rather slipped out, but Bertie took it with his usual air of unfailing cheerfulness and simply smiled broadly at her.

  “That’s settled then,” he declared rising and returning to the side table to reload his plate. “Where do you think we should start?”

  “By finding out how that snoop got in,” Flora said decisively. “Unless we can find a broken window or some kind of side door that has been forced, it would appear to be a mystery. Before we get to that, though,” she added, wandering across the room to help herself to coffee, “what did you do with that body?”

  Bertie blithely continued to pile food onto his plate, and said simply that it was all “taken care of.”

  “Yes, but how?” Flora insisted. “Will Magda stumble across the body next time she goes outside to hang up the washing? Is there now a shallow grave in the middle of the ornamental garden?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Bertie reassured her. “He won’t be found, I promise you. Not unless you’re a particularly keen snorkeler, at any rate.” This final caveat was said rather more quietly than the rest of the sentence, but Flora seized upon it at once.

  “My god, Bertie, you flung him in the moat!”

  Bertie chose neither to admit nor deny this charge, and simply buttered another slice of bread with an innocent expression on his face.

  “I hope you weighed him down,” Flora commented, practical as always. “The last thing we need is a bloated man floating about by the drawbridge.”

  This drew a reluctant chuckle from Bertie. “Of course I weighed him down,” he reassured her. “I shan’t go into the details at the breakfast table, but do bear in mind that I was in the Navy, Flora.”

  “I suppose I should be grateful you weren’t in the air-force,” she responded irrepressibly, “or we may have found him lashed to one of the turrets.”

  As soon as they had finished their breakfast the pair did a tour of the ground floor of the castle, searching for broken windows and hidden side doors. Despite spending a very thorough couple of hours checking every inch of the place, neither Bertie nor Flora were able to unearth so much as a draught: there were other doors into the castle of course, but they were all securely locked and bolted. They did, however, find a series of unusual objects which spoke to the idiosyncratic hobbies of the late Uncle Antal, including a lobster pot, a pair of stilts, a parachute, an engraving kit, a sniper rifle and a collection of wigs. “If it wasn’t for those Germans, I’d suspect that my uncle was having me on,” Flora said, rather gingerly holding a false moustache aloft by the tip. “He seems to have been something of an eccentric.”

  Bertie slipped a navy blue fedora on his head and, doing his best Clark Gable impression, suggested that they should talk to Magda.

  They found her in the kitchen, quietly peeling potatoes and singing a folksong to herself. Seeing the pair coming down the stairs towards her, Magda hurriedly tried to remove the bottle of schnapps from the centre of the wooden table; Bertie was too quick for her, however, and managed to demonstrate through a kind of semaphore that he would like to try some. A surprised and slightly hesitant Magda poured a small measure into two tumblers and handed them to her visitors. Bertie went first, tipping the clear, fiery liquid into his mouth and swallowing it in one. His blue eyes swam with tears but he managed not to cough, and even raised a smile: this, in Magda’s eyes, was the pinnacle of virility. Flora, who rather prided herself on being able to hold her drink, gasped with shock as the home-made spirit trickled down her throat, wheezing as she placed the glass back on the table.

  “Good lord,” she said, eyeing the bottle with renewed respect. “Magda, that stuff’s vicious. I shall have to procure a bottle for Teddy.”

  The housekeeper grinned with pleasure, inviting the young pair to sit down now that they’d passed the test. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” Flora said, taking a seat opposite Magda. “Do you happen to know,” she began slowly, wondering how best to phrase her question without giving too much away, “whether it might be possible for someone to gain entrance to the castle if all the doors and windows are locked?”

  “Of course,” Magda said with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  Bertie drew up a chair next to Flora and watched this exchange with interest, wishing that he could speak this utterly impenetrable language.

  “Really?” Flora asked in surprise. “Could you show us?”

  With a small sigh, Magda relinquished her knife and pushed herself away from the table. “Come on then,” she said, shuffling around the table and back up the stairs.

  Flora was rather taken aback by the speed of these developments but quickly hurried after Magda, keen to pursue any lead.

  “Does she know something?” Bertie asked, as they made their way back up to the hallway.

  “It would seem so,” Flora replied. “D’you know, I haven’t been this riveted since Miss Waverley’s production of Medea: The Musical.”

  In no time at all Magda had led them to the coat cupboar
d next to the library. Flinging open the doors, Magda pushed the coats aside and stepped inside, stamping on the floor until she could hear a hollow echo. “Aha,” she cried, before bending down and pulling up what appeared to be a trap-door, “there you are.”

  Bertie pulled his torch out of his pocket, and quickly shone the light into the small cavity. “Stone the crows!” he cried, replacing Magda in the back of the wardrobe, “It’s a secret passage, Flora!”

  Bertie put the torch in his mouth and started climbing down the small metal rungs leading down into the darkness. “This is marvellous!” he cried in delight through his clenched teeth, as his head disappeared.

  “What is this, Magda?” Flora asked the housekeeper, half-wondering what other surprises this strange old castle might have in store for her.

  “Just an old passage,” Magda replied with another nonchalant shrug. “Your father and uncle used to play in it all the time when they were boys.”

  “And where does it lead?”

  “The top of the path leading to town,” Magda answered, smiling suddenly as Bertie shouted up muffled words from the dark hole below. “There’s another trap-door there, but it’s mostly overgrown now. I don’t think anybody has been down there for twenty years.”

  “And do people in town know about it?” Flora wondered, stepping into the cupboard and looking down into the tunnel. “I must say, this is all rather Lewis Carroll,” she muttered in English.

  “Oh yes,” Magda replied, “everyone knows about the tunnel. I’m sure half the men in the village have been down in it – your father used to charge an entrance fee.” She chuckled fondly at the memory, shaking her head as she began to make her way back down to the kitchen. “Such a clever little boy.”

  When Bertie didn’t reappear Flora assumed he must have decided to see how far the tunnel could lead him, so she settled herself in the library with a glass of wine and a novel. Just as she was managing to lose herself in Barsetshire (it turned out that the castle was very well stocked with a selection of both English and Hungarian classics), he came crashing through the front door, rather damp and covered in ivy.