by Ellis Peters
‘Good idea!’ McHugh came to his feet gaily. ‘I’ll come with you. Might as well make ourselves useful.’
Trevor did not offer to accompany them. Digging a way through frozen snow between enclosing rocks was not in his line, however much he longed to escape from Oberschwandegg. As for the doctor, he went back to his sleeping patient, so promptly that Susan plucked at his sleeve to ask him anxiously: ‘He is out of danger, isn’t he?’
‘Oh, yes, he’ll be all right now, he’s over it. I just want to stand by for a few hours in case he still needs a stimulant.’
‘Can I come and sit with him? Just until lunch? You could get a few hours’ rest, and I could sleep later. I’d call you if he woke up, or if there seemed anything wrong.’
‘Girl, you’re crazy! And I’ve just sidetracked his mother by telling her I was going to sit with him myself.’ But he let her into the room perforce, since he was sure even if he ordered her away she would not go.
Laurence was sleeping with the abandon of a child exhausted, his face burrowing deeply into the pillow. Susan drew a chair close to the bed, and kept guard over him through what was left of the morning, until the savoury smells of Frau Mehlert’s cooking and the big, hearty voices of the returning labourers announced the approach of lunchtime. He did not move when the doctor came in again, refreshed, shaven, and fed, and sent Susan down to her meal, nor had he stirred when she returned.
Neil came in for a few minutes before he went back to his digging. He sat down on the opposite side of the bed, and stared thoughtfully and rather miserably at the drawn face on the pillow.
‘You know what nobody remembered to ask you, Susan?’ He kept his voice very low, not to trouble the sleeper. ‘What were you doing up and fully dressed in the middle of the night?’ He lifted to her a brief and intimate smile, foreseeing what her answer would be.
‘I hadn’t been to bed. I was waiting and trying to get up my courage to go and talk to him. I wanted to tell him why I’d pitched him into this horrible position, and to say that of course I meant to tell the truth and get him out of it again. But the first time I tried it I didn’t carry any more conviction with him than I did with you,’ she said bitterly, ‘only in another way, and I don’t suppose I should have done any better last night, either. As it turned out it didn’t arise. I couldn’t get any answer from him. So I roused Liesl, and made her come with me to see if he was all right.’
‘Lucky for him!’ said Neil. ‘You be careful this unknown murderer of yours doesn’t turn nasty with you, my girl. You’ve thrown a fair-sized spanner into the works for him, you know.’ He grinned at her, not unkindly. He could afford to grin at the conception, she thought wryly, since he didn’t believe in it. He was still sure that the murderer was here between them in the bed, sleeping like a baby.
The doctor turned back the coffee-stained sheet to reach for Laurence’s wrist. ‘Nice, steady pulse,’ he said contentedly. ‘Let’s see if I can sound his heart without disturbing him. I think he might be the better for one more dextrose injection, last night took a lot out of him.’
Under his ministrations Laurence stirred and sighed, and the deep, long breaths stilled into quietness. He shivered lightly, and turned on his back, and lay with closed eyes, frowning and moistening his dry lips, on which the bitter aftertaste of nausea lingered unpleasantly.
‘Thirsty!’ he muttered, his face contorting in sour distaste.
Susan reached for the jug of lemonade Liesl had provided, poured a glassful, and slid her right arm under him to raise him while he drank. Neil encircled him from the other side, and took his weight from her. The heavy lids, still blue-stained and underlined with shadows, opened slowly upon dazed hazel eyes, and his lips parted eagerly and leaned to drink. Then, as though he had recognized first the hand that held the glass, his labouring glance climbed her arm and arrived at her face.
He stared for a moment with drawn brows, while colour came back into his cheeks and sharp and painful intelligence into his eyes; then deliberately and arrogantly he drew back his head and turned his face away from her into Neil’s shoulder.
She felt Neil’s startled eyes upon her for an instant in embarrassment and pity before he hastily averted them. Dr Randall, who was preparing his syringe at the table, had turned his head and was staring at them sharply. She sat for a moment, frozen into stillness, and then with fastidious care withdrew her arm, leaving Neil to support the invalid who had so pointedly rejected her. She held out the glass across the bed, and Neil took it from her without venturing to meet her eyes. From him Laurence accepted the offering greedily, and drank and drank until he had all but emptied the glass. She did not wait to see it, however, the door had already closed quietly upon her departure. She took her dignity with her unimpaired to the privacy of her own room, if that was any satisfaction to her. That door, too, closed upon her without emphasis. Laurence had done what Dr Randall could not manage, and sent her to bed at last.
Neil, setting the glass back on the tray, raised a significant eyebrow at the doctor, and laid his burden gently back into the pillows. ‘I think,’ said he, ‘I’d better get back to work.’ His look and his faintly embarrassed, faintly dismayed grin said plainly: ‘Digging is less complicated.’
After he had left the room the silence was almost oppressive. Laurence had stung himself into complete wakefulness with that decisive act of rejection, and a certain hypersensitivity warned him that he was the object of marked disapproval, though he was completely at sea about everything else. He lay breathing rather quickly, flags of rising colour in his cheeks, his eyes fixed defensively on the doctor’s face; but all the doctor said, very drily, was: ‘Turn over!’
It was extraordinary what unquestionable authority doctors had, as soon as you were in their hands, even if you had very little idea of how you had got there. Laurence turned obediently on his face. The needle went in with a vicious jab which hurt, and perhaps had been meant to hurt. It jerked an indignant gasp out of him, and made him turn his head just far enough to train one amazed and reproachful eye upon the doctor’s face.
‘Young man,’ said the doctor grimly, returning the look, ‘if you were in your usual rude health I’d give you something more than a few needle pricks to feel sore about. All right, you can turn over again now.’ And when his patient had righted himself and settled back defiantly into his pillow, Dr Randall sat down on the edge of his bed and fixed him with severe eyes. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’
‘No,’ said Laurence, smouldering.
‘You will be when I’ve finished with you.’ The doctor took a deep breath, and began to talk. The entire history of Laurence’s lost night took no more than three minutes to tell, and submerged recollections of misery and indignity rose out of his cloudy memory to fuse with what he heard. His eyes, fixed in fascination on the doctor’s face, grew larger and wider as he listened. ‘And then,’ said the doctor warmly, ‘you wake up and slap her in the face like that, a girl who’s fought for you all night like a tigress. And you say you’re not ashamed of yourself! You should have heard her tearing into us downstairs on your behalf, my lad. Oh, no, you don’t! You lie down again, I haven’t told you you can get out of bed.’
He took his agitated patient by the shoulders, and tucked him back into bed without much trouble; his strength was not yet equal to his will, and even this slight effort had brought out drops of sweat on his forehead.
‘I’ve got to talk to her,’ said Laurence feverishly. ‘I didn’t know – Oh, God, can’t you see I must see her?’
‘So you shall, but not yet. You’re going to calm down and eat some lunch, and put in several more hours sleeping, and then we’ll see about asking Susan if she’ll condescend to look in on you again.’
‘But it was so horrible, what I did. Suppose she won’t come near me? Please let me go to her now, just for a moment, only to apologise, only to tell her—’
‘Let me catch you trying to budge from this bed, and you’ll be even sorrier for
yourself than you were last night. By this evening you may be fit to get on your legs for a bit. You can just live with your ungrateful young self for a few hours more, like it or lump it. You don’t deserve any better.’ But the tone of his voice had warmed considerably; he was well pleased with his penitent.
Laurence lay back flushed and large-eyed. ‘And she’s come right out and told everybody I didn’t do it? She never really believed I had? She—Damn, and now I’ve made her think badly of me, after all. Oh, God, I could kick myself!’
‘That’s an idea,’ said the doctor. ‘You do that.’
‘But I couldn’t very well know, could I? It wasn’t all my fault. It hurt like hell, thinking she—And then she did all that for me!’ An obscure memory rose out of the darkness of his lost hours, when death had fought to keep its hold of him, as Susan had fought to break it. ‘You know, I could have sworn someone called me – I don’t remember very much, but I thought somebody said “Darling” – twice! But she couldn’t have, could she?’
‘Why not?’ said the doctor, still moved to administer a judicious back-hander here and there. ‘If her pet dog was ill she’d call him that. I daresay you got in by the back door of womanly sympathy, too.’ But the wide, wondering stare took no account of this cold douche. Laurence reached out and caught at his hand; the hot, trembling clasp of the long fingers startled and moved him.
‘Won’t you please go and ask her to come to me just for a moment? Say I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t know what I was doing. Say I beg her to come.’
In the end he had to go, in order to calm his patient down; but he came back empty-handed.
‘Now listen to me, young man. You can’t see her now, because she’s in bed and fast asleep, and if anyone needs it, she does. I expect she crept into bed to cry in private over you, you ungrateful brat, but she’d be asleep almost as soon as she lay down. She’s plain exhausted. I promise you shall see her as soon as she gets up again, but I’m not going to wake her for you or anyone. You’ve got nothing to worry about, boy, she’ll be ready to listen. Now, are you going to behave yourself and do as I tell you?’
Laurence, compelled to make do with this, said that he was. It left him plenty to look forward to, at any rate, since all that she had done to him was more than compensated for by all that she had since done for him. The feeling of reconciliation with her was wonderfully sweet to him as he sank again into sleep. Even penitence was not such a bad bedfellow.
CHAPTER XIII
So strangely I’m perplexed,
I would know all things, yet I fear to know the truth.
Act 3
Susan awoke with a start that set her heart thumping, and lay quivering in the darkness of her room, shaken adrift from place and time. She groped after the past hours, and found no thread to which she could hold. In a silent panic she listened to the low voices outside her door, and was suddenly aware, for no reason, that it was the click of the latch falling into place that had penetrated her sleep.
‘She is still asleep.’ That was Liesl’s voice, in a soft undertone. ‘She has not touched her supper tray.’
And Neil answering as softly: ‘Surely we could let her sleep on until he’s seen all the rest of us. She was so terribly tired. It won’t make any difference to him which of us he interviews first.’
A man’s voice said something in German, in the broad, resonant voice common to all these mountaineers; but this voice had a tenor quality about it, nonetheless, which did not belong to Franz Mehlert. This was a younger man. She wondered, with straining nerves, who he could be, and did not have long to wonder. ‘Herr Klostermann is quite agreeable,’ said Liesl. ‘We shall call her when she is needed.’
Herr Klostermann – then that grave, burdened young voice belonged to Frau Agathe’s husband. But he was below in Bad Schwandegg, how could he be here? Susan lay motionless as the voices receded, while her heart steadied and her mind dragged itself reluctantly from the pit of nothingness where she had taken refuge. Drunk with sleep too long-delayed and too heavy when it came, she could feel at first nothing but gratitude that she had not stirred when Liesl looked into the room; then the troubled memories quickened in her, and in a blinding rush of pain everything came back together, death and sickness and fear, the worst of fears, fear for another. She remembered with terrible clarity Laurence’s head heavy on her arm, the long greenish stare of his eyes cold as the snow outside, and his face turning away from her. She had crept away to hide herself, and made far too good a job of it, for now she had lost all the hours between, and the police were here. The road was open, and the party from Bad Schwandegg had broken through the last drift to find murder waiting for them. There was no more time left for thought. Except, of course, that by the mercy of God she had stayed asleep just long enough at the last moment, and she was to be interviewed after all the others. If she could think of a way of being convincing by the time he finished with the rest, Laurence would be safe.
She sat up in bed and looked at her watch. Everything happened by night, the days were for sleeping, so that you could be ready for the feverish acitivity of the darkness. It was just past eleven o’clock, that fatally recurring hour. She had slept for ten hours without a break; she felt as though she had fallen out of the world, and had now to rediscover the technique of moving, thinking, and acting in it, as an injured man learns to walk again.
There was a neat little tray on her bedside table, just as Liesl had said; a vacuum flask of coffee, a little carafe of wine, a covered plate of cold meats and cheeses and pickles, and some buttered biscuits and fruit. They had shown her every possible consideration. Below her in the house, just awakening instead of just falling asleep, she felt rather than heard the big, alien voices of the mountain men, and their long, light footsteps.
She slid her feet out of bed, and pulled on her dressing gown, and stole out into the corridor. From the head of the stairs she could hear clearly the buzz of many voices below, and feel the vibration of excitement that set the air quivering. She crept down to the turn of the stairs, and sat there with her cheek against the wall, hidden from the people who moved restlessly about the hall beneath her.
Neil’s voice, authoritatively raised, was explaining above the murmur: ‘I’m sorry about this, but it’s necessary. He doesn’t intend to keep you up any longer than he need, but he wants to interview us all and get a general picture of the case before we call it a day. He wants you all to wait in the dining room until you’re called, please.’
The voice that rose highest in protest was, of course, Miranda’s, but Trevor, too, seemed to be complaining about being kept from his bed.
‘This is a murder case,’ Neil reminded them tartly, ‘and we’re all material witnesses, better bear that in mind. If you’re tired, what d’you think Klostermann is? He’s spent all day digging his way through to here, only to find he has to go on duty as soon as he gets here, with a vile job like this on his hands. He hasn’t even had time to go home and see his wife yet. You should grumble!’
They subsided, having no choice. Someone said: ‘Susan isn’t here. Should we call her?’
‘No, let her sleep. He knows about Susan, Liesl will call her when he gets round to her. And Laurence is in his room, of course. Where’s McHugh?’
Nobody knew. ‘I thought he’d gone to bed, but he hasn’t,’ said Trevor. ‘I looked in to wake him. Maybe he went down to the head of the track again with Franz and the others after dinner, and hasn’t hurried back. He had an early night last night, you couldn’t expect him to think of turning in before midnight twice running. He’ll be along soon.’
‘Tell him to stand by, too, when he does come in. I’m going into the office now to hand over all the stuff we’ve got laid up in the safe.’
The office was a small, quiet back room near the kitchen, and there, it seemed, Klostermann meant to conduct his interviews. Susan heard the door close. The dining-room door must have been left open, for the murmur of subdued, apprehensive voices continued cl
early; all English voices there now, the Austrian ones had withdrawn into the kitchen and bar, and the smell of coffee laced with rum came in vagrant waves up the stairs. She sat shivering, but not with cold. In the office the safe would be wide open now. Neil would display every exhibit fastidiously, without touching it, with heartfelt gratitude that he could turn over his unsought responsibility into the proper hands at last. Trevor’s photographs, McHugh’s masterly collection of fingerprints, the ashtray with the last charred remnants of Richard’s will – what talented amateurs we all turned out to be, she thought bitterly, just clever enough to amass a great deal of enigmatic evidence, put it all together and arrive at the wrong answer. And I had to make myself a self-confessed liar right at the start, so that no one should ever again feel sure he could believe me. I was the cleverest of the lot, and the biggest fool. And I’m not so sure I’m grateful to Neil for asking them to let me sleep. At this very moment a picture is being presented which I’m going to find very difficult to refute if I come last. I’d rather have got my blow in first. But he meant it kindly; he’s always been kind.
The stab of realisation reached the sensitive part of her mind without warning, and brought her up from the stairs trembling. McHugh was missing from the census! Of all people, McHugh! Thank God no one but she knew where he vanished to in the night. How could he have been so reckless as to go to Frau Agathe so early? She did not want to take away any part of her mind from Laurence, from his wrongs which must be righted, from his innocence which must be defended, and yet other people existed, too, to be hurt unfairly and ruined too lightly. She turned and scurried back to her room and began feverishly to dress, right to her coat and boots. It wasn’t for McHugh’s sake, damn him, she owed him nothing, but was that poor girl’s marriage to be broken in pieces just for his Christmas entertainment? It was too trivial a rock for two lives to founder on, and they, the interlopers, had already done enough damage to Oberschwandegg’s immemorial peace. This at least she could ward off in time.
