by Ellis Peters
‘Let me help him! You can’t leave him. You can manage to kill people, in a distant sort of way, I can understand that, but you can’t just walk past an injured man and leave him to freeze to death.’
‘Go on!’ he whispered in a strangled voice. ‘And shut your mouth, or I’ll kill you! Whatever happens afterwards, I’ll kill you!’
She cast one glance at him, the first she had ventured since they set out, and saw his face for a moment twisted into a theatre mask of appalling grief; and it seemed to her that this moment marked for him the formal and irrevocable sentence of his banishment from the world in which he had moved blamelessly all his life until now. He had left it without knowing what he did, but now in every step it forced him away, and in every image that marked the stages of his going he saw reflected everything he had lost.
McHugh croaked: ‘Everard, thank God! I thought I’d never—’
They passed by him, hurrying, stumbling, their faces set and strained, with eyes fixed blindly ahead. In awful amazement he, too, fell silent, unable to understand or believe, as though two dead people had walked past him in the white of noon. The moment bound them all three in a constricting circle of silence and dread. Only when they were by him, and the indifferent snow slashed between, did he heave himself up on his elbows and begin to shout after them frantically: ‘Everard, what the hell are you doing? Come back here! Give me a hand, damn you, my leg’s broken—’
The whining wind soon took the words and tore them to shreds, and even the sound might have been no more than the fretted gale tangled in the palings of the fence. They were soon out of earshot. It was doubtful if his cries would be heard from any of the houses, with that wind blowing.
The last fence fell behind. The path declined, zigzagging with the gully as meticulously as a brook, and across the last open ground the increasing snow danced and whirled dizzily. They groped their way down to where the rocks began, and halted to draw breath and clear their eyes in the shelter of the first jagged face.
‘You could still go back,’ she said. Even if he did kill her she could not help saying it. But perhaps it wasn’t even true; perhaps the only terms on which he could go back were such as to make it, for him, an impossibility. ‘You could still turn back and help him.’
‘Go on,’ he said, and pushed her forward down the tortuous track between the rocks. Already the wind had driven in snow knee-deep, smoothing out all the tracks Klostermann and his fellows had left on their way up. By morning the road might very well be sealed again. Where freaks of air and rock formation gave the gale play Susan floundered up to the waist, and felt her way by the boulders, for her eyes were useless. Out of the valley below snow boiled upwards like mist, carried on rising eddies.
She paused for a moment, panting, her back braced against the rock. ‘You can’t kill everyone,’ she cried. ‘Him, me, everyone who crosses your path. We didn’t speak to him. What then? Nothing could have shouted louder. They’ll know. It was inevitable from the time I got to know. It was always inevitable, really.’ She was no longer shouting, because he had been glad to halt, too, and was leaning breast to breast with her in the lee of the rocks, in a little island of quietness hedged in from the gale. He was no less distressed than she was. She could hear the breath sobbing between his lips. “Turn back now,’ she said.
‘I wish to God I could,’ he said quite gently, with terrifying resignation. ‘Don’t you think I’d unwind all this and be my old self again if I could? You can’t go back. Once you kill somebody there’s no going back.’ His face was very close. What faint light there was seemed to gather into the great aching expanse of his forehead beneath the wet red-brown hair whitened over with snow. He still had the briefcase clutched under his left arm, and his right hand was deep in the pocket of his coat, but she knew that it was still clenched on the gun. ‘It was so easy,’ he said with a kind of tired wonder. ‘I didn’t even have to touch him, I didn’t feel soiled at all. Only after that there was no going back, and no standing still. Events kept pushing me forward. You kept pushing me forward. Forcing my hand. You’re still doing it. Making me kill you. I never wanted to kill you.’
She had known all along, in her heart, that that was his intention. However his disappearance and hers might cast suspicion on him, it could not of itself convict him of murder, even of hers. No one but she could ever tell them the truth about Antonia’s will and the Treplenburg-Feldstein diamonds. If she never reappeared living, no one else would ever know. That could at least confuse the issue, and this delay might, with luck, afford him enough time to get clear away, especially if the blizzard sealed this road again before morning. But she would not survive to slow him up much longer, she perfectly understood that. Time was what he could least afford.
‘Even with me dead events will still keep pushing you on,’ she said, ‘the only way to stop them is to turn and face them.’
The deep, sighing breaths – they laboured rather with the weight upon his heart than with any load of physical weariness – gathered strength slowly to answer: ‘I’ve thought of that.’
It all came out quite simply, as if it eased him to share the intolerable load with her. ‘When you’re gone I’m going back. I shall tell them I looked in on you to see if you were awake, and found you’d gone – run away. Because you were lying in trying to give Laurence an alibi, and now that the police had arrived you’d lost your nerve. You’d be an accessory after the fact, you see. So you ran away. I went out to look for you and bring you back, but I couldn’t find you. But we shall find you, tomorrow, when it’s light. You’ll have slipped from the path below here, where the ground falls away on one side. It’s quite a drop – and the snow will do the rest. Nobody else has seen the will, you know, so I shall easily be believed. I’ll destroy the will if I have to – I can account for that somehow. Oh, yes, I shall be believed.’
There was no complacency in that flat, sorrowful voice, and no triumph; she thought she could have borne it better if there had been. To be killed was enough, surely, but to be killed without even removing the shadow of death from Laurence was such aggravated cruelty that she felt in herself suddenly what this man had never felt, the honest, burning desire to kill, the impulse of absolute anger, almost too great to be contained, far too great to be expressed in any senseless, pointless words or motions of rage. She fought as she could, hacking mercilessly at the ground under his feet.
‘So I ran away – without my money, without my passport? Who’s going to believe that of me?’
‘They’ll believe it,’ he said, his chest heaving. ‘I’ll make it plausible. When people panic they do crazy things.’
‘And who’s ever seen me panic? Have you? Am I panicking now? Those people know me better than you do, they won’t swallow that tale. And besides,’ she said, smiling up at him fiercely, and shoving from her forehead the wet dark tendrils of her hair, ‘in that case you should have killed McHugh, shouldn’t you? Nobody has to convince him of anything. He knows! No good telling him I ran away and you followed to try and bring me back – he saw us go!’
‘He won’t be sharing what he knows with anyone else,’ panted Neil, wrenching his face aside from the glare of her vengeful eyes. ‘The snow and frost will take care of him.’
‘He’s indoors by now, and you know it. He’ll shout until someone does come and help him – someone who hasn’t kicked himself out of the human race—’
‘Nobody’ll hear him! The wind will drown his voice—’
‘Then he’ll crawl to one of the houses. And don’t forget they’ll be looking for me by now. When they don’t find me in the house they’ll search outside. They’ll find McHugh. And he’ll tell them how you and I left the village. You see,’ she said, spitting the words in his face, ‘there’ll always be somebody else you have to kill, more and more and more of them. They multiply. You might as well give up now. There’s no end to it.’
And indeed he saw no end, look as far ahead as he would, never any end to the killing; an
d always the revulsion from it, that mounted in horror every time, as though death itself could be eternally reproduced upon his own flesh. He bowed forward over her with a sob, and leaned his forehead against the rock above her shoulder, and cried brokenly in his desolation; but he did not relax his fingers from the butt of the gun that bruised her side.
CHAPTER XV
Fear naught, whatever may befall!
To save you now must be my one endeavour,
And yet I know not how.
Act 2
Laurence had been left alone in his room until he was damned if he was going to stand it any longer. A dozen times since that bad break at midday he had enquired anxiously whether Susan had reappeared, and been told with varying degrees of exasperation that she had not, and that when she did he would be informed. But it had gone on so long that he no longer quite trusted even Dr Randall. And now it seemed the working-party from the lower village had cut their way through, and with them Frau Agathe’s policeman, and the whole case was being taken to pieces and put together again in one more hopeless inquest; but no one came near him. Somewhere down there arguments were being piled up against him in his absence, which was patently unfair, if he had had a thought to spare for it; but his real grievance was that they were still keeping him from Susan.
He had slept again, and eaten heartily, and he felt encouragingly normal; so as there was no one to order him back to bed he got up and tried his legs about the bedroom, and found them only slightly shaky under him. He was perfectly all right, apart from a slightly hollow and queasy feeling which had nothing to do with hunger, a decided stiffness and soreness of all his muscles, as though he had been beaten all over, and a sharp local discomfort, reminiscent of his unco-operative schooldays, when he sat down too briskly on a wooden chair to pull on his socks. He dressed with the slightly clumsy movements of convalescence, and while he was combing his hair roughly into order he heard, faintly crossing the end of his isolated corridor, light footsteps which he recognised as belonging to Liesl.
He threw down his comb to pummel the door with both fists, and then changed his mind just in time. If he did that she’d never risk opening the door. He was supposed to be in bed, and still so nearly an invalid as to be no threat to any girl’s peace of mind. He called instead. A weak and plaintive appeal would have fetched her like a bird, but for the fact that it would never have reached her ears. He compromised, calling her name just loudly enough to make himself heard, and just pathetically enough to incline her to listen.
The footsteps halted; she came hesitantly to his door. ‘Do you want something, Mr Quayne?’
‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m not allowed to get up and get it for myself – I’d like a book out of my suitcase, if you’d give it to me, please. I want to stay awake, they’ll want me presently. And there’s nobody to talk to. I must do something.’ He was almost ashamed of the facility with which he achieved that appealing note; his shoulders all the while flattened against the wall behind the door, and his voice pitched in such a subdued key that she should not detect his nearness to her.
She had her keys still in her pocket, he heard the jingle of the bunch as she separated the one she wanted. ‘Of course, Mr Quayne, I will get it.’ The door opened confidingly, she stepped into the room and took two or three trusting paces before she realised the bed was empty. At the same moment the door was taken firmly from her hand; he was not going to have her darting out again and slamming it in his face.
She gave a soft, startled cry of reproach. ‘Oh, Mr Quayne, you must not – you should not—’
‘Oh, don’t be an ass!’ he said. ‘I won’t hurt you, and I’m not doing any harm, but I’m sick of being in quarantine up here like a case of bubonic plague. I’ve as much right to be down there keeping an eye on my own interests as any of the rest of them. And besides, I want to see Susan. Where is she?’
‘But you are ill,’ she said, spreading her pretty arms gently as if she would shoo him back into his bed like a chicken into its pen. ‘You should not be up, you know it well, the doctor said—’
‘I feel perfectly well, and I want to talk to Susan. Is she down there with them? Where? In the dining room?’
‘No, she is still in her room, I was just going to wake her. But, please, I cannot let you—’
‘Dear Liesl, you can’t stop me.’ He was out in the corridor and heading for Susan’s door. Liesl trotted agitatedly at his heels, fluttering like a ruffled bird. ‘Nobody’s going to blame you, and anyhow, I’ll go down and give myself up like a lamb, once I’ve talked to Susan. We’ll go down together, I promise you.’
He took her gently by the shoulders, and stood her in front of the closed door of Susan’s room. ‘Now you go in and say a good word for me, like a good girl. Tell her I’m outside putting ashes on my head, and ask her not to hit me when I’m down.’
Never in his life had he looked or felt less down than now. He didn’t know why, but he carried in him a hopefulness on which nothing could make a mark; not death, nor injustice, nor suspicion, nor ill-feeling between man and man. He thought of Susan lying asleep not three yards away from him, on the other side of that door, and everything was well with him.
Liesl rapped softly, and got no answer. She turned the handle and went in. He didn’t try to follow her, he waited dutifully in the middle of the corridor, his heart beating a little more rapidly, with an optimism nothing could subdue.
‘It is strange,’ said Liesl, ‘she is not here. She must have gone down only this moment, when you called me to your room.’
He went in then, and snapped on the light. The room was empty, the bed empty, the covers turned back as she had left them. He was not disturbed, not yet. He turned and ran down the stairs and into the dining room, where Miranda and Dr Randall waited, but Susan was not there either. His mother jumped up and embraced him with the unusual warmth generated by her own weariness and anxiety. He hugged her abstractedly, his eyes roving the room quickly over her shoulder, and the eager gleam faded out of them before the first shadow of uneasiness.
‘Laurence, dear, has he let you out, then? Does he realise—?’
‘Where’s Susan?’ asked Laurence directly. ‘Have you seen her?’
‘She’s still in her room,’ said the doctor. ‘Liesl has gone up to wake her. I hadn’t forgotten about you. And when did I tell you you could get up?’
‘I know about Liesl, I’ve just left her upstairs. But Susan isn’t there. We thought she must have come down.’
‘No,’ said the two voices at once. Miranda went on somewhat acidly: ‘You may be sure she’s somewhere about the house, quite safe and well. Why should you question her movements? It’s high time you considered your own position. I told that young man: “My son is entirely innocent, and you have no right to cast doubts—”’
‘I’m sure you did, Mother,’ said Laurence automatically, and took his arms from her abruptly and plunged back through the hall. The floor still had a tendency to go slightly soft under his feet, but it was steadying. Anxiety over Susan froze everything into sharp definition again, even the yielding bones of his legs. He flung open the door of the little office, and erupted into the room like a blast of cold outer air.
‘We’ve lost Susan,’ he said, casting the statement accusingly into Klostermann’s astonished face, and remembered with exasperation that if he wanted to be understood he should have said it in German, as well as somewhat elaborating the bald fact. Either exercise was beyond him. He turned instead upon Trevor Mason, who apparently could converse with his questioner well enough without an interpreter.
‘She isn’t in her room, and nobody’s seen her down here, and I’m worried. We ought to look for her. I don’t like mislaying Susan, not at this hour of night, and while we’ve still got a murderer around.’
Miranda pulled irately at his arm. ‘You’re being very silly. In all probability she’s in the bathroom, since apparently she’s just got out of bed—’
‘She hasn’t
just got out of bed. The bed’s cold. And she isn’t in the bathroom. I just came past it on my way down, and the door’s ajar and the light’s off. Tell him, Trevor! We’ve got to find her.’
Trevor interpreted inexpertly but effectively. Dr Randall, pressing in at Miranda’s shoulder, suggested: ‘Perhaps she took her tray back to the kitchen,’ and trotted away to see before Laurence could save him the trouble; for her tray was still untouched in her bedroom. Klostermann got up from behind the table, a thick-set quiet man of thirty or so, with a weathered, long-sighted mountaineer’s face. His intelligent and lively eyes flashed from face to face, settled longest on Laurence. Still studying him, he asked brief questions of Trevor, and gathering up the array of papers ranged neatly over the table, swept them back into the safe.
The doctor returned from the kitchen with Franz on his heels, and Liesl, running down the stairs, said in a voice high-pitched with uneasiness: ‘Her coat is gone. And her boots, those pretty snow boots, they are gone, too. I do not understand. Where could she go at this hour?’
Klostermann cast one quick glance round them all. Frau Mehlert was in bed and asleep, but by now this sudden tension had drawn together all the rest of the household. All but one.
‘Wo ist Herr Everard?’ he asked.
No one knew. No one had seen him since he emerged from the office and went upstairs. Franz ran to look for him in his room. He was not there, and his bed had not been disturbed. The wardrobe door swung open, a hanger had fallen to the floor. The window on the balcony was closed, but an edge of the long curtain was caught in it; as soon as the inner window was opened to release it a flurry of new snow fell into the room with it and blew in feathery petals across the rug.
