by Ellis Peters
All right, damn you! said Francis, setting his teeth, then I’ll settle for that!
CHAPTER THREE
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So from then on he had two people’s interests to serve, Maggie’s and his own; and for the time being they were identical. If ever the two interests should diverge, God only knew what he would do, or which of them he would put first. There was no sense in trying to anticipate the event, and no comfort, either.
Back to the business in hand, then. If X was an injured lover, he belonged somewhere at the threshold of success. Ever since she was twenty years old she had lived in the sun, known exactly where she was going, and needed no claws. The more he thought about it, the more he was left with two formative years, the last two she had spent under Paul Fredericks.
What wouldn’t he have given to be able to question the old man, or even his sister who had worked with him? Perhaps especially his sister, for an elderly woman sees more of what goes on inside ambitious girls of genius than does a doting old man whose protégées they are. But they were both dead long ago. Francis had, however, the lists of names of those who had accompanied Maggie on her three tours with Freddy’s Circus. He began with the last, in the autumn of 1955. The last for an excellent reason, because after it she had been invited to sing Cherubini at Covent Garden, and Freddy had acknowledged that she was ready. That was also reason enough why Francis should consider it first.
And there in the list, if he couldn’t have Esther Fredericks, was the woman who had taken her place on the trip. Bernarda Elliot. Now Bernarda Felse. If Freddy had turned to her in a crisis, she must have a good head on her shoulders, as well as a contralto voice in her throat. And hadn’t Maggie said that she lived—or had then been living—somewhere here in the Midlands? Felse is not a very common name.
He looked in the regional telephone directory. Felse is not a common name at all, he found. There was just one of them in the whole of two border English counties and a large slice of mid-Wales. George Felse, of 19 Prior’s Lane, Comerford. In the circumstances it wouldn’t be much of a trick to find out whether his wife’s name was Bernarda.
It was; though most people, he discovered, seemed to know her as Bunty. And her husband—well, well, who would have thought it?—turned out to be a detective-inspector in the Midshire C.I.D. A far cry from Freddy’s Circus to a modest modernised cottage in the village of Comerford, only a few miles out of the county town, and just in sad process of becoming a town itself. Thirteen years is a long time; George Felse must have been a bobby on the beat when this girl—and Maggie had said she was good—decided he was what she wanted most.
So it can happen!
Don’t build on it, Francis, he warned himself grimly, it couldn’t happen to Maggie. A little interlude of a few months—even a year or so—you might get if you’re lucky and clever, but not a lifetime, don’t look for it.
He called the number in the book. The voice that answered was lighter than Maggie’s, and more veiled. ‘Yes, I’m Bernarda Felse. But how did you know?’
A good question, but for some reason a daunting one. He might have to be on his guard with a woman like that, in case he gave away more than he got from her.
‘My name’s Francis Killian. I got your name from Maggie Tressider. You know she’s in hospital in Comerbourne, after an accident? I do private research for anyone who needs it, in connection with books, indexing, that sort of thing. While she’s laid up, Miss Tressider is compiling material for a possible monograph on Doctor Paul Fredericks. She’s using me to do some of the donkey work for her. I believe you knew him well?’
‘I studied under him,’ said the distant voice, with pride, with affection, with gaiety; entirely without regret. ‘He was one of the world’s darlings. But irascible as the devil! No, come to think of it, the devil wouldn’t be, would he? Somebody ought to put Freddy on record, that’s a fact.’
‘It would be a great help if I could talk to you about him. May I come over and see you, some time?’
‘Any afternoon that suits you,’ said Bunty Felse. ‘Today, if you like?’
The moment he set eyes on her he stopped wondering if she had any lingering doubts about her bargain. She was one of the few people he’d ever seen who looked as if they had never regretted anything in their lives. She was about his own age, a slender person of medium height, with a shining cap of glossy hair the colour of ripe conkers, and a few engaging silvery strands coiled in the red here and there. Her eyes, large and brightly hazel, looked straight into his over the coffee-cups and declared her curiosity quite openly, and the effect their candour had upon him was of a compliment.
‘Will she really ever do anything about it?… this book on Freddy?’
‘Ah, that’s another question,’ admitted Francis. ‘Not for me to ask. You could, if you went to visit her. I think she’d be pleased.’
‘That,’ said Bunty, reaching for an ashtray from the bookcase, ‘one doesn’t do. I have just about as much claim on Miss Tressider as I have on half the big names in music to-day—I once studied for three years under a man they all knew and valued. So did dozens, maybe hundreds of others, most of them as obscure as I am. No, I contracted out, and you can’t have it both ways, and personally I’ve never even wanted to. Well… hardly ever, and then only for a day or so. I never really knew the girl, in any case. I was married some years before she even came to Freddy. It was only the accident of Esther’s illness that made us acquainted at all.’
‘But you remember her? As she was then?’
‘You wouldn’t,’ said Bunty with the slow smile that made the freckles dance across the bridge of her short, straight nose, ‘be likely to forget her. I assure you she was already glorious. I may have contracted out myself, but I haven’t lost interest. I knew what we had with us on that trip abroad. Freddy told me, for that matter, but I’d already noticed for myself. In a way I think that particular tour was the turning point for her. She suddenly realised her full possibilities. As if everything in her had discovered its pole and fixed on it for good. She turned her back on everything except music.’
The phrase arrested his mind and his pen together; he had a couple of pages of notes on Dr. Fredericks by then, since that was where his interest ostensibly lay. By this time he could surely afford to manifest some curiosity of his own about Maggie.
‘She had her first big successes on that tour?’ he asked.
‘She did, that’s true enough. But it was more than that, something that happened inside her own mind. I should guess she had plenty of faith in herself when we set out. After all, it was her third trip with Freddy. But somewhere along the line she seemed to wake up fully, and after that she set her sights on the top of the mountain and started walking. And she’s never looked back.’
She had, though, in the end; but Francis kept that to himself. When death put its hand on her and stopped the breath in her throat on the operating table, and then changed its mind and withdrew from her after all, somewhere a forgotten window had opened and Maggie had looked back.
He closed his notebook on his knee, and sat looking at Bunty Felse over it for a moment of silence. Then he said: ‘Tell me about that particular tour. Where did you go? Where were the concerts held? Did anything out of the ordinary happen? Tell me everything you can remember about it.’
The hazel eyes, dappled with points of brilliant green in the sunlight, studied him thoughtfully. Now was the time for her to say: ‘I thought it was about Freddy you were collecting material!’ but she didn’t say it. Whatever she saw in him seemed to her logical enough reason for the change of emphasis. She didn’t even find it necessary to comment.
‘I’ve still got the whole itinerary and my working notes somewhere. It was the only time I had the job to do, so I had to get it right. I did all the secretarial work, you see, bookings, bills, the lot, as well as keeping an eye on the girls.’ She got up, and went to rummage in the drawers of the bureau. She hadn’t kept these papers as treasured souvenirs, ap
parently, or if she had they had long outlived her reverence for them, and found their way somewhere to the most remote corner.
‘Did you have much trouble?’ asked Francis.
She laughed. ‘Very little with the girls. There were only three of them, and they were all completely serious about their careers. Freddy’s students usually were, or they didn’t last long. There was more trouble with Freddy himself, actually, that trip. He was always excitable before concerts, and we had one rather turbulent member among the boys who was just beginning to get in his hair.’ She found what she wanted, somewhat crumpled at the back of a loose-leaf book, and came back to the coffee-table smoothing it out in her hands; a dozen or so sheets of quarto paper stapled together, a handful of hotel bills and a sketch-map of their route across half of Europe and back to Calais. She dropped the little file before him, and sat down again. ‘Take it if it’s any help to you.’ Her eyes met his levelly, and still she refrained from comment. She had her own ideas about the nature of his interest in Maggie Tressider, and who was to say she was wrong?
‘I’d like to, if you’re sure you don’t mind? I’ll return it…’
‘Don’t!’ she said, and smiled. ‘It was a nice thing to do, just once, more interesting in a way than when I went with him as a soloist myself. But I’ve finished with it now. I did just one Circus when I was nineteen, and then opted for marriage, and that was it. My son was seven years old, going on eight, that summer when Esther went to hospital. To tell the truth, I felt more flattered being asked to stand in for her than if he’d asked me to go back to singing. And my mother took over the family for me while I was away. Everything went off nicely, and it’s something to remember. But it’s a long time ago now.’
‘You were saying,’ prompted Francis, his eyes on the map, ‘that Dr. Fredericks was having a certain amount of trouble during the trip. Did something happen to upset him?’
‘Nothing very surprising. There’d been friction for some time in that quarter. We came home to England one member short, that’s all. One of the orchestra walked out on us in Austria. Well, one of the orchestra… he was our occasional ’cello soloist, too, we had to rearrange some of the programmes after he defected.’
‘I take it this was the turbulent one who was getting in the doctor’s hair? Do you remember his name?’
She leaned over to take the crumpled papers out of his hand and flick through them for the typed concert programmes she had compiled so long ago. ‘Yes, here we are… Robert Aylwin. That’s right, they called him Robin. He was quite a brilliant player, if he’d ever worked at it, but it was becoming pretty clear that he never intended to. He’d been with Freddy for two years, but that trip he was putting all his deficiencies on show, and it was plain he wasn’t going to last much longer. I doubt if he’d have lasted that long, if he hadn’t been such a charmer. That was probably his trouble, he was used to smiling at things and having them fall into his hands, not having to work for them. Music was too much like hard labour. He was getting bored with the whole thing, and treating it with distressing levity. With Freddy that was naturally heresy. They’d had words two or three times, and we all knew it. Nobody was very surprised when the boy just took himself off, one night between dinner and bedtime, and never showed his face again. There were rumours that he’d been misusing his respectability as Freddy’s protégé for a little smuggling, and Freddy’s conscience was such—not to mention his natural sense of outrage—that he really might have turned the boy in. If true, of course! But one could believe it. Probably not much wrong with him except this incurable light-mindedness, but that was enough for Freddy.’
‘You mean he just packed and slipped away without saying a word to anyone? Not even to one of the other boys?’
‘Well, supposing there was anything in the smuggling rumour, and he’d come to the conclusion he’d better disappear, then he wouldn’t take anyone in the Circus into his confidence, would he? He probably wouldn’t in any case, he was a very self-sufficient young man, he ran his own show.’
‘And you’ve no idea what happened to him afterwards?’
‘Not the slightest. He was never going to hit the headlines as an instrumentalist, he couldn’t be bothered. We just went on with our schedule without him. Freddy made no attempt to trace him, after all he was over twenty-one and his own master. He probably drifted back home when he felt like it, or signed up with some small orchestra over there. He was the kind to fall on his feet, and he spoke both German and French, he’d get along all right. We weren’t worried about him.’
But the strange, the unnerving thing was that suddenly Francis was worried about him. For no reason, except that the boy had been near to Maggie, and had walked away into a long-past evening and left no trace behind him.
‘Didn’t his family want to know what you’d done with him?’
‘He had no close family, as far as I know. He’d been knocking about on his own for two or three years already.’
‘What was this boy like? You haven’t a photograph?’
She shook her head. ‘No photographs. I had loads of publicity pictures at the time, of course, but obviously I didn’t file them. It’s a long time ago. I remember him as a very attractive young man, and well aware of it. Girls liked him.’ She added after a moment’s thought: ‘He laughed a lot.’
‘And where did this happen… this walking out?’
‘We were staying in a little resort in the Vorarlberg, a place called Scheidenau. You’ll find it all in the papers there. Freddy always used the Goldener Hirsch as a convenient base for all our concerts round there—Bregenz, Bludenz, Vaduz, St. Gallen, Lindau, all those places. It’s very near to the German border, and quiet, and rather cheap.’
‘And he walked out between dinner and bedtime? Just like that? Did you notice anything different about him at dinner? Nothing to show what he had in mind?’
By this time, he realised, she ought to have been asking questions herself, and the very fact that she was not had drawn him into deeper water than he had intended venturing. He smiled at her, shaking away the betraying tension of his own concentration. ‘It seems such an odd time to cut his moorings.’
‘All he seemed to have in mind at dinner,’ said Bunty, disconcertingly remaining grave, ‘was ingratiating himself with Maggie. He’d been paying her special attention for several days, that I do remember. Not that there’s anything remarkable in that. She was… she is a most beautiful person. All our boys were a little in love with her.’
He kept his eyes steady and faintly amused on hers, his hands placid on the papers they held, with an effort of will that left him no energy for speech for a moment. And he wondered if she could have hit him so hard and so accurately without knowing exactly what she was doing. Not out of malice, perhaps, just by way of experiment; there are other ways of satisfying one’s curiosity, besides asking direct questions.
‘I’m sure they must have been,’ he said evenly, when he had his voice under control again. Let her wonder, too, by how much she had missed her target. ‘And what about Miss Tressider? Did she respond?’
‘Maggie had other things on her mind by then. She knew what she wanted. She was nineteen,’ said Bunty, ‘she liked being liked, and she was a very nice, patient, quiet girl who would in any case have been kind to him. But she never took her eyes from her objective, for him or anyone.’
Her voice was gentle, deliberate and detached. It was more than time to work his way back unobtrusively to Paul Fredericks for ten minutes or so, and then take himself off, before he gave her more than he was getting out of her. She was altogether too perceptive. He managed his retreat with finesse, but finesse was not enough. Never mind, she had made it clear that she sympathised, and also held it to be no personal business of hers; and he was never going to see her again closer than across a Comerbourne street.
‘Of course,’ said Bunty Felse disconcertingly, seeing him out at the door, ‘after all this time she may have changed.’
It did
not occur to her that there was anything to disturb her in this interview, for fully an hour after it was over. Her visitor was presumably what he purported to be, and it was only his misfortune that an aching preoccupation of his own had side-tracked him from the master to the pupil. If there hadn’t been something she had liked about him she might not even have noticed, much less felt obliged to warn him that she had. But after he was gone her mind began to nag at the curious implications of their conversation. Surely everything he had learned from her about autumn, 1955, Maggie already knew at least as well, and he must have known she would need no help in recalling details, supposing that she was serious about this book. No, that probe had been for his own satisfaction. And granted he had his own unhappy reason for wanting to talk about Maggie rather than her teacher, why just that incident, and why with so much controlled intensity? Why dwell so insistently on Robin Aylwin, who was of no significance whatever? Why want a photograph of him? The more she thought of it, the more it seemed to her that their conversation had gathered and fixed upon that enigmatic young man with quite unjustified interest.
She had not been asked to treat the interview as confidential. So she told George about it over tea, as she did about most things that stirred or puzzled her. George, who had had a fairly boring day, listened to her with pleasure and affection, but with only one ear, until a single harmless word unexpectedly caused all his senses to prick into life together. He came erect out of a faint blue cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘Scheidenau?’ he repeated sharply.
‘Scheidenau,’ agreed Bunty, opening her eyes wide. ‘Why? Ring a bell, or something? I must have mentioned it ad nauseam at the time, but of course it’s a long time ago. Anyway, it’s only a tiny little resort, nothing special about it. What made you sit up and take notice suddenly?’
