by Ellis Peters
He would never know what he had done for her!
Friedl had died in the lake, but with the marks of hands round her throat. That meant murder! Not the obscure, malign influence of a woman who was accursed and carried death around with her against her will, but simple, physical, brutal murder, ordered by a human brain and carried out by two human hands. Not her hands, and not her brain. She was absolved; this at least she knew she had not done, nor caused to be done. Someone else had been prowling the woods at midnight, spying on them. A dead twig had cracked underfoot, and Friedl had shrugged it away as of no significance. And if this was plain, workaday murder, then surely so had Robin’s death been, long ago.
Not hers at all, never hers, neither the act nor the guilt. All she had been was the diversion, the instrument, the fool of God blundering about helplessly in the path of some other force not troubled with a conscience.
There was someone else, then, who had wanted Friedl dead. There was someone else who had wanted Robin dead. What a fool she had been, what an inflated fool, thinking herself so important that heaven would put itself out to spread its lightnings round her! Humility came to her aid now, she saw herself small and accidental, ridiculously irrelevant. Some other more urgent, more practical reason must account for these deaths. Someone else’s advantage, or profit, or threatened security.
So why? Why kill Robin? Why kill Friedl? These two deaths, however far divided in time, could not be separate. There was no possibility of mere coincidence. Friedl had lived safely enough here all those years, but she had not long survived once she began to answer questions on this one subject. Questions which it seemed had never been asked by anyone before. She was malevolent and talkative, and she died. Someone had reason to fear her tongue. Someone who knew all about Robin Aylwin’s death. Someone who flourished in anonymity and did not wish to be investigated, someone who could not permit curiosity, who could not afford curiosity!
The more she considered what knowledge she had, the more certain did it seem to her that the murderer of Robin and the murderer of Friedl Schiffer were one and the same. Why else should it be necessary to stop Friedl’s mouth?
It seems, she told the bright, transfigured self in her glass, that these things began happening because I began to probe Robin’s disappearance. His death, though I didn’t know that at the time, not for certain. So that gives us all the more reason for continuing to probe, but also all the more reason for doing it very, very carefully, and thinking out and covering up every move before we make it. Above all, for going over every single word either of us got out of Friedl. Because she must have told us more than we’ve realised yet, if only we can find out which bits are really significant.
To-morrow, she promised herself, I shall have help. Over lunch I’ll tell him all this, he’ll know how to go on from there, what we ought to do. Go straight to the police and tell them all we know and all we guess, or hold back until we have more to offer? I’ve already lied, I can bear to stay a liar until then, because he’s implicated, too, once I admit what I know about last night. I can make no move until I’ve seen him.
So that was settled, and she was left staring in delight and disbelief at that shining image before her, with gentian eyes dilated and radiant, and a soft flush of excitement like summer bloom on her pale cheeks. She thought, astonished: He’s never really seen me, and I’ve never really seen him. We shall be meeting for the first time!
At about the same hour of the afternoon when Maggie celebrated her miraculous restoration to sanity and health by washing her hair and giving her favourite dress to a chambermaid to be pressed, Francis Killian was standing beside a grave in the small cemetery of Felsenbach, five miles inside the German frontier.
A little excursion over the border into the Allgau, itself a very charming district and on terms of intimate exchange with its southern neighbours, is a normal enough way of spending a day if you happen to be a tourist in the northern Vorarlberg or the north-western Tirol. And since English tourists habitually visit churches, even those tourists who hardly ever enter a church at home, Francis had felt it to be natural enough to make for the churchyard and do his own hunting, rather than risk asking leading questions in any of the inns of Felsenbach, let alone the one which belonged to the husband of Marianne Waldmeister. Buried, Friedl had said, as a charity, and with a stone over him, but without a name. That should be data enough to identify what Francis was looking for. If there was a stone there would be some inscription on it, if only to call attention to the piety of the donor.
Felsenbach lay in a shallow bowl among the hills, with the river circling round it, one bank deeply undercut. In the spring thaw this insignificant little stream would come down fast and bring a great deal of the débris of the higher lands with it. Now in the moist, mild September weather the Rulenbach ran lamblike round the northern edge of the village, and threatened no one.
The church lay on the southern fringe of the village, on rising ground, and the cemetery spread over a gentle plateau behind it. An old church, squat, whitewashed, with an onion cupola weathered to a beautiful Indian red. Its thick walls had a heavy batter, its windows were small and sunk far into the masonry like deep-set eyes. The burial ground, too, was old and thickly populated. Francis saw confronting him a miniature forest of close-planted, rigid little trees, wooden-shafted trees with complicated foliage of iron filigree and paper blossoms, and violet mourning ribbons turning a uniform dun-colour with age and weather.
He made several exposures of the church, in case anyone was interested in his activities, though it seemed unlikely, and one of the valley from over the tiled crest of the boundary wall; and then he began to move among the graves, taking a picture here and there. The display of ironwork was fantastic enough to turn any addict camera-happy. Most of the older memorials, the carved wooden crosses and pale stone kerbs, bore framed photographs of the dead, some of them so worn and faded that only a feature or two survived, a vast moustache from early in the century, a pair of unwavering, sad eyes, a piled nest of frizzy hair. Some of the newer granite headstones had their frontal surfaces glazed black, to carry more permanent and more startling reminders of the people they commemorated, portraits engraved into the glaze to last as long as the stone. These were never going to mellow into anonymity, every rain washed them clean, even if every All Souls’ Day had not turned out the survivors with detergent and chamois leather to make sure not a line was lost.
It took him an hour or more to find the one he was looking for, but once found there was no mistaking it. It was tucked into a far corner of the cemetery, close to the waste plot where old flowers and garlands were piled together to await destruction, and it was the only stone he saw which was both modern and neglected. The charity which had buried Robin Aylwin could not be expected to visit him annually and clean him up for the festival of the dead; and even if the church took care of this task, the grave had had almost a year now to get overgrown. The grass was roughly trimmed back from it, there was still one faded wreath, but the black mirror of the squat headstone was filmed here and there with a thin layer of grey lichen. Nevertheless, its most startling aspect was immediately apparent; above the inscription there was an engraving of what was certainly a human head.
Francis found himself a fine sliver of shale, and began to pare away the growth of lichen, and then with a handful of moist paper flowers from the waste heap scrubbed the surface clean. The thing sprang out at him unnervingly clear and improbable. It was a human head, certainly, and with enough individuality in the face to suggest a portrait; but it differed from all the rest in being recumbent and seen in half-face, as you might have seen it if you had been called to identify it on a slab in the morgue. The eyelids were closed, the young features frozen into the lofty detachment of death. The thick hair, streaming back from the bland forehead as if still heavy with the water of the Scheidenauersee, had yet a suggestion of waves in it. The lips, full and firm, curled a little at the corners with a suggestion of the self-confi
dence of life. In its way it was an impressive piece, a pious generalisation for drowned youth, and yet with a markedly individual personality of its own.
Which, of course, was absurd! Or was it? Granted the corpse must have been at least four months in the water before it came ashore, they had been the winter months of almost total frost.
Even if the clothes had been a complete loss, as Friedl had said, the body might still have retained some indications of its living appearance, enough to guide a skilled man. The doctor who conducted the post-mortem might even have advised on a reconstruction from the bones of the face. Given the interest, it could be done. But would the result look like this? Or perhaps it was entirely fanciful; the romantic and morbid German temperament, Francis reflected, had done stranger things than this in its time. And perhaps some rich man not far from the end of his span was concerned rather with making his own soul than salvaging Robin Aylwin’s. The elaboration of his offering was what mattered. Beneath the portrait—for reconstructed or imaginary, it was a portrait—was an inscription in German. Francis translated it loosely, and wondered:
‘Pray for the repose of an unknown young man, drowned in the Rulenbach, and for those who erected this memorial over him.
February 1956.’
A modest donor, he had left his own name out of it along with the necessary omisson of the victim’s. Francis used up the rest of his film on the grave. The light was still good, and the definition in the engraving excellent. Developing the results would not be so easy, but at this time of year the backlog of work in the local studio would not be great, and a little persuasion and a discreet bribe might get him his pictures by to-morrow morning if he hurried back and handed over the film now. He would have preferred to spend a little time in making friends with the photographer and getting him to lend his darkroom, but with a police investigation going on in Scheidenau even so small a departure from the norm would invite attention. No, better just be a tourist in a hurry, there was nothing abnormal about that.
He went to the trouble, before he departed, to inspect every face of the stone. There was something about it that made him uneasy, something small and prosaic in which it differed from its kind, quite apart from the macabre quality of the work involved; but for the life of him he could not put his finger on it.
He picked up his car in the square, and drove back through the valley towards Austria. For two or three miles the road was a gentle rise with open meadow views. Then, in the belt of country near the frontier, there were broken woodlands and outcrop rocks, and more than one short but dramatic defile between high walls of forest and cliff. In this complex countryside echoes played strange tricks. Occasionally he would have sworn that he was about to meet another car, yet nothing appeared, and it seemed that the sound of his own engine was being flung back to him from some oblique face of rock ahead. Twice he thought he caught the note of a car following him, and once went so far as to cut his engine and slide in among the trees to see if anything passed by; but nothing did, and as soon as the note of his own motor ceased he was surrounded by a profound silence. It was a dark, enclosed road, little frequented at this time of year. He completed the ascent, and emerged into the comparative daylight of the westward side, winding down among rolling meadows to the Customs’ barrier. A bored official urged him through. In twenty minutes he was passing the Alte Post and entering Scheidenau.
In the darkness under the trees he stood and watched her windows, but he went no nearer than the water’s edge, where the public path in the little park ended; for she was there, safe, he need not wonder about her to-night.
She was singing. The notes of the piano prelude drifted across the lambent silver of the water, refined into unearthly purity and clarity. And then the voice, molten gold, pouring out on the air a passion of hope and longing.
‘Die Welt wird schöner mit jedem Tag,
Man weiss nicht was noch werden mag,
Das Blühen will nicht enden…’
Walled in and overshadowed with autumn, murder and sorrow, she sang about spring and hope and certainty, proclaimed that the world grew more beautiful every day, that no one could guess what miracle would happen next, what prodigy of blossom burst before a man’s eyes. And you would have thought, he reflected with an aching heart, that she truly believed it, she in her sickness and loneliness and undefined danger. Such a demon she had in her, and so little did it consider her. If he had not known in what extremity he had unwillingly left her that morning, he would have said, yes, this is the acme of joy.
‘Es blüht das fernste, tiefste Tal.
Nun, armes Herz, vergiss der Qual!
Nun müss sich alles, alles wenden,
Nun müss sich alles, alles wenden.’
Now, poor heart, forget your pain; Now everything, everything must change!
I wish, he thought, following the last droplet of the postlude to its silvery resolution far over the lake, I wish I believed it. For you it may yet, my beautiful, my darling, for you it shall if I can make it. But not for me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
« ^ »
Maggie pushed open the door of the restaurant Zum Bären just ten minutes after noon. He was there before her, credibly installed alone at one of the smaller tables for two. He saw her come, and his face, after the first blank glance, lit up with what she took for a creditable impersonation of a rather bored tourist spotting a totally unexpected acquaintance, though in fact the bravery of her appearance and the bloom that awakening had cast over her pallor and frailty had dazzled him out of all pretence. Maggie had been right, he was seeing her for the first time; the trouble was that he did not realise it. What he believed he was seeing, blessedly reassuring and agonisingly lovely though he found it, was what she could do by way of putting on a show when her life and future were at stake. Even so, he marvelled and adored her for it; but he would have been very chary indeed of taking it as genuine.
She walked across the room between the tables with her head up and her eyes roving, and her stride was young and elastic and easy, it would have done for the self-confident débutante she had never been. She made to pass him, and then looked straight at him, and halted, swinging upon him with delighted face and eagerly outstretched hand.
‘Mr. Killian! Well, what are you doing here? How nice to see you!’
Not overdone, either, he thought with rueful approval, the voice still subdued meant only for him, even the gesture preserving a thoroughly English restraint. She was, after all, an experienced opera singer, and no one needs acting skill more.
It was at that moment that he observed the man who had entered so unobtrusively after her. A tall man in a grey suit, who was just hanging up his hat and taking a seat at a table not too close to them, but strategically placed beside a pillar faced on its six sides with mirrors. He had his back to them, and the table was so aligned that Francis could not even see his face in the mirrors, but the stranger had only to turn his head a little to keep a close eye on them.
On his feet, beaming painfully at the apparition of beauty that was not and never could be his, going through the motions of inviting her to join him, seating her devotedly, Francis said into her ear, with no change of expression or intonation: ‘You’ve picked up a shadow. No, don’t look round! He’s several yards away, he can’t hear us if we’re careful, but he has us under observation. Keep acting, and slip in what you want to say among the chatter.’
He felt her stiffen for an instant, but when he sat down opposite her she was smiling at him. ‘How wonderful to meet somebody to whom I can talk in English. My German has been strained to the limit. Police, do you mean?’
‘Yes, plain clothes. Very discreet. But for the hat I’d have said English.’ He handed her the menu. ‘Tell me what you’re doing here?’
Frowning over a plethora of dishes, she said, ‘Convalescing. But it seems I may have picked the wrong place. You’ll have heard about our excitement? They were easily satisfied, it went all right. I got something, too, something
definite.’ She looked up at him over the long card with its border of vine-leaves. ‘You think the venison would be a good idea?’
‘I think it might. Beer or wine?’
‘Wine. You choose.’ She leaned her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. It brought her a little nearer to him, and made it possible to use her fingers to screen the movement of her lips. ‘Friedl was murdered. He told me there were fingermarks round her throat.’
Francis kept the easy social smile fixed on his face; he had to, the man by the mirrors had just shifted his chair very slightly to have them more favourably in view.
‘There’s an open red wine, a local, shall we try it? The police told you that?’
‘Yes. All right, let’s.’ She sat back as the waiter approached to take their order. This was not the interview to which she had looked forward. The very smile she was obliged to wear was becoming cramped and painful. Between trivialities they might manage to convey the bare bones of what they had to say to each other, but she would be no nearer knowing whether he believed her, nor could this kind of exchange ever communicate what she felt, the extraordinary sense of deliverance, the revealing quality of the light now that the shadow of guilt had dissolved from over her. This was the first meeting with him to which she had ever come with an open heart, willing to let him in to her, and because of the stranger watching them they must still remain apart. But she tried. As soon as the soup was served and the waiter had left them she lifted to his face one clear, unsmiling glance. ‘I’m cured,’ she said.
If he had understood, he made no sign. To talk under these circumstances, in the sense of using language in order to effect a communion between two people, was impossible, and he was not going to attempt it. All they could do was exchange information. Some day there would be a time for doing more than that, but not now. ‘She was strangled?’
