by Ellis Peters
‘He didn’t say that. Just that there were fingermarks on her throat. Apart from that there’s been nothing. I’m just staying in and having a thoroughly lazy time. How about you? Have you got a car here?’
‘I hired one in Zurich. Had it waiting for me at the airport.’ He busied himself with refilling her glass until the waiter had served their venison and left them to enjoy it.
‘And have you found anywhere interesting to visit round here?’
‘I was over in Germany yesterday,’ he said. ‘I went over to look up an old acquaintance, as a matter of fact. In Felsenbach.’ Obliquely he told her the bare facts of his find, scattered along the way on a verbal conducted tour of one corner of the Allgäu.
‘You must show me your pictures some time,’ she said.
‘You may not like them. It could be said I choose rather offbeat targets.’ He had the sharpest and best of the prints already folded into the menu. ‘Would you like something to follow?’ He held out the card to her across the table, open, the blown-up photograph carefully secured by a forefinger. ‘See what you think.’
Her eyes lit upon the starkly outlined face just before her fingers touched, and for an instant the colour was shocked out of her cheeks. Her mask shook, and was resolutely clamped back into place. She took the menu from him, and sat steadily gazing at the print.
‘Yes, I think so. Yes…’
‘An idealised guess?’
‘A likeness. The way the eyes are set… and the mouth…’ But for Friedl’s thirteen-year-old treasure it might have been hard for her to recall that exact curl of the lips. ‘Formalised, but really a likeness.’ In Friedl’s picture the full lids had also covered and hidden the eyes, whose colour she could not remember, and the lips had borne this same shadow of a smile. Maggie handed the menu back with composure. ‘I’ll just have fruit, I think. And coffee.’
Francis palmed the print and slipped it back into his pocket under the table. The setting of the eyes she had remarked on first; well, that could be guessed at even after months, better than a guess in fact. There is nothing much more durable than bone. But the mouth… That was another matter. The soft tissue of the lips, even if it survived through the frost, surely would not retain much of its normal shape after being buffeted downstream in the thaw.
Maggie peeled a pear with rather strained attention, and asked brightly, without looking up: ‘Have you any plans for this afternoon?’
‘I thought I might have another drive in the same direction. There are some rather good woodcarvers over there, I might have a look what’s to be found. Other artists, too.’
‘Take me with you!’ she said.
The first time she had ever asked him for anything except in return for a fee, and it was the one thing he would not and could not do for her. He wanted her safe in the Goldener Hirsch, with the police on the premises and a good lock on the door.
‘If I were you I should stay in and get plenty of rest. With all this disturbance you must have been under a good deal of strain. Stay in, let them see you’re there on call, not anxious, not involved.’
‘I suppose it might be a good idea,’ she admitted.
‘Wait for me to-night. I’ll come to you as soon as I can. By the verandah. Then we can talk.’
‘Yes!’ she said eagerly. She set down her empty coffee cup, and looked at him for a moment helplessly and hopefully across the table. ‘You will come?’
‘I’ll come.’
‘What do we do about getting out of here? You think it’s me he wants or you? Shall we leave together?’
‘No, you go first, I want to see if he follows.’
‘At least we gave him time to eat his lunch,’ said Maggie, and her fixed and tortured brightness dissolved for a moment into a real, youthful, entrancing smile. What might she not be, he thought, if only he could get her safe out of this with her recovered innocence unspotted?
‘All right, you say when!’
He wanted her to sit there for a long time, smiling at him like that, but he had a lot to do before he could come to her room at night by the verandah staircase, and he wanted her watched and guarded while he did it. ‘When!’ he said, and groaned inwardly at seeing her rise. He came to his feet with her, hurried to draw out her chair and help her into her light grey coat. ‘Don’t go out at all,’ he said into her ear, ‘not anywhere!’
She marshalled coat and gloves and handbag, made a feminine gesture in the direction of her hair without actually touching it, and held out her hand to him.
‘Thank you, Francis, it was a lovely lunch. I shall look forward to seeing you.’
She was gone, weaving between the tables with her long, free, recovered stride. He stood for a few moments to watch her go, and then sat down again slowly, and lit a cigarette over the dregs of his coffee. His ears were full of her voice speaking his name for the first time, a stunning music, but full of cruel overtones. Gratitude and kindness can do terrible injuries, with the best intentions. It ought to be enough to be of service to her. It had to be enough, there wasn’t going to be anything else for him.
The tall man in the grey suit was paying his bill, and rising at leisure to collect his hat from the stand. It was nice to have been right about something, at least. He kept his head negligently turned away as he walked to the door, but one mirror picked up his image in passing and gave Francis a glimpse of a thin, faintly whimsical, pensive face, of deep and generous lines and little flesh, with hair greying at the temples, and deep-set, quiet eyes.
Not, by any stretch of imagination, an Austrian face. Hat or no hat, that was an English sportscoat, and an English countenance.
Now what were the English police doing here in the Vorarlberg, tramping hard on Maggie Tressider’s heels?
He fretted about her all the way to Felsenbach. But when all was considered, she was best and safest in the Goldener Hirsch, with the Austrian police deployed round her on a murder hunt. He had no doubt at all of the accuracy of what she had managed to tell him. Friedl had been, if not strangled, half-strangled and thrown into the lake. Whatever the eccentricity of Maggie’s behaviour, they would not suspect her of an act like that. A woman may perhaps push another woman into a lake, but by and large, it is only men who strangle women. By and large, it is only men who have the necessary hand-span and the necessary force. No, he could leave her for a few hours. And after that, their best course might well be to go together and tell their entire story to the investigators, and leave the rest to them. For the more complex this business became, the more certain did he feel that Maggie was entirely and tragically innocent, a helpless victim caught into somebody else’s schemes only by her hypersensitive conscience, and by the accident of a car smash which had shaken her off-balance and put all her defence mechanisms out of gear.
What was ironical was that only after talking to her had he had been able to put his finger on the thing that was most wrong with Robin Aylwin’s gravestone. All that gratuitous anonymity! The victim, of course, couldn’t be named, no one knew, or admitted to knowing, his name. But not only was the donor also anonymous; most improbable of all, there was not a name, not an initial, not even a mason’s mark, anywhere on that stone to identify the memorial artist who made it! Unheard-of, for the craftsman in death not to avow his work! A monumental mason is a businessman, a tradesman like other tradesmen, he wants his excellence known.
This one didn’t. Why?
There was only one monumental mason in Felsenbach, indeed only one mason of any kind, a builder of long establishment who employed none but his own family, the ramifications of which ran into three generations. Gravestones, kerbs, vaults he took in his patriarchal stride. He remembered the corpse from the Rulenbach, he remembered the funeral; but he had had no part in the business of burial or monument. Some wealthy resident of Regenheim, he recalled, had paid for the interment out of goodness of heart, and the small municipality of Felsenbach had naturally raised no objection. No doubt some mason from Regenheim had been employed t
o make the memorial, afterwards. The donor would obviously look on his own doorstep.
It was another fifteen miles to Regenheim, an undulating, busy road this time, clear of the mountain slopes. The place, when he arrived there, was no bigger than Felsenbach, but unmistakably more a town. There was a square almost large enough for aircraft landings, a waste of cobbles populated by a handful of cars. There were four or five cramped streets eddying out of it, overhung by black and white houses, tottering archways and jutting upper stories. There was a sprawl of modern villa-buildings beyond. And it was raining. The place had not got its name for nothing.
He parked the Dodge in the square and set about locating whatever monumental masons the town might hold. It was already evening, he had lost more time than he had bargained for in reaching this place. He bought some cigarettes at a solid family shop which was still open, and probably would continue so until ten o’clock provided one of the family happened to be spending the evening at home. The woman who served him was elderly and at leisure, and looked as if she and her forebears had been there since Regenheim’s free-city days. If anyone knew where to put a finger on every tradesman in the town, she would.
She was very willing to talk, and showed no surprise at being asked for the local furbishers of graves. There were, she said, only two of any substance. One of them, the oldest established, had his mason’s yard behind his own house, and he or one of his sons could always be found there. The other had built himself a new villa out on the edge of the town. She gave copious directions for finding it. Then there was, of course, the Klostermann outfit, still in business, though they had few clients now, that side of the family’s trade had been neglected since they went in for road haulage. Indifferently she gave him instructions for finding even this unlikely firm, though her large shrug said that she herself wouldn’t consider taking them any of her business. . The head of the old-established house happened to be putting away his pick-up in the corner of the yard. He took out a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to inspect the photographs Francis offered him. No, he had never seen this stone before. If he was curious he did not show it; he had been in the world something like seventy years, and learned to concentrate on his own business, and the discipline had paid him well.
The second one, the dweller in the new villa, was a younger man, a go-ahead type with social ambitions and a look of the townsman about him. The villa was aggressively modern and ostentatious, the wife who opened the door was decorative and well-padded. Francis apologised for calling on them out of the blue and at such an hour, and made it clear at once that he wanted only five minutes of their time. He needed, as it turned out, even less than that.
‘Thirteen years ago!’ said the man of the house, and shook his head decisively. ‘That is before we came here to open our business. We are from München, we have been here only seven years. I am sorry!’
Which left only the family Klostermann, of whom the old woman in the tobacconist’s had thought so poorly. It was getting dark by then, so Francis was torn two ways; but he was not going back without having a look at even so dim a possibility. He threaded the outer edge of the town, and turned back towards the square by side streets that lacked both the black and white fascination of the town centre and the green spaciousness of the suburbs, but were merely utilitarian early-twentieth-century, without squalor or distinction. And there, sure enough, was a dark and almost empty window, once designed for display, with nothing left in it now but a dusty imitation-marble urn, and a shelf of granite vases with perforated aluminium flower-holders. Beside it the high wall of a yard ran for some distance, double doors set in it. The upper windows were dark, the house was not lived in. But the paint on the gates were new.
The whole place appeared deserted, and Francis might have gone away and left it at that; but as he was turning back to the car a man came briskly along the pavement from the direction of the square, fitted a key into the lock of the yard doors, and let himself in. A thickset, youngish man in a belted leather jacket and a black beret, with a battered briefcase under his arm. Francis gave him a minute or two, and then followed him in. He had left the heavy door ajar, and his lively footfalls clashed diagonally ahead over the cobbles. In the far corner of the yard, in a one-story building obviously added to the original house, a light sprang up.
All one side of the yard was garage doors, and several lorries and vans stood ranged along another wall. Behind the frosted window of what seemed to be the office the dark shape of the leather-coated young man moved vaguely. In a corner of the yard some relics of the expiring monumental business mouldered gently, synthetic granite kerbing, a half-shaped headstone, a small, drooping angel leaning on a cross.
Francis rapped at the office door and pushed it open before him. The man in the leather jacket swung round from the desk under the window, his briefcase open in one hand, a folder of papers in the other. The movement was silent, alert and surprised, but by no means alarmed. He had a smooth, well-fleshed face, high-coloured and bland, with round-set eyes of a bright and yet opaque black, like coal.
‘Was wünschen Sie?’ His voice was gravelly and deep, with no implications of either welcome or animosity.
‘Herr Klostermann?’
No, he was not a Klostermann, it seemed. He relaxed, however, on finding that the late caller was looking for his boss. Francis went through his brief explanation for the third time, and produced his photographs. The young man bent his large head over them, breathing stertorously and considered them for a few moments with respectful attention. Then he shook his head regretfully.
‘I am sorry! I am with Herr Klostermann myself only two years. I drive for him. I came to pick up my delivery schedule for to-morrow. With the memorial business I have nothing to do. I do not know if he made this or not. If you could come to-morrow, he will be here.’
‘I should like to get in touch with him now,’ said Francis, ‘if it’s possible. I have to drive back to Scheidenau to-night, and I’d rather not have the same journey again if I can help it.’
‘I am sorry!’ He handed back the picture, and closed his briefcase with deliberation, his round eyes still black and steady on Francis.
‘Would there be records here for 1956?’
‘No, no records. It is now chiefly a haulage business, everything else he has at his own house.’
‘Could I go round there to see him now? It would be a great help to me.’
‘I think he is not there,’ said the gravelly voice gently. ‘Wait, I will call the house for you, and see.’
He walked away into the dark corner of the room, and opened a narrow door there. His fingers touched the light switch within, and Francis caught a glimpse of a larger, less austere office, with filing cabinets from floor to ceiling along the visible wall, and some pleasant panelling beyond. Then the door was closed firmly between, and he was alone, free to move noiselessly after, and apply his eye to the minute keyhole, and then his ear to the thin panel of the door. It got him very little. There was a long table just within his vision, and the young man was leaning over it, telephone receiver at his ear, dialling a number; but the room within was larger than it seemed, and nothing more than an indistinguishable murmur reached the listener’s ear. There was nothing whatever to make his thumbs prick. The young man had said he would telephone, and he was telephoning. A local number, too, or at least somewhere he could dial and get without delay. And he was already cradling the receiver, better get well away from the door before he reached it.
The door opened peacefully, the young man stood shaking his head sadly on the threshold. Behind him the light went out.
‘I am sorry, Mr. Klostermann is at his married daughter’s house for the evening. I can tell you how to reach him there, if you care to go? It is a farm, about five kilometres from here. You take the road from the square towards Kempten, then two kilometres on you come to a right-hand fork, the signpost says Maienbach. Follow that road for two kilometres, and on the left is a cart road to the farm. It is not h
ard to find. I should go and speak with Herr Klostermann there. He will not need records to know his own work.’
‘No,’ said Francis, ‘I don’t suppose he will. Thank you! If it’s only five kilometres I might as well reach him now, and get it settled.’
‘If you should have to ask, the name at the farm is Haimhofer.’
‘Thank you very much!’
‘Bitte!’
Francis walked purposefully across the yard,pulled the unlocked gates to behind him, got into his car and drove up towards the square with aplomb. Arrived there, he circled right-handed about the central parking space, and passed without a second glance the sign marked: Kempten. Reasonable or not, his thumbs were pricking almost painfully. He took the road for Felsenbach, and stepped hard on the accelerator as soon as he emerged from the narrow confines of the streets. He was heading back towards Scheidenau as fast as he could go.
He was past Felsenbach, half-way to the frontier and immured between encroaching plantations of conifers, before he could be quite certain that he was being followed. There were all yesterday’s prickings of uneasiness, all yesterday’s minute outward signs, but magnified by the extreme, washed clarity of the air. The rain had scrubbed the atmosphere clean as bone, sounds carried as in an echo-chamber. When he stopped his engine for a moment under the trees on a sharp bend, there was not so much a perceptible sound of an engine following, as the vibration of a motor just cut out, by some hypersensitive perception, to match his. Then the superhuman silence. They were there, not too far behind, not too close on his tail; they knew where he was, and were not anxious to overhaul him, as long as they could hold him at this convenient distance, and be sure of not losing him. He wondered what spot they would choose, where they would elect to close the gap. He wished he carried a gun, but knew it was not his weapon and not his style, and that he would have been useless with it even if he had had one. There are killers and non-killers. Guns don’t make them.
