by Ellis Peters
They parted on the upper landing, Una going to the right, Crista to the left, and passed from room to room, testing the catches of the windows, drawing the creaking shutters to and fastening them with the iron peg that bolted them close. Room after room darkened on their heels. As yet there was no power connected here, only in the living quarters. Again they met on the landing above the staircase, and descended together into the hall.
‘Toss you,’ said Una, fishing a forgotten five-schilling piece out of the pocket of her skirt, ‘who goes which way.’
‘No, you began that way, let’s go on like that.’ It would bring Una back gradually to the inhabited part, and to Lucas, while Crista laboured longer in the deserted wing. She understood, even before Crista continued, almost deprecatingly: ‘You should go back to him first. It will be better.’
‘All right! Yes, I’ll go.’
In the direct path of Venus’s chariot they separated, Crista going on by the ground-floor rooms on the distant side, and so round into the damp and decaying glories of the forsaken wing, Una turning back to comb the lower storey on her own side, and work her way back to Lucas. For a time they heard each other’s tiny, lonely foot-falls clashing on the tessellated floors and marble corridors, and vanishing into mouldering carpets and the muffling quietness of dust-sheets and heavy curtains. Then each of them was alone, the only source of sound in all that majestic silence.
Everything was changed for Una from that moment. She imagined echoes of her own footsteps, following somewhere a few paces behind; but when she turned her head there was no one to be seen. She saw brocade curtains swing as though a hand had just let them fall, and the gimcrack tinsel and gilt of the panelling, as she opened the door of room after room, seemed to tremble with a reflected presence just flashing out of sight. She went methodically through the ground-floor rooms of her side of the main block, testing window catches, clamping shutters together where they were not already closed. Occasionally, when she came near to the hall again, she heard Crista’s sandals clicking in time with her own, somewhere there on the opposite side. But more and more distantly, as they drew apart. Crista was moving more briskly than she, perhaps aware of having farther to go. After they lost touch with each other, new and strange sounds moved in and took possession of the silence, the mysterious, rustling sounds of all unused houses.
From every window she looked out toward Gries, to see if the darkening water bore anywhere the darker speck of a boat; but now the pleasure cruisers had drawn in for the night, and there was no sign, only a great pewter stillness before the true, cobalt darkness fell. She came back, walking softly, to the rear part of the hall, her round completed. No, not completed! There was a narrow little door under the staircase, hidden behind Venus’s billowing draperies. Of course, the passage to the lantern on the promontory must begin here, it was the centre-point of the view from the town. Had Crista checked the little chamber there? She thought not, for Crista was ahead of her, and had vanished into the recesses of the other wing.
She tried the little door, white, etched in curvilinear gold, and it gave to her hand. Was it possible for anyone to get in by way of that ostentatious little summer-house on the rock, and so enter the house? The cliff below it looked sheer, but she had seen it only from the water. Better make sure.
The passage was panelled all the way in the same white, soiled now with the dust of years, engraved with tarnished gilt. It was lit from above, and an astonishing amount of light still spilled into it, for half the panes of glass above were broken, and she trod over tinkling crystal shards as she walked. The floor was mosaic, cold through her thin soles, and with arms half-extended she could touch both walls.
She came to a second door like the first, and beyond was the small hexagonal room she might have expected, the three walls towards the water all windows, the other three painted with odiously coy nymphs and lewd Cupids, the arched ceiling ebullient with cloud-borne deities. Rococo always made her feel puritan in recoil, it ogled and leered so. She averted her eyes from the indecent pink balloons of flesh, still visible in the afterglow and the reflections from the water, flaking off in leprous patches, bulging where more flakes were about to fall, like some obscene skin disease, and went straight to the window, to peer out again towards the town. She felt like the lookout in Bluebeard. ‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?’
She was scrubbing at the dusty glass with her handkerchief when the tiny, crisp, metallic sound at her back made her stiffen where she stood. For an instant she held her breath, ears pricked to listen more intently, then she whirled and flung herself across the paved floor to clutch the handle of the door in both hands, and twist and tug at it with all her strength, but it did not move. She laid her ear against the painted panels, and listened again, but she heard no sound of a footfall. Whoever had come had come silently, and as silently departed. The door was locked, and she was a prisoner.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For fully two minutes she continued to wrestle with the door-handle, almost convinced that it had merely jammed, that she had not pressed it far enough to release the catch, though she knew in her own mind that the key had been turned. Arduously she span the handle to its limit, but the door remained immovable. Then, realising that she was out of range of anyone’s hearing except, possibly, Crista’s, and that with every moment of delay Crista must be moving briskly and dutifully away from her, leaving her utterly isolated, she cupped her hands round the great keyhole, and kneeled to turn them into a trumpet for her mouth, and shouted Crista’s name time after time with all her might. When she listened, between shouts, trying to silence her heaving breath, no sound replied. Crista was already out of earshot, surely, more than half the bulk of the house between them. And besides, if there was an intruder already inside the Himmelhof with them, and Crista came running back to her, what might happen to Crista?
The door fitted closely into its jamb, but the large keyhole seemed to offer at least a possibility of being able to pick the lock. Her summer dress had a narrow belt with a long buckle, and therefore a long steel tongue. She unfastened it, and went to work with eyes half-closed, feeling her way into the interior of the lock with fierce concentration; but five long minutes of cautious wrestling left her with damp forehead, bruised and numbed fingers, and no sign of any yielding in the lock.
She scrambled up from her knees, and looked round for a better weapon, for she was sure the key had been removed from the lock on the other side. But there was nothing in the tower room but one draggled chair, and no latch or bar of metal on the windows that she could hope to detach and use. And even if there had been a tool handy, she doubted if she could move that massive lock via the keyhole.
Clearly she could shout until she was hoarse, and no one would hear her. Even if these rooms had been supplied with electric light, or she had carried a torch, any signals she flashed would surely have passed unregarded. Her windows faced the lake, she was detached from the main body of the house by the closed passage, and from all its inhabited parts by a considerably greater distance. If the design was to separate her from Lu, and prevent her from giving any warning of the approach of the enemy, she could not have been trapped in a more effective place.
She had often wondered how she would react in an emergency. Prior consideration on that score was obviously pointless, for in the end it all depended on what was at stake. If she had been in fear for herself, of starving to death here undiscovered like the bride in The Mistletoe Bough, she would probably have wasted time and energy in battering at the door, and screamed herself hoarse and desperate trying to fetch someone to her aid. But what mattered in this crisis was to get out of here and get to Lu’s aid. Having tried her art on the door and her lungs on yelling, and found both inadequate, she stood stock-still in the middle of the floor, and thought deliberately, almost coldly, through the sparse possibilities.
Not the door, that was out. Except by some farfetched accident she was unlikely to attract the attention of
anyone in the house. A light was out of the question, so she had no means of signalling her plight to Gries or even to a boat. Mike had said he would come, however late, and Mike was a man of his word, but whoever had turned the key on her would not wait. There remained the window as a way out. Rock beneath, and surely deep water under it, but diving would be far too foolhardy. Well, at least she could look.
The two side windows were fixed, the central one was designed to open. She got the inner pane opened, and struggled with the rusty catch of the outer one, and when it defied her hands, being corroded into an inseparable block with its socket, she stepped back into the room and looked round for her only tool, the draggled satin chair. It stood against the wall on curving, slender legs, its mildewed stuffing dangling. She picked it up by its gilded back, with the seat as a shield before her face and her bare arms, and jabbed the carved legs viciously through the glass.
One leg of the chair, eaten with worm, crumbled away almost into powder, but the other three stabbed through the barrier with a sound like the parting of ice-floes on a spring river, and the whole great pane, its tension shattered, sprang outwards and rang in a shivering fall down the rocks. The thin, slithering echoes seemed to go on for a long time. She could hear them still drifting and tinkling when she had battered away the daggers of glass that clung in the edges of the window-frame, and carefully wedged the chair over the jagged fringe that remained, so that she could lean over and look down.
What had seemed a sheer drop did not look quite so precipitous from here, especially to the left side of the sharp little promontory. The lantern stood on a small, rough headland jutting like the prow of a ship, and terminating in a space three yards square, or a little more, of uneven but relatively level rock. She climbed carefully out over the sill, leaving the chair propped in place so that she could get back if she had to.
She saw at once that from this little eyrie there was no external way back to the rest of the house. She had hoped it might be possible to work her way along by the outside wall of the passage, and climb in again at one of the house windows, even if she had to break her way through some shutter she herself had just fastened from within. But the walls of the passage ran down flush into the rock on both sides. There was no way back except by water. The thought of risking a dive, even from the most favourable point, at this height, with inadequate knowledge of the shore below, made her stomach turn over. Far more likely to hit the rocks than the water. But if only she could climb down towards it, even part of the way, and get a better look at the hazards, it might be feasible. She wasn’t afraid of the swim, she had been at home in water since she was three or four years old.
She edged forward to the brink of the descent, towards the left, where it looked least abrupt. There was an iron stanchion, as thick as her wrist, driven into the rock close to her feet, she kicked it before she was aware, and recoiled in sharp fear at the tremor it caused in her balance. It was dusk now, she had to peer cautiously at the broken formations of rock she trod, here where she felt herself assailed on every side by air that at once supported and tugged at her – like the figure-head of some stone ship. She went down on her knees to escape that frightening persuasion, and then stretched out flat on her face, looking down over the edge. The stanchion, jutting about nine inches from the rock, was comforting to cling to, for when she gripped it she found it solid and immovable as the cliff itself. From its round eye a frayed tassel of wire rope stood up several inches more, like an aigrette. She felt downwards from the eye in which it was secured, and found that the wire rope ran down as far as she could reach, over the rim and into the dusk of the rocks. She shook it experimentally, and it resisted the movement, no more than quivering in her grasp. Somewhere below it was secured again, just as firmly. And below that?
How would she ever know, unless she tested it? She edged forward until head and shoulders hung over the void, and holding fast with her right hand, felt down along the surfaces of rock with the other.
Beneath the first near-vertical drop, no more than twelve or thirteen inches deep, the rock levelled again. What was more, her fingers felt it curiously smoothed, as though men had helped to shape it. A step! Begun by the natural formation, but finished off, surely, by man, just as man had driven in those stays and fixed that solid wire handrail. And if that was true, it ought not to terminate halfway, it must have been meant at some time to provide a workable way down to the lake, for those used to such short-cuts. Someone, at least, had used it, or it wouldn’t be here. And where someone else had gone she could go. If she could get down to the water she could swim round to the beach, she wasn’t afraid of that part.
She turned, clinging to the stanchion, and backed gingerly into the void, groping with one foot for the second step. It was there, cut and shaped, level enough to give her a good hold. She brought her other foot down to join the first, holding the rope with both hands, breathing now into the blue-black crevices of the rock. Without that handrail she would never have dared to venture like this. She wasn’t afraid of heights, or of the voids they presented around them, provided there was a firm handhold to cling to. Descending even a vertical ladder is simple and easy while you have the firm round rungs to fill your hands; and this rock face, sheer and lofty though it was, was not quite vertical, and varied by many striations and crevices that afforded comforting footholds. But don’t look down, she thought. That’s the one fatal thing to do.
She had preferred not to think of the possibility that the wire rope might, after all, end halfway, having served its purpose for climbers more accomplished than herself; or that it might somewhere have broken loose from its moorings, or even parted and rusted away, for it must have been neglected for many years. But at every yard of progress she gripped and shook it again, and so far it held firm below her, giving no more than her balance could bear.
She was some ten yards down the cliff, braced and reaching down with stretched toes for the next foothold, when she heard the shot.
It was only a small, flat sound, away there on the other side of the dark hulk of the house, where the lighted windows were and the sheltered garden terraces. It should not, by rights, have reached her ears at all, but passed, muted, above her head; but it did not, it spat its dry crack into the pure, still air of the evening, and let it diffuse like a monstrously accelerated ripple across the face of sky and lake, everywhere carried and repeated, a scar across the silence.
She knew what it was, and her heart leapt sickeningly into her throat. She shut her eyes and hung shivering with nausea for a moment, thinking of Lu sitting at the harpsichord, comforted and charmed, absorbed into the astonishing devices of ‘La Battalia’, and of death reaching a bony hand over his shoulder to turn the page for him. And of Crista, turning from her devoted labours in the distant wing and running wildly along the echoing colonnade towards the sound, while she, who had the better right to love him, hung there spread-eagled like a fly in a spider’s web, and couldn’t even run to him.
She came out of that paralysis in an explosion of vigour and anger and resolve, gripping the rough wire and letting herself slide backwards, feeling with frantic toes for the next hold. The rusty strands tore her fingers, her sandals slipped on the irregular planes of stone, but the crude giant steps continued, and somehow she scrambled and slid and fell down them, divorced from fear. It felt like going away from him, but it was the only way back to him.
For a time she moved and thought and acted in a misty and limited world of shock and rage, where concrete things like the rock against her breast, the lapping water below her, the crumbling rope that scorched her palms, were hardly real to her at all, and her mind, detached from her own extremity, grappled with vital realities. The police had guns, if Lu had refused the one offered to him. It had to be Geestler or Schwalbe who had fired. They wouldn’t leave him, not both of them, one would be always on call. Some false alarm, a movement in the gardens, an animal rustling in the bushes … God, don’t let it be anything more than that!
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br /> Sound carries well over water, she remembered, somewhere in a chill, logical chamber at the core of her furious mind. And she hung still for a moment, turning her head to shout across the plashing surface of the Himmelsee, now so close beneath her. There had been a boat abroad at night once, there might be again. She held her breath to listen for a reply. Nothing. Only the loose, watery sound of the lake lipping at the rocks, like a dog lapping at a bowl. Step by invisible step she groped backwards, and with every yard the air darkened and stilled about her, but she was so inured to the dusk by this time that she hardly noticed.
Once, feeling herself very near now, she anchored herself firmly, and deliberately turned and looked down. At the foot of the face of cliff the rocks spread out in a low ridge into the water; there was even a narrow level of hard soil, terminating in the rotting remains of a little wooden stage, long disused, half its planks trailing. From that she could get safely into the water.
She touched one foot to the last level, and shakily brought the other down to join it, and her knees quivered under her. Here there was room to stand, even to move; she was no more than six feet above the water. Gingerly she loosened her convulsive grip on the rope, and smoothed her scratched palms achingly down her thighs. Hugging the rock face, she felt her way along to the edge of the broken landing-stage.
There was flooring enough to stand on, a shaky rail, and a ladder down into the lake. It would do. She kicked off her sandals, hardly noticing when one of them slid over the edge and vanished in a minute phosphorescent fountain in the shallows. She was kneeling at the edge of the stage with her ruined dress half over her head when she heard the sound for which she had been waiting; and she was so far lost in her own solitary struggle that it had been throbbing distantly in her ears for half a minute before she realised what it was. It came so subtly and gradually out of nowhere, a low-pitched, busy, dotted-line of a sound, like a cat purring. Somewhere out there in the dark a motor-boat was shearing westward through the water, headed for the southern point of the island.
