by Ellis Peters
“Nadporucík Ondrejov?” asked Dominic with aching care. To the best of his knowledge the correct translation of the rank was “lieutenant,” like an army rank, but he didn’t feel certain enough of his facts to use it. He preferred at least to pay his host the compliment of attempting to pronounce his Czechoslovak title.
The elderly countryman behind the desk took his broad behind off the office chair, and rose to straddle the floor like a farmer his lands.
“Come in, come in! Yes, I’m Ondrejov.” The younger man who had been sitting on the rear corner of the desk rose, flicked an eyebrow at his superior, intercepted and recorded the answering twitch of the grey, bushy head, and walked away into the inner room, closing the door gently after him. “Please, Miss Barber, take this chair. Miss Mather? Be seated, please! And you are Mr. Felse? Yes, we were waiting for you. It was good of you, it was right, to notify us at once.”
He might have been sixty, or five years less or more, there was no dating him. He had probably looked much the same for ten years, and wouldn’t change for twenty more. Grey at fifty, and still sporting curly, crisp grey hair at eighty-five. No, ninety, he looked remarkably durable. He was not the long, rangy Slovak shape, with great, elegant, shapely bones, but short and sturdy and running to flesh, broad-beamed and broad-breasted, broad-cheeked and wide-eyed, broad-jowled and stubble-chinned, with a bright, beery face. Perhaps of mixed blood, the most inscrutable product in the country, looking now Czech, now Slovak, almost at will. In the high-coloured face the blue, bright, knowing eyes were clear as sapphires, and limpid as spring-water. He was in his shirt-sleeves, his tie comfortably loosened round a bull-neck. Dominic felt better; this was what Mirek Zachar, of fond memory, would have called a “country uncle.” He warned himself vainly that what he felt might be only a false security. He was so tired that it would be dangerous to relax.
“We were grateful for your call. You may rest assured that everything is in hand. Now, naturally, I should like to hear the story directly from you. Please, Mr. Felse! You may speak quite freely. For the moment this is not official.” He smiled benevolently into Dominic’s tired, drawn face. “You are wondering about my English. It is not so strange. People of my generation here learned English because we had relatives in England or in America. In America especially. We learned English in the hope of going there some day to join them. I was there for five years, before the war, and now I keep up my English from books. My children have forgotten it, my grandchildren do not learn it. They speak excellent Russian, and I am out of date. Times change. It is not matter for regret, only for interest. But I like to use my assets. You need not be afraid that I shall not understand you. Please, speak!”
They were as tongue-tied, after that, as if they had really been confronted with the grim, smooth police official of cold-war fiction, and a good deal more at a loss. Nevertheless, Dominic set to work and ploughed his way doggedly through their agreed story, disliking it more with every word, but making a good job of it.
“Miss Barber and I were out for a walk this evening, after dinner. We ate rather early, I think it must have been about twenty minutes to eight when we went out. We took the road up the valley, and when we got near that small chapel on the hillside there we thought we’d go up and have a look at it.”
Lieutenant Ondrejov, a model listener, did not once interrupt, not even with an intelligent and helpful question, but neither did he leave the narration to plod along unencouraged. His round, good-humoured face was encouragement itself, he helped the story along with an occasional sympathetic nod of understanding. They could hardly expect much excitement from him, since he knew already the crucial fact of the murder; but no one could complain that he wasn’t responsive. At the end of it he leaned back in his chair with a gusty sigh, and looked from one to another of them thoughtfully, scrubbing at his bristly chin with thick, adroit finger-tips.
“I understand, yes. You went up the valley together, you and Miss Barber?”
“Yes,” said Tossa gruffly, lifting the lie from Dominic’s shoulders this time. It was the first time Ondrejov had heard that odd, touching little voice of hers, and it made him cock an eye at her with twinkling interest, his grey head on one side.
“And you were together when you heard the shot, and entered the chapel?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, did you know this man at all? The dead man?”
“Not know him, exactly. But we’d seen him once before,” said Dominic firmly, “when we were driving through into Slovakia.”
“In the hotel at Zilina?” suggested Ondrejov affably.
Four hearts lurched sickeningly towards churning stomachs. He had tugged the ground out from under them like a mat, and the fall, though they sat still and kept their faces obstinately blank, knocked the breath out of them, and the invention with it. He was guessing, with preternatural accuracy, but guessing. He couldn’t know. They stared polite, patient, uncomprehending enquiry.
“In a hotel somewhere on the way,” said Dominic. “We came through so many places, I forget names.”
Ondrejov leaned over his desk and wagged a finger at them admonishingly. “Children, children, never try to deceive the old ones. It may be a long time since they were boys, but they have had two refresher courses with their sons and grandsons, and that is much more dangerous. Now, do you want to tell me anything more? Or to think again about what you have already told me?”
Dominic said: “No!” for all of them. What else was there to say? However disastrously, they were committed now.
“Good! Then let us see if we can contribute something, too.” He tilted his chair back, and reached behind him to turn the handle of the inner door. “Mirku! Pod’ sem!”
Into the room, as fresh and pink and blond as ever, walked Miroslav Zachar, and took up station solidly at his chief’s left elbow, confronting with a heightened colour but a placid and purposeful face his four erstwhile friends.
“Mirek,” said Ondrejov heartily, slapping the young man resoundingly on the back, “I think you should explain to our young guests exactly what you are doing here. Tell them everything, we have nothing to hide from them.”
“I am here,” said Mirek simply, “because I discovered the body of Robert Welland this evening. I reported it by telephone from the nearest connected house, which happens to be over the north wall there, in another valley—you would not know the path. Then I waited with the body until the detail came out there, and returned here to report fully in person.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Ondrejov, “it would help if you explained in full your connection with the affairs of these young people, and how you came to be on the scene tonight. From the beginning!”
“Certainly!” He looked from face to face round the four of them, looked them all fully and firmly in the eyes. Why not? He had nothing to be ashamed of, even if he had been cheated and startled into feeling shame when Tossa kissed him by way of apologising for reservations she should, instead, have respected and re-examined. He had had a job to do, and he knew he was good at it. Dominic, a policeman’s son, gave him the ghost of a smile; they were all giving him their fixed and painful attention.
“I was detailed to pick up your party at the frontier, escort you as far as I could, and continue to keep an eye on your movements and your welfare afterwards.”
Toddy, hackles erected, demanded: “Why?”
“Why? Naturally Miss Barber, like other visitors, was obliged to apply for a visa. With the recent events in mind, and certain dimplomatic complications always possible, our police in Bratislava were hardly likely to have left Mr. Terrell’s background and circumstances unexamined. They knew that he had married a widow named Barber, with one daughter, now a student at Oxford. The connection was not beyond their ability. They therefore felt that it would be well to keep a protective eye on Miss Barber as long as she remained in this country, for her own good as well as ours. We do not want trouble. There seemed reason to suppose that Miss Barber and her friends
were making for the Tatras. I was born here, I used to serve under Lieutenant Ondrejov before I transferred to the plain-clothes branch. As a local man, with good English, and as you see, quite well able to look like a student, I was seconded to this duty.”
“Then I suppose this means you’ve been spying on us ever since you pretended to leave us,” said Toddy bitterly.
“I have been carrying out my assignment. Without, I hope, interfering with your enjoyment. This evening I was in cover on the hillside above the chapel, near the crest. There is a place there from which you can cover, with glasses, almost the whole length of the valley. I have often used it. You were within view for perhaps half of your walk, and hidden from me only when among the trees. I saw you come to the chapel.”
“And were they together?” murmured Ondrejov innocently.
Into the momentary well of silence, while the four of them held their breath, Mirek dropped his: “No,” very gently, but it fell like a stone.
“Did they enter the chapel together?”
“No. Miss Barber came first. It was clear from her manner that she thought she was alone, but I had already seen Mr. Felse carefully following her. She climbed to the rock shelf, and walked straight to the door of the chapel. I had her within sight until the last few yards. The doorway itself was out of my sight. Mr. Felse remained in the shadow of the trees, and did not attempt at first to follow her.”
“And then?”
“Then there was a shot. It came perhaps five or six seconds after Miss Barber passed out of my sight and into the chapel. I could not determine from which direction the sound came, it is very difficult in such an enclosed and complex place. It could have been fired from outside, even from some distance. But my immediate impression was that it came from within the chapel itself.”
Tossa’s hands, linked in her lap, tightened convulsively, but she made no sound. It was Toddy who flared in alarm and anger: “That’s a lie! You’re trying to frighten her! You know it isn’t true!”
“Please, Mr. Mather! Go on, Mirek, what next?”
“Mr. Felse dropped to the ground and scrambled across to the doorway. They were in there for several minutes together. I was raking the valley for any signs of movement, but I found nothing. I therefore began to work my way down the slope towards the chapel, but as you know, it is rather a risky field of scree there, one must go cautiously. While I was still well above, I saw Miss Barber dart away from the doorway and run down the path among the trees. After perhaps five more minutes Mr. Felse followed her. It was then beginning to be dusk. He had a fall on the rocks as he ran across the open ground. It was then I saw that Miss Barber had waited for him, just within the trees.”
“And by the time you got down there?”
“They were both well away. And when I entered the chapel I found Mr. Welland’s body there.”
“Mr. Felse stayed behind, perhaps, just long enough to go through the dead man’s pockets?” suggested Ondrejov placidly.
Involuntarily Dominic let out an audible gasp of disgust, remembering that the idea had never even occurred to him. And Miroslav smiled.
“I don’t suggest he did do so, but the time would have been sufficient, yes.”
“And did you hear a second shot, as Mr. Felse says? When he fell?”
“I did not hear one, no. Admittedly I was coming rather quickly down the scree, and I was concentrating on my foot-work, as well as making a considerable noise of my own.”
Tossa raised her heavy eyelids just long enough to flash a glance at Dominic, and intercept his startled glance at her. They had heard the scree shifting, and never dreamed of looking up there for a witness.
“One more point,” said Ondrejov comfortably, stretching his broad shoulders back until the chair creaked. “The encounter at Zilina. Did it appear to you that Miss Barber was acquainted with Mr. Welland?”
“Yes, quite certainly she was.”
“And did she, then, behave naturally when meeting him there?”
“No, she affected not to know him. As I think her friends really did not. But she took occasion to pass a message to him, and he almost certainly passed one back to her.”
“Such as this folded scrap of paper, perhaps?”
Ondrejov produced it gently from his pocket, unfolded it with deliberation, and read aloud in his amiable rolling bass: “I shall be at the Riavka hut. Please contact me!” He looked up over Tossa’s note with twinkling blue eyes narrowed in an indulgent smile. “If our young and chivalrous friend did go through the victim’s pockets, he didn’t make a very good job of it, it seems. Zachar has had more practice, of course,” he added by way of consolation to Dominic, and folded the paper carefully away again.
“So it seems we have a somewhat changed picture now. You are sure there is nothing you wish to add or alter?” Where would have been the point? All their lies were already demolished, and to think up new ones now would be worse than useless. They were silent, watching him with closed faces and apprehensive eyes. “In that case you must see my predicament. And you should also take into consideration the fact that as yet the cartridge-shell has not been found, and since the bullet is still embedded in the dead man’s skull, and only an autopsy can recover it for examination, so far as we know up to now it could as well be from a pistol as a rifle. Couldn’t it?”
Tossa was the last to see where he was leading her. She stared from behind these serried facts as through bars, and shook her head helplessly, trying to shake away the sense of nightmare that oppressed her.
“None of us has a gun, or ever had one,” said Dominic quickly and quietly. “Certainly Tossa couldn’t have had one on her last night. I was following her every step of the way.”
“But at a safe distance. And certainly is a large word. A small pistol is not so difficult to conceal.”
“She was never out of my sight for more than a few seconds.”
“The few seconds when the shot was fired.”
“But this is fantastic!” cried Toddy wildly. “For God’s sake, how could she cart a gun about with her without my sister seeing it, sooner or later? How could she get it into the country?”
“Oh, come, Mr. Mather! Are you really suggesting our frontier staff are so thorough? Did they even open your cases at Rozvadov?”
Tossa put up her hands wonderingly, and touched her throbbing temples and drawn cheeks as though to satisfy herself that she was still in her own day-to-day flesh, and not astray in a bewildering and terrifying dream.
“But I’ve never even touched a gun, not once in my life. If you really believe I had one, then where is it now? What did I do with it?” Her voice was so heavy that she could hardly lift the syllables. Like her eyelids, like her heart.
“Ah, that is an open question. The obvious thing to do with it would be to toss it out of the window immediately. But the valley is large enough, and the dusk by then was deep enough, to make it a very open question indeed. So no doubt you will realise, my dear Miss Barber, why I am obliged to keep you, for the present, in custody.”
The next ten minutes were confused, noisy and angry. Tossa sat mute and numb in the middle of the storm, too tired to distinguish voices any more, too disoriented to know friend from foe, too deeply aware of having lied, and forced Dominic to lie, to put up any fight for her own liberty. Christine had an arm clasped tightly about her shoulders, and was adding a soprano descant to Toddy’s spirited impersonation of an Englishman at bay. Toddy raved about police states, conspiracies and frame-ups, and threatened everything from diplomatic intervention to gunboats. In the heart of her desperate confusion and solitude Tossa remembered inconsequently that Czechoslovakia had no coastline, and laughed, genuinely laughed, but no one noticed except, perhaps, Ondrejov, who noticed everything, whether he acknowledged it or not. He looked like a good-humoured, clever peasant, and he sat here behind his desk manipulating them all. She suspected that he was very much enjoying Toddy. There couldn’t be much theatre in Liptovsky Pavol.
“Now, now, my dear boy, I guarantee that Miss Barber shall be well treated, and we’ll take every care of her. And since it’s too late now for the rest of you to think of going back to Zbojská Dolina to-night, I’ll make arrangements for beds for all of you, and we’ll call the hut and tell the Martíneks you’re staying here.”
“That isn’t good enough! You know very well that you’ve no right to detain Miss Barber. As the person in charge of this case, you will be held responsible.”
Pale with rage, Toddy stood between Tossa and her captors, his nostrils pinched and blue with desperation, as gallant as he was ineffective. Dominic, deep sunk in his own silence and doubt, stared hard at Ondrejov, and wished he could read his mind, but it was impenetrable. Did he really suspect Tossa? Or had he quite another motive for this move? He swung in an agony of indecision between two opinions. The one thing of which he was in no doubt at all was that it was his job to get Tossa out of this. Toddy could make as much fuss and noise as he liked, it wouldn’t be done that way. If Ondrejov had been what Toddy claimed he was, he would have laid Toddy flat long before this. And let no one think he couldn’t do it single-handed, as old as he was!
“In charge? I in charge of the case?” Ondrejov’s blue, bright eyes widened as guilelessly as a child’s. “You think such cases as this are left to the uniformed branch here? No, no, I am waiting at this moment for the plain-clothes people to arrive from Bratislava. I am responsible to them. That is why I am compelled to hold you available, you see, my field of action is strictly limited. The men from Scotland Yard,” he said, pleased with this flight of fancy, “will be here in a matter of a few hours. You may put your objections and make your statements to them.”
“Then at least,” said Toddy valiantly, hunted into a corner but still game, “I demand that the British Embassy in Prague shall be contacted at once, and informed that Miss Barber is being held on suspicion.”
