House of Green Turf

CHAPTER SEVEN

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Something came to life again in the dull depths of her eyes, a quivering intelligence that proved she was still within reach of argument and persuasion, if only he had had time for either. But it was growing lighter every moment, and he had to get out of there quickly, or she would have no chance at all. There was no time to question her. He made one attempt, and she said nothing, merely stood withdrawn into some remote dream of horror. There was nothing he could do but take charge of her, and hope to God she would do what he told her, and be too numbed to realise what a tightrope she was walking until she was safely over.

He drew her across the room in his arm, and thrust her into her bedroom.

‘Get those clothes off, quickly! Give me the stockings and the dress… Hurry, I’ll get them out of here.’

She went where he urged her and did what she was told like an automaton. In a few moments she emerged in her housecoat, the torn stockings and stained dress in her hands. He bundled them into his pockets, and drew her to the bed, and sitting her down there, held her by the shoulders eye to eye with him.

‘Listen to me! The police will be here all day, asking questions of everybody. You, too! You’ve got to be ready for them. You know nothing about Friedl, you understand? You didn’t see her last night, you weren’t with her…’

It was then that her face awoke suddenly, stirred into agitation and pain, for it was then that it dawned on her that he half-believed she had killed Friedl. And in a sense so she had. There was a doom on her. People who came too near her died, without any motion of her will. And so might he, if she did not send him away from her.

‘I must tell you,’ she said, raising upon him eyes no longer blind, but brilliant with apprehension and resolve. ‘I did see her… I was with her…’

‘I’ve asked you nothing,’ he said roughly. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘I want to tell you. There was more, something she didn’t tell you…’

‘Quickly, then!’ He eyed the paling light, and shook with anxiety for her.

She had caught the sting of his urgency at last. She told him what she had to tell in a few words. He held fast to her all the while, afraid that she might relapse into her border world of despair if he took his hands from her.

‘Felsenbach! That’s over in the Allgau. And this photograph… you’re in no doubt that it is Aylwin?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s Robin. There isn’t any doubt.’

‘You went out by the verandah here… No one saw you? No one was about, when you left or when you returned?’

‘No, no one.’

‘Good, that makes it easier. If people saw you come upstairs after dinner, so much the better. Understand, you went to bed, and you’ve been here ever since. You’ve been ill, you’re under orders to get plenty of rest.’ They’ll believe that, he thought, his heart aching over the pale spectre he held between his hands. ‘You understand? You went early to bed, and slept, and you know nothing about any happenings in the night. That’s what you have to tell the police, when they ask, and for God’s sake get it right and stick to it.’

‘I won’t forget,’ she said submissively.

‘And listen, stay close to the hotel all to-day. Maybe they’ll insist on that, but do it in any case. But to-morrow come to the restaurant in the village, for lunch, and I’ll meet you there. The one next to the church, The Bear. Make it about noon. By then we may be able to see how the land lies. We’re acquaintances in England, running into each other here by chance. Have you got that clear?’

In a whisper she said: ‘Yes,’ and let it be taken for a promise, though she had promised nothing. All she wanted now was for him to go away quickly, before the shadow fell upon him as it had fallen on Robin and on Friedl.

‘I must get out of here, it’ll be broad daylight soon. When I’ve gone, go to bed, sleep if you can, but go to bed anyhow, and when it’s time, get up and go down to breakfast as if nothing had happened. As far as you’re concerned, nothing has happened! That’s all you have to remember.’

He left her there sitting on the edge of her bed, looking after him. Soundlessly he turned the latch of the door, and silently let it relax into its place again under his hand. The pre-dawn light was now dove-grey, but the woodland below, the invisible shore, the gardens, still drowsed in obscurity and silence. Quicksilver, dully shining, the lake lay in its bowl asleep; when the sun rose there would be faint curls of mist drifting across its surface on the south-west wind. Towards the north-east, and the dwindling corner where the Rulenbach flowed out on its detour across the German border. Towards Felsenbach, where, if Friedl had been telling the truth, Robin Aylwin was buried in a grave without a name.

When he was gone, she did as he had told her to do. She went to bed, and by some curious process of subconscious obedience she even fell asleep. She slept until the sun was high, and the usual morning noises had come to life all round her, the normal echoes of an old, spacious house with bare wooden floors. She rose and dressed herself with care, and made up her face as scrupulously as for a stage performance, which in a way this day was going to be.

She went down the stairs slowly, straining her ears at every step. There was a changed quality in the bustle of sound within the house, a high, soft, hysterical note of tension. From the staircase windows that looked into the courtyard she saw a police car and an ambulance standing on the cobbles. Within the broad double doorway of the hall Herr Waldmeister stood conversing earnestly and in low tones with a middle-aged police officer. Frau Waldmeister, in the doorway of the office, talked volubly to someone within, in a cataract of excited dialect supplemented with a frenzy of shoulder-heaving, and head-wagging, and when Maggie passed by she could see another, younger policeman busy clearing the office desk for his own use. Two or three guests hovered just within the doorway of the dining-room, peering and whispering in delighted horror.

Gisela, hunched over her adding machine, punched out figures blindly with one hand, and held a handkerchief to her nose with the other. Not to question or comment would in itself be ground for comment. Maggie turned towards the reception desk.

‘Whatever’s the matter? What is it? Has something happened?’

Gisela looked up with brimming eyes. ‘Oh, Miss Tressider, isn’t it terrible? The police are here, they want to talk to everybody. Friedl… she’s dead! She drowned herself in the lake!’

It was late in the afternoon before the police got round to Maggie. By then it was quite simply a relief to be called into the office, and it seemed to her that in closing the door behind her on entering she shut herself into a quiet island, immune to all the agitation and gossip and rumours that were convulsing the household. There was excitement, disquiet and awe abroad in the Goldener Hirsch; but there was no grief. Only Gisela, in love with living and genuinely sorry that anyone should have to surrender it, much less feel wretched enough to want to opt out of it, had shed tears.

In the office it was very quiet. The young man behind the desk, thickset, solid and tanned, looked up from the list he had before him, and smiled briefly and perfunctorily in tribute to a good-looking woman. Off-duty, he would have had more time to appreciate her.

‘Sit down, please. You are Miss Maggie Tressider?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s my name.’

‘And you occupy room Number One. You know what our business is here?’

‘Gisela told me, this morning. One of the maids has been drowned in the lake.’

‘Friedl Schiffer… yes. We took her body from the water very early this morning.’ He did not say what had brought them looking for her there at such an hour, but the rumours were already circulating, and by this time there were not many people in Scheidenau who did not know that a celebrated local poacher, out before daylight after his night-lines, had sighted the body in the water and given the alarm. ‘Did you know her well?’

‘I’ve been here only two days,’ said Maggie simply. ‘I knew her by name and by sight, of course, I’ve talked to her once or twice, but that’s all.’

‘We are anxious to find out when she was last seen alive. Can you help us? When was the last time that you saw her?’

‘She helped to serve dinner. After that I didn’t see her again. I went up to bed very shortly afterwards.’ She caught his shrewd brown eye on her, and smiled faintly. ‘I am not exactly on holiday. About a month ago I was involved in a car crash, and had some rather troublesome but not dangerous injuries, which required surgery. I came here for a complete change and rest during convalescence.’

He nodded sympathy; it had already dawned on her that he knew quite well who Maggie Tressider was, and in spite of all his professional impartiality he would find it very easy to treat her as a privileged person. It made her almost ashamed of pleading illness, however truthfully. ‘I am almost well,’ she said quickly, ‘only not yet quite strong again.’

‘May I say that I hope this tragedy will not upset you too much? You must try to put it out of your mind once this enquiry is over, and I trust the air of Scheidenau will restore you to health. We are hoping to have the pleasure of hearing you at Salzburg again next year.’ He turned back to the business in hand without hesitation and without embarrassment. ‘Your room is on the lake side of the house. Did you hear or see anything out of the way? During the evening or in the night?’

‘No. I have sleeping tablets,’ she said apologetically. It was not even a lie; she had them, though she never took them. They were the doctors’ idea, not hers. ‘When I came down this morning you were already here, and Gisela told me what had happened.’

It seemed that he was satisfied; he was marking off her name in his list. ‘One more thing. I would like you to look at this.’

He took it from under the papers on the desk; she knew it as soon as her eyes lit upon it, and it went to her heart like an invisible arrow, reminding her that she was herself the instrument not of one death only, but of two. She put out a hand that astonished her by not trembling—perhaps there was nothing left to make her tremble, if she accepted that sentence of damnation—to take the photograph he was offering her. She bent her head over it dutifully, and the passion with which she studied it was no lie.

It was the one thing for which she had not been prepared, and for a moment she did not know what to do. The boy in the photograph, head bent like hers, brow furrowed like hers, braced hands fleetingly happy in making music, bowed away at his ’cello and ignored her. No one could have cared less what she did about him; that was her affair. A stain of damp from the dewy grass had dried across one corner, a smear of green marked the neck of the ’cello. Suddenly she wanted with all her heart to acknowledge this boy, to declare her interest in him and her grief for him, and above all her endless and inescapable responsibility for his death. But she could not do it. If she dealt herself in, how long would it be before Francis Killian was dragged in beside her?

She shook her head helplessly, and looked up at the man behind the desk. ‘Who is he? Is it something to do with Friedl?’

‘We should be interested to have him identified. Do you know him?’

So all the Waldmeister family had either genuinely not remembered Robin Aylwin, or else preferred not to know him, not to be drawn in any deeper. She wondered which? ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t know him.’

‘You never saw this before?’

‘I’m sorry!’ That at least was no lie; she was sorry that she could not lay down the load that was again crushing her, but if she did, someone else would find himself carrying it.

‘Thank you, Miss Tressider, that is all. Don’t worry, we shall try not to disturb you any more. Rest and relax, and think about other things.’

‘You’re very kind,’ she said, and meant it. At the door she hesitated, looking back. It was without premeditation that she asked: ‘Did Friedl fall in? Or… do you think she did it herself?’

She was never quite sure, afterwards, why he answered her, and apparently so unguardedly. Perhaps the directness of the question had surprised an answer out of him before he was aware; but that she could hardly believe. Or perhaps it was a deliberate concession on his part to a person he held to be above suspicion. She hoped it was not that. Or perhaps, and most probable of all, he chose her to fly a little kite for him, to put a small and deceptively innocent cat among the pigeons, in order to see what birds, if any, took flight, and what feathers flew.

‘Hardly either,’ he said with a hollow smile, ‘if the fingermarks round her throat mean anything. Goodday, Miss Tressider!’

She walked out of the office and up the staircase like a creature in a dream. She saw no one, she heard nothing but that matter-of-fact voice repeating its calculated, its miraculous indiscretion. A huge, clean, boisterous wind was blowing through her mind and spirit, blowing the sickness from her soul and the corruption from her will. She closed the door of her room, and sat down before the mirror to stare into her own face, and saw it marvellously changed. She felt cold and pure, scoured into her ultimate clarity, like a Himalayan peak honed diamond-clear and diamond-hard by the withering winds of the heights. She saw herself bright and positive and brave in the mirror, and wondered where this self of hers had been hiding so long.

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-confidence 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.