House of Green Turf

CHAPTER EIGHT

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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?’

‘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 to 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 hard 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.

He was on the climbing sector now, bend after sharp bend, the margins unfenced and with only shallow ditches, the trees crowding close. Silence all round, apart from his own re-echoing sounds, and darkness but for his own headlights glazing and gilding the embossed trunks of the trees, the inset panels of mirror, the scoured faces of rock. If he craned to look upwards he could not distinguish a line where earth and sky met. It had rained fitfully all the way, and was raining still. The sky was shrouded, there were no stars, and no moon.

There must have been someone watching for him, to make sure that he took the Kempten road and drove into the trap. Maybe they had lost time in setting out after him when he swung past it and turned towards Austria, but he had been fool enough to mention Scheidenau, and they were on his heels now, he was sure of that. The young man in the leather jacket had loosed the hunt after him with a vengeance, and if he was going to shake it, it would have to be now, on this complex stretch where the echoes would play on both sides, and confuse every issue. He put his foot down hard, and gave the car its head. The bends were well engineered, a joy to drive round, but also blind and deaf, at every swing light and sound cut off together, sharp as the descent of a guillotine.

All his senses were so trained on the threat behind that he was, in any case, curiously vulnerable to any hazards ahead. Anything approaching from Austria was his friend and ally, he had no need to be wary of it. Where there was company on the road there was safety. Who could close on him and attack while neutral headlights were bearing down on the scene?

He swung at speed round a right-handed bend, sharp as a shrew’s elbow, and straight into the glare of headlights cut off sharp by the curtain of dark trees. Someone was running along the road towards him, a torch in an extended hand waving him down. He braked sharply and drew in to the right, and the face and the torch plunged to a halt and turned back, running alongside him. On the left of the road headlights leaned drunkenly into the ditch. A panting voice alongside implored him:

‘Bitte… bitte, halt! Unfall…’

Somebody else’s accident was due to be Francis Killian’s salvation. Why not buttonhole the pursuers, too, from safe ambush among the victims, flag them down and send them back to call an ambulance, if necessary, or the police? What an irony! Francis pulled in obediently to the side of the road, half on the bald grass verge, swung open the door and piled out of the car, turning to meet the young man who came panting towards him with the torch. He saw a young, frightened, boyish face, wild with relief, blazing at him wide-open welcome.

Something hit him hard on the back of the head. The lights and darks exploded before him, changed places, merged, blinked out into single and absolute darkness. The ground came up and struck him in the face, scoring his cheek and lips raw. He groped along the grass, and the grains of loam were large as boulders. Dimly his mind pursued logic, argued, reproached him. The enemy were in front, not behind. Then who was behind? Someone else, assiduous on his heels, but not the enemy. The enemy were these shadows who had struck him down. Enemies of the enemy, perhaps? Leave them a sign! Not far behind, he had wondered when they would close the gap. The fingers of his right hand, hooked deep into his left inside pockets, gouged out the wallet that held his photographs, and spilled it into the lush, overgrown autumn grass in the ditch below him. He prised himself up arduously from the ground, the lighter by that load, his head spinning, and levered himself upright on wavering legs, one arm flailing to ward off the first assault.

They were three, he saw them clearly, even photographed them on some emulsion in his mind, his eyes recording nothing. The image sank in, and left his eyes blind.

Two of the three rushed him, one from either side. The third, the boy with the torch, swerved round him as he swayed to his feet, and plunged on. Francis stiff-armed the first of his attackers half across the road, but the second one was on his back in the same moment, one arm crooked round his neck, dragging him over backwards into the shallow ditch. They rolled confusedly together, the wet grass stinging and cold against their faces.

Francis heard a car door slam and a motor thrum into life, and knew it for the note on his hired Dodge from Zurich. Its lights swung impetuously forward and back, forward and back in the road, cutting yellow swathes out of the darkness as it turned, and then it surged past them and roared away at speed in the direction of Felsenbach. That was the last thing Francis knew. His assailant enveloped him suddenly in both arms, and rolled over beneath him, holding him helpless and exposed for the second blow. This time the man with the cosh made no mistake. The world exploded in a flash of light, and collapsed into chaotic darkness. Francis slid slowly into the ditch, and lay still.