House of Green Turf

CHAPTER TWELVE

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Two voices were discussing her above her head. They didn’t know that dead people can hear. Quite dispassionate voices, cool, leisurely and low, discussing her in terms of life and death. Either they had no bodies, or dead people can’t see. She was dangling just below the level of consciousness clinging to the surface tension like the air-breathing nymph of some water creature.

‘So schön auch,’ said the first voice critically.

‘Nobody’s beautiful who gets in my way,’ said the second voice in plain English and without overtones; a light, pleasant, untroubled tenor voice without a care in the world.

‘Aber schön,’ the first voice insisted with detached approval. ‘She has everything!’

‘Except immortality.’

‘What are you going to do with her?’

The second voice was silent long enough to indicate a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Did I make her wade in here so far out of her depth? She had a death wish.’

‘Waste of a girl!’ said the first voice with impersonal regret.

‘There are others. Even some with perfect pitch.’ And in a blithe half-tone the second voice began to sing to itself dreamily:

Mein Eigen sollst du werden gewiss,

Wie’s Keine sonst auf Erden ist,

O Lieb… auf grüner Erden…

Any moment now she would feel the prick of the needle in her thigh, and submerge again. So this must be hell. What could be more absolute hell than to have to go on living and reliving these few weeks to eternity, trying to escape from the net, believing she had escaped, only to find herself back at the beginning and trapped as fast as ever? Everything to do again, everything to suffer again, everything to lose again. No, not quite a duplication, this time the dialogue had changed. The decision last time had been for life. This time it was for death.

Then, in the moment that she broke surface and knew herself conscious, miraculously the burden was gone. Last time she had awakened alone, oppressed and appalled by the horror of guilt without a source. Now that the verdict was for death she awoke to the calm and lightness of deliverance. She had not been deceived, after all, her guilt had been only a delusion, a sickness of which she was healed at last. Even if she died now, it would be as a whole, a sane person.

For this second voice she knew very well, and it belonged firmly in this world and no other. It was no poor injured ghost that had come to fetch her away, but a living and dangerous man, and he had come not because she owed him a death, but because she was a threat to him alive. Her probing had begun to uncover him of the carefully cultivated invisibility of years, he could not afford to let her go on with it. Grave or no grave, memorial or no memorial, Robert Aylwin was alive. She had neither killed him nor done him any wrong; and even if he killed her, she would never again be truly in his power, never his victim as she had been all these years. Neither living nor dead would Robin ever stand between her and love again.

She opened her eyes upon low stone vaulting that had a worn and monumental grandeur, like a feudal hall before luxury came into fashion. She was lying on a rough grey blanket spread upon a stone settle built all along one wall, and in the wall itself she saw the round fretted grooves left by the ends of barrels. The flagged floor was sifted with fine sand, the accumulated dust of wind erosion and time. The air felt moist and cool. There was a dim light from one heavily shaded electric bulb, that showed her only the side of the room where she lay, and a glimpse of a door in the corner, a door not worn at all, but surely almost new and very solid.

‘Achtung!’ said the first voice very-softly. ‘She’s coming round. Shall I…?’

‘No, let her! Company will help to pass the time until those fools go home to bed.’

She could see the pair of them only up to the shoulders, for the dark shade over the light obscured their faces. One of them stepped back accommodatingly into the shadows, the other came forward and sat down on one hip on the edge of the settle beside her feet. He saw that her eyes were wide-open and fixed upon his face, and turned the lamp deliberately to let it illuminate him fully.

‘Allow me! Is that better?’

He no longer glistened and streamed, the fall of wavy hair was nearly dry, only the unruly way it curled round his forehead showed that he had recently been out in the rain. He must have stood outside her room under the dripping trees all the while she was singing, waiting for the appropriate moment. He must, she thought, have been amused by the Mahler; a little Gothic horror would appeal to his sense of humour. He was dressed to go invisibly in the dark, in clerical grey slacks and a thick black sweater with a polo neck; the same, perhaps, in which he had prowled the woods that night he throttled and drowned Friedl.

Looking at him now, she found nothing surprising in that. He sat smiling at her, a cigarette held delicately between forefinger and thumb, narrowing his eyes slightly against the smoke that drifted towards his face in a light draught. The same boyish, regular features, the same full, mobile, strongly curling lips for ever on the edge of laughter. He laughed a great deal, always, at everything. For years she had forgotten the colour of his eyes, lowered in Friedl’s photograph, closed in that dead faun’s face over his grave. Perhaps it had cost her an extra effort to forget them, and she had managed it only because it was essential. They watched her now steadily, curiously, pale greenish-gold eyes, round and bold, a goat’s eyes, intelligent, inscrutable, malicious. The eyes laughed, too, almost without cease, but at some private joke that was not for ordinary humans. He was hardly older than he had been thirteen years ago, when she had last seen him. Why should he be, when he lived—it was to be seen in the debonair face and the cool, bright eyes—immune from all feeling and all responsibility?

She drew herself up with an effort to sit upright, her back—how appropriately!—against the wall. Never for a moment did her eyes leave his face.

‘It is you,’ she said at last, ‘it was you behind everything!’ She braced her hands against the cold stone to take fast hold of reality. She knew her situation now, and her enemy. She had marvellously recovered the fullness of life only just in time to lose it again, and feel the loss double. But also she had now a double stake for which to put up a fight. ‘So you are alive,’ she said.

‘Dear Maggie,’ he said, lazily smiling, ‘I believe so.’

‘Then what was it I heard, that night? What was it that went into the lake?

She thought for a moment that he was not going to answer her, but with a captive audience, and all the cards and all the strings in his own hands, and time to kill—but how did it happen that he had time to kill?—why not talk? After all, she wasn’t going anywhere, was she, to repeat anything he might let fall? He could indulge his fancy with no risk to himself.

‘Just one of old Waldmeister’s stacked logs,’ he said serenely. ‘The whole clearing down by the water was full of them, he surely couldn’t grudge me one in a good cause.’

‘But why?’ she said almost inaudibly, wrenching at the wanton shaft that had broken off short in her spirit as in wounded flesh, and festered ever afterwards. ‘Why play me such a trick? Why did you have to die at all? And even if you had your reasons for wanting to vanish, why stage a scene like that with me first? Why pretend you loved me? Why ask me…’ She drew breath slowly, and flattened her shoulders warily against the wall; the chill pierced her like a gust of cold air, and every such minute shock of reality helped to calm her senses and clear her mind. She, too, could talk; words were there to be used for her purposes as well as his. The more attention he gave to her, to impressing and subduing her, even to amusing himself with her, the less he would have left for imagining any counter-attack. ‘Just think,’ she said, eyeing him narrowly from under the fall of her loosened hair, ‘I might even have accepted you! What would you have done then?’

He found the recollection of that night rather flattering, she thought; maybe his memory even embroidered it. But be careful of believing that. Conceit is only a discardable toy to a man without feelings.

‘I should have married you, of course,’ he said sunnily. ‘It wouldn’t have been too great a hardship. You’d have turned out quite a profitable investment, the way things have gone. And as my wife, you wouldn’t have been asked to give evidence against me, either—would you?’

So that was one more piece of the puzzle falling into place. He had flicked it into her lap deliberately, she knew that. Nevertheless, record it, Maggie! He’s quite sure of his security, but there are things even he doesn’t know. He may yet live to regret dropping these small golden apples to distract you into running about at his will.

‘I see,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But what was I supposed to be able to tell? I never knew there was anything to be told against you.’

He leaned back to prop himself against the wall by one wide, lean shoulder, and grinned at her amiably through the smoke of his cigarette.

‘Do you remember the spring trip we made that year with the Circus?’

‘Well, well!’ she said. ‘You’ve still got the terms pat, after all this time.’

‘Dear Maggie, I have as near as damn it total recall. I remember the whole ramshackle set-up, and you so dedicated and earnest, and such an easy touch. You remember carrying some expensive cosmetics through Customs for me, that spring? A girl could get by with declaring those jars, when a man would automatically get charged on them. And it turned out that way, didn’t it? And a friend of mine met us at the boat-train, and I handed the whole works over as a present for his sister. Dear Maggie, you can’t have forgotten that kind deed? After all, what did you ever have to declare, except sheet-music and gramophone records?’

What money had she ever had, in those days, to buy any but the most vital necessities, all of which were comprehended in music? But all she said was: ‘I remember.’

‘Well, they picked up my anonymous friend later that year with rather a lot of heroin on him. Yes, that’s what was in the jars, sealed below about an eighth of an inch of cream and stuff. We were in Basel on the autumn tour when I got word, so I had to make up my mind quickly what to do. There was no knowing for sure that he’d keep his mouth shut about me, and even if he did, there might still be something they could hook up to me. And if ever they had found their way to the Circus, you’d soon have told them how those cosmetics came into England, wouldn’t you? It all boiled down to a choice between marrying you to close your mouth, and going home and chancing my luck, or staying here and turning professional. They’d been inviting me to do that for a year or more.’

‘They?’ said Maggie gently.

‘What good would it do you if I named names, my dear? The whole set-up has changed since then. Just one organisation among many, until I made it over to my taste. Call it what you like. Cosa mia…’

Yes, clearly anything into which he entered would soon have to become ‘his thing’; he wasn’t interested in being a subordinate. Perhaps that was why he’d never bothered to work at music, because even the disciplined approach necessary was only going to get him into the third, or at best the second, rank. ‘So you’d been smuggling for them for some time,’ she said, ‘under cover of Freddy’s respected name.’

‘Every trip. You’d helped me once before. Oh, not always hard drugs, in fact, very seldom. Anything light and profitable, precious stones, lenses, passports, medicines, even watches when other fields were dull. Once I went into England with two medieval manuscripts among my sheet music. We had a customer waiting for those, of course. Miniatures, rare coins, stamps, small art items—anything portable enough and expensive enough. We provide a world-wide service, moving the goods to where the demand is. Even before the crunch came I’d been thinking of throwing up the Circus before it threw me up, and going into the business full-time. It looked as if my career with Freddy was nearly up in any case. I let you make up my mind for me. You turned me down, they got me. You even provided me with a reason for suicide, if people got too nosy, though I admit the log was an afterthought. I remember taking off down the hillside, and there were these stacks of wood ready for carting, and it was too good to miss. You were so damned confident and secure, it seemed an appropriate gesture to give you something else to think about besides your great future.’

‘It must have been a disappointment to you,’ she said dryly, ‘when I didn’t tell anybody the story you’d so thoughtfully set up for me to tell.’

He leaned his head back against the wall and laughed aloud.

‘I was shocked to find you capable of such duplicity. You didn’t want any scandals or other little stumbling-blocks in the way of your career, did you? But after all, it worked out very well. Friedl kept me informed. If everyone had accepted Freddy’s dark hints, and come to the conclusion that I’d simply run out to avoid minor unpleasantness, that was fine with me. Just so long as nobody started a serious search for me alive.’

‘Friedl was your creature? One of the organisation?’

‘Hardly that. Let’s say Friedl became a useful camp follower. One of our ears on the world. One of our tongues, too, though,’ he added candidly, ‘I ought to have known better.’

‘Then it was you who put her up to telling all those lies to Francis and to me, to prove that you were dead?’

‘To Killian, yes. But to you? There she exceeded her orders, she had her own bone to pick with you. Friedl…’ He hoisted one shoulder in a smooth and eloquent gesture. ‘She always preferred to lie rather than tell truth, if not for policy, then for pleasure. Her facility has been useful on occasions, but when she was mad with jealousy—oh, yes, hadn’t you realised that?—she was a menace. She talked altogether too much. When she put you on to the grave, that was the end. She had to go. Probably the grave was a mistake from the beginning, I should have let well alone. But at the time it seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to have a second line of defence ready, in case of need. And then you had to get too interested in it, of all people, and of all people you would never have swallowed it. Anybody else she might have told, but you…’

‘I’ve seen the photographs,’ said Maggie. ‘How did you even manage that affair? Was it you who provided the body? Is there really a body there?’

‘Oh, yes, there’s a body, just as she told you. He came down with the snow water in the thaw. No, that wasn’t any master-stroke of mine, he was pure luck. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know who he really was. No, all I did was take the chance when it offered. Then there’d always be a grave to which I could misdirect enquiries if ever I needed to suggest my own death. It was a body, male, near enough my height and build and age, and past being identified. All I needed to do was make the anonymous offer to pay for his burial, as an act of piety, and make sure the death of an unknown young man was recorded and dated. Nothing so crude as a false identification or a name, of course. The portrait was an afterthought, a jeu d’esprit. Maybe too impudent, but it amused me.’

‘So you have a monumental mason in your pocket, too,’ said Maggie admiringly.

‘We have one of everything we need,’ he agreed calmly.

‘You must have risen rapidly in the organisation.’

‘To the top. Some years ago now. Class tells,’ he said demurely, and his lips curled in the very same private laughter he had allowed the mason to engrave on the tombstone, giving the lie to the depersonalised brow and marble eyelids, turning the dead mask into a living demon.

‘And then,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you had to come along and start looking for me—you, who weren’t going to swallow that grave without gagging. If you hadn’t turned so curious, after all this time, none of this need have happened. For God’s sake, why did you?’

She stared back at him wordlessly for a long minute, herself marvelling to find the landscape of her mind so miraculously changed. ‘I had you on my conscience,’ she said with deliberation. ‘I believed I owed you a life.’

Very softly, and with the most beguiling of smiles, he agreed: ‘And so you do.’

It could hardly be a surprise. She had known all along that she had gone too far to be left alive. Would he be talking to her like this, otherwise? From the beginning she had known at the back of her mind that she was talking chiefly to engage his attention, to make him forget time, to gain minutes as best she could. Because of the one thing he did not know about that Mahler performance of hers tonight, the fact that she had been waiting for the arrival of another visitor.

What if Francis was late in coming? He would come. And whatever others might think at finding her bedroom empty—that she had gone off of her own will, to some appointment in the woods, to somebody else’s bed, to the bottom of the lake—Francis would know better. Francis would know that she had been waiting for him, and that nothing would have induced her to leave the appointed place until he came. And whether he called in the police or not, he would begin a search for her on his own account until he found her.

On that one chance she pinned her hope, and saw that it was still a substantial hope. No point in over-estimating it, though. For Robin wouldn’t be killing time with her in this idle way, however enjoyably, if he himself were not waiting for something.

At least go on talking, she thought. At least keep him from deciding not to wait, after all.

‘How do you intend to dispose of me?’ she asked conversationally.

His bright, probing, inscrutable yellow stare was fixed and blinding upon her face, and for once he was not smiling.

‘My dear girl, you set the whole scene yourself. Here are you with a recent record of illness and odd behaviour, and apparently with some sort of obsession about me, a small, sad episode in your distant past. And then your rest-home is invaded by a tragedy—a girl drowned in the lake. Suicide is infectious. Now they’re going to find your verandah door open, and a nice little trail laid down to the shore. I’ve seen to that. And on your piano, just as you left it, that wonderfully appropriate Mahler song about the dead lover returning by night to visit his beloved… Oh, yes, someone will be able to make the connection. With that sort of background, who’s going to be surprised that you finally ran off the rails altogether, and did away with yourself?’

‘Then why didn’t you slip me into the water right away, while you had the chance?’

He laughed gaily. ‘Because there’s a plague of drunken wedding guests holding a regatta all round the lake. And a damned inconvenient moment they chose to embark.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ said Maggie tartly.

‘Granted. But they’ll get sick of it just now, and go home to bed. Don’t worry, to-morrow the police will be dragging for your body.’

‘And of course,’ she said, ‘they’ll find it?’

‘Oh, yes, they’ll find it. Quite definitely death by drowning, there’ll be no injuries to spoil the picture, not even a bruise. A pity I let Friedl make me angry, but what can you do? No, my dear, for a Maggie Tressider they might go on searching too long and too well, if I didn’t make them a present of you. They might find other things, one never knows. No, they shall have you gratis.’

To make a suicide like that convincing, she reasoned with furious coldness, and to ensure that she was found with satisfying promptness, she would have to be put into the water near to the hotel. So they must be somewhere quite close now. Why not go on doing the direct thing, and ask? He had answered some curious questions already, being quite certain of his security here. But if this waiting continued long enough, and every moment counted, what she had gleaned from him might come in useful yet to convict him.

‘Where have you brought me?’ She looked round the dim room as though she had just discovered it. There was a second door in the distant wall, directly opposite the first one, as though this was only one in a series of rooms. Cellars? Not in the hotel, surely? Yet he could not have brought her far. The other man sat silent on the far side of the single lamp, decapitated by the sharp edge of the black shade, unconcernedly breaking, cleaning and loading a gun, a pair of large, dexterous hands with no head to direct them, but remarkably agile and competent on their own.

‘We’re in the wine-cellars of the old castle. There was a whole labyrinth of them originally,but most are blocked up with rubble. We sealed off the safest part of the network as a repository. One of several. With three frontiers so close, we need a safe place handy in each country, where men and things can be got out of sight quickly until the heat is off. No,’ he said grinning, ‘don’t look round for treasure, we’ve cleared everything out. After to-night we shan’t be using this place again, it’s likely to be a little too precarious for our purposes.’

‘And you, where do you pass the—shall we say “unburied”?—part of your life? I suppose you’ve still got an identity somewhere among the living?’

‘Oh, several,’ he assured her merrily. ‘Most respectable ones, and in more than one country. As one frontier closes, another opens. To a new man, of course. You know, Maggie…’ She waited, watching him steadily. He was eyeing her with calculating thoughtfulness, like a sharp trader contemplating an inspired deal. ‘In a way, it’s a pity I couldn’t have both, you and this. Who’d have thought you’d stay in mourning for me all this time?’

She remembered the anguish he had cost her, the obsessive hold he had had upon her, and suddenly it dawned upon her that Francis had made the same mistake about her that this man was making now. Because she had all but wrecked her life on him, they believed she must have loved him, if only in retrospect after he was gone. She opened her eyes wide, and laughed in Robin’s face. It was perhaps the only luxury she had left, and not one that did her any credit, but she could not resist it.

‘In mourning for you? Do you know what you’ve been to me? A nightmare, a curse, and that’s all…’

The man with the gun said: ‘Achtung!’ sharply and clearly, and came to his feet.

Maggie’s laughter broke off in her throat. She crouched against the wall with head reared, ears straining after those small, stony sounds approaching somewhere outside the door. Robin watched the little sparks of hope come to life softly in her eyes, and the smile shattered by her laughter came back to his lips like a reflection in a pool reshaping itself after the dropping of a stone. He slid from the settle and stretched himself contentedly.

‘Too bad, my dear, it isn’t what you think.’

She had already grasped that it could not be. This was someone who knew the way in here, and approached quietly but without stealth. Not what she had been hoping for; merely what Robin had been waiting for.

The man with the gun crossed to the door and drew back the bolts. Maggie lowered her feet quickly over the edge of the stone shelf and stood up, drawing the folds of her soiled housecoat about her, for it seemed that time had run out.

Into the room walked four men, bringing in with them gusts of the chill night air and the green smell of the wet woods. Two of them were big, raw-boned mountaineers, from which side of the border there was no knowing. The third was slim and lightweight and young, and belted into a wasp-waisted raincoat. The fourth, who was thrust in limping heavily, with blood on his face and a gun in his back, was Francis.

Maggie made not a sound, but as if she had cried out to him his gaze flew to her, and fastened on her with such dismay and despair that her heart turned in her; and what he saw in her face was a mirror image of his own anguish. The only grain of consolation he had left was that she was safe in her bed; the only hope she had been able to keep was that he would launch the hunt for her in time. Both bubbles burst and vanished.

Maggie hardly noticed the dwindling of her own small chance of life in the sudden rush of rage and pain she felt for him. She had bought this fairly, but what had he done? She had brought him into this, unarmed and alone against a highly-organised and ruthless gang, and it was because of her actions that they were both going to die. She was to drown, because they wanted her found and accounted for. But Francis… No, better for them if he vanished altogether. What was the good of shutting her eyes? Since they had taken him prisoner somewhere on the road, perhaps well away from Scheidenau, why bring him back to this place if he was ever to leave it again?

Robin and his men were speaking rapid and colloquial German, Robin questioning, the others answering. She was soon lost in the language, but the implications were clear enough. Any trouble? No, no trouble, everything in hand, everything to numbers. There was something about a car—Francis’s car?-—that should be in Klostermann’s yard by now. They were all easy and content, not elated but extracting a certain workmanlike satisfaction out of their efficiency. Maggie stood almost forgotten, trying to understand, straining her senses in case there should be something, anything, at which hope could claw as it went by, and find a hold. For one of them, at least. For Francis! But she knew there would be nothing now. Just a few hours of deferment, and they had lost their chance for ever.

His captors had loosed their hold of him as soon as they had him inside, and the door firmly locked and bolted. Why not? He was battered and unarmed, and they had several guns between them. Even Robin had a gun in his hand now, a tiny, snub-nosed black thing that he dangled on his forefinger like a toy.

Something had been said about her, a question in the other direction. All three of Robin’s men were eyeing her with some concern; no doubt they had expected her to be in the lake by this time.

‘Oh, Maggie!’ said Robin carelessly, giving her a light glance over his shoulder. ‘There was a slight hitch there.’ He had slipped back into English, she thought, not by chance, but so that she should understand. ‘We shall have to keep her now until the Volga boatmen go home to sleep it off. They’re sure to tire sooner or later. Roker’s keeping an eye on them upstairs, he’ll give us the tip when they quit.’ He looked back at Francis, and spun the little gun in his hand, and the butt nestled into his palm like a bird homing. ‘But we may as well get this one underground,’ he said.

Francis had taken out a handkerchief, and was quietly wiping the blood from his cheek. His face,grey and drawn, kept a total, contained silence. Even when he raised his eyes for an instant to take one more look at Maggie, they gave nothing away beyond a kind of distant, regretful salutation. In the presence of these people he had nothing to say to her, not even with his eyes. The burden of longing and self-blame and love was not something he wanted to display for them or pile upon her at this last moment. As long as he had a card to play—and he had one, the last—he might as well play it, and speak to the point. The rest could stay unsaid; she wouldn’t be any the poorer or more unfortunate for ending her life without any declaration from Francis Killian.

‘There’s one thing you don’t know… Aylwin,’ he said, his voice emerging hoarse and clumsy from a bruised throat, ‘I take it you are Aylwin? Who else? Your boys don’t know it, either, but all the way up that mountain section there was a car following me to-night. It was on my trail yesterday, too, I couldn’t be sure of it then, but I know it now. I thought it was your pack on my heels, till I hit your ambush ahead. There’s only one other thing it could be, you know that, don’t you? A police car keeping an eye on me. They weren’t far behind when this bunch flagged me down. You think they’re blind and deaf? Or do you suppose they’d drop their assignment just when it got interesting? They’ll be hard after us right now, and there’ll be reinforcements on the way. Do you think you’re ever going to get out of here unobserved?’

‘I think,’ said Robin, smiling at him lazily, eyes narrowed and golden, ‘that you are a gallant but hopeless liar, trying the only bluff you’ve got left. But just to be obliging…’ He turned to the three who stood watching and listening, and snapped back briskly into German. They shook their heads in vigorous rebuttal, laughing the story away with absolute confidence. ‘You see? No shadow, no police, no fairy tales. If you had a tail, it got lopped off en route. But I think you never had one.’

‘Your trouble,’ said Francis levelly, ‘is that you have to have too much faith in your understrappers. The usual trouble with businesses that get too big. That Dodge will never get as far as Klostermann’s. If they miss it in Felsenbach, they’ll pick it up before it reaches Regenheim. And in case there’s any doubt about the place where I was waylaid, and about your tie-in with the affair, let me tell you I’ve left them my wallet and papers there on the spot. With the whole set of photographs of your grave.’

The first faint shadow of doubt touched but could not deface Robin’s smiling certainty. He turned his head again to shoot orders at his underlings; and they laid hands urgently on Francis and began to turn out his pockets, though they still poured voluble scorn on his story. He raised his hands out of their way, flinching as they handled him.

‘No wallet, no passport, no driving licence. You think I came out without those, Aylwin? Don’t bother to send a man back to pick them out of the ditch, the police did that long ago. And did you know that there’s an English detective in Scheidenau, co-operating with the locals? He followed me from England. Maybe he’s the one who’s been on my trail all day. He certainly was when we had lunch at The Bear.’

‘All right, so you left your wallet in the ditch. What good is it going to do you? Someone will spend your money and throw the rest away. I’ll believe in your English detective when I see him. And as for your police tail, Max with your hired job would have run head-on into it round the bend, and got word to me long ago.’

‘Maybe he did run into it, and they picked him up on the spot. Ever think of that? Better not write them off so easily, Aylwin, they were there, all right.’ It was his only anchor now, a frail one, but not an illusion. They had been there. God knew what had become of them now, but they might yet find their way where they were needed. ‘You haven’t a hope of getting out of here unseen. Why add more murders to the score? It’s long enough already. You might get away with Friedl. Touch Maggie Tressider, and they’ll hunt you to the end of the world.’

It was breath wasted. Even if he had been subject to intimidation, even if he had believed, Aylwin had gone too far now to turn back. He yawned elaborately in Francis’s face, and smiled, reaching up one hand to turn the shade of the lamp, and direct the light towards the darkest corner of the cellar. The circle of pallor flowed across the flagstones like a silent tide. Against the wall a heap of dark earth reared into view, and the rims of two of the stones showed black and thin as pen-strokes.

‘Get them up!’

They had crowbars and spades propped in the corner. The slanting light cast monstrous shadows from the stooped shoulders and heads of the two mountain men, as they leaned their weight almost languidly on the crowbars, and the thin black line at one end of the nearer stone broadened into a gash, a gaping rectangle of darkness.

For me, thought Francis, not for Maggie; he said they’d have to keep her until the Volga boatmen went home… Boatmen! Yes… so someone’s balking them from going near the lake. At this hour? A grain of hope clung obstinately to life within him, for the police might justify him yet, and come in time for Maggie, though not for him. Bargaining was out of the question, what had he to bargain with? Certainly not his own life, that was already forfeit. No means even of buying time. If he set out to sell his life as high as he could, there would be bullets flying here, and Aylwin might opt to cut his losses and change his plans, and hurry both his prisoners out of the world and into the ground together. No, nothing left to do but count on the Volga boatmen—whoever they were, thank God for them!—and submit without provocation, and pray that they might be police patrols who would never go home until she was found alive.

Robin Aylwin swung one long leg negligently from the edge of the settle, played with his little pistol, and watched his men at work. A job like any other. He paid no more attention to Francis, and Francis, arrived at the bleak conclusion that there was nothing he could do for Maggie but die submissively, had fallen mute. It was Maggie who broke the silence.

‘Francis!’

Never in his life had he heard his name spoken like that. A small, fine-spun, golden, intimate sound, like the marvellous mezza voce she could float clean to the back row of the remotest gallery of any opera house in the world, to pierce the last listener’s heart as if no one existed but himself and the singer. Out of the centre of one being, and aimed with certainty to reach the centre of another. For no one was present here now but Francis and Maggie. She had excised the others from her own consciousness and she banished them from his. There was only one thing left that she could do for Francis, and she was doing it as well as she knew how.

‘Francis, I’m sorry I ever got you into this. Forgive me! But I want to tell you that for my part I’m glad to have known you, even on these conditions. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I don’t have to say good-bye. I shan’t be long after you.’

Robin had turned his head to stare at her. The men leaning hard over the half-open grave froze, and hung watching and listening. And then Robin’s head went back with a toss like an angry horse balking, and he uttered a shout of brief and violent laughter. Something in the sound sent his men scurrying back to work on the second stone in haste. Never had Maggie looked at him like that, never spoken his name with that particular awareness that suddenly bestowed a greatly enlarged identity. Never had she turned on him this starry face, with blazing, recognising eyes wide-open to love. He had gone to the trouble to stage a beautiful declaration of love for her once, and she had not even heard him. A phoney love, of course! Still, by all the rules she ought to have succumbed.

The flagstones were propped back gently against the wall, uncovering the greyish, hard-packed earth, and the long, narrow hole from which the heap of soil had been dug out already in preparation for a new incumbent. Harsh darkness and a sinister bony light, distorted figures stooped over an open grave. Maggie’s mind drifted, recoiling from a present that was unbearable and a future that was non-existent. This was the dungeon scene from Fidelio. But Leonora had at least had a pistol, and here all the pistols were on the other side. She had nothing to fight with, nothing with which to defend her own or attack her enemy. ‘Ich bin sein Weib!’ No, this would be a Fidelio without any ecstatic love duet, without any final triumph for justice…

Robin slid from the settle and spread his feet firmly. She saw his thumb slide back the safety catch of the gun. He had forgotten her again; his attention was fixed on the open grave. Business as usual, he had his own affairs to look after, and no emotion had any part in them, not even offended vanity.

‘You won’t be lonely,’ he said pleasantly, his amber eyes measuring Francis, ‘you’ll be joining the sitting tenant. A fellow-countryman of yours who also got too nosy. The errand-boy always thinks he can run the business better than the managing director.’

He raised his hand without haste, and levelled the gun. The grave-diggers and their colleagues drew off from Francis and stood clear, waiting phlegmatically to fill in the hole again and replace the stones. The long finger on the trigger contracted gently.

Maggie awoke before it tightened to the firing-point. Nothing to fight with? But she had! She had one weapon, the ultimate weapon, not effective to stand off death, but a grenade exploding in Robin Aylwin’s orderly plans. She had a body he needed unmarked for his own purposes, with lungs that could still breathe in lake-water. She gathered it in a convulsion of vengeful energy, and flung it between Francis and the gun.