The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 3

THE MAN WHO THUMBED A LIFT

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They came spiralling down over France at about nine o’clock on a fine Thursday morning, craning to see the bewildering expanses of the blown sand-dunes revolve below them, starred with little salt pools and furry with pines. The estuary of the Canche dipped under one wing and vanished, the bridge and its crawling beetles of cars disappeared. By dazzling glimpses the white, urbane, anglicised villas winked at them from among the trees, and the long beach trailed a golden ribbon along the lacy edge of the sea. Le Touquet would never be so beautiful again.

Twenty-five minutes after they had left England they were creeping gingerly round the snack-bar called “L’Aubette,” and into the groves of pines, round whose braced feet the waves of sand broke like a patient and treacherous sea. The first gendarme eyed them warily as they rolled decorously round his concrete bollard, and bore away towards the golf links. Left turn after left turn, until you cross the bridge over the Canche, and then sharp right. And you’ve started. You’re heading for Montreuil-sur-Mer and the main Paris road; for Brussels and Aachen and the Cologne-Frankfurt autobahn, and all points east.

“We’re in France!” said Dominic, shattered and transported, for the first time relaxing the grim concentration with which he was keeping to the right. “We’re abroad!”

They ran off the autobahn for their first night at the rest-house at Siegburg, and thwarted of a bed there—it seemed one must stop at about four o’clock to be sure of a room anywhere immediately on the motorway—cruised down the hill into the town, under the Michaelburg, and fetched up in an embarrassingly narrow and difficult yard off the glittering main street. Toddy parked the van gingerly in a cramped corner, and hugged himself at the thought of Dominic manipulating it out into traffic next morning. Every man for himself!

They strolled through the surprising glitter of the streets, still lively at past eight in the evening, and climbed the Michaelburg in the dusk to the fortress church.

And out of the blue Tossa made her next move.

“Wouldn’t it be fine to go all the way east into Slovakia?” she said suddenly and fondly, as they sauntered down again through the silent gardens. “As far as the Tatras, anyhow. We couldn’t go back without seeing the mountains.”

“If we have time,” agreed Toddy accommodatingly, willing to entertain all suggestions. “We’ve got to see Prague first.”

The twins had known her for years, perhaps that was why their thumbs didn’t prick. They knew her so well they’d stopped being sufficiently aware of her to question her attitudes and motives. What she offered, they accepted at its face value. Dominic had no such insulation. He walked beside her in the deepening dusk, her long, impetuous step almost a match for his, and felt some inexplicable tension drawing her taut as a bow-string.

It was at that moment that Dominic grasped, without any adequate grounds for his certainty, that she was steering this expedition carefully and patiently towards some end of her own. Hadn’t she been the one who had suggested providing the car with a carnet? Wasn’t it she who had thought of the Czech visas? Now, if he was right, she was making the next move, prodding them to hurry on eastwards into the Tatras; and if he was right, she would gently but doggedly persist until she got her own way.

“Why don’t we just steam ahead right to the mountains,” said Tossa, in the same brightly eager voice, “and take it easy on the way back? I’ve been had too many times, with the days running out because some gourmand for Gothic couldn’t be dragged away from some cathedral or other. Make sure of the remotest bits first, I say. We know we’ve got to get back, let’s make a point of getting there.”

“Toddy!”

“Hallo?” mumbled Toddy sleepily, across the bedroom window silvered down one edge with moonlight. “What’s up?”

“You know you told me Tossa’s stepfather got killed, climbing somewhere?”

“Hmm, yes, what about him?”

“Was she fond of him at all?”

A snort of laughter from the other bed fetched an answering creak out of the pale, scrubbed wood of the bedstead. “Are you kidding? She couldn’t stand him. He was so correct he made her want to throw things. Tossa left home, didn’t even see much of her mother until she left this fellow for good. Why, what about him?”

“Oh, nothing. Just wondering if she had him on her mind, or something.”

“Tossa misses him like you’d miss a rotten tooth. No, that’s a lie, too, because since her mother left him she hasn’t even felt any twinges. Even before he kicked off, he just wasn’t there any more.” A rustle of bedclothes and a lift in the sleepy voice indicated a quickening interest on Toddy’s part: “Hey, Dom, you getting to like our Tossa?”

“She’s all right,” said Dominic sedately. “Bit prickly sometimes. Tod, where did this fellow kick off?”

“Oh, abroad, somewhere. Austria or Switzerland, or somewhere. Didn’t check, actually. Does it matter?”

“Not a lot, I suppose. If you’re dead you’re dead. Good night, Tod!”

“Good night, Dom! That’s final notice!”

“OK! Pass out, I’ve finished.”

Toddy passed out with the aplomb of an exhausted child. They had had to rise in the middle of the night to drive down to the airport. Dominic, however, lay awake and alert. Toddy might not know where this chap Terrell had got himself killed, but according to Dominic’s pricking thumbs Tossa knew. Tossa knew, and stage by stage she was taking them there, to the very region, to the very spot. What did she know of the Tatras, unless that Terrell had dived to his death somewhere round their granite planes? Why mention them, unless of fixed intent?

Dominic’s father was a C.I.D. Detective-Inspector in a county force on the Welsh borders. Maybe there’s something to police parentage that sets you nosing for mysteries wherever you go. Or maybe there was really something about Tossa’s shuddering anticipation that justifiably set his flesh crawling. Whichever it was, Dominic was a long time falling asleep.

They camped the next night, a little way short of the Czech border, in the beautiful, rolling, forest-and-meadow land of the Palatinate. And in the morning they crossed the frontier.

Waidhaus was quiet, efficient and polite, the Customs house poised on the edge of a sharp dip. Beyond the barrier the road curved away into Czechoslovakia, straightened again, and immediately began to climb; and there before them, on either side all youns the way, were the white buildings of the Czech Customs offices; and drawn up in the roadway on the near side of the barriers were at least a dozen cars, buses and caravans, from which at least fifty people had spilled out to flourish carnets and passports at harassed but amiable Czech officials.

It took them an hour to get through. There were more papers to be dealt with here, passports and visas, the carnet, the insurance document, as well as a polite and good-humoured pretence at examining their baggage, and a genuine scrutiny of the car.

“For the first time,” said Christine approvingly, “I feel as if someone cares whether we’ve arrived or not. It got almost insulting, being waved from one country into another like tossing the morning paper over the gate.”

“Not so cynical as the French,” Toddy allowed judicially, in an undertone, distributing their cleared passports. “Not so disdainfully efficient as the Germans. I like to see officials who sweat over the job, and aren’t past getting excited. That immigration chap took a liking to your passport photograph, Tossa—even showed it to his mate at the other table. Come to look at it,” he admitted, studying it impartially, “it isn’t at all bad.”

“Thank you!” said the saturnine young Czech who had been feigning to examine Tossa’s suitcase, without so much as disarranging the one tissue-wrapped party dress she had popped in at the last moment “in case.”

“Everything is in order. You can proceed.”

They piled eagerly into the van again, Dominic at the wheel. The Customs man signalled to the young soldier who held the chain of the barrier, and up went the pole. Gravely they acknowledged the salutes that ushered them through into a new country, and wormed their way through the congestion of cars and under the quivering pole.

“We’re in!” breathed Christine, staggered to find it so easy.

“No iron curtain, no nothing,” agreed Toddy, astonished in his turn. “A bit like crashing the sound barrier, though.”

The van climbed out of the frontier hollow, between slopes of silver birches, under the distant shadow of the first of many castles, a gaunt ruin on a lush, wooded hill. They were surging merrily into full speed, when a second barrier loomed in sight, barring their road, and a tall wooden watch-tower beside it. The very young soldier on guard there glared with a solemnity beyond his seventeen years, as Dominic slowed to a discreet halt before the bar, and waited dutifully to see what was required of him.

With unshaken gravity the boy lifted a telephone from its stand in the box beside him, and consulted some unknown authority.

“No iron curtain?” whispered Christine, between apprehension and the giggles.

“Shut up, idiot!” hissed Toddy. “He’s only doing his job.”

The boy replaced the telephone with deliberation, walked round them, eyeing the girls with a curiosity that brought the transaction down to a completely human level, and hoisted the pole, motioning them through with only the most austere inclination of his head. He was very young, and took his duties seriously.

They saluted this gateman, too, but apart from a quickening spark in his eye he preserved his motionless dignity. Possibly he treasured the girls, acknowledging his services decorously from the rear windows; but if he did, he wasn’t admitting it. Only when they were well away from him, soaring up the slope, did he suddenly lift one arm above his head, in a wave as impersonal as the hills.

They never even saw it; all their attention was fixed eagerly ahead, as Dominic accelerated happily towards the crest of the rise, among the shimmering birch trees.

A man’s figure rose suddenly and joyously out of the ditch beside the road, and stood on the verge, energetically thumbing them to a standstill. A young, round, glowing face under a sunburst of blond hair beamed at them confidently, and had no doubts whatever of its warm and friendly welcome. A small rucksack swung from the cajoling arm that flagged them down. In the other hand he held a large open sandwich, which he balanced expertly as he ran alongside them and signalled, from ingenuous blue eyes and beaming mouth, his pleasure in having hooked so interesting, so rewarding a ride. The GB plate, the number, the girls, one glance and he had them all weighed up.

Dominic wound the window right down, and said: “Hallo!” As an obvious greeting he didn’t see why it shouldn’t do just as well as any other; but in spite of Tossa’s predictions he was hardly prepared to be addressed promptly and fluently in his own language.

“Good morning!” said the beaming young man, tilting his open sandwich just in time to retrieve a slipping gherkin. “Please excuse that I trouble you, but if you go to Prague, may I ride with you? If you have room?” He knew they had room, he had practically measured their cubic content with that one expert flick of a blond eyelash. “I could be of help, if you do not know the road. To work my passage, I shall be the guide, if you permit?”

Toddy not only permitted; he applauded. He enjoyed driving, but to him navigating was a chore. He cast a glance behind him at the empty road, and was out of the front passenger seat like a greyhound from its trap.

“It’s all yours! Here, give me your rucksack, I’ll stow it in the back with our stuff, and you take this seat.”

“But you are sure? The ladies will not mind if I ride with you? I should not like to be a burden, and some people do not approve of auto-stop.”

They assured him that this method of travelling was well-established even in England, and that they had no personal objection to it, had even used it on occasions. They installed the young man, his sandwich, and his rucksack. Christine, rendered thoughtful by the last glimpse of the gherkin as it vanished behind strong white teeth, reached into the food-box and began to compile a mid-morning snack.

“You are also students?” asked their new passenger, as they drove through Rozvadov, a nondescript street-village hardly different from those they had left on the other side of the frontier, except that, lacking the exact German tidiness, it appeared a little shaggier and dustier. “My name is Miroslav Zachar. To my friends Mirek—you will find it easier to remember. I am student of philosophy.”

They told him freely who they were, and what they were reading, and he overflowed with uninhibited questions, produced so naturally and confidently that it was impossible to find any of them offensive. They were on vacation, of course, like him? Was it their first visit to Czechoslovakia? Where were they going to stay in Prague? And where else did they intend to go? He was full of helpful suggestions. Castles, lakes, towns, he knew them all.

“You must do quite a lot of auto-stopping,” said Christine, busy with cheese and crackers. “You seem to have been everywhere.”

“I do it a lot, yes. Every holiday. Sometimes I go with friends, sometimes alone. It is better alone. For one person it is easy to get a lift.”

“And what made you come all the way out here? You do live in Prague?”

“I have been walking in these hills of the Bohemian Forest. Now I come back to the road, hoping to get a lift back into Prague quickly. This is a good place, foreign cars coming in here, naturally they rush straight to Prague. But I am lucky to meet some more students. That’s nice! I’m glad I time it so good. No, in Prague I have an uncle and aunt, if you will kindly take me so far I can stay with them, and afterwards stop another car,” he said serenely, “to take me on eastwards. Because of course you will be staying in Prague.”

“Perhaps only for one or two nights,” Tossa said suddenly, in that gruff boyish croak of hers, that could be so disconcerting to the unaccustomed ear.

They were on a stretch of road complicated by many climbing bends among trees, but without forks where Dominic could possibly go wrong. Miroslav Zachar abandoned his navigating for a moment to turn his head and study this dark-brown girl seriously. His amiable moon-face shone upon her approvingly.

“You will be going on so soon? But where?”

“Into Slovakia,” she said quite positively, asking no one’s agreement.

“No, really? You go to Bratislava, perhaps?”

“No,” she said, with the same authority; and if no one took her up on it now they were quite certainly committed. And no one did. “No, we want to go to the Tatras. We can make a longer stay in Prague on the way back. Is that the same way you wanted to go? You did say eastwards. Where is your home?”

“My home,” said Mirek, delighted, “is in Liptovsky Mikulás. That is very near the Tatra range. If you are really going so far, and if you would like to have a guide, believe me, I will make it easy for you, I will take care of everything. You have rooms in Prague? No? I can arrange it. The Students’ Union will manage it for us, you’ll see. And I will show you the city. I know it like my hand. How long you would like to stay? One night? Two nights? I shall make a programme for you. And then you will take me with you to Slovakia? I know the best camping-ground on the way, in Javorník, in the most beautiful hills. Oh, I shall work my passage, you will see!”

It sounded like the answer to everything. The others might have demurred at leaving Prague so soon in other circumstances, but with a heaven-sent guide added to the party, gratis, it seemed much the most practical and economic solution to run right through, as Tossa had urged, spend as long as possible in the east, and then make their way back, without a guide, over a road already travelled once. Even if they saw fit to vary it, they would at least know the lie of the land.

“It’s a bargain!” said Tossa, incandescent with eagerness. “One night in Prague, if you can really work it for us…”

“Two!” Christine demurred.

“One! We shall come back, and we shall know the basic lay-out then, we can easily find our way around. And then we go on to the Tatras. Mirek, you must know those parts awfully well, if it’s your home. Do you know a place—not in the High Tatras, actually, in the Low Tatras—called Zbojská Dolina?”

“Dig that!” said Toddy, impressed. “The girl’s been studying the map.”

“You have so good a map?” Mirek was astonished and respectful. “It is only a small valley. I think it is not marked on any map I know. We do not have many such large-scale maps for walking, like yours.”

Tossa fortified herself with a large bite from her cheese cracker, and made the most of the muffling noise. “No, it isn’t on the maps. I knew somebody once who stayed there, and they—she—said it was lovely. I always thought I’d like to go there.”

Geese, parading the dusty open green of the small town of Bor, scuffled with indignant shrieks from before the wheels of the van. The small, dilapidated castle mouldered peacefully among its trees on their right, as they curled through the single deserted street. Everything was coloured a faint, neutral brown. New pastel paint would have shattered a sacred silence. Border Bohemia drowsed, veiled itself, and let them pass by.

“Hey!” reminded Dominic peremptorily. “Which way at this fork? I can’t see any ‘Praha’.”

Children at the crossroads, in diminutive shorts and faded cotton sweaters, bounced, smiled and waved at them energetically. Of the welcome extended to foreigners, on this level, there was no possible doubt. They were the glitter in the children’s world.

“To the left,” said Mirek, sliding hastily back to his duty.

“This friend of mine,” Tossa’s voice persisted, doggedly offhand behind Dominic’s shoulders, “stayed at a little inn somewhere in this Zbojská Dolina. It was called the Riavka hut. Do you know it?”

They cruised down into a river valley, level green meadows on the near side of it, a sharp escarpment beyond, and climbed out again by a winding road, glimpsing silver on either hand as they turned.

“Why, yes, surely I know it,” said Mirek.

“My friend said it was lovely walking country there. We like to walk. Do you think we could get rooms at this Riavka hut? Do you think the Students’ Union would try to arrange it for us?”

They were climbing steadily into the little town of Stríbro.

“It means silver,” explained Mirek, as they wound their way into the square, and turned sharp right out of it, to uncoil in a long spiral down the mount on which the town was built. “Here there were silver mines.” And to Tossa, without turning his head, he said cheerfully: “Yes, they can arrange it. I shall do it for you. For you I shall do everything you wish.”

And not one of them had questioned this sudden detailed knowledge she had displayed of the region to which they were bound; no one had marvelled, and it was too late to marvel now. She had the whole expedition in her hands. They were going where, for her own inscrutable purpose, Tossa wished to go.

Mirek showed them Prague. Seeing they had tamely submitted to staying only one night in that delectable city, it was amazing how much he did manage to show them. The shopping centre, based firmly upon the great, broad thoroughfare of Wenceslas Square and the two streets forking from its massive foot, was concentrated enough to be viewed quite easily and quickly. But how did he manage to get them to Hradcany, that magical castle-quarter walled like a town within the fortress ramparts high above the Vltava river, and also out to the Mozart Museum in its lost, enchanted garden south of the town? It was impossible in the time, but Mirek did it. He showed them the little monastery of Loretto, long monkless, with its honeyed carillon of bells and its blinding treasury. He showed them the eleventh-century hall deep beneath the castle, austere, imaginatively restored and imperishably beautiful, after which all the loftier and later layers were anticlimax. And late in the evening he showed them a very handsome dinner, and two tiny night-clubs, each with an incomprehensible but apparently sophisticated cabaret.

They fell asleep in the beds Mirek had found for them, with a picture of Prague behind their eyelids, shabby, neutral-tinted, mouldering, gracious, imperial, drab, flamboyant, invulnerably beautiful; so old that it was indifferent to criticism; so assured that it turned a deaf ear to praise. The dirty industrial quarters hanging on its skirts were merely the soiled ruffles of an empress, dulled by one day’s wear. The fall of the tumbling terraced gardens beneath the castle, encrusted with stone statuary and grottoes and galleries, was a cascade of lace on the imperial bosom, heady and fresh as the acacia sweetness that hung on the night air.

And the next day they headed eastward for Slovakia.

They drove down out of the Javorník hills at leisure from their night camp, and into the town of Zilina. Beyond the civic buildings in the town square the crests of farther hills hung in the sky, pointed, shaggy, forested, the cones and pyramids of the Little Fatras. Mirek, moved to ecstasies of local patriotism as soon as he stood on Slovak soil, had whiled away the miles by telling them the story of Janosík, the Slovak outlaw-hero, who took to the hills here with his eleven mountain boys, in revolt against the feudal tyranny that kept his countrymen serfs. Born in the Fatra Hills, he died at last on a gallows at Liptovsky Mikulás, and after him all the mountain boys died tragic deaths. No happy ending for them; the usual comparison with Robin Hood, said Mirek a little didactically, foundered on that rock of martyrdom. There were many songs about Janosík, and Mirek knew them all. It took the waft of coffee from the foyer of the hotel to silence him.

“You’d like the second breakfast here? We’re not in a hurry to-day, and the next stretch is wonderful. You will want to stop and take pictures.”

They agreed that they could do with coffee. Toddy turned the van from the road, and let it run gently into the parking-ground along the hotel frontage.

“Look! An MG!” Christine halted them delightedly to admire a car from home. “No GB. Diplomatic plates! Somebody from the embassy must be here.”

“Idiot!” said Toddy amiably. “It doesn’t have to be an English owner. Probably United Arab Republic, or something. Half the world buys British when it comes to cars, especially semi-sports jobs like this.”

“There’s a suitcase on the back seat, anyhow.” Christine had already caught the Czech habit of walking all round unfamiliar cars and examining them closely, without the least embarrassment or offence. “So he’s not staying here, only halting like us. Maybe he smelled the coffee, too. What’ll you bet I can’t pick him out in the kavarna?” She had adopted the Czech word for café, it came more naturally now than the French; and since in English both were borrowed, why not use the native one?

“If you know the code,” said Toddy, “you can tell by the registration letters which embassy it belongs to. Do you know, Mirek?”

“It is someone from the British Embassy,” said Mirek at once.

Tossa’s warm, rose-olive complexion protected her from betrayal by pallor or blushing, and her silences were quite inscrutable. She looked the MG over, and dismissed it from her notice. “Come on,” she said impatiently, “I’m famished for that coffee.” And she led the way in through the cool, dim foyer, shoving the kavarna door open with a heave of her shoulder, and marching across the room to appropriate a table by the window.

“Mostly Czechs,” reported Christine confidently, looking round with interest as she sat down at the marble-topped table, scaled to allow half a dozen people to spread their elbows comfortably.

A white-aproned waiter came bustling to take their order. They left the talking to Mirek. Their only complaint against him was that he made everything too easy; but the time was coming when he would leave them to their own limited resources.

“Got him!” Christine proclaimed with satisfaction. “Don’t look round yet, he’s looking this way. In the corner away to the left, close to the mirror. Wait a moment, I’ll tell you when you can look. But that’s him! He couldn’t be anything but English. Mirek, do we go around looking as conspicuous as that?”

“Hurry up!” protested Toddy. “I’m getting a stiff neck, trying not to turn round. Can I look yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll tell you when. Now, quick! He’s just talking to the waiter.”

She was right, of course. There was only one person there who had to be English. You could almost say he had to be an English diplomat. Quite young, about thirty, dressed for the country, but so correctly that he retained a look of the town. Nondescriptly fair, rather lightly-boned among these solid square Czechs and gaunt, rakish Slovaks, withdrawn, gentle, formal. The cut of his sportscoat gave him away, and the Paisley silk scarf knotted in the throat of his open shirt. Even the way he drank his coffee was unmistakably English.

“Funny!” sighed Toddy. “You never notice anything special about people when they’re at home. Man, does it stick out here!” He plumped his chin into a resigned palm, groaning. “I give up! I bet from over there I look just like that!”

“Oh, not quite,” said Mirek comfortingly. “One could say, perhaps, English on sight, but not embassy English. More student English. It is a distinction.”

“Thank you! Thank you very much! I don’t want to be identifiable at a hundred yards.”

“Why not?” said Mirek disarmingly. “Are you ashamed of it?”

“He looks lonely,” said Christine. “Shouldn’t we pick him up? It would be quite easy. He’s giving Tossa the eye, anyhow.”

Tossa turned and gave the distant customer a long, considering look. Not a muscle of her smooth oval face quivered. “Not my type,” she said, after a merciless scrutiny, and turned back to her coffee. “Anyhow, he’s probably heading the other way, back to Prague.”

Christine shut her eyes for a moment to reckon up the days since they had left England. “Monday! Yes, I suppose he could be. Back to the grindstone after a week-end in Slovakia. But the way the car’s parked, I’d have thought he was going our way.”

Dominic had been thinking the very same thing, and was thinking it still; and the thought had first entered his mind in the instant when Tossa’s eyes had encountered those of the Englishman in the distant corner, held his gaze just long enough to register detached and unrecognising curiosity, and moved on just in time to avoid any suggestion of rudeness. For the man hadn’t been quite so adroit. He hadn’t the kind of face that gives much away, but for one instant there had been a kindling of his eyes, a sharpening of his attention, the unmistakable, instantaneous light of recognition. It was gone in an instant, too, without trace. He looked at her now with interest and approval across the room but as if he had never seen her in his life before.

Because he had recovered himself, and suppressed what she must not be allowed to see? Or because he had taken a hint from her cool, impersonal glance, and responded in kind as soon as he had grasped what she wanted? If the second, then they were in this curious affair together, and yet separately, for plainly he hadn’t expected Tossa to show up here in the middle of Europe, but equally plainly he had hastened to conform to what she desired when she did inexplicably appear. And if the first? Then Tossa wasn’t acting; he knew her but she did not know him, and there was something in the air important enough—or sinister enough—to make it expedient for him to dissemble his knowledge.

Dominic drank his coffee, and let their chatter ricochet round him; he was beginning not to like this secrecy at all. Tossa’s affairs were her own, but after all, here they were seven hundred miles or more from home, in an alien, and some would even have said an enemy, country. There had been one death, a death which began now to look more and more suspect. Beyond question Tossa was up to something, biting off, perhaps, much more than she could chew. And what could he do? Nothing, not even question her or offer help, unless she showed a disposition to want it, and that was the last thing he expected from Tossa. Nothing in the world he could do, except, perhaps, stay close to her and keep his eyes open.

When they paid for their coffee and left, Tossa walked out without so much as a glance in the stranger’s direction; but Dominic, looking back quickly from the doorway, saw that the waiter was just threading his way between the tables towards the Englishman’s corner.

In the foyer Tossa halted, rummaging like a terrier in the depths of her overcrowded handbag after powder and comb. “You go ahead, I’ll be with you in a minute.” She wandered off questingly towards the back of the hall, and left them to make their way out into the sunshine without her.

Dominic let the others go on ahead, and halted on the pavement a step aside from the doorway. The wide glass door was fastened fully open, and the dimness of the wall behind turned it into a very passable mirror. It showed him, darkly but distinctly, a segment of the foyer which included the door of the kavarna, just swinging back after the passage of a waiter with a tray of beer-tankards. A moment more, and the door swung again, more sedately, and the solitary young man came out into the hall, looked round him quickly, and began to read the cinema posters on the baize notice-board.

The clack of Tossa’s sandals echoed lightly from the rear corridors, and she came into sight, first a pale shadow in the glass, then rapidly growing clearer and closer. She passed by the young man without a glance, busily stuffing her powder compact back into her bag. Something oblong and small dropped out of the bulging outer pocket just before she snapped the catch.

Dominic ought, of course, to have turned in at the doorway to meet her, and called her attention at once to whatever it was she had let fall. Instead, he leaped away from the wall like a scalded cat, and by the time she emerged he was strolling round the corner after the others, looking back at the turn for her, and waiting to be overtaken. She came up with him brisk and smiling, and even slipped her hand in his arm as they fell into step together, a thing she had never done before.

He had hardly understood what he himself had just done, and why, until he felt her fingers close warmly on his sleeve, and realised with a startling surge of bitterness that even that touch was merely a part of her camouflage. It wasn’t that he blamed her for making use of whatever came to hand, if she had such an urgent need to cover her secret; but he did resent being made the recipient of a first small mark of intimacy for so humiliating a reason. It hadn’t dawned on him until then that she might be going to matter very much indeed in his life. And this, he thought bitterly, counting the seconds before the MG man should come hurrying after them, is a fine time to realise it!

Toddy and Christine had the map spread out against the side of the van, and were tracing the next stage of the drive.

“We are about to enter,” proclaimed Toddy, turning from his explorations to report to the late-comers, “the spectacular gorge of the Váh, clean through the Little Fatras, passing close by the romantic ruins of Strecno castle and Stary Hrad—to name but a few! Come on, pile in. I’m driving.”

The young man from the MG came bustling round the corner at that moment, and seeing them already embarking, broke into a light run, and waved an arresting arm.

“Excuse me! Just a moment!”

Nearly two minutes, thought Dominic. Time to read a few words, or write a few words, or both. Provided she passed him something a message could be hidden in properly.

She had. What the young man held out, as he came up panting and smiling, was her little leather comb-case, an ideal receptacle for a folded slip of paper.

“Excuse me, I was in the hall just now, I believe you dropped this as you were leaving.”

She took it, astonished and charmingly vexed at her own carelessness, and voluble in thanks to him.

“Not at all! I’m glad I caught you in time.” He withdrew a step or two, making it clear he had no wish to detain them. “You’re on holiday?” He looked round them all, memorising faces, his smile a shade too bright, but then, he had every mark of a naturally shy and serious young man. “You’re going on into the mountains?”

They made dutiful conversation, as one does when the encounter can be only a couple of minutes long, and probably will never be repeated. There is an art in touching deftly and graciously, and leaving a pleasant warmth behind on such occasions. On the whole, the young do it better than anyone.

“I’m sure you’ll like it in Slovakia. There’s lovely country to be explored here. Well, bon voyage! Have a good time!”

He drew back a few more steps, and then wheeled and walked smartly away from them. Tossa, with admirable calm, shoved the comb-case into her bag without a glance, and climbed into the van.

And no one else, thought Dominic, handing Christine in after her, had noticed a thing amiss with that little scene. Or could he really be sure of that? The twins would have given tongue at once, almost certainly. But who could be sure how much this pleasant fellow Miroslav noticed, or how deep he was? Or, for that matter, he thought for the first time, and with a sudden sickening lurch of his heart, who or what he was?

“Didn’t play that one very well,” said Christine critically, as they took the road eastwards out of Zilina. “After hooking him so neatly, too.”

“Too little!” responded Tossa automatically. “I threw him back. Anyhow,” she added wickedly, with a smile of pure defiance, “I got my bait back, didn’t I?”

The oddest thing in their three-day acquaintance with Mirek happened when he took his leave of them. And of all people, it was Tossa who precipitated it.

He brought them safely to Zbojská Dolina by mid-afternoon, himself driving the van up the last two miles of rough and narrow mountain track to the Riavka hut, and there confiding them to the care of the Martínek family. He fulfilled, in fact, everything he had undertaken for them, and everything he had claimed for himself was proved true. Clearly he was indeed a local man, well known here, for Martínek senior hailed him from the open cellar-flap of the inn with a welcoming roar as soon as he blew the horn at the log gate, and Martínek junior, higher up the incredibly green valley pastures with two rangy dogs, whistled and waved. Mrs. Martínek came hurrying out from the kitchen to the bar, the scrubbed boards creaking to her quick steps, and shook Mirek by the hand warmly but casually, as a crony’s son from the next village rather than a rare and honoured visitor. Any friend of Mirek’s, clearly, was welcome here.

All the doubts and suspicions that had been haunting Dominic’s mind since morning were blown away. He felt ashamed and confounded. There were, it seemed, still people in the world who had nothing to hide, and were exactly what they purported to be.

“I leave you now,” announced Mirek, beaming at them over the pile of luggage he had assembled on the bar floor. “You will be all right with Mrs. Martínek, she has two rooms for you, and everything is prepared. You can talk to her in German, she understands it a little. And Dana—she speaks English, enough for every day. So now I shall go home. I thank you very much for such a pleasant ride, and I hope we shall meet again some day.”

It was an honest farewell speech if ever they’d heard one. He shook hands all round, his rucksack already hoisted on his shoulder.

“But how far have you to go?” Toddy demanded. “After all you’ve done for us, you must let us drive you home. Or at least down to the road. Oh, nonsense, you must! We know this road now, we’re home and dry, now let’s see you home.”

But Mirek wouldn’t hear of it. He laughed the offer out of the bar window. “All this time I have no exercise, these few miles to my home I must walk. Often I walk the length of Slovakia on vacation. No, no, no, you will have your own walking to do.” He held out his hand to Christine. “I have been very happy, getting to know you all. It was for me a great pleasure.”

When he reached Tossa, she was gazing up into his face with the most curious expression, half sullen and half guilty; and Dominic saw with astonishment that there were tears in her eyes. As they shook hands she suddenly reached up on tip-toe, and kissed Mirek’s round brick-red cheek very quickly and awkwardly.

“Mirek,” she said impulsively, “you’ve been absolutely everything some people at home would like to think Czech people aren’t—so kind, and warm, and sincere. I can’t tell you how much I’ve appreciated it.”

This extrovert behaviour was staggering enough in their moody, insecure and sceptical Tossa; but before they had time to wonder at it, something even more surprising had manifested itself in Mirek. Out of the collar of his open-necked shirt surged like a tide the most stupendous blush they had ever seen, engulfing muscular neck and tanned cheeks, burning in the lobes of his ears, and washing triumphantly into the roots of his blond hair. He stood looking down at Tossa from behind this crimson cloud, his pleasant features fixed in mid-smile, and his blue eyes helpless and horrified. He couldn’t even think of a joke to turn the moment aside, it was Toddy who had to prick the bubble of constraint and set him free to go.

“You know what the English are,” said Toddy indulgently, “well-meaning but imprecise. The girl means Slovak people, of course!”