The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 4

THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SCORE

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The Riavka hut took its name from the brook that came bounding down Zbojská Dolina from its source in the topmost bowl of the valley, “riavka” being a Slovak diminutive for just such an upland river. It looked very much like any other mountain hut in any other high range anywhere in Europe, a large, rambling, two-storied house, part stone, part wood, with heavily overhanging eaves, railed verandas, and firewood and logs stacked neatly beneath the overhang all along one wall. Besides being an inn for the herdsmen and the occasional rambler, it was also a farm and a timber-station, and a whole conglomeration of low wooden buildings clung to the outer log fence that bounded its garden and paddock. It stood in lush green meadows, a third of the way up the valley, and cows and horses grazed freely to the edge of the conifer belt that engulfed the path a few hundred yards above the house.

Beyond was deep forest, the brook purling and rippling away busily somewhere on their left hand, until they crossed it by a log bridge, and walked for some way on a rock causeway poised high above it. The pines and firs absorbed the heat of the sun, and transmitted it to earth as a heavy, intoxicating scent as thick as resin. The padding of needles under their feet was deep and spongy, and there were huge boletus mushrooms bursting through it here and there, and colonies of slim yellow “foxes” like pale fingers parting the mould. In the more open places, where the heat of the sun poured through upon them suddenly like laughter, and the ripe August grass grew waist-high, the air was rich with a spicy sweetness that would always thereafter mean hot summer woods to them, the scent of raspberries. The wild canes grew in thick clumps among the grass, heavy with fruit. They picked handfuls, and walked on, eating them.

Beyond the belt of woodland there were broken areas of outcrop rocks and boulders, the interstices of the rocks full of flowers, heaths and stonecrops and alpine roses. The path, partly natural, partly laid with flat stones, wound bewilderingly through this miniature rock town, taking the easiest way. They had lost the brook now, it ran somewhere in the deep cleft that fell away on their right; but beyond the point where the rocks gave place again to higher, drier meadows they kept company with it again for a while, and crossed it again. In the greener, moist patches here there were gentians of several tints and sizes, and the colours of quite ordinary flowers, as is their way in the mountains, had darkened into glowing brilliance, the scabious royal purple, the coltsfoot burning orange.

They were overshadowed now on either side by scree slopes and striated faces of rock. If a climber wanted a little practice in Zbojská Dolina, this was where he would have to come. There were a few nice rock pitches leaning over them here, a few limestone needles of the kind experts like to play with when the snow-peaks are out of reach. Ahead of them, on a low shelf on the right-hand side of the valley, and almost thrust from its precarious perch by boulders settling at the foot of the scree, sat a small white building, its squat walls leaning inward with a heavy batter, a tiny lantern tower crowning its roof. The door, as the sunlight showed them, leaned half-open, its upper hinge broken.

“Wonder what that is?” Christine said.

“It’s a chapel,” said Tossa. “Some people got snowbound here once, and died of exposure, so they built a little refuge in case the same thing happened to somebody else. That sort of chapel, not one for holding services.”

“How did you find all that out?” demanded Toddy. “It isn’t in the guide-book.”

“Dana told me. I was asking her about the valley just before we came out, that’s all.” Tossa took a wide, measuring look round her, at all the exposed faces of rock, and her gaze settled with a swoop upon the pallid scar of a path that crossed the mountainside on the opposite slope, on a level slightly higher than the roof of the chapel. Above the mark the oblique, striated rock rose steeply, below it was almost sheer for fifty feet or so. But for one excrescence where a harder stratum had refused to weather at the general speed, it would have been a perfectly straight line that crossed the cliff, from the crest on one side to a fold of bushes and trees on the other, descending perhaps fifteen feet in the process. But at the nose of harder limestone the path turned sharply, making a careful blind bend round the obstruction. The result looked, from here, like a large, bold tick slashed across a slate.

Tossa hitched her camera round her neck, and left the path. Without a word she turned towards that face of rock, studying it all the while with drawn brows and jutting lip as she went, and set a straight course for the foot of it across the strip of meadow and into the fringe of bushes.

They all followed her docilely. Dominic would have followed her in any case, and the twins didn’t care which direction they took, where all was new and the sun was shining. Almost imperceptibly, for these very reasons, they had arrived at an arrangement by which Tossa constantly set the course, and the others fell into line after her; for Tossa did care where she went. Tossa was a woman with a purpose. Through the trees she led them, following her nose blindly now, or perhaps drawn by the invisible thread of tension that had compelled her across Europe. Her navigation was accurate enough. She came to the spot where the trees fell away, then to the first slanting tables of outcrop rock, tilted at the same angle as the strata in the exposed face above. The cliff hung like a pale grey curtain over them, the heat of the sun rebounding from it into their faces. A broad limestone shelf, moving upward in three irregular steps, jutted from the foot of the pleated folds.

“Where are we going?” asked Christine idly, not greatly concerned about the answer.

“Oh, we’ll go on up the valley in a minute.” Toasa squinted experimentally and almost convincingly into the view-finder, and backed a little from the cuff. “I just thought this would make a fine backcloth for a picture.”

If it was simply an excuse for her detour, it wasn’t a bad one. The light was fingering every pleat in the rock curtain like the quivering strings of a harp, and she had space enough to get plenty of contrast and scope into her picture.

“Would you mind disposing yourselves nicely on the seats so thoughtfully provided for you? One on each step. A little more to the left, please, Chris. My left, you nut! Yes, that’s fine! Hold it!”

They clambered obediently up the shelf of limestone, and sat down where she directed, while she made two exposures, and took her time about it. As she lowered the camera for the second time, Dominic saw her raise her head and cast one rapid glance at the cliff directly above the spot where he was sitting; and because she had just uncovered her face it was for once a naked and readable glance, fierce and doubtful and afraid, and aching with a dark, suppressed excitement that disquieted him horribly.

It was gone in a moment, she was winding her film on and waving them down. The others had noticed nothing, because they were looking for nothing. But Dominic cast one quick glance upwards, where she had looked, and saw that he had been sitting right beneath the jagged nose of rock that jutted to form the angle of the path above.

He felt a light sweat break on his forehead and lip, as understanding broke like a flush of sudden heat in his mind. Tossa on a trail was single-minded to the point of ruthlessness. That projection of rock up there, making a blind cross with the face of the cliff against the sky, was the cross that marked the spot where the accident occurred. He was sitting in the very place where Tossa’s stepfather had crashed to his death.

Dana Martínek was alone in the bar when Dominic went in to order their coffee that evening. He had hoped she would be. His friends were sitting on the little front terrace under the stars, well out of earshot. If he was making a fool of himself, concocting a melodrama out of a few trivial incidents and Tossa’s moodiness, now was the time to find out and alter course.

“Miss Martínek, we’ve been up as far as the chapel this afternoon. Just opposite there, on the other side of the brook, there’s an almost sheer rock face, with a path crossing it. You know the place I mean?”

She turned from the washing of glasses to look at him curiously; a tall girl, not pretty, but with the composed and confident carriage which was common among young women here, and a cast of face to which he was becoming accustomed, wide-boned but softly and smoothly fleshed, widest across the eyes, which were themselves rounded and full and clear. Eyes that could conceal with perfect coolness; but what they did choose to confide, he thought, would be the truth.

“Yes, I know it,” she said, volunteering nothing.

“Wasn’t somebody killed in this valley only a couple of weeks or so ago? An Englishman who was staying here?”

She said: “Yes,” without any particular reluctance or hesitation, but that was all.

“And was that the place where it happened? He fell from that path on to the rock?” His spine chilled at the thought that he had been sitting there, posing for a photograph. “Miss Martínek—”

Burningly candid faces like hers could withhold smiles, too, their assurance made it possible to be grave even at close quarters and with strangers. But she smiled at him then, not without a touch of amusement in the goodwill. She was twenty-one, two good years older than Dominic.

“You may call me Dana, if you like. It is quicker. Yes, you are right, it was there that he fell.”

“From that bend in the path?”

“So it seemed.”

“Would you mind telling me about it?”

“What is there to tell? Mr. Terrell came here and wished to stay, and the room was free, because one couple who should have come had illness at home. So of course, we took him. He was out alone all day. That’s normal for people who come here, at least when the weather is good. So we were not worried on the third evening, when he did not come back until dark. But by ten o’clock we grew anxious, and alerted the mountain patrol, and went out ourselves with lights, to search in the head of the valley. But we were not the first to find him. When we got there the police from Liptovsky Pavol were already there. He was dead when they found him.”

“The police? But you hadn’t notified the police, had you? Only the mountain rescue people.”

She shrugged. “The patrol must have called the police, I suppose. They were there. It was they who found him.”

“And his injuries? Did it seem as if they were the result of a fall like that?”

She looked him in the eye for a moment, very gravely. “Mr. Felse…”

“You may call me Dominic,” he said, with a grin that managed to be unwontedly impudent because of his nervousness. “It takes longer, but it’s more friendly.”

“Dominic,” said Dana, her smile reappearing for a moment, “you should ask the police these questions. I did not have to go and look at that poor man broken on a slab of limestone, and so I did not go. All I know is what my father said, and he helped to carry him. You know what such a fall on such a surface could do to a man’s bones, how many fractures there would be, what sort of fractures? Yes, he was like that. Yes, he fell. You do not get like he was in any other way. They say he died within a few minutes, maybe almost instantly. And I think you have too romantic an imagination, you should curb it.”

“Not me,” said Dominic, taking his elbows from the bar with a sigh. “It isn’t that easy. Well, thanks, anyhow. I’ll take the coffee out, shall I, and save you a journey.”

While she was making it he thought of another question. “What sort of equipment was he carrying, this Mr. Terrell?”

He had hardly expected very much from that, but she turned and looked at him with interest. “Yes, that was perhaps odd. He had with him ice-axe, nylon ropes, kletter-schuhe, everything for climbing. Naturally he did not carry or need them here. But perhaps it is not so strange, because he came here from the High Tatras. You know them, the big mountains, you must have seen them across the valley as you came from Ruzomberok.”

“Yes,” he agreed eagerly, remembering how abruptly that sickle of icy heads had appeared in the sky on their left hand, like a mirage of snow-fields and honed blue slopes and trailing banners of cloud beyond the green, lush flats of the Váh, fifteen miles wide. “Yes, there he’d want his kit.”

“I asked him how he could bear to leave sortie overé Pleso, but he said he had pulled a muscle in his arm, so he came away where he could walk, and not be tempted to use it too soon.”

“Strbské Pleso? That’s where he was staying, over there?”

“It means the lake of Strba. It is at the western end of the Freedom Road, that high-level road that runs along the range. Hand me that tray, will you, please? So, and there is your coffee.”

He thanked her, and lifted the tray, balancing it carefully. He had reached the doorway, encrusted with stars, when she said quietly behind him: “Dominic…”

“Yes?” He turned his head alertly.

“Do you know you have been asking me all the same questions your friend asked me this afternoon? The little dark girl—Miss Barber, I think she is called.”

“Yes… I thought she might have,” said Dominic, and wavered in the doorway for a moment more. “Did she ask what hotel he was staying at, over there?”

“No, she did not. But in any case he did not tell me that, and I did not ask him.”

“All right. Thanks, anyhow!”

He carried the tray of coffee out to the terrace. It was not at all surprising that he should arrive just in time to hear Tossa saying, with the sinister, bright edge to her voice that he was beginning to know only too well: “How about making a sortie over into the High Tatras, to-morrow?”

All the way along the winding road that brought them out of the range, with the enchanting little river bounding and sparkling on their left hand, and the firs standing ankle-deep in ferns along its rim, Dominic was waiting with nerves at stretch to see how she would manage to direct their movements exactly where she wanted to go, and how much she would give away in the process.

“To the right,” Tossa instructed him, poring over the map as though she had not already learned it by heart, “and keep on the signs for Poprad.”

At Liptovsky Hradok there was a promising fork, where the left-hand road seemed to set course directly for the roots of the mountains.

“Don’t take it,” warned Tossa, “keep on towards Poprad. It doesn’t join the Freedom Road, it goes straight over into Poland, and we can’t go, and anyhow I think the frontier’s closed there. It’s a broken line on this map. There’s a left fork from this road, oh, twenty kilometres on, that takes us up on to this Freedom Road, and then it runs on along the range all the rest of the way.”

All of which Dominic knew as well as she did; he’d been doing his homework even more industriously. He also knew that the first-class route up to the Freedom Road was nearer forty kilometres ahead than twenty, and joined the shelf highway in mid-course; but the turning to which she was directing them, short, second-class and quite certainly extremely steep to make the gradient in the distance, would lead them to the western end of the upper road, and straight to the lake of Strba.

That didn’t take much accounting for, of course; so much she had learned from Dana. What he was waiting to see was what she would do and where she would lead them when they got there. Because she wouldn’t know precisely where to look for her stepfather’s traces in the lake resort, unless she had information Dana didn’t possess.

The road streamed eastward along the floor of the great valley, threading the cobbled streets and spacious squares of small towns, and emerging again into the empty, verdant fields, that fantastic back-drop of peaks still unrolling steadily beside it.

Two main streams combine to form the river Váh, the White Váh the white mountain water from the High Tatras, the Black Váh from the district of Mount Royal in the Low Tatras. Their road crossed the White Váh for the last time, not many miles from its source, and they were over an imperceptible water-shed, no more than the heaving of a sigh from the valley’s great green heart, that separated the westward-flowing Váh from the eastward-flowing tributaries of the Poprad, which is itself a tributary of the Dunajec, and joins it to wander away northward into Poland beyond the Tatra range. Those tiny streams they were leaving were the last of the Danube basin. This new and even tinier one, crossed soon after they turned on to Tossa’s climbing road and headed precipitately towards the foothills, was the first innocent trickle of the vast drainage area of the Vistula. A couple of miles and a slight heave in the level of the plain determined their eternal separation.

The van climbed dizzily, on a roughly-surfaced but adequate road, left the viridian levels of the river plain, and wound its way between slopes of forest and cascades of rock rich with mountain flowers. The gradient increased steadily. The peaks had abandoned them, they were tangled in the intimacy of the foothills, and there were no longer any distances before them or behind.

They emerged at last on to a broad, well-made road that crossed them at right-angles, and went snaking away left and right along the shoulder of the range.

“Which way now?”

“Whichever you like,” offered Tossa with deceptive impartiality. “This must be the Freedom Road. Left is the highest end, and we’re quite near it here. How about going up there to Strba Lake for lunch, and then we can drive the length of the road to Tatranská Lomnice at the other end, and see if we can go up the funicular?”

It sounded a reasonable programme, and they accepted it readily. The great road climbed still, between slopes of noble pines, until it brought them out suddenly on a broad, open terrace, and the whole panorama of the plain below expanded before them, an Olympian view of earth. They parked the van in a large ground thoughtfully provided opposite the terrace, and rushed to lean over the railing, and marvel at the pigmy world from which they had climbed.

The whole flat green valley of the Váh lay like a velvet carpet beneath them, shimmering coils of cloud drifting between. Through this wispy veil they could see clearly the white ribbon of the road, and the silver ribbon of the river, threading the emerald field, and the little towns splayed like daisies in the grass of a meadow.

“But wait till we go up to the Lomnice Peak!” Tossa promised them, and the magic of joy had penetrated even Tossa’s absorption, and made her eyes shine and her voice vibrate. “This, and another leap on top of it—an enormous one, it looks in photographs. Quick, lock the van, and let’s go in to the lake.”

The snow-peaks, exquisitely shaped, bone-clean, polished granite and gneiss, reappeared as soon as they turned inward to the heart of the range, head beyond beautiful head materialising as they walked the curves of the road towards the blue gleam of the lake in its oval bowl. First there were white villas and large modern hotels, and then as the water opened before them broad and gracious, the older hotels, partly timbered, marking their age by their wooden towers and little lantern turrets, an element of fantasy that turned out later, surprisingly, to be traditional; for these towers for tourists were the lineal descendants of the timber churches and belfries of Slovakia, some as old as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

There were hotels round almost a quarter of the lake shore, but above and beyond rose the mountains, forested in their lower reaches, sharpened to steel above, etched with piercing patterns of ice, and snowfields radiant as flowers. Across the water, not far from the shore, towered the timber structure of a ski-jump, like an out-of-season shrub barren in summer and simulating death.

They walked the whole circuit of the lake, staring, exclaiming, photographing, as hordes of other holiday-makers, probably of a dozen nationalities at least, were also doing all round them. And Tossa took stock of every hotel they passed, and gave no sign of seeking or finding.

Not until they came to the Hotel Sokolie, built out to the very edge of the lake, with a terrace overhanging the clear, chill shallows, a sunken garden between its walls and the road, and its name on a wooden sign by the gate.

“This looks nice,” said Tossa, loitering. “And not too posh, either, so it won’t be frantically dear. Anybody but me hungry yet?”

She was learning how to do it. She had the tone just right, happily casual, attracted but easy, willing to go along with the general vote. She had known all along which hotel she was looking for; and that was information she could not have got from Dana.

Not one of the luxury models, just as she had said. Not even new. Half its structure was in wood, with a shingled steeple on one corner. But it had a pleasant, welcoming foyer, and a pine-panelled dining-room with a view over the terrace and the lake. And it was very easy to get the twins compliantly through the swing doors after her, and heading, on the head waiter’s prompt and agile heels, towards a table near the window, where the mountains leaned to them in silver outline against a sapphire sky, and the ice-cold mountain water mirrored that blue with a deeper, gentian tone, drowning their senses, soothing them into hungry complacence.

There wasn’t a hotel anywhere round the lake that couldn’t have provided them with an equally wonderful prospect and a comparable menu; but only this one would do for Tossa. For this was undoubtedly the hotel where Herbert Terrell had stayed for his few meagre days, before he removed to the Low Tatras, to Zbojská Dolina, and the death that was waiting for him there.

“I knew it!” said Toddy, groaning. “We’re going to get the English expert let loose on us wherever we go, I can see that. And I’ll swear we never actually said a word in the head man’s hearing, he just looked us over. How do they know?”

“You’d be even more annoyed,” said Christine with certainty, “if they took you for something else, instead. Like all the English!”

The head waiter had led them to their table himself, but having weighed them up in one shrewd glance he had thereupon withdrawn, and despatched to them a short, square, good-humoured citizen who greeted them, inevitably, in very competent English. Pretence was useless; they were immediately recognisable, it seemed, wherever they went.

Tossa followed the waiter’s bouncing passage through the service doors with a narrowed and speculative glance, the gleam of purpose in her eye. She was here after information, she had an obvious use for an English-speaking waiter. The chief difficulty confronting her now must be how to slip her three companions long enough and adroitly enough to be able to talk to the man alone.

“We could have our coffee on the terrace,” she suggested, her eyes dwelling dreamily on the blue, radiant water outside.

Of course, coffee on the terrace! And then, when they were comfortable and somnolent in the sun, half drunk with mountain air even before they succumbed to the “Divcí Hrozen,” Tossa would begin delving into that all-purpose bag of hers for her powder compact, and wander off demurely into the hotel, ostensibly in search of a mirror and privacy, but in reality in pursuit of the English-speaking waiter.

Everything happened just as he had foreseen. At the edge of the terrace, leaning over the brilliant clarity of the water, Tossa was the first to finish her coffee, and the first to excuse herself.

“Oh, lord, what do I look like?” She peered into an inadequate mirror, and scowled horribly. “You might tell a girl!” She gathered up her bag in that armed, belligerent way women have, and pushed back her chair. “I’ll be right back.”

He gave her three minutes before he followed her in through the now almost deserted dining-room, and into the foyer. The sunken garden must, he calculated, continue past all the rooms on the landward side of the house, including lounge and bar, and not a window would be closed on a day like this. The English-speaking waiter was not in the dining-room; he might be in the bar, he might be in the kitchen, he might be almost anywhere, and out of Tossa’s reach, but at least the available rooms could be covered. Dominic was launched on a course from which he could not and would not turn back. If he had to listen from hiding he would do it, yes, or at keyholes if necessary, anything to feel that he had the knowledge to help Tossa when the need arose. If it never arose, so much the better, she need never know; and nobody else ever should.

The garden was green, shrubby and wild, its lawns scythed instead of mown, as was the custom here. The thick, clovery grass swallowed his footsteps, and the level of the windows just cleared his head. He walked softly the length of the wall, listening for Tossa’s voice; and suddenly there it was, clear, urgent and low, sailing out from the open window above him.

“But why should he leave like that? Something must have happened. Didn’t he say anything to account for it?”

“No, madame, nothing at all.” A slightly beery bass, rich and willing to please. “All was as usual with him that morning, only the rain kept him indoors. Here he sat and waited, and read the English papers. There was nothing.”

“But there were other people here. Did he talk to anyone?”

“Only to me, madame. I was on duty here.” The waiter’s voice was patient, puzzled and reserved. Did she really think she could run round the district like this, asking fierce questions about the sudden death of a foreigner, and not call attention to herself? “We had not many callers, because of the rain. Only residents. There were a few, of course. Some herdsmen came in, local people, and drank coffee. They were playing cards, the English gentleman went over and watched them for a while. He was asking me about the pack they used, and the game they played. You have other games, this was strange to him. When the men left he picked up the paper on which they had been keeping the score, and examined it. But what is there in that?”

“But then very soon he packed and left?”

“About half an hour afterwards I saw him come down with his bag, and go to pay his account. He asked me about getting a car.” The note of constraint had become a softer, more deliberate intonation of wonder and interest. He went on answering questions almost experimentally. To see what she would ask next?

“But he was interested? In these herdsmen and their game? Did you see this paper with the score on it? Was there anything special about it? But how could there be!” said Tossa hopelessly, and heaved a long, frustrated sigh.

“I did not see it, madame. He put it in his pocket and took it away with him.”

The silence was abrupt and deep, like a fall down a well, but not into darkness. After a moment Tossa said, in an eased voice: “I believe his widow came and collected all his things. You don’t know…” She drew back suddenly and warily from what she had been about to ask him, and said instead: “He asked you about the men, too? What about them?”

“Simply who they were, from what place they came. I think he was interested in the dress. The two older men wore the old, traditional dress from Zdiar.”

“And which of them was the one keeping the score?”

“Oh, that was a young man I know well, but not from here, he comes from across the valley.”

“Did you tell Mr. Terrell about him, too?”

“I think he asked me his name, and where he came from, yes.”

In the same muted voice, but now curiously slowed, as though she had reached the end of one stage of her journey,

Tossa asked: “And what was his name?”

“His name,” said the English-speaking waiter simply, “is Ivo Martínek. His father keeps a hut, over there in the Low Tatras.”

to sec reached the hall in a frenzied dash, just in time to saunter convincingly into Tossa’s sight as she emerged from the deserted bar. He hoped she wouldn’t notice his slightly quickened breathing. Looking back from the doorway as they went out to join the twins on the terrace, he caught a glimpse of the English-speaking waiter gazing after them with a wooden face and blank eyes. He was glad to let the door swing closed between them, and hustle Tossa almost crossly away from that look.

He did not, therefore, linger to take another quick glance into the hall, or he might have seen the waiter shut himself firmly into the telephone box and begin dialling a number. But even if he had been within earshot he would not have learned much, for it was not in English that the English-speaking waiter began:

“I am speaking from the Hotel Sokolie. Comrade Lieutenant, I think you should know that there is a young English lady here who is asking many questions about the dead man Terrell.”

They drove back to the Riavka at last, drugged with mountain air and bemused with splendour. Even though the highest leap of the funicular to Lomnice Peak had been out of commission—as it so often is by reason of its extreme height and free cable—they would never forget the bleached, pure, bony world of the Rocky Lake, half-way up, and the far-away, sunlit view of the valley five thousand feet below them, or the steely, shoreless waters of the lake with the clouds afloat on their surface, incredibly clear and still in a bowl of scoured rock, its couloirs and crevices outlined in permanent snow. The mirror of winter in the dazzling sunlight of summer remained with them, a picture fixed and brilliant in the mind’s eye, all the way home.

Tossa had taken a great many photographs, and talked rather more than usual. The twins had hopes of her. The time would come, they felt, when they would even cease to think of her instinctively as “poor Tossa!” After all, with a mother like she had, she’d be doing extremely well if she managed to be normal at twenty. Even better, Dominic showed distinct signs of being interested, which was exactly what Christine, at least, had had in mind. And what a day! The stone-pure, sunlit, withering summits, and then this soft but lofty valley to cradle them at the sleepy end of it!

“I have to write to my mother,” said Tossa resignedly, over dinner. “At least a postcard, otherwise there’ll be trouble. Stick around, I won’t be long.”

Whatever she did now, whether she went or stayed, talked or was silent, Dominic couldn’t help finding some hidden significance in it. He was uneasy in her presence, but he had no peace at all when she was absent. After a few minutes he left the others in the dining-room, and went out to the bar to buy stamps. That, at least, was his excuse; what he really wanted was to be where he could keep a silent and unobtrusive guard on Tossa.

He could not quite bring himself to follow her upstairs; things hadn’t reached that pass yet. But from the bar, with the door standing wide open on the scrubbed pine hall, he would hear her if she called. Crazy, he fretted, to be thinking in such terms; and yet she was certainly meddling in something which was of grave concern to other and unknown people, and they were all these miles from home, in territory the orthodox Briton still considered to be inimical.

Dana turned from her array of bottles behind the bar, and gave him his stamps. She looked at him in a curiously thoughtful way, as if debating what to do about him. He was turning away when she said suddenly: “Dominic!”

“Yes?” He turned back to her, shaken abruptly by the recollection that she and her family were directly involved in this mystery of Terrell’s death. Her brother, that tough, stocky young forester, burned to dull gold by the yellowing mountain sun, was the man who had kept the score in the card game at the Hotel Sokolie, and left behind him, apparently quite light-heartedly, a scrap of paper which had drawn Terrell here to his death.

“I do not know,” said Dana very gravely, “what it is that is troubling Miss Barber, but I think I should perhaps tell you that to-day she thought of one more question to ask me.”

“Since we came home?” His choice of phrase astonished him, yet it had come quite naturally; he couldn’t think of any people in Europe with whom he’d felt so quickly at home, if it hadn’t been for this distorted shadow in the background.

“Yes, since then. She asked me which room Mr. Terrell occupied while he was staying here.” Her eyes were searching his face closely; he felt almost transparent before that straight, wide glance.

“And which room did he occupy?” His throat was dry and tight with the effort to keep his voice casual.

“The one in which you and your friend are sleeping,” said Dana.

He had a feeling that she knew exactly what he was going to do, and that there was no point whatever in attempting to dissemble it or postpone it. He said: “Thank you!” quite simply, not even defiantly, and walked out of the bar and straight up the stairs. The pale, scented treads creaked; she would know every step he took. Tossa, very busy upstairs, might hear the ascending footsteps, but would not recognise them; he was only too well aware that she hadn’t had any attention to spare for learning things about him. None the less, he approached his own bedroom door very softly, and turned the handle with extreme care, pushing the door open before him suddenly but silently.

Tossa, on her knees at the chest of drawers, the bottom drawer open before her, brushed the lining paper flat and shoved the drawer to in one smooth movement, swinging to face him with huge eyes wary and challenging. He saw in the braced lines of her face excitement and consternation, but no fear, and that frightened him more than anything. Then she saw who it was who had walked in upon her search, and something happened to her courage. It was not, perhaps, fear that invaded her roused readiness, but a trace of shame and embarrassment, and a faint, formidable glimmer of anger.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said, too brightly. “Maybe you know where Toddy’s put the big map. I thought it was here somewhere. I couldn’t remember how to spell some of the names.” Her breathing wasn’t quite in control, but the solid, sensible note was admirable, all the same.

“It’s still in the van,” said Dominic, in a tone to match hers.

She got up and dusted her knees, unnecessarily, for the floor was spotless and highly waxed. “Damn! It would be. Where’s the road map, then, the pocket one?”

There was no way past that solid front. He found the map for her, and let her walk out with it, and with all the honours. But when she was gone he closed the door carefully, and took the room to pieces. For whatever it was she was looking for—and he was reasonably sure of the answer to that—she certainly hadn’t yet had time to find it. If, of course, it was here at all. And if it was, he wasn’t going to miss it.

Nothing under the linings of the drawers; she’d reached the last one, no need to look there again. Nothing under the rugs; the crevices between the pine boards were sealed closely and impermeably. No chimney, of course, except the stack of the tiled stove in the corner. He explored the accessible area inside the metal door, and found nothing. Nothing under the pelmet of the heavy curtains. Nothing in the huge, built-in wardrobe; he examined every hanger, every board of the floor. One side of it was for hanging clothes, the other had six shelves, ingeniously and improbably filled with Toddy’s few belongings. Dominic stood and looked at them glumly for a moment, and then began at the top one, and tested them all to see how tightly and immovably they fitted.

The third shelf, just at shoulder-level, stirred ever so slightly in its place.

With his left hand he eased it carefully out as far as it would go, no more than a fraction of a fraction of an inch, and with the finger-tips of his right hand he felt along the rear edge of it, running his nails deep into the crevice. Two-thirds of the way along, something rustled and stirred, dislodged a centimetre from its place. A corner of something white showed beneath the shelf. He edged it gingerly lower, and drew out a long slip of paper, carefully folded to be narrower than the thickness of the shelf, and perfectly invisible when inserted behind it.

And there it was in his hand, when he had unfolded it; four columns of figures, headed by initials, broken by periodical tottings-up, the score of an unknown card game. Nothing at all odd about it that he could see, until he realised that it was scribbled on good-quality manuscript music paper, and suddenly holding it up to the light, found the upper half of an English firm’s water-mark glowing at him from the close texture.

Even then it took him a full minute to think of turning it over. On the other side was noted down, in slashing strokes by a ball pen, a few bars of music, that rushed across the paper impetuously, only to be scored through impatiently a moment later, and left hanging upon an unresolved chord. Dominic hadn’t worked very hard at his piano lessons when he should have done, but he could decypher enough of this to see that it was the opening of what seemed to be a rather sombre prelude for piano. Maybe a nocturne; or maybe he was merely rationalising from the few lines of verse that were scrawled above the abortive essay, in a passionate hand and in good English:

Come, shadow of mine end, and shape of rest,

And like to death, shine through this black-faced night.

Come thou, and charm these rebels in my breast,

Whose raving fancies do my mind affright.

Dominic stood staring at it for a moment, recognising Dowland, and frozen to a stillness of pure wonder at finding him here in this vehement and impersonal landscape; those poignant, piercing words of loneliness among these aloof and unmoved mountain outlines startled like frost at midsummer.

Then, without stopping to reason or doubt, he marched out of the room with the wisp of paper in his hand, and straight to the room the girls shared. Tossa was feverishly writing her postcard there, to have something to show for her absence. She looked up at him warily and coldly, as at an enemy. Whoever pursued her now was her enemy, and must simply be prepared for the hurt, and contain it, and go on doggedly, if he wanted to help her. Dominic laid the slip of paper on the table in front of her, and said in a flat, detached voice:

“I think this may be what you were looking for.”