The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 7

THE MAN WHO WASN’T IN CHARGE

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The first look at their soiled and shaken faces effectively cut off all questions and exclamations, shocking the twins into silence. The significant jerk of Dominic’s head drew them after him up the stairs, unresisting, to an urgent council of war.

In the girls’ bedroom, secure from surprise at the far end of a creaky wooden corridor, Tossa sat down on her bed and unburdened herself of the whole story at last: how she had blundered into the affair by accident, through reading Robert Welland’s note left for her mother, how he had come back to reclaim it, too late, and made the best of it by telling her everything, and so putting her under the sacred obligation to keep it secret. She told them everything she had learned about Karol Alda, why he must be somewhere here, close at hand, and why it was almost certain that he was a double murderer. The newspaper photograph, the half-sheet of music paper, passed from hand to hand in a stunned silence.

“I believe my stepfather recognised this handwriting as soon as he saw it in the Hotel Sokolie. He must have seen it regularly when they were both at the Marrion Institute, and it was his job not to forget things like that. I think he followed Ivo Martínek over here to look for Alda. I don’t suggest the Martíneks know anything much, or even that they’re particularly close to Alda. This place is an inn, the local people do use it, and that piece of paper could easily have been left here some time when Alda was here, maybe sitting over a beer, playing with an idea he had in his mind. He’s a musician, too, it seems he was a very good one. He didn’t get this right. He tore off the false start and left it on the table. Maybe Ivo just picked it up out of curiosity, and felt interested enough to pocket it. Something like that, something quite casual and harmless, because he didn’t think twice about making use of it when he wanted a paper to score their card game, and he didn’t bother to take it away with him afterwards. But it did prove Alda was somewhere in the vicinity of the Martíneks, known and accepted there. So my stepfather came to look for him here. And he was killed here, up the valley where we went the first day. Opposite the place where Mr. Welland was killed tonight.”

“And for the same reason,” said Toddy positively, his face sharp with excitement. “Because they both located him! Isn’t it plain? This chap Welland was to try to trace him, and report back to the Institute through the embassy in Prague. And he’d done it! He was in Zilina when we came through, and saw you there, and you tipped him off where he could find you. And three days later he turns up on the telephone, asking you to meet him. He’d found him! He’d been to Prague to send the notification they’d agreed on, and he came back here to keep an eye on events in the meantime. You were a complication.”

“My guess is,” said Christine, gnawing her knuckles furiously, “he was worried about you turning up on the scene. He’d been thinking it over, and he wanted to have a word with you to-night to get you to lay off. Maybe to tell you whatever he knew, as the best way of satisfying you. But certainly to warn you not to start anything.”

“Whatever he had to say to me,” said Tossa, “couldn’t be said over the telephone. Maybe he was going to tell me where Alda was, maybe he wasn’t. What difference does it make now? Whoever killed him was taking no chances. And now what do we do?”

“We report the death,” said Dominic forcibly, “and cooperate with the police.”

Toddy gaped between the fists that clutched his disordered hair. “Are you crazy? Can’t you see this is a hand we’ve got to play against the police? Against the Czech authorities, against every soul round us? Can’t you see there’s a little matter of national security involved? Tossa’s told you, the affair’s top secret, and big enough to kill for. She’s pledged to keep everything to do with the Marrion Institute secret, and that goes for us, too.”

“You’re seeing this as a real-life spy thriller,” said Dominic without heat. “I’m seeing it as a murder. Murder is something I don’t play spy games with. Odd as it may seem to you, I believe that the professional police everywhere are dead against murder, and when they run up against it their instinct is quite simply to try to find out who did it, and get him. If you ask me, do I think that goes in a Communist country, yes, I think it goes in every country, and always will, as long as people are people and professionals are professionals. It’s a queer thing about police—by and large, in spite of a few slip-ups, they don’t like crime. And I come from a police family, and I don’t like it, either. So either we go to the police or I go to the police. Whichever way you like.”

“We go,” said Tossa, faintly but finally. “We have to, I do see that. We owe it to him and to them. Only I can’t tell everything. I can’t tell about the Institute, or anything that’s mixed up with security. You may be right about the police, Dom, they may be absolutely on the level. Only I’m bound, don’t you see that? I’m not entitled to take any risks, it isn’t for me to judge.”

“You can tell them about the shooting,” urged Christine, “without mentioning the background. You could say you went up the valley for a walk after dinner, and heard the shot, and found him in there. There’s no need to say you went there to meet him.”

“That’s it! You’d be giving them everything that could possibly help them over Welland’s murder. If they’re genuinely interested in solving it,” said Toddy sceptically, “though that’s a laugh, if ever I heard one. You were out together, you two, you blundered into it without meaning to. That’s all you need say.”

“Even just to cover ourselves,” admitted Christine, frowning over the perilous tangle that confronted them, “we’d have to go that far. But there’s no need to go any further. What are we supposed to do, go there and say: ‘Please, some of your confidential agents have wiped out two of ours because they got too near to something hot. Do something about it!’? I like to think I’m honest, but my God, I don’t take it to those lengths!”

“And supposing there’s nothing whatever official or approved about this murder?” demanded Dominic. “Supposing it’s a completely private act, and the police are just as interested in catching the criminal as you are. You think it’ll make no difference to their chances, our keeping back nine-tenths of the facts?”

“You can’t,” protested Toddy savagely, “be as simple as you’re acting!”

“Wish I could say the same for you, but apparently you can. All right, we can’t drag the Institute into it, but we could still tell the truth about to-night, we could still say he telephoned Tossa and asked her to meet him, we could even say why—that she didn’t feel satisfied about her stepfather’s death, and came here to see for herself, and Mr. Welland was in her confidence and wanted to help her. Half of which,” said Dominic, scrubbing at his tired forehead, still pallid with dust from the white-washed wall of the chapel, “they’ll know already, and if you doubt that you’re even simpler than I thought. But make up your minds, and let’s get going. I’m for telling as much of the truth as we can.”

“And I’m for using our gumption and telling as little as possible.” Toddy set his jaw obstinately. “Didn’t you hear, there are plans of secret work involved, valuable stuff, dangerous stuff. Of course it’s no private murder. You just heard the shot, and went in and found him. For God’s sake, whose side are you on?”

“Christine?” appealed Dominic, ignoring that.

“I’m with Toddy,” said Christine, roused and belligerent. “Let’s face it, we’re in enemy territory over this, we can’t co-operate.”

Dominic looked down at Tossa’s tormented face, and gently touched her hand. “It’s up to you, Tossa. Whatever you say, I’ll go along with.”

She shook her head helplessly, and didn’t look up; after a moment she said huskily: “I can’t! I’d like to. I’d much rather, but I can’t. I’m with them, Dominic.”

“All right, we’ll do it that way.” He looked at Toddy, who alone had enough German to be sure of communicating, where none of them had Slovak, and English was somewhat less common an accomplishment than in Prague. “Will you telephone, please, Tod? You’ll have to ask Dana which is the right place to call, but all you have to get over is that we’re reporting a death, and where they’ll find him, and that we’re coming in with our statements. We shall have to, so why not now? Find out where we should check in, and I’ll be getting the van out.”

Liptovsky Pavol, St.-Paul-in-Liptov, turned out to be a small town of perhaps five short streets, all of them converging on the vast cobbled square in front of the church. Two of the streets, which were a yard or so wider than the others, conducted the main road in and out of this imposing open space, which in fact was not a square at all, but a long wedge-shape, inadequately lit, completely deserted except for two or three parked Skodas and an ingenious homemade body on a wartime Volkswagen chassis, and scalloped on both long sides with deep arcades, beneath which the van’s lights fingered out the glass of shop windows. The short side of the wedge was the municipal buildings, the only twentieth-century block in sight; and in the rear quarters of this town hall there were two rooms which did duty as the police office for the sub-district.

It was past ten o’clock by the time they found it, and locked the van on the cobbles outside; but they were not surprised to see the door open and the lights on inside the dingy passage-way, since their telephone call would obviously have alerted the local force, and presumably sent someone clambering and cursing out to the chapel in Zbojská Dolina long before this. In such a quiet little place the police office would surely be closed and abandoned around five o’clock, at normal times.

They had agreed on the way that Dominic was to do the talking. Of the two who had been on the scene, presumably the Slovaks would expect the man to act as spokesman, the girl to confirm what he said. Even such small points affect one’s chance of being believed without question.

The passage was vaulted, with peeling plaster, and belonged to some older building, now largely replaced. There was an open door at one side of it, and a steep wooden staircase within. Dominic climbed it slowly, his throat dry and constricted, every step carrying him deeper into a strange land. What if Toddy was right? What if the damned cold war was still almost at freezing point, and he was in enemy territory? He had felt nothing but friends round him here, but suddenly he was a little afraid. “He speaks English,” Toddy had reported, coming back confounded from his telephone call. “Good English!” It had frightened Toddy more than anything else, when it ought to have reassured him and made things easier; and it was frightening Dominic now. With an interpreter you have also a protective barrier, you can plead misunderstanding, you can be inarticulate and still credible. With this man he was deprived of any insulation. But at least he was warned.

“Pod’te d’alej!” said a leisurely, rumbling bass voice, in reply to his tentative knock on the door at the top of the stairs. And next, in the same easy tone: “Come in, please!”

He spoke excellent English, almost unaccented. Learned from records? Certainly not only from the book.

Dominic opened the door and went in, the other three filing closely behind him. Toddy closed the door after them. The room was small, twelve by twelve at most, and bare, furnished with a couple of chairs in front of the desk, and two more behind, a battered typewriter, two tall, narrow filing cabinets, and a small, iron stove. The walls were painted a dull cream, and scaling here and there. Behind the desk somebody had used the wall as a convenient tablet for notes, calculations, and pencilled doodlings, perhaps while hanging on the telephone, or filling in very dull duty hours with nothing to do. It would be very surprising indeed if there was much crime in Liptovsky Pavol.

“Nadporucík Ondrejov?” asked Dominic with aching care. To the best of his knowledge the correct translation of the rank was “lieutenant,” like an army rank, but he didn’t feel certain enough of his facts to use it. He preferred at least to pay his host the compliment of attempting to pronounce his Czechoslovak title.

The elderly countryman behind the desk took his broad behind off the office chair, and rose to straddle the floor like a farmer his lands.

“Come in, come in! Yes, I’m Ondrejov.” The younger man who had been sitting on the rear corner of the desk rose, flicked an eyebrow at his superior, intercepted and recorded the answering twitch of the grey, bushy head, and walked away into the inner room, closing the door gently after him. “Please, Miss Barber, take this chair. Miss Mather? Be seated, please! And you are Mr. Felse? Yes, we were waiting for you. It was good of you, it was right, to notify us at once.”

He might have been sixty, or five years less or more, there was no dating him. He had probably looked much the same for ten years, and wouldn’t change for twenty more. Grey at fifty, and still sporting curly, crisp grey hair at eighty-five. No, ninety, he looked remarkably durable. He was not the long, rangy Slovak shape, with great, elegant, shapely bones, but short and sturdy and running to flesh, broad-beamed and broad-breasted, broad-cheeked and wide-eyed, broad-jowled and stubble-chinned, with a bright, beery face. Perhaps of mixed blood, the most inscrutable product in the country, looking now Czech, now Slovak, almost at will. In the high-coloured face the blue, bright, knowing eyes were clear as sapphires, and limpid as spring-water. He was in his shirt-sleeves, his tie comfortably loosened round a bull-neck. Dominic felt better; this was what Mirek Zachar, of fond memory, would have called a “country uncle.” He warned himself vainly that what he felt might be only a false security. He was so tired that it would be dangerous to relax.

“We were grateful for your call. You may rest assured that everything is in hand. Now, naturally, I should like to hear the story directly from you. Please, Mr. Felse! You may speak quite freely. For the moment this is not official.” He smiled benevolently into Dominic’s tired, drawn face. “You are wondering about my English. It is not so strange. People of my generation here learned English because we had relatives in England or in America. In America especially. We learned English in the hope of going there some day to join them. I was there for five years, before the war, and now I keep up my English from books. My children have forgotten it, my grandchildren do not learn it. They speak excellent Russian, and I am out of date. Times change. It is not matter for regret, only for interest. But I like to use my assets. You need not be afraid that I shall not understand you. Please, speak!”

They were as tongue-tied, after that, as if they had really been confronted with the grim, smooth police official of cold-war fiction, and a good deal more at a loss. Nevertheless, Dominic set to work and ploughed his way doggedly through their agreed story, disliking it more with every word, but making a good job of it.

“Miss Barber and I were out for a walk this evening, after dinner. We ate rather early, I think it must have been about twenty minutes to eight when we went out. We took the road up the valley, and when we got near that small chapel on the hillside there we thought we’d go up and have a look at it.”

Lieutenant Ondrejov, a model listener, did not once interrupt, not even with an intelligent and helpful question, but neither did he leave the narration to plod along unencouraged. His round, good-humoured face was encouragement itself, he helped the story along with an occasional sympathetic nod of understanding. They could hardly expect much excitement from him, since he knew already the crucial fact of the murder; but no one could complain that he wasn’t responsive. At the end of it he leaned back in his chair with a gusty sigh, and looked from one to another of them thoughtfully, scrubbing at his bristly chin with thick, adroit finger-tips.

“I understand, yes. You went up the valley together, you and Miss Barber?”

“Yes,” said Tossa gruffly, lifting the lie from Dominic’s shoulders this time. It was the first time Ondrejov had heard that odd, touching little voice of hers, and it made him cock an eye at her with twinkling interest, his grey head on one side.

“And you were together when you heard the shot, and entered the chapel?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, did you know this man at all? The dead man?”

“Not know him, exactly. But we’d seen him once before,” said Dominic firmly, “when we were driving through into Slovakia.”

“In the hotel at Zilina?” suggested Ondrejov affably.

Four hearts lurched sickeningly towards churning stomachs. He had tugged the ground out from under them like a mat, and the fall, though they sat still and kept their faces obstinately blank, knocked the breath out of them, and the invention with it. He was guessing, with preternatural accuracy, but guessing. He couldn’t know. They stared polite, patient, uncomprehending enquiry.

“In a hotel somewhere on the way,” said Dominic. “We came through so many places, I forget names.”

Ondrejov leaned over his desk and wagged a finger at them admonishingly. “Children, children, never try to deceive the old ones. It may be a long time since they were boys, but they have had two refresher courses with their sons and grandsons, and that is much more dangerous. Now, do you want to tell me anything more? Or to think again about what you have already told me?”

Dominic said: “No!” for all of them. What else was there to say? However disastrously, they were committed now.

“Good! Then let us see if we can contribute something, too.” He tilted his chair back, and reached behind him to turn the handle of the inner door. “Mirku! Pod’ sem!”

Into the room, as fresh and pink and blond as ever, walked Miroslav Zachar, and took up station solidly at his chief’s left elbow, confronting with a heightened colour but a placid and purposeful face his four erstwhile friends.

“Mirek,” said Ondrejov heartily, slapping the young man resoundingly on the back, “I think you should explain to our young guests exactly what you are doing here. Tell them everything, we have nothing to hide from them.”

“I am here,” said Mirek simply, “because I discovered the body of Robert Welland this evening. I reported it by telephone from the nearest connected house, which happens to be over the north wall there, in another valley—you would not know the path. Then I waited with the body until the detail came out there, and returned here to report fully in person.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Ondrejov, “it would help if you explained in full your connection with the affairs of these young people, and how you came to be on the scene tonight. From the beginning!”

“Certainly!” He looked from face to face round the four of them, looked them all fully and firmly in the eyes. Why not? He had nothing to be ashamed of, even if he had been cheated and startled into feeling shame when Tossa kissed him by way of apologising for reservations she should, instead, have respected and re-examined. He had had a job to do, and he knew he was good at it. Dominic, a policeman’s son, gave him the ghost of a smile; they were all giving him their fixed and painful attention.

“I was detailed to pick up your party at the frontier, escort you as far as I could, and continue to keep an eye on your movements and your welfare afterwards.”

Toddy, hackles erected, demanded: “Why?”

“Why? Naturally Miss Barber, like other visitors, was obliged to apply for a visa. With the recent events in mind, and certain dimplomatic complications always possible, our police in Bratislava were hardly likely to have left Mr. Terrell’s background and circumstances unexamined. They knew that he had married a widow named Barber, with one daughter, now a student at Oxford. The connection was not beyond their ability. They therefore felt that it would be well to keep a protective eye on Miss Barber as long as she remained in this country, for her own good as well as ours. We do not want trouble. There seemed reason to suppose that Miss Barber and her friends were making for the Tatras. I was born here, I used to serve under Lieutenant Ondrejov before I transferred to the plain-clothes branch. As a local man, with good English, and as you see, quite well able to look like a student, I was seconded to this duty.”

“Then I suppose this means you’ve been spying on us ever since you pretended to leave us,” said Toddy bitterly.

“I have been carrying out my assignment. Without, I hope, interfering with your enjoyment. This evening I was in cover on the hillside above the chapel, near the crest. There is a place there from which you can cover, with glasses, almost the whole length of the valley. I have often used it. You were within view for perhaps half of your walk, and hidden from me only when among the trees. I saw you come to the chapel.”

“And were they together?” murmured Ondrejov innocently.

Into the momentary well of silence, while the four of them held their breath, Mirek dropped his: “No,” very gently, but it fell like a stone.

“Did they enter the chapel together?”

“No. Miss Barber came first. It was clear from her manner that she thought she was alone, but I had already seen Mr. Felse carefully following her. She climbed to the rock shelf, and walked straight to the door of the chapel. I had her within sight until the last few yards. The doorway itself was out of my sight. Mr. Felse remained in the shadow of the trees, and did not attempt at first to follow her.”

“And then?”

“Then there was a shot. It came perhaps five or six seconds after Miss Barber passed out of my sight and into the chapel. I could not determine from which direction the sound came, it is very difficult in such an enclosed and complex place. It could have been fired from outside, even from some distance. But my immediate impression was that it came from within the chapel itself.”

Tossa’s hands, linked in her lap, tightened convulsively, but she made no sound. It was Toddy who flared in alarm and anger: “That’s a lie! You’re trying to frighten her! You know it isn’t true!”

“Please, Mr. Mather! Go on, Mirek, what next?”

“Mr. Felse dropped to the ground and scrambled across to the doorway. They were in there for several minutes together. I was raking the valley for any signs of movement, but I found nothing. I therefore began to work my way down the slope towards the chapel, but as you know, it is rather a risky field of scree there, one must go cautiously. While I was still well above, I saw Miss Barber dart away from the doorway and run down the path among the trees. After perhaps five more minutes Mr. Felse followed her. It was then beginning to be dusk. He had a fall on the rocks as he ran across the open ground. It was then I saw that Miss Barber had waited for him, just within the trees.”

“And by the time you got down there?”

“They were both well away. And when I entered the chapel I found Mr. Welland’s body there.”

“Mr. Felse stayed behind, perhaps, just long enough to go through the dead man’s pockets?” suggested Ondrejov placidly.

Involuntarily Dominic let out an audible gasp of disgust, remembering that the idea had never even occurred to him. And Miroslav smiled.

“I don’t suggest he did do so, but the time would have been sufficient, yes.”

“And did you hear a second shot, as Mr. Felse says? When he fell?”

“I did not hear one, no. Admittedly I was coming rather quickly down the scree, and I was concentrating on my foot-work, as well as making a considerable noise of my own.”

Tossa raised her heavy eyelids just long enough to flash a glance at Dominic, and intercept his startled glance at her. They had heard the scree shifting, and never dreamed of looking up there for a witness.

“One more point,” said Ondrejov comfortably, stretching his broad shoulders back until the chair creaked. “The encounter at Zilina. Did it appear to you that Miss Barber was acquainted with Mr. Welland?”

“Yes, quite certainly she was.”

“And did she, then, behave naturally when meeting him there?”

“No, she affected not to know him. As I think her friends really did not. But she took occasion to pass a message to him, and he almost certainly passed one back to her.”

“Such as this folded scrap of paper, perhaps?”

Ondrejov produced it gently from his pocket, unfolded it with deliberation, and read aloud in his amiable rolling bass: “I shall be at the Riavka hut. Please contact me!” He looked up over Tossa’s note with twinkling blue eyes narrowed in an indulgent smile. “If our young and chivalrous friend did go through the victim’s pockets, he didn’t make a very good job of it, it seems. Zachar has had more practice, of course,” he added by way of consolation to Dominic, and folded the paper carefully away again.

“So it seems we have a somewhat changed picture now. You are sure there is nothing you wish to add or alter?” Where would have been the point? All their lies were already demolished, and to think up new ones now would be worse than useless. They were silent, watching him with closed faces and apprehensive eyes. “In that case you must see my predicament. And you should also take into consideration the fact that as yet the cartridge-shell has not been found, and since the bullet is still embedded in the dead man’s skull, and only an autopsy can recover it for examination, so far as we know up to now it could as well be from a pistol as a rifle. Couldn’t it?”

Tossa was the last to see where he was leading her. She stared from behind these serried facts as through bars, and shook her head helplessly, trying to shake away the sense of nightmare that oppressed her.

“None of us has a gun, or ever had one,” said Dominic quickly and quietly. “Certainly Tossa couldn’t have had one on her last night. I was following her every step of the way.”

“But at a safe distance. And certainly is a large word. A small pistol is not so difficult to conceal.”

“She was never out of my sight for more than a few seconds.”

“The few seconds when the shot was fired.”

“But this is fantastic!” cried Toddy wildly. “For God’s sake, how could she cart a gun about with her without my sister seeing it, sooner or later? How could she get it into the country?”

“Oh, come, Mr. Mather! Are you really suggesting our frontier staff are so thorough? Did they even open your cases at Rozvadov?”

Tossa put up her hands wonderingly, and touched her throbbing temples and drawn cheeks as though to satisfy herself that she was still in her own day-to-day flesh, and not astray in a bewildering and terrifying dream.

“But I’ve never even touched a gun, not once in my life. If you really believe I had one, then where is it now? What did I do with it?” Her voice was so heavy that she could hardly lift the syllables. Like her eyelids, like her heart.

“Ah, that is an open question. The obvious thing to do with it would be to toss it out of the window immediately. But the valley is large enough, and the dusk by then was deep enough, to make it a very open question indeed. So no doubt you will realise, my dear Miss Barber, why I am obliged to keep you, for the present, in custody.”

The next ten minutes were confused, noisy and angry. Tossa sat mute and numb in the middle of the storm, too tired to distinguish voices any more, too disoriented to know friend from foe, too deeply aware of having lied, and forced Dominic to lie, to put up any fight for her own liberty. Christine had an arm clasped tightly about her shoulders, and was adding a soprano descant to Toddy’s spirited impersonation of an Englishman at bay. Toddy raved about police states, conspiracies and frame-ups, and threatened everything from diplomatic intervention to gunboats. In the heart of her desperate confusion and solitude Tossa remembered inconsequently that Czechoslovakia had no coastline, and laughed, genuinely laughed, but no one noticed except, perhaps, Ondrejov, who noticed everything, whether he acknowledged it or not. He looked like a good-humoured, clever peasant, and he sat here behind his desk manipulating them all. She suspected that he was very much enjoying Toddy. There couldn’t be much theatre in Liptovsky Pavol.

“Now, now, my dear boy, I guarantee that Miss Barber shall be well treated, and we’ll take every care of her. And since it’s too late now for the rest of you to think of going back to Zbojská Dolina to-night, I’ll make arrangements for beds for all of you, and we’ll call the hut and tell the Martíneks you’re staying here.”

“That isn’t good enough! You know very well that you’ve no right to detain Miss Barber. As the person in charge of this case, you will be held responsible.”

Pale with rage, Toddy stood between Tossa and her captors, his nostrils pinched and blue with desperation, as gallant as he was ineffective. Dominic, deep sunk in his own silence and doubt, stared hard at Ondrejov, and wished he could read his mind, but it was impenetrable. Did he really suspect Tossa? Or had he quite another motive for this move? He swung in an agony of indecision between two opinions. The one thing of which he was in no doubt at all was that it was his job to get Tossa out of this. Toddy could make as much fuss and noise as he liked, it wouldn’t be done that way. If Ondrejov had been what Toddy claimed he was, he would have laid Toddy flat long before this. And let no one think he couldn’t do it single-handed, as old as he was!

“In charge? I in charge of the case?” Ondrejov’s blue, bright eyes widened as guilelessly as a child’s. “You think such cases as this are left to the uniformed branch here? No, no, I am waiting at this moment for the plain-clothes people to arrive from Bratislava. I am responsible to them. That is why I am compelled to hold you available, you see, my field of action is strictly limited. The men from Scotland Yard,” he said, pleased with this flight of fancy, “will be here in a matter of a few hours. You may put your objections and make your statements to them.”

“Then at least,” said Toddy valiantly, hunted into a corner but still game, “I demand that the British Embassy in Prague shall be contacted at once, and informed that Miss Barber is being held on suspicion.”

“The British Embassy,” said Ondrejov, dwelling upon the luscious syllables with sensuous pleasure, “has already been informed. As a matter of courtesy, you understand, Mr. Welland being a British national and a member of their staff. They will also be informed that Miss Barber is here, and may be held on suspicion of murder. By to-morrow morning, no doubt, someone will be flying in to take care of her interests, and I can assure you I shall make no objections.”

They fell back and studied him afresh in silence, with something of the embarrassment of people who have flung their full weight against an unlatched door and fallen flat on their faces, but with a residue of distrust, too. Did he mean it? It appeared that he did, for he wasn’t even troubling to lay any great emphasis on the correctness of his proceedings; but what he intended should follow from them was another matter. Perhaps he was simply covering himself, and making sure that all the awkward decisions should be left to his superiors, when they came. That was human and credible enough, in any country, in any force.

“When it comes to the point,” said Dominic, on the heels of the dubious silence, “Tossa has nothing to be afraid of.” He was curiously in doubt, himself, whether he was speaking for her or for Ondrejov. “As soon as the bullet’s recovered it will clear her completely. Because it will be a rifle bullet.”

“Now that,” said Ondrejov, fixing him with a bright and calculating eye, “is a sensible observation. To-morrow,” he went on briskly, dropping the pretence of harmlessness as blithely as he would have dropped a cigarette-end, “I suggest you may all prefer to move to the hotel here, and remain near Miss Barber. When you have satisfied yourselves that there are people present to take care of her interests, perhaps you, Mr. Felse…” The blue eye dissected him again, with analytical detachment and interest. “… will be so good as to drive your van back to Zbojská Dolina to settle the bill and collect your luggage.”

He still sounded like a country uncle, but one you wouldn’t care to fool with; and there was no mistaking that this was an order.

“It will be interesting,” said Ondrejov meditatively, “to see who does turn up to take the responsibility for Miss Barber.” He smiled into the inscrutable distances of his own thoughts, which were certainly more devious than his bucolic appearance suggested, and repeated pleasurably: “Very interesting!”