The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 2

THE MAN WHO WASN’T SATISFIED

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The person who was to put the cat fairly and squarely among the pigeons presented himself at the gatehouse of the Marrion Institute on a Thursday morning, just two days after Chloe Terrell and Paul Newcombe had flown to Prague. He was of an unexceptionable appearance, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, and carried upon him the indefinable stamp of the public servant. The ex-sergeant-major in command of the Institute’s blocking squad used towards him a manner one degree on the friendly side of his normal one, recognising him as one of us. That didn’t help him, however, to penetrate even the outer defences.

He asked to see Sir Broughton Phelps, and in his innocence really seemed to expect to be haled through the barriers on sight. He would not state his business, except to stress that it was urgent. When he was told that no one got to see Sir Broughton without a Ministry permit, he adjusted promptly and without undue surprise to this check, but he did not go away, nor did he withdraw his demand. Instead, he asked if a message could be taken in to the Director or his Chief Security Officer, so that they might make up their own minds whether to see him or not. The ex-sergeant-major saw nothing against this; and the stranger scribbled a few words on his visiting-card, sealed it down in an envelope, in a way which might have been slightly offensive if he had not just had it impressed upon him how stringent security arrangements round here were, and handed it over.

The messenger delivered this billet to Adrian Blagrove’s secretary, who preferred, understandably, to hand it over to his chief unopened. So it happened that Blagrove was the first to withdraw the card and read what the stranger had written.

Robert Bencroft Welland (said the card)

Assistant Commercial Secretary

British Embassy, Prague I,

Thunovská 14,

CSSR.

And above the name was scribbled in a vehement, cornery hand:

Terrell’s accident was no accident.

Robert Bencroft Welland came in gravely, displaying no signs of elation at having penetrated the first protective layers, and no haste about completing the feat. He accepted a chair and a cigarette, and settled his brief-case conveniently on the carpet beside his feet. Shut in together, they contemplated each other across the desk which had been Terrell’s.

“Mr. Welland,” began Blagrove very soberly, “you appear to be suggesting something which doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone else, even as a possibility. The Slovak police were quite satisfied of the facts of poor Terrell’s case, and made very full and correct reports which apparently convinced our authorities just as completely. I take it this is an unofficial approach, or you would have been sent here already provided with the means of reaching me, and wouldn’t have had to write me—this little billet.” It glanced coyly between his closed fingers for an instant, and vanished again. “May I ask if you’ve confided your doubts to anyone in Prague? Any of your superiors?”

“No, I haven’t. I came to the Marrion Institute because it seemed to be the party most affected by Terrell’s death, and what I believe to be the facts about it. I came over only yesterday, on a week of my leave, and I had some enquiries to make before I was ready to come to you.”

“Presumably, since you’re here,” said Blagrove drily, “your enquiries produced positive results. You realise you’re the only person who has questioned the circumstances of Terrell’s accident?”

“I could hardly let that influence me, could I?” said the young man mildly, with such simplicity that Blagrove took another and closer look at him. Under thirty, probably, of medium height and lightly built, neat, tow-coloured hair, all very presentable, all very ordinary. Put him among an office-full of civil servants, and you could lose him in a moment. Except that the good-natured face, earnest and dutiful to the point of caricature, had a little too much jaw for comfort, and confronted his seniors with a pair of wide-set blue eyes of startling directness and obstinacy. He looked, at first glance, like all the others of his class and profession; but at second glance it was clear that being on his own wouldn’t stop him from doing whatever he felt he had to do.

“Perhaps,” suggested Blagrove carefully, “you’d better tell me just why you’re not satisfied.”

“In the first place, because I knew Terrell, and I’ve seen the place where he was found. Oh, I didn’t know him well, but it so happens I’ve climbed with him, last year in the Zillertal, so I know his class. He was an excellent climber, on a rope or alone. The Zillertaler Alps were his proper league. But the Low Tatras, where he was found, are walking country. Not alpine stuff at all, but open, grassy slopes and rounded summits, with wooded valleys. You could find a few practice pitches there, rock outcrops, scrambles, that kind of thing. But nothing to tempt a man like Terrell. So the first question, even if I’d known nothing more, is: “What was he doing there at all?”

“I see nothing to prevent even a climbing man from fancying a walking holiday now and again, for a change,” objected Blagrove reasonably.

“Nothing whatever. Except that they just don’t do it. Hardly any of them, and certainly not Terrell. Once you’re as proficient as he was, you lose interest in the mild stuff. The climbs have to get harder all the time, and higher. Failing that, you just go somewhere new, where at least they’re different, unknown. But you don’t go back to walking and scrambling. And for that matter, even if you did go back, you certainly wouldn’t fall off a perfectly good traverse path, even at a blind corner, like the place where they found him.”

“I shouldn’t like to be so sure it couldn’t happen. The skilled and experienced sometimes fail to give all their attention to the easy bits.” Blagrove was playing somewhat irritably with the card he held in his fingers. “Unless you have something more than that to go on….”

“Oh, I have. You see, Terrell got in touch with me early this year, and asked my advice about good climbing country in the High Tatras. You don’t know that part of the world? There’s this great, open valley of the river Váh, running east-west, and to the south of it these broad, rolling crests of the Low Tatras. Then to the north, sickle-shaped, like this, and much more concentrated, there’s the cluster of the High Tatras, the highest peaks in the whole Carpathian range. These are for climbers. Anything up to nearly nine thousand feet, granite, three hundred or so peaks packed into about fifteen miles length, and magnificent country. I advised him to book in at Strba Lake, or at Tatranská Lomnice. And he did. He booked for two weeks at the lake. So what was he doing across the Váh valley in the Low Tatras?”

Blagrove raised his brows. “He could surely have changed his mind. How do you know he went ahead with his booking?”

“For the best reason in the world,” said Welland flatly. “Because I made the reservation for him, as long ago as April. And I know he turned up on time at the hotel, because he dropped me a card on arrival. He said nothing then about moving. On the contrary, he confirmed the arrangement we’d made by letter earlier. I was supposed to go along and spend the week-end climbing with him on Krivan. Only, you see, before the week-end came we got the news at the embassy that he’d been found dead—fifty kilometres away across the valley, in the Low Tatras, where he’d never intended going. He’d checked out from Strba Lake on the third day, and gone away to a small inn in one of the valleys in the other range. No mystery about what he did, up to that point. The only mystery is why?”

“And you think,” said Blagrove, his hands still and alert before him on the desk, “that you know why?”

“No, not yet. All I have is certain indications that may suggest reasons. As, for instance, that at some time after his arrival at the lake, something happened within his knowledge, something that caused him to pay his bill there and then, and go rushing off across the valley. No one at the hotel could account for it. He just left. But something happened that made him leave. If it had been simply something that disinclined him to stay where he was, made him dislike the place or con-struct uncomfortable there, he’d most probably have transferred to another hotel, somewhere along the range, or come back to Prague! Instead, he made his way for some reason to this one particular valley in the Low Tatras, not even a very frequented place. Whatever it was that happened didn’t just drive him away from Strba Lake—it led him to Zbojská Dolina. And believe me, it can have had nothing to do with climbing. Do I interest you, Mr. Bla-grove?”

“You interest me, yes, up to a point. You didn’t say any of this to your superiors in Prague?”

“No, I didn’t. One doesn’t like to start hares of that kind without making sure first of as many facts as possible. I had some leave to come, and I used it to come over here. Whatever drew Terrell to the Low Tatras, it can’t have been something private and personal from his own past, because he had no connections there, this was his first visit. He knew nothing of the country, he knew none of the people. I thought, knowing what his work was, and what it might sometimes involve, that there might be a link with something he’d handled or known about in the course of his duty. I hoped to get an interview with his widow, but she wasn’t in when I called at her flat.”

“She’s in Slovakia at this moment,” said Blagrove, “seeing about having her husband brought home.”

“Ah, so that’s it, I see. Well, since I could get nothing from her I spent the afternoon and evening among the press files, going back over the details—only the published details that are open to everybody, of course, but you’d be surprised how much that covers—the details of any reportable work handled by Terrell during the last few years. I have friends among the pressmen. I didn’t tell them what I wanted, I didn’t know myself. I just picked over their memories and then worked backwards through the files. I thought somewhere there must be something to dig up, something that would tie in at one end to Terrell, and at the other end to Slovakia—with a lot of luck, even to that part of Slovakia.”

Blagrove let out his breath in a soft, cautious hiss, and braced his shoulders against the back of his chair. “And you found something?”

“I found,” said Welland with deliberation, “the unfinished case of Charles Alder.”

In the moment of silence they stared steadily at each other.

“Or of course,” said Welland, “if you prefer it, the case of Karo Alda.”

It was a pity. It was really a pity. To have the whole affair tucked away peacefully in its coffin as an accident would have been so much simpler and more satisfactory; but there were two good reasons for abandoning, here and now, any attempt to dissuade this young man from pursuing his enquiries further. First, he wouldn’t be dissuaded; the supererogatory jaw was set, and the uncompromising eyes expected and would countenance only a zeal for justice the equal of his own. And second, to assume the responsibility for smothering a matter as serious as this was too great a risk. It would have to go to higher authority, however vexatious the results might be.

“I think,” said Adrian Blagrove, pushing back his chair, “I really think you’d better come with me to the Director, and tell him the whole story.”

Sir Broughton Phelps sat forward at his desk with his lean jaw propped broodingly on a closed fist, and scarcely took his eyes from the visitor’s face as Welland repeated the tale of his reservations and his discoveries, until he reached Charles Alder’s name.

There was an expectant pause there. Welland looked a little pale and a little anxious when it prolonged itself beyond his expectations. He would have liked someone else to contribute something, a hint of appreciation, or at least belief; better still, a grain of confirmation. But when no one obliged, he did not look any the less convinced or any the less obstinate.

“I know you must be much better informed than I am, sir, about this case of Alder’s. But if you want me to sum up everything as I find it, I’ll willingly go on.”

“Please do,” said the Director, fingering the clipped silvery hair at his temple. “I assure you you have my very serious attention.”

“What I found, of course, was the dossier—or the published part of it—compiled by Terrell after Alder’s disappearance. Otherwise I wasn’t conscious of ever having heard of the man before. So my information comes, virtually, from Terrell himself. Alder was a refugee who came over here with his parents in 1940, and settled in England. He was then fifteen years old, and already something of an infant prodigy, musically and mathematically. I believe they often go together. His father was a physicist, and after a probationary period he was allowed to work here. He proved valuable, and before the end of the war all three of them were naturalised. The boy had studied physics, too, but soon began to distinguish himself in his own special fields, as composer and performer, and in the world of pure mathematics. Perhaps he was even a genius. After the war he did quite a lot of experimental flying, and originated some minor improvements in aircraft, ending up in this Institute, where he was associated with a number of important modifications in aircraft and car design. Also, it seems, he sometimes had differences with the government and his superiors. He objected to the exclusively military use of innovations which he seems to have considered could be beneficial in civil life. And he didn’t like techniques of his evolving to be kept under wraps, when he believed they could be adapted to help with necessary processes in underdeveloped countries. He seems to have been a difficult colleague of individual views, insubordinate, unwilling to conform against his judgment. And he must have been really brilliant, because according to a Guardian article I found, about the time he vanished he was definitely in the running for the directorship of this Institute, and at his age that was fantastic.” The young man raised his direct and daunting eyes, and looked the present Director full in the face. “Can you confirm that, sir?”

“I can and I do.” Phelps committed himself without hesitation. “The man was brilliant. He was a computer that thought and reasoned. No programming, no minding, no servicing necessary. We spend millions trying to construct an Alder, and then wear out bright young men feeding it. When we get a genuine one as a free gift from heaven we usually fail to recognise him. But difficult he certainly was. Go on, finish your exposition.”

“Finally, after both his parents were dead, Alder wished and offered to resign from here. I don’t know exactly why, I suppose he was disturbed by a feeling of alienation from the aims of this place, and maybe he felt out of sympathy with policy in general. Anyhow, he was obviously valuable, and he was persuaded to think it over while he took some leave that was due him. I take it the authorities here hoped he would change his mind and stay on. He went off into Savoy alone. And he never came back.

“When he failed to return on time, there were rumours and an alarm, and Terrell was sent to France to follow up his tracks, until they ended without further trace in Dauphiné. It was automatically assumed that he’d departed behind the Iron Curtain, but no more was ever heard of him from any quarter. He could have come to grief somewhere in the mountains, being alone there. But the obvious inference was that he’d turned traitor. And Terrell was the man who followed up his case, and compiled a very damning dossier out of all those small unorthodoxies in Alder’s professional life and attitudes. I’d say that that dossier made it impossible for him ever to come back—supposing, of course, that he’d wanted to change his mind.”

“Happily we have no reason to suppose anything of the kind,” said the Director tartly. “You don’t seem to have wasted your time, Mr. Welland. You find all this relevant?”

“I think it becomes very relevant, sir, when you remember that Charles Alder was born Karol Alda, of a Czech father and a Slovak mother. Especially when you add to that the fact that the mother’s birth was registered at Liptovsky Mikulás, not twenty miles from Zbojská Dolina.”

“Let me understand you clearly. You are suggesting, I take it, that Alder may be there in those parts now—that he may have gone back to his old country and his old allegiance?”

“I am suggesting that it is more than a possibility. I should also hazard that that is exactly what you must have believed he would do.”

“And you’d be right, naturally. But the fact remains that there has never been any indication, not the slightest hint, that he did so.” He got up abruptly from his desk and began to walk the room, not restlessly, but with a controlled, energetic step, like a man starved of proper exercise making the most of cramped quarters. The two younger men followed his pacing with alert eyes, and waited. “You think Terrell may actually have seen Alda?”

“Something unexpected happened to him, something that drew him across the river valley to Zbojská Dolina. It could be connected with Alda. I don’t claim more than that.”

“But you imagine more, much more. You think, don’t you, that either he saw Alda, or picked up somehow a clue to his whereabouts? And that he followed it up, and got himself pushed off a mountainside when he got too close for comfort. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

Welland paled a little at seeing it posed before him in this pointblank fashion; even he had a trace of the diplomat’s dislike of formulating anything too exactly. But he stared back gallantly, and said emphatically: “Yes.”

Blagrove stirred protestingly. “But, good lord, the case is six years old now! It’s no longer important. Times have changed, the cold war’s a dead issue, or dying, trade’s developing. Even if Terrell did turn up unexpectedly on his trail, why should Alda even care any more? Neither Terrell nor any of us could be any threat to him there. And would it be worth killing the man just for plain spite?”

“But isn’t that missing the point of what Sir Broughton said a minute ago?” argued Welland intently. “You expected him to turn up in Czechoslovakia. Word of where they are always leaks out eventually, doesn’t it? But not a word ever leaked out about Alda. So wherever he is, secrecy is vital—to him, and to whoever is cashing in on his work now. Six years of successful concealment argues it’s important enough to murder for. I believe there’s something going on right now, right there in the Low Tatras, that has to be kept absolutely secret, and that Alda is at the heart of it. I believe Terrell found out, or they thought he had found out, what he couldn’t be allowed to report.”

“If there is anything in this,” began Phelps, after a long and pregnant pause, “and I’m not admitting yet that there necessarily is, but if there is—then you realise it’s happened in a place and in circumstances which practically put it out of our power to investigate. If he is there, and if he is being kept as tightly wrapped as all that, then we must assume that this is national business. In which case we must also assume that the Czech authorities, if not the police on the spot, know all there is to be known about this death.”

“I’m convinced,” said Welland vehemently, “that they do. The local police know about mountains, they can’t have failed to see what a queer sort of accident it was for an experienced man. Yet within a day they’d closed the case. I think they’ve had their orders.”

“Even if you believed in their honesty,” said the Director drily, “our position would be the same. I can’t impress upon you too strongly, Mr. Welland, that everything to do with this Institute is top secret. In this case or any case that involves us in any way, nothing whatever may be confided to foreign authorities, friendly or otherwise. There can be no overt enquiries.”

“No, sir, I realise that. But I’m there on the spot. I week-end in the mountains quite frequently, they’re used to me. I move about quite freely, I speak the language a little. I could look into it myself, without alerting anyone.”

He offered them a dutiful silence, but neither of them, it seemed, had anything to say. They looked at him narrowly, with unwinking concentration, and he found it unnerving that he had not the least idea what either of them was thinking. They were the product of the closed establishment, closed men, each in his own air-tight, suspicious, ambitious, narrow world, specialising in ever more attenuated expertise. The horrific thought visited him that he might live to be like them. He found it absolutely vital to give utterance again to the realities that still existed in him, while they existed.

“I intend to find out if Terrell was murdered. I can’t help it. If he was killed for activities that seemed to him in line of duty, then I believe we owe it to him to investigate, and to see that justice is done. He’s entitled to justice. Quite apart from the possibility that something is going on there that affects our national interests and security. We can’t just let murder go by default. It isn’t right.”

He produced this final simplicity with an authority that restored its lustre. He said with dignity: “I would much rather proceed with your approval, of course. I hope I have it.”

But he would proceed with or without it. He was committed by his conscience. An interesting survival, but there he was in the flesh, determined and distressed, perfectly conscious of what he was saying and doing, and prepared to be judged by it.

“My dear boy!” said Sir Broughton, for the first time warming into the charming smile that transformed his professionally austere face into something human and likeable. “Proceed with our blessing, of course, but with our warnings, too. One man, according to your theory, has already been killed. I beg you to take care of yourself. That’s the first essential. The second is the preservation of complete secrecy for this establishment. That I can’t over-stress. And the third thing is something I feel I ought to tell you. If you’re going into this at all, you must go with your eyes open. Nobody knows this, outside this Institute and its parent Ministry.”

He came back slowly to his desk, and leaned on his hands there, pondering. For a moment he looked more than his age, an elderly man bowed by his responsibilities.

“When Charles Alder vanished, his current working notebooks vanished with him. They contained all his projects at the experimental stage, and at that stage they were so completely his own brain-children that no one could continue his work on them. No other sketches, no other outlines existed. We don’t know, apart from a few preliminary ideas, what was in them. But he was at the height of his powers, and working like a demon, mainly on problems of aerodynamics. If he’s been pursuing the same lines of research elsewhere, there could be sensational developments. There could be more than enough at stake to invoke murder. You understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” said Welland, weak with relief and gratitude, “I understand.”

“And you understand the absolute need for secrecy? You must not say one word to anyone about this. You haven’t taken anyone into your confidence? The press men, your friends?”

“I didn’t tell them anything, beyond showing curiosity over Terrell’s record. Knowing I’m stationed in Prague, they wouldn’t wonder at that.” He was all eagerness now, dazzled and exhilarated by the Director’s energy.

“And no one else, either?”

If Welland hesitated at all, it was so briefly that the instant passed unnoticed. “No, sir, no one knows anything about this from me.”

“Good! Then go ahead, but take care of yourself. If you do hit upon a lead to Alda, you must report at once to us. Don’t go on alone and take risks, just report back and wait for orders, you understand? I’ll see that the Minister is kept informed, otherwise no one must know of this except the three of us here. I’ll arrange with the embassy in Prague, and have any message from you transmitted direct to us here by telephone. We’ll have a code signal agreed before you leave here. If you locate Alda, then send it. When we receive it, it may be advisable for Mr. Blagrove to come to Prague on some pretext, to be on hand—and to help you,” he said, the human smile reappearing for one abstracted instant, “in case of need. Even you may need help sometimes, Mr. Welland. Who knows?”

“I’ll be very careful, sir. You can rely on me.”

“We are relying on you, my boy. You’ll report to nobody else but this Institute. Not even our people in Prague. You understand? Nobody else!”

He had accomplished all and more than he had hoped for. At the edge of an adventure, with the water cold and mysterious before his plunge, Robert Welland was a vindicated, even a happy, man.

Or he would have been happy, but for one small scruple.

As soon as he left the conference in Sir Broughton’s room he hurried to the Underground station, and made his way back into London, to the Chelsea street where Chloe Terrell had her top-floor flat. It hadn’t, of course, been absolutely honest of him not to tell Sir Broughton about the note he’d dropped through Mrs. Terrell’s letter-box, when he found her out. The note certainly did confide something, more than he should have said, even to the suggestion of murder. But there was no harm done, after all, because Mrs. Terrell was not merely away from home, but out of the country. He had Blagrove’s own word for that. So no one would have read the note he should never have been so indiscreet as to write, and what he had said was not, in fact, a lie. No one knew anything about this affair from him. And no one would.

There wasn’t even any hurry about it, his sense of anxiety and impatience was folly. She was in Czechoslovakia, and she wouldn’t, couldn’t be back yet. He had plenty of time to dig out the porter of the service flats, explain that he’d left a vital paper by mistake, not knowing Mrs. Terrell was out of the country, and must recover it and get word to her elsewhere at once. The porter would have keys, and it wouldn’t be difficult to establish his own good faith. When he’d burned that note he would feel better, because his shadow of a lie wouldn’t exist, then, and there would be no leakages through him. He liked to have everything above-board, and that was how it would be.

All the same, his mind was not quite easy. Better just have a look at the top-floor flat first, before he tackled the porter, and make sure that it was still closed and empty. Just to reassure himself.

The lift was creaking its way slowly upward as he stood in the hall; he had caught a glimpse of the door closing upon a dark, slender girl with her arms full of parcels, and to judge by the time that elapsed before the lift-cable was still and the door clashed open, high up the shaft, she was disentangling her purchases at least four floors up. He pressed the call button, and nothing whatever happened. A woman with both hands full doesn’t stop to close the lift doors after her. He would have to walk up.

He didn’t know why he was hurrying as he tackled the stairs. Hadn’t he already told himself that there was no haste, no possibility that Mrs. Terrell would have returned and read his note? But he began taking the steps two at a time before he reached the second landing, and by the fourth he was running, his heart pounding and his breath short. He came to the corner from which he could see Chloe Terrell’s door, and baulked as if he had run his nose into a brick wall. For the outside door of the flat stood open. And the pretty girl with the parcels stood in the hall with her burdens dropped unceremoniously about her feet, and his letter open and unfolded in her hands.

She was still as a statue until his rush of movement ended in abrupt stillness, and then she was aware of him, and looked up at him over the spread sheet of paper with great dark eyes blank with horror. For a moment they stared at each other in fascination and dread. He didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t know what to think.

She couldn’t possibly be, she wasn’t more than eighteen or nineteen! But women did marry as young as that. How was he to know that the wife would be a mere child? Horrified, he lifted his leaden feet up the last few steps, and moved towards her like a hypnotised rabbit, utterly helpless.

“Mrs. Terrell…?”

She stared back at him as if she had heard nothing, following her own fixed channel of consciousness. She looked down at the sheet of paper in her hand, and back at him.

“You’re Robert Welland? It was you who left this note?”

She had a voice that startled, an octave deeper than anyone would have expected; a gruff whisper, like an adolescent boy not yet used to his new instrument. She took a small step back from him, warily and wildly, and stumbled over her own parcels discarded on the floor.

“Yes, I’m Robert Welland. I didn’t mean….I didn’t realise…. Mrs. Terrell, I must apologise and explain….”

“I’m not Mrs. Terrell,” said the girl, shrinking. “I shouldn’t have opened it, but I thought it might be something I ought to send on. I’m Tossa Barber. Sorry, that won’t mean a thing to you.” She put up her hand dazedly, and pushed back the fall of dark hair from her brow. “I’m Mrs. Terrell’s daughter. I came up to do some shopping for the holidays, and I use her flat when I’m in town.” It was extraordinary that she should feel she had to explain to him, when it was he who had so much to explain, the letter, the implications of the letter, his presence here in such a hurry. Suddenly she was calm for both of them, because it was too late to take back anything, and there was no way to go except forward. “You say here,” she challenged pointblank, “that my step-father was murdered.”

In what he had written he had not, he remembered, used that word. He thought of a hundred ingenious evasions, and confronted by Tossa’s large, unwavering eyes, rejected them all. “Yes,” he said helplessly, “that’s what I believe.”

“Come in,” said Tossa. “You may as well. Now I have to know. You can see that, can’t you? I’ve got to know.”

He made one convulsive attempt to extricate himself, even as he was stepping forward into the flat and closing the outer door behind him. He couldn’t possibly confide in a child like this, even if he hadn’t just sworn secrecy under awful warnings; but neither could he stand in an open doorway close to the echoing well of the stairs and the lift-shaft, and make his excuses for all the house to hear.

“Miss Barber, I’m very sorry I’ve alarmed you for nothing. Since I left this note for your mother I’ve had an opportunity to consult the people who’re best-informed about your father’s…” These relationships were confusing him, he didn’t quite know where he was with them. “—about Mr. Terrell’s death. I should be glad if you would try to forget about the whole matter. I did have my suspicions, but they’re not shared by others who should know best, and it may be that I was quite wrong.”

“You just said: ‘That’s what I believe’,” she reminded him, “not: ‘That’s what I believed’.” She slipped by him very quickly at the slight movement of retreat he made, and put her back against the door. “No, you can’t! You can’t go away now and leave me like this.”

And he saw that he couldn’t. Not simply because she already understood too much, and could make his escape impossible, but because her face was so desperately resolute and her eyes so full of an acute personal distress for which he was responsible. It was already too late to undo that; all his disclaimers wouldn’t convince her now, all his reassurances wouldn’t restore her peace of mind. His own little indiscretion had trapped him. It wasn’t enough even to plead that he had promised secrecy, since his promise had been breached by accident almost as soon as he had given it. “Miss Barber,” he began earnestly, “I did come here with certain information that disquieted me, and I wanted to consult Mrs. Terrell before I took the matter any further. I’ve now had it impressed upon me that this whole affair is urgently secret, and I’m bound by that. It was foolish of me not to have realised it for myself, and I’m deeply sorry that my mistake has now caused you distress. I wish I could undo it.”

“You can’t,” said Tossa fiercely, “and you can’t leave it like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have read it, but I did, and he was my step-father, even if we weren’t at all close, and do you expect me just to sit back and live with the thought that somebody murdered him, and not do anything at all about it?”

“I sincerely hope there’s going to be no need for you to do anything about it. That’s a job for others.”

“No!” she protested passionately. “That isn’t good enough. That doesn’t help me.”

He had already reached the point of knowing that he was going to tell her everything. Maybe he was a good judge of human nature, and maybe he wasn’t, but it seemed to him that there was only one way of ensuring that secrecy should indeed be complete. She had the passion to demand her rights from him, maybe she had also the generosity to meet him half-way when he piled the lot into her arms without reserve.

“Miss Barber, I gave my word. There’s no way I can satisfy you, except by extending that promise to cover you as well as myself. If I tell you everything, then I shall be vouching for you, too. Staking my reputation on you. Maybe my life.”

She opened her eyes wide to stare at him in wonder and doubt, but she could find no hint of anything bogus in his face or his tone. It seemed people still existed who talked in those terms, quite without cant.

“Do you want to know on those conditions? Remember, I shall then be relying upon you absolutely.”

“You can,” she said. “I won’t breathe a word to anyone, I promise. Yes, I want to know.”

“And you understand that it’s a matter of national security that what I tell you should go no further?”

“Yes, I understand. You have my word.” Her face was earnest with the terrible solemnity of youth. Yes, he thought, she had the generosity and imagination even to be able to keep secrets. And he stopped being afraid of her, just when he should have begun to be afraid.

He sat down with her on the antique bench in Chloe’s hall, and told her the whole story, suppressing nothing, not even the significance of the notebooks Alda had smuggled out of the country with him when he vanished.

For a moment, at the end of it, her sceptical mind revolted. Spies, counter-spies, defecting scientists, all exist, of course, but as sordid professionals fumbling grimy secrets of dubious value, for which governments must be crazy to pay out a farthing in bribes or wages. Not like this, not with ideals mixed up in the squalor, and patriotism—whatever that ought to mean, in these days of supranational aspirations—and honest, clean danger. It couldn’t be true! Robert Welland was a romantic who had constructed a romantic’s ingenious theory out of a few chance facts, and all he was going back to was the long, slow let-down into the untidy world of reality. He wouldn’t find anything; there was nothing to find. Herbert Terrell had simply made a mis-step at last, the one that waits for every expert somewhere along the way, and fallen to his death.

Just for a moment she held the facts away from her, and saw them thus distantly and coolly; and then the whole erection of evidence toppled upon her and overwhelmed her, and she believed with all her heart, and was lost. She had no longer any defences against Terrell. He was dead, murdered, killed as the result of something he had undertaken out of his sense of duty to his profession and his country. He was more than she had ever given him a chance to show, and she owed him justice all the more now, because she had denied it to him living.

“So you see that everything possible will be done to find out the truth. And you will be very careful, won’t you, not to let anything out even by accident? Remember I’ve vouched for you as for myself.”

“I won’t forget. I’m very grateful for your trust, I shan’t betray it.” She was staring before her with stunned eyes, seeing herself suddenly drawn, almost against her will, into a world of noble clichés, which she vehemently distrusted, but for which there existed no substitutes.

“And you’ll try to set your mind at rest, and leave everything to us? I’m sorry that I’ve troubled your peace at all.”

“Oh, no!” she said positively. “It’s better to know.”

And to his question, with only the faintest note of reserve:

“I know you’ll do everything possible. And thank you!”

But he hadn’t her personal obligations, and he hadn’t her sense of guilt, and how could he expect her to sit back and let him lift the burden of her conscience and carry it away with him?

The first thing she looked round for, when he was gone, was the large-scale map of Central Europe she had just bought at Hatchards.

“Czech visas,” said Toddy thoughtfully, “cost money.” He sat back on his heels and pondered the delectable roads racing eastwards across the map, and his expression was speculative and tempted. “Not that I’m saying it wouldn’t be a nice thing to do, mind you.” He added ruefully: “Rather a lot of money, if you ask me!”

“I know they do, but look at the tourist exchange rate! We should more than get it back. And if we did decide on it, we could be through France and Germany in a couple of days. Eating in France is damned dear unless you picnic all the time, and who wants to do that? I bet we’d save by running through as quickly as possible, and surely Czechoslovakia would be a whole lot more interesting.”

“I always did think you had a secret urge to live dangerously.” Christine swung her legs from the edge of the table, and drew the crumbling Iron Curtain thoughtfully back into position with one toe. “Quite apart from prison cells, secret police, and all that guff—supposing it is guff, we could be wrong about that, too!—who does the talking?”

“We all do, in English. I’m told the Czechs are marvellous linguists, now’s their chance to prove it. And if we do get out of bounds for English, I bet Toddy’s German would get us by well enough.” Tossa withdrew a little, to leave them with an idea they would soon be able to persuade themselves was their own. “Whatever you think, though, I’m easy. But I’ll write for visa applications if you like. They say it only takes a few days. I’m going to make some G.I.D.,” said Tossa, judging her moment nicely, and left them holding it.

“Maybe it does seem a pity not to use the carnet, now we’ve got it,” said Christine reflectively.

“Quickest route on the map,” reported Toddy, sprawled largely across Europe, “is Cassel—Brussels—Aachen, and straight down the autobahn. It takes you right past Wurzburg now, and part-way to Nuremberg. Might have got a bit farther, too, since this was printed.”

“It’s faster travelling through France than Belgium,” warned Christine. “We could just as easily run through to Saarbrücken, and get on to the southern branch of the autobahn, and then go north to Frankfurt.”

“It’s miles longer.”

“Yes, but hours faster.”

Dominic, who had never yet driven on the Continent, said nothing, but sat back and let them argue it out. So it happened that he was the only one who did not miss the look on Tossa’s face when she re-entered the room with the coffee tray, to find the twins deep in discussion of the various ways of reaching the Czech border quickly, and the possibilities presented once they had crossed it. He saw the small, fevered spark that lit in her eyes, the brief vindicated smile that touched the corners of her mouth, and ebbed again even more rapidly, leaving her fixed and sombre.

Tossa had what she wanted. But what it gave her was not pleasure, it seemed to him, only a brief and perilous sense of accomplishment, as if she had just taken the first step on a very uncertain journey.