Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me! Just a moment!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”