The House Of Green Turf
Ellis Peters
Felse Family 08
A 3S digital back-up edition v3
click for scan notes and proofing history
Contents
|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|
|Appendix|
When world-famous singer Maggie Tressider crashes her car on the way to a concert, she wakes up in hospital, dazed, in post-operative shock—and haunted. From some secret place in her subconscious arises the awful conviction that somehow, at some time in the past, she has been responsible for a death. The only way to lay the nameless spectre is to confront it face to face. A psychiatrist, her doctor suggests. But Maggie chooses a very different expert to find the truth for her. Her commission launches private investigator Francis Killian on a hunt across Europe in search of a grave. But the trail also leads him to one Bunty Felse, former colleague of Maggie’s and wife of Inspector Felse. The successful end of Killian’s search is only the beginning of a long pilgrimage for them all—a journey which leads her not only back into the past but to a remote corner of the Austrian alps, where many frontiers touch and many trails cross. And where some of them end—with murder.
First published in Great Britain by Collins. This Large Print edition published byChivers Press by arrangement with The Macdonald Group
ISBN 0 7451 7567 8 Copyright© 1969 Ellis Peters
The right of Ellis Peters to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available
All characters in this publication are fictitious anda ny resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Photoset, printed and bound in Great Britain by REDWOOD PRESS LIMITED, Melksham, Wiltshire
CHAPTER ONE
^ »
But for a five-minute shower of rain, and a spattering of pennystone clay dropped from the tailboard of a lorry, Maggie Tressider would have driven on safely to her destination, that day in August, and there would never have been anything to cause her to look back over her shoulder and out of her ivory tower, nothing to make the mirror crack from side to side, nothing to bring any unforeseen and incomprehensible curse down upon her. She would have been in Liverpool by tea-time, relaxing before her concert, and then she would have dressed carefully and driven with her accompanist to the Philharmonic Hall, to give her usual meticulous performance in Brahms’s ‘Alto Rhapsody,’ which was one of the things she did best, and Schumann’s ‘Frauenliebe und Leben,’ which in her opinion was not. And the next day she would have shared the driving with Tom Lowell again on the way home, and then settled down to consider her next engagement, which was a recording session in London for a new and expensive Fidelio. And everything would have gone on hopefully and auspiciously, just as it had during all the past ten years, every new undertaking adding a further burnish to her reputation and fresh laurels to her crown.
But the clay fell, shaken loose from a careless load just where the road leaned the wrong way on the long curve by the brickworks; and a following lorry squashed the glutinous lump into a long, murderous slide, unobtrusive on the pale surface.
And then the thin little shower came and passed, too feeble to wet the road thoroughly, but enough to leave sweaty globules all along the slide of clay, and give it a more treacherous sliminess. The trap was now all ready for the prey.
Maggie, new to the road but a good driver, estimated the angle of the curve as she reached it. It uncoiled right-handed in a sharp descent, one of those hazards due to be ironed out some day, when county funds permitted. It went on and on until it seemed they must be spiralling back beneath their own tracks, but Maggie continued to drive confidently round its convolutions, and checked her speed only slightly. At the most acute point of the curve the slide of clay waited for them, just where the gradient sagged away outwards instead of giving them support.
They hit it at forty, and everything went mad. Away went their wheels sidelong in a long glissade, while Maggie did all the correct things to adjust to the skid and get control again, and nothing responded. She fought the car with every sense and every nerve she had, and still inexorably, greasily, derisively, it went its own pig-headed way, outwards towards the white kerbing and the fall of tousled grass beyond. They hit the kerb and leaped shuddering into the air, and she dragged frantically at the wheel to get them back on to the road before they touched again, but then they were over, lurching in crazy, lunging bumps like an elephant amuck, down the tufted grass towards the quickset hedge below, and the stumps of three long-felled trees.
Earth and sky flickered and changed places, and sizzled and blinked out like broken film. She heard Tom cry out, and felt his hand beside hers on the wheel, which was no help at all. Doggedly she clung and swung, correcting headlong lurches as best she could, struggling to hold the car upright and bring it to a halt, but the gradient was against her. You might as well try to pat a bullet out of its course with your palm. But she never let go, and she never stopped trying.
She remembered yelling at Tom to loose his safety belt and jump, while they were still on the grass. But because of course he wouldn’t, she remembered leaning across him and trying to open his door. A mistake, she had to take one hand from the wheel. Cool air blew in on her. The weight of the door swinging brought the car round and almost broadsided it short of the hedge, but its own impetus rolled it against the weight and sent it hurtling over in a slow somersault. The door flapped, like a wing trying to lift them clear, but as helpless as she was to save them. Then the seat beside her was empty, and the spiky shapes of the hedge surged upwards one moment, downward the next, to spear her, and the squat, solid, moss-grown stump of a tree launched itself from the sky to stamp her into the ground.
The world exploded in her face, and a fragmentation bomb in her lap. And then there was darkness, aeon upon aeon of darkness, and the last thing she knew, extended diminuendo long after everything else was gone, was her own voice, or perhaps only the silent phantom of her own voice, lamenting inconsolably: My God, what have I done! I’ve killed poor Tom! My God, what have I done, I’ve killed Tom, I’ve killed him… killed him… killed him…
Two voices were discussing her over her head. They didn’t know that dead people can hear. Quite dispassionate voices, cool, leisurely, and low. Either they had no bodies, or dead people can’t see. She was dangling just below the level of consciousness, clinging to the surface like the air-breathing nymph of some water creature.
‘Beautiful, too!’ said the first voice critically.
‘Nobody’s beautiful on the operating table,’ said the second voice cynically.
‘Beautiful, gifted and famous. It seems some people can have everything.’
‘Except immortality.’
‘What are her chances?’
‘Oh, pretty good now. Nothing’s ever certain, but… pretty good. She had us on the run, though! Set on dying, you’d have said.’
‘Scale tipped the right way in the end. Pity if she’d slipped through our fingers. Maggie Tressider… what a loss!’
‘ “Maggie is dead. And music dies!” ’
‘Pardon?’ said the first voice blankly, not recognising Byrd’s despairing tribute to Tallis, his master and idol. But Maggie recognised it, and was enchanted, disarmed, humbled.