‘Fortyish, middle height, on the thin side but I think he’s solider than he looks. Dark brown hair and eyes, thick brows, hair a bit grey just at the temples. Quite a good face, clean-shaven, a lot of bone and not much meat, a long, straight nose and a rather high forehead. Daunting way of looking at you, guarded and aloof but critical, too, as if he held you at arms’-length to get a stranger’s view, and didn’t want to get any closer to anyone. Slumps his shoulders a bit, but when he’s on his feet he moves well, so it may be an affectation. Or pure discouragement! He did look rather as if he’d nearly given up, and then suddenly got kicked back into the race. Not quite seedy—he’s physically too trim for that—not so much a shabby elegance as an elegant shabbiness.’
She had closed her eyes, the better to see the man who was not there. When she opened them they were bright, thoughtful and clear. ‘How’s that?’
‘Strictly for the fiction shelves,’ said George rudely, and tucked away mentally every word of it. ‘Now supposing—just supposing—you wanted to get to Scheidenau quickly, and money was no object. How would you go? Air to Munich… Zurich…?’
‘Zurich,’ said Bunty promptly. ‘Could do it either way, but Zurich would be quicker and easier.’ She sat looking at him wide-eyed, a shining mirror reflecting his thoughts back to him. ‘I happen,’ she said cautiously, ‘to be on rather good terms with Laura Howard in the B.E.A. office in Comerbourne. I could have a word with her. Very discreetly, of course. What did you mean about money being no object? He didn’t look as if it would be no object to him.’
‘If she’s retained him to do a job for her,’ said George, ‘Miss Tressider will be paying the expenses. And if he takes off for Austria after your long-lost ’cellist, the quick, expensive way, that should clinch one thing, at least: he’ll be following up this line on her business, not his own.’
‘But we,’ said Bunty, now with unmistakable regret, ‘shan’t be able to follow him there.’
‘Too true we shan’t. But we just might, with a lot of luck, get an inkling of what, if anything, he brings back with him.’
The violinist who had shared Robert Aylwin’s room at the Goldener Hirsch in Scheidenau, thirteen years ago, lived now in Birmingham, and played in the City of Birmingham Orchestra. Bunty’s working papers of the tour had proved very useful indeed, supplying the names Maggie had forgotten, and even such day-to-day details as room accommodation. Charles Pincher and Robert Aylwin had been roommates throughout, so they must, if not friends, have been reasonably congenial companions. Why should Maggie remember the one, apparently the less memorable, and forget the other?
Mrs. Felse had said clearly and kindly that Maggie had not been interested in Aylwin or in any man, and probably never would be. But Mrs. Felse might be mistaken. And still Francis saw, or thought he saw, the shadowy outline of a person round whom his bitterness could gather corrosively, a man who must have meant something to her, probably much, perhaps everything, if she hadn’t disastrously mistaken her own heart, and kicked away love too hastily from trammelling her feet on the climb to the heights. Why else should she fasten so suddenly and hungrily on fame, why come back changed, unless she had not merely turned her back on the alternative, but herself destroyed it?
So he went to see Charles Pincher. And Charles Pincher, tall, stooped, balding and cheerful, remembered the Scheidenau affair very well.
‘There was one rather odd thing about it, you know. He didn’t take anything with him when he lit out.’
Slowly Francis closed his notebook on his knee. ‘He didn’t…? You mean he just walked out empty-handed? But Mrs. Felse said nothing about that…’
‘No, well, I don’t suppose she ever realised. But his suitcase and his ’cello were there in the room still, after he’d gone. Freddy left them in old Waldmeister’s charge when we left, he said he’d be sure to come back and collect them as soon as he knew we’d gone, and the bill was paid.’
‘And did he?’
‘I suppose so, old boy, but I was never there again. I had the chance of a good job, so I quit the Circus. I expect he did, you know. We all knew he’d fallen out with Freddy. He’d just keep out of sight until we were on the move, and then stroll back and pick up his traps at leisure.’
The sensible thing to believe, of course. The only question left was whether it had actually happened like that. Whether, in fact, there had been some sound reason why it couldn’t happen like that. And there was only one infallible way to find out, and find out quickly.
‘We were right,’ said Bunty over the telephone to George. ‘Zurich! Laura booked him in on the two o’clock Trident flight from Heathrow to-morrow. Open return. Took him a day and a half to make up his mind.’
‘Now I wonder,’ said George at the other end of the line, ‘I do wonder to whom he talked yesterday, and what they told him, to make his journey really necessary?’
CHAPTER FOUR
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The little Scheidenauersee, a silver-blue pear-shape three-quarters of a mile long, lay in green folded hills under a late summer sky, smooth as a looking-glass and brushed clean with feather dusters of cloud. Its narrow end, where the tiny Rulenbach flowed into it, pointed south into the foothills of the Vorarlberg, and round this southern tip the village of Scheidenau lay, three short streets arranged in a Y shape, the cup of the Y filled with the water of the lake as with silver-blue wine. The northern end of the lake widened and overflowed from the cup, mirroring two or three tiny islands, and at the north-eastern corner the Rulenbach flowed gaily out again, twice its former size and bouncing down a crumpled, stony bed, to make an unexpected six-mile detour through Germany, owing to the complicated contours of the land, before returning into Austria in a series of right-handed twists, to empty itself into the Bregenzer Ach, and eventually into Lake Constance south of Bregenz. Where the three streets met there was the usual village square, with a well-head and a modest Trinity column in the middle, and on all three sides—for in fact the square was an irregular triangle, dwindling towards the south into the stem of the Y—the beautiful, exuberant housefronts and shopfronts, the overhanging eaves, the mellow dark wood and virtuoso wrought iron that makes almost any small Austrian settlement look like a stage set for operetta. There was a baroque church, of no particular merit but of pleasing appearance, one restaurant that was not also an inn and two that were, and a confectioner’s noted for its rum babas. All the down-to-earth shops like the butcher’s and the baker’s and the ironmonger’s, lined the landward street. The two roads that embraced the end of the lake, and dwindled later into footpaths along its undulating shores, found room for the villas and gardens of the better-off, for a small public park nestling in the base of the Y like the dregs of the wine, and for the two larger of Scheidenau’s three hotels, which peered into each other’s windows across the placid surface, just where the arrow-straight clay-blue line of the Rulenbach’s inflow, coloured by mountain water, foundered and became invisible in the deeper, calmer blue. The third and smallest hotel, the Weisses Kreuz, faced the church across the broader end of the square.
Outside the village the farms and fields began, rolling, heaving, foothill fields white with the shaven stubble from which the harvest had been taken, and upland pastures scalloped like fish-scales from the marks of the scythe. The highest point visible from the square was the abrupt hummock of the castle hill just to the west of the lake, with its snaggle-toothed ruin on top, meanly reduced now to its last few feet of broken wall and a tangle of overgrown rubble, useless as a tourist attraction. Outcrops of bedrock and outcrops of masonry spattered the sides of the hill over an area of a square mile or so, and because of the rich rooting of trees and bushes it was sometimes difficult to tell which was which. In parts of the forlorn shell the practical natives had dumped rubbish, and there were rats as the only inhabitants; but still that scattered rash of worked stone erupting everywhere among the grass bore witness to the formidable extent of the place in its hey-day. The Waldmeisters, who owned the Goldener Hirsch, and had been there now for seven generations, took their name from an ancestor who had once been head forester to the Lords of Scheidenau.