Not, by any stretch of imagination, an Austrian face. Hat or no hat, that was an English sportscoat, and an English countenance.
Now what were the English police doing here in the Vorarlberg, tramping hard on Maggie Tressider’s heels?
He fretted about her all the way to Felsenbach. But when all was considered, she was best and safest in the Goldener Hirsch, with the Austrian police deployed round her on a murder hunt. He had no doubt at all of the accuracy of what she had managed to tell him. Friedl had been, if not strangled, half-strangled and thrown into the lake. Whatever the eccentricity of Maggie’s behaviour, they would not suspect her of an act like that. A woman may perhaps push another woman into a lake, but by and large, it is only men who strangle women. By and large, it is only men who have the necessary hand-span and the necessary force. No, he could leave her for a few hours. And after that, their best course might well be to go together and tell their entire story to the investigators, and leave the rest to them. For the more complex this business became, the more certain did he feel that Maggie was entirely and tragically innocent, a helpless victim caught into somebody else’s schemes only by her hypersensitive conscience, and by the accident of a car smash which had shaken her off-balance and put all her defence mechanisms out of gear.
What was ironical was that only after talking to her had he had been able to put his finger on the thing that was most wrong with Robin Aylwin’s gravestone. All that gratuitous anonymity! The victim, of course, couldn’t be named, no one knew, or admitted to knowing, his name. But not only was the donor also anonymous; most improbable of all, there was not a name, not an initial, not even a mason’s mark, anywhere on that stone to identify the memorial artist who made it! Unheard-of, for the craftsman in death not to avow his work! A monumental mason is a businessman, a tradesman like other tradesmen, he wants his excellence known.
This one didn’t. Why?
There was only one monumental mason in Felsenbach, indeed only one mason of any kind, a builder of long establishment who employed none but his own family, the ramifications of which ran into three generations. Gravestones, kerbs, vaults he took in his patriarchal stride. He remembered the corpse from the Rulenbach, he remembered the funeral; but he had had no part in the business of burial or monument. Some wealthy resident of Regenheim, he recalled, had paid for the interment out of goodness of heart, and the small municipality of Felsenbach had naturally raised no objection. No doubt some mason from Regenheim had been employed to make the memorial, afterwards. The donor would obviously look on his own doorstep.
It was another fifteen miles to Regenheim, an undulating, busy road this time, clear of the mountain slopes. The place, when he arrived there, was no bigger than Felsenbach, but unmistakably more a town. There was a square almost large enough for aircraft landings, a waste of cobbles populated by a handful of cars. There were four or five cramped streets eddying out of it, overhung by black and white houses, tottering archways and jutting upper stories. There was a sprawl of modern villa-buildings beyond. And it was raining. The place had not got its name for nothing.
He parked the Dodge in the square and set about locating whatever monumental masons the town might hold. It was already evening, he had lost more time than he had bargained for in reaching this place. He bought some cigarettes at a solid family shop which was still open, and probably would continue so until ten o’clock provided one of the family happened to be spending the evening at home. The woman who served him was elderly and at leisure, and looked as if she and her forebears had been there since Regenheim’s free-city days. If anyone knew where to put a finger on every tradesman in the town, she would.
She was very willing to talk, and showed no surprise at being asked for the local furbishers of graves. There were, she said, only two of any substance. One of them, the oldest established, had his mason’s yard behind his own house, and he or one of his sons could always be found there. The other had built himself a new villa out on the edge of the town. She gave copious directions for finding it. Then there was, of course, the Klostermann outfit, still in business, though they had few clients now, that side of the family’s trade had been neglected since they went in for road haulage. Indifferently she gave him instructions for finding even this unlikely firm, though her large shrug said that she herself wouldn’t consider taking them any of her business. . The head of the old-established house happened to be putting away his pick-up in the corner of the yard. He took out a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to inspect the photographs Francis offered him. No, he had never seen this stone before. If he was curious he did not show it; he had been in the world something like seventy years, and learned to concentrate on his own business, and the discipline had paid him well.
The second one, the dweller in the new villa, was a younger man, a go-ahead type with social ambitions and a look of the townsman about him. The villa was aggressively modern and ostentatious, the wife who opened the door was decorative and well-padded. Francis apologised for calling on them out of the blue and at such an hour, and made it clear at once that he wanted only five minutes of their time. He needed, as it turned out, even less than that.
‘Thirteen years ago!’ said the man of the house, and shook his head decisively. ‘That is before we came here to open our business. We are from München, we have been here only seven years. I am sorry!’
Which left only the family Klostermann, of whom the old woman in the tobacconist’s had thought so poorly. It was getting dark by then, so Francis was torn two ways; but he was not going back without having a look at even so dim a possibility. He threaded the outer edge of the town, and turned back towards the square by side streets that lacked both the black and white fascination of the town centre and the green spaciousness of the suburbs, but were merely utilitarian early-twentieth-century, without squalor or distinction. And there, sure enough, was a dark and almost empty window, once designed for display, with nothing left in it now but a dusty imitation-marble urn, and a shelf of granite vases with perforated aluminium flower-holders. Beside it the high wall of a yard ran for some distance, double doors set in it. The upper windows were dark, the house was not lived in. But the paint on the gates were new.
The whole place appeared deserted, and Francis might have gone away and left it at that; but as he was turning back to the car a man came briskly along the pavement from the direction of the square, fitted a key into the lock of the yard doors, and let himself in. A thickset, youngish man in a belted leather jacket and a black beret, with a battered briefcase under his arm. Francis gave him a minute or two, and then followed him in. He had left the heavy door ajar, and his lively footfalls clashed diagonally ahead over the cobbles. In the far corner of the yard, in a one-story building obviously added to the original house, a light sprang up.
All one side of the yard was garage doors, and several lorries and vans stood ranged along another wall. Behind the frosted window of what seemed to be the office the dark shape of the leather-coated young man moved vaguely. In a corner of the yard some relics of the expiring monumental business mouldered gently, synthetic granite kerbing, a half-shaped headstone, a small, drooping angel leaning on a cross.
Francis rapped at the office door and pushed it open before him. The man in the leather jacket swung round from the desk under the window, his briefcase open in one hand, a folder of papers in the other. The movement was silent, alert and surprised, but by no means alarmed. He had a smooth, well-fleshed face, high-coloured and bland, with round-set eyes of a bright and yet opaque black, like coal.