Gisela, startled out of her beauty sleep by the extension ’phone beside her bed, was scandalised at the very suggestion.
‘But Miss Tressider went to her room at nine o’clock, she will have been asleep for a long time. I cannot disturb her. Can it not wait until to-morrow, if you are staying in Scheidenau?’
‘No,’ said Bunty crisply, ‘it can’t. Or at least, that’s exactly what I want to find out, whether it can or not. I tell you what, you have keys, you slip up and have a look if she’s all right, and if she is, I’ll call her to-morrow.’
Though even so, she thought doubtfully, there were other girls who might equally be in danger, supposing Friedl’s killer was a random defective just breaking out after long harmlessness. What mattered was whether she had really seen what she supposed. But always her mind came back to Maggie. Who else stood so hapless and so alone in the storm-centre of all these happenings?
‘I am sorry,’ said Gisela indignantly, ‘I cannot do such a thing.’
‘All right, then,’ said Bunty. ‘I can! I’m coming over.’
Gisela was waiting for her in the vast vaulted lobby of the Goldener Hirsch when she arrived, out of breath, a quarter of an hour later. It would have been quicker to get Helmut to ferry her over, but Helmut was weaving inspired circles round the grouped rowing boats in the centre of the lake, and his massed choir was singing, pleasantly enough but very loudly:
Heute blau und Morgen blau
Und Übermorgen wieder,
Ich bin dein, und du bist mein,
Und froh sind uns’re Lieder.
Gisela, huddled in a red dressing-gown, was by this time rather less indignant and considerably more uneasy. What was the use of pretending no harm could come to anyone in this house, after Friedl?
‘I have been up to her room. Everything is in order there, her door is locked and her light out. I am sure she is asleep. I tapped gently, but she didn’t answer, and I do not like to disturb her rest.’
But her eyes were round and anxious, even afraid. Bunty understood. Somebody had to take the matter farther, now, but Gisela didn’t want the responsibility. What Miss Tressider’s friend insisted on doing was her own affair.
‘The small light in her bedroom is still burning,’ she said gently. ‘She has a door on the verandah, hasn’t she? Is there a way up from outside?’
‘Oh, yes!’ Gisela jumped at the idea. ‘I will show you. We can go through the house.’ And with luck, if they found the guest in Number One fast asleep, then they could all lock up and go to bed, and no one but themselves would ever be any the wiser about this night alarm.
They passed through the long corridor to the rear of the house, and out by a short passage on to the path from the terrace, and came to the fringe of the trees. A little way along in the darkness was the wooden staircase that led up to the verandah. Bunty felt her way up it by the rough wooden handrail, and half-way up her fingers, sliding along the wood, encountered a jagged knot, and a fragment of something silken soft and fine, like long strands of mohair, that clung to her skin with the live persistence of synthetic fibres convulsed with static. She pulled the strands loose from the rough place where they had caught, and shut them in her palm as they went on up the stairs.
Gisela hung back, quivering. ‘The door… it is open!
The glass door stood wide on the darkness of Maggie’s sitting-room. Through the half-open door that led to the bedroom beyond, the small gleam of the bedside lamp illuminated for them a pillow still covered by a hand-crocheted bedspread. The pillow was dented by the pressure of a head; so, when they put on the light to look round the room, was the bed itself by a light body. But no one was there now. The verandah door must have been open for some time, for rain had blown in… No, that was impossible. The verandah was not completely roofed in, but the jut of the eaves above covered a good half of it, and there had been almost no wind to drive the showers. Yet there was a damp patch just inside the doorway, slightly darkening the scrubbed boards. Everything was tidy, everything was normal, but nothing remained of Maggie Tressider except the score of Mahler’s ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ on the piano, and in Bunty’s palm a small triangle of material woven from one of the more expensive synthetics, printed in a delicate feather pattern of grey and white, like fine lace, with a few long strands of silky nylon fringe trailing from it.
Gisela looked at it and moistened her lips. ‘It is from the girdle of her housecoat. I have seen her wearing it.’
‘Yes,’ said Bunty. ‘I thought it might be. We’ve got no choice now. You can see that, can’t you? Don’t worry, it isn’t your fault, I’ll do the talking. You go down and call the police. And better tell Herr Waldmeister, he’ll have to know. I’ll wait here. Tell them the message is from the wife of Detective-Inspector Felse. They’ll understand.’
They understood and they came, with all the more alacrity because they had already received, some ten minutes previously, Werner Frankel’s call from a mountain inn over the border in Germany. By the time they reached Bunty, waiting for them in Maggie’s sitting-room, there were police patrols out in Germany checking all cars between the border and Felsenbach for a middle-aged light-brown Dodge with a Swiss registration, and Austrian police patrols converging from Langen and Bregenz on Scheidenau, watching for a dark-blue or black Mercedes in a hurry.
It sounded complicated enough without any new complications; but it was becoming quite clear that it was all one case, and too large for taking any chances. First an associate of Miss Tressider was ambushed and abducted on the highroad; and now the girl herself, it seemed, had vanished from her hotel room without warning or explanation.
Not, however, without trace. There were traces enough. A shred torn from her girdle by a knot in the handrail of the staircase. An unimpressive and rapidly drying patch of damp inside her verandah door. And down the slope towards the water, under her windows, search produced a silver chiffon ribbon, still loosely knotted, with one or two dusky gold hairs twined in the knot. It had caught in the fir branches where the half-grown trees grew close, and just at the height of a woman’s shoulders. As if she had run from her room, leaving the door open, and straight down the slope in a frenzy of resolution and despair into the lake.
‘Yes,’ said Bunty, bolt upright on the piano stool, ‘that’s what we were meant to think.’ She stabbed a finger emphatically at the music on the stand. ‘Even this could be part of the picture. She has a recent history of illness, and has been investigating the disappearance of a man who toured with her here when she was just beginning. That’s what it looks like, anyhow. The man in the photograph, yes. And now it seems he’s dead. And here is she running through a song like this, all about the demon lover coming back from the grave to claim his bride. If she drowned herself, people might be shocked, but I don’t suppose anyone would find it incredible.’ She added after a moment’s thought: ‘Except, perhaps, this man Killian. He seems to have got nearer to her than anyone.’
‘And he,’ said the man in charge dryly, ‘has been taken care of at the same time, eh?’
She never got the police ranks of Austria clear in her mind, but his name, it seemed, was Oberkofler. He was probably in the sixties, a tall, rangy mountain man with a wrinkled leather face and shaggy grey hair. He wore whatever had come to hand first when his subordinates got him out of bed, and most of it was non-uniform, but he still had no difficulty in looking like the holder of authority. He was Scheidenau born and bred, and looked the part. Bunty found him impressive. She was glad he was the one among them who spoke English, it gave her an excuse for staying in his vicinity.