‘Then why didn’t you slip me into the water right away, while you had the chance?’
He laughed gaily. ‘Because there’s a plague of drunken wedding guests holding a regatta all round the lake. And a damned inconvenient moment they chose to embark.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ said Maggie tartly.
‘Granted. But they’ll get sick of it just now, and go home to bed. Don’t worry, to-morrow the police will be dragging for your body.’
‘And of course,’ she said, ‘they’ll find it?’
‘Oh, yes, they’ll find it. Quite definitely death by drowning, there’ll be no injuries to spoil the picture, not even a bruise. A pity I let Friedl make me angry, but what can you do? No, my dear, for a Maggie Tressider they might go on searching too long and too well, if I didn’t make them a present of you. They might find other things, one never knows. No, they shall have you gratis.’
To make a suicide like that convincing, she reasoned with furious coldness, and to ensure that she was found with satisfying promptness, she would have to be put into the water near to the hotel. So they must be somewhere quite close now. Why not go on doing the direct thing, and ask? He had answered some curious questions already, being quite certain of his security here. But if this waiting continued long enough, and every moment counted, what she had gleaned from him might come in useful yet to convict him.
‘Where have you brought me?’ She looked round the dim room as though she had just discovered it. There was a second door in the distant wall, directly opposite the first one, as though this was only one in a series of rooms. Cellars? Not in the hotel, surely? Yet he could not have brought her far. The other man sat silent on the far side of the single lamp, decapitated by the sharp edge of the black shade, unconcernedly breaking, cleaning and loading a gun, a pair of large, dexterous hands with no head to direct them, but remarkably agile and competent on their own.
‘We’re in the wine-cellars of the old castle. There was a whole labyrinth of them originally,but most are blocked up with rubble. We sealed off the safest part of the network as a repository. One of several. With three frontiers so close, we need a safe place handy in each country, where men and things can be got out of sight quickly until the heat is off. No,’ he said grinning, ‘don’t look round for treasure, we’ve cleared everything out. After to-night we shan’t be using this place again, it’s likely to be a little too precarious for our purposes.’
‘And you, where do you pass the—shall we say “unburied”?—part of your life? I suppose you’ve still got an identity somewhere among the living?’
‘Oh, several,’ he assured her merrily. ‘Most respectable ones, and in more than one country. As one frontier closes, another opens. To a new man, of course. You know, Maggie…’ She waited, watching him steadily. He was eyeing her with calculating thoughtfulness, like a sharp trader contemplating an inspired deal. ‘In a way, it’s a pity I couldn’t have both, you and this. Who’d have thought you’d stay in mourning for me all this time?’
She remembered the anguish he had cost her, the obsessive hold he had had upon her, and suddenly it dawned upon her that Francis had made the same mistake about her that this man was making now. Because she had all but wrecked her life on him, they believed she must have loved him, if only in retrospect after he was gone. She opened her eyes wide, and laughed in Robin’s face. It was perhaps the only luxury she had left, and not one that did her any credit, but she could not resist it.
‘In mourning for you? Do you know what you’ve been to me? A nightmare, a curse, and that’s all…’
The man with the gun said: ‘Achtung!’ sharply and clearly, and came to his feet.
Maggie’s laughter broke off in her throat. She crouched against the wall with head reared, ears straining after those small, stony sounds approaching somewhere outside the door. Robin watched the little sparks of hope come to life softly in her eyes, and the smile shattered by her laughter came back to his lips like a reflection in a pool reshaping itself after the dropping of a stone. He slid from the settle and stretched himself contentedly.
‘Too bad, my dear, it isn’t what you think.’
She had already grasped that it could not be. This was someone who knew the way in here, and approached quietly but without stealth. Not what she had been hoping for; merely what Robin had been waiting for.
The man with the gun crossed to the door and drew back the bolts. Maggie lowered her feet quickly over the edge of the stone shelf and stood up, drawing the folds of her soiled housecoat about her, for it seemed that time had run out.
Into the room walked four men, bringing in with them gusts of the chill night air and the green smell of the wet woods. Two of them were big, raw-boned mountaineers, from which side of the border there was no knowing. The third was slim and lightweight and young, and belted into a wasp-waisted raincoat. The fourth, who was thrust in limping heavily, with blood on his face and a gun in his back, was Francis.
Maggie made not a sound, but as if she had cried out to him his gaze flew to her, and fastened on her with such dismay and despair that her heart turned in her; and what he saw in her face was a mirror image of his own anguish. The only grain of consolation he had left was that she was safe in her bed; the only hope she had been able to keep was that he would launch the hunt for her in time. Both bubbles burst and vanished.
Maggie hardly noticed the dwindling of her own small chance of life in the sudden rush of rage and pain she felt for him. She had bought this fairly, but what had he done? She had brought him into this, unarmed and alone against a highly-organised and ruthless gang, and it was because of her actions that they were both going to die. She was to drown, because they wanted her found and accounted for. But Francis… No, better for them if he vanished altogether. What was the good of shutting her eyes? Since they had taken him prisoner somewhere on the road, perhaps well away from Scheidenau, why bring him back to this place if he was ever to leave it again?
Robin and his men were speaking rapid and colloquial German, Robin questioning, the others answering. She was soon lost in the language, but the implications were clear enough. Any trouble? No, no trouble, everything in hand, everything to numbers. There was something about a car—Francis’s car?-—that should be in Klostermann’s yard by now. They were all easy and content, not elated but extracting a certain workmanlike satisfaction out of their efficiency. Maggie stood almost forgotten, trying to understand, straining her senses in case there should be something, anything, at which hope could claw as it went by, and find a hold. For one of them, at least. For Francis! But she knew there would be nothing now. Just a few hours of deferment, and they had lost their chance for ever.
His captors had loosed their hold of him as soon as they had him inside, and the door firmly locked and bolted. Why not? He was battered and unarmed, and they had several guns between them. Even Robin had a gun in his hand now, a tiny, snub-nosed black thing that he dangled on his forefinger like a toy.
Something had been said about her, a question in the other direction. All three of Robin’s men were eyeing her with some concern; no doubt they had expected her to be in the lake by this time.