‘Oh, Maggie!’ said Robin carelessly, giving her a light glance over his shoulder. ‘There was a slight hitch there.’ He had slipped back into English, she thought, not by chance, but so that she should understand. ‘We shall have to keep her now until the Volga boatmen go home to sleep it off. They’re sure to tire sooner or later. Roker’s keeping an eye on them upstairs, he’ll give us the tip when they quit.’ He looked back at Francis, and spun the little gun in his hand, and the butt nestled into his palm like a bird homing. ‘But we may as well get this one underground,’ he said.
Francis had taken out a handkerchief, and was quietly wiping the blood from his cheek. His face,grey and drawn, kept a total, contained silence. Even when he raised his eyes for an instant to take one more look at Maggie, they gave nothing away beyond a kind of distant, regretful salutation. In the presence of these people he had nothing to say to her, not even with his eyes. The burden of longing and self-blame and love was not something he wanted to display for them or pile upon her at this last moment. As long as he had a card to play—and he had one, the last—he might as well play it, and speak to the point. The rest could stay unsaid; she wouldn’t be any the poorer or more unfortunate for ending her life without any declaration from Francis Killian.
‘There’s one thing you don’t know… Aylwin,’ he said, his voice emerging hoarse and clumsy from a bruised throat, ‘I take it you are Aylwin? Who else? Your boys don’t know it, either, but all the way up that mountain section there was a car following me to-night. It was on my trail yesterday, too, I couldn’t be sure of it then, but I know it now. I thought it was your pack on my heels, till I hit your ambush ahead. There’s only one other thing it could be, you know that, don’t you? A police car keeping an eye on me. They weren’t far behind when this bunch flagged me down. You think they’re blind and deaf? Or do you suppose they’d drop their assignment just when it got interesting? They’ll be hard after us right now, and there’ll be reinforcements on the way. Do you think you’re ever going to get out of here unobserved?’
‘I think,’ said Robin, smiling at him lazily, eyes narrowed and golden, ‘that you are a gallant but hopeless liar, trying the only bluff you’ve got left. But just to be obliging…’ He turned to the three who stood watching and listening, and snapped back briskly into German. They shook their heads in vigorous rebuttal, laughing the story away with absolute confidence. ‘You see? No shadow, no police, no fairy tales. If you had a tail, it got lopped off en route. But I think you never had one.’
‘Your trouble,’ said Francis levelly, ‘is that you have to have too much faith in your understrappers. The usual trouble with businesses that get too big. That Dodge will never get as far as Klostermann’s. If they miss it in Felsenbach, they’ll pick it up before it reaches Regenheim. And in case there’s any doubt about the place where I was waylaid, and about your tie-in with the affair, let me tell you I’ve left them my wallet and papers there on the spot. With the whole set of photographs of your grave.’
The first faint shadow of doubt touched but could not deface Robin’s smiling certainty. He turned his head again to shoot orders at his underlings; and they laid hands urgently on Francis and began to turn out his pockets, though they still poured voluble scorn on his story. He raised his hands out of their way, flinching as they handled him.
‘No wallet, no passport, no driving licence. You think I came out without those, Aylwin? Don’t bother to send a man back to pick them out of the ditch, the police did that long ago. And did you know that there’s an English detective in Scheidenau, co-operating with the locals? He followed me from England. Maybe he’s the one who’s been on my trail all day. He certainly was when we had lunch at The Bear.’
‘All right, so you left your wallet in the ditch. What good is it going to do you? Someone will spend your money and throw the rest away. I’ll believe in your English detective when I see him. And as for your police tail, Max with your hired job would have run head-on into it round the bend, and got word to me long ago.’
‘Maybe he did run into it, and they picked him up on the spot. Ever think of that? Better not write them off so easily, Aylwin, they were there, all right.’ It was his only anchor now, a frail one, but not an illusion. They had been there. God knew what had become of them now, but they might yet find their way where they were needed. ‘You haven’t a hope of getting out of here unseen. Why add more murders to the score? It’s long enough already. You might get away with Friedl. Touch Maggie Tressider, and they’ll hunt you to the end of the world.’
It was breath wasted. Even if he had been subject to intimidation, even if he had believed, Aylwin had gone too far now to turn back. He yawned elaborately in Francis’s face, and smiled, reaching up one hand to turn the shade of the lamp, and direct the light towards the darkest corner of the cellar. The circle of pallor flowed across the flagstones like a silent tide. Against the wall a heap of dark earth reared into view, and the rims of two of the stones showed black and thin as pen-strokes.
‘Get them up!’
They had crowbars and spades propped in the corner. The slanting light cast monstrous shadows from the stooped shoulders and heads of the two mountain men, as they leaned their weight almost languidly on the crowbars, and the thin black line at one end of the nearer stone broadened into a gash, a gaping rectangle of darkness.
For me, thought Francis, not for Maggie; he said they’d have to keep her until the Volga boatmen went home… Boatmen! Yes… so someone’s balking them from going near the lake. At this hour? A grain of hope clung obstinately to life within him, for the police might justify him yet, and come in time for Maggie, though not for him. Bargaining was out of the question, what had he to bargain with? Certainly not his own life, that was already forfeit. No means even of buying time. If he set out to sell his life as high as he could, there would be bullets flying here, and Aylwin might opt to cut his losses and change his plans, and hurry both his prisoners out of the world and into the ground together. No, nothing left to do but count on the Volga boatmen—whoever they were, thank God for them!—and submit without provocation, and pray that they might be police patrols who would never go home until she was found alive.
Robin Aylwin swung one long leg negligently from the edge of the settle, played with his little pistol, and watched his men at work. A job like any other. He paid no more attention to Francis, and Francis, arrived at the bleak conclusion that there was nothing he could do for Maggie but die submissively, had fallen mute. It was Maggie who broke the silence.
‘Francis!’
Never in his life had he heard his name spoken like that. A small, fine-spun, golden, intimate sound, like the marvellous mezza voce she could float clean to the back row of the remotest gallery of any opera house in the world, to pierce the last listener’s heart as if no one existed but himself and the singer. Out of the centre of one being, and aimed with certainty to reach the centre of another. For no one was present here now but Francis and Maggie. She had excised the others from her own consciousness and she banished them from his. There was only one thing left that she could do for Francis, and she was doing it as well as she knew how.
‘Francis, I’m sorry I ever got you into this. Forgive me! But I want to tell you that for my part I’m glad to have known you, even on these conditions. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I don’t have to say good-bye. I shan’t be long after you.’
Robin had turned his head to stare at her. The men leaning hard over the half-open grave froze, and hung watching and listening. And then Robin’s head went back with a toss like an angry horse balking, and he uttered a shout of brief and violent laughter. Something in the sound sent his men scurrying back to work on the second stone in haste. Never had Maggie looked at him like that, never spoken his name with that particular awareness that suddenly bestowed a greatly enlarged identity. Never had she turned on him this starry face, with blazing, recognising eyes wide-open to love. He had gone to the trouble to stage a beautiful declaration of love for her once, and she had not even heard him. A phoney love, of course! Still, by all the rules she ought to have succumbed.