The Piper on the Mountain
Ellis Peters
Felse Family 05
A 3S digital back-up edition 2.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
Contents
CHAPTER I: THE MAN WHO FELL OFF A MOUNTAIN
CHAPTER 2: THE MAN WHO WASN’T SATISFIED
CHAPTER 3: THE MAN WHO THUMBED A LIFT
CHAPTER 4: THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SCORE
CHAPTER 5: THE MAN ON THE SKYLINE
CHAPTER 6: THE MAN IN THE CHAPEL
CHAPTER 7: THE MAN WHO WASN’T IN CHARGE
CHAPTER 8: THE MEN WHO CAME TO THE RESCUE
CHAPTER 9: THE MAN WHO REAPPEARED
CHAPTER 10: THE MAN IN AMBUSH
CHAPTER 11: THE MAN WHO FAILED TO ARRIVE
CHAPTER 12: THE MAN WITH THE FUJARA
Also by Ellis Peters
Mourning Raga
Death to the Landlords
City of Gold and Shadows
The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael
And writing as Edith Pargeter
The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet
Copyright © 1966 Ellis Peters
First published in 1966 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd
First published in paperback in 1989
by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING PLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN 0 7472 3226 1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow
HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING PLC
Headline House
79 Great Titchfield Street
London W1P7FN
Chapter I
THE MAN WHO FELL OFF A MOUNTAIN
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Herbert Terrell went to spend his annual summer leave climbing on the Continent, and fell off a mountain in Slovakia. He was traversing a fairly steep rock face by a narrow path at the time, and it seemed that he must have missed his footing at a blind turn where the rock jutted abruptly. They found him fifty feet below, lying on a shelf at the foot of the slope. The shelf, being of white trias limestone, had predictably got the better of the collision. Terrell was impressively and conclusively dead.
Since there was nothing else they could well do for him, the local police did the obvious things. They took a long, cool look at the circumstances of his death, made a full report in the right quarter, popped the body in cold storage, and settled back to await instructions.
In due course, and through the appropriate channels, the news made its way back to all the interested parties in England; and between them, after their own fashion, they compiled Herbert Terrell’s obituary.
Sir Broughton Phelps, Director of the Marrion Research Institute, received the news on a Sunday morning in his London flat. Immaculate from church, he sat at his desk and ploughed his way with disfavour through the surplus of work that had kept him in town over a fine week-end, when he would very much rather have been in his garden in Berkshire, sunning himself in a lawn chair. However, he was a hard-working, serious minded and efficient public servant, very well aware of the responsibilities of his office, and the sacrifice of an occasional Sunday was something he accepted as part of the price of eminence.
For one moment, as he cradled the telephone, his whole mind was concentrated upon Herbert Terrell. He saw him more clearly than he had ever seen him in the flesh: forty-five or so, middling tall, even-featured, obstinately unmemorable; a useful, reliable subordinate, thorough, valuable, arid and uninteresting. He saw again the dry, tough methodical body, the austere face, the humourless eyes. Can there be such a thing as a civil servant who has ceased to be anything separate from his office? Where the human qualities are feeble and ill-developed, perhaps the function eats them. Phelps saw his Chief Security Officer clearly as never before, but he saw him for only a moment. The features began to fade at once, until all that was left was the empty outline of a man, the vacancy that would have to be filled immediately.
The Marrion Research Institute was one of those hybrids so frequent in English public and social life. Old man Marrion had founded and endowed the place out of his oil millions, to prospect in dynamics and fuels for the future. The government had taken advantage of an optimistic director’s over-spending to muscle in on this profitable field, and propped up the Institute’s temporarily shaky finances in exchange for a watching brief and an option on all the results the Marrion computers, drawing-boards and laboratories produced. And this uneasy and contentious engagement had culminated in a slightly embittered marriage a year later, when the Ministry assumed the husband’s role, and the Institute’s scientists and mechanicians found themselves islanded and fenced in by considerations of national security, who had ingenuously considered themselves, up to then, as dedicated to human advancement. They had felt, some of them, like the children of an autocratic Victorian household, strictly confined in a world where the cheerful and ungifted ran free. And some of them, Sir Broughton remembered, had rebelled. For a little while.
Circumstances had exalted Herbert Terrell’s office, as circumstances had placed him in it. Where security precautions are so tight and vital, the sudden death of one man cannot be allowed to disrupt essential services. To-day only a skeleton office staff and the maintenance men were in, tomorrow someone else must be securely installed in Terrell’s place, that man-shaped outline, faint as a wraith now, solidly filled again, another hand on the curbs, another sharp eye on the most secret of secret files, the private personnel file.
He supposed he’d better contact the Minister, and ensure that his authority to appoint could not be questioned. The old man didn’t care a damn, if the truth were told, but could be awkward if his perquisites were infringed or his nominal authority by-passed.
Sir Broughton Phelps picked up the telephone again, and switched on the scrambler before he asked for the number of the Minister’s country house. No doubt where he’d be on a fine Sunday in July.
“Just a few minutes, darling, ” he said across the desk to his decorative and influential wife, who had put her head into the library to call him to lunch. “Something’s come up unexpectedly. I won’t be long.”
She made a face at him, not entirely playfully. Not even on Sundays did his time belong to her, but she still considered that it should. “Something bad?”
“No, no, ” he said soothingly. “Nothing serious. Just a vacancy that’s cropped up and has to be filled, that’s all.”
The Minister’s private secretary was a dashing young man whose native flippancy was held in check by his unerring sense of occasion. He had more respect for Sir Broughton Phelps than for most people, but even that wasn’t saying very much. He intended, however, to rise in his profession, and he was good at official languages. It didn’t matter that Sir Broughton could disentangle his utterances at the other end of the line just as effectively as the scrambler could unscramble it. What is said, not what is meant, goes in the records.
“I’m extremely sorry, Sir Broughton, but the Minister’s just gone out for some urgently needed air and exercise. He’s been hard at it all morning. Is it anything urgent? Should I try to find him? Or can I convey a message, and get him to call you back later?”