Tossa hitched her camera round her neck, and left the path. Without a word she turned towards that face of rock, studying it all the while with drawn brows and jutting lip as she went, and set a straight course for the foot of it across the strip of meadow and into the fringe of bushes.
They all followed her docilely. Dominic would have followed her in any case, and the twins didn’t care which direction they took, where all was new and the sun was shining. Almost imperceptibly, for these very reasons, they had arrived at an arrangement by which Tossa constantly set the course, and the others fell into line after her; for Tossa did care where she went. Tossa was a woman with a purpose. Through the trees she led them, following her nose blindly now, or perhaps drawn by the invisible thread of tension that had compelled her across Europe. Her navigation was accurate enough. She came to the spot where the trees fell away, then to the first slanting tables of outcrop rock, tilted at the same angle as the strata in the exposed face above. The cliff hung like a pale grey curtain over them, the heat of the sun rebounding from it into their faces. A broad limestone shelf, moving upward in three irregular steps, jutted from the foot of the pleated folds.
“Where are we going?” asked Christine idly, not greatly concerned about the answer.
“Oh, we’ll go on up the valley in a minute.” Toasa squinted experimentally and almost convincingly into the view-finder, and backed a little from the cuff. “I just thought this would make a fine backcloth for a picture.”
If it was simply an excuse for her detour, it wasn’t a bad one. The light was fingering every pleat in the rock curtain like the quivering strings of a harp, and she had space enough to get plenty of contrast and scope into her picture.
“Would you mind disposing yourselves nicely on the seats so thoughtfully provided for you? One on each step. A little more to the left, please, Chris. My left, you nut! Yes, that’s fine! Hold it!”
They clambered obediently up the shelf of limestone, and sat down where she directed, while she made two exposures, and took her time about it. As she lowered the camera for the second time, Dominic saw her raise her head and cast one rapid glance at the cliff directly above the spot where he was sitting; and because she had just uncovered her face it was for once a naked and readable glance, fierce and doubtful and afraid, and aching with a dark, suppressed excitement that disquieted him horribly.
It was gone in a moment, she was winding her film on and waving them down. The others had noticed nothing, because they were looking for nothing. But Dominic cast one quick glance upwards, where she had looked, and saw that he had been sitting right beneath the jagged nose of rock that jutted to form the angle of the path above.
He felt a light sweat break on his forehead and lip, as understanding broke like a flush of sudden heat in his mind. Tossa on a trail was single-minded to the point of ruthlessness. That projection of rock up there, making a blind cross with the face of the cliff against the sky, was the cross that marked the spot where the accident occurred. He was sitting in the very place where Tossa’s stepfather had crashed to his death.
Dana Martínek was alone in the bar when Dominic went in to order their coffee that evening. He had hoped she would be. His friends were sitting on the little front terrace under the stars, well out of earshot. If he was making a fool of himself, concocting a melodrama out of a few trivial incidents and Tossa’s moodiness, now was the time to find out and alter course.
“Miss Martínek, we’ve been up as far as the chapel this afternoon. Just opposite there, on the other side of the brook, there’s an almost sheer rock face, with a path crossing it. You know the place I mean?”
She turned from the washing of glasses to look at him curiously; a tall girl, not pretty, but with the composed and confident carriage which was common among young women here, and a cast of face to which he was becoming accustomed, wide-boned but softly and smoothly fleshed, widest across the eyes, which were themselves rounded and full and clear. Eyes that could conceal with perfect coolness; but what they did choose to confide, he thought, would be the truth.
“Yes, I know it,” she said, volunteering nothing.
“Wasn’t somebody killed in this valley only a couple of weeks or so ago? An Englishman who was staying here?”
She said: “Yes,” without any particular reluctance or hesitation, but that was all.
“And was that the place where it happened? He fell from that path on to the rock?” His spine chilled at the thought that he had been sitting there, posing for a photograph. “Miss Martínek—”
Burningly candid faces like hers could withhold smiles, too, their assurance made it possible to be grave even at close quarters and with strangers. But she smiled at him then, not without a touch of amusement in the goodwill. She was twenty-one, two good years older than Dominic.
“You may call me Dana, if you like. It is quicker. Yes, you are right, it was there that he fell.”
“From that bend in the path?”
“So it seemed.”
“Would you mind telling me about it?”
“What is there to tell? Mr. Terrell came here and wished to stay, and the room was free, because one couple who should have come had illness at home. So of course, we took him. He was out alone all day. That’s normal for people who come here, at least when the weather is good. So we were not worried on the third evening, when he did not come back until dark. But by ten o’clock we grew anxious, and alerted the mountain patrol, and went out ourselves with lights, to search in the head of the valley. But we were not the first to find him. When we got there the police from Liptovsky Pavol were already there. He was dead when they found him.”
“The police? But you hadn’t notified the police, had you? Only the mountain rescue people.”
She shrugged. “The patrol must have called the police, I suppose. They were there. It was they who found him.”
“And his injuries? Did it seem as if they were the result of a fall like that?”
She looked him in the eye for a moment, very gravely. “Mr. Felse…”
“You may call me Dominic,” he said, with a grin that managed to be unwontedly impudent because of his nervousness. “It takes longer, but it’s more friendly.”
“Dominic,” said Dana, her smile reappearing for a moment, “you should ask the police these questions. I did not have to go and look at that poor man broken on a slab of limestone, and so I did not go. All I know is what my father said, and he helped to carry him. You know what such a fall on such a surface could do to a man’s bones, how many fractures there would be, what sort of fractures? Yes, he was like that. Yes, he fell. You do not get like he was in any other way. They say he died within a few minutes, maybe almost instantly. And I think you have too romantic an imagination, you should curb it.”
“Not me,” said Dominic, taking his elbows from the bar with a sigh. “It isn’t that easy. Well, thanks, anyhow. I’ll take the coffee out, shall I, and save you a journey.”
While she was making it he thought of another question. “What sort of equipment was he carrying, this Mr. Terrell?”
He had hardly expected very much from that, but she turned and looked at him with interest. “Yes, that was perhaps odd. He had with him ice-axe, nylon ropes, kletter-schuhe, everything for climbing. Naturally he did not carry or need them here. But perhaps it is not so strange, because he came here from the High Tatras. You know them, the big mountains, you must have seen them across the valley as you came from Ruzomberok.”