“Yes. Thank you! I’m all right,” said Dominic, still staring down into the boiling eddies of dust below, beneath which the wreckage of the talus still slid and settled with sluggish, sated movements. He thought of a body buffeted and ground and slashed in that titanic disintegration, and the body became live, and his own. He would never play with those things again! He felt sick, but he was alive. For the moment that was all he could feel, and it was enough.
“Mr. Alda…” he said. His tongue was slow and stupid, and his mouth dry with dust. “Mr. Veselsky, I mean…”
“Mr. Veselsky is on his way down, look! Like one of his own goats! Does he look damaged? Nie, there was only one shot—mine.”
Alda was dropping down the grass slope on the far side of the scar in long, sure-footed bounds, balanced like a dancer. They saw that he carried a rifle in his hands.
“Good!” said Ondrejov. “The gun at least we have, if we can’t have the man.” He laid his arm warmly about Dominic’s shoulders, and turned him towards the descent into the bowl. “Come on, let’s go down. Let’s see what we have there.”
What they had was a wilderness, a new desolation. They foregathered in silence in the safe, hollowed heart of the bowl, where nothing could fall any farther, and ranged the scattered fringes of a desert of tumbled stones, through a pall of acrid dust that still silted down thickly on every blade of grass between the rocks, until there was no green left. Somewhere under those piled cairns the body of Robert Welland’s murderer was buried.
“There won’t be much to identify,” said Ondrejov grimly, “but I suppose we shall have to dig him out. We shall need heavy equipment on the job. You didn’t, by any chance, get a proper look at him?”
“No, nothing. I saw only the end of his fall.”
“And we had no field-glasses. No telescopic sights, not even a diopter. Our best shots were covering the road.” Ondrejov nodded sombrely, looking down at the rifle in his hands, on which the dust was settling pale and fine as talc. “He had, though. A Zbrojovka Brno gun, of course. ZKM 581 small-calibre rifle. Automatic. Light to carry, not too bulky to hide, and a man could run into them by the thousand here. That tells us nothing till we find out who applied for the permit to buy it. As we shall.” He shook himself like an experienced old dog making ready for action, and turned towards the downhill path, coughing. “Let’s get back where we can breathe. We’ll work this out in Pavol.”
“Then we still don’t know who he is,” said Dominic, swept along in Ondrejov’s arm, shaky with reaction now.
Ondrejov hoisted an eloquent shoulder. “We soon shall. We’re in no hurry now.” He looked back once, briefly, at the murky desolation where the murderer lay buried. “Neither is he,” he said laconically. “Even for him, the emergency’s over.”
“I’m officially off-duty,” said Ondrejov smugly, “but as Major Kriebel is at Liptovsky Mikulás, examining Mr. Welland’s baggage at his hotel there, and enquiring into his movements, I shall take the liberty of presiding until he returns.”
And he did, and the wires hummed. First, the salvage operations in Zbojská Dolina; then a dutiful call, naturally, to Major Kriebel, so worded that he would, with luck, feel it incumbent upon him, in defence of his dignity, to go to survey the devastation in the valley before he came back to Pavol; and lastly, calls to the two hotels at Mikulás where Freeling, Blagrove and Sir Broughton Phelps had installed themselves, and across the square to the Slovan, where Paul Newcombe had taken a room. None of them was actually in his hotel to be contacted personally, which was hardly surprising on a lovely August afternoon; it was a question of leaving a message in each case, asking them all to report at Ondrejov’s office, in person or by telephone, as soon as possible.
That done, Ondrejov assembled his cast for the last act, the Mather twins from their forlorn and fruitless councils of war at the Slovan, Tossa from a long and blissful sleep on her solitary cot downstairs. And they all talked at last, fully and freely.
After that, Ondrejov talked.
“When Mr. Terrell was found dead,” he said, “I was already in possession of the facts about that death, but not of the background. I therefore knew from the beginning that this was not a case of murder. But there were certain curious features about it that interested me. And when you, Miss Barber, applied for a visa, with your friends, the authorities, who were also on the alert, contacted me. We supplied you with Mirek as an escort, and waited to see what would follow. And it was known to me, before the death of Mr. Welland brought things into the open, that you were making enquiries about your stepfather’s movements. Movements which we already knew, but to which your anxiety gave significance. You even uncovered some points which were not known to us. For instance, at the Hotel Sokolie—you remember the waiter who spoke English? He was a very worried man, Miss Barber, very worried. He had thought nothing of the small matter of the card-game, and the paper on which Ivo Martínek kept the score, until you became excited about it.”
Tossa, refreshed and radiant, sat by Dominic’s side, and smiled back at Ondrejov with all her heart. She had never looked younger, and never in Dominic’s experience half so light-hearted. She was clear of suspicion, clear even of her suspicions of herself. Terrell had not been a hero or a patriot, but only an ambitious schemer bent on climbing in his profession, if necessary over other people’s faces. She was free of him, she had her life back fresh and new, and she had Dominic tightly by the hand. She knew now, though imperfectly, how nearly she had lost him.
“Naturally I questioned the Martíneks about that incident; so already I had a picture of another kind of case, with its roots somewhere in the past, even before Mr. Welland was killed. I knew from Mr. Veselsky—shall I call him Mr. Alda, for our purposes?—I knew from Mr. Alda that he had known Terrell, and worked in the same enterprise with him in England. I knew from your activities that you suspected Terrell had been hunting for someone or something in the neighbourhood of Zbojská Dolina, and I knew from Ivo the nature of the lead he—and you after him—had found. Of Welland I knew only that he had known Terrell, and that he, too, was returning with marked persistence to the place where Terrell had died, also plainly in search of something there. It was as evident to me as it was to you that every thread led into the heart of that one valley, and that the person to whom all those threads were leading must be Mr. Alda. The man who had known and worked with Terrell, and reported his death, the man who had an English past of some importance. Which, naturally, we, too, investigated.
“Now you, Miss Barber, have been so kind as to fill in all the gaps. It is very lucky for me, that Mr. Welland was forced by circumstances to confide in you. I had not this detailed knowledge then, but I had enough to show me that certain persons, all English, were very much interested in locating Mr. Alda, and that after the death of the first of them those of you who were continuing the search obviously held that same death to be murder. I knew it was not; but it was interesting to think that there was somewhere, known to someone, a reason why it could have been murder. And the second death was murder. I was not altogether prepared for that, never having taken it quite seriously. Your secret agent game became real, quite suddenly, because it appeared there was someone who was desperate to prevent you from finding Mr. Alda, someone who had killed and would kill again to keep the facts about his departure from England from being re-examined, or the case re-opened in any way.