Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain

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

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?”

Fishing, thought Sir Broughton, mentally translating. Slept all morning, and won’t come in until dusk. Could be over at Patterson’s with his horses, but more likely fishing.

“I’d be obliged if you could get word to him. I just heard from Prague that the Institute’s Security Officer has had an accident on holiday there, climbing in the mountains. I must make some arrangements to fill his place at once. No, it won’t be a temporary appointment. Terrell’s dead. If you could reach the Minister, I should be glad. My own nomination would be Blagrove, but of course I defer to his judgment.”

The secretary unscrambled that into: What does the old devil care, as long as the job’s done properly? Go and get his OK for me, and he can doze off again.

So he went. His thoughts, as he walked down the fields towards the river, were speculative and pleasurable. He had his eye on a certain promotion job himself, but unfortunately the most hazardous thing the present incumbent ever did was to play a moderate game of golf. A pity!

The Minister was flat on his tweedy back in the lush, vivid turf by the river, his rod carefully propped beside him. He opened one speedwell-blue eye, startlingly young under its thick grey brow, and trained it forbiddingly on his favourite assistant.

“No touts, no hawkers, no circulars!” he said, in the buoyant and daunting voice he had only acquired in his old age, after a lifetime of watching his step, and one liberating instant of abandoning every such anxiety.

“No, sir, I promise you needn’t move. It’s Phelps on the secret line. I wouldn’t call what he has a problem. It could be a slight jolt. His right-hand man’s died on him—Terrell, his Security Officer.”

“Nonsense!” said the Minister, closing the eye again. “Terrell’s out of England somewhere, the Caucasus, or some such outlandish region. Climbing. Does it every year. Never could understand people taking up such unintellectual hobbies. What’s in a lump of rock? What does he get out of it?”

“A broken neck, sir, apparently. It seems he fell off one of his pitches this time. They picked him up dead. No, sir, there’s no doubt. Sir Broughton’s had the official report. He’s concerned about the vacancy, and would like your authority to appoint.”

“Hmm, yes,” owned the old man after a moment’s thought, “I suppose we shall have to be thinking about that. Did for himself finally, did he? I always said it was an idiotic way of passing one’s time. Why do they do these things? I take it Phelps has someone in mind for the job?”

“He mentioned one Blagrove, sir, if you approve.”

“Old Roderick’s boy. Might do worse. Used to work with Terrell before his promotion, I remember. All right, tell him he can go ahead, I approve.” He closed both eyes again, and lay soaking in sun. Not fishing weather, of course, but you can’t have everything. “Oh, and, Nick…” He opened one eye again, reluctantly.

“Sir?”

“There’s a wife. Widow, rather. Terrell’s, I mean. Seem to remember they separated, about a year ago. If Phelps knows where to contact her, perhaps he should break the news, otherwise they may have trouble locating her.”

“Of course, I’ll suggest it to him.”

“Good boy!” said the Minister vaguely, and closed his eye again, this time with unmistakable finality, having taken care of everything. “Not that I think she’ll be fearfully interested,” he said honestly, and returned his mind gratefully to his own intellectual and productive hobby.

Chloe Terrell, formerly Chloe Barber, born Chloe Bliss and soon to be Chloe Newcombe, turned her key in the door of her Chelsea flat about eleven o’clock that night, and heard the telephone buzzing at her querulously. She towed Paul Newcombe across the hall after her, and plunged upon the instrument eagerly. One of the most disarming things about her was that even at forty-three she still expected only pleasant surprises. Telegrams, sudden knocks on the door at late hours, letters in unknown hands from unknown places, all the things that make most people’s blood run cold, merely made Chloe’s eyes light up, and had her running to meet benevolent fortune half-way. Fortune, hypnotised like the audiences from whom she conjured applause simply by expecting it, seldom let her down.

“Oh, Sir Broughton—how very nice! Have you been calling me earlier? I’m so sorry! Such a lovely day, we ran out to Windsor.”

She hoisted brows and shoulders at Newcombe across the pleasant, pastel-shaded room, to indicate that she couldn’t make out what this caller could possibly want with her. Off-stage and on, her voice had made such a habit of intimacy that she never could remember to moderate the tone, whether for dukes or dustmen.

“Get yourself a drink, darling, and make yourself comfortable. One for me, too, please, and I’ll be with you…” The telephone clucked at her, and she took her smooth, cool palm from the mouthpiece again. “No! But
really
? Oh, no, it’s impossible!”

She was a
belle laide
, brown, slender and sudden, with an oval, comical, elf’s face, a blinding smile, and huge, purple-brown eyes. The eyes grew larger and larger now, dilating in pure astonishment, without, as yet, any suggestion of either consternation or delight. You would have been willing to hazard, however, that she enjoyed being astonished. A blazing smile touched her parted lips and lingered, but that could have been the reflex of disbelief.

“You’ve taken my breath away. I don’t know what to say. Well, that’s very understanding of them, and very kind. I think I
should
like to go out there, yes. I do think I ought to, don’t you? Where was it you said? Just let me write it down.” She scribbled indecipherably on the margin of the telephone directory, and whistled soundlessly at the outlandish spelling involved. “Thank you so much for letting me know, Sir Broughton, and for your sympathy. So kind of you! So very kind! Good-bye!”

She put down the receiver, and stood staring at Newcombe over it, wide-eyed, bright-eyed, open-mouthed.

“Paul, the maddest thing! Herbert’s gone and got himself killed!”

Paul Newcombe spilled his whisky. A few drops flicked from his shaky fingers and spattered the large photograph of Chloe Bliss as Viola, which stood on top of the cabinet. She made a delicious boy.

“What did you say? Terrell
killed
?”

“Yes, darling! Had a fall, climbing somewhere in some impossible place.” She spelled out from her own hieroglyphics, not without difficulty, and with a very engaging scowl: “Zbojská Dolina—can that be right, do you think? In something called the Low Tatras, in Slovakia. He’d worn out all the ordinary Alps, you know. He was quite good, so they said. But this time he fell off a traverse, or something. Anyhow, they picked him up dead.”

“Look, honey, are you quite certain? Who came through with this? Can you rely on it that it’s true?”

“Of course it’s true. That was the head of his Institute on the line, and he had it officially. Poor old Herbert, who’d ever have thought it!”

“
Dead
! Well, I’m damned!”

“I know! And, darling, there’s another thing, he says the Czechoslovak authorities are prepared to make it possible for me to go out there immediately, if I like, and see about the arrangements for bringing him home. Isn’t that something? And I’ve never been to Czechoslovakia, so why not? After all, they’ve asked me—”

“Chloe,” he said, appalled, “you don’t realise what this really means.”

“Oh, yes, I do. But I didn’t do it to him, you know. I didn’t do a thing, it just happened. I can’t make it unhappen. So what’s the use of being hypocritical about it? In a way it’s very convenient, you can’t deny it. Now I shan’t have to bother about trying to get him to agree to a divorce, we can get married whenever we like. And he did have a certain amount of money, besides being insured. Not that I’d have wished anything bad to happen to him just for that—or even at all. But why not admit to being interested in the results, now that it has happened? I hate humbug. Money’s useful, and being a widow makes it easy to be your wife. And I want to be your wife, and you want me to—don’t you?”

Newcombe put down his whisky, tilted her head back gently by a fistful of her thick, dark, straight hair, and kissed her vehemently. She emerged smiling.

“Well, then! And you will come with me to this place in Czechoslovakia?”

In a couple of weeks more he had, in any case, to undertake a protracted buying tour on the Continent—he manufactured and imported gloves, handbags, brief-cases and other small leather goods—but of course if she wanted him to he would go. She always got what she wanted out of him.