Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (14 page)

When he drove out on to the straight stretch along the floor of the valley there were no rear lights anywhere to be seen. He put on a spurt to reassure himself that the quarry was still around, but the night remained vacant, calm and clear. The moon was high, the wind had dropped, the rags of cloud had been fretted away into scattered threads. The road ahead was utterly innocent of traffic going his way; and the first thing he encountered was one more black police Volkswagen, cruising gently along to meet him.

Somewhere between the edge of Scheidenau and this point rather less than a mile along the road, the Mercedes and its crew of three and their kidnapped man had all vanished without trace.

Ever since midday the Alte Post had been taken over by a wedding party. Maggie could hear across the water the sound of their fiddles and guitars, and the blown drifts of singing that grew beerier and gayer as the evening drew in. Several times during the dusk the guests had made brief exploratory sallies down to the water, the women like bright, blown petals swept along in a gale, but each time the showers had driven them in again to their dancing and drinking. The array of lights winked across the lake; the windows had been closed against the rain, and only wisps of music emerged now when some door was opened. Every time that happened, the night seemed to be shaken and convulsed with a distant burst of gigantic laughter.

Maggie went in from the verandah with a few drops of rain sparkling in her hair, and a half-hearted ray of moonlight, the first to break through the clouds, following at her heels. It looked as though they meant to keep up the party all night over there, surely she could have another half-hour of practice before she closed the piano.

The old authentic delight had come back, the intoxication that had been missing for so long. She was alive again, she could sing, she hated to stop singing. When this was over she must get into form quickly, and go back to pick up the wonderful burden. When this was over!

She had not looked ahead at all yet; her vision stopped short, charmed and exalted, at the recognition of her own deliverance. What if that lunch at The Bear had proved only a torment and a frustration? It would not always be so. Francis had promised to come to her here, and he would come; and this time they would be able to talk freely. There had to be respect between them, and an honourable understanding, everything circumstances had made impossible before. It was still true, for all their efforts at noon, that they had never met. Maggie looked forward to their meeting now with passion and impatience; she wanted to know him, and she wanted to be known. The world is too full of impaired and partial contacts that achieve nothing, satisfy no need, do justice to no one. Their relationship should at least close on a better footing than that. She had the Mahler song settings from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ on the piano. Contraltos are liable—Tom in one of his sourer moods had once remarked that there was no doubt about it being a liability!—to find themselves expected to include a good deal of Mahler in their recital programmes. Maggie, for her part, had no reservations at all. These full-dress romantic settings of folk-ballads four centuries old might stick in Tom’s gullet, but they were strong wine to her.

Ich ging mit Lust durch einem grünen Wald,

Ich hört die Völein singen,

She sang that opening line, and as always it seemed to her a complete song in miniature, with a logical development, a single climax and a perfect resolution.

Many years ago, when she was first learning these songs, she had written in beneath the German words her own attempt at an English singing version. Her unfamiliarity with the original language had worried her, as though it stood between her and the depth of interpretation she wanted. It was easy enough to get someone to provide a literal translation into English, but the meaning divorced from the rhythm and feel of the German had been no help at all. She had wanted a true image, and the only way had been to make one for herself. She never thought of the songs now in her version, she no longer needed these stepping-stones into a world she knew better than her own heart. But in their time they had served their purpose.

As forth I went, all in the gay greenwood,

To hear the birds a-singing…

She sang it through in the English, with care and wonder, because now it was the English that seemed alien.

Curiously she turned the pages to see what she had made of some of the grander songs. ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ belonged to the later set, originally conceived with orchestral accompaniment, and the piano was a poor substitute for those distant, haunting trumpet calls and drum rolls that hung like ominous storm-clouds over the illusion of happy reunion. The soft, brooding introduction came to hesitant life under her fingers, and her voice took up the doubtful, hopeful question with which the song opened:

Wer ist denn draussen, und wer klopfet an.

Der mich so leise, so leise wecken kann
?

Who’s that without there, who knocks at my door,

Imploring so softly, so softly: Sleep no more
?

She had no intention of being asleep when Francis came…

Das ist der Herzallerliebste dein,

Steh’ auf und lass mich zu dir ein
…

Your love, your own true love is here,

Rise up and let me in, my dear!

And must I longer wait and mourn?

I see the red of dawn return
…

… nor of keeping him waiting outside the door, patiently tapping, like the last time. This meeting had to pay a lot of debts.

…
The red of dawn, two stars so bright.

O that I were with my delight,

With mine own heart’s beloved
!

The maiden arose and let him in.

Most welcome home, my more than kin,

Most welcome home, my own true love
…

She could not help remembering a moment in another hotel room, arms holding her, lips on hers, a voice whispering brokenly: Maggie, forgive me, forgive me! Whether she liked it or not, there was love also to be taken into account. You cannot demand truth, and then select half and throw the inconvenient remainder away. Something would have to be done even about love, if they were to be honest with each other.

Ah, do not weep, love, do not pine,

Within the year you shall be mine,

Ere long you shall be one with me

As never bride on earth shall be,

No, none but you on earth, love
!

Across the heath to war I fare,

The great green heath so broad and bare
…

She sang it through to the end, to the last hair-raising diminuendo among the distant fanfares.

For there, where the splendid trumpets blare and thunder,

There is my house, my house the green turf under.

She would really have to stop this. When the last note of the postlude died away it was so silent that it was borne in upon her guiltily how late it was. Most of the guests must be trying to sleep. Much better, too, if she put out all the lights and seemed to be joining the sleepers; he would find it more difficult to approach if there was light spilling down the staircase into the trees.

She stood for a moment listening, after the lights were out, but everything was quiet and still, not even a thread of song drifted to her across the water. She lay down on the bed in her grey and white housecoat to wait patiently for Francis.

She was close to sleep, for all her resolution and eagerness, when the expected tapping came at the glass door on to the verandah. She leaped up gladly, switched on the small bedside lamp, and ran through the sitting-room to whisk aside the curtain and fling the door wide.

The maiden arose, and let him in
…

The faint light from outside gilded a wet, glistening outline, the shape of a man tall against the sky. The little gleam from the bedroom lit upon the pallid hand that rapped at the glass, and the black stone in the remembered ring on his finger.

The breath congealed in Maggie’s throat and the blood in her veins.

This was not Francis, this pale, tense face and shimmering wet body slipping silently into her room, with slow drops coursing down his temples and hair plastered like weed against his forehead. Not Francis, but a drowned man come back out of his grave, out of the lake, out of the past, just when she had allowed herself to be tricked into believing herself rid of him for ever. The rank scent of lake-water and death came over the sill with him, drifting over her in a wave of faintness and nausea. She gave back before him a few steps, and then was stone, unable to move or speak. She was cold, cold, cold as death.

Then everything began to slip away from her, like flesh peeling from her bones, all her delusions of hope, all her belief in the future, any future, even her passion for her own gift. All illusory, all drifting away like dispersed smoke, leaving her naked and lost and damned after all. The world and time came toppling upon her, closing in until there was nothing left but this moment, which was her death.

He came towards her slowly, smiling his pale, drowned smile, his hands held out to her. For what had he come up out of his grave if not to claim her? The hands touched her breast, and cold as she was, she felt their icy chill sear her to the bone. Cold, wet arms went round her and drew her down, down into green depths…

Her lips moved, saying: ‘Robin!’ but made no sound. There was a voice whispering in her ear, soft and distant through the darkness that was beginning to wind itself about her:

Aufs Jahr sollst du mein Eigen sein.

Mein Eigen sollst du werden gewiss

Wie’s Keine sonst auf Erden ist,

O Lieb… auf grüner Erden…

Within the year you shall be mine… mine as never bride on earth can be… No, none on this green earth
… How could she have disregarded the end? Mine in my house across the heath, the last dwelling of the drowned…
the house of green turf
…

His face drew near to her, floating through the gathering dark, smiling. When it swam out of focus his lips touched hers, and cold and dark burned into one absolute and overwhelmed her. She sagged in the arms that held her. She experienced death, the death that gave her back to him.

Stooping, the dead man hoisted her slight weight to his shoulder, and carried her away…

Bunty Felse sat in the gallery at the Alte Post until past eleven o’clock, watching the fun and waiting for George to come home.

For two days, ever since the poacher and the police had fished Friedl Schiffer’s body out of the lake, Bunty had been on her own. It was all very well for George to conduct his mild investigations in private, so long as he was merely keeping an eye on two English people apparently involved in something mysterious and possibly dangerous, but not known to be in any way criminal; but murder was quite another matter. So George had gone to the local police with his part of the story, and Bunty had been left to take care of herself from that moment on. What they had made between them out of their pooled information was more than she could guess, but its result had been to provide George with an English-speaking plainclothes-man and a car, with
carte blanche
to shadow Francis Killian’s movements as he thought fit. As for the girl, she was safe enough at the Goldener Hirsch; the hotel was under police surveillance, and she had showed no inclination to try to go anywhere, except for a walk into the town to have lunch, surprisingly enough, with her compatriot at The Bear, a meeting which could hardly have been as unplanned as it appeared. And even there they had been directly under George’s eye, whether they knew it or not. Bunty hadn’t seen him since he walked into the restaurant on Maggie’s heels, and left his wife to slip back alone to the Alte Post, before either of those two caught a glimpse of her.

She arrived just in time to relieve the lunch-time loneliness of the elderly Englishwoman who had accidentally got herself included in a predominantly young party, at this tag-end of the holiday season, and found herself ruthlessly shaken from their every activity. To be honest, she was a bore, and Bunty had a certain amount of sympathy with the young people; but since there was no chance of being useful to George for the rest of the day, she resigned herself cheerfully enough to filling a gap for someone else.

The elderly Englishwoman was fascinated and repelled by the wedding party, which was a great deal more rumbustious and well-lubricated than any at which she had ever been a guest. The enormous energy of those young men and their strapping girls seemed to her slightly indecent, and even the lustiness of the music had a strongly earthy flavour about it. The boys might all be in their best dark suits and dazzlingly white shirts, but they still looked as ebulliently fleshy and muscular as in their everyday leathers, and the pointed town shoes pounded the wooden floor as solidly as local hand-made mountain boots. And that awful man who seemed to be cheer-leader and master of ceremonies, the one with the beery paunch and the brick-red face who had always a girl in one hand and a two-litre stein in the other, such a man as that, totally uninhibited, simply could not happen in England. The elderly Englishwoman had, Bunty had discovered, run through two husbands, and one of them had been a butcher and the other a brewer, which made her views rather more surprising. Either the quality of English butchers and brewers was in decline, or she was remembering them rather as she would have had them than as they had been.

The master of ceremonies was, in fact, rather a splendid figure, over six feet high and nearly as wide, with a roaring laugh and the true mountain bass voice, straight out of a square mile of cavern.

He was the one who kept leading little forays out into the mild evening, to see if it had yet stopped raining. If it cleared, he would have them all tumbling out to the hotel boat-house, with arms full of food and hands full of bottles, to embark with their musicians and their instruments and their inexhaustible energy on the pewter surface of the Scheidenauersee.

The bride and ’groom had long departed, seen off with the maximum of noise and every traditional joke. The elderly Englishwoman said good night and went off to bed, but the party showed no sign of ending as long as food, drink and breath held out. Now Helmut was charging out by the garden door for the fiftieth time, and out there one of the girls was hallooing that it had stopped raining and the moon was out. There was loud and hilarious conference, and the musicians began to pack up their music and stands. Might as well see the aquacade set off, Bunty thought, and went up to her room over the lake.

They would be a little time yet, they were hunting for lanterns to take with them, to turn the night into a carnival. Bunty took her hair brush to the open window, and looked at the long, comfortable bulk of the Goldener Hirsch, high above the trees. Several lights were still burning there, and several windows uncurtained, so that an ethereal golden haze brooded over the crest of the hill, as though a swarm of fireflies had clustered there. As she watched, one or two of the lights blinked out. Maggie’s two windows were already dark. No, not quite, in the inner one there was a glow-worm spark that must be the bedside lamp. A convalescent like Maggie should sleep early and long.

Down beneath Bunty’s window three wedding guests, the vanguard of the flotilla, were opening the boat-house. On impulse Bunty turned back into the room, and went to look for George’s binoculars. She was not sleepy, and this promised to be quite a night. If only she had happened to catch Helmut’s hospitable eye, down there in the hall, she could probably have got herself an invitation to join the party; everyone who was willing was welcome. Free transport across the lake to that lovely and sinister shore where Friedl had died two nights ago. Not that there would be anything relevant to find there, after the police had combed the whole stretch of woodland thoroughly. They had found merely several trampled places, hardly very informative where tourists were accustomed to walk, sit and picnic even thus late in the year, and one photograph, half-buried in long grass among the trees. It had not been there longer than a day or two, or the previous rains would have reduced it to a pulp; and the implications were too obvious to resist. Robin Aylwin, George had guessed, on being shown the thing, though he could not positively know whether he was right or not. And at his request they had showed it to Bunty; and Bunty did know. It was a long time ago, but Bunty, after all, had handled not only the bookings but also the publicity on that tour. It was not merely a matter of knowing the faces; she knew the photograph.

The glasses were powerful, and seemed to find light where the naked eye could find none, though she realised as soon as she looked again without them that the moon had emerged again, and was pouring a pale wash of silver across the surface towards the farther shore. Below her several boats were rocking gently on the water, and a shouting, laughing company was piling aboard food, drink, lanterns, guitars, game girls and husky boys. Oars rattled hollowly into rowlocks, there was a good deal of scuffling and scrambling for places. Bunty heard a motor sputtering experimentally; that would surely be Helmut, whose ambition knew no bounds. She lengthened the focus of the glasses again, and made a thoughtful sweep along the shore opposite, just as the wave of moonlight reached it. It looked almost close enough to touch. She fixed on the forward wash of the tide of light, and let her sweep keep pace with it; and for a moment she felt like a surf-rider. Round towards the bowl of darkness below the Goldener Hirsch, stroking the advancing light across the close-set trunks of the trees like fingers over the strings of a harp.

Thus she saw by pure chance, and was the only one to see, the figure that suddenly lunged forward out of the trees beneath the hotel. A man, tall, curiously top-heavy, bursting straight out of the shadow towards the water. The licking tongue of light found pallor about his shoulders, darkness below, a head bent somewhat forward. It had no time to find features or inform her of details, though her eyes in that instant had photographed more than she realised; for at that same moment Helmut got his motor-boat rocketing into life, and with a huge bass-baritone bellow of triumph shot out across the lake, a torch spearing the air before him and a lantern glowing bravely at the stern,three blonde girls trailing scarves in the slip-stream, and the first three or four rowing boats labouring valiantly after. The figure at the edge of the trees recoiled on the instant, and vanished into cover. Appearing and disappearing were almost one movement, so abruptly was he come and gone. There had been a lift of the head, alert to record the gaily-coloured invasion of his solitude, a glimpse of a regular oval of pallor that told her nothing about his face except that he was clean-shaven. But the vehement movements said young and the aplomb of his responses said he was as quick on the uptake as a wild beast. Bunty ranged the whole rim of the lake there, and tried to penetrate the belt of trees, but she saw no more of him, and no movement to indicate where he passed.

There was, however, nothing about him that could possibly be imaginary, not even in retrospect. Bunty lowered the glasses, and watched the hilarious progress of Helmut’s aquacade towards the very curve of shore where the apparition had emerged and vanished. She was unreasonably disturbed. Who recoils like that from being observed by good-natured, harmless souls bent on nothing but fun? Poachers? Where poachers had the sympathy of most people, barring officials, it seemed far-fetched.

True, now she came to think of it, that top-heavy appearance of his, and the slight stoop, the bending of the head, these were all consistent with the fact that he had been carrying something. Something pale. Why else that pallor there at his shoulder? It wasn’t warm enough to be running around at night in shirt-sleeves. That was it, he had been hurrying head-forward, bent under something he carried… And as soon as she had thought of it in those terms, she was almost certain it could not have been a net, even if night-poachers here used a net. No, something heavier than that. Nets are nylon now, they weigh almost nothing. This man had been carrying a considerable weight. Not too much for him, he had moved freely and forcefully under it. Nevertheless, something heavier than a net.

Heavy and pale, and turning him into an asymmetrical shape. The bulk poised on one shoulder.

A small core of ice seemed to spring to life in Bunty’s heart. For the more she thought about that shape draped upon the stranger’s shoulder, the more did it put on a positive and eloquent form, and confront her, in spite of all her sound, sensible skepticism, with the idea of a girl’s limp body in a light-coloured garment, something long and wide-skirted, a housecoat or a negligee. Her weight nicely balanced on the man’s shoulder, one arm and hand dangling. Nets don’t have hands, whatever they have! Was she imagining it now, after the event?

But why should he start back and hide himself so promptly, so instinctively, if his movements were innocent? And where, come to that, was he heading in such a hurry before Helmut scared him away? For he had started out of the trees at speed, straight towards the water. And there was no boat in all that sweep of shore, no landing stage below the hotel, nothing but the strip of gravel and then dark water.

She reached this point, and the short hairs rose on her neck. What business could he have had with the lake at this hour? What, except the business someone had had with Friedl? Maybe he was still there, somewhere among the trees in hiding, waiting for the revellers to get tired at last, and go home to bed.

And then
?

She had a feeling that she was imagining things, probably making the world’s fool of herself. But one girl had been drowned, only two nights ago. And that had been murder.

Bunty made up her mind. There was another girl at the heart of this affair, and where could be the harm in making sure that she was safe in her bed? Midnight or not, there was no sense in waiting; and after all, they had known each other once, however briefly and however long ago. She dropped George’s glasses on the bed, and went straight downstairs to the telephone booth in the hall.

Gisela, startled out of her beauty sleep by the extension ’phone beside her bed, was scandalised at the very suggestion.

‘But Miss Tressider went to her room at nine o’clock, she will have been asleep for a long time. I cannot disturb her. Can it not wait until to-morrow, if you are staying in Scheidenau?’

‘No,’ said Bunty crisply, ‘it can’t. Or at least, that’s exactly what I want to find out, whether it can or not. I tell you what, you have keys, you slip up and have a look if she’s all right, and if she is, I’ll call her to-morrow.’

Though even so, she thought doubtfully, there were other girls who might equally be in danger, supposing Friedl’s killer was a random defective just breaking out after long harmlessness. What mattered was whether she had really seen what she supposed. But always her mind came back to Maggie. Who else stood so hapless and so alone in the storm-centre of all these happenings?

‘I am sorry,’ said Gisela indignantly, ‘I cannot do such a thing.’

‘All right, then,’ said Bunty. ‘I can! I’m coming over.’

Gisela was waiting for her in the vast vaulted lobby of the Goldener Hirsch when she arrived, out of breath, a quarter of an hour later. It would have been quicker to get Helmut to ferry her over, but Helmut was weaving inspired circles round the grouped rowing boats in the centre of the lake, and his massed choir was singing, pleasantly enough but very loudly: