The Piper on the Mountain

thought that he had been sitting there, posing for a photograph. “Miss Martinek—”

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.”

“Yes,” he agreed eagerly, remembering how abruptly that sickle of icy heads had appeared in the sky on their left hand, like a mirage of snow-fields and honed blue slopes and trailing banners of cloud beyond the green, lush flats of the Vah, fifteen miles wide. “Yes, there he’d want his kit.”

“I asked him how he could bear to leave sortie overe Pleso, but he said he had pulled a muscle in his arm, so he came away where he could walk, and not be tempted to use it too soon.”

“Strbske Pleso? That’s where he was staying, over there?”

“It means the lake of Strba. It is at the western end of the Freedom Road, that high-level road that runs along the range. Hand me that tray, will you, please? So, and there is your coffee.”

He thanked her, and lifted the tray, balancing it carefully. He had reached the doorway, encrusted with stars, when she said quietly behind him: “Dominic…”

“Yes?” He turned his head alertly.

“Do you know you have been asking me all the same questions your friend asked me this afternoon? The little dark girl—Miss Barber, I think she is called.”

“Yes… I thought she might have,” said Dominic, and wavered in the doorway for a moment more. “Did she ask what hotel he was staying at, over there?”

“No, she did not. But in any case he did not tell me that, and I did not ask him.”

“All right. Thanks, anyhow!”

He carried the tray of coffee out to the terrace. It was not at all surprising that he should arrive just in time to hear Tossa saying, with the sinister, bright edge to her voice that he was beginning to know only too well: “How about making a sortie over into the High Tatras, to-morrow?”

All the way along the winding road that brought them out of the range, with the enchanting little river bounding and sparkling on their left hand, and the firs standing ankle-deep in ferns along its rim, Dominic was waiting with nerves at stretch to see how she would manage to direct their movements exactly where she wanted to go, and how much she would give away in the process.

“To the right,” Tossa instructed him, poring over the map as though she had not already learned it by heart, “and keep on the signs for Poprad.”

At Liptovsky Hradok there was a promising fork, where the left-hand road seemed to set course directly for the roots of the mountains.

“Don’t take it,” warned Tossa, “keep on towards Poprad. It doesn’t join the Freedom Road, it goes straight over into Poland, and we can’t go, and anyhow I think the frontier’s closed there. It’s a broken line on this map. There’s a left fork from this road, oh, twenty kilometres on, that takes us up on to this Freedom Road, and then it runs on along the range all the rest of the way.”