She was out of the rock belt now, she set off boldly across the meadows, and he hung back in cover, and let her go. Once she looked round, and stood for a moment with head reared, watching and listening to make sure she was alone. Then, satisfied, she turned and hurried on, breaking into a run.
He dared not step into the open after her until she had vanished at the first turn of the path, where the outcrop rocks closed in upon it and twisted it, like fingers snapping off a thread. But then he set off across the thick, silent turf at a fast run, to make good the distance he had lost. Even if she looked back, now, she could not see him, and with this springy carpet under his feet she would not hear him. He reached the rocks, and began darting after her from bend to bend of the cramped path, until he heard a stone roll away from under her foot, somewhere ahead of him and not far away.
She had left the path; though narrow and winding here, it was almost level and partly grassed, a stone would not roll like that unless she had begun to climb again. By the sound, she had turned to the right from the track. That way there was at least one possible goal; he could see the roof of the little refuge, rose-coloured tiles against the backdrop of ashen scree. It was still in sunlight, a long ray pierced the open lantern tower like a golden lance. They had climbed a considerable distance already, and for a little while, at least, had outdistanced the twilight.
Yes, she was heading for the chapel. Quiet as she was, the small sounds she did make came down to him clearly, and he could trace her progress by them. The pathway up to the shelf had been laid, at one time, with flat stones, but many of them were unsteady now. And here there were thick bushes and even trees, encouraged by the shelter of the little promontory. Stones from the encroaching scree-slope behind had rolled right down among the bushes, and lay raw and pale in the grass. Then, as the track reached the edge of the level shelf, the trees fell back, and Tossa stepped out on to the plane of rock before the chapel door. Rubbish of scree had reached the wall on the inner side, and begun to pile up against the footings.
Tossa never hesitated. She walked quickly across the few yards of open space, towards the door that sagged sideways on its broken hinge. Dominic wormed his way to the edge of the trees, and watched her go. The place seemed private, silent and abandoned, surely safe enough. He found himself a secure spot in cover, and settled down to wait until she should reappear.
Tossa reached the door, laid her hand on the leaning timbers, and slid round them into the chapel. It seemed she might be a few minutes late for her appointment; at any rate, it was three minutes past eight by Dominic’s watch. She vanished. He began, almost unconsciously, to count seconds.
Four seconds, to be exact. Four seconds of silence from the instant when she disappeared round the sagging door into the dark interior. Then the sharp, small crack, that he took first for a dry twig snapping under a foot, and knew next moment for a gun-shot.
He discovered that he knew it when he found himself flat on his face, writhing like an eel out of the bushes and on to the grey, striated face of rock, wriggling frantically towards the door of the chapel. And it seemed that his senses were capable of splitting themselves into action squads, where the need was sharp enough, for he was simultaneously aware of recording the dull sound of a fall, and the faintest of muted cries, while his conscious hearing was busy with the sound of the shot, struggling to sort out its direction, and baffled by a multiplicity of echoes. Here in this confined and complex valley every explosion of sound ricocheted from plane to plane, repeated endlessly along the gorge, out to the open bowl to westward, and the lowland spaces to eastward.
Tossa had walked into the chapel erect and innocent. Dominic crawled, drawing up his feet behind him into the grateful shade of the doorway, and dragging himself up by the great iron latch. He scrambled round the obstruction, and the first thing that hit him was the slanting shaft of sunlight through the empty window-frame on his left hand. It blinded him for a moment, and then, before he regained his sight or took his sheltering arm down from his eyes, he grasped the significance of this late radiance, and dropped to the floor again in a hurry. His outstretched right hand lit upon something warm and rough-textured, a tweed sleeve, the roundness of an arm limp and still within it.
A yard before his face, and on the same level, Tossa’s face hung frozen and blank with shock, lips parted, great eyes stunned into dullness. That was the first thing he saw as his vision cleared again. The second was the young man who lay sprawled between them half on his face, one arm doubled under him, one flung out towards the doorway, with a blue-black hole oozing a sluggish glue of blood just to the right of the base of his skull, in the neatly cropped fair hair, and a small pool gathering underneath his throat, in the dust of the paved floor. A well-dressed young man, in good grey slacks and sportscoat, as English as brown ale. It was hardly necessary to stoop and examine the motionless, astonished face pressed against the dirty flagstones, but Dominic did it, all the same.
The man who ran the MG, the man who had drunk coffee in a corner of the kavarna at Zilina, and exchanged messages with Tossa by means of her comb-case, was never going to report on his mission, whatever it might be. There was no pulse detectable in the wrist on which Dominic pressed his fingers; there was not the faintest misting discernible on the watch-glass he held to the slack lips for want of a mirror.
X with diplomatic plates was unmistakably and irrevocably dead.
Tossa came out of her daze with a violence that almost shattered them both, broke into rending, tearless sobs, and tried to get to her feet, in a horrified recoil from the poor creature on the floor. Dominic dropped the heavy hand he had been holding, and caught her by the shoulders roughly, pulling her down again.
“Don’t get up! Don’t you understand? The window! The light!” He reached across the dead man, and drew her close to him, kneeling upright and holding her tightly in his arms. His back ached with her weight and his own, but that didn’t matter. Neither, for the moment, did the dead man over whom they leaned to each other thankfully and fearfully. “I’m here, I’m with you, I won’t leave you. Keep down, and keep hold of me. You’ll be all right. Tossa, you know me—Dominic. Now, take it easily, and we’ll pull out all right. I came to look after you. I said I’d be around.”
“He’s dead!” whispered Tossa, shivering with shock.
“He
“No, there’s nothing we can do. He’s dead.” It disposed, he saw, of the first urgency. He felt her relax in his arms. Now they were two, burdened with the responsibility only for themselves. It was no comfort at all, but it simplified things. It even accelerated understanding.
“I came here to meet him,” she said numbly. “He telephoned me. It wasn’t my mother.”
“I know. Never mind that now. What happened? When you came in here? Tell me what you can.”
“He was standing over there,” she said in a dulled but obedient whisper, “beyond the window, where it’s dark. When I came in, he started across to meet me. He stepped right into the sunlight, and then he suddenly lurched forward, and fell past me. I couldn’t understand what had happened to him, all at once like that.”
“Somebody shot him,” said Dominic. “Somebody’s outside with a rife. I heard the shot. He was covering that window, waiting for his chance, and he got it when this chap stepped into the light. So keep down here in the
