The Piper on the Mountain

shadow, whatever you do.”

“He may have seen us come,” she said, shuddering in his arms, “you or me or both. Especially me—I didn’t hide. Suppose he thinks Mr. Welland may have told me something before he was killed? He came to tell me something!”

“Somebody out there was damned determined he shouldn’t get the chance. Did he manage to say anything to you? Anything at all?”

“When I came in he started to say: ‘Miss Barber, there you are.’ Something like that. And then he pitched forward and fell down.”

“And afterwards? When you were kneeling by him?”

“He did try to say something. It sounded like: ‘But he couldn’t have known—nobody else knew!’ And then he said: ‘Impossible!’ quite clearly, sort of angrily. Just: ‘Impossible!’ And then there wasn’t anything else. And now he’s dead!”

“And on the telephone? He didn’t tell you anything then?”

“He only said he must see me, and would I meet him here. It’s my fault. If it hadn’t been for me, if I hadn’t interfered, he’d still have been alive. I never wanted to break things, but I do. I break everything!”

She was shaken by a momentary gust of weeping, but she pushed the weakness away from her indignantly, and clung to Dominic’s sweater with convulsive fingers, as to the anchor of her sanity.

“If the man outside—the man with the rifle—if he knows we’re in here, if he knows we’re defenceless, we’re as good as dead, too, aren’t we? Because he can’t afford any witnesses.”

“He may not know. And even if he does, he can’t be all sides of us at once. Listen, Tossa! You stay here, and stay down. You understand? I want to take a look out of the window.”

“You can’t! He’s that side, he must be. He’ll fire again.” She kept her hold of him fiercely, and it was not a hysterical grip, but a very practical and determined one, meant to secure what she valued.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to show myself, I’m not such a fool. I’ve got to see where he could be, and how much ground he can cover.” He detached her hands from his person firmly, and slid away from her along the dusty floor, to draw himself up cautiously on the dark western side of the window.

With his cheek flattened against the wall, he could peer out with one eye over the range of country which must contain, somewhere, the man with the rifle trained on this spot. He found himself looking out, as he might have realised before if his mind had been working normally, over the full width of the valley, for below him the ground fell away to the path and the brook. Only a long segment of the opposite wall of the valley was presented to view. That was comforting, for it meant the marksman must be some considerable distance away, too far to change his ground quickly.

His field of fire was more or less determined. Dominic recollected the way the bullet had entered, slightly to right of centre near the base of the skull. That seemed to indicate that the rifleman was somewhat up-valley from their position, undoubtedly somewhere in cover on the far side, and approximately on a level with the chapel.

Right opposite the window where he stood, and on a level perhaps a few yards higher, was the scarred face of rock where Herbert Terrell had fallen to his death. There were plenty of bushes at the up-valley side of that cliff- face. The position was approximately right. Murder, it seemed, clung very close to this spot.

What could the distance be? Nearly half a mile, surely. Did that mean telescopic sights? If he couldn’t sight them from where he was, he certainly couldn’t change his position and shorten the range very quickly. And if he was covering this window from over there, he couldn’t even see the doorway, it was round a good, solid corner of masonry. So with a lot of luck he might not have seen them at all. In that case he could only feel uneasily certain that the young man who knew too much must have come here to meet someone, and he might, just might, know enough to feel sure who that someone was likely to be. But he couldn’t know, at this moment, and he couldn’t break cover and show himself, in case someone escaped to tell the tale. Secrecy was of the essence. When he killed it had to be anonymously, unless he could be absolutely sure of killing everyone who might be able to connect him with the affair.

There was cover for most of the way back to the Riavka hut; only the thirty yards of open rock here outside the door, and the expanse of meadows well below, presented real hazards. And the first was surely the worst, just the getting out of this stone box, and into the bushes. It was all very well calculating hopefully that the enemy must be in a position from which he ought not to be able to see the doorway, but even so he might be able to see the last few yards of that rock shelf before the path dropped from it into the trees. And it appeared that he was an excellent shot, too good by half. Could he command a view of the lower meadows from his perch? And would a target crossing them be still within his range?

If they waited a little while the abrupt dusk would fall, and make it easier to move unseen; but easier for their enemy as well as for them. And in that same little while he could be down in the valley, if he knew enough to be sure who they were and where they must make for, and slicing diagonally across rough ground to get to the meadows before them and cut them off there.

Dominic licked sweat from his lip, and hung irresolute for a moment. The slanting shaft of sunlight, narrower and narrower every moment, had begun to tilt steadily now. The globule of brightness where it struck the far side of the window-frame was climbing upwards, accelerating all the time. He understood; the sun had reached the point of dropping behind the crests, and when the last sliver of orange-red vanished it would suddenly be half-dark. If there was going to be one moment when it would be safe to run across the shelf of rock and into the trees, that would be the moment. The valley dusk fell like a stone; even eyes braced and trained to watch steadily must be blind for a second or two.

He looked down at Tossa, coiled in the dust of the floor and watching him unwaveringly. She had on a heather tweed skirt that could vanish against almost any indeterminate background, but her sweater was cream-coloured. Dominic peeled off his dark-red pullover, and tossed it across to her.

“Put this on. And for God’s sake do just what I tell you, and don’t give me an argument. We’ve got to get out of here intact, that’s all that matters.”

She looked at the dead man, and said faintly: “We can’t leave him here like this.”

“Don’t be an idiot! We can’t take him with us, and if we get knocked off ourselves we can’t even report his death. Do as I tell you. Put that pullover on, and get over to the door. Stay inside until I give you the word, and then run for the trees. And I mean run! And keep running. Stay in cover. When you come to the open bit, I hope it’ll be dark enough to cover you, but run like a hare, anyway. Don’t stop till you get home. I’ll be following you.”