The Piper on the Mountain

“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: “Zbojska 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.

“Darling, this won’t be business, not exactly. And I’ll be there. It’s fashionable to go behind the Iron Curtain this year, everybody’s doing it. And it’s the least we can do for poor old Herbert. The most, too,” she added reflectively.

“I thought you hated humbug! Oh, all right, of course, if you want to go…”

“Darling!” murmured Chloe, hugging him happily. “It’ll be wonderful! I must get lots of beautiful black. I look well in black, and they’re sure to be rather conventional in Central Europe. But I’ll be a fiancee, as well as a widow! What superb timing!” She held him off for a brief instant to get a good look into his swarthy, self-confident, faintly wary face. “Are you sure you didn’t pop over and push poor old Herbie off his mountain?”