The Piper on the Mountain

“They call me Karol Veselsky here. But yes, I am Karol Alda. Karol Alda or Charles Alder, whichever you prefer. And what do you want with him?”

“I’ve got a friend who’s in trouble, and I want your help. It concerns you. But it’s quite a story.”

“You’d better tell me.”

And Dominic sat with his hands gripped tightly together between his knees, and told him, almost in a breath. He was not afraid of not being understood. And now he was no longer afraid of any kind of evasion.

“There are four of us here together, I daresay you’ve seen us around. One of the girls is Tossa Barber, and her stepfather was a man named Terrell, who was killed here in this valley, about three weeks ago. It isn’t that she was fond of him, or anything, but she felt bound to him, and she wasn’t satisfied about his death, that’s why she got us to come here. She wanted to find out for herself. And what she found out was that you were somewhere here, and he’d picked up your trail and was looking for you. Tossa felt it might have been murder. But the Slovak police had closed the case and lost all interest in it.”

“Perhaps,” said Alda, eyeing him levelly, “because for them there was no mystery about his death.”

“You mean they know how he died?”

“They know exactly how he died.”

“How?” asked Dominic, moistening dry lips. “I mean, how do they know?”

“They know because I told them. I reported his death.”

“You reported it? I thought the Martineks… They called out the mountain rescue people…” He broke off there, remembering Dana’s account of that night search. The Martineks had notified the mountain rescue service, and then gone out to hunt for their missing guest, but the police had been first on the scene. Because the police, it seemed, had known exactly where to go. “Would you mind telling me about it? This isn’t curiosity, it’s terribly important.”

“It’s very simple. I was on my way home by the high-level path that crosses the open rock there. Since you came to investigate his death, I take it you’ve looked at the place. I wasn’t thinking of Terrell. I haven’t thought about him for five years at least, I’ve had other things to think about. I had no idea he was within seven hundred miles of me.

“And at the blind point in the path I met him, face to face.” He caught the brief, fearful gleam of Dominic’s eyes, the one returning instant of doubt, and smiled wryly. “No, I didn’t touch him. I had no time for anything beyond recognising him. Because he’d recognised me, and his reactions were the quicker and the deadlier. He shrank back from me. Jumped back would be nearer the truth. And he went over the edge. When I climbed down to him—it takes ten minutes or so from there—he was already dead. Well, my own telephone at home was as near as any other, so I went on there, and called in the police from Pavol. There was never any mystery for them about his death, except perhaps the mystery of what he was doing there at all, in the dusk alone.”

“But do they know,” asked Dominic pointblank, “about the connection there was between you before? Did you tell them he was the man who was put on your case when you left England?”

Alda’s eyebrows rose. “You’re very well-informed, I see. I told them I had known him and worked in the same institute with him. That was necessary, they wanted him identified, of course. But as for the rest… why bother? It seemed to me irrelevant. I could and did tell them exactly how he fell to his death, and they didn’t question my word. I didn’t think our past connection had anything more to say in the matter. The man was dead. I took it for granted, then, that our meeting like that was pure chance.”

“It wasn’t! He was looking for you, trying to find out what you were doing here, what you were working on. He’d found a piece of scrap paper, music paper, with your handwriting on it, and that brought him here to Zbojska Dolina, searching for you. I suppose it would have been another feather in his cap if he’d been able to bring home word of something sensational.”

He had got so far when he saw that Alda was leaning back against the wall in a convulsion of silent laughter. He sat staring, confounded.

“Forgive me! But how baffled he’d have been if he had found out what I’m working on! Do you know what it is? Do you know why my privacy was left largely undisturbed, why things were arranged so that I did not have to come into the limelight with my story? Because of my vitally important work! Because I am at work on an opera about Comenius! How many sinister codes he’d have read into every note! Especially into the evangelical psalms! That was his profession, and his occupational hazard. It seems he died of it.”

Every word rang true. Dominic believed him all the more readily because there was no attempt to convince; belief was taken for granted, as between honest men who recognise each other on sight. But he still did not understand.

“But why did he fall? Even if he was startled, even if the dusk was coming on, why? He was used to mountains, he climbed the big stuff. Why did he jump back like that? Did he expect you to attack him?”

“Possibly, though nothing was farther from my mind. If only he’d known how little ill-will I bore him, how little I thought of him at all! But more probably he suffered a reflex of conscience, a superstitious recoil. Coming face to face quite inescapably, as he did,” said Alda softly, “with a man he had, by his own standards and in his own way, murdered.”

Alda lifted the empty glass from Dominic’s clenched fingers, and went and refilled it at the rough cupboard on the wall. “Here, it won’t hurt you. You still look as if you need it. How much do you know about myself and Terrell and the Marrion Institute? And how did you get to know? Security must be as tight as ever there.”

“Tossa had it from a man named Welland, some sort of secretary at the embassy in Prague, who knew Terrell as a good climber, and didn’t believe his death could be an accident. He began poking into the past, and he… well, he found…”

“He found me. Quite! A Slovak, an enemy, a possible murderer. A defecting physicist-cum-mathematician on highly secret work. A little hackneyed now, perhaps, but to him convincing, I’m sure. Do you need to know the rest of it? How much do you know?”

Dominic told him, and blushed feverishly over the telling. It was like recapitulating the plot of a sausage- machine thriller; in this clear air he marvelled that anyone should be able to view motives and actions in such crude and unlikely ways.