Dominic made a trumpet of his hands and yelled wildly aloft. And at the same moment Alda made his leap, beautifully and vainly gauged to drop him upon the very spot from which the other man had so silently withdrawn.
The rifle, its barrel a bluish gleam in the sun, was already braced and waiting for him. Dominic saw it flung up to meet the hurtling body, felt the tension of the firing arm like a pain transfixing his own flesh, and set his teeth and held his breath, steeled for the shot. A small, distant, dry, bright sound. The slopes took it up and tossed it among them in innumerable echoes, ripple on ripple, to die in the depths of the valley below.
The bushes threshed beneath Alda’s falling body, swallowing him from sight. Dominic drew breath in a wail of despair, and stood staring numbly, so sick with his own impotence that he saw what happened next only as an illogical sequence experienced in a dream, and for several seconds could make no sense of it in this disastrous daylight world.
The man braced on the rough run of the rock chute hung quite still for a long moment. Then slowly his arms sank and spread apart, and the rifle slithered from his hold, and drifted away from him almost languidly, to lodge in a tuft of grass ten feet below, and hang there gently rocking. His outspread hands clutched at the rock and the thinning soil beneath him, and found no purchase, or no strength to maintain their hold. His knees sagged gently under him, and his body began to slide, first with unbelievable slowness, then with gathering momentum, until it struck a projecting knuckle of rock, and was flung abruptly outwards towards the centre of the chute. It struck again, and rebounded, and came spinning and turning and bouncing downwards like a stone.
In the dwarf bushes above, Karol Alda gathered himself up nimbly, and slid hastily down the few yards to where the rock path began. He reached the edge just in time to see the rag-doll form strike the piled stones of the talus on the ledge below. A sudden convulsion shuddered through the whole laborious erection, running like a ripple from the shock, outward to either end. Particles of stone shifted, toppled, re-settled, and set their new neighbours shuddering in their turn. Then, with a sudden grinding roar, the whole unstable mass burst from its shaky moorings and exploded violently outwards over the valley, spitting rocks like chaff, and hurtled down with the body, in an earth-shaking thunder and a cloud of pallid dust, into the bottom of the bowl.
Chapter 11
THE MAN WHO FAILED TO ARRIVE
« ^ »
Down from the recesses of the northerly col Ondrejov came bouncing and rolling, that lumpy elderly body of his marvellously deft and rapid in movement, his rifle bumping vigorously at his hip as he ran. Hard on his heels came Miroslav Zachar, still in his leather motor-cycling jacket, and sweating profusely, and two young policemen in uniform. They descended upon the hut, where Dominic stood dazed and appalled, staring down into the cauldron below him, from which a thick, choking smoke of dust rose, and the last muted rumblings of the thunder.
Ondrejov turned him about by the shoulders, looked him over for damage, and found nothing worse than a scratched cheek.
“Well for you two,” he bellowed, clouting him boisterously behind in his relief, “that I’ve kept my hand in with a rifle. And well for you I had Mirek on your trail. He was waiting for you below, and you never came. You cost him a fine hunt before he found the van, and a fine fright I got when he rang up to tell me. If you youngsters would only do as you’re told! I had the road well covered for your sake, but we had to reorganise in a hurry. There’ll be two of us on their way up the valley now, and the rest of us came over the quickest way from Kral’s inn. And lucky for you the first shot gave us our bearings. You’re all right?”
“Yes. Thank you! I’m all right,” said Dominic, still staring down into the boiling eddies of dust below, beneath which the wreckage of the talus still slid and settled with sluggish, sated movements. He thought of a body buffeted and ground and slashed in that titanic disintegration, and the body became live, and his own. He would never play with those things again! He felt sick, but he was alive. For the moment that was all he could feel, and it was enough.
“Mr. Alda…” he said. His tongue was slow and stupid, and his mouth dry with dust. “Mr. Veselsky, I mean…”
“Mr. Veselsky is on his way down, look! Like one of his own goats! Does he look damaged?
Alda was dropping down the grass slope on the far side of the scar in long, sure-footed bounds, balanced like a dancer. They saw that he carried a rifle in his hands.
“Good!” said Ondrejov. “The gun at least we have, if we can’t have the man.” He laid his arm warmly about Dominic’s shoulders, and turned him towards the descent into the bowl. “Come on, let’s go down. Let’s see what we have there.”
What they had was a wilderness, a new desolation. They foregathered in silence in the safe, hollowed heart of the bowl, where nothing could fall any farther, and ranged the scattered fringes of a desert of tumbled stones, through a pall of acrid dust that still silted down thickly on every blade of grass between the rocks, until there was no green left. Somewhere under those piled cairns the body of Robert Welland’s murderer was buried.
“There won’t be much to identify,” said Ondrejov grimly, “but I suppose we shall have to dig him out. We shall need heavy equipment on the job. You didn’t, by any chance, get a proper look at him?”
“No, nothing. I saw only the end of his fall.”
“And we had no field-glasses. No telescopic sights, not even a diopter. Our best shots were covering the road.” Ondrejov nodded sombrely, looking down at the rifle in his hands, on which the dust was settling pale and fine as talc. “He had, though. A Zbrojovka Brno gun, of course. ZKM 581 small-calibre rifle. Automatic. Light to carry, not too bulky to hide, and a man could run into them by the thousand here. That tells us nothing till we find out who applied for the permit to buy it. As we shall.” He shook himself like an experienced old dog making ready for action, and turned towards the downhill path, coughing. “Let’s get back where we can breathe. We’ll work this out in Pavol.”
“Then we still don’t know who he is,” said Dominic, swept along in Ondrejov’s arm, shaky with reaction now.
Ondrejov hoisted an eloquent shoulder. “We soon shall. We’re in no hurry now.” He looked back once, briefly, at the murky desolation where the murderer lay buried. “Neither is he,” he said laconically. “Even for him, the emergency’s over.”
“I’m officially off-duty,” said Ondrejov smugly, “but as Major Kriebel is at Liptovsky Mikulas, examining Mr. Welland’s baggage at his hotel there, and enquiring into his movements, I shall take the liberty of presiding until he returns.”
