The Piper on the Mountain

She caught the glitter of his excitement without understanding it, and turned quickly to look at Alda. “Mr. Welland said they told him at the Marrion that you took all your papers away with you, when you went. All your notes, all your plans… They told him the potential value was enormous, that you had planned work with you that could easily account for murder.”

“Notes? Plans?” Alda met her eyes across the circle with a grey-blue stare of detached astonishment. “I never intended to leave. I went on holiday with a rucksack, and when I got back to Briancon I found myself already a traitor. I took nothing with me. What I stood up in, a change of shirt and underclothes, some music paper, and a little money. Nothing more.”

“But you had projected work?” said Dominic intently. “Ideas that might have worked out and been worth a lot? You had them there, in the Institute?”

“Oh, yes, several. Some might have foundered. Most would have worked out. But I give you my word I left them there.”

“Yet Robert Welland told me,” said Tossa, her shining eyes fixed eagerly on Ondrejov, “that somebody there in the Institute—he didn’t say who, but one of them—told him Mr. Alda had removed all his notes and papers. He said nobody knew it, except the Institute and the Ministry.”

“And, don’t you remember,” Dominic took up just as ardently, appealing to Alda, “up there in your hut you told me about the crop-sprayer? The helicopter adaption? One of your ideas, put on the market by a commercial firm in France? How many years’ work would it have taken, to put it into production?”

“Three. Four, perhaps, without me. It was a completely new engine, driving a re-designed three-blade rotor. I was glad to see it produced for ordinary, human uses. But someone else must have hit on it. Why should my design turn up in France?”

“Because it was safer than selling it in England,” said Dominic. “Are you even sure it’s the only one?”

“No,” admitted Alda, startled. “How can I be sure? There could be others. I shouldn’t care, I shouldn’t think myself robbed. Better they should be used in the open market than filed for Institute modulations. They were always military! And we were not even a military establishment.”

“And how many were there in all, in these notebooks?” asked Ondrejov. “How many such marketable projects?”

“It’s hard to remember. Perhaps as many as nine or ten, at this same stage. Some others merely conceived and sketched out.”

“A fortune!” said Ondrejov, and sat back with a long breath of fulfilment, spreading his hands peacefully on the table. “Is it enough to kill for now? To keep this from being uncovered? Would they have kept their jobs then? Their reputations? Either of them could have done it. You are gone, your papers are there. How easy, if the idea dawns in time, to make away with them, and say: You see, his flight was premeditated, he removed everything! Who would doubt it? Who would stop to wonder? It is a time of hysteria, press and public would make enough outcry to cover one man’s orderly retreat with a stolen fortune under his arm. Either of them could have done it. Either of them was a natural repository for Welland’s reports—one the Director, the other the Security Officer. Both of them turn up here. Either of them could have followed Welland to his rendezvous and shot him, and then returned from the scene, the one by plane back to Prague, the other to the White Carpathians—three or four hours by car, what is that?—in time to be fittingly surprised and distressed when he heard of Miss Barber’s detention. Either of them could have acted on my hints, and followed Mr. Felse this morning, waiting to pick him off and make away with another possible witness. Mr. Blagrove could have hired a car in Mikulas—was that why you had difficulty, Counsellor?—Sir Broughton Phelps already had a car, hired in Bratislava. One of them had bought a ZKM 581 hunting rifle, with telescopic sights and the special sixteen-cartridge magazine. Which?”

The knock on the door and the abrupt burr of the telephone came at the same moment.

“Come in!” shouted Ondrejov, and reached for the telephone. “Ondrejov! No, islo to! Dobre, dobre!” Hanging upon the telephone with held breath, and watching the door with snapping, sparkling blue eyes, he saw Adrian Blagrove enter the room, his long face wary, his long lips faintly disdainful, his aloof eyes more than a little defensive.

“D’akujem, uz to viem,” said Ondrejov gently to the telephone. “Viem, kto to je.” He hung up. “I know,” he repeated in English, more to himself than to them, “I know now who he is.”

He pushed the instrument away from him wearily but contentedly, to the length of his arm. “They have found the car from Bratislava, a little above the place where you hid your van, Mr. Felse, but better hidden. He had more cause to hide. And in the head of the valley they have also found Sir Broughton Phelps. What remains of him.”

Chapter 12

THE MAN WITH THE FUJARA

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The light in the room had mellowed into the fine, clear gold that came between the mountains at the onset of evening, and its clarity, sharp as wine, seemed to be the appropriate colour of the quietness that had descended after the young people were gone, marshalled away decisively by Karol Alda to his grandmother’s farm by the southerly col; after Paul Newcombe had accepted his polite but firm dismissal with a shrug, between offence and relief, and gone off to see about his return to Vienna next day; after the young constable had withdrawn to the outer room to clatter out the transcription of his notes on the typewriter, and Mirek Zachar had taken his Jawa and gone thankfully off-duty, with a light heart and his job completed.

“Lieutenant,” Charles Freeling began very carefully and gravely, when the three of them were alone, “on behalf of my embassy I want to express our appreciation and admiration of the way you’ve handled this very difficult matter, and the consideration you showed towards these young people. I needn’t tell you what a great shock this has been to us. We shall take up the matter of the Alda plans, of course. Clearly my country has done a great injustice to him, which ought to be set right. But it seems that he does not wish his case to be brought into prominence again at this late stage. For that I am grateful. We are none of us free agents, and absolute justice would seem to be a luxury we cannot always afford. At a time when technical and cultural co-operation between our countries is making such progress, is it worth while to allow old irregularities to obtrude? Publicity could do so much harm. We are being obliged to admit to a wrong. But since, after all, the man is dead…”

Within one hour Sir Broughton Phelps had become “the man,” an inconvenience, disowned, deprecated. This morning they would have been rolling out red carpets for him and listening enthusiastically to his fishing stories.

“Gentlemen,” said Ondrejov, leaning back in his chair and spreading his great arms on the table with a gusty sigh, “I am merely a policeman, with a straightforward job to do, and I shall do it. I shall pass on the relevant