The Piper on the Mountain

She might, he conceded, studying her covertly as she scowled down at Central Europe, be quite capable of contributing her fair share to any friction that was hanging around. He wasn’t sure yet whether he was going to like her, though any friend of the Mathers was practically guaranteed in advance. But he was quite sure she was the most delightful thing to look at that had come his way since he’d arrived in Oxford.

Tossa would have been staggered to hear it. Brought up on the legend of her mother’s charm, she had never been able to see anything in herself but the laide, and nothing at all of the belle. That hadn’t soured her, she had sighed and accepted it as her fate. She had even convinced those of her friends who had known her from childhood, like the Mathers, that her view of herself was a true one. But you can’t fool a young man you are meeting for the first time, without a preconception in his head about you, or any predisposition to take you at your own valuation.

So Dominic Felse saw Tossa as belle, and not at all as laide. Chloe’s pale golden complexion became olive-bronze in her daughter, and smoother than cream. Chloe’s rounded slenderness was refined in Tossa to the delicate, ardent tension of something built for racing, and anguished with its own almost uncontainable energy. Tossa still was like a coiled spring. It would be nice to teach her relaxation, but it was nice to watch her quiver and vibrate, too. Her face was a regular oval with wonderfully irregular features, lips thoughtful and wry, so that you missed the sensitivity of their moulding unless some sudden change in her caused you to look more closely; huge, luminous, very dark brown eyes. Her hair was a straight bob, just long enough to curve in smoothly to touch her neck; very dark brown like her eyes, heavy and soft and smooth, with a short, unfashionable fringe that left her olive forehead large and plaintive to view, an intelligent child’s knotty, troubled forehead, braced squarely against a probably inimical world.

No, Dominic was in no doubt at all about Tossa, she was beautiful enough to stop any sane man in his tracks for another look, before she vanished and he lost his chance for ever. All the more effective because she didn’t even know it. She might have a pretty good opinion of herself in other ways, for all he knew, but she hadn’t the faintest notion that she was lovely to look at.

“She won’t go and muck this trip up at the last moment, will she?” asked Christine, suddenly sitting bolt upright and abandoning the map, her grey eyes narrowing with suspicion.

Well, that was sound evidence, in its way. Christine had known Tossa’s family almost since her infant school days.

“Oh, no, that’s all right! She gave me her blessing. Don’t worry about her, she’s going abroad herself, anyhow.” Tossa scowled even more fiercely, and stooped her weighted brow nearer to the map, only too plainly annoyed, thought Dominic, that she had volunteered something she needn’t have volunteered. “How far did we get?”

“Oh, we needn’t plan all that closely. As long as we’ve got all the papers we even may need, we can go where we like, and see how the time works out.” Toddy drew up his long legs and hugged his knees. He was his sister’s senior by an hour, and a good year ahead of the other two, and inevitably, or so it seemed to him, he was cast as the leader of the expedition. “Everybody’s got valid passports, and I’ve applied for the insurance card. Anything else we need?”

Tossa stooped her head even lower towards the map. The heavy curtain of hair swung low and hid her cheek, drooping like a broken wing. She followed the west-east road through Nuremberg, and on towards the border, over the border and on through Pilsen and Prague, until the edge of the map brought her up short of the Slovak border, baulked of her objective. What was the use, anyhow? His death was an accident, and no fault of hers. If she’d somehow failed him, that was incurable now.

But if she’d only given him a chance to be liked! Not everybody can do that by warm instinct, most of us have to be helped.

She hadn’t done much to help him, had she?

With a sense of wonder and disbelief, as if her mind had taken action without her will, she heard her own voice saying with careful casualness: “It wouldn’t do any harm to have a carnet for the van, would it? Just in case we wanted to go farther afield? After all, we might—mightn’t we?”

Chapter 2

THE MAN WHO WASN’T SATISFIED

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The person who was to put the cat fairly and squarely among the pigeons presented himself at the gatehouse of the Marrion Institute on a Thursday morning, just two days after Chloe Terrell and Paul Newcombe had flown to Prague. He was of an unexceptionable appearance, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, and carried upon him the indefinable stamp of the public servant. The ex-sergeant-major in command of the Institute’s blocking squad used towards him a manner one degree on the friendly side of his normal one, recognising him as one of us. That didn’t help him, however, to penetrate even the outer defences.

He asked to see Sir Broughton Phelps, and in his innocence really seemed to expect to be haled through the barriers on sight. He would not state his business, except to stress that it was urgent. When he was told that no one got to see Sir Broughton without a Ministry permit, he adjusted promptly and without undue surprise to this check, but he did not go away, nor did he withdraw his demand. Instead, he asked if a message could be taken in to the Director or his Chief Security Officer, so that they might make up their own minds whether to see him or not. The ex-sergeant-major saw nothing against this; and the stranger scribbled a few words on his visiting-card, sealed it down in an envelope, in a way which might have been slightly offensive if he had not just had it impressed upon him how stringent security arrangements round here were, and handed it over.

The messenger delivered this billet to Adrian Blagrove’s secretary, who preferred, understandably, to hand it over to his chief unopened. So it happened that Blagrove was the first to withdraw the card and read what the stranger had written.

Robert Bencroft Welland (said the card)

Assistant Commercial Secretary

British Embassy, Prague I,

Thunovska 14,

CSSR.

And above the name was scribbled in a vehement, cornery hand:

Terrell’s accident was no accident.

Robert Bencroft Welland came in gravely, displaying no signs of elation at having penetrated the first protective