The Piper on the Mountain

layers, and no haste about completing the feat. He accepted a chair and a cigarette, and settled his brief-case conveniently on the carpet beside his feet. Shut in together, they contemplated each other across the desk which had been Terrell’s.

“Mr. Welland,” began Blagrove very soberly, “you appear to be suggesting something which doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone else, even as a possibility. The Slovak police were quite satisfied of the facts of poor Terrell’s case, and made very full and correct reports which apparently convinced our authorities just as completely. I take it this is an unofficial approach, or you would have been sent here already provided with the means of reaching me, and wouldn’t have had to write me—this little billet.” It glanced coyly between his closed fingers for an instant, and vanished again. “May I ask if you’ve confided your doubts to anyone in Prague? Any of your superiors?”

“No, I haven’t. I came to the Marrion Institute because it seemed to be the party most affected by Terrell’s death, and what I believe to be the facts about it. I came over only yesterday, on a week of my leave, and I had some enquiries to make before I was ready to come to you.”

“Presumably, since you’re here,” said Blagrove drily, “your enquiries produced positive results. You realise you’re the only person who has questioned the circumstances of Terrell’s accident?”

“I could hardly let that influence me, could I?” said the young man mildly, with such simplicity that Blagrove took another and closer look at him. Under thirty, probably, of medium height and lightly built, neat, tow-coloured hair, all very presentable, all very ordinary. Put him among an office-full of civil servants, and you could lose him in a moment. Except that the good-natured face, earnest and dutiful to the point of caricature, had a little too much jaw for comfort, and confronted his seniors with a pair of wide-set blue eyes of startling directness and obstinacy. He looked, at first glance, like all the others of his class and profession; but at second glance it was clear that being on his own wouldn’t stop him from doing whatever he felt he had to do.

“Perhaps,” suggested Blagrove carefully, “you’d better tell me just why you’re not satisfied.”

“In the first place, because I knew Terrell, and I’ve seen the place where he was found. Oh, I didn’t know him well, but it so happens I’ve climbed with him, last year in the Zillertal, so I know his class. He was an excellent climber, on a rope or alone. The Zillertaler Alps were his proper league. But the Low Tatras, where he was found, are walking country. Not alpine stuff at all, but open, grassy slopes and rounded summits, with wooded valleys. You could find a few practice pitches there, rock outcrops, scrambles, that kind of thing. But nothing to tempt a man like Terrell. So the first question, even if I’d known nothing more, is: “What was he doing there at all?”

“I see nothing to prevent even a climbing man from fancying a walking holiday now and again, for a change,” objected Blagrove reasonably.

“Nothing whatever. Except that they just don’t do it. Hardly any of them, and certainly not Terrell. Once you’re as proficient as he was, you lose interest in the mild stuff. The climbs have to get harder all the time, and higher. Failing that, you just go somewhere new, where at least they’re different, unknown. But you don’t go back to walking and scrambling. And for that matter, even if you did go back, you certainly wouldn’t fall off a perfectly good traverse path, even at a blind corner, like the place where they found him.”

“I shouldn’t like to be so sure it couldn’t happen. The skilled and experienced sometimes fail to give all their attention to the easy bits.” Blagrove was playing somewhat irritably with the card he held in his fingers. “Unless you have something more than that to go on….”

“Oh, I have. You see, Terrell got in touch with me early this year, and asked my advice about good climbing country in the High Tatras. You don’t know that part of the world? There’s this great, open valley of the river Vah, running east-west, and to the south of it these broad, rolling crests of the Low Tatras. Then to the north, sickle-shaped, like this, and much more concentrated, there’s the cluster of the High Tatras, the highest peaks in the whole Carpathian range. These are for climbers. Anything up to nearly nine thousand feet, granite, three hundred or so peaks packed into about fifteen miles length, and magnificent country. I advised him to book in at Strba Lake, or at Tatranska Lomnice. And he did. He booked for two weeks at the lake. So what was he doing across the Vah valley in the Low Tatras?”

Blagrove raised his brows. “He could surely have changed his mind. How do you know he went ahead with his booking?”

“For the best reason in the world,” said Welland flatly. “Because I made the reservation for him, as long ago as April. And I know he turned up on time at the hotel, because he dropped me a card on arrival. He said nothing then about moving. On the contrary, he confirmed the arrangement we’d made by letter earlier. I was supposed to go along and spend the week-end climbing with him on Krivan. Only, you see, before the week-end came we got the news at the embassy that he’d been found dead—fifty kilometres away across the valley, in the Low Tatras, where he’d never intended going. He’d checked out from Strba Lake on the third day, and gone away to a small inn in one of the valleys in the other range. No mystery about what he did, up to that point. The only mystery is why?”

“And you think,” said Blagrove, his hands still and alert before him on the desk, “that you know why?”

“No, not yet. All I have is certain indications that may suggest reasons. As, for instance, that at some time after his arrival at the lake, something happened within his knowledge, something that caused him to pay his bill there and then, and go rushing off across the valley. No one at the hotel could account for it. He just left. But something happened that made him leave. If it had been simply something that disinclined him to stay where he was, made him dislike the place or con-struct uncomfortable there, he’d most probably have transferred to another hotel, somewhere along the range, or come back to Prague! Instead, he made his way for some reason to this one particular valley in the Low Tatras, not even a very frequented place. Whatever it was that happened didn’t just drive him away from Strba Lake—it led him to Zbojska Dolina. And believe me, it can have had nothing to do with climbing. Do I interest you, Mr. Bla-grove?”

“You interest me, yes, up to a point. You didn’t say any of this to your superiors in Prague?”

“No, I didn’t. One doesn’t like to start hares of that kind without making sure first of as many facts as possible. I had some leave to come, and I used it to come over here. Whatever drew Terrell to the Low Tatras, it can’t have been something private and personal from his own past, because he had no connections there, this was his first visit. He knew nothing of the country, he knew none of the people. I thought, knowing what his work was, and what it might sometimes involve, that there might be a link with something he’d handled or known about in the course of his duty. I hoped to get an interview with his widow, but she wasn’t in when I called at her flat.”

“She’s in Slovakia at this moment,” said Blagrove, “seeing about having her husband brought home.”

“Ah, so that’s it, I see. Well, since I could get nothing from her I spent the afternoon and evening among the press files, going back over the details—only the published details that are open to everybody, of course, but you’d be surprised how much that covers—the details of any reportable work handled by Terrell during the last few years. I have friends among the pressmen. I didn’t tell them what I wanted, I didn’t know myself. I just picked over their memories and then worked backwards through the files. I thought somewhere there must be something to dig up,