House of Green Turf

him,’ said Bunty, who always knew her own mind, and added, relevantly enough: ‘Poor boy!’ That he was her own age, within a year one way or the other, did not invalidate the sentiment. ‘I knew you weren’t listening,’ she said, ‘I told you all this.’

‘I’m listening now. Tell me again.’

She told him, well aware that this was not a game. She had touched some recollection which had nothing at all to do with her own stay in that remote Austrian village.

‘And he never showed up again, this Aylwin chap?’ said George, when she had reached the end of the story.

‘You know, I never once thought of it in those terms. He wasn’t any greenhorn, he spoke three languages, he knew his way around. I would bet he made his own erratic way wherever he was going, and is playing that ’cello of his somewhere around Europe now. But no, I suppose he didn’t show up again anywhere we went, at any rate. Why? What makes him suddenly so interesting to everybody?’

‘Just that he disappeared in Scheidenau. That would be how long ago? Twelve years?… thirteen. Because it so happens,’ said George, handing over his cup for a refill, ‘that another young man failed to come home from a continental holiday just a couple of years ago. A Comerbourne young man, which made him our case. An art student named Peter Bromwich. Stepfather works at the power station, mother has a job at the ordnance depot out at Newfield. Twenty-three years old, off on his own with a rucksack. He knew the answers, too, it wasn’t his first trip by several, and he was a bit of a know-all by inclination. But he didn’t come home, and nobody’s heard of him since.’

‘In Scheidenau?’ asked Bunty, now very grave indeed.

‘Not quite, not this time. Bromwich was last seen on the German side of that border, trying to thumb a lift towards Immenstadt. From then on he just vanished. We made pretty wide enquiries at the time, and more police forces than you can imagine got into the act, since so many borders meet around those parts. German, Swiss, Austrian, even Italian. Nobody found Peter Bromwich. What we did find, when we all got our heads together, was that an awful lot of major and minor mysteries had dwindled away into dead ends just where all those frontiers tangle, over the past ten years or so. Some were currency cases, some were drugs, some were stolen valuables, mainly small but first-class stuff, jewellery, antiques, art pieces. Two escaped convicts from an Austrian gaol disappeared off the face of the earth in 1960 after being chased as far as Langen—not the Arlberg one, a little place up there near the border. A suspect wanted for murder in Munich was traced to Opfenbach, and then completely lost. Quite a remarkable collection of loose ends, as if they’d originally tied up neatly into a skein at the eastern end of Lake Constance, and somebody had sheared the knot clean out and got rid of it. And not a thing there to think much about until we got the lot together, because a case or two in one country’s records, that’s not so impressive, but a dozen together begin to look like something above lifesize. But nothing ever led anywhere, and Bromwich never reappeared.’

‘And the case is still officially open?’

‘Very much so. And I’d still be more than interested in closing it. It did emerge that Bromwich was on Cannabis, and may have graduated to the hard drugs, and there were indications that he might have brought the stuff through Customs with him at least a couple of times before when coming back from holidays. It looked rather as if he’d got himself tangled into the fringes of some sizeable organisation. Maybe this time he got a little too cocky? Or too curious about his employers? Now I suppose there wouldn’t be any such indications in the case of your young Aylwin, would there?’

‘In a small way,’ admitted Bunty, ‘there would. Not drugs, though, I’m sure. If Freddy’d had any such suspicion he’d have turned him over to the police like a shot, and my impression is that he just intended to get rid of him and leave it at that. There were rumours that Freddy had accused him of taking advantage of his position as one of the Circus—so respectable as we were you see!—to get away with some petty smuggling. I took it to be simply the little personal luxury things everybody’s tempted to try and sneak in once in a while. His real crime—or disability, rather—was that he simply couldn’t take life, or music, or even Freddy seriously.’

She sat back to consider, with a dubious frown, the picture she had just painted, and it did seem to her, on reflection, that there might be a basic similarity between these two troublesome young men.

‘You think he may have stumbled into waters too deep for him, too? Chanced his arm with somebody dangerous, and come off worst?’

‘Or blundered into something dangerous by accident, and failed to get clear? There are, of course, other possibilities. Maybe he’s still hitch-hiking his way round the world somewhere at this moment.’

‘That,’ said Bunty, though without conviction, ‘is the ending I prefer.’

‘It’s the ending Peter Bromwich would have preferred, I don’t doubt. But I very much doubt if it’s the end he came to.’

They sat silent for a moment, eye to eye. They could see deeper into each other than most people, and it was often like looking into a glass, their minds moved with such unanimity.

‘But why,’ asked Bunty then, ‘was it the name Scheidenau that brought all this back to you now? Peter Bromwich was some miles away in Germany when he was last seen.’

‘He was. A good point! I told you we turned up, between us, any amount of other queer cases that ended in blanks, all roughly round that eastern end of Lake Constance. It occurred to Duckett once, when he had nothing better to do, to link them all up into a squashy sort of circle and see what he got. And then, just for the hell of it, he plotted the centre. And whether it means anything or not, where do you think it fell?’

‘Scheidenau,’ said Bunty.

‘Scheidenau. A tiny little dot on the map that nobody’d ever heard of, but that’s what he got. Maybe if we plotted the exact centre of the figure described by linking up all last year’s bank raids, it would drop on Windsor Castle. But still my thumbs prick. Scheidenau once may well be a freak, and I might even have had a lurking suspicion that my dear chief didn’t do his sums right. I never checked! But Scheidenau twice, and do you wonder I have the feeling that fate is nudging me?’

‘But this man Killian is working for Maggie Tressider,’ Bunty said positively. ‘That’s true enough. He suggested I should go and visit her, he isn’t afraid of his credentials being investigated.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt that. But he may be working for her on something rather different from what he gave you to understand. He seems to have spent more time asking you about the lady herself than about her teacher.’

‘Yes, I know. Though we’d already been talking about Freddy for some time. But it’s natural he should want to talk about Maggie. I told you, he’s in love with her. Even this fixation about Robin Aylwin… I had a feeling even that