House of Green Turf

was a personal thing with him. As if jealousy was eating him alive, and he had to find somebody to bear the burden, somebody round whom he could crystallise it and get rid of it. And when I talked about Robin, good-looking and close to her, and her own age, for the first time—and I’m sure it was the first time he’d so much as heard of him—he felt he’d found a possibility. Somebody to resent. Not that it helps,’ said Bunty wryly, ‘but they always think it will.’

‘God forbid, love,’ said George piously, ‘that you should ever feel the urge to psychoanalyse me. I hate to think what you might come up with. No, I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with Killian or with Miss Tressider, I should say it’s very long odds against it. But if her commission, whatever it may be, is turning his attention to the disappearance of a young man in Scheidenau, then I’m very, very interested. It might be well worth while keeping an eye on his moves. Even if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, he may accidentally turn up something interesting to us. I’ll try to get a look at him myself as soon as I can. What’s he like?’

She told him. It appeared that she had been weighing up Francis Killian’s physical attributes as acutely as his state of mind, and the odds were that she was pretty accurate about both.

‘Fortyish, middle height, on the thin side but I think he’s solider than he looks. Dark brown hair and eyes, thick brows, hair a bit grey just at the temples. Quite a good face, clean-shaven, a lot of bone and not much meat, a long, straight nose and a rather high forehead. Daunting way of looking at you, guarded and aloof but critical, too, as if he held you at arms’-length to get a stranger’s view, and didn’t want to get any closer to anyone. Slumps his shoulders a bit, but when he’s on his feet he moves well, so it may be an affectation. Or pure discouragement! He did look rather as if he’d nearly given up, and then suddenly got kicked back into the race. Not quite seedy—he’s physically too trim for that—not so much a shabby elegance as an elegant shabbiness.’

She had closed her eyes, the better to see the man who was not there. When she opened them they were bright, thoughtful and clear. ‘How’s that?’

‘Strictly for the fiction shelves,’ said George rudely, and tucked away mentally every word of it. ‘Now supposing—just supposing—you wanted to get to Scheidenau quickly, and money was no object. How would you go? Air to Munich… Zurich…?’

‘Zurich,’ said Bunty promptly. ‘Could do it either way, but Zurich would be quicker and easier.’ She sat looking at him wide-eyed, a shining mirror reflecting his thoughts back to him. ‘I happen,’ she said cautiously, ‘to be on rather good terms with Laura Howard in the B.E.A. office in Comerbourne. I could have a word with her. Very discreetly, of course. What did you mean about money being no object? He didn’t look as if it would be no object to him.’

‘If she’s retained him to do a job for her,’ said George, ‘Miss Tressider will be paying the expenses. And if he takes off for Austria after your long-lost ’cellist, the quick, expensive way, that should clinch one thing, at least: he’ll be following up this line on her business, not his own.’

‘But we,’ said Bunty, now with unmistakable regret, ‘shan’t be able to follow him there.’

‘Too true we shan’t. But we just might, with a lot of luck, get an inkling of what, if anything, he brings back with him.’

The violinist who had shared Robert Aylwin’s room at the Goldener Hirsch in Scheidenau, thirteen years ago, lived now in Birmingham, and played in the City of Birmingham Orchestra. Bunty’s working papers of the tour had proved very useful indeed, supplying the names Maggie had forgotten, and even such day-to-day details as room accommodation. Charles Pincher and Robert Aylwin had been roommates throughout, so they must, if not friends, have been reasonably congenial companions. Why should Maggie remember the one, apparently the less memorable, and forget the other?

Mrs. Felse had said clearly and kindly that Maggie had not been interested in Aylwin or in any man, and probably never would be. But Mrs. Felse might be mistaken. And still Francis saw, or thought he saw, the shadowy outline of a person round whom his bitterness could gather corrosively, a man who must have meant something to her, probably much, perhaps everything, if she hadn’t disastrously mistaken her own heart, and kicked away love too hastily from trammelling her feet on the climb to the heights. Why else should she fasten so suddenly and hungrily on fame, why come back changed, unless she had not merely turned her back on the alternative, but herself destroyed it?

So he went to see Charles Pincher. And Charles Pincher, tall, stooped, balding and cheerful, remembered the Scheidenau affair very well.

‘There was one rather odd thing about it, you know. He didn’t take anything with him when he lit out.’

Slowly Francis closed his notebook on his knee. ‘He didn’t…? You mean he just walked out empty-handed? But Mrs. Felse said nothing about that…’

‘No, well, I don’t suppose she ever realised. But his suitcase and his ’cello were there in the room still, after he’d gone. Freddy left them in old Waldmeister’s charge when we left, he said he’d be sure to come back and collect them as soon as he knew we’d gone, and the bill was paid.’

‘And did he?’

‘I suppose so, old boy, but I was never there again. I had the chance of a good job, so I quit the Circus. I expect he did, you know. We all knew he’d fallen out with Freddy. He’d just keep out of sight until we were on the move, and then stroll back and pick up his traps at leisure.’

The sensible thing to believe, of course. The only question left was whether it had actually happened like that. Whether, in fact, there had been some sound reason why it couldn’t happen like that. And there was only one infallible way to find out, and find out quickly.

‘We were right,’ said Bunty over the telephone to George. ‘Zurich! Laura booked him in on the two o’clock Trident flight from Heathrow to-morrow. Open return. Took him a day and a half to make up his mind.’

‘Now I wonder,’ said George at the other end of the line, ‘I do wonder to whom he talked yesterday, and what they told him, to make his journey really necessary?’

CHAPTER FOUR

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The little Scheidenauersee, a silver-blue pear-shape three-quarters of a mile long, lay in green folded hills under a late summer sky, smooth as a looking-glass and brushed clean with feather dusters of cloud. Its narrow end, where the tiny Rulenbach flowed into it, pointed south into the foothills of the Vorarlberg, and round this southern tip the village of Scheidenau lay, three short streets arranged in a Y shape, the cup of the Y filled with the water of the lake as with silver-blue wine. The northern end of the lake widened and overflowed from the cup, mirroring two or three tiny islands, and at the north-eastern corner the Rulenbach flowed gaily out again, twice its former size and