So
The more she considered what knowledge she had, the more certain did it seem to her that the murderer of Robin and the murderer of Friedl Schiffer were one and the same. Why else should it be necessary to stop Friedl’s mouth?
It seems, she told the bright, transfigured self in her glass, that these things began happening because I began to probe Robin’s disappearance. His death, though I didn’t know that at the time, not for certain. So that gives us all the more reason for continuing to probe, but also all the more reason for doing it very, very carefully, and thinking out and covering up every move before we make it. Above all, for going over every single word either of us got out of Friedl. Because she must have told us more than we’ve realised yet, if only we can find out which bits are really significant.
To-morrow, she promised herself, I shall have help. Over lunch I’ll tell him all this, he’ll know how to go on from there, what we ought to do. Go straight to the police and tell them all we know and all we guess, or hold back until we have more to offer? I’ve already lied, I can bear to stay a liar until then, because he’s implicated, too, once I admit what I know about last night. I can make no move until I’ve seen him.
So that was settled, and she was left staring in delight and disbelief at that shining image before her, with gentian eyes dilated and radiant, and a soft flush of excitement like summer bloom on her pale cheeks. She thought, astonished: He’s never really seen me, and I’ve never really seen him. We shall be meeting for the first time!
At about the same hour of the afternoon when Maggie celebrated her miraculous restoration to sanity and health by washing her hair and giving her favourite dress to a chambermaid to be pressed, Francis Killian was standing beside a grave in the small cemetery of Felsenbach, five miles inside the German frontier.
A little excursion over the border into the Allgau, itself a very charming district and on terms of intimate exchange with its southern neighbours, is a normal enough way of spending a day if you happen to be a tourist in the northern Vorarlberg or the north-western Tirol. And since English tourists habitually visit churches, even those tourists who hardly ever enter a church at home, Francis had felt it to be natural enough to make for the churchyard and do his own hunting, rather than risk asking leading questions in any of the inns of Felsenbach, let alone the one which belonged to the husband of Marianne Waldmeister. Buried, Friedl had said, as a charity, and with a stone over him, but without a name. That should be data enough to identify what Francis was looking for. If there was a stone there would be some inscription on it, if only to call attention to the piety of the donor.
Felsenbach lay in a shallow bowl among the hills, with the river circling round it, one bank deeply undercut. In the spring thaw this insignificant little stream would come down fast and bring a great deal of the debris of the higher lands with it. Now in the moist, mild September weather the Rulenbach ran lamblike round the northern edge of the village, and threatened no one.
The church lay on the southern fringe of the village, on rising ground, and the cemetery spread over a gentle plateau behind it. An old church, squat, whitewashed, with an onion cupola weathered to a beautiful Indian red. Its thick walls had a heavy batter, its windows were small and sunk far into the masonry like deep-set eyes. The burial ground, too, was old and thickly populated. Francis saw confronting him a miniature forest of close-planted, rigid little trees, wooden-shafted trees with complicated foliage of iron filigree and paper blossoms, and violet mourning ribbons turning a uniform dun-colour with age and weather.
He made several exposures of the church, in case anyone was interested in his activities, though it seemed unlikely, and one of the valley from over the tiled crest of the boundary wall; and then he began to move among the graves, taking a picture here and there. The display of ironwork was fantastic enough to turn any addict camera- happy. Most of the older memorials, the carved wooden crosses and pale stone kerbs, bore framed photographs of the dead, some of them so worn and faded that only a feature or two survived, a vast moustache from early in the century, a pair of unwavering, sad eyes, a piled nest of frizzy hair. Some of the newer granite headstones had their frontal surfaces glazed black, to carry more permanent and more startling reminders of the people they commemorated, portraits engraved into the glaze to last as long as the stone. These were never going to mellow into anonymity, every rain washed them clean, even if every All Souls’ Day had not turned out the survivors with detergent and chamois leather to make sure not a line was lost.
It took him an hour or more to find the one he was looking for, but once found there was no mistaking it. It was tucked into a far corner of the cemetery, close to the waste plot where old flowers and garlands were piled together to await destruction, and it was the only stone he saw which was both modern and neglected. The charity which had buried Robin Aylwin could not be expected to visit him annually and clean him up for the festival of the dead; and even if the church took care of this task, the grave had had almost a year now to get overgrown. The grass was roughly trimmed back from it, there was still one faded wreath, but the black mirror of the squat headstone was filmed here and there with a thin layer of grey lichen. Nevertheless, its most startling aspect was immediately apparent; above the inscription there was an engraving of what was certainly a human head.
Francis found himself a fine sliver of shale, and began to pare away the growth of lichen, and then with a handful of moist paper flowers from the waste heap scrubbed the surface clean. The thing sprang out at him unnervingly clear and improbable. It was a human head, certainly, and with enough individuality in the face to suggest a portrait; but it differed from all the rest in being recumbent and seen in half-face, as you might have seen it if you had been called to identify it on a slab in the morgue. The eyelids were closed, the young features frozen into the lofty detachment of death. The thick hair, streaming back from the bland forehead as if still heavy with the water of the Scheidenauersee, had yet a suggestion of waves in it. The lips, full and firm, curled a little at the corners with a suggestion of the self-confidence of life. In its way it was an impressive piece, a pious generalisation for drowned youth, and yet with a markedly individual personality of its own.
Which, of course, was absurd!
Even if the clothes had been a complete loss, as Friedl had said, the body might still have retained some indications of its living appearance, enough to guide a skilled man. The doctor who conducted the post-mortem might even have advised on a reconstruction from the bones of the face. Given the interest, it could be done. But would the result look like this? Or perhaps it was entirely fanciful; the romantic and morbid German temperament, Francis reflected, had done stranger things than this in its time. And perhaps some rich man not far from the end of his span was concerned rather with making his own soul than salvaging Robin Aylwin’s. The elaboration of his offering was what mattered. Beneath the portrait—for reconstructed or imaginary, it was a portrait—was an inscription in German. Francis translated it loosely, and wondered:
‘Pray for the repose of an unknown young man, drowned in the Rulenbach, and for those who erected this memorial over him.
February 1956.’
A modest donor, he had left his own name out of it along with the
