House of Green Turf

something definite.’ She looked up at him over the long card with its border of vine-leaves. ‘You think the venison would be a good idea?’

‘I think it might. Beer or wine?’

‘Wine. You choose.’ She leaned her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. It brought her a little nearer to him, and made it possible to use her fingers to screen the movement of her lips. ‘Friedl was murdered. He told me there were fingermarks round her throat.’

Francis kept the easy social smile fixed on his face; he had to, the man by the mirrors had just shifted his chair very slightly to have them more favourably in view.

‘There’s an open red wine, a local, shall we try it? The police told you that?’

‘Yes. All right, let’s.’ She sat back as the waiter approached to take their order. This was not the interview to which she had looked forward. The very smile she was obliged to wear was becoming cramped and painful. Between trivialities they might manage to convey the bare bones of what they had to say to each other, but she would be no nearer knowing whether he believed her, nor could this kind of exchange ever communicate what she felt, the extraordinary sense of deliverance, the revealing quality of the light now that the shadow of guilt had dissolved from over her. This was the first meeting with him to which she had ever come with an open heart, willing to let him in to her, and because of the stranger watching them they must still remain apart. But she tried. As soon as the soup was served and the waiter had left them she lifted to his face one clear, unsmiling glance. ‘I’m cured,’ she said.

If he had understood, he made no sign. To talk under these circumstances, in the sense of using language in order to effect a communion between two people, was impossible, and he was not going to attempt it. All they could do was exchange information. Some day there would be a time for doing more than that, but not now. ‘She was strangled?’

‘He didn’t say that. Just that there were fingermarks on her throat. Apart from that there’s been nothing. I’m just staying in and having a thoroughly lazy time. How about you? Have you got a car here?’

‘I hired one in Zurich. Had it waiting for me at the airport.’ He busied himself with refilling her glass until the waiter had served their venison and left them to enjoy it.

‘And have you found anywhere interesting to visit round here?’

‘I was over in Germany yesterday,’ he said. ‘I went over to look up an old acquaintance, as a matter of fact. In Felsenbach.’ Obliquely he told her the bare facts of his find, scattered along the way on a verbal conducted tour of one corner of the Allgau.

‘You must show me your pictures some time,’ she said.

‘You may not like them. It could be said I choose rather offbeat targets.’ He had the sharpest and best of the prints already folded into the menu. ‘Would you like something to follow?’ He held out the card to her across the table, open, the blown-up photograph carefully secured by a forefinger. ‘See what you think.’

Her eyes lit upon the starkly outlined face just before her fingers touched, and for an instant the colour was shocked out of her cheeks. Her mask shook, and was resolutely clamped back into place. She took the menu from him, and sat steadily gazing at the print.

‘Yes, I think so. Yes…’

‘An idealised guess?’

‘A likeness. The way the eyes are set… and the mouth…’ But for Friedl’s thirteen-year-old treasure it might have been hard for her to recall that exact curl of the lips. ‘Formalised, but really a likeness.’ In Friedl’s picture the full lids had also covered and hidden the eyes, whose colour she could not remember, and the lips had borne this same shadow of a smile. Maggie handed the menu back with composure. ‘I’ll just have fruit, I think. And coffee.’

Francis palmed the print and slipped it back into his pocket under the table. The setting of the eyes she had remarked on first; well, that could be guessed at even after months, better than a guess in fact. There is nothing much more durable than bone. But the mouth… That was another matter. The soft tissue of the lips, even if it survived through the frost, surely would not retain much of its normal shape after being buffeted downstream in the thaw.

Maggie peeled a pear with rather strained attention, and asked brightly, without looking up: ‘Have you any plans for this afternoon?’

‘I thought I might have another drive in the same direction. There are some rather good woodcarvers over there, I might have a look what’s to be found. Other artists, too.’

‘Take me with you!’ she said.

The first time she had ever asked him for anything except in return for a fee, and it was the one thing he would not and could not do for her. He wanted her safe in the Goldener Hirsch, with the police on the premises and a good lock on the door.

‘If I were you I should stay in and get plenty of rest. With all this disturbance you must have been under a good deal of strain. Stay in, let them see you’re there on call, not anxious, not involved.’

‘I suppose it might be a good idea,’ she admitted.

‘Wait for me to-night. I’ll come to you as soon as I can. By the verandah. Then we can talk.’

‘Yes!’ she said eagerly. She set down her empty coffee cup, and looked at him for a moment helplessly and hopefully across the table. ‘You will come?’

‘I’ll come.’

‘What do we do about getting out of here? You think it’s me he wants or you? Shall we leave together?’

‘No, you go first, I want to see if he follows.’

‘At least we gave him time to eat his lunch,’ said Maggie, and her fixed and tortured brightness dissolved for a moment into a real, youthful, entrancing smile. What might she not be, he thought, if only he could get her safe out of this with her recovered innocence unspotted?