‘All right, you say when!’
He wanted her to sit there for a long time, smiling at him like that, but he had a lot to do before he could come to her room at night by the verandah staircase, and he wanted her watched and guarded while he did it. ‘When!’ he said, and groaned inwardly at seeing her rise. He came to his feet with her, hurried to draw out her chair and help her into her light grey coat. ‘Don’t go out at all,’ he said into her ear, ‘not anywhere!’
She marshalled coat and gloves and handbag, made a feminine gesture in the direction of her hair without actually touching it, and held out her hand to him.
‘Thank you, Francis, it was a lovely lunch.
She was gone, weaving between the tables with her long, free, recovered stride. He stood for a few moments to watch her go, and then sat down again slowly, and lit a cigarette over the dregs of his coffee. His ears were full of her voice speaking his name for the first time, a stunning music, but full of cruel overtones. Gratitude and kindness can do terrible injuries, with the best intentions. It ought to be enough to be of service to her. It had to be enough, there wasn’t going to be anything else for him.
The tall man in the grey suit was paying his bill, and rising at leisure to collect his hat from the stand. It was nice to have been right about something, at least. He kept his head negligently turned away as he walked to the door, but one mirror picked up his image in passing and gave Francis a glimpse of a thin, faintly whimsical, pensive face, of deep and generous lines and little flesh, with hair greying at the temples, and deep-set, quiet eyes.
Not, by any stretch of imagination, an Austrian face. Hat or no hat, that was an English sportscoat, and an English countenance.
Now what were the English police doing here in the Vorarlberg, tramping hard on Maggie Tressider’s heels?
He fretted about her all the way to Felsenbach. But when all was considered, she was best and safest in the Goldener Hirsch, with the Austrian police deployed round her on a murder hunt. He had no doubt at all of the accuracy of what she had managed to tell him. Friedl had been, if not strangled, half-strangled and thrown into the lake. Whatever the eccentricity of Maggie’s behaviour, they would not suspect her of an act like that. A woman may perhaps push another woman into a lake, but by and large, it is only men who strangle women. By and large, it is only men who have the necessary hand-span and the necessary force. No, he could leave her for a few hours. And after that, their best course might well be to go together and tell their entire story to the investigators, and leave the rest to them. For the more complex this business became, the more certain did he feel that Maggie was entirely and tragically innocent, a helpless victim caught into somebody else’s schemes only by her hypersensitive conscience, and by the accident of a car smash which had shaken her off-balance and put all her defence mechanisms out of gear.
What was ironical was that only after talking to her had he had been able to put his finger on the thing that was most wrong with Robin Aylwin’s gravestone. All that gratuitous anonymity! The victim, of course, couldn’t be named, no one knew, or admitted to knowing, his name. But not only was the donor also anonymous; most improbable of all, there was not a name, not an initial, not even a mason’s mark, anywhere on that stone to identify the memorial artist who made it! Unheard-of, for the craftsman in death not to avow his work! A monumental mason is a businessman, a tradesman like other tradesmen, he wants his excellence known.
There was only one monumental mason in Felsenbach, indeed only one mason of any kind, a builder of long establishment who employed none but his own family, the ramifications of which ran into three generations. Gravestones, kerbs, vaults he took in his patriarchal stride. He remembered the corpse from the Rulenbach, he remembered the funeral; but he had had no part in the business of burial or monument. Some wealthy resident of Regenheim, he recalled, had paid for the interment out of goodness of heart, and the small municipality of Felsenbach had naturally raised no objection. No doubt some mason from Regenheim had been employed to make the memorial, afterwards. The donor would obviously look on his own doorstep.
It was another fifteen miles to Regenheim, an undulating, busy road this time, clear of the mountain slopes. The place, when he arrived there, was no bigger than Felsenbach, but unmistakably more a town. There was a square almost large enough for aircraft landings, a waste of cobbles populated by a handful of cars. There were four or five cramped streets eddying out of it, overhung by black and white houses, tottering archways and jutting upper stories. There was a sprawl of modern villa-buildings beyond. And it was raining. The place had not got its name for nothing.
He parked the Dodge in the square and set about locating whatever monumental masons the town might hold. It was already evening, he had lost more time than he had bargained for in reaching this place. He bought some cigarettes at a solid family shop which was still open, and probably would continue so until ten o’clock provided one of the family happened to be spending the evening at home. The woman who served him was elderly and at leisure, and looked as if she and her forebears had been there since Regenheim’s free-city days. If anyone knew where to put a finger on every tradesman in the town, she would.
She was very willing to talk, and showed no surprise at being asked for the local furbishers of graves. There were, she said, only two of any substance. One of them, the oldest established, had his mason’s yard behind his own house, and he or one of his sons could always be found there. The other had built himself a new villa out on the edge of the town. She gave copious directions for finding it. Then there was, of course, the Klostermann outfit, still in business, though they had few clients now, that side of the family’s trade had been neglected since they went in for road haulage. Indifferently she gave him instructions for finding even this unlikely firm, though her large shrug said that she herself wouldn’t consider taking them any of her business. . The head of the old-established house happened to be putting away his pick-up in the corner of the yard. He took out a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to inspect the photographs Francis offered him. No, he had never seen this stone before. If he was curious he did not show it; he had been in the world something like seventy years, and learned to concentrate on his own business, and the discipline had paid him well.
The second one, the dweller in the new villa, was a younger man, a go-ahead type with social ambitions and a look of the townsman about him. The villa was aggressively modern and ostentatious, the wife who opened the door was decorative and well-padded. Francis apologised for calling on them out of the blue and at such an hour, and made it clear at once that he wanted only five minutes of their time. He needed, as it turned out, even less than that.
‘Thirteen years ago!’ said the man of the house, and shook his head decisively. ‘That is before we came here to open our business. We are from Munchen, we have been here only seven years. I am sorry!’
Which left only the family Klostermann, of whom the old woman in the tobacconist’s had thought so poorly. It was getting dark by then, so Francis was torn two ways; but he was not going back without having a look at even so dim a possibility. He threaded the outer edge of the town, and turned back towards the square by side streets that lacked both the black and white fascination of the town centre and the green spaciousness of the suburbs, but were merely utilitarian early-twentieth-century, without squalor or distinction. And there, sure enough, was a dark and almost empty window, once designed for display, with nothing left in it now but a dusty imitation-marble urn,
