and a shelf of granite vases with perforated aluminium flower-holders. Beside it the high wall of a yard ran for some distance, double doors set in it. The upper windows were dark, the house was not lived in. But the paint on the gates were new.
The whole place appeared deserted, and Francis might have gone away and left it at that; but as he was turning back to the car a man came briskly along the pavement from the direction of the square, fitted a key into the lock of the yard doors, and let himself in. A thickset, youngish man in a belted leather jacket and a black beret, with a battered briefcase under his arm. Francis gave him a minute or two, and then followed him in. He had left the heavy door ajar, and his lively footfalls clashed diagonally ahead over the cobbles. In the far corner of the yard, in a one-story building obviously added to the original house, a light sprang up.
All one side of the yard was garage doors, and several lorries and vans stood ranged along another wall. Behind the frosted window of what seemed to be the office the dark shape of the leather-coated young man moved vaguely. In a corner of the yard some relics of the expiring monumental business mouldered gently, synthetic granite kerbing, a half-shaped headstone, a small, drooping angel leaning on a cross.
Francis rapped at the office door and pushed it open before him. The man in the leather jacket swung round from the desk under the window, his briefcase open in one hand, a folder of papers in the other. The movement was silent, alert and surprised, but by no means alarmed. He had a smooth, well-fleshed face, high-coloured and bland, with round-set eyes of a bright and yet opaque black, like coal.
‘
‘Herr Klostermann?’
No, he was not a Klostermann, it seemed. He relaxed, however, on finding that the late caller was looking for his boss. Francis went through his brief explanation for the third time, and produced his photographs. The young man bent his large head over them, breathing stertorously and considered them for a few moments with respectful attention. Then he shook his head regretfully.
‘I am sorry! I am with Herr Klostermann myself only two years. I drive for him. I came to pick up my delivery schedule for to-morrow. With the memorial business I have nothing to do. I do not know if he made this or not. If you could come to-morrow, he will be here.’
‘I should like to get in touch with him now,’ said Francis, ‘if it’s possible. I have to drive back to Scheidenau to- night, and I’d rather not have the same journey again if I can help it.’
‘I am sorry!’ He handed back the picture, and closed his briefcase with deliberation, his round eyes still black and steady on Francis.
‘Would there be records here for 1956?’
‘No, no records. It is now chiefly a haulage business, everything else he has at his own house.’
‘Could I go round there to see him now? It would be a great help to me.’
‘I think he is not there,’ said the gravelly voice gently. ‘Wait, I will call the house for you, and see.’
He walked away into the dark corner of the room, and opened a narrow door there. His fingers touched the light switch within, and Francis caught a glimpse of a larger, less austere office, with filing cabinets from floor to ceiling along the visible wall, and some pleasant panelling beyond. Then the door was closed firmly between, and he was alone, free to move noiselessly after, and apply his eye to the minute keyhole, and then his ear to the thin panel of the door. It got him very little. There was a long table just within his vision, and the young man was leaning over it, telephone receiver at his ear, dialling a number; but the room within was larger than it seemed, and nothing more than an indistinguishable murmur reached the listener’s ear. There was nothing whatever to make his thumbs prick. The young man had said he would telephone, and he was telephoning. A local number, too, or at least somewhere he could dial and get without delay. And he was already cradling the receiver, better get well away from the door before he reached it.
The door opened peacefully, the young man stood shaking his head sadly on the threshold. Behind him the light went out.
‘I am sorry, Mr. Klostermann is at his married daughter’s house for the evening. I can tell you how to reach him there, if you care to go? It is a farm, about five kilometres from here. You take the road from the square towards Kempten, then two kilometres on you come to a right-hand fork, the signpost says Maienbach. Follow that road for two kilometres, and on the left is a cart road to the farm. It is not hard to find. I should go and speak with Herr Klostermann there. He will not need records to know his own work.’
‘No,’ said Francis, ‘I don’t suppose he will. Thank you! If it’s only five kilometres I might as well reach him now, and get it settled.’
‘If you should have to ask, the name at the farm is Haimhofer.’
‘Thank you very much!’
Francis walked purposefully across the yard,pulled the unlocked gates to behind him, got into his car and drove up towards the square with aplomb. Arrived there, he circled right-handed about the central parking space, and passed without a second glance the sign marked: Kempten. Reasonable or not, his thumbs were pricking almost painfully. He took the road for Felsenbach, and stepped hard on the accelerator as soon as he emerged from the narrow confines of the streets. He was heading back towards Scheidenau as fast as he could go.
He was past Felsenbach, half-way to the frontier and immured between encroaching plantations of conifers, before he could be quite certain that he was being followed. There were all yesterday’s prickings of uneasiness, all yesterday’s minute outward signs, but magnified by the extreme, washed clarity of the air. The rain had scrubbed the atmosphere clean as bone, sounds carried as in an echo-chamber. When he stopped his engine for a moment under the trees on a sharp bend, there was not so much a perceptible sound of an engine following, as the vibration of a motor just cut out, by some hypersensitive perception, to match his. Then the superhuman silence. They were there, not too far behind, not too close on his tail; they knew where he was, and were not anxious to overhaul him, as long as they could hold him at this convenient distance, and be sure of not losing him. He wondered what spot they would choose, where they would elect to close the gap. He wished he carried a gun, but knew it was not his weapon and not his style, and that he would have been useless with it even if he had had one. There are killers and non-killers. Guns don’t make them.
He was on the climbing sector now, bend after sharp bend, the margins unfenced and with only shallow ditches, the trees crowding close. Silence all round, apart from his own re-echoing sounds, and darkness but for his own headlights glazing and gilding the embossed trunks of the trees, the inset panels of mirror, the scoured faces of
