Then everything began to slip away from her, like flesh peeling from her bones, all her delusions of hope, all her belief in the future, any future, even her passion for her own gift. All illusory, all drifting away like dispersed smoke, leaving her naked and lost and damned after all. The world and time came toppling upon her, closing in until there was nothing left but this moment, which was her death.
He came towards her slowly, smiling his pale, drowned smile, his hands held out to her. For what had he come up out of his grave if not to claim her? The hands touched her breast, and cold as she was, she felt their icy chill sear her to the bone. Cold, wet arms went round her and drew her down, down into green depths…
Her lips moved, saying: ‘Robin!’ but made no sound. There was a voice whispering in her ear, soft and distant through the darkness that was beginning to wind itself about her:
His face drew near to her, floating through the gathering dark, smiling. When it swam out of focus his lips touched hers, and cold and dark burned into one absolute and overwhelmed her. She sagged in the arms that held her. She experienced death, the death that gave her back to him.
Stooping, the dead man hoisted her slight weight to his shoulder, and carried her away…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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Bunty Felse sat in the gallery at the Alte Post until past eleven o’clock, watching the fun and waiting for George to come home.
For two days, ever since the poacher and the police had fished Friedl Schiffer’s body out of the lake, Bunty had been on her own. It was all very well for George to conduct his mild investigations in private, so long as he was merely keeping an eye on two English people apparently involved in something mysterious and possibly dangerous, but not known to be in any way criminal; but murder was quite another matter. So George had gone to the local police with his part of the story, and Bunty had been left to take care of herself from that moment on. What they had made between them out of their pooled information was more than she could guess, but its result had been to provide George with an English-speaking plainclothes-man and a car, with
She arrived just in time to relieve the lunch-time loneliness of the elderly Englishwoman who had accidentally got herself included in a predominantly young party, at this tag-end of the holiday season, and found herself ruthlessly shaken from their every activity. To be honest, she was a bore, and Bunty had a certain amount of sympathy with the young people; but since there was no chance of being useful to George for the rest of the day, she resigned herself cheerfully enough to filling a gap for someone else.
The elderly Englishwoman was fascinated and repelled by the wedding party, which was a great deal more rumbustious and well-lubricated than any at which she had ever been a guest. The enormous energy of those young men and their strapping girls seemed to her slightly indecent, and even the lustiness of the music had a strongly earthy flavour about it. The boys might all be in their best dark suits and dazzlingly white shirts, but they still looked as ebulliently fleshy and muscular as in their everyday leathers, and the pointed town shoes pounded the wooden floor as solidly as local hand-made mountain boots. And that awful man who seemed to be cheer-leader and master of ceremonies, the one with the beery paunch and the brick-red face who had always a girl in one hand and a two- litre stein in the other, such a man as that, totally uninhibited, simply could not happen in England. The elderly Englishwoman had, Bunty had discovered, run through two husbands, and one of them had been a butcher and the other a brewer, which made her views rather more surprising. Either the quality of English butchers and brewers was in decline, or she was remembering them rather as she would have had them than as they had been.
The master of ceremonies was, in fact, rather a splendid figure, over six feet high and nearly as wide, with a roaring laugh and the true mountain bass voice, straight out of a square mile of cavern.
He was the one who kept leading little forays out into the mild evening, to see if it had yet stopped raining. If it cleared, he would have them all tumbling out to the hotel boat-house, with arms full of food and hands full of bottles, to embark with their musicians and their instruments and their inexhaustible energy on the pewter surface of the Scheidenauersee.
The bride and ’groom had long departed, seen off with the maximum of noise and every traditional joke. The elderly Englishwoman said good night and went off to bed, but the party showed no sign of ending as long as food, drink and breath held out. Now Helmut was charging out by the garden door for the fiftieth time, and out there one of the girls was hallooing that it had stopped raining and the moon was out. There was loud and hilarious conference, and the musicians began to pack up their music and stands. Might as well see the aquacade set off, Bunty thought, and went up to her room over the lake.
They would be a little time yet, they were hunting for lanterns to take with them, to turn the night into a carnival. Bunty took her hair brush to the open window, and looked at the long, comfortable bulk of the Goldener Hirsch, high above the trees. Several lights were still burning there, and several windows uncurtained, so that an ethereal golden haze brooded over the crest of the hill, as though a swarm of fireflies had clustered there. As she watched, one or two of the lights blinked out. Maggie’s two windows were already dark. No, not quite, in the inner one there was a glow-worm spark that must be the bedside lamp. A convalescent like Maggie should sleep early and long.
Down beneath Bunty’s window three wedding guests, the vanguard of the flotilla, were opening the boat- house. On impulse Bunty turned back into the room, and went to look for George’s binoculars. She was not sleepy, and this promised to be quite a night. If only she had happened to catch Helmut’s hospitable eye, down there in the hall, she could probably have got herself an invitation to join the party; everyone who was willing was welcome. Free transport across the lake to that lovely and sinister shore where Friedl had died two nights ago. Not that there would be anything relevant to find there, after the police had combed the whole stretch of woodland thoroughly. They had found merely several trampled places, hardly very informative where tourists were accustomed to walk, sit and picnic even thus late in the year, and one photograph, half-buried in long grass among the trees. It had not been there longer than a day or two, or the previous rains would have reduced it to a pulp; and the implications were too obvious to resist. Robin Aylwin, George had guessed, on being shown the thing, though he could not
