ended. There were police converging on Scheidenau from all directions, methodically threading the woodland along the lake-shore, a small army mustering because of what George and she had loosed in this quiet village. She intended to see finished what they had begun.
‘Then of course you may stay. Where should we have been without you? You can rest here in your friend’s room, why not?’
But he showed neither surprise nor disapproval when she followed him down to the office where he had set up his headquarters.
The telephone was busy almost every moment for the next hour, but they found no further trace of Maggie Tressider. The revellers on the lake sang and rowed on unflagging, which in its way was as astonishing as it was admirable. It would have been only human to tire and long for sleep as soon as they were officially requested to go on celebrating. Outside among the trees the search proceeded, inside here Oberkofler directed and co-ordinated. The Waldmeister parents, philosophical and phlegmatic, not to say faced with their usual working day in a few hours’ time, accounted for themselves and went back to bed, the sons volunteered their services and went to join in the hunt. And Bunty watched and listened and waited, and harried her memory for any submerged detail or any hopeful idea; and worried now not only about those two hapless people lost, but also about George, from whom there had been no word.
A call from Werner Frankel, over in Felsenbach. The Dodge must have got through before they had an effective block-up. They were getting out a general call on it, and hoped to pick it up somewhere near Regenheim.
Another call from Werner, half an hour later. They had returned now to the scene of the abduction, and found in the ditch where the attack took place a wallet containing the papers of Francis Killian, together with several photographs of a certain gravestone in the cemetery at Felsenbach.
‘Of which,’ said Oberkofler, ‘perhaps you have heard from the Herr Inspektor?’
‘He told me about it yesterday,’ said Bunty. ‘The day before yesterday, I mean.’ She was a little lightheaded with so much waiting and thinking, and so little sleep. ‘But I haven’t seen it. George didn’t have a camera. Our mistake!’
And at last, just before one o’clock, another telephone call which Oberkofler answered in voluble German, to switch suddenly and wonderfully into English.
‘Yes… yes, good, I will send you every man I can, and more as they come in. Yes, your wife is here. Please, only a word…’ He held out the receiver to Bunty with a smile as wide and deep as the sea. ‘Your husband, Frau Felse.’
‘George?’ said Bunty, heaving a deep sigh. ‘Did he tell you? We’ve lost Maggie as well.’
‘Yes, I know. That makes us quits, love, I lost the car they had Killian in. We had a mile of road to comb for whatever hole they dived into, but it turned out there’s only one, apart from farm-tracks. This one’s blind, too, it goes to the lake and stops, so they tell me. Doesn’t even pass anything, except that rubble that used to be Scheidenau Castle. But somewhere up there is where they must be. There isn’t anywhere else. We’re off to hunt for the car now.’
‘George, isn’t there anything I can do to help?’
‘From all I hear you’ve done it,’ said George. ‘They also serve…! If we find him, the odds are we find her, too. This is all one set-up. Keep hoping! Sorry, got to clear this line, it may be wanted.’
‘Yes, of course. See you, then!’
She held out the receiver to Oberkofler, but he shook his head at her and smiled. She hung up. She was suddenly shaking with reaction, and dared not try to guess how the night would end.
Distantly, inexhaustibly, across the lake and in at the window came the thunder of the guns of Helmut’s navy:
CHAPTER TWELVE
« ^ »
Two voices were discussing her above her head. They didn’t know that dead people can hear. Quite dispassionate voices, cool, leisurely and low, discussing her in terms of life and death. Either they had no bodies, or dead people can’t see. She was dangling just below the level of consciousness clinging to the surface tension like the air-breathing nymph of some water creature.
‘
‘Nobody’s beautiful who gets in my way,’ said the second voice in plain English and without overtones; a light, pleasant, untroubled tenor voice without a care in the world.
‘
‘Except immortality.’
‘What are you going to do with her?’
The second voice was silent long enough to indicate a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Did I make her wade in here so far out of her depth? She had a death wish.’
‘Waste of a girl!’ said the first voice with impersonal regret.
‘There are others. Even some with perfect pitch.’ And in a blithe half-tone the second voice began to sing to itself dreamily:
