House of Green Turf

‘To the top. Some years ago now. Class tells,’ he said demurely, and his lips curled in the very same private laughter he had allowed the mason to engrave on the tombstone, giving the lie to the depersonalised brow and marble eyelids, turning the dead mask into a living demon.

‘And then,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you had to come along and start looking for me— you, who weren’t going to swallow that grave without gagging. If you hadn’t turned so curious, after all this time, none of this need have happened. For God’s sake, why did you?’

She stared back at him wordlessly for a long minute, herself marvelling to find the landscape of her mind so miraculously changed. ‘I had you on my conscience,’ she said with deliberation. ‘I believed I owed you a life.’

Very softly, and with the most beguiling of smiles, he agreed: ‘And so you do.’

It could hardly be a surprise. She had known all along that she had gone too far to be left alive. Would he be talking to her like this, otherwise? From the beginning she had known at the back of her mind that she was talking chiefly to engage his attention, to make him forget time, to gain minutes as best she could. Because of the one thing he did not know about that Mahler performance of hers tonight, the fact that she had been waiting for the arrival of another visitor.

What if Francis was late in coming? He would come. And whatever others might think at finding her bedroom empty—that she had gone off of her own will, to some appointment in the woods, to somebody else’s bed, to the bottom of the lake—Francis would know better. Francis would know that she had been waiting for him, and that nothing would have induced her to leave the appointed place until he came. And whether he called in the police or not, he would begin a search for her on his own account until he found her.

On that one chance she pinned her hope, and saw that it was still a substantial hope. No point in over- estimating it, though. For Robin wouldn’t be killing time with her in this idle way, however enjoyably, if he himself were not waiting for something.

At least go on talking, she thought. At least keep him from deciding not to wait, after all.

‘How do you intend to dispose of me?’ she asked conversationally.

His bright, probing, inscrutable yellow stare was fixed and blinding upon her face, and for once he was not smiling.

‘My dear girl, you set the whole scene yourself. Here are you with a recent record of illness and odd behaviour, and apparently with some sort of obsession about me, a small, sad episode in your distant past. And then your rest-home is invaded by a tragedy—a girl drowned in the lake. Suicide is infectious. Now they’re going to find your verandah door open, and a nice little trail laid down to the shore. I’ve seen to that. And on your piano, just as you left it, that wonderfully appropriate Mahler song about the dead lover returning by night to visit his beloved… Oh, yes, someone will be able to make the connection. With that sort of background, who’s going to be surprised that you finally ran off the rails altogether, and did away with yourself?’

‘Then why didn’t you slip me into the water right away, while you had the chance?’

He laughed gaily. ‘Because there’s a plague of drunken wedding guests holding a regatta all round the lake. And a damned inconvenient moment they chose to embark.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ said Maggie tartly.

‘Granted. But they’ll get sick of it just now, and go home to bed. Don’t worry, to-morrow the police will be dragging for your body.’

‘And of course,’ she said, ‘they’ll find it?’

‘Oh, yes, they’ll find it. Quite definitely death by drowning, there’ll be no injuries to spoil the picture, not even a bruise. A pity I let Friedl make me angry, but what can you do? No, my dear, for a Maggie Tressider they might go on searching too long and too well, if I didn’t make them a present of you. They might find other things, one never knows. No, they shall have you gratis.’

To make a suicide like that convincing, she reasoned with furious coldness, and to ensure that she was found with satisfying promptness, she would have to be put into the water near to the hotel. So they must be somewhere quite close now. Why not go on doing the direct thing, and ask? He had answered some curious questions already, being quite certain of his security here. But if this waiting continued long enough, and every moment counted, what she had gleaned from him might come in useful yet to convict him.

‘Where have you brought me?’ She looked round the dim room as though she had just discovered it. There was a second door in the distant wall, directly opposite the first one, as though this was only one in a series of rooms. Cellars? Not in the hotel, surely? Yet he could not have brought her far. The other man sat silent on the far side of the single lamp, decapitated by the sharp edge of the black shade, unconcernedly breaking, cleaning and loading a gun, a pair of large, dexterous hands with no head to direct them, but remarkably agile and competent on their own.

‘We’re in the wine-cellars of the old castle. There was a whole labyrinth of them originally,but most are blocked up with rubble. We sealed off the safest part of the network as a repository. One of several. With three frontiers so close, we need a safe place handy in each country, where men and things can be got out of sight quickly until the heat is off. No,’ he said grinning, ‘don’t look round for treasure, we’ve cleared everything out. After to-night we shan’t be using this place again, it’s likely to be a little too precarious for our purposes.’

‘And you, where do you pass the—shall we say “unburied”?—part of your life? I suppose you’ve still got an identity somewhere among the living?’

‘Oh, several,’ he assured her merrily. ‘Most respectable ones, and in more than one country. As one frontier closes, another opens. To a new man, of course. You know, Maggie…’ She waited, watching him steadily. He was eyeing her with calculating thoughtfulness, like a sharp trader contemplating an inspired deal. ‘In a way, it’s a pity I couldn’t have both, you and this. Who’d have thought you’d stay in mourning for me all this time?’

She remembered the anguish he had cost her, the obsessive hold he had had upon her, and suddenly it dawned upon her that Francis had made the same mistake about her that this man was making now. Because she had all but wrecked her life on him, they believed she must have loved him, if only in retrospect after he was gone. She opened her eyes wide, and laughed in Robin’s face. It was perhaps the only luxury she had left, and not one that did her any credit, but she could not resist it.

‘In mourning for you? Do you know what you’ve been to me? A nightmare, a curse, and that’s all…’