Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (2 page)

“Darling, this won’t be business, not exactly. And I’ll be there. It’s fashionable to go behind the Iron Curtain this year, everybody’s doing it. And it’s the least we can do for poor old Herbert. The most, too,” she added reflectively.

“I thought you hated humbug! Oh, all right, of course, if you want to go…”

“Darling!” murmured Chloe, hugging him happily. “It’ll be wonderful! I must get lots of beautiful black. I look well in black, and they’re sure to be rather conventional in Central Europe. But I’ll be a
fiancée
, as well as a widow! What superb timing!” She held him off for a brief instant to get a good look into his swarthy, self-confident, faintly wary face. “Are you sure you didn’t pop over and
push
poor old Herbie off his mountain?”

He took it that she was playing games of fancy with him, and stopped her mouth the easiest and pleasantest way; but afterwards, on his way out, he had a queasy feeling that she might not have been joking. Either she was an immoderately silly woman with pockets of cleverness, aa most people supposed, or she was an inordinately deep one who enjoyed appearing naïve. He could never quite make up his mind. Possibly she was both at the same time, or both in alternation. Whatever she was, she was irresistible, so he might as well give up speculating.

It was he who remembered, as he was leaving, that there was one more person who ought to be notified. The girl wasn’t Terrell’s daughter, of course, she belonged to Chloe’s first marriage, and her father had been a quite distinguished scholar in his provincial way, Professor Henry Barber, the sort of middle-aged, shabby, eccentric, companionable wit for whom young and ambitious actresses fall with a resounding but transitory bang. He’d died when his daughter was twelve years old, which meant she was turned eighteen now. She hadn’t, by all accounts, got on at all well with her first step-father. Took herself off to Oxford, so Chloe said, largely to get away from him; after old Barber’s unpredictable and exciting vagaries, this one’s cool, correct orthodoxy had infuriated her. Newcombe hoped profoundly that the second stepfather was going to be more of a success with her, but the thought of confronting a self-possessed and hypercritical eighteen-year-old frightened him more than he would have liked to admit.

“I suppose we ought to let Tossa know as soon as possible,” he said. The “we” was partly a deliberate assumption of Chloe’s responsibilities, and partly a pious prayer for harmony.

“Yes, of course, I’ll call her in the morning. It’s much too late to-night.
She’ll
take it in her stride,” said Chloe sunnily. “She never could bear him.”

Adrian Blagrove came back from his leave on Monday morning, clocked his mechanical way through the Marrion Institute’s defences in depth, and reported prompt at nine to his own office in the secretariat. He had been there no more than three minutes when he was sent for to Sir Broughton Phelps’s office in the most august and sacred recesses of Building One, and acquainted first with the fact of Herbert Terrell’s demise, and then with the probability of his own permanent appointment to the vacancy thus created. Both pieces of information he received with the appropriate awe, gravity and gratification, nicely tempered with a modesty which was far from native to him. Bursting with health and lightness of heart after his fortnight’s holiday, he felt capable of virtuoso performances. This job was what he had wanted for years. The frivolity with which he played his graceful little comedy of accepting it was entirely unconnected with the tenacity with which he would hold fast to it, and the intensity with which he would perform it.

“The appointment is at present temporary, pending confirmation. You understand that, of course.”

“Of course!”

“But if you acquit yourself as well as I believe you will, I can say there’s very little probability of confirmation being withheld. You’ve worked with Terrell, you know his methods and you know the organisation of his office. It’s vital that someone shall be able to step straight into his shoes without a falter in the apparatus or its working. Can you do that?”

“I think I can. I’ll do my best.”

He was a lanky but graceful fellow, not as tall as he appeared, but marked everywhere by noticeable length; long hands, long feet, long neck, long face in the best aristocratic tradition. A little like a well-bred horse, but with certain indications that the horse was by a sire with intelligence out of a dam with devilment. He was forty-one, and still a bachelor, in itself a diplomatic achievement, especially in view of the social life he led, and the fact that he was, as the Minister had remarked, old Roderick’s boy, and old Roderick’s only boy, at that.

“Then you’d better move in at once, and take over. The secretariat is geared to carry your absence a week longer, by which time we shall have made a new appointment there. Well, good luck, Blagrove!”

“Thank you, sir!”

He left the presence very demurely. In the long, soundless corridors of Building One he danced a little when there was no one else in sight, but it was a sarabande rather than a jig, and his face remained bland, intent and fierce with thoughtfulness. He knew exactly what he would do with the Security Office; he had had his own ideas ever since he had worked with Terrell on a certain dossier, and found the differences between their minds sharpening at every contact. It was that dossier, he remembered, that had put Terrell in charge of security at the Marrion in the first place.

He moved his own personal things into the office which had been Terrell’s. Temporary the appointment might be, and pending confirmation, but Blagrove spent a coolly happy hour rearranging things to his liking, taking down Terrell’s few mountain photographs from the walls, installing his own yachting colour pictures in their place. The beautiful Chloe Bliss—he’d kept her picture in its place even when she left him—went into a desk drawer with the rest. Of Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends and contemporaries, there were no pictures, or he might have been tempted to secrete one for his own private pleasure when he had his predecessor’s effects packed up for delivery to the widow.

By noon he had made a clean sweep. As far as the Marrion Research Institute was concerned, Herbert Terrell was not merely dead, but buried, too.

Chloe spent the whole of Monday shopping for glamorous mourning, and quite forgot about telephoning her daughter until late in the evening. While she waited for the operator to get the number of Tossa’s Oxford digs she practised looking appropriately widowed and murmuring: “Poor Herbert!” There was a mirror suitably placed opposite the telephone for this exercise, so it wasn’t time wasted. Shopping had acted as a tonic; she was looking blooming. Pathetically blooming, of course, but blooming. A pity about the name, though. What could you possibly do with “Herbert?” And yet how like him, how decorous and dull. Even death, even a sudden death like this, couldn’t get such a name off the ground.

The telephone sputtered in her ear, and Tossa came on the line, sounding defensively grim, as usual. Unexpected calls at this hour of the evening could only be from home.

“Tossa Barber here. Mother?”

Where did the child get that gruff voice, like a self-conscious choirboy just stricken by puberty? She might make a hit on television some day, if she could learn to use her natural oddities, but she’d never make it on the stage. You couldn’t fill a theatre with that bashful, suppressed baritone stammer.

“Darling, yes, of course it’s me. Did I interrupt something for you?”

“No, nothing much, we were just planning this foreign route. And arguing a lot, of course. The boys want to drive and drive, they don’t see any point in stopping at all, really. But it doesn’t matter, once we’re across to Le Touquet we can go wherever we like, and change the plans as much as we like. We’ve got the car, that’s the main thing. It’s a VW van, third-hand, but it’s been looked after. And you won’t have to worry about us at all, because we’ve got two first-class mechanics.”

Trot out at speed all the mitigating circumstances, and pray that she isn’t feeling maternal, or you’ve had it. Tossa and her fellow-students had been planning this holiday abroad all the term, and shelled out the money already for the air passage across the Channel, but one unpredictable impulse of mother-love on Chloe’s part could still wreck it. Well, even if she quashed their plans, Tossa was determined she wouldn’t go with her to Menton, to play chaperone for her and her next-man-in, before she’d even shucked off the present incumbent. She couldn’t help it, and Tossa knew she couldn’t, and didn’t hold it against her. But, my God, how it complicated things!

“Tossa, love, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. Darling, I have to go abroad, very soon, to-morrow if we can get a passage. You must try to be brave for me. I know you can. It’s Daddy…”

Christ! thought Tossa, she
is
coming over all cosy and motherly. She can’t have made it up with him? Even for her that would be an all-time, way-out crazy reaction. Even when she was gone on him she never tried this “Daddy ” business before—never in life!

“… something happened to him on holiday. He had an accident. He’s dead, sweetheart!”

Never in life, no, just in death. That made sense, anyhow. Death called for a gesture, and Chloe Bliss wasn’t the one to turn a deaf ear. Tossa stood frozen, clutching the receiver to her ear like some cosmic seashell bringing in the wavelengths of other worlds. And after a while she croaked faintly into the wood-dove’s muted cooing: “You mean it? He’s
dead
?”

“Yes, darling. He had a fall in the mountains, and was killed. Everybody’s being terribly sweet to me, his chief rang me up himself to break the news, and the Czechoslovak authorities have offered to give immediate clearance if I want to go out and arrange about bringing him home myself. And I do think I ought to, don’t you, dear? I’ve said yes, and Paul is arranging everything, and coming out there with me. I should feel so inadequate, alone. You do understand, darling? You mustn’t let it spoil your holiday, you know, I shouldn’t like that.”

“No! I see,” said Tossa numbly, and fumbled for the nearest available exit. “I’m sorry, Mother! It’s quite a shock. How long do you think you’ll be away?”

“Only a few days, I expect, maybe a week.”

“And you don’t mind if I go right ahead with this trip with Chris and the boys? It won’t be immediately, there’s ten days or more yet.”

“Of course, go, darling. I know you’ll be all right with Christine and her brother. Just take care, that’s all I ask.”

“Mother, I
am
sorry! About Mr. Terrell—Herbert….”

There wasn’t anything, not one single thing in the world, she could decently call him. The field between them had been as arid as that. And whose fault was it?

“Yes, sweet, I know you are. But there it is, these things happen, that’s all. Now, promise me you’ll get a proper sleep to-night, and not brood about anything?”

“No, I won’t brood. You know we weren’t close. I’m just sorry it had to happen to him. Mother, where
did
it happen?”

Chloe repeated punctiliously the names she had to spell out carefully each time from her own cramped handwriting. Zbojská Dolina, Nizké Tatry, Slovakia. Strange, far-off places. But not really so far-off, in these days of circling the globe, like Puck, in eighty minutes.

“I’ll send you a postcard, darling. Now good night, and God bless! Don’t stay up too late!”

“I won’t, Mother. Good night! I’m terribly sorry!”

She was the first and last to say that about the death of Herbert Terrell, and mean it. She stood for a long time with her hand still pressing the telephone receiver down on its rest, and she knew what she had said for truth, but still she didn’t know why. They had never come within touch of hands or minds, she and the dead man. He had been everything she hadn’t been used to and couldn’t get used to, precise, cold, methodical, thorough, pedestrian. He had courted her doggedly in ways that had only succeeded in alienating her still more implacably. But whose fault was it? Whose? A little more effort, no, a little more willingness, and she might have met him and achieved contact, she might have tapped unsuspected warmths in him. And now it was too late, he was dead. You couldn’t make new discoveries about people when they were dead, and you couldn’t make amends to them, either.

Well, no use dithering here like a wet hen, there was nothing she could do about him now. She marched back doggedly to her own bed-sitter, where her friends were sprawled happily over an outsize map of Europe spread out on the floor, the Mather twins in full cry. Tossa coiled herself once again in her place in the circle, and propped one elbow in the Aegean, and the other in the sea off Rimini. The soft, heavy wings of straight, dark hair swung forward and shadowed her face.

“Anybody interesting?” asked Christine, returning with capricious suddenness from Dubrovnik.

“No!” It came out so abruptly that it sounded like a snub, and she hastened to soften the effect, and made a mess of that, too. “Only my mother.”

It was simply that she didn’t want to talk about it, not yet, perhaps never. Think, yes, but talk, no. But to her own ears, and especially when she considered the fourth person present, who had never met her until this evening, it sounded distinctly ungracious, even a little shocking. Why did she have to be so maladroit? Chloe Bliss could and did put her foot in it right, left and centre, but always in the drollest and most disarming ways. Her daughter, it seemed, had to trip over everything, even the simple answer to a straight question. This friend of Toddy’s wasn’t going to find himself charmed or disarmed by rough cracks like that.

She cast a side glance at him from under the protective shadow of her hair. His name was Dominic Felse, and he was reading English literature. She didn’t know much more about him, except that it seemed he was a useful man in a boat, and Toddy thought well of him. He came from some river town somewhere in the Midlands, where all the grammar schools crewed racing eights, fours and pairs as a matter of course, hence his prowess. He was in his first year, like herself, and probably within a couple of months the same age; rather tall and a little gawky still, with a bush of cropped, reddish-brown hair, hazel eyes that didn’t miss much, and a fair skin that freckled heavily across the cheekbones and the nose. What he was thinking of her was more than she could guess.