Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain Read Free Page B

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