Read Online Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf by Ellis Peters - Free Book Online

German and French, he’d get along all right. We weren’t worried about him.’
    But the strange, the unnerving thing was that suddenly Francis was worried about him. For no reason, except that the boy had been near to Maggie, and had walked away into a long-past evening and left no trace behind him.
    ‘Didn’t his family want to know what you’d done with him?’
    ‘He had no close family, as far as I know. He’d been knocking about on his own for two or three years already.’
    ‘What was this boy like? You haven’t a photograph?’
    She shook her head. ‘No photographs. I had loads of publicity pictures at the time, of course, but obviously I didn’t file them. It’s a long time ago. I remember him as a very attractive young man, and well aware of it. Girls liked him.’ She added after a moment’s thought: ‘He laughed a lot.’
    ‘And where did this happen… this walking out?’
    ‘We were staying in a little resort in the Vorarlberg, a place called Scheidenau. You’ll find it all in the papers there. Freddy always used the Goldener Hirsch as a convenient base for all our concerts round there—Bregenz, Bludenz, Vaduz, St. Gallen, Lindau, all those places. It’s very near to the German border, and quiet, and rather cheap.’
    ‘And he walked out between dinner and bedtime? Just like that? Did you notice anything different about him at dinner? Nothing to show what he had in mind?’
    By this time, he realised, she ought to have been asking questions herself, and the very fact that she was not had drawn him into deeper water than he had intended venturing. He smiled at her, shaking away the betraying tension of his own concentration. ‘It seems such an odd time to cut his moorings.’
    ‘All he seemed to have in mind at dinner,’ said Bunty, disconcertingly remaining grave, ‘was ingratiating himself with Maggie. He’d been paying her special attention for several days, that I do remember. Not that there’s anything remarkable in that. She was… she
is
a most beautiful person. All our boys were a little in love with her.’
    He kept his eyes steady and faintly amused on hers, his hands placid on the papers they held, with an effort of will that left him no energy for speech for a moment. And he wondered if she could have hit him so hard and so accurately without knowing exactly what she was doing. Not out of malice, perhaps, just by way of experiment; there are other ways of satisfying one’s curiosity, besides asking direct questions.
    ‘I’m sure they must have been,’ he said evenly, when he had his voice under control again. Let her wonder, too, by how much she had missed her target. ‘And what about Miss Tressider? Did she respond?’
    ‘Maggie had other things on her mind by then. She knew what she wanted. She was nineteen,’ said Bunty, ‘she liked being liked, and she was a very nice, patient, quiet girl who would in any case have been kind to him. But she never took her eyes from her objective, for him or anyone.’
    Her voice was gentle, deliberate and detached. It was more than time to work his way back unobtrusively to Paul Fredericks for ten minutes or so, and then take himself off, before he gave her more than he was getting out of her. She was altogether too perceptive. He managed his retreat with finesse, but finesse was not enough. Never mind, she had made it clear that she sympathised, and also held it to be no personal business of hers; and he was never going to see her again closer than across a Comerbourne street.
    ‘Of course,’ said Bunty Felse disconcertingly, seeing him out at the door, ‘after all this time she may have changed.’
     
    It did not occur to her that there was anything to disturb her in this interview, for fully an hour after it was over. Her visitor was presumably what he purported to be, and it was only his misfortune that an aching preoccupation of his own had side-tracked him from the master to the pupil. If there hadn’t been something she