Read Online Heil Harris! by John Garforth - Free Book Online Page B

he asked politely. She did. They ought to have brought a picnic lunch with them. “There are two alternatives,” he said at last. “Either we can question every person who was within miles of this place in June 1945, or we can alert the nearby countryside so that anybody coming to this spot in the near future would find himself involved in a very public expedition.”
    Heidi agreed. “But there is nothing to be gained from questioning people about 1945. A few villagers know that the stuff was taken to Mount Klausenkopf, but they know nothing more. They think that it was taken away by American soldiers and smuggled into the U.S.A.”
    “Whereas it was brought here and the men who brought it are dead.” Steed sighed. “I wonder who arranged for it to be brought.”
    There was no answer to that. Heidi’s father had browsed around many years ago and learnt nothing more. The only thing was to carry out plan number two, and alert the entire village of Zwergern. “If we go back to my boat we can be there in half an hour.” Steed spent a pastoral afternoon rowing on the lake with Heidi, eating rural food in the village inn and drinking the local wine. During the course of three hours they gossiped with police and publican and anyone standing nearby. It was a small village and it was simple enough to ensure that every inhabitant heard the news within a few hours of their departure.
    “Herr Steed is a British Intelligence agent hunting for the Reichsbank loot,” she told a bank manager they met in the street.
    Steed shook hands sheepishly.
    “He thinks he has found it in that cave a few kilometres along the shore...”.
    When the bank manager had looked suitably impressed and gone on his way Steed tried to remonstrate with Heidi. “It’s a little ingenuous, if you know what I mean, to introduce me as a British Intelligence agent.”
    “But Herr Schon is secretary of the local N.P.D. He was in the S.S. during the war.”
    “And what do you hope he’ll do now?”
    “I thought he might try to kill you.”
    “Huh. And I was just beginning to fall in love.” Heidi seized his hands and looked immensely serious. “I’m sure you’re so much more clever than my father. He didn’t really believe that anyone would kill him, and when they took him out one early morning to shoot him he was so taken up with dying honourably that he let them do it.”
    Steed had a feeling he was being got at, but he smiled blandly and assured her that he himself believed in protesting vigorously when people waved guns in his direction.
    “If we’re lucky, you see, they’ll come after you, and you will revenge my father’s death.”
    He put his arm round her shoulder. “I’ll see what can be done.” He had known Heinrich Toppler well, a good man as well as the father of a wildly attractive girl. “I ought to find out who killed him, if only to stop up the leak between London and the N.P.D.”
    She threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. Steed blinked slightly. “You live over the other side of the lake—”
    “I’ll stay with you until this is all over. You might need some help.” She brushed aside his modest protests. “I told mother that I’d be staying with you until every one of those murderers is dead.”
    “Oh well, that’s settled then.”
    She looked such a peaceful girl, brought up on all the health-giving vitamins, smelling slightly of new-mown grass with a dash of honey. But as he watched her run happily up the mountainside on the way back to his car he had to remember that she was more like a leopard. Savage beneath the feline grace and probably deadly.
    “I thought there weren’t many of you left in England now,” she called at one point. “Aren’t they all pop stars and realist actors since the war?”
    “We’re hanging on,” said Steed. “I have a cousin and we fight shoulder to shoulder.”
    He drove the Volkswagen at an average speed of seventy-three miles an hour all the way back, which was