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Kristian closed his eyes. “And Sarah Mackeson?” he said in a whisper. “Whoever killed her meant to!” He shuddered convulsively. Imagination, or a memory too hideous to bear? Or the realization that Max Niemann could be guilty after all?
“Tell me about him,” Monk demanded tensely. “Kristian, for God’s sake, give me all you can! I need to find the truth. If it isn’t Niemann, then I need to know that. But someone killed them. . both!”
Kristian made an effort to regain his composure and appeared to concentrate, but still he said nothing, as if the past enclosed him in its reality and the present ceased to be.
“Somebody’s going to the rope for it!” Monk said brutally. “If you didn’t kill them, don’t let it be you! Are you protecting someone?” He had no idea who. Why should Kristian die to save Max Niemann? Or to hide something that had happened in Vienna thirteen years ago? He
couldn’t possibly think Callandra had any part in it. Did he even know how much she loved him? Monk doubted it.
“I’m not defending anyone!” Kristian said with startling force, almost anger. “I just don’t know what to tell you. I haven’t any idea who killed them, or why. Do you think I want to hang-or that I don’t realize that I almost certainly will?” He managed to say the words with superb control, but looking at his eyes, Monk saw the fear in them, black and bottomless, without faith to build a bridge over the void, nothing but courage. And when at the very last he was utterly alone, with his pain, and oblivion in front of him, all love and friendship and pity left behind, there would be nothing to hold on to.
“Tell me where to look,” Monk said, horrified by the vision himself, aware that the similarity between them was far more profound than any difference. “Where did you live? Who were your friends? Who do I look for to ask?”
Reluctantly, each one an effort, Kristian gave him half a dozen names and addresses in three different streets. There was no lift of hope in his voice, no belief. “She was beautiful,” he said softly. “They’ll all say that. I don’t mean her face.” He dismissed it as trivial, but Monk could not. He saw in his mind the haunting loveliness of the woman on Allardyce’s canvas. That face was full of passion, dreaming just beyond the grasp, inviting the onlooker to dare anything, imagine the impossible and love it, need it enough to follow her to the ends of the earth.
“I mean the heart of her,” Kristian went on. “The will to live, the courage to meet anything. She lit the fire that warmed us all.”
Was it memory speaking, or wish, or the kind of emotion that gilds the recollection of people who are loved and lost? Or was it guilt trying to make up for the gulf that had grown between them since then? Would Monk find in Vienna the truth about Kristian as well?
He wrote down what Kristian gave him, then tried to think of something to say in parting which would convey what he wanted to. It was impossible. Frustration. The hunger to believe that Kristian was innocent, not only for his sake but for Callandra’s, because she was in love with him, and Monk knew what it was to be in love. He had not wished to be; it laid one open to pain far out of any control.
He wanted Kristian’s innocence for Hester, because she believed in him, and would be so hurt for them all. Even for Pendreigh, because he would not be able to contain the disillusion about his daughter if it had been a tragic domestic crime after all. Perhaps also for the woman who stared out of Allardyce’s canvas, and surely deserved better than to end a crumpled heap on a studio floor, killed by accident or on purpose by a husband she had destroyed in her crazy compulsion, throwing away everything on the turn of a card or the roll of dice-not after she had fought for everything that mattered infinitely, known freedom and dignity, the right of strangers to govern their own destiny.
“I’ll do all I can,” he said to Kristian. “We all will.”
Kristian nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
CHAPTER TEN
Monk left London on the last train to Dover, so he could catch the first boat of the morning across to Calais and on through Paris to Vienna. It was a journey which would take him three days and eight hours, assuming all went well and he at no time got lost or met with any delays or mechanical faults. A second-class ticket cost eight pounds, five shillings, six pence.
At any other time the journey would have fascinated him. He would have been absorbed by the countryside, the towns he passed, the architecture of the buildings, and the dress and manners of the people. His fellow passengers would have interested him particularly, even though he did not understand their conversation and could deduce only what observation and knowledge of human nature told him. But his mind was intent upon what he would find in Vienna, and upon trying to formulate the questions he should ask in order to learn some truth through the mist of heroic memory.
The journey seemed endless, and he lost the sense of time and place. He was imprisoned with strangers in a padded iron room which swayed and jolted through alternate gray daylight and intense darkness as the late autumn evenings closed in. Sometimes it was clear, sometimes rain pattered against the windows, blurring the view of farmland, villages, bare forests.
He slept fitfully. He found it difficult because there was no space to lie, and after the first night and day his muscles protested against the constant inactivity. He could speak to no one because it seemed all the other passengers in his coach understood only French or German. He exchanged polite nods and smiles, but it did little to break the monotony.
His mind raced over possibilities of success and failure, all the difficulties that might arise to prevent his learning anything of use, above all that he was ignorant not only of the language but of the culture of the people.
And what would success be? That he could prove Niemann guilty? That he could find and take back to London something at least to raise a reasonable doubt? What, for example? No one was going to confess, not in any form that could be used. Sworn testimony of a quarrel, money, or revenge? Would that be sufficient, along with the evidence that Niemann had been in London?
And was Monk taking the chance of accusing and perhaps slandering a man who was innocent?
All that turned over and over in his mind during the long days and interrupted nights as the train crossed France and made its way over the border into Austria, and finally through the city outskirts into the heart of Vienna.
Monk climbed to his feet and retrieved his luggage. His back and legs ached, his mouth was dry and his head pounded with weariness. He longed to smell fresh air and to be able to walk more than a few swaying steps without bumping into everything and having to stand aside as someone passed him.
He alighted onto the platform amid clouds of steam and the rattle and clang of doors, shouted orders, greetings, demands for porters and assistance, little of which he could understand. He grasped his single case and, feeling profoundly lost, he started to walk along the platform, patting his inside pocket again to assure himself his money and letters from Callandra and Pendreigh were still there. He looked for the way out to the street, to begin the struggle to find a cab of some sort with a driver who would understand his request to be taken to the British Embassy.
He was crumpled and dirty, which he loathed, and tired beyond the point of thinking clearly, when at last he was deposited on the steps of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to the Court of the Emperor Franz Josef of Austro-Hungaria. He paid the driver in Austrian shillings; from the startled look on his face, Monk gave him far more than he deserved. He climbed up the steps, his case in his hand, knowing he looked like some desperate Englishman fallen on hard times and begging for assistance. It galled his pride.
It was another hour and a half before his letters gained him an audience with a senior aide to the ambassador, who explained that His Excellency was heavily engaged in matters of state for the next two days at the least. However, if a guide and interpreter were all Monk required, no doubt something could be done. He looked down at Pendreigh’s letter, spread open on the desk in front of him, and Monk thought he saw more respect in the man’s face than affection. It did not surprise him. Pendreigh was a formidable man, a good friend perhaps, but a bad enemy for certain. But then, no doubt the same would have been said of Monk himself. He recognized the impatience, the ambition to assess and to judge.
“Thank you,” he accepted stiffly.
“I will send someone in the morning,” the aide replied. “Where are you staying?”
Monk glanced down at his suitcase and then at the man, his eyebrows raised very slightly. The question had been intended as patronizing, and they both knew it.
