The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

your word of honour—I will trust it—to come to England any time within the next ten days, I shall be silent on that point. If you do not give me your word, I go to Signor Mussolini at once, and you will be arrested at once," Pointer went on.

      Flight again for di Monti was out of the question. He would not try to escape from his own country, his new position. Both men knew as much.

      "You mean that I am to come to England to be arrested for the murder of Miss Charteris?" di Monti asked slowly.

      "That's as may be. Even so, you would have a chance of proving your innocence, a chance of an acquittal. You will have none if I go to your chief with the story of what has just happened to me at the Castello. I have witnesses who helped me to get out."

      "I might have known that you wouldn't come alone!" di Monti said bitterly. He walked up and down the room for some minutes. "I must agree. I give you my word of honour as an officer and a gentleman to come if you summon me within ten days."

      "Not necessarily to be arrested." Pointer did not want a suicide; and di Monti was capable of anything. "Possibly merely to help the case."

      Di Monti gave him a long look, and uncovered his teeth in an incredulous smile, then, with a curt nod, he returned to the council room, and Pointer walked on downstairs.

      He dismissed the young Italian from his mind for the time being. Pointer wanted to find the professor. Rose's father might hold the key to the whole involved series of events which had taken place that Thursday night at Stillwater. Di Monti said that he had not been near his family. As he was quite willing for Pointer to check that statement by a talk with his father, the Chief Inspector accepted his word.

      That registered letter that Rose had received had been sent from Bolzano. To Bolzano, Pointer was therefore bound.

      He telephoned to the old count. A telephone message obtained a hearing often when a caller was kept waiting. He spoke of himself over the wire as Gilchrist, Professor Charteris's family solicitor. Had the professor made any arrangement to stay with Count di Monti? A feeble voice told him that the professor had. He was to have come to Verona to the Palazzo di Monti on May first, and spend the week-end there. But he had telephoned from Genoa earlier, asking whether his visit could be put forward a week, as otherwise he must give it up. It had not been possible for the count to do this, much as he regretted the fact. There the matter had rested. The voice of the old man showed that he thought himself somewhat summarily treated, for he had had no word from his once-invited guest of explanation or apology.

      Pointer caught the night train up to Bolzano. He had much to think about as the train wound up beside the Adige.

      The next morning he woke to true Bolzano weather, though the year was unusually cold. May, as a rule, is hot in this wonderful little spot of Europe where north and south meet, where the grape ripens under the pine trees, where the same valley can show glacier and coral formations. Pointer liked Bolzano. Though he thought its old name of Bozen suited it better. There is something angular and wooden about the Tirol word that goes with the gables, and turrets, and arched passages of the busy town, where the swifts swoop like hounds on the scent down the main streets, dodging under the elbows of passers-by, and chasing each other like children at tag through the arcades.

      The professor stopped at the Hotel Laurin.

      Pointer knew by inquiries made already from England that he had arrived on the Sunday before Rose's death, alone, and had left, alone, the next day. His only luggage had been a suit-case, which he had sent to the station early on Monday morning, saying that it was to be forwarded to Meranoo.

      Pointer found that it had been duly forwarded and fetched from the latter station. Either the professor, or some one else, had handed in the scontrino and been given the bag. But who had produced that voucher?

      Pointer's first walk was to the Bolzano post-office, where he verified the registered letter sent off on the Monday before Rose's death, some twelve days ago now.

      He was shown the duplicate slip, which stated:

      Assegno L.—Charteris. Hotel Laurin.

      Destnario—Charteris. Medchester.

      The hour, Pointer learnt, must have been before noon, as at that time the clerks had been changed, and the one in whose writing the slip was made out had gone off duty for the day.

      At the hotel he learnt that the professor had shown no preference either for people or for solitude. Some of his meals he had taken in the dining room, some in his own bedroom. Apparently he had acted like any ordinary traveller.

      Pointer began to be more certain than ever that the murderer had made a mistake, that he had expected that registered letter's enclosure to contain—what?

      What was it, what could it have been, that might have been enclosed instead of that memo, that might have been wanted by some one who thought that some important piece of news might have been sent to the daughter by the father, news so important that at all costs to the receiver, at all risks to the criminal, it must be prevented from being passed on?

      Where was the professor? What had happened to him between Bolzano and his promised visit to Meranoo?

      A railway line runs between the two towns, but Charteris had expressly spoken of walking over the Mendel. Where could his walk have led him that no word of his only child's murder seemed to be able to reach him? The Mendel Pass is not out of the world. It is a favourite summer resort, with most up-to-date hotels, where every well-known English newspaper would be taken.

      Pointer went for a walk along the old dyke, planted with trees and shrubs, broad as the king's highway, that keeps the river in bounds.

      He loved nature as only the man can who spends his life in towns. And that walk is unique. With the chanting Talfer rushing past, clear as crystal, with vineyards stretching on either hand, with feudal castles and gleaming farmhouses, and tiny white churches like, candles dotted here and there, on the slopes of the green hills of Tirol that rise on every side, while far away, as though looked at through gauze, towers the great Rosengarten range, set like a throne of the high gods against the sky.

      Just now it was still hung with veils of white over its own changing purple and grays. At sunset it might show itself for a brief moment of incredible beauty, a garden of red roses blowing, tossing, blooming, only changed by the spell of King Laurin to stone, as runs the Ladine legend.

      Pointer stood drawing in deep breaths of the dry, pure air, hanging fresh pictures in the gallery for which he cared most, his memory gallery.

      An impression of being stared at made him turn. A little man had come up behind him, and was standing examining him attentively, from his English hat to his English boots. Pointer had an odd feeling as he looked back at him. The man was unlike any other whom the Chief Inspector had ever seen, and Pointer felt that the difference was racial, not individual. He had never met a specimen of the primitive man before who still exists here and there in Europe, and he was surprised at strong sensation, half repulsion, half interest, which he felt.

      The man was about five feet in height, very sturdily built, and conveying a sense of—not bad proportions but different proportions to what we call the normal. He was thickset, with next to no neck, and with odd, haunch-like hips. On his well-shaped—but still differently-shaped head, the hair grew straight, and coarse, and thick, like cocoanut fibre mat, to below the line of his low collar. He was clean-shaven, with a fawn-like face, and small eyes, brown and soft, and shifting quickly. On meeting Pointer's stare, he turned and walked away.

      A gardener was sweeping the walk.

      "Do you know who that little man is?"

      "That's Ladiner Toni. A guide from the Paesi Ladini."

      "A good guide?"

      "Very good. But now, of course, with the snow so late, there's little climbing to be done. He's been in Bozen a lot lately, but as a rule, other springs, one never saw him."

      Sauntering down in the town proper, Pointer again noticed the little man, and also that he was deliberately following him.