Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

porter was every bit as helpful as the telephone directory had been. He identified the circus immediately as the Circus Wagner, and the village where the accident had taken place as the village of Oberhausen, situated some way beyond Bruck, in the Gleinalpe, the hilly region that lies to the west of themain road from Vienna to Graz and the Yugoslav border.
    ‘Really, there’s nothing to this detective business,’ said Timothy, relaying this information to me. My own German is of the sketchy variety which allows me to understand public notices, and to follow simple remarks reasonably accurately if they are made slowly enough, and preferably with gestures; but Tim’s schoolboy German, though certainly slow and liberally laced with pantomime, seemed fairly fluent, and it got results.
    ‘Ask him about the fire,’ I said. ‘It may have been a serious one if they know so much about it up here in Vienna.’
    But no, this was not the case. The hall porter’s very gestures were reassuring. The only reason he knew so much himself was because he himself came from the village near Innsbruck where the Circus Wagner had its winter quarters, and not only did he know the owners and some of the performers, but he seemed to have a fair idea of their summer route through the country. The fire? Ah, that had been a terrible thing; yes, indeed, two men had been killed, a fearful affair it was, a living-wagon burned in the night, and the men with it. Who were they? Why, one of them was the horse-keeper. The hall porter, it appeared, had known him, too, a good man, good with the horses, but he drank, you understand . . . No doubt he had been drunk when the accident happened, knocked over a lamp, been careless with the bottled gas . . . these things were too easy to do in such cramped quarters,and something of the sort had happened once before . . . The only reason they kept him on, poor old Franzl, was because he was some sort of relation of Herr Wagner himself, and then he was such a very good man with the horses . . .
    ‘And the other man?’
    But here the hall porter’s information ran out abruptly. I didn’t need German to understand the lifted shoulders and spread hands. This, he did not know. It was no one belonging to the circus, or the village. Herr Wagner himself had not known him; he had not known, even, that there had been a second man in old Franzl’s wagon that night. There were rumours – he himself had heard them – that it had not been an accident, that Franzl had been involved in some crime, and that he and the other man had been murdered as a result; but then there were always such rumours when the police would not close a case straight away; whereas anyone who had known old Franzl would realise that such an idea was absurd, quite out of the question . . . As for the other man, he believed that he had been identified, but to tell you the truth, he had not read about this in the papers, or had forgotten it if he had . . .
    He smiled deprecatingly, and shrugged his wide shoulders once again. ‘It is over, you understand,
gnädige Frau
, and the newspapers lose interest. Indeed, they would hardly have taken the trouble to report poor old Franzl’s death, if it had not been for the elephant . . . A circus is always news, and particularly if there is an elephant . . . You saw some of the stories, perhaps?The truth of the matter was that there was only one elephant, a very old one, kept just for the parades, and she had in fact broken her rope, but had gone only a little way into the village, and had touched no one. The little girl, who was reported to be injured, had fallen down while running away in terror; the elephant had not touched her at all.’
    ‘Ask him,’ I said, ‘ask him if he’s ever heard of a man called Lewis March.’
    ‘Never,’ said the hall porter, for once mercifully brief.
    I wouldn’t have ventured the question but that it was obvious that the man was so delighted to have an audience for his