Murder in Vienna

E. C. R. Lorac

Description

Superintendent Macdonald, C.I.D., studied his fellow-passengers on the Vienna plane simply because he couldn’t help it, because he hadn’t conditioned himself to being on holiday. The distinguished industrialist he recognised: the stout man he put down (quite mistakenly) as a traveller in whisky. The fair girl was going to a job (he was right there) and the aggressive young man in the camel coat might be something bookish. Macdonald turned away from his fellow-passengers deliberately; they weren’t his business, he was on holiday - or so he thought.
Against the background of beautiful Vienna, with its enchanting palaces and gardens, its disenchanted back-streets and derelicts of war, E. C. R. Lorac constructs another great detective story with all its complexities, an exciting and puzzling crime story.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Mystery
• Detective

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 11 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644454
• Langue: English

Extrait

Murder in Vienna
by E. C. R. Lorac

First published in 1956
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
MURDER IN VIENNA
by E. C. R. Lorac
For DAPHNE, with love and gratitude
Trauttmansdorffgasse Wien 1954, 1955

CHAPTER I
A S THE AIRCRAFT changed course, heading a point east of south, it seemed to pivot on a wing-tip, smoothly and effortlessly, like an albatross whose glancing wings plane delicately to win advantage from an air current.
Far below—so very far below that visibility had a ghost quality—the crazy patchwork of English fields faded out, to be replaced by a shot-silk effect, vaguely bordered by a drift of golden-brown.
The man who was looking down through the oval window of the Viscount, watched fascinated as the English coast slipped away. He had often seen all this before, but never wearied of it. Nothing here of the famous white cliffs which board-ship passengers sentimentalise over, he pondered: no white headlands outlined proudly against a pale English sky. There was hardly any shape at all; just a gradation of colour blurred by chiffon trails of low tenuous cloud, a mingling of earth and strand and sea, like interwoven scarves of colour changing imperceptibly from pale gold to paler aquamarine, as the shallow waters deepened and earth and sand faded out. The shipping away below looked no more important than sardines—very slender sardines—gliding over a shimmer which was more like light than sea.
“Dungeness,” thought Robert Macdonald, “with Romney Marsh behind, and Rye and Winchelsea away back, but it might be anywhere in the world: elements of geography misted over into a dream.”
It was very tranquil in the aircraft on that sunny September morning. There are many ways of travelling from London to Vienna, and those who love roads and seas wax scornful over the lazy unintelligence of air-travel; but for a tired man, intent on a comfortable holiday, there is a lot to recommend the ease of flying. From the passenger, no effort is demanded: once his baggage has been checked in, he is taken in hand by benevolent authority. He becomes freight—human freight, handled with care—and there’s nothing he need do about it: only watch a silver wing-tip describe an arc over the land he is leaving, and enjoy (if he is wise) the blended colours far below.
As the English coast slipped away and the blurred outline of the Continent took its place, the aircraft bumped a little in the air-pockets which often signal an aerial “landfall.” Macdonald had an odd feeling that he was reliving his own past, slipping through the years as imperceptibly as the Viscount slipped over the North Sea. He had travelled overnight from Inverness (where his forebears had lived) to London (where he had spent his boyhood). Now he was somewhere above northern France and the Low Countries, where he had fought in the London Scottish between 1914 and 1918. Names came back—names never forgotten by Englishmen of Macdonald’s age—Amiens, Abbeville, Ypres, Paschendaele: the Aisne, the Somme, the Marne. Was that the valley of the Marne, away below there, with Rheims to the north and Vitry to the south? After the Armistice of 1918, Macdonald had gone on into Germany with the Army of Occupation, marching eastwards, as the Viscount was bearing him eastwards now—into another zone of “Occupation.”
With a sudden sense of repugnance, Macdonald decided his analogy had gone too far: he didn’t want to think about Occupying Powers and the turmoil of East-West power politics. He thanked his stars he had never got involved in what is generically described as “.Intelligence”—M.I.5, Special Duties, Counter Espionage and “Security.” His passport described him as a Government Servant, and that was true enough, but his job was, of its very nature, blessedly unpolitical: it gave a man leave to be himself when on leave, not binding him to Intelligence with a capital I.
With acknowledgments to Robert Graves in the long ago, Macdonald said “Good-bye to all that,” turned from the window and its reminders of the war-to-end-war, and considered his fellow-passengers instead.
The white-haired man of ambassadorial aspect he recognised: an ambassador of commerce this one, a V.I.P. in one of the great chemical combines. The stout lady was French, her complexion and closed eyes denoting that she fought an internal battle with air sickness.
Immediately across the gangway from Macdonald sat a fair-haired girl, neat as a daisy in a nicely-tailored suit, with a demure little wing of a black hat on her shining hair. She was doing her best to look out of the window, but she had been unlucky in not getting a window seat. Beside her, blocking the window as he leaned over a book, was a young man to whom Macdonald took an immediate dislike. Hunched up in a most superior top-coat of the “camel” variety, he leant over his book so that only his unruly dark hair and outsize horn-rims were observable. A blase young man, obviously quite uninterested in aerial views: he didn’t want to see the world below, or the incredible shining cloud-scape which occasionally obscured that world. “He might just as well let the lass have his seat,” thought Macdonald. “He’s seen it all before and he’s bored in advance. She’s never seen it and wants to.”
Inevitably he began to place his fellow-passengers: the girl, he guessed, was not merely on holiday. She was so neat, so soignee, so businesslike, despite her chic. “Going to a job, and all kitted-up to look efficient as well as attractive,” he hazarded. And the young man? Something self-consciously artistic—but his artistry appeared to pay. That coat had cost a lot of money. “Architect, doing nicely out of the dehumanised school?” thought the Scot, “or a designer . . . book production . . . going to the Vienna Trade Fair as representative of some precious bindery or pure-fount type. And the stout merchant might be encouraging the sales of Scots whisky—if it needs any encouraging.”
Coffee was brought to the passengers by the inevitably charming stewardess: newspapers were offered, but Macdonald turned to his window again. Chalons-sur-Marne was away behind: Switzerland was coming up, and Switzerland brought wholesome memories: the Wengen Scheidegg ski-run: climbing Mont Blanc (not nearly so difficult as some of the lesser peaks), driving over the Simplon—and the view from the hospice. Switzerland . . . a sane, safe wholesome country: alpen-sport and the best watches in the world.
When the Viscount began to circle over Zurich, Macdonald observed again the astonishing contrast between British and Swiss systems of land tenure. The English landscape, “. . . plotted and pieced, fold, fallow and plough” was a patchwork quilt—crazy patchwork, no modern geometry of hexagons or such like: every field a different shape and size, a jig-saw of individual eccentricity. Below him now, in Switzerland, striped ribbons curved over the rolling landscape, each strip of exquisite precision: vivid green of mown meadow, gold of stubble, brown of ploughland, blue green of root crops; border and headland as precise as if measured by a foot-rule. It had an astonishing look of ordered virtuosity, an economy both beautiful and efficient.
The plane swung lower and lower, the white buildings of the airport came into view, as tiny as a child’s toy, and then the long white runways. The plane swooped gently, fined up on its own runway, touched down without even a bounce and. taxied towards its place, between a K.L.M. and a T.W.A. Macdonald glanced at his watch: they were ahead of schedule: the following wind had added an unofficial quota of m.p.h. That meant a good hour in Zurich airport—a pleasant prospect on this sunny morning: air travellers frequently say that if you have seen one airport you have seen them all, but the Swiss had done an out-of-the-way good job at Zurich and it is a pleasant halt.
The passengers all left the plane and were shepherded to the airport building, cards thrust into their hands: “Those leaving the plane at Zurich this side, please. Those going on to Vienna, this side. Thank you: you will be called when the plane is due to leave.”
With smiling courtesy, repeating their injunctions in other languages, the Swiss airport hostesses dealt kindly yet firmly with their little flock, encouraging the passengers for Vienna to walk on into the main hall of the airport. Macdonald went downstairs for a wash, finding the Swiss version of the international word “Toilet” catered for in thoroughgoing Swiss fashion (baths, barbers, and toilet articles all laid on).
When he returned to the main hall (where nationals of seemingly every variety were eating, drinking, buying and chattering), he walked across to examine the display of Swiss watches at the farther end and found himself standing beside the fair girl whom he had observed in the plane. She looked a little lost and uncertain, but her face brightened as she saw Macdonald.
“Please—are you going on to Vienna?” she asked.
“I am—B.E.A. flight 265; and you?”
“I’m going there,