Dorothy Fielding - Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries

Pointer helped him to get the stone away. It could be levered with the ice-axe quite easily. He stooped and entered an icy-cold hole in the rock, where, on the dry tufa, lay the body of an elderly man, frozen stiff. Pointer recognised it by the many portraits he had seen as Professor Charteris. As Ladine Toni had said, the pockets were empty. The head wound must have been made by some such instrument as the axe's point. The Chief Inspector crawled out again. Toni watched him like a half-timid, half-trusting animal.

"No one saw this affair, I suppose? No one knows of it but your mother and you?"

"A Croderès lives up there," Toni pointed. "He is a chamois-hunter. He might have seen something, but it would take a lot of money to find out."

"Why so? Surely he would speak if appealed to."

Toni shook his head helplessly.

"You mean he was there when this man was killed?" Pointer asked again.

Toni nodded several times.

"I saw him on his ledge when I looked for the short cut."

"Why won't he tell what he saw, supposing he saw the murder?" persisted the detective officer.

Toni looked haggard.

"I and my mother have plenty to live on with our big garden, but money—money enough for a Croderès—" Again he shook his head feebly.

"Can we get up to the hut of this Cro—" Pointer let the word fade away in the approved fashion of a stranger speaking an uncertain tongue.

Toni nodded after looking at the soles of Pointer's boots. They were well nailed.

"What am I to do about— him ?"

Pointer did not commit himself. "What is a Crodere?" he asked instead.

Toni gave his little helpless wriggle.

"It is just a name we use. Some people say they belong to us, Ladines. There are not many left. They only live among the rocks, chiefly, towards Cadore."

"And are they so fond of money?"

"They are Croderès."

"So I gathered. But why do they love money so?"

Toni looked at him in silence, but after awhile he began to talk as they climbed the fairly easy goat path. Pointer pieced together from his disjointed confidences' the account of a race of mountain miners and hunters, who looked like ordinary men and women, and lived like them, but who were really stone men. They could feel nothing, neither love nor hate, anger nor joy, pain nor pleasure.

They are always even-tempered, he went on, and never harm any one on purpose, but a Croderès would see a child roasted alive if it happened to fall into the fire, though by merely putting out his hand he could save it. They have no hearts, no feelings, but they have clever brains, and they love money, though it can do nothing for them. A Croderès can feel neither heat nor cold.

Pointer again felt as though he were in a world unknown. Piffle, of course, but such strange, eerie piffle.

Suddenly Toni stopped. A moment more and they stood on a wide, smooth stone, evidently the entrance to a cave. A man stood inside watching them. He was about Toni's height, but broader, with longer arms. His hair was as thick, but curly. His eyes, however, were different—of a curious ice-blue, the eyes of a Siamese cat. Otherwise there was nothing odd about his tanned face. He looked rather stupid, but quite good-natured—when his eyes were downcast.

"The gentleman wants to talk to you, Seppi."

"I am inquiring about a friend of mine. He was up here in the mountains a fortnight ago yesterday. Do you happen to remember an accident of any kind on that day?"

The man looked at him placidly, turned, and went back into his cave as though to fetch something.

"He won't come out again, not unless the sun shines," Toni muttered.

"Is it permitted to enter?" Pointer asked in Italian.

" Prego, prego !" The man acquiesced civilly, going on with his work of clipping the ears of some chamois masks which he was mounting. The only chairs were boulders. A little fire flickered on a huge rock that served the man as table. A pot of glue stood in the centre; shears and taxidermist's knives lay on a slab beside it.

"I will pay well for reliable information."

"What will you pay?" Seppi's voice was husky and very even.

Pointer laid ten two-lire pieces in front of him, and kept his hand on them. Ice-blue eyes met gray eyes for a second.

"What age was your friend? What did he wear?"

Pointer told him.

"Yes, I saw him."

The man went on with his humming,

"Ste Ii a vardar, El Latemar."

Pointer pushed across two of the coins.

"He was sitting on a rock in the valley," the rock man said briskly.

"Did you see anything else?" Another coin was shoved across, and so it went on, Pointer feeding the man as though he were some sort of talking automaton.

"I saw Toni go up to a ledge to see how the short cut was. I saw him shade his eyes and peer at it. I saw the old man in the valley move around a corner on to a rock in the sun. I saw another man come along the valley, pick up the ice-axe, and come crouching half around the corner. I saw Toni dislodge a stone. At its rattle the second man slipped back again around the bend. I saw that he meant to kill the old man." Seppi spoke as unconcernedly as though he had been describing army manoeuvres.

"Why didn't you shout?"

"And scare away the chamois? I was glad to see that the man intended to use an ice-axe and not a gun. He came on a second time with the axe up, and crashed it down into the head of the old man sitting with his back to him. The man fell off the boulder."

"Could you see what Toni was doing?"

"He had just reached the flat rock which would show him the short cut."

"Couldn't he see the murder?"

"Of course not. There is that crag between. See for yourself. The man raised the axe again, but evidently the other man was dead. I saw him examine him with care, or rob him. I couldn't see clearly which it was. Then he jumped up and ran behind the corner again, and on out of sight around that bend you see from here. I saw him no more."

"Could you describe him?"

The description was hopeless. Middle size, middle dark, rather young, full beard, soft hat, oldish cape over his coat. It would have fitted three-quarters of the men who had passed that way.

Pointer arranged with the man to pay him the amount of a day's chamois hunting should he need him to report the murder to the Carabinieri. The man agreed, asked for something on account, and, as he stretched out his hand, passed it accidentally through the flame. He held it there for a second, till Toni's exclamation made him look at it. With perfect unconcern he picked off the black flesh, and shoved the hand into his pocket.

"I must tie it up. It is a nuisance that I was not looking."

"Does it hurt?" Pointer asked, watching him closely. The man laughed shortly.

"Nothing can hurt me. That's the danger. You can lose an arm without noticing what's wrong, if you don't look out."

As he walked back to the cottage with Toni, Pointer was still not sure if that apparently painless burn had been acting, or the result of self-suggestion, or some sort of Yoga.

"Do nothing till you hear from me again," he told Toni.

"I want time to think things over. I may have to speak to the Carabinieri about the matter, but I shall be able so to put it that you are seen to be innocent, I think. Will you leave it to me?"

Toni shivered.

"The carabinieri—they are so quick! Always in such a hurry to act!"

"I think I shall be able to make their maresciallo understand, and it is the only way. The only way, Toni, believe me."

For Pointer there never was but one way—the way of the law.

Toni licked his dry lips.

"You—you think so?"

"Courage!" Pointer laid a kindly hand on his shoulder. "You have a good reputation. You are a good guide, and a good guide is not a man to lightly suspect of murder. Then there is your cold-blooded friend up there—"