Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain by Ellis Peters

of every hotel they passed, and gave no sign of seeking or finding.
    Not until they came to the Hotel Sokolie, built out to the very edge of the lake, with a terrace overhanging the clear, chill shallows, a sunken garden between its walls and the road, and its name on a wooden sign by the gate.
    “This looks nice,” said Tossa, loitering. “And not too posh, either, so it won’t be frantically dear. Anybody but me hungry yet?”
    She was learning how to do it. She had the tone just right, happily casual, attracted but easy, willing to go along with the general vote. She had known all along which hotel she was looking for; and that was information she could not have got from Dana.
    Not one of the luxury models, just as she had said. Not even new. Half its structure was in wood, with a shingled steeple on one corner. But it had a pleasant, welcoming foyer, and a pine-panelled dining-room with a view over the terrace and the lake. And it was very easy to get the twins compliantly through the swing doors after her, and heading, on the head waiter’s prompt and agile heels, towards a table near the window, where the mountains leaned to them in silver outline against a sapphire sky, and the ice-cold mountain water mirrored that blue with a deeper, gentian tone, drowning their senses, soothing them into hungry complacence.
    There wasn’t a hotel anywhere round the lake that couldn’t have provided them with an equally wonderful prospect and a comparable menu; but only this one would do for Tossa. For this was undoubtedly the hotel where Herbert Terrell had stayed for his few meagre days, before he removed to the Low Tatras, to Zbojská Dolina, and the death that was waiting for him there.
     
    “I knew it!” said Toddy, groaning. “We’re going to get the English expert let loose on us wherever we go, I can see that. And I’ll swear we never actually said a word in the head man’s hearing, he just looked us over. How
do
they know?”
    “You’d be even more annoyed,” said Christine with certainty, “if they took you for something else, instead. Like all the English!”
    The head waiter had led them to their table himself, but having weighed them up in one shrewd glance he had thereupon withdrawn, and despatched to them a short, square, good-humoured citizen who greeted them, inevitably, in very competent English. Pretence was useless; they were immediately recognisable, it seemed, wherever they went.
    Tossa followed the waiter’s bouncing passage through the service doors with a narrowed and speculative glance, the gleam of purpose in her eye. She was here after information, she had an obvious use for an English-speaking waiter. The chief difficulty confronting her now must be how to slip her three companions long enough and adroitly enough to be able to talk to the man alone.
    “We could have our coffee on the terrace,” she suggested, her eyes dwelling dreamily on the blue, radiant water outside.
    Of course, coffee on the terrace! And then, when they were comfortable and somnolent in the sun, half drunk with mountain air even before they succumbed to the “Divcí Hrozen,” Tossa would begin delving into that all-purpose bag of hers for her powder compact, and wander off demurely into the hotel, ostensibly in search of a mirror and privacy, but in reality in pursuit of the English-speaking waiter.
    Everything happened just as he had foreseen. At the edge of the terrace, leaning over the brilliant clarity of the water, Tossa was the first to finish her coffee, and the first to excuse herself.
    “Oh, lord, what do I look like?” She peered into an inadequate mirror, and scowled horribly. “You might
tell
a girl!” She gathered up her bag in that armed, belligerent way women have, and pushed back her chair. “I’ll be right back.”
    He gave her three minutes before he followed her in through the now almost deserted dining-room, and into the foyer. The sunken garden must, he calculated, continue past all the