A Few Days in Endel: A gripping romantic suspense tale with twists and turns Read online

  A Few Days in Endel

  Lucilla Andrews

  writing as

  Diana Gordon

  Copyright © The Estate of Lucilla Andrews 2019

  This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1968

  www.lucillaandrews.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork images © Ian Sherriffs / Irbis Pictures (Shutterstock)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  Also by Lucilla Andrews,

  from Wyndham Books

  The Print Petticoat

  The Secret Armour

  The Quiet Wards

  The First Year

  A Hospital Summer

  My Friend the Professor

  Nurse Errant

  Flowers from the Doctor

  The Young Doctors Downstairs

  The New Sister Theatre

  The Light in the Ward

  A House for Sister Mary

  Hospital Circles

  Highland Interlude

  One Night in London (The Jason Trilogy Book 1)

  A Weekend in the Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2)

  In an Edinburgh Drawing Room (The Jason Trilogy Book 3)

  Wyndham Books is reissuing

  all of Lucilla Andrews’s novels.

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  Go to www.lucillaandrews.com

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

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  Chapter One

  He was standing behind me in the queue waiting to buy chair-lift tickets at the foot of the Alterberg that morning. He was the right tallish, sturdy build of a good skier and he wore the black quilted anorak with a mandarin collar and heavily rimmed black glasses that were uniform for trendy German skiers that winter. He had on a bright yellow tea-cosy hat, the flaxen hair at his temples was bleached white and he was chatting-up a large blonde Berliner in baby blue. I had seen her on the slopes in the last week. I had never seen him before. I would have remembered as beneath the tea-cosy and behind those glasses, he could have been Charles. I would have remembered as I was Charles’s widow.

  I propped my skis against the booth to buy my tickets. When I turned for them Yellow Hat handed them to me with a correct little bow. I said, ‘Shönen Dank,’ and he said, ‘Bitteschön, Fräulein,’ and returned his attention to his blonde. That suited me as I had nearly reached the limit of my German vocabulary and raising ghosts was not my favourite pastime.

  The lift attendant wrapped a blanket round my waist and half lifted, half threw me into a moving chair. Yellow Hat swung upwards in the chair behind me. He was wearing his skis and sitting back, as the old hands did, with his legs crossed and without bothering to fix the safety chain. My skis were clipped together and lying across my chair-arms, so I did not notice the screw in the left toe-clip working itself loose and dropping out. It had to have happened then as the screw had been there when I skied down from the Classes Meeting Place to the foot of the lift.

  I discovered it had gone directly I got on my skis at the top. Luggi, my class instructor, sent me straight down. Luggi said he wished his class alive to stay and proper repairs must at the ski shop only be made.

  Ernst, the ski mechanic at the shop, was very dark and half Italian. ‘Is lucky she come out on the lift and not when you make the run down. Today the snow is fast, no?’

  ‘So Luggi says. He thinks I might easily have broken something.’

  ‘Ach, so!’ Ernst beamed. ‘Very possible!’

  My hotel was roughly three hundred yards above the village. Walking back up the narrow snow-packed road, I watched the line of dots that was my class following Luggi’s transverse run down. A black dot topped with yellow streaked by them in a straight run. He was as good a skier as I had guessed from his build, and worth watching in action. I did not stop to watch.

  Herr Schneller, the hall porter, was eating a dumpling stew in the little office beyond his desk. He did not hear me and choked on a bit of dumpling when he saw me waiting. ‘So sorry, madame!’ He bounded out and as we were mates his hand did not shake too much when he gave me my key and the one letter that had come for me in the mid-morning mail. ‘No class, today?’

  He crossed himself when I explained. He was a Tyrolean, in his fifties and an educated man. He had been a schoolmaster until he turned soldier. For the last twenty years the only job he had been able to hold down was his present one, and that because the hotel was owned by his brother-in-law. He was a pale grey man and thin as paper. He had a face like a skull.

  Occasionally he talked of his war to me and always as if it had been fought exclusively between the Russians and the Germans. If anything, he hated the Germans the most, which made life tough for him in the winter sports’ season. When life got too tough, Herr Schneller retired to his little office and wept over the fringed tablecloth. Once I had lent him a shoulder and given him a box of tissues. That was one reason why we were mates. There were others. I never asked him about Stalingrad. He never asked me about my late husband.

  My letter had an English stamp. The postmark was blurred and the handwriting strange. I didn’t open it. During the last year I had acquired the habit of carrying my mail around unopened, sometimes for days. Curiosity was another emotion in which Charles had left me in short supply.

  I went up to my room to get out of my outdoor clothes, but the maids were still in there cleaning. The one lounge was crowded, so I went out on the terrace. There was no sun that day so I had it to myself.

  The terrace ran the leng
th of the west side of the five-storey wooden building. It overlooked the village, the nursery slopes directly below and the Alterberg across the valley. Even without the sun it was sheltered as the overhang of the roof reached a point directly above the broad wooden balustrade. The roof edge was now fringed with long, thick, pointed icicles. The hotel guests considered those icicles the best barometer in the village. When the temperature rose a couple of degrees they shed slow heavy tears on to the backs of our necks as we leant on the rail. The wooden surface was dry when I leant on it and thought about my lost screw and Ernst’s saying I was lucky.

  A Spanish maid once said, ‘The good are lucky, Señora.’ On that occasion, I had had measles.

  The Classes Meeting Place was beyond the first nursery slope. The scarlet posts carrying the ski instructors’ names, were stuck in the snow and looked like streaks of blood. I wondered why I had not noticed that previously and then how the snow had looked on a French mountain a year ago. Charles had been returning to Spain from a trip to London to fix up a new series of articles with his agent. His aircraft had lost height in a storm and there had been no survivors. Had I not had that belated attack of measles, I would have been with him. We had then been married two years. We had no children. People said, the pill, of course. I said, of course.

  The lounge door opened behind me. My circulation did a stop-go as Yellow Hat gave me a rather less formal little bow. He sat in one of the wooden-painted chairs against the wall and opened a German newspaper as Lisa, one of our waitresses, followed him out with a glass of beer on a pewter tray. ‘Bitte, mein Herr.’

  He said something that made her squeal coyly, which was no problem as Lisa was a great squealer. As my German was so limited I couldn’t be certain the conversation concerned me, until Yellow Hat hitched down his glasses and gave me that questioning smile that reads ‘I’m willing, how about you?’ in any language. I answered it by looking straight through him and if that meant one more vote against our joining the Common Market, there was nothing I could do about it. I thought of retreating to the lounge, but objected to being turned off my own terrace nearly as much as I objected to my own antipathy to his presence. I couldn’t spend my life running away from fair men of a certain age and build and if he was German he would not try again now Lisa had almost certainly told him I was English. I remembered my letter. It would have to be read sometime. It might be good therapy now. I sat down and slit the envelope with the side-piece of my dark glasses.

  It was good therapy. I did not see Lisa leave and I forgot Yellow Hat. It was only after I had read the letter a third time that I was conscious of being watched. I glanced up and Yellow Hat bent a little too quickly over his newspaper. I made myself watch him, briefly. It was no use. I still wished to God he would go away. My letter had raised a row of unknown ghosts. I did not want another I recognised sitting right by me. I read the letter again and after a while, again I forgot Yellow Hat.

  We were both still there when Adrian appeared with two glasses of wine. ‘Rose, my dear! I was simply gasping when I saw you through the lounge window!’ Adrian widened his large brown eyes and raised his mobile eyebrows to the fringe of his brown beatle-cut. ‘How come you’re down?’

  I told him. ‘Why’re you back early?’

  ‘My dear, our class is kaput! Absolutely kaput! There are now only the two Masons and myself left and Koni wants to push us all into Heinz’s lot! I refused! I simply refused! Heinz is a butcher and if his class’s bones aren’t going snap, crackle and pop all over the Alterberg, he doesn’t think he’s earning his lolly! Koni says I can join Luggi’s tomorrow, but if you’re catching them up this afternoon, I’ll ask Koni if I can tag along with you.’

  ‘That’ll be fun though you’re much too good for us.’

  ‘Think how that’ll boost my ego.’ He lowered his long thin body into the chair next to mine. ‘And I’ll be with you all day.’

  I liked Adrian, affectations and all. He made me laugh. He had been my shadow since we met on the platform at Calais. I had been surrounded by shrugging porters with my luggage apparently lost for ever and the Calais-Innsbruck express due out in a few minutes. My French was fair. Adrian’s was perfect. He had been educated in Switzerland and was trilingual in English, French and German. He had found my luggage, my seat on the train and exchanged his with a Dutch boy in my compartment before we were clear of Calais. He had managed partly through his linguistic talents and partly as he had been able to pull a useful string. He had been at school with one of the couriers on the train.

  His name was Adrian Browne. He had an Australian passport, but had not lived permanently in Australia since he was seven. His father had worked in Europe for years, but had now retired to Melbourne with his wife. Adrian was their only son. He was now in his last year at London University and reading economics. He said he had no relatives in England and most of his friends were Swiss, but he adored London. At twenty-two, he was a year my junior, which gave him a tremendous kick and made life much easier for me as he was so easy to handle. He was sufficiently immature to get an extra kick out of my being a widow ‒ which gave me an extra reason for liking him. Most people when confronted by a young widow feel uncomfortable and vaguely guilty, and it shows. Frequently, since Charles’s death, I had been tempted to lie out of public spiritedness. I didn’t have to, with Adrian. I could talk to him as I had not talked to anyone since I was first married. Naturally, though he liked my being widowed, he did not want to hear about my marriage, so I did not have to bore him or hurt myself.

  I told him now about my letter. ‘Read it. I’d like an outside opinion.’

  ‘New job?’

  ‘An invitation to a family reunion.’

  ‘Family?’ He accepted the letter, frowning. ‘You said you hadn’t any!’

  ‘Nor have I, apart from these cousins I’ve yet to meet. Charles had none, as I told you on the train out.’

  ‘So you did.’ He read the letter, then looked up. ‘This bloke Robert Endel? He’s your cousin?’

  ‘Yes. First cousin. The June he mentioned as his wife I’ve never heard of till now.’

  ‘You’d heard of Cousin Robert? And this grandfather who died in his sleep last August? You must’ve!’

  ‘Only vaguely. I knew my father had a father alive when he himself died. I knew he had an elder brother, Richard. I knew Richard Endel married a French girl who died in childbirth and that the child was a boy. I never knew his name till now. I never realised my grandfather was alive up to last summer. I knew Richard Endel was dead. He was killed in Normandy in 1944 the year after my father was killed in the Navy. Obviously, I don’t remember him.’

  ‘Did Grandfather raise young Robert?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Only guess?’

  ‘That’s all I can do. Mother never talked about the Endels. I don’t think she knew much. She never met ’em. When I was about seventeen she told me father had broken away from his family long before she met him and would never discuss them, even with her.’

  He looked at the letter. ‘Cousin Robert blames some blood row, but he doesn’t seem to know what it was all about. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother tell you?’

  ‘I’m not even sure she knew. Like I’ve said, she seldom mentioned the Endels. After my father’s death, we went back to her old home in Devon. We’d no relatives on her side left, but she’d lots of old friends. We lived there till she remarried when I was sixteen and we moved to London. We were living in London when mother and my stepfather died in a car crash just after I first met Charles. He helped me through all that had to be done. I didn’t let the Endels know. Never dawned on me that I should. I’ve never missed them. I can’t imagine why Robert Endel now wants to meet me.’

  ‘Couldn’t it be like he says? That as you two are, at the moment, the end of the line, he’d like to get together? Why not take him up? Spend a few days in Endel, like the man says.’ The rustle of a newspaper m
ade him glance round. He jerked a thumb. ‘What’s he?’

  ‘I think, Deutschlander.’

  Adrian had another look. ‘Could be. Right clobber. He speak English?’

  ‘Search me. Adrian, should I accept this?’

  ‘What’ve you got to lose? If you like ’em, could be fun. If you hate their guts ‒ well, so what on a long weekend?’

  ‘You may be right.’

  A maid on the fourth floor shook out a rug and we both looked up. The fringe of icicles jangled but held firm. The dust particles floated down slowly on the still, frozen air. I watched one speck and made a bargain with myself. If it went over the balustrade, I’d say, no. If it landed on the terrace, I’d accept.

  Adrian asked, ‘What kind of a joint is this Endel House? Old?’

  ‘Very, if it’s the one in which my father was born. He was in the fifteenth generation in the direct line to do that.’

  ‘He was? Rose! This you must see!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My dear! Where’s your sense of history? Your family pride?’

  ‘Don’t possess either.’ My speck was dithering in mid-air.

  Adrian re-read the letter. ‘This bloke sounds decent. He says he’s wanted to know you for years and has been trying to trace you since the old man died.’

  ‘Nice of him. But why wait till then?’

  ‘Maybe your being your father’s daughter kind of stuck in Grandpappy’s throat?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And Cousin Whatsit only managed to get in touch with your old headmistress who put him on to the girl with whom you share a flat in town last week.’

  ‘So he says.’

  He lowered the letter. ‘Rosie, what’s eating you?’

  My speck had settled on the terrace without convincing me. ‘I’m not sure I dig family reunions. Or perhaps I’m more my father’s daughter than I ever realised.’

  ‘Stuff that!’ he said impatiently. ‘Which century are you living in? What the hell does a row between three men all now dead matter now?’

  I did not answer at once. I was thinking of Charles. He would have dropped Robert Endel’s letter into the nearest dustbin. Mentally, I could hear his clipped voice. ‘Only fools forgive and forget. I’ve never done either.’