Across the heath to war I fare
The great green heath so broad and bare
For there, where the splendid trumpets blare and thunder
There is my house, my house the green turf under.Such is the closing stanza of Maggie Tressider's personal translation of "Where the Splendid Trumpets Blow", made when she first began learning her concert repetoire. Contraltos, as her friend and colleague Tom Lovell is wont to say in his more sour moods, are liable to find themselves expected to sing a lot of Mahler.
Sharing the driving en route to a concert in Liverpool, Maggie hits a patch of slick clay at forty, and the last thing she's aware of is her own voice, lamenting "My God, what have I done, I've killed Tom." Even upon awakening in the Royal Hospital in Comerbourne after nearly dying in surgery, and being assured that Tom escaped with only a mild concussion, Maggie is filled with a foreboding shaken loose by the shock of the accident. Her surgeon, a great admirer of her music, persuades her to confide in him, as one artist to another who wishes to keep his work from being wasted. She's haunted by the feeling, too foggy to be quite a memory, that at some time, she failed someone so badly that he died.
Her surgeon (meaning to tactfully steer her onto a therapist's couch), suggests, "Suppose someone else, someone who makes a job of that kind of thing, took over the stone-turning for you?" And Maggie grasps the idea with both hands - and gets him to put her in touch with a good private detective.
Enter Francis Killian, a battered Korean War veteran, who mostly takes on impersonal investigations involving lots of paper: research for writers, tracing witnesses, searching records for lost details. Noting that Maggie always speaks of her victim as 'he', Francis begins combing through her past for the great turning points of her life, and looking for any young men she might have associated with before immersing herself completely in her concert career. Her serious study began with Dr. Paul Fredericks; as one of his star pupils, she accompanied some of his twice-yearly European tours ('Freddy's Circus'). And on her last such trip, there was one difference: Bernarda Eliot Felse, rather than Freddy's sister, served as chaperone.
Enter Bunty Felse and her husband Inspector George Felse. Bunty had noticed a change in Maggie on the trip, turning her back on everything in life but music. And one troublesome young cellist, Robert 'Robin' Aylwin, walked out on the Circus in Austria - left the hotel, the Goldener Hirsch, and never returned. A hotel in a little town at the exact center of a lot of illegal activity along several borders, including another of George's missing person cases. And George, as a professional stone-turner who *hates* loose ends, suggests a little vacation, to see if Francis flips over the right stone to answer everyone's questions.
Did Maggie have anything to do with Robin's fate? Or could he himself have flipped over the wrong rock one summer night, and turned up something deadly?
Bunty has a larger role in this volume than in some of the cases set earlier in the Felse marriage. Their son, Dominic 'and his Tossa' are away in Yugoslavia (possibly _The Piper on the Mountain_) and don't enter into the story. Maggie Tressider, the woman with an archangel's voice whose face carries more force than any photograph can convey, dominates the story, however. After her ranks Francis, who's being forced to feel again after so much digging through her emotional history, looking for someone who could have made her feel so guilty. The supporting players are also very well drawn: surgeon Gilbert Rice; Friedl, an otherwise beautiful woman cursed with a harelip, one of the family who runs the hotel; and who can forget the platoons of drunken Austrian wedding guests infesting the hotel late in the story, getting in *everyone's* way as a search is undertaken. :)
