4.Little Victim (16 page)

‘What do you think Ria was doing under the bed?’ Payne asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

There was a pause. ‘She wanted to see how I’d react. She intended to give me a nasty shock,’ Camillo said slowly. ‘She knew I’d go to the bungalow, even though she’d told me not to. I’ve had time to work things out. She knew I was terribly keen on her, so she expected me to turn up. I phoned her in the morning, you see, and told her I wanted to give her a Valentine present. I think the woman was some friend of hers. I believe Ria put her up to it – asked her to dress up as her, put on a wig.’

‘You believe Ria decided to play a trick on you?’

Camillo swallowed again. ‘Yes. She must have called her friend and asked her to dress up like her, so that she could have a good laugh at my expense. She wanted to see the expression on my face. I think she wanted to make me look a fool, to humiliate me, to put me off her for good.’ Camillo hung his head miserably.

‘Makes perfect sense. Miss Leighton does appear to be the kind of girl who leads people to commit extraordinary lunacies. Did you by any chance notice whether she moved at all?’ Major Payne asked casually. ‘Her head wasn’t bobbing up and down with silent mirth or anything of that sort?’

‘No. I didn’t see her move. I didn’t stop to look. I ran out of the room. It gave me such a shock – seeing her under the bed – a very nasty feeling. I was terribly upset – shaken up by the whole thing.’

‘You didn’t get angry with her? You didn’t work yourself up into a state? It never occurred to you to go back later and have it out with her?’

Antonia bit her lower lip.
Could
Camillo have killed Ria? Hugh was watching the boy keenly. Camillo’s hair was short and wavy and light brown. That long black hair on Ria’s pillow wasn’t his – whose
was
it? Had Ria had many lovers?

‘No. I didn’t get angry with her.’ Camillo shook his head firmly. ‘Or if I did, it didn’t last long. I was more upset than angry. I then managed to think the matter over. Since Ria clearly didn’t want to have anything to do with me, there was no real point in me going back and making a scene.’

‘I see. Most commendable. You accepted defeat in the manliest, not to say the most gentlemanly fashion. How interesting. Charlotte told us you were on the brink of self-destruction. She suggested you wanted to kill yourself.’

Camillo frowned. ‘Kill myself? Is that what she said? I never said I wanted to kill myself. It was she who told me not to go and do anything stupid.’ He sounded a little annoyed.

‘Is that so? I bet she patted your hand?’ Payne’s left eyebrow went up.

‘Well, she did. She seemed extremely concerned about my state of mind. She said I reminded her of her favourite grandson. I believe she was under the impression I was much more upset than I really was.’

‘Her favourite grandson?’ Payne grinned. ‘She can’t stand her grandson.’

‘I feel such an ass –’ Camillo broke off. ‘What did you mean when you asked if I’d seen Ria move? You don’t think she might have been dead, do you? Oh, my God. That she’d been killed and shoved under the bed? You don’t think it was that woman who killed her?’

‘Well –’

‘That’s what you meant when you asked whether I’d noticed her move, didn’t you?’

‘Tell me, was there a carpet on the bedroom floor?’

‘A carpet?’

‘Yes. White, with a deep pile?’

Camillo frowned. ‘Yes, there was. I am sure there was a carpet. White, yes. That woman kept stumbling over it while she danced. I don’t think she was terribly comfortable on her high heels. They must have been Ria’s shoes.’

‘Well, the carpet wasn’t there when we went to the bungalow. That was about two hours ago. It is our belief that Ria’s body was taken out of the bungalow in the carpet. What time was it when you went?’

‘Midday. The church bell was chiming twelve,’ Camillo said promptly. ‘Do you think it was that woman – that big, bloated, truly awful-looking woman – who killed Ria?’

‘It might have been her, though at the moment we suspect somebody else.
The bloated baggage.
Isn’t that what one of the Macbeth witches says?’ Payne turned towards Antonia.

‘The way she laughed. She sounded gleeful – pleased with herself –
triumphant
. It all feels like a bad dream now – some terrible nightmare.’

‘We know exactly how you feel. It’s been like that for us for the past three hours. Gosh, is that
all
? Only three hours since Knight spoke to you?’ Once more Payne addressed Antonia. ‘It feels like
ages
.’

‘I should have been braver. I should have confronted that woman,’ Camillo said. ‘Asked for an explanation. I should have asked who she was and what she was doing in Ria’s bedroom. I should have gone back and looked under the bed – instead of running as if all the devils in hell were after me!’

‘I’d have reacted in pretty much the same way if I’d been in your shoes,’ Payne said reassuringly. He stroked his jaw with his forefinger. ‘Who was the mad creature, I wonder? You have no idea?’

‘No,’ Camillo shook his head. ‘I think she was Indian.’

‘The first Mrs Songhera?’ Antonia said. ‘I mean Roman’s wife. Her name is Sarla. Charlotte said Sarla was fat, ugly and completely bonkers. On the plane – don’t you remember?’

‘Of course!’ Payne slapped his forehead. ‘So it was her! Must have been.’

‘Roman’s wife? I’ve never seen her but I’ve heard about her,’ Camillo said. ‘She lives somewhere local. I don’t know exactly where. I haven’t been here long. Some of the other boys were saying she’d been banned from going anywhere near Ria. They too said she was quite mad. Yes. Why didn’t I think of her?’

‘You have had a bizarre experience of the ghastliest kind,’ said Payne, ‘but if you want my honest opinion, it’s all for the best. It’s put you off Ria for good and that’s the healthy way to live. Am I right in thinking that you went to school in England? No, don’t tell me which one. Say, “the most frightful collage of shadows” once more, slowly.’

Hugh’s doing a Professor Higgins now, Antonia thought, trying not to roll her eyes.

‘The most frightful collage of shadows.’

‘Winchester? No – Marlborough.’

‘Marlborough is right.’ Camillo looked impressed. ‘Though I did a year at Winchester first. That was before my father lost all his money.’

‘So that rigmarole Charlotte told us about the conquistador blood and you being of the
noblesse
was not a rigmarole after all?’

Camillo gave a faint smile. ‘I suppose not.’

‘I did think you were the real thing, but I convinced myself you looked too innocent to have been to an English public school.’

‘So when you went to Ria’s bungalow, she wasn’t there . . . She wasn’t – under the bed . . . Neither was the carpet,’ Camillo whispered.

‘We have an idea where the body might be. We may be completely wrong, but we intend to go and check. It might be a dangerous enterprise. Somebody’s already been killed because of what they knew.’ Payne waved his hand. ‘It’s an impossibly convoluted story. We’ll tell you the details some other time.’

‘Did Roman kill her – because of me?’

‘We do suspect it was Roman Songhera who killed her, but not necessarily because of you. Ria was a very bad girl. She drove her father round the bend. She actually caused him to die of a massive heart attack, or so we believe. You are well out of it, old boy. Actually, I don’t believe Songhera knows about your involvement with her. If he knew,’ Major Payne reasoned, ‘I don’t suppose you’d be standing here, chatting to us. Still, if I were you, I’d make myself scarce at once – to be on the safe side. As I believe I made it clear, we don’t think much of your boss. Things may become worse in the next couple of hours. Songhera may go berserk and have us all thrown to the crocs. I am serious. This is
not
a terribly nice place. It deserves the fire of heaven. No, that’s not fair. Rather – Coconut Grove is one of those places where every prospect pleases –’

‘–
and only man is vile
.’ Camillo frowned. ‘Is that Heber?’ ‘Heber it is. Now then, we don’t want you to come to any harm. Have you got anywhere safe to go? I mean go at once, post-haste? How about England? If you haven’t got the money, we could lend you some.’

‘That’s awfully kind of you, sir. I’ve got enough money – and a British passport too.’

‘Couldn’t be better. You won’t have any problems then. What the hell have you been doing here? However did you decide to join Songhera’s troupe of Turks?’

‘It was an adventure – a caper.’

Payne peered at him. ‘You look terribly white. I’m sure you were darker this afternoon. You had a tan at the party, didn’t you? Same as your fellow waiters. Golden toast-like. Where’s that gone?’

Camillo grinned. ‘It came out of a bottle. I haven’t been here long, so I needed to blend in. It washes off –’

‘Out of a bottle? You mean a bronzer? Oh!’ Antonia exclaimed.

‘Do you disapprove?’

‘Not at all – sorry – just an idea.’

‘My wife writes detective stories,’ Payne explained, looking at her curiously.

‘Do you really? I love detective stories,’ said Camillo.

‘You could stay with us when you come to London.’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Antonia was aware of her husband looking at her sharply. Jealous, poor thing, she thought, amused. Well, the boy was terribly good-looking. ‘You could easily embark on a modelling or acting career.’

‘Thank you so much. Mrs Depleche also invited me to stay at her house at Eaton Square if I ever found myself in London.’

‘Did she now? You are all set then,’ Major Payne said somewhat stiffly. There was a pause. ‘If the Honourable Charlotte has an ounce of sense in her head, which I am not sure she has, she’d say no to this house deal and go back to Wiltshire. Post-haste.’

23

The Snow Queen

Some five minutes later they were walking across the hall towards the swing doors. There was no one about. The bearded concierge was not at his desk. Probably watching the firework display, Antonia thought.

Major Payne said that they were reaching the most dangerous part of their adventure. They were about to walk into the lions’ den. Did they have any alternative? Could they afford
not
to walk into the lions’ den? Could they toddle along to their room instead, have a shower, retire to bed, read a bit, then turn off the lights, wish each other a good night and go to sleep? The answer, they agreed, was no, a definite no – they couldn’t. They needed to investigate and they had to do it
now
. By tomorrow morning the body might no longer be in the deep freeze. Then they would never know if they had been right or not.

‘What shall we do if we do find the body?’ Antonia said.

‘No idea. No idea at all.’ Payne looked grim.

They had tried to ring England on their mobiles but, again, there was no network. The doors swung behind them and they found themselves walking along a beautifully carpeted if inadequately lit corridor. ‘Let’s hope we won’t run into one of Songhera’s goons,’ Payne murmured. Antonia noticed with some surprise that the walls were decorated with Rackham’s illustrations of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in silver frames. Ria had had a book of Andersen’s fairy tales in her room. Roman Songhera seemed to have bowed to Ria’s taste, or did he perhaps share it?

There they all were. The steadfast one-legged tin soldier gazing besottedly at his beloved paper dancer. The sinister Shadow. Little Ida and her flowers, looking faded and exhausted after their midnight ball. There was the ugly duckling and the emperor whose new clothes no one could see. The Snow Queen and little Kay. Antonia was familiar with them all and she remembered the Snow Queen’s chilling words, ‘Now you are not getting any more kisses, or else I’d kiss you to death.’

Ria seemed to have been a fervent Andersen aficionado. Her name might have come from an Andersen tale, Antonia reflected. Ria had read Andersen’s tales in bed. She couldn’t have been entirely rotten then. No person who liked fairy tales was ever irredeemably bad. Was that a logical argument? There was also something touching in the fact that Roman had gone to the trouble of having Rackham’s illustrations mounted so beautifully in their silver frames and hanging them on the wall in such a perfectly symmetrical way. It did look like a labour of love. Roman had gone out of his way to please Ria.

The first door they opened turned out to be a broom cupboard, but the second revealed a steep staircase leading down into what looked like a cellar. The storeroom that housed the deep freeze?

They started descending the stairs. Antonia leant on her husband’s arm. How sore and tired her feet felt. We are descending into the very bowels of hell, she thought. She was a little hysterical – she was extremely tired – one always exaggerated and said silly things like that when one was nervous – it was a defensive reaction of sorts. The lights flickered and there was a faint crackling sound. She hoped there wouldn’t be a sudden blackout. They had been warned about blackouts but of course one expected a place like Coconut Grove to be exempt from the kind of power cut that seemed to afflict Goa’s lesser mortals. Coconut Grove was after all the local Buckingham Palace. Roman Songhera
must
have his own generator.

The last step, thank goodness. No, the cellar at Coconut Grove did not bear a single similarity to hell. The temperature for one thing was lower than it had been upstairs; it felt pleasantly cool and airy. Antonia stood looking round. The walls were of a colour that brought to mind a winter sky in England and seemed to be covered in some insulating material since Hugh’s jocular ‘Point of no return’ sounded particularly strained and hollow in the silence. She wished he didn’t say things like that. If they started screaming for help, no one would hear them . . .

Everything was perfectly clean. Clinically so. There was the smell of some superior disinfectant in the air. A cool fresh fragrance. Alpine Breeze? They might have been inside a well-ordered private hospital. Antonia decided she didn’t care for the hospital association either. Major Payne pointed silently to the row of tall shining metal doors. The deep freeze, must be. There were six doors, taking up the whole of the long wall, each one sporting the
New Millennium
logo, same as on Ria’s fridge. Antonia’s heart began to beat faster. She didn’t like the idea of opening doors and finding out what was behind them – look what happened to Blue Beard’s young bride!

Most fairy tales were rather sinister and they frequently had the surreal logic of dreams. Some of them were highly unsuitable for children. Antonia’s thoughts turned to Andersen once more. To paraphrase what the roses said to little Gerda –
She’s not dead. We’ve been in the ground, where
all the dead are, but Ria wasn’t there.
No. Antonia didn’t actually believe they would find Ria’s body in the deep freeze. This is all nonsense, she thought. A mare’s nest. We are on a wild-goose chase. It was ridiculous to expect the deep freeze to yield a
corpus delicti
. Out of the question. Ria was alive. She was hiding somewhere.

She saw her husband open the first door. ‘Ice cream. Vanilla. Belgian chocolate. Midnight cookies and cream.’

‘You don’t have to read aloud,’ she said.

‘Are you scared?’

‘Yes.’

He reached out for the second door. She stood beside him as he pulled it, but the door seemed to have got stuck, so he pulled again –

The caviar probably, Antonia thought. The next moment the door opened with a sharp crack. Antonia felt an icy blast.

Some long object, taller than either of them, fell out amidst swirls of steam.

It was the rolled-up white carpet.

Antonia cried out and stepped back. This is not happening, she thought as she watched her husband catch the carpet before it hit the floor and lay it down gently. This is only part of the nightmare.

Neither of them said anything. Major Payne started unrolling. The carpet had frozen and it felt stiff and unyielding to his touch.

The girl’s face was encircled by a sparkling aureole of ice and Antonia was put in mind of some strange flower that had grown in a glacier. The hair was no longer golden-brown but bluish-white with intricately patterned ice crystals. The cheeks were smooth and white. The lips were pale pink, slightly parted. She seemed simply asleep, an impression belied by her wide-open beautiful blue eyes.

The eyes stared back at them . . .

The fragrance of the flowers says the girls are corpses. Dingdong.
The evening bell is tolling for the dead.
Andersen had such a morbid imagination! A very strange man by all accounts, from what she had read about him. Antonia thought she smelled hyacinths. A sweet, sickly smell. The smell of death? That now was
her
morbid imagination. Or was it the disinfectant? Perhaps she had been wrong. Not Alpine Breeze but hyacinths –

Ria was wearing silk red-and-black Brook Brothers pyjamas with white pearl buttons. The top button was missing. Antonia suddenly felt like bursting into tears. Ria wasn’t wearing a brassiere under the top. Silently they knelt on either side of the body. The throat was white, vulnerable, exposed. No, not entirely white. There were dark blue marks on either side of it, where somebody’s hands (Roman’s?) had squeezed the life out of her. So Julian Knight had told the truth. Ria was dead. She had been killed. She had been strangled. Oddly enough the face didn’t bear any of the usual signs associated with strangling – it had not turned purple, nor was it distorted or bloated –

Antonia spoke and her voice sounded harsh. ‘Julian Knight told me he saw Roman bang her head against the bedpost. He said he heard a crack. He didn’t say anything about strangling.’

‘Perhaps he got confused . . . Let’s check.’ Raising Ria’s head gently, Major Payne slipped his hand behind it. ‘There’s a swelling – at some point her head does appear to have met with some hard surface all right – though I doubt whether that was enough to kill her. Doesn’t feel that lethal. It might have made her pass out . . . I am no expert of course . . . A doctor would be able to establish the exact cause of death, but I see no chance of a PM, do you? Hello, what’s this?’

Payne reached out for Ria’s half-closed hand.

Antonia thought she heard a noise. Looking up, she was startled to see their distorted reflections in the freezer’s convex silver doors. Their faces looked ghostly, bug-eyed, ghoulish. But theirs weren’t the only reflections. There was somebody standing behind them, at the bottom of the staircase. A man –

‘Oh, my God.’ Antonia’s hand went up to her throat.

Major Payne turned round sharply. The next moment he was on his feet, his hands clenched into fists.

Roman Songhera was wearing a white dinner jacket and black tie. The theatrical turban had disappeared. He looked very sleek and suave. His hair was revealed as black and shiny. Oiled back. Too short – the long black hair on Ria’s pillow isn’t his, or he might have had a haircut, Antonia thought irrelevantly. Or had Ria slept with the James Bond taxi driver? That young man’s hair had been long and black all right – he’d had it in a pony tail! Antonia’s next thought was:
Roman is bound to have a gun
in his pocket
.
He’s going to shoot us.

Only he didn’t. What happened next was, in a way, rather unsettling. Roman Songhera hadn’t uttered a word. He wasn’t looking at either of them – they might not have existed. His eyes were fixed on the body in the red Brook Brothers pyjamas lying across the white carpet. Roman’s face was extremely pale. He took a step towards the body, then another. He held out his hand in a pleading gesture. Tears had started pouring down his cheeks. His shoulders shook. He took another step. He moved like a robot or a sleepwalker. He stopped beside the body.

Antonia and Major Payne moved away, to the left and to the right, respectively. They watched Roman Songhera bow his head and fall on his knees. The whole thing looked like some elaborate formal dance.
Dance Macabre
. . . The dance of death . . . Roman reached out for Ria’s left hand and held it in his with great tenderness. He stroked each finger with his forefinger. He then cradled Ria’s head on his lap. He was crying soundlessly; his tears were falling on Ria’s face, on her bosom. It was all unbearably sad. Would the tears soak into her heart and thaw out the deadly lump of ice, the way it happened to little Kay in the Andersen tale?

Despite herself, Antonia felt a lump in her throat. She reminded herself that Roman was a bully and a hoodlum, the worst of thugs and very possibly a murderer, that he kept crocodiles in a lake and didn’t deserve a scrap of sympathy, yet she couldn’t help being filled with terrible pity. Roman’s sense of loss was heartbreaking . . .

‘Ria,’ he said, then again, ‘Ria.
Can the flames of the heart
die in the flames of the pyre
?’ He looked at Antonia, then at Payne, his eyes dimmed by tears. A more unlikely poetry quoter Antonia could not have imagined. ‘That’s what she read to me once – it was from one of those tales she loved so much.’

His voice sounded choked, flat and hollow among the insulated walls. Now he was stroking the dead girl’s cheeks, first one, then the other, very gently, with the tips of his fingers, as though she were a sleeping child. His hand then went up to her forehead and her hair. After that he touched her throat . . . They heard him gasp. He had seen the blue marks. He turned his head towards Antonia.

‘Who did this?’ he asked. When she didn’t answer, he repeated his question, on a threatening note. ‘
Who did this?

’ ‘Look here, Songhera, don’t you think –’ Major Payne began, but Antonia pulled at his sleeve.

‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘We are trying to find out.’

‘You are trying to find out?’ Roman Songhera frowned – as though trying to collect his thoughts. His eyes held a dazed, hopeless, puzzled expression.

‘D’you mean you don’t know who killed her?’ Payne said.

There was a pause.

‘I kept ringing her, but there was no answer. She didn’t answer her mobile, nor her landline. I wanted to go and see what was going on, but I was very busy. The party – Charlotte – the fireworks. Ria didn’t want to come to the party, but she promised she would.’ Roman’s right hand now lay across the dead girl’s forehead. He spoke in a halting voice, simply, without any affectations, no longer with the
faux
English public school accent. Antonia thought he sounded American.

‘The party was about to start. I was expecting her. At first I was annoyed with her. I thought she wasn’t answering on purpose. I thought she had decided not to come. Sometimes she did things to annoy me. I was getting angry. At about ten past six I sent two of my men to her house, to see what was going on. The fools didn’t get back to me . . . I waited . . . They were making me wait! Why didn’t the fools ring and tell me at once she was dead?’