A Fragment of Fear (3 page)

“In a letter to Tacitus, ladies and gentlemen, Pliny the Younger, who was in nearby Misenum, said the world became quite black, not merely like a dark night, but like a room without windows. At one moment the sky was clear. Suddenly there was a loud and terrible crack, and gradually the sky darkened with stones and ashes. The sea receded, stranding maritime creatures. At first there was a horrible black cloud, rent by shafts of darting flames. Fleeing chariots, on seemingly flat ground, were rocked and flung about like toys, so that even heavy stones could not keep them steady. People screamed and called to each other in the gathering gloom. Apart from the looting slaves, there were others who stayed in Pompeii. The sick and infirm. Those who hoped it would quickly pass and remained in their homes.

“Those homes, ladies and gentlemen, were buried to a depth of many metres, and those people who were not crushed by falling walls and pillars were killed by the foul poisonous fumes which accompanied the ashes. And in the end there was no escape. Only death in the darkness which was like a room without windows.”

This bit was always Aldo’s great moment. I have myself heard his performance, and very fine it is, his voice rising and falling with simulated fervour. When he came to the last sentence he always spoke in a low tragic voice, hardly louder than a whisper, and followed it with a silence, as if in memory of those who had died.

It was at this point, and while he was weighing in his mind the words of Lenin, who said that in certain circumstances one could have a peaceful transition to Socialism, that Mario Bartelli saw the white butterfly, lost in the nectarless wastes of Pompeii, and a girl of about nine who had lagged behind Aldo’s party, and was trying to catch the insect.

Like most Italians, Mario loved children.

He watched as the butterfly settled on a stone and the child cautiously approached, and he smiled when the butterfly escaped at the last moment.

He was delighted. Jumbled thoughts went through his mind. There had been the cruelties of a slave-owning community, the terror of the arena, the sulphurous darkness of the eruption, the centuries of silence and death; and now there was sunshine again, and the dainty white butterfly playing with this healthy, pink-faced little girl.

It restored your faith in the triumph of good over evil, he thought awkwardly, or told me he did.

He slowly walked towards the entrance to House No. 27, into which the child and butterfly had gone, hoping to see more of the chase, and staggered as the child hurtled out again and into his knees.

He bent to pick her up, saying, “What is it?” but she eluded him, and ran down the street, and fell once, as she crossed the stepping-stones to the other side where her parents were still listening to Aldo; and she picked herself up, and ran on, without bothering to brush the dust from her grazed knees, until she had flung herself into her mother’s arms.

He saw Aldo and the tourists gather round the girl, and he himself became suddenly aware of a loud thrumming noise, and turning he saw a dense cloud of flies above the wall which divided the front and the back rooms of House No. 27. So he went behind the dividing wall, and then came back again to the street, and leaned over the low outer wall, and croaked for air. As the sickness passed he heard running footsteps, and Aldo the guide joined him.

Mario Bartelli said: “Don’t go in! It is a matter for the police.”

But Aldo shook him off and went in. When he came back Mario Bartelli said:

“Stand at the entrance here and don’t let anybody in. I will run down to the Administration and report.”

Aldo said: “I will go if you wish. Smoke a cigarette. I will go.”

Mario shook his head. It was his duty to report personally all unusual incidents and irregularities in his Section.

He turned and hastened along the street, still feeling sick, half walking, half running, past the Forum, and down the street that sloped to the tunnel called the Porta Marina, and out of the twilight of the tunnel into the sunshine again, past the vendors of postcards and souvenirs, and so, perspiring, to the Administration building near the railway station.

During part of the way he thought about the child.

It was not good for a small girl to see a thing like that. It could give her nightmares.

Only a thin, ruined wall had divided innocence and fun from evil and death.

The dainty butterfly had led her in, and then flown heartlessly on. He hoped she would not have nightmares. He was afraid she would but he hoped she wouldn’t. He told me that these were his thoughts, and they probably were.

He was a kindly man at heart, though he did his best to hide the fact.

After hearing of these things from Bartelli, I returned to my hotel, and after dinner when darkness had fallen, I watched the little boats creep round the coast of the Bay of Naples, as Lucy Dawson had done, the crews fishing with lantern and hand harpoon. From the inland villages, the fireworks of the harvest festivals echoed round the mountains like gunfire. I imagined how in Pompeii the night guards were languidly patrolling, meeting, chatting, and passing on. It is easier to break into a bank, these days, than to steal the remaining Roman treasures of Pompeii.

The moon doubtless shone on the Forum and on the rising tiers of seats in the Amphitheatre, and on the House of the Mysteries, and on the Street of Tombs, turning the colour of the bricks to a pale cream, and upon the piece of bare ground on which Lucy Dawson had lain, unrobbed, her jewellery glittering, while alarm at her failure to return spread through the other hotel guests.

I got up and strolled into the hotel and made my way to the bar and ordered a cognac. Bruno, the barman, was talking to the proprietor, Signor Bardoni, a short, thick-set man with a jutting chin, known secretly to the staff as the Duce, and less reverently to the visitors as Musso.

Bardoni greeted me politely, and so he should have done, considering the prices he charged.

“And did you have a good trip, Signor Compton?” he said in English.

I shrugged, and replied in Italian. I did not like Bardoni.

“So-so. I have a notebook full of notes. It was hot. I felt like a cross between an architect and an estate agent taking an inventory.”

“It seems that you did not need to move very far for a murder story. You have heard, of course?”

I nodded and took a sip of brandy.

“When was she buried?”

“Two days ago. In the Protestant cemetery at Naples. A sad business. Not good for the tourist trade.”

“I doubt if millions of British people will cease to visit Italy because one old lady was murdered.”

“People are funny, Signor.”

“Not as funny as that.”

“We must hope not,” he said, indifferently. The subject was petering out, and that suited me. But as an afterthought I said:

“Were there any Italian people at the funeral?”

“Only me, Signor, representing the hotel. She had often visited us. I took a wreath on behalf of the staff—and of the other guests, of course.”

He had small, dark eyes, and the formation of the face around them was curiously hard, so that one had the impression that the sockets had been chopped out of wood.

I noted the chin jutting out more than usual, and the way his eyes looked straight into mine. People have grown accustomed to the cliché about shifty characters who cannot look you straight in the face, and so have the shifty characters; so much so that I have found that when a person now looks you straight in the eyes, as he speaks, it is often a damned good reason to think he is telling you a whopper.

I thought that Bardoni was probably lying now, and that he had not bothered to go.

“Any of the guests from the hotel go?”

“Signor, I did not tell them about it. Why should I? They come here for holidays, not funerals.”

“Anybody from England fly out to Naples?”

He was in a bit of a spot now, of course, because, if he hadn’t attended himself, he wouldn’t know.

“The fare is expensive, and last minute tickets hard to get,” he murmured tactfully with a sigh. He looked at his watch, muttered something about a telephone call, and left me. It was a neat evasion of the question. I guessed that as far as Bardoni was concerned Lucy Dawson had ceased to be a paying proposition, and was therefore of no account, from the moment when the scarf was tightened round her throat.

“I do not think Mrs. Dawson had any family left,” I heard Bruno say.

He was a different type from Bardoni. He was a tall, soft-spoken young man, with copper-coloured hair and grey eyes, and a friendly desire to please everybody.

I nodded and finished my brandy.

“Poor old soul,” I said.

“Poor old lady,” agreed Bruno.

I was right about Bardoni not going to the funeral. But I was wrong about the reason. In a negative sort of way, Mrs. Dawson was a paying proposition for Bardoni from the moment she died.

The following morning I still had a fixation about old Mrs. Lucy Dawson being buried by bored Italian gravediggers, after a scraped-up service by the local chaplain, the funds advanced against her estate by the British Consulate, and not a soul to wish her farewell, and not a flower thrown on the grave. And all that sort of stuff. I can be sentimental to the point of sentimentality, given half a chance. Not that it usually lasts very long.

I swam in the clear sea during part of the morning, watched a little shoal of grey fish butting their noses inquisitively against my legs when I stood upright; and I lay in the sun and read; and had a couple of iced Cinzanos before lunch.

In the afternoon I had to go into Naples to verify some facts at the National Museum, and while I was in the little electric coastal train which swayed its way past Pompeii along to Napoli–Vesuvio Station I had another nasty attack of sentimentality, and knew what I would do when I had completed my business at the museum.

So in the late afternoon I bought a bunch of red and white carnations, hired a taxi, and drove to the cemetery. The cemetery keeper, with suitable words of dismay at the cause of her death, showed me her grave. I laid the carnations on the grave without a card, because in the circumstances I couldn’t think of anything suitable to write.

There was one other wreath on the bare soil, a rather sumptuous affair made up mostly of gladioli, the flowers now sad and faded in the sun. I bent over to read the inscription on the card, sorry that I had done Bardoni an injustice, and found I hadn’t.

The card simply said:
From the Stepping Stones in memory of happier times.
Some small type in the bottom left-hand corner read: Trans-Continental Flowers Ltd.

I had heard of some shaggy-looking singers called the Rolling Stones, but the Stepping Stones meant nothing to me.

Still, it meant that somebody, probably in England, had had the thought to wire some flowers for the funeral. It also meant that somebody, probably in England, knew when the burial was to take place, though the significance of this was not and could not be apparent to me at the time.

What with the carnations, the taxi, and a tip to the cemetery-keeper, the expedition had cost me rather over two pounds.

I sometimes think it was the worst spent money I have ever laid out.

J
uliet and I were due to be married on October 16th, and it might seem odd that we were separated. The reasons are simple enough. I was in Italy because I had had a bit of a battering in a car accident. There was no permanent damage, but a couple of weeks in hospital while the bits and pieces mended had left me pale and under the weather. I was not sleeping very well for one thing. So the doctor had recommended sun, swimming, and all the rest of those things which trip so easily off the medical tongue.

Juliet, on the other hand, had to go to America as a secretary attached to a government delegation and attend conferences. So we separated for a month, with moans and sighs, and all the appropriate agony.

As a result of conference delays she was not now able to return before October 11th, which would mean a hectic few days before the wedding. I stayed in Italy till October 2nd.

During the last few days I developed my “thing” about old Mrs. Dawson. I was writing up the odd descriptive paragraph based on my notes, and kidding myself that I was doing some work. But of course I wasn’t. Not really. I was swimming and sunbathing, and strolling along the little roads, peering in at cottages among the vines and lemon trees, and reading, and breakfasting late in my pyjamas on the balcony overlooking the sea. I hadn’t a care in the world, but plenty of time to think.

Everybody knows that when everything is going well, and there is not a cloud in the sky, then that is the time to watch out, because such conditions are not normal in this troubled life, and can’t last. One pays lip service to such platitudes, but that is about all. As far as Juliet and I were concerned, we were both healthy, in love, and solvent, and I had no morbid premonitions.

I had no firm plot for my next book, but I knew that would come. I was not worried. My mind was, in a way, a sort of vacuum, and into the vacuum seeped this “thing” about Lucy Dawson.

What kept worrying me, as I am sure it did the Italian police, was the fact that she had not been robbed. Every explanation I invented could easily be faulted.

The man had planned to rob her, but suddenly thought he was about to be disturbed and had left hurriedly. (But he could have returned.) Or he had had an inhibition about robbing a dead body, thinking it might bring ill luck. (Then why kill her? Murder is not for sensitive souls.) So it went on.

Meanwhile her room remained locked on the instructions of the Italian police, and pending action by the British Consulate to remove her belongings; which I expect annoyed Bardoni because he couldn’t let it.

Two days before I left the hotel to fly back to London I had what I then thought, in my ignorance, was a stroke of luck. I wandered back from a mid-morning swim in my towelling wrap. It was somewhere about eleven o’clock, and I thought I would change and do an hour or so’s work before the pre-lunch drink.

I trudged up from the sandy beach and through the hotel vestibule, my leather bathing shoes slapping on the gleaming tiled floor, then up the uncarpeted wooden staircase to the first floor, and along the corridor to my room.

On the way, I had to pass Mrs. Dawson’s room. I remember I was thinking about the malarial conditions which had finally caused the Greek settlements to abandon the temples at Paestum when I noted that her door was ajar.

I paused and listened.

There was no movement inside the room. I heard faint voices from below in the hotel, and from outside the cries of swimmers and people playing tennis, but they seemed filtered, like echoes from far away.

I gently pushed the door open.

In the sunlight which percolated through the half-opened jalousies I saw a bucket and a mop near the doorway, and guessed that the hotel management had decided, police or no police, Consulate or no Consulate, that the room should be cleaned. Sophia would be doing the cleaning. She cleaned my room, and all the others along the corridor, a plump, cheerful little dark-skinned woman of about thirty-five. Either she had left earlier than usual to have her mid-day meal, or she had forgotten some cleaning material, or had gone to fetch some more.

I guessed I could handle Sophia, yet when I went in I trod as softly as my beach shoes would allow—perhaps because I had a slightly guilty conscience, knowing I should not be there; perhaps because of the associations of the room with the dead woman; perhaps a bit of both.

Two vases of flowers were on the built-in dressing-table. The roses were dead, but the gladioli still had some red at their tips which had not yet quite faded.

Two monogrammed Edwardian silver hairbrushes were set neatly beside the vases and two silver boxes with intricately worked edges, a glass powder bowl with a silver top and two ebony clothes brushes with silver initials. On the washbasin shelf were one or two medicine bottles, a bottle of aspirins and a small pill box.

At the back of the door her beige-coloured tweed travelling coat was hanging. Over it hung one of her pastel-coloured chiffon scarves.

Still laid out on the bed was her silk night-dress—old-fashioned, with inset lace and hand embroidery. Yet although it looked well worn the silk was still thick and strong.

Outside, in the tiny anteroom, the wardrobe was full of her clothes; unexceptionable print dresses, blouses, and cotton skirts. Four or five pairs of sandals and neat walking shoes were placed in a row on the floor of the cupboard.

I went into the tiled bathroom and noted her mauve silk dressing-gown, her toothbrush in its place, and a large tablet of bathsoap in the soap dish. I picked it up. Like her clothes the soap was unexceptionable. I think it was jasmine.

I walked back into the bedroom and opened the dressing-table drawer. Face cream, lip-salve, a nail-case in mauve leather, some corn plasters, a pair of curling tongs, hairgrips and hairpins. Handkerchiefs in an embroidered sachet. On the night table there were three books—a biography of Edward VII, two Tauchnitz editions of modern novels, two maps and a guide to Naples.

As I looked round the room, a slight wind moved the thick, blue woven curtains. The dust on the tiled floor and the faded flowers on the dressing-table spoke of neglect and loss, but the voices from the beach still filtered from another life, and through the windows I could see the waiters moving about behind the cactus hedge, under the pine trees, setting the tables for lunch. Their white coats made patches of light against the bright reds, the yellows, the greens and blues of the fringed tablecloths.

I was eager now to be out of the room with its half-light and depression, even a little impatient with myself for entering, and I made for the door.

As I did so, I passed a small table by the windows. On it lay a camera, a tin of English biscuits, her passport, a cheque-book, one of those imitation leather covers which hold travellers’ cheques and a most sumptuously produced book on Pompeii and Herculaneum.

I could not resist picking up the book. It was beautifully illustrated, the photographs taken by a camera artist. At the back of the book, before the pages of the index and bibliography, was a slim Italian bookmark in tooled leather. It had been inserted at the map page showing the lay-out of each street and house in Pompeii. Almost automatically I looked for House No. 27 in Section 2. I found it fairly easily, for the simple reason that somebody, presumably Mrs. Dawson, had marked the site with a small cross in pencil. She had done more. She had traced the route, lightly in pencil, from the Porta Marina, past the Forum, to Section 12 and right up to the house.

She knew where she was going all right.

She had carefully marked the way to her own death. Almost certainly, then, she knew whom she was to meet, which would have made things easier for whoever adjusted her scarf; if you could call it adjusting her scarf.

I am amazed now at the importance I attached to these piffling details at the time and how clever I thought I was.

The evening before I left for London I went to the reception desk and asked for my bill. Alfredo, an olive-skinned Sicilian, was on duty, a pleasant, affable young man of good family, I should say, who was gaining experience in the hotel business by working in various departments. All Italian hotel bills, presented in lire, look like calculated distances in light-years to some distant star. I joked with him about State tax and local tax and service charge, and added a facetious remark, in rather poor taste, which I instantly regretted:

“I hope for Signor Bardoni’s sake that poor Mrs. Dawson had paid her bill.”

“I could not say,” said Alfredo. “Mrs. Dawson always paid her money direct to Signor Bardoni. It was an eccentricity. Perhaps she did not quite trust our mathematics,” he added a little tartly.

“Elderly English ladies sometimes develop these odd habits,” I said soothingly.

I glanced down at the bill with its astronomic-looking total. The details meant nothing to me, and never do, especially those on the little chits attached to the bill, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, and dealing with items such as wines, bar drinks, soda water, laundry, car hire, room service, etc., most of them long past and uncheckable.

I looked through the chits in a dazed kind of way, but I was not thinking about them. I was finally facing the fact that I wanted to build up Mrs. Dawson as a person. I wanted to know more about her.

She had become my pet victim. The one who was killed but not robbed, either of her jewellery, her money, or her virtue.

“Can you give me her address in England?” I said, suddenly.

Alfredo’s mind was on other things.

“Whose address, sir?”

“Mrs. Dawson’s.”

Signor Bardoni had a light tread. I did not know he was behind me. He said:

“I can give you her address, Mr. Compton, if you come into my office.”

I followed him into his little office, with its tiled floor, modern desk and chairs and filing cabinets.

“Sit down, Mr. Compton.”

I sat down and offered him a cigarette, but he refused it. He did not need to refer to any papers. He knew her address. He said: “In England she lived at the Bower Hotel, Burlington-on-Sea, Sussex. If you had asked me that I would have told you. It was not necessary to go into her room to try to find out, Mr. Compton.”

His chair behind the big desk was higher than mine, which can be annoying if one knows one is in the wrong. He lit a cigar, pulling at it vigorously. Through the blue smoke I saw his eyes watching my face from their wooden sockets.

For the first time in this affair I caught a whiff of hostility. It was something more than that of a hotel proprietor gently reproving a guest for a misdemeanour. I am very sensitive, not merely to atmosphere, but to shades of atmosphere.

“I was not looking for her address, Mr. Bardoni. I was—”

He cut me short.

“It could have been very embarrassing for me—and for you, if the police had heard about it.”

“I happened to be passing her room, and saw the door ajar.”

“Many guests leave their doors ajar, Mr. Compton. It is not usually regarded as an invitation to look round their rooms.”

The rebuke was open and undisguised.

“This guest is permanently away from her room,” I said coldly.

“Mr. Compton, her possessions are still in my care. I am responsible for them.”

I got up out of my chair.

“I am not suggesting anything, Mr. Compton, naturally not, except perhaps to point out that to meddle in matters in which the police of this country are already engaged, either now or even in the future, can perhaps lead to trouble, and even pain for innocent people.”

He was on his feet, too, now, and moving to the door to open it for me. He said:

“Real life people are real life people, and story-book people are story-book people. Better and easier to keep the two apart, is it not?”

His voice suddenly dropped, and he spoke softly and persuasively, and none can do this better than the Italians:

“Better to allow this poor English lady to rest at peace. Her life has run its course, Mr. Compton, with all its trials and tribulations. Her soul has departed, and her body sleeps in our Italian soil which she loved so dearly. Do not create from her sad ghost some distorted character for a book. Agreed?”

He was hammering it up, of course, though to some effect. I hesitated. But he couldn’t leave well alone. As he opened the door he added:

“Let her be, Mr. Compton, let her be! If not for her sake then for your own, for sometimes the dead can hit back!”

It was the cheap threat in those corny words about the dead hitting back which destroyed the earlier effect of his words. As I went out, I said:

“While she was alive her affairs were her own. But now the manner of her death has made her, in some measure, the concern and even the property of us all.”

As a rejoinder it was pretty corny, too, though at the moment, as an off-the-cuff retort, it seemed a nicely rounded phrase.

But like Bardoni, I could not leave well alone. The temptation was too much and I had to have another crack at him.

“I took some flowers to the grave yesterday. The wreath from the hotel staff and guests must have faded, and been removed, since it was not there.”

He stood by the door, soft persuasiveness gone, his entire face now looking as though it had been carved out of wood, not just his eye sockets.