Rum Affair (16 page)

I refused, automatically, the Duke’s invitation to go to bed with him straight away; and he rose, smiling without impatience, to make way for two heavily-built middle-aged men who sat on either side of me on the Duke’s Chinese brocade, with no packing space to speak of. My drink was renewed. So were theirs. We exchanged badinage, of a sort.

I have seldom spent a more uncomfortable hour. Relays of whisky appeared, but no food. Hennessy watched me ceaselessly as the Duke’s guests, in rotation, took their turn on my sofa. He watched me, but talked of electric switchgear, and the programming of steel supplies, and the trend on the Stock Exchange. They all did. I was the light relief. I began to wonder how to get myself out.

In a moment, the problem was solved for me. The steward tripped. And I received four Scotch on the rocks straight down the white frogging and the black quilted trouser suit.

Amid the sibilant, Middle-European hissing of sympathy, the Duke whipped out some monograms and dabbed at me uselessly, then commanded the steward, with satisfying acerbity, to lead me out and find me something to wear. There was a practised air about the whole scene which I found even touching. This sort of thing I can handle.

So I came to exchange the saloon for my stateroom where, the steward said as he left me, I should find a selection of clothes.

I knew that. I have met Duke Buzzies before. I shut the stateroom door firmly behind me, and looked for a key.

Naturally, there was none. And the furniture, of course, was bolted to the floor. Ah, well. Peeling off my soaked quilted jacket, I crossed to the long wardrobe lockers and opened the door. It was full of expensive dresses on hangers. And among the hangers, dropping outwards towards me, was a man.

I cannot deny that, for perhaps a second, I was not fully conscious of my surroundings. One’s nerves are not sixteen-core hawsers. I choked as he hit me, and could not see properly, while the pressure of blood drummed in my ears. These things are bad for a singer. Then he had his hand over my mouth and I realised that this was not the large, dead, cold-eyed Mr Chigwell but someone small, and spare and agile, with large powerful hands and a gold tooth that gleamed as he smiled.

He smiled now. “Go and sit down,” said the man whom I had last seen leaping from another wardrobe in that awful Edinburgh flat. “And if you scream I’ll wring your beautiful neck.”

I sat down. “They’ll miss me.”

“Not for a while.” He was wearing chief steward’s uniform. He locked the door with a key taken out of his pocket, and flung me a dress from the locker. “But you had better put one of these on just in case.”

It was not the one I should have chosen, but that was not the moment to think of it. I said, undressing shakily: “I haven’t told anyone. I promise I haven’t.”

He sat down and crossed his legs, damn him, like a man at a strip club. “Not even Johnson?” he said.

It was a choice of evils. I don’t gamble with money. But in life, I take risks. If I have to. “Oh, I told Johnson,” I said. I picked up the dress. It wasn’t bad. “I had to, goodness. He was there in the flat. But he agreed to do nothing about it for my sake, because of the scandal.” I paused. The thing was hell to put on: all hooks and eyes and wiring and cutaways. I got it half on, and then took the rest of my clothes off underneath it. It was that kind of dress. “If anything happened to me, of course, he’d do something at once. Or if anything happened to Kenneth Holmes.”

Show over. Mr Gold-tooth uncrossed his legs. “Nothing will happen to Kenneth Holmes,” he said. “Unless the police discover he murdered the landlord.”

I didn’t believe it. I said: “You can’t get away with that. Putting the blame on him for the murder. Why should he kill Chigwell, anyway?”

Gold-tooth grinned. “Because Chigwell was a Government agent,” he said, agreeably. “And Kenneth Holmes – didn’t you know? – blew up the
Lysander.
”

There was a blank pause. I dropped my hands from the last hook and stared at him. “You can’t—”

“I can.” Someone tried the door and then knocked on it. He paid no attention, and neither did I. I said: “I’ll damned well tell . . .”

“Will you?” He was still smiling. Outside the door, someone was calling my name.

“Will Tina Rossi really tell her private life to the world? And if you do, will it save Dr Holmes?”

“What else can I do that will save Dr Holmes?” I said. And sang out: “Wait a moment!” to whoever was banging outside.

Gold-tooth cracked his enormous, powerful fingers. “I could always try to replace him by someone expendable,” he said. “If I were properly paid.”

In my black, sling crocodile bag – how did he know? Maybe he didn’t – was Hennessy’s Wartski bracelet. You don’t leave anything uninsured like that aboard an untended boat. Grimly, I hauled the bag open.

I’d been afraid of this. But it was the only way, I supposed, to save both Kenneth and my reputation. I could, I hoped, one day replace it. And if Hennessy were the man behind Gold-tooth, I hoped he’d understand, when and if he found out.

I tossed the bracelet to Gold-tooth and he caught it, just as the door opened under a master key and Duke Buzzy walked in. Mercifully, before he was properly over the threshold, Gold-tooth had vanished once more into the locker of dresses, and the door was fast shut.

It had a keyhole, I noticed much later, so Gold-tooth must have enjoyed what came next. Even I did, and I’d a lot on my mind.

If Hennessy was surprised, in due course, by my carefree return to the saloon, he showed little of it, although I did think his manner constrained during the Duke’s rather forceful farewells. Then Hennessy and I got into
Vallida’s
powerboat, waved to the row of Middle-European gentleman, and tore off into the sunset. Michael Twiss, I learned, had already gone off home to
Dolly.

I didn’t want to go off to
Dolly:
not to a tête-à-tête with Michael Twiss with that queer look in his eye. I wasn’t very happy about Hennessy either.

I’d bribed Gold-tooth all right. But I hadn’t bribed whoever employed him. I said a cheerful goodnight to Stanley Hennessy and dropped him on
Symphonetta.
He hadn’t said a word beyond admiring my dress and Duke Buzzy’s horizontally stranded red fox fur coat. My trouser suit, after all, had been ruined.

Vallida’s
helmsman was accommodating. I chugged about, looking for company. In the end, it was a light on
Seawolf
that attracted me. Victoria. Or even Cecil Ogden would do.
Vallida’s
powerful boat stopped; I shouted, and on deck stepped not Victoria or Ogden but Lenny Milligan. I said: “Where’s Victoria?”

Neither the furs nor the cutaway dress disturbed Lenny a whit.

“On shore. I’m getting her guitar for her. Ogden’s on shore too, elsewhere, trying to produce instant friendship with
Vallida’s
chippy and plumber. Care to join Victoria’s party? We’re all at the croft over there.”

He nodded towards the other side of the bay, and I saw some dim, stone-built cottages, thatched and splayed at the corners. “If you want to hear the real Gaelic bit, that’s the place. Kishmul’s Galley, sung right on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer set. I bet,” said Lenny with cheerful malice, “you ain’t heard Kishmul’s Galley yet, or some of the other warbles they’ve got. The flamenco of the north. Proper groovy, it is. They’ve even got a bunch of Macneils staying there, hung up waiting for the Chief, and all set to twang the old ‘arp strings in the great ‘all. No kidding,” said Lenny, helping me into
Dolly’s
dinghy and making nautical conversation with the
Vallida’s
boat crew at the same time. “This you must see.”

Revolting, of course. But
Dolly
was the alternative. So I thanked the Duke’s retainers, and I tipped them, and I allowed Lenny Milligan to motor me yet again over the bay, while I considered what on earth to tell Johnson. I even toyed with a fancy to tell him the truth.

It was the kind of occasion that sticks in one’s mind. You bent low, entering the house of Duncan’s Peggy; and the windows were small as Johnson’s bifocals, and sunk in the walls. The hens came in with you, and a few more dogs; and some of them stayed inside and some of them didn’t. Duncan’s Peggy herself came to the door at Lenny’s shout, peering through the blue haze of peat and pipe and cigarette smoke, and said: “My word, the bonny lass you have there, Lenny Milligan. Come away you in, and take off that coat: you’d think there was a furnace in it here, with all these big sweaty men. Have you supped?”

I stared at her queasily, and Lenny said: “Don’t show your ignorance now: she’s off Buzzy’s yacht. When did he start handing out free meals?”

“Don’t answer that,” said Johnson’s mild voice and, emerging in turn from the haze, he took my fur like an old mac and, pipe on my shoulders, steered me into the room.

“And relax. If you are assaulted at Duncan’s Peggy’s, you get made an honorary member of the Clan Macneil.” And he sat me down and began introductions.

I had been grossly misled. The peat fire was not in the centre of the room, but in a tiled fireplace with a tall mantelpiece, whose ornaments served to prop up a variety of over-bright postcards and bundles of dog-eared envelopes, mostly with foreign stamps. A deep-sea household, then, with sons who had flunked out on the fishing and ventured into the big world. I could imagine the trash they sent back to her – the plushy carpets, the brassware, the Cape Verde tusks. Or did they send her money instead?

So far, apart from Lenny and Rupert and Johnson, all the men and women in the room had been Barra folk, of all shapes and sizes. No one mentioned the cutaway dress. Then Victoria came in and exclaimed: “Madame Rossi! Duncan’s Peggy, can she hear Kishmul’s Galley? And the Macneils must sing again, would you? Madame Rossi must hear you!” and a group of three men, sitting politely on the horsehair chairs farthest from the fire got up and bowed and said: Yes, of course.

Their voices were a little different from the rest, and I tried to pin it down, while the preparations for the regional dirge were begun. Then I had it. They must be the exiled Macneils, come to pay their respects to their Chief. From Canada, perhaps.

Then the talk died down and a woman’s voice, unaccompanied, sang Kishmul’s Galley through to the end.

It is set in Barra, of course. Sung, normally, by a strong untrained soprano with poor breath control and a bad piano accompaniment, it is something to make angels flinch. Angels, that night, would have broken out into a pustular rash.

As it came to an end, and the applause broke out, Duncan’s Peggy said in my ear in a kindly, low voice: “She is a woman of great age, that; and had it from another of the same, so the notes are likely authentic. The School of Scottish Studies have her, of course. But she would take it very kindly were you to mention that you might sing it yourself now, one day.”

So they knew I sang. I wondered what they would expect me to contribute. Vilja, of the
Merry Widow,
perhaps. Would they have heard of the
Merry Widow
? As I spoke to the woman who had sung, I thought, well, they appreciated that. But this is their culture. If I ask her for an encore,
she
may even sing Vilja from the
Merry Widow,
at that, and they will applaud even more. And out of the corner of my eye – oh, shades of Kenneth, and all my overbearing aunts, and all the frustration and boredom and unrewarded patience I have ever exerted – I saw the outline of a harp, waiting for the Celtic twilight to fall on it . . . and after that, I anticipated song after song from the exiled Macneils . . .

But suddenly, a pile of cucumber and cheese sandwiches had appeared mysteriously under my hand, and a cup of strong tea at my elbow, and a weather-beaten man with a two-day beard and no collar on was observing: “The School of Scottish Studies has this one too, Mistress Rossi, but I will English it for you as I go along, and you will maybe enjoy the one or two jokes in it . . .”

It wasn’t a bad story, if you could make out the accent. At the end, when I clapped him with the rest, I noticed that the plate of sandwiches was quite empty and I had no recollection of eating one. “They taped eight hundred of his,” said Johnson’s succinct voice. “Dates from the days of illiteracy, of course. Did Buzzy give you a bad time on
Vallida?
Hennessy shouldn’t have taken you.”

“I can look after myself,” I said. They were wheeling forward the harp.

“So I see. We’ve had a message from Glasgow,” said Johnson. “Permission to sail for Rodel, at last. What else of interest occurred on
Vallida?
”

They had taken the harp cover off, and someone was tuning the strings against a guitar. The pedals clattered and knocked. I wondered what his expression would be if I said: “I’ve found Chigwell’s murderer.” Mild congratulations, probably: no more. But I couldn’t risk it. I had bought Kenneth’s safety, I hoped. I wasn’t going to put any strain on Johnson’s problematical conscience, and have all that good work undone. For, apart from anything else, if Gold-tooth were picked up, another would just take his place. Another, or
the
other. It took two to operate that trick with the mine. It took two, come to think of it, to get me on Duke Buzzy’s yacht. Then the harp tuning stopped, there was a clattering of chairs, and the Macneils settled down to perform. They turned out to be one of the coolest harp, guitar and tenor sax combos I had heard outside Harlem. Bald-headed Lena belted out over Castlebay, Barra, and no one seemed surprised except me.

I knew the long-distance halves of the bifocals were watching. After an interval, when they had to break off to retune the harp, Johnson remarked: “Don’t underrate them. Duncan’s Peggy has reared a surgeon, a police chief and a Minister of State besides Rupert. Education in the Highlands, you ought to know, is a sectarian rite.”

I shifted my chair back a little. “What did you say?”

“I said Rupert’s mother isn’t the only one to be proud of her sons.”

“I can’t hear you. I thought you called Duncan’s Peggy Rupert’s mother.”