The Cherry Blossom Corpse (16 page)

“Not the slightest,” I agreed equably. “Quite apart from the fact that I haven't spoken to the police since this morning, so I don't know much more than you do.”

“We gather her publisher's here,” said Maryloo Parker, “and that you've spoken to him.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“Or
rather,”
Patti Drewe put in, “one should perhaps say the man who created the Amanda Fairchild persona. Created it on the bodies of nameless and doubtless underpaid scribblers.”

I shot Arthur Biggs a glance of distaste. There was not now going to be any chance of launching that particular line of questioning on anybody with any hope of surprising them.

“Did you want me to keep it quiet?” he asked airily. I ignored him and ate another biscuit.

“Do there happen to be any of the nameless and exploited scribes here present?” I asked casually, sitting down at the only empty table and gazing out over the lawn as if I hoped to see a squirrel. When I looked back everybody shook their heads.

“It came on all of us as a terrific surprise,” said Mary Sweeny. “Obviously if anyone had written any of those titles, they would have
known.”

“Quite,” I said. “Though surprise is an extremely easy emotion to counterfeit.” I swung my chair backwards and looked around at them in a somewhat lordly fashion, rather as my late great-grandfather must have surveyed deputations of foundry-hands. “And the surprise, surely, can't have been
entirely
universal. You, Mrs. Biggs,
must have known—and surely you, too, Mr. Manning. Wasn't it one of the things that you three . . . chewed over together?”

“Oddly enough, it wasn't,” said Manning, and Mrs. Biggs murmured: “No, indeed.”

“Funny,” I commented.

“Amanda Fairchild wasn't a very interesting figure, looked at from the point of view of the art of romance,” elaborated Everard Manning, with the air of a 'thirties Oxford don, very much
manqué.
“A backward-looking figure in almost every way. She certainly cannot be said to have changed the possibilities of the romance form.”

“Ah,” I said.

“What we're all rather worried about—” put in Mary Sweeny.

“Well, not
worried,”
said Arthur Biggs.

“—worried about, is this question of what we were all doing at the relevant time.”

“That's always rather difficult,” I said. “Particularly if there was any sort of party or gathering.”

“Well, you know, Perry, that we were all in the bar,” said Maryloo, giving me a vanity-of-human-wishes sort of look. “But you know too that one is never in the bar
all the time.”

“Oh, quite,” I said.

“I mean, some of us went to our rooms, I imagine, some of us took a stroll, and nearly all of us went to the lavatory,” said Mary Sweeny.

“Naturally,” put in Arthur Biggs pompously. His manner always grated on me, so I got stroppy.

“Oh, I don't know about that.”

“What on earth do you mean?” asked Wes Mackay.

I stirred in my seat, sated with biscuit, and stood up.

“I'm not sure that it was natural that you all, apparently, went to the lavatory.”

“For God's sake, what could be more natural than a call of nature?” demanded Maryloo.

“One makes calls of nature when one has been drinking,” I said, preparing to go back to the house. “So far as I've observed since I came here, the price of drinks in Norway has prevented most people from drinking anything much at all.”

I exited on this line, and had a quiet internal chuckle over the frame of mind in which it left them as I walked through the lounge. Like most such smart-alec remarks, it didn't bear too great a weight being laid on it: there was water on the table at dinner, and no doubt some of the men had been drinking beer; again, women often go to the lavatory to repair their make-up, or to see to various little intimate matters. Still, there was at least
something
in it. The water at table had not, as a rule, been drunk in any great quantity: I had noticed this because it was wonderful water, such as British water may once have been, but had not been in many a long year—pure, delectable rainwater. Patti Drewe drank an awful lot of water with her meal, as many Americans do, but nobody else much had done so. Maryloo, I remembered, had shared a half-bottle of Jugoslav Riesling with Felicity Maxwell. None of the British writers had drunk much water, and the Arthur Biggs table had shared another half-bottle of wine. So it was just about worth considering, though one always had to remember that bladders were funny things. And it was quite possible that writing romances led to what one of my Australian relatives calls a “frequency.”

All was quiet upstairs in the corridor. Even the Finn's room, outside which the brawny sergeant sat reading a Mickey Mouse comic, was silent as the grave. I found Stein and Svein in Amanda's room, confabbing in their quiet-voiced way over the results from the police labs in Bergen. They welcomed me with genuine friendliness,
pulled up a chair for me, and poured me a beaker of coffee from the percolator which stood on its little warmer in the corner—no doubt provided by the proprietress in recognition of a chronic Norwegian need. Then we all three got down to discussing the developments of the day.

“First of all, she was deliberately drowned,” said Stein. “There was a vicious karate blow to the neck, but that wasn't what killed her. No doubt it sent her toppling into the water, but there are bruises on the shoulder which show that she was held under. It would have taken perhaps three or four minutes.”

“Right,” I said. “After which the cherry blossom bough was thrown in on top of her.”

“That's right,” agreed Stein. “Though by the way, she was never entirely in the water. One foot and calf were still almost dry—they must have remained on the landing-stage. But your point, I take it, is: why not push the body out into the fjord and make
some
attempt to suggest that this was a natural drowning?”

“Yes. This proclaimed itself as murder.”

“Yes. We're puzzled by that too. Now, those bits of paper that you picked out of the water—very sensibly. Just one is vital—the rest is supermarket bills, old envelopes and so on. One is a little piece ofpaper—
Kvalevåg Gjestgiveri
notepaper.”

“Ah. There's plenty in the lounge, and a few bits in each room.”

“Exactly. Anyone could get hold of it. And the message is typewritten—but unfortunately on the typewriter in the little office off the lounge.”

“The proprietress's?”

“That's right. There's no money kept there, and it's always open. In fact, I gather she's said that one or two of the guests asked if it was all right to use it, and she told them it was perfectly OK.”

“Damn. Does she remember who?”

“Yes—Maryloo Parker and Mrs. Biggs.”

“Mrs.
Biggs?”

“Yes—apparently she types her husband's works, and all his correspondence. But Fru Tønnesen—that's the lady who owns this place—says that others took this as a general permission.”

“Double damn. And what did the thing say?”

“It just read: ‘9:30. OK?' ”

“Short and to the point. But apparently not so
much
so that Amanda felt any suspicion. You're not going to get anything very conclusive about finger pressure out of
that.
Is there anything else?”

Stein stirred in his chair, and his rather bland face furrowed at the forehead.

“A couple of things, both of them rather odd. Or unexpected, perhaps I should say. First there were all these Roberts that we had to check, to see if they might have been the man, the boyfriend, she was writing to.”

“Yes?”

“Well, all of them deny any knowledge of her, outside her books, and all of them deny having met her. I must say that, without
really
being able to check up, because that would mean going minutely into all their life histories,
and
the victim's, still, I found most of their denials convincing. But the odd thing is that there is one of them who admits to having
seen
her.”

“Seen her?”

“On scene—on
stage.”

I thought for a moment, to discover what was puzzling him.

“I suppose that is a little odd, since it wasn't much of a theatrical career.”

“But the odd thing is that it was the Nigerian who had seen her—Robert Achinowuba. He said he saw her real name in
Happy Tears,
just as you did. He saw her as Celia
in a British Council African tour of
As You Like It
in Nairobi in the early 'sixties.”

“How strange. And you're quite sure that was
all?”

“So he swears. And since apparently he was only sixteen at the time, it seems likely he's telling the truth. She may have had some sort of agent that we can check dates with. As it is, the age he says he was is borne out by his passport. He said he was taken from school—it was one of the big events of his young life, and he still has the programme at home. It was his only experience of Western drama before he began coming to Europe, which was fifteen or more years later. So that's one odd little coincidence.”

“Right. We'll have to make of that what we can. What's—”

But I was interrupted by a sound that shattered the somewhat murky silence of the upper corridor—a voice raised in some doleful student ditty, such as was doubtless sung in the student residences of Helsinki, as they handed the twenty-fifth bottle around. We darted out into the corridor, and gazed disgustedly at the sergeant, who was looking at the Finn's door in dismay.

“May I make a suggestion?” I asked.

“Do,” said Stein courteously.

“There must be some empty rooms somewhere in the guest-house. There were several people arrived last night who were shunted off to the KvalevÃ¥g Hotel. Put him in pyjamas, do a thorough body-search, and lock him in one of those. As it is, you won't be able to do much with him until the morning.”

As Stein went off, melancholy and somewhat shamefaced, to see Mrs. Tønnesen and arrange it, I turned to Svein.

“As I was about to say, before I was so rudely interrupted—”

“You were going to ask about the other curious thing.”

“Yes.”

“Well, perhaps it was not so curious. It just isn't quite what we expected, from what we'd heard of . . . Miss—I suppose it was Miss?—Fairchild.”

“Amanda.”

“Yes. Well, from an inspection of the bedclothes, and from the pathologist's report—”

But I knew already what was coming.

“That doesn't seem right,” I said.

“No. At some time in the fairly recent past, Amanda had—how do you put it nicely in English?—engaged in sexual activity.”

“Right. And judging by the letter to ‘Robbie,' it wasn't with him.”

“That's what we thought. Is this something you would have expected?”

“No,” I said. “It's not something I would have expected at all.”

I
T WASN'T STRICTLY PART OF MY SIDE
of the inquiry, but when Stein and Svein said they were going to go and talk to Mrs. Tønnesen and the odd job boy, I decided to go along with them. The boy, at least, was important, because his position at the head of the lane leading to the guest house could make him a prime witness. He it was who could set limits, if we believed him, to the list of suspects we needed to keep in mind.

Mrs. Tønnesen led us to a quiet corner of the kitchen, away from the muscular cook and her assistants. We sat round a table with a red checked cloth, feeling very much
au paysan.
The boy played with a knife, but he seemed nervous mainly because his English was to be on show and might be found wanting. Fru Tønnesen
was careful in her English, but precise and perfectly collected.

The boy was called Gorm, poor soul, and he was the son of one of Fru Tønnesen's cousins. He had worked at Kvalevåg for the last two summers, thus earning much-needed cash (for I gathered from him that Norwegian students do not get grants, which doesn't say much for their much-boasted womb-to-tomb social security). Gorm had gone down to the bus stop at around a quarter to eight. The bus was due about eight, but it was a long time before he realized that this was not just a normal delayed arrival. He had stood there from about ten to eight until the bus arrived about ten twenty-five. If he had known about the accident and the blocked road he would have taken something to read, or his transistor. As it was, he had nothing to do but mooch around and look up and down the road.

He was adamant that no one had come down the road to the guest-house, nor had anyone left the guest-house to walk the road to Kvalevåg. Only my sister and Bernard had been down, to talk to him for a while. Even the locals had stayed away from the bar that evening, as they tended to when the long evenings came and the foreign tourists began to arrive. He was almost certain that no one had scuttled across the overgrown field that separated the guest-house from the road. To do that without his seeing them, they would have had to have left the road round the corner, tracked through a coppice, then propelled themselves practically on their belly through the long grass until they got to the trees around the guest-house lawn. He just didn't think it could be done without his noticing. Certainly he convinced all of us that it was highly unlikely.

“You must have been one of the last people to see the lady alive,” said Stein, speaking in his soft, unemotional
voice. The boy screwed up his face and nodded, tapping nervously with his knife on the red-patterned cloth.

“How much did you have to do with her during her stay?”

He shrugged.