Tour de Force (14 page)

The key had turned …?

So very much noise, the first time. So very much less, the second time. He got up quietly and went across to the great, wooden, iron-hinged door.

San Juan el Pirata was running true to form. The guard had gone off, late for his afternoon siesta, and forgotten to lock the door.

He went out quietly into the shivery corridor, up the dank, twisting, slimy shallow stone steps, through the cool, dim hall where the politio peacefully slept, their heads pillowed on their folded arms; out into the clean, bright, glorious light of the day; and walked through the little town as though all the hounds of hell had been after him; and so to the Bellomare Hotel.

The Gerente got there at five o'clock. The Inspector was sitting with Fernando on the terrace, and leapt to his feet, all hypocritical smiles. Through Fernando he thanked the Gerente unreservedly for the charming hospitality of the politio; he had enjoyed his luncheon immensely – but then, feeling drowsy, had strolled back to the hotel for his siesta without waiting for his friend – the Inspector felt sure El Gerente would understand? El Gerente understood perfectly; but it was he himself who had instituted the idea that it was all a jolly luncheon party; and nothing had been said about the Inspector remaining under guard. He really must have a word with Pedro about leaving that door open: Pedro was a good man, one of his best men – in a rough sea, under dangerous conditions, perhaps the best; but really, a fellow must keep his mind on his jobs. Meanwhile …

Meanwhile, reunited, the Helpless Ones drew together as never before. Il Grouppa took possession of the beach and made all hideous with British bathing cries; the seven poor suspects conducted an emergency meeting among the pines.

Detective Inspector Cockrill made a short speech. He said that from this moment on, it was every man for himself and what the French called
sorve qui pert
. One of six persons – seven if they liked to count him in, and they were welcome to – was a murderer. He, Cockie, was not going back to that dungeon to save the neck of any murderer; and he was not going to let anyone else go. No innocent person should end up in the Barrequitas gaol if he could help it; if he could help it, the guilty should not end there either, but come back to England and there stand a fair trial and have a fair chance. ‘But that's all the mercy he'll get from me,' said Cockie. ‘From this moment I'm against him: whichever of you six people it is. And if you've got any sense, you'll be against him too. Whatever you may think of the rights and wrongs of murdering a blackmailer – if she was a blackmailer – the fact remains that by letting the blame fall on the innocent, the killer is a danger to us all. I'll help you all I can; but you'll have to help
me
. And I give you fair warning, that my neck isn't out of the noose yet, not by a long chalk; and I'm going to do everything I possibly can to find out the true murderer, and protect myself.' He sat down abruptly on the intricately pebble-patterned seat in a little clearing in the pine trees, and took out his tobacco. They were silent, sitting on the pine-needled ground in a ring round his feet like children listening to a bedtime story; but the story was too grim for children at bedtime and they were startled and shocked at the cold vehemence in his voice. Into the anxious silence, he repeated it. ‘This isn't funny, not a bit; and man, woman, or child, I'll get whichever of you six people is the murderer. I'll go back to that place for no one. I warn you now.'

‘Yes. But Inspector Cockrill,' said Leo Rodd, ‘taking as read that we don't for one moment suppose that you are the murderer – you did, yourself, give the Gerente an alibi for all the rest of us. And it was true. We
were
there, you
could
see us all. You said you had thought it over carefully …'

‘I have thought it all over a great deal more carefully since,' said Cockie, ‘and it only goes to show that one should not work to preconceived notions of things. When I wanted none of you to be guilty, I soon convinced myself, quite sincerely, that none of you could be guilty, that I could give you an alibi. Now I want one of you to be guilty, and I can clearly see that none of you had an alibi after all.'

Except one. One of them had an alibi; and at the bottom of his arid old heart, he knew that he was glad of it. For there was, in Louli Barker, that quality which in these young creatures always had power to move him – that quality of gaiety and courage, hiding under however garish an exterior, a humble and deeply vulnerable heart. He was glad that she had an alibi; had slept through the long, sun-drenched afternoon, lying at his feet with her red head pillowed on her arms. Louli Barker was Out. For the rest of them, it was definitely
sorve qui pert
.

Chapter Eight

T
HERE
is no room on the island of San Juan el Pirata for a burial-ground. For some decades, this constituted a drawback in its amenities, but at last the inhabitants were made happy by the discovery of a current which could be relied upon to deposit a corpse – in not less than five days from its launching – upon the Ligurian shore; and, thus delicately blackmailed, Italy agreed to cede a plot of ground just north of Piombino, complete with landing-stage. Here the Juanese built a high wall in the Moorish fashion still prevalent in Spain, pitted with narrow recesses like overlong bread ovens, where the dead might be popped, head first, to bake slowly away into nothingness, decently sealed in with the paraphernalia of Christian piety. The little
Vaporetto del Muerte
plies between Barrequitas and the landing-stage, exquisitely gloomy in dingy black and silver and all a-flutter with purple drapery and ostrich feather plumes. By this means, on the second day after her doing to death, Vanda Lane of St John's Wood, London, was taken – weather not only permitting but insisting – to her last resting-place.

Telegrams had been exchanged between Inspector Cockrill and Scotalanda Yarda, to the infinite astonishment of the Gerente who appeared to regard the whole thing as a species of witchcraft; but so far nothing was known of close friends or relatives of the dead girl. A considerable company, however, followed her coffin, inappropriately gay in their summer holiday clothes; and stood with muffled curiosity among the sentinel cypresses while Mother Church, on the off-chance that this might be one of her children, conditionally performed the last rites. Mr Cecil, half hidden behind a cypress and hardly less sorrowfully dark in trappings of full Juanese mourning bought for the occasion and really too amusingly chic for words, scribbled away in his sketch book with ostentatious surreptitiousness and confided to Louvaine that probably this was the best turn La Lane had ever done to anyone in her
life
.….

‘Only it's in her death,' said Louli.

Louvaine, also, was tremendously decorative that day, in a skirt of bold patchwork lined with scarlet and a scarlet blouse to match, that nobody else in the world would have dared to wear with that hair. ‘I think one should go a bit gay at funerals,' she confided to Miss Trapp, who caught up with her as they trailed along the dusty white road back to the landing-stage. ‘I know
I
shan't want people going around in black when I die, folding their hands and looking piously down their noses …'

Miss Trapp stifled any inclination to say that she thought the chances of Louli's friends observing the proprieties at her obsequies, were remote. She said instead that, as she found Miss Barker alone – so difficult usually, she was always so surrounded by – er – friends – she would be glad of a word with her. ‘Miss Barker, I wish to ask you a question, straight out.'

‘A question,' said Louvaine, looking round rather desperately for one or any of the doubtful friends.

‘Yes, a question. Miss Barker – that day, while we were watching Miss Lane diving (poor creature, this is all so dreadful, one can hardly believe it, even yet!) – you – you mentioned that you had been in one of those bathing cabins some of the time …'

The road was long and straight, bordered with depressed villas in hideous shades of burnt siena and arsenic green and a crude rose-pink. The heads of the straggling procession were dappled with the flickering shade from the laced branches of the bordering trees. ‘I was in one of the cabins, yes, fixing my bathing dress.'

‘That would be while – while Mr Fernando and I were talking? The others had gone on down to the beach by then.'

‘I didn't hear what you were saying, if that's what you mean.'

‘But, Miss Barker –'

‘You were standing quite a little way from me, Miss Trapp, the other side of the steps from the top terrace. I wasn't eavesdropping, I do assure you; I heard nothing.'

Miss Trapp's nervous hand fidgeted on the handle of the brown bag. She wore yet another of her expensive silk dresses, which surely had never been designed to have a V neck. ‘Yet you told the Inspector that Miss Lane was blackmailing me.'

‘I told him she spoke to you when she came back up to the top of the rock, after her first dive.'

‘You could hear that too?' said Miss Trapp with an edge to her voice.

‘I couldn't hear any of it. Mr Fernando had started off down the path and she said something to you as she passed you; but I didn't hear what it was and so I told the Inspector.'

‘Well, all she said to me was, “The tide's on the turn.”'

‘That doesn't sound very blackmailing,' agreed Louli.

‘That is what she said,' declared Miss Trapp firmly.

‘O.K., well, that's splendid. Just tell the Inspector that that's what she said, and then don't fuss any more.'

‘I have told the Inspector,' said Miss Trapp. ‘He replies that you told him I went white and gave a startled exclamation.'

Louvaine had actually reported that La Trapp had gone mud-grey and let out a great squawk. She did not labour this distinction, however. ‘I had only just opened a crack of the door, Miss Trapp, and peeked through, and I saw Miss Lane say something to you. I do hope you realize,' said Louvaine a little anxiously, ‘
why
I told inspector Cockrill all this? It was only to protect you: it was before the murder happened that I told him, you know. She tried the same thing on me a moment later. I told the Inspector about me and about you at the same time.'

‘But there was nothing to tell.'

‘All right, then there wasn't,' said Louli. ‘In view of the fact that she started in on me one minute later, perhaps I was only being wise after the event and imagining that you sort of cried out. Mr Fernando came back up the path and asked you what was the matter …'

‘He did not ask me what was the matter He merely turned back to see if I was coming; Mr Fernando has good manners,' said Miss Trapp, tossing her head in its depressing brown straw.

‘Well, all right, he didn't ask you what was the matter,' said Louli, getting cross. ‘I don't see why you should be in a state about it, anyway. Anyone would think I'd accused you of murdering the woman.'

Miss Trapp went mud-grey once more. ‘I was on the beach while she was being murdered. I could not have been anywhere near her.'

Louvaine was hot and weary, the white dust kicked up through the open straps of her sandals, unpleasantly dry and scrunchy beneath her toes, the red hair hung hot and heavy about her white neck. She said irritably that that was not what Inspector Cockrill believed: he had said that, after all, any of them had had opportunity to kill. ‘You could have gone up the path by the rock …'

‘I was on the beach during the entire afternoon. Inspector Cockrill could see me there.'

‘He could see an enclosure of towels and beach umbrellas,' said Louli. ‘You needn't have been inside it, after all! You'd built it right up against the diving rock, you could have chosen that place on purpose, you know; you were better placed than anyone for going up to her room, you only had to skip along the bottom of the rock, up the steep little path in the corner where it joins the terrace, and so on up through the jasmine terrace and all the rest of it; and scuttle down again.' Mr Cecil overtook them, exquisite in his tapering black satin trousers and billowing black cotton blouse, tucking away the sketches in his red attaché case as he walked. ‘Oh, Cecil, do come here and rescue me! Miss Trapp's being so cross because I'm supposed to have told Cockrill that La Lane was blackmailing her, when all the time it turns out she was only remarking chattily that the tide was on the turn.'

‘Hardly an observation to have made me turn pale,' suggested Miss Trapp with heavy irony.

‘Oh, but. my dear, I couldn't agree less.' said Mr Cecil. promptly. ‘Too pale making for words! I mean, whatever can she have meant?'

‘Have meant?' said Miss Trapp, beginning to falter.

‘But the Mediterranean, dear: no tides,' said Mr Cecil.

‘Drinks, of course, were available on the Vaporetto del Muerte and might be taken with great wedges of pizza, rich with garlic and onion and tomato and waxy, melted cheese, to the accompaniment of mournful music played by an ordinarily cheerful small brass band. Helen Rodd, who seemed to find some ease of spirit in the cool, impersonal, heartless friendliness of Mr Cecil, joined him at one of the little tables and accepted an Americano. Leo Rodd left them and went and leaned over the rail at the stern of the boat, looking out over the scummy white wash slashing the shining blue silk of the still sea. Louvaine, joining him there, repeated her remark about going gay to funerals, leaning on the rail beside him trying surreptitiously to touch his hand. ‘I mean, I think one should wear something not too depressing.'

‘So I see,' he said rather coldly, and he moved his hand away from hers. ‘Damn it, darling – not now!'

She whipped away her own hand as though it had been stung and once again there came to her face that look of sorrowful foreboding that had come to it when he had snubbed her on the evening of Vanda Lane's death. ‘Oh, Leo …'