Tour de Force (6 page)

Unwontedly friendly, she came over and stood beside them at the rail. ‘Have the others appeared yet?'

‘Mr and Mrs Rodd have gone on,' said Cockie. ‘Miss Barker went after them.'

‘No doubt,' said Vanda Lane, dryly.

‘Well, I mean …' But he would not make matters worse to make them better. ‘And Mr Fernando has just gone along with Miss Trapp.'

‘Still clutching the handbag!' said Cecil, gaily.

She leaned forward and looked at him across Inspector Cockrill. ‘I see you have yours too.'

Just one's scribblings, said Mr Cecil. London was going all Hoowarnese next season or his name was not Cecil Pr.… Well, Cecil. Masses and masses of tiny frills from the knees down and terribly tight under the tail, they'd all have to walk about with their knees bent like Spanish dancers, it would be too new for any! The little red attaché case was crammed to the top, nothing elaborate, of course, nothing finished, just one's rough scribbles to take to Rome and complete in the studio but, and this was the vital thing,
ideas
. …

‘Which you've gathered since you came to Italy?' said Vanda.

He went a shade white, gave a little startled yap like a small dog and like a small dog snapped round on her. ‘What do you mean by that?'

She put on an innocent face. ‘Does it suggest some special meaning?'

He tossed back the lock of gold hair but it was purely from habit, there was no room in him now for affectations. ‘I don't know. It seems …'

‘Ah, seems,' said Vanda. Her hands were fisted on the rail of the balcony, but loosely like the paws of a cat, and she kept up an air of easy bantering, only subtly touched with venom. ‘Ah – seems! But this is a holiday; and on holiday, nothing's quite what it seems. People aren't what they seem. Are they, Inspector? You're a policeman – you know that.'

Above them the sun blazed down, below them the sea danced, sequined blue, the terraces were a massed glory of rose and oleander, of myrtle and orange blossom, of palm and pine; but suddenly there was a chill wind about them, ugly and chill. Cockie said flatly: ‘People are never exactly what they seem.'

‘But especially on holiday,' she insisted. ‘Surrounded by people who don't know one. No give-away relatives, no childhood friends, no birth certificates, no diplomas, no marriage lines …'

‘No police records,' said Cockie.

‘Exactly,' she said. ‘Reborn. Reborn just for a couple of weeks, with a whole, new spick and span character to present to a whole new world. Starting with casual little showing-off lies to strangers – then the strangers become acquaintances, become friends, become patrons, perhaps, or even prospective employers, and it's too late to go back on the lies, they have to be strengthened, they have to be built up by other lies until at last there's a whole, great terrifying structure of lies to be lived up to for the whole, long holiday, perhaps even after the holiday, perhaps to the end of one's life …' She looked into their faces with cold, blue, disagreeably sneering eyes. ‘Don't you agree?'

‘You're a student of human nature, Miss Lane,' said Inspector Cockrill smoothly.

‘I find it a profitable study.'

‘On holiday?' he suggested.

‘And after. I keep up with my holiday acquaintances, Inspector.'

‘No doubt it pays to do so,' said Cockie.

She gave him a brief, cold, secret smile as though at some private joke all of her own. ‘Perhaps!' She shrugged lightly; but he saw that her hands now were tightly clenched on the wooden rail.

Below them and to their left, they could see the little row of bathing huts and the base of the great rock nose where it jutted out from the forehead of the land. The Rodds were standing there chatting in their civil, impersonal way to Fernando and Miss Trapp. Cockie gestured towards them. ‘For example …'

‘Oh, them!' She shrugged again, lightly. But suddenly the mask slipped, she said with a predatory gleam: ‘All of them with money, their own or somebody else's. All of them with secrets, all playing parts. Each one of those four people – hugging a despicable secret, deceiving the rest. That creature Fernando – if they did but know why we went to that
albergo
in Siena! And Miss Trapp – hoarding up her miserable fortune in a gold-monogrammed bag. And the other two – pretending; she looking into his eyes and pretending that she doesn't know what he's planning to do to her, he looking back, accepting her pretences, pretending there's nothing to know. All of them, all four of them, all the others on this tour, that Mrs Sick, pretending to be delicate and interesting when all the time at home she's as strong as a horse, that woman with the niece, Gruff and Grim as you call them, pretending to be generous and kind when all she wants is to get the girl under her jealous influence and force her life into a groove as solitary and sour as her own.… All of us, acting: all of us struggling to keep our mean little secrets, ready to die to protect them, ready to fight and cheat and lie …'

‘And pay,' suggested Inspector Cockrill pleasantly.

She whipped away from them, running off abruptly down the wooden steps on soundless, rubber-soled feet, and away under the bougainvillea boughs. They saw her emerge from the tunnel of jasmine that covered the steps from the upper terrace to the lower, pause for a moment to fling her white towel into one of the bathing huts, and run out along the ridge of the diving rock, bounce once on the springy board and soar out – out and down to the blue water, twenty feet below.

The sea sent up a feather of triumphant spray: and closed in over her.

*

Sharply, as a razor blade slitting through stretched blue satin, her white hands cut their way up through the surface of the water. She swam back to the shore immediately, shaking the drops from her shining black costume. ‘I hope she feels – cleaner,' said Mr Cecil, still standing at the balcony rail, staring down at her.

‘Yes,' said Cockie. He thought it over. ‘What a very curious conversation!'

‘Very revealing, don't you mean?' said Cecil.

‘Yes, that's just what I do mean.' She had climbed up the path in the angle of the land and the rock and now appeared on the terrace, they saw her go up and speak to the group standing watching her there. She pointed down to the beach and they began to move off, down the steep path up which she had come. ‘They're going to watch from there,' said Cecil. ‘She's going to show Mr Rodd a dive that he could do. Let's go and watch too.' His face had lost something of the pasty look that terror had brought to it, he was returning to a nervous desire for action, he was longing to talk, to confide, to protest, to exclaim. ‘Where's Louli? We'll go and find
her
.' They went down the central steps together and joined Helen Rodd and Leo, now standing on the sand looking upwards at the diving board. Vanda Lane had gone out there again and was standing, gently springing, deep in thought. As they watched, she turned sideways to the board's end, her right arm stiff to her thigh, the left curved upwards over her head: and so sprang high into the air and forced herself up and out and down. But she hit the water rather flatly, surfaced almost at once and, as she scrambled ashore, stood for a moment and gave her head a little, uncertain shake. Leo Rodd ran forward to meet her. ‘You didn't hurt yourself?'

‘No, but …' She blew out her breath and patted her diaphragm. ‘I'm winded, that's all. I came down a bit flat.' A faint stain of pink was slowly creeping up over her shoulder and arm where she had hit the water, and she raised her knee and hugged it, blowing out her breath again. ‘I say, I do feel bad about this,' said Leo. ‘You were trying it for me.'

She protested. ‘No, no, I'm perfectly all right; but the truth is, the board's too high for experimenting. It was stupid of me.'

‘Yes, well don't try any more. I'm sorry,' he said again. ‘I do feel guilty.'

Miss Trapp and Fernando arrived at this moment and Miss Trapp was suddenly galvanized into womanly concern. She thought Miss Lane looked not at all well, she thought Miss Lane should lie down for an hour or two, she thought Miss Lane should take a drop of brandy or some aspirin at least.…

A civil wrangle followed between two schools of thought, those who considered that Miss Lane should certainly take brandy and lie down, and those who could clearly see that she had had the wind knocked out of her for a moment but was already practically restored to normal health. Miss Trapp, however, was adamant, threatening to march Miss Lane back to the hotel herself, tuck her up with a couple of aspirin and mount guard over her to see that she didn't get up. Vanda, quite obviously horrified by this well-meant offer, finally consented to change out of her wet things and perhaps have a rest on her bed. Cockie, looking on with a lacklustre eye, suspected that she was not entirely sorry to be forced to give in. She toiled back up the little path to the top of the rock and paused there for a moment, apparently to speak to Louli Barker; for Louli, a couple of minutes later, came flying down the path, looking rather white, but loud with exaggerated accounts of the hideous time she had had cowering in one of the huts while they all nattered outside, holding together the split in her already not very adequate bathing suit. However, she said, in a rather forced, high voice, fortunately that clever Miss Lane had had the brilliant suggestion of tying it up with a handkerchief, which was not frightfully safe but on the whole doing quite well …

‘In one of the bathing huts?' faltered Miss Trapp.

Louli gave her a wink which considerably imperilled the safety of one set of the preposterous eyelashes; but Cockie could not rid himself of an impression that she looked rather white and strained and, as Cecil rushed up and poured out his confidences into her ear, he saw her jaw drop, her eyes grew wide and startled, she began to gabble in reply, returning confidence for confidence, looking back over her shoulder to the top of the rock; looking at the rest of the party, now swimming or floundering in the sea as their custom was – at Helen and Leo (she shook her head vigorously) – at Fernando, at Miss Trapp.… At Cockie himself. After a moment they came to some agreement about Cockie; and so parted and fell to an exhibition of bobbing and screaming whose forced gaiety quite outdid the bobbing and screaming of the earlier bathe at Rapallo. So, thought Cockie, they're going to confide in me that Miss Lane is trying to blackmail them; and I shall reply that she is merely taking a malicious pleasure in frightening them and that they are silly to go and give away, by their very response, that they each have something to be blackmailed about. And then they will decide that I am only a stupid old codger, and leave me to read in peace.

And sure enough, as soon as the bathe was over, Louvaine appeared, sauntering up the shallow steps to the lower terrace where he had established himself in his deck-chair. ‘Oh, hallo, Inspector. I didn't know you were here.'

‘Didn't you?' said Cockrill, sardonically.

‘Goodness, you are cosy! I shall come and join you.' She sat down on the pebble-patterned terrace at his feet, shaking out her mop of red hair. He observed with amusement that with all the bobbing, not one drop of water had been permitted to endanger the wisdom of a dozen magazine articles on How to Keep Lovely in the Summer, accumulated on her charming face. To make quite sure, she dived into the recesses of the scarlet beach bag and, producing an outsize flapjack, peered intently into the looking-glass, added yet another layer of sun-tan powder, attended to the left set of eyelashes which had become seriously unsettled by her earlier wink at Miss Trapp, and removed excess grains of powder from both with a licked fourth finger. ‘That is a disgusting habit,' said Inspector Cockrill severely.

‘Well, some people actually put them
on
with spit. I do use my white of egg.' She added some quite unnecessary lipstick and fished in the bag again. ‘Do you mind if I do my nails?'

‘If it involves the smell of pear drops, I mind very much,' said Cockie.

‘No, that's taking off. I'm putting on.' Unvarnished, the inch-long nails looked like an extension of her fingers, they made the whole hand seem very narrow and inordinately long. ‘Repellent, aren't they? Like poor, dead hens' hands, I always think, hanging up in poulterers' shops.' She produced a bottle of violently bright varnish and a little brush. ‘I say, Inspector – do
you
think Miss Lane's a blackmailer?'

‘Is that what you came up here to ask me?' said Cockie.

‘Yes,' she said frankly. ‘Cecil and I agreed …'

‘I know you did. Well, the answer is – no. Not for money.'

She looked up at him sharply, one hand half-painted, held with fingers apart to keep from smudging contacts. ‘Goodness, Inspector – what a clever person you are!'

‘I think what she does, she does for the kick she gets out of it. It gives her a sense of power. Herself, she's unsocial and ungregarious, she's an introvert: she doesn't like to see other people free and easy and happy, and so she tries to spoil things for them, that's all. She's clever at putting two and two together, she finds out things or she just guesses and if the guess doesn't come off, there's no harm done. But it often does: most of us have a bone or two at least, in the skeleton-cupboard.'

‘You think she just likes to see us wriggling on the hook?'

‘Us?' said Cockie. ‘You too?'

She bent her head over her hand again. ‘Well, you see-I don't know if you know that Leo Rodd and I …'

‘Yes, what about it?' said Cockie.

She seemed surprised by his level tone but after a moment's hesitation she went on. ‘Well she – she sort of referred to it. Look – I'll tell you what happened. You know when you talked to me on the balcony up there? – well, you didn't know it but you said something and it made me give a sort of jump and I was fiddling with my bra at the time which was a tiny bit torn at the top and I must have given it a jerk because the damn thing started to split right down. Well, my dear, there isn't much of it at the best of times and by the time I'd got down to the diving rock it had gone a bit more and it really was
not
quite the thing! So I dove into one of the huts because it was a trifle embarrassing, Leo being there with Mrs Rodd and all, so I sort of skipped round the back and dove in and thought I would try and fix it; but I had nothing to fix it with and it wasn't all so easy, and by that time Fernando and La Trapp had arrived so I couldn't go out and there I was …'