Death of a Ghost (29 page)

‘How very, very nice of you to come,' she said, allowing him to kiss her hand without embarrassment.

‘Absurd, my dear Erica.' Max waved away her gratitude self-consciously and added with the air of one announcing a delightful surprise: ‘I've read the book!'

The lady's expression was suitably humble and shyly glad.

‘Really? Oh, Mr Fustian, that's too nice of you. I really didn't expect that. I do hope you weren't too disappointed.'

‘Not at all.' The Fustian drawl had reached the point of becoming indistinct. ‘I found it quite adequate. Even more – dignified. I congratulate you. You have only to work to be a second Vasari. I think I may say that.'

‘Vasari? The historian? Er – do you think so?'

For a moment something approaching polite bewilderment flickered in Lady du Vallon's bright grey eyes.

‘I've said so,' said Max grandly.

The conceit of the man was never more apparent, and someone who felt it must be intentionally exaggerated laughed audibly, only to look uncomfortable when no one else smiled.

Lady du Vallon, who knew that she had only written a monograph on the goldsmith to knit fifty or sixty wood-cuts into a book, clearly felt a little at sea, but she was a woman of courage.

‘I always saw you in that role, Mr Fustian,' she said, taking the bull by the horns. ‘As Vasari, you know.'

‘I? Oh no, dear lady. Not Vasari.' Max smiled.

In his tartan waistcoat the man looked like a barrel-organ monkey, Campion reflected.

‘I see myself more as a patron of the arts – a Medici, shall we say. Lorenzo de Medici.'

He laughed, and his embarrassed audience were glad to join in with him and turn back to their own more human and more interesting conversations.

‘And yet the dam' feller gets away with it!' muttered old Fyvie to Campion as he passed. ‘Can't understand it. Something fishy somewhere.'

Max was still chattering to his hostess with a wealth of gesture but in a lower tone and not so publicly as before, while a thin, shy young man had joined the group. This was Urquhart, the cutter of the woods, and Max was evidently much employed.

As Campion waited he watched the exotic little figure and considered him.

He was puny, ridiculously dressed, insufferably or laughably conceited according to one's temper, and yet there was hardly a soul in the crowded room who would willingly offend him. Moreover, he had murdered two human beings in the past three months; one impulsively in an insane fit of hatred, and one in cold blood after considerable preparation. Also he had got clean away with both crimes. Looking at him now it seemed quite impossible.

Mr Campion considered murder.

The chief deterrent to private killing, he reflected, was probably the ingrained superstitious fear of the responsibility of ending a human life, but in a man of Max's inordinate conceit this objection could no doubt be swept away by being decided a necessity.

Then, nearly if not quite as strong a deterrent was the fear of apprehension, but here again sufficient conceit and belief in one's powers might easily make one insensible to this second terror also.

The third difficulty, of course, was the practical side of the business.

Concerning the murder of Dacre, Mr Campion was inclined to think that the astonishing luck attending that affair was one of those tragic chances whose results are even more far-reaching than might be at first supposed. If ever a beginner received encouragement, he thought grimly, Max had certainly not lacked it. The impulsive stab in the dark had come off with fantastic ease, and in the consequent enquiries not even suspicion had ever really touched the killer.

Fustian's second essay, on the other hand, the murder of Mrs Potter, had been ingeniously carried through, ruthlessly and without a slip, but, Campion realized suddenly, the actual details had been no more neat and ingenious than those of a hundred delicate business intrigues which Max must have carried out in his time.

In fact, once the two main objections to murder had been overcome the rest required merely that subtlety and lightness of touch of which Max was admittedly a master.

Campion frowned. As a possible third victim he found the subject extraordinarily interesting.

It was at this moment that he noticed that Max had left his hostess. He went over to join him.

Fustian greeted him effusively.

‘My dear fellow,' he murmured. ‘My dear fellow, what an impossible crush! No room to breathe or move or talk. Why do we come to these herdings of the little brains!'

He spoke affably and loud enough to be heard by all his more immediate neighbours, who shot him resentful or contemptuous glances according to their humour.

At the same time he was forging through the throng. Mr Campion partook of another cocktail while Max demanded sherry, and after some little delay and trouble all round obtained it.

He was in excellent spirits, chatting and nodding graciously to everybody, whether he knew them or not. Mr Campion got the impression that he must be almost universally disliked. His affectations seemed to have broadened to the point of farce, and there were people about who laughed at him openly.

He was standing, glass in hand, his head thrown back, surveying the throng and commenting on it as though he were watching it through a microscope, when Bee Birch, the militant painter of athletes, came up with fire in her eye and a magazine in her hand.

She was a picturesque figure herself in her puce stuff dress and outrageous sailor hat lying flat on her soft grey hair. The tales of her battles were many and her habit of never leaving a thought unsaid was the terror of her hostesses.

She descended upon Max like a very nice war-horse and thrust the open magazine at him.

‘Fustian, did you write this disgusting piece of effete snobbery?' she demanded.

Campion, who was wedged in by the bar and Max himself, saw the magazine was the current issue of
Life and Letters
, and the article was headed ‘The Coarse in Paint, by Max Fustian.' Moreover, there was a photograph of him, very dark and dramatic.

It seemed as if a certain amount of unpleasantness must ensue, but Max was unruffled.

‘Dear Miss Birch,' he murmured. ‘Of course I shall be delighted.'

And then, before anyone realized quite what he was about, he had set down his glass and taken an enormous gold pencil from the pocket of his dreadful waistcoat, signed the photograph with a flourish, and handed the paper back to her with the hint of a bow.

Rendered completely speechless with indignation, Miss Birch stood silent, and, seizing Campion's arm, Max made an unhurried but purposeful getaway.

‘We must discuss our business over dinner. I insist,' he said as they came down the stairs together. ‘One can't talk in a bear garden like that. I can't drink a sherry these days without getting a crowd round me.'

Campion glanced at him sharply, but he was apparently perfectly serious.

‘We must drop in at my flat first,' he went on. ‘Between ourselves, I want to change my waistcoat. Then we'll go on to Savarini's. I have a table there.'

Mr Campion did not demur. He wondered how Max was thinking of killing him. Savarini's sounded safe enough.

The flat in Baker Street proved to be one of those luxury apartments on the top floor of a giant block.

The room into which Max conducted him with a murmured apology for his absent man and a languid comment on the servant problem generally had much of the ascetic elegance of the Bond Street gallery: that is to say, it only just escaped being definitely bare. Its lovely stripped pine walls were decorated by a single Matisse over the fireplace, and the plain pale green carpet was reflected more ethereally still in the slightly domed ceiling.

Campion seated himself in one of the two chairs as big as Austin Sevens on either side of the hearth, while his host slid back a part of the panelling to reveal a small bottle cupboard.

‘If you don't mind, my dear fellow, I'll stick to sherry,' he said, his fingers moving deftly among the paraphernalia of refreshment. ‘But I have an excellent cocktail here, my own invention. You must try it.'

Mr Campion felt a fool.

‘I don't think I will, if you don't mind,' he said. ‘I've been drinking all the afternoon.'

‘Really? Oh, but I know you'll change your mind. You needn't be afraid. I know what these home-made concoctions are so often like, but I assure you I'm an expert. I shan't give you the recipe. I guard that most – most jealously.'

On the last word he shook a few drops of poisonous-looking green stuff from a bitters bottle into a minute shaker and fastened it up.

‘There,' he said a moment or so later as he filled a glass and poured out a sherry for himself.

Campion, leaning back in the gargantuan chair, wondered at himself and his host. The chances of a man poisoning one in his own flat were remote, of course, but in so serious an issue the most unlikely eventualities were worth considering.

Max was still talking. His drawl was less noticeable, his guest thought, and his languor had given place to vivacity.

‘Now the cherry,' he said. ‘This is the one cocktail in the world in which the cherry is an integral part.'

‘I don't like cherries,' said Campion feebly.

‘You'll adore this one. This cherry,' said Max firmly and with an inflection which gave his guest an uncomfortable sensation, ‘is like no other you have ever tasted – or ever will.'

He took a stick with a red blob on the end of it from some recess in the cupboard and dropped it gently into the glass.

‘There, my friend,' he said, placing the potion in Campion's hand. ‘If you'll excuse me I'll leave you to enjoy it while I change my waistcoat for something a little less festive.'

Campion sat looking at the glass, conviction of the complete unreality of the whole scene creeping over him.

He reproached himself for undue jumpiness, for seeing innuendoes in innocent remarks. Nevertheless, he did not drink from the glass in his hand but, removing the cherry stick with its burden still attached, sniffed the contents cautiously.

It seemed perfectly normal; a little odd in colour, perhaps, but otherwise very much the ordinary flavoured gin which he had been drinking all the evening.

He was about to replace the cherry when a fleck of white upon it caught his attention. He set the glass down and examined the fruit.

Its secret became obvious almost at once. The hole where the stone had been was now filled with a greyish white paste which certainly did not look wholesome.

Campion stared at it and his emotion was at least half disappointment. The whole ridiculous business was so unbelievably crude. Was this the man who had engineered the death of Mrs Potter? It seemed hardly credible.

He wondered what exactly the stuff was and what symptoms his host might expect him to show when he returned.

He emptied the contents of the glass in the back of the fire and watched it blaze. Most of it was spirit, anyway, he reflected. The cherry he placed carefully in an old envelope from his pocket and stowed it in his wallet.

Max could hardly be hoping him to die in the flat, he decided, however much his methods might have deteriorated. He was still contemplating the amazingly puerile attack when it occurred to him that more than likely Max had no conception of the completeness of his own discovery. He must know now that the authenticity of the later Lafcadios was under suspicion, but he probably had no idea that his part in the deaths in the household had been traced.

In this case was the present attempt so childish after all? Campion shuddered to think of the concoctions he had thoughtlessly swallowed down in the houses of acquaintances.

The subtlety might come later – in the disposal of the body, no doubt. Or perhaps it was one of those slow-working things; a culture, even, although that would be difficult for anyone but a doctor to obtain. It would be interesting to see what Max intended to do next.

Max intended to go to Savarini's, latest love of the moneyed intelligentsia. That was evident as soon as he returned.

He had changed not only his waistcoat, but his whole suit for a set of darker garments, and seemed very happy.

‘Did you like it?' he enquired, picking up the glass. ‘Not very much, perhaps?' he added, as his guest hesitated. ‘You don't like bitters? I do myself. They seem to give to a drink what minor disappointment gives to life, just that touch of the unsatisfactory which makes it worth one's going on. It's nearly half past eight. I must apologize. You must be positively starving.'

Savarini's was crowded, as usual, and at the little tables, under the famous ceiling painted by du Parc, sat many who had been at the cocktail party. Campion recognized at least a dozen people, including young Farquharson, the shipping heir, dining with a party. He looked hard at his friend and harder at his friend's friend, and raised his eyebrows questioningly. There was a lot of the snob about young Farquharson.

Max himself had something of a royal entry. Preceded by Joseph, the pontifical head waiter with the mustachios, he strutted among the crowded tables, nodding at every face turned towards him.

Evidently it was to be a special occasion. The table in the alcove of the furthest window was reserved for them, and as they settled down on the upholstered bench they had a complete view of the whole restaurant. Joseph himself superintended their meal, which appeared to have been ordered beforehand. Mr Campion decided that perhaps, after all, he was not expected to die at the dinner.

Max was speaking in his new role of the perfect host.

‘I took the precaution of leaving the food to our good
Maître
, my dear Campion. We're to taste the Cantonetti tonight, and to appreciate it one must eat the right things with it. This is to be a gourmet's meal, a fitting prelude to the discussion of the Lafcadios.'

Campion expressed his willingness to enjoy whatever Joseph should set before them and enquired about the Cantonetti. The name was vaguely familiar to him, but he could not place it.