Rose in Darkness (31 page)

A pause. One could almost hear Sofy’s thoughts coming over, What is this, what am I to say, what will be best for him? But evidently Etho was admitting to it. She said rather cautiously: ‘Well—yes.’

‘And—did you drive back with him?’

This would obviously be the nitty gritty. If she had been with him, he could not have killed Vi Feather. ‘Yes, I did,’ said Sofy, much more confidently.

‘You and he together—just the two of you?’

Did he mean...? Was he suggesting, after all, that Vi Feather...? If Vi had been with them, if they had started off by giving Vi a lift—there was such a thing as collusion, they were known to be close friends and Vi a common—enemy. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Sofy, absolutely firmly this time. ‘Only Etho and me. Who else?’

Charlesworth put down the receiver, went slowly back to the chair. Rufie remained speechless. Etho said: ‘OK, Inspector, it just seemed simpler to tell a fib—’

‘Quite a fib, sir, if one may say so,’ suggested Charlesworth, ‘in a murder investigation. And one asks oneself—why? Because you can’t help seeing that Miss Morne is quite right—the case against your friend is beginning to look rather positive.’

‘Oh, Rufie, I didn’t mean to suggest any case against you!’ But if Rufie had put that body in her car—what he thought was her car—had placed his own guilt on to her shoulders... So close, so near, so loving and trusting, they two to one another—if he had done this to her...

‘Mr Wendover, let’s just get this straight. And no more lies, please, or I tell you,’ said Charlesworth with quiet savagery, ‘I’ll get you for obstruction of the police in the performance of their duty—that isn’t just bonking them on the conk, you know!—and After the Fact, and Before the Fact for all I know; the whole damn lot. So let’s have it! You got back to your house, having dropped Miss Burnsey off at her flat—at what time?’

‘I’d better explain to you, Inspector—’

‘Please do,’ said Charlesworth, with a touch of ice.

‘—that we hadn’t been in touch, we didn’t know Rufie—Mr Soames—was going to Wren’s Hill. He didn’t make up his mind till the last minute, there was some do at this club he went to, and he couldn’t decide. But we met him there, at least we saw him as we left, Sofy and me; and we exchanged guilty glances, jokey glances, and then we two came home. He was getting up when we saw him as though he were leaving too, and we looked out for him, but in the car park in all that storm you couldn’t see a thing and it didn’t matter anyway, we’d get in touch later. We drove home and I got back to my place about ten to eleven or a minute or two after that.’ He paused. ‘You wouldn’t care to check with Miss Burnsey?’

‘No,’ said Charlesworth. ‘Now that you know that I can do so, I don’t think I need to. But thanks, all the same.’

V-eeeery sarky! thought Ginger, with nothing to do but keep as still as one reasonably could, curled up like a small pork sausage in a large can of baked beans. It amused him very much when in crime stories, accompanying sergeants chipped in with intelligent questions of their own. It was an underling’s place to keep his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut.

‘So, having established your alibis—’

‘They weren’t alibis then,’ said Etho. ‘Why should they be?—we knew nothing about any murder. On his way past my place, and he actually passes the door, he stopped off to compare notes; it was the sort of thing we do all the time. He’d see my car and know I was back. Any element of alibi would be to deceive Sari. On my account, largely. Just say we’d spent the evening together. She’d asked us not to go.’

‘And why did you go?’

‘Me, personally? Well, my company still has an interest in her, I wanted to see how the film went, audience reaction to her. Sofy wanted to see her old self, Rufie wanted to see his dress designs... And he longed to know what we’d thought of it, so on his way home—’

‘Just a casual dropping in, then?’

‘I’ve told you. And you’ll hardly suggest’, said Etho, ‘that he’d casually drop in, leaving his car standing out in the road with a dead body lolling in the passenger seat? It’s a small car, no hiding place in it.’

Charlesworth shrugged. ‘Pushed to lie across the two seats, covered with a rug or something. Who’s peering into parked cars at eleven o’clock on a night like that?’

Eleven o’clock! Etho said slowly: ‘Inspector—Rufie left my place soon after eleven. He wanted to be back before Sari got home. And he did get back before she got home, she’d been held up by the fall of the tree and he was already waiting for her in the flat. So—’

Rufie roused himself from his terrible lethargy, sitting strained forward in his chair, white hands grasping the arms, white face thrust forward. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t have moved the body into the other car. The other car wasn’t yet there.’

On the couch, Sari sat up very straight: very straight, very tense, the bright colours of the tight-fitted painted pants shifting under the soft, transparent over-all gleam of the flowing gown. ‘
Rufie?
’

The thin, nervous white hands spread out, palms upwards, in a sort of appeal to credulity. ‘Do you honestly think I could do such a thing—to her? Shift the blame from myself—to
her?
I could have—chucked it out somewhere along the edge of the heath, done anything, gone out afterwards, if you like, she always takes sleeping stuff, gone out by the Visitors’ Stairs, taken the car out again in the dark and the rain, tumbled the body out somewhere. But for God’s sake—not put it in her car...!’ He said to her: ‘It’s all right, darling. Of course I didn’t do it, God knows you’d never believe I’d do such a thing... Put the body in your car...!’ And as her face grew ever more taut with fear, the great eyes gazing back to him in an agony of doubt, he cried, ‘It’s all right, darling, don’t worry any more—I’m safe!’

But if Rufie was safe... Oh, my God! her heart cried out, what about Phin, what about Phin? The police ‘would be seeing Phin again’, were half suggesting that when he swapped with her car in the course of the Sunday picnic, the dead body might have been in the boot of his own.

And she heard her own voice saying: ‘But of course then, Rufie, I told you about the exchange, I told you it
wasn’t
my car.’

To those that knew and loved him, it was as though a brush passed across his face, expunging the look of apprehension, relief—painting there instead of a terrible pain. He said in a dead voice; ‘Oh, Sari—!’

Etho left her side, went over swiftly and sat on the arm of the big easy chair, took one of the shaking hands in his own and held it, hard and comforting, as though it were a child’s. ‘It’s all right, Rufie, you’re all right, you’ll be safe.’

But he had forgotten his fears for himself. He repeated in that voice of bleak agony: ‘Oh, Sari—!’

‘I didn’t
say
anything,’ said Sari, but in her eyes there was something—terrible.

‘You said without saying it,’ said Charlesworth, ‘that rather than risk driving the body out, disposing of it somewhere which mustn’t be too close to home—it would be safer and more muddling, especially when you still had the Juanese to blame for everything strange that happened—for him just to go down the fire-escape outside his bedroom and—now that he knew it wasn’t your car—put the body into the stranger’s car.’

Now he became alive again to his own safety. ‘But I didn’t have any body in my car, I didn’t kill her, I swear, I swear, I didn’t have her in my car...’

That terrible look, that dead look in Sari’s eyes. ‘You did when you left Wren’s Hill,’ she said. ‘I saw you with her, following me.’

‘Following you?’ said Rufie stupidly.

‘Dodging me. Slowing down, catching up with me again—’

‘We weren’t following you, Sari. Just the other way about—I was trying to keep out of your sight.’ And realising what he had said, he fell against Etho’s arm and cried out, ‘Oh, my
God
!’

Charlesworth stood up. ‘I think Mr Soames, we mustn’t go on with this, here. I’m going to ask you to come with me to the police station.’

He clawed at Etho’s arm, clinging to him like a child. ‘I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t, I swear!’

‘She was in your car with you?’ said Charlesworth.

‘She started on about Angelico. He was... He wasn’t even gay, I just... She started in the cinema; to shut her up there, I agreed to drive her home. She went on and on. In the car, I mean; vile things, horrible things, so—ugly. And dangerous for him, such things being spread around about him. It made me sick, I thought I would go mad. I stopped and rolled a cigarette; I knew it was stupid, I’d already smoked that evening and when I’m hopped up I know I do crazy things. But I did and then I drove on and it was worse, her voice went on and on...’ He was white, shuddering, sobbing it all out at last. ‘And then there was a roar and a crash and I knew that behind us a tree had fallen and I thought of how it might have fallen on the car, I felt as if it had, as if the car was crushed and I was caged in with her there... I couldn’t bear it one moment longer, I just opened the door and pitched her out into the night. She ran after me, screaming at me but I slammed the door shut. A car passed me going in the opposite direction and I think I vaguely thought that they might pick her up but anyway I didn’t care, I just drove on, anything to get away from her voice going on and on... But I didn’t kill her. I just drove away and left her there.’ He had shifted from the shelter of Etho’s protection, came slowly to his feet, stood swaying. He did not look at Sari. He said to Charlesworth, ‘Yes, if I could come with you and you could write it all down? I think it would be—I don’t know—cleaner.’ Charlesworth put a hand on his arm but he shook it off. ‘It’s all right, I’m coming with you. I want to come.’ Without a backward glance, he went with them. Sari fell against the heaped, wild cushions on the couch and burst into a storm of terrible tears.

Silence, silence in the big room, broken only by the sounds of exhausted sobbing. The room that Nan had admired in its clutter of beauty and a sort of mad utility, the lovely possessions, the drips of melted wax from the Batik work on Rufie’s unfinished nightie, the patch on the rich carpet where someone had once spilt a bowl of spaghetti—brilliantly disguised (‘All we can do is make a Feature of it, darlings, like they say in the magazines. Rufie, we could paint a little pond with a goldfish in it, visitors would always be carefully stepping over it, think it was a pool of water, though what could a pool of water be doing in the middle of a carpet?’)—the sewing machine, pushed into a corner because of the party, but still on the floor—where once the famous Sofa-cover kaftan had been turned into a flowing blouse, bright with flowers, that Sari could wear to Rome for the especial enchantment of a half-witted crippled child... Etho went across and opened the tall windows to lean out and look down into the yard. ‘They’re taking him to the police car. He’s walking between them. They’re not holding him. I think he wants to go.’

She roused herself. He came across and offered her his handkerchief. She said at last: ‘Will they believe him?’

‘Of course not,’ said Etho.

She got up and went herself and stared out the window at the diminishing twinkle of the tail lights of the car; and standing there, framed in the autumn twilight, the soft evening breezes stirring the gossamer gown, the frame of hair the only touch of bright colour in all the softness, said: ‘They’ve gone.’

‘Yes,’ said Etho, standing across from her as though some intangible obstacle held them, now and for ever, apart.

‘What will they do with him?’

‘They’ll what is known as grill him,’ said Etho. ‘And you know, Rufie’s such a very thin little slice of bacon, almost transparent, no substance to him; he’ll grill easy.’ She was silent. He said, still standing there, away from her:

‘So, Sari—we can’t let this go on.’

Her hands gripped the edge of the heavy curtains framing the tall window. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Darling—it has to be said at last. You’ve often said that I know you, I understand you. That’s true. Solon turned me over to know you and understand you, you were precious to him in those days, he cared very much about you and for many reasons. So—it was my business to know you and understand you. To find out.’

Doom entered her panicking heart. ‘To find out-? About
me
?’

‘Your childhood was terrible, Sari; I’ve known all that. The wicked aunt—dragging you from one clinic to another all over Europe in search of her health... But it was
your
health, wasn’t it?—your mental health, your emotional health. And then, suddenly, she died, too suddenly, I suppose, to have made arrangements for your guardianship, only leaving your money carefully tied up, but nothing personal for you, yourself. She’d come down to the convent in Tarquinia to die, and you were still there, being looked after by the nuns. But you ran away and Solon found you and we arranged with them to offer you film work. They didn’t like it but they had no control over you, all they could do was to try to explain to us as much as they dared—after all, these were your own personal problems—and promise you a refuge if ever you needed them...’

She stammered: ‘You’ve known all this?’

‘As much as they believed they should tell me, Sari. For your own sake. And of course things did begin to get too much for you, you went back to them, they got you to come to their clinic, psychiatrically they were treating you. But then Aldo ran away and the whole thing blew up in your face. It brought on a serious breakdown, they kept you with them...’

Her back was to the light, he could not see how her face for a moment softened. ‘They are angels,’ she said. ‘They make you believe in God.’

‘But you had to come away at last, you had to begin to live again. Solon valued you still, you might still have worked again—it was Aldo and all that over-excitement with Aldo that tipped the scales. And Solon valued you, as I say, he wanted me to watch you. I talked to the nuns, they thought I’d be understanding and take care of you. I encouraged you to come back to England where I could keep an eye on you—and I watched you. Secretly—you were like a forest creature that would scamper off out of sight if you were startled; you wouldn’t stand being watched and controlled, they explained that to me. And I had no control over you, nobody had. I had to stand by helpless and witness the decline in you, Sari, the terrible decline. I encouraged the nonsense about Luigi, knowing that you went back each time to Tarquinia, saw your psychiatrist, got a new handhold from the love and understanding—the overt, acknowledged understanding—of the nuns who had cared for you. But by then...’