Rose in Darkness (9 page)

‘Nothing short of murder would have stopped her,’ said Rufie, removing the kaftan and chucking it back on to the sewing machine. ‘But unfortunately murder did.’

Sari sat up straight and reached for the inevitable cigarette. ‘Oh, it’s dreadful to be laughing!’ The horror of it—the pity of it! It was all so unbelievable; a sort of hideous dream. ‘But, the thing is—what happens next?’

Rufie was sufficiently elevated in spirit to be able to believe, for the moment at any rate, in the exchange of cars. ‘The thing is just to go out and find this man.’

‘A man with a Cadmus Halcyon 3000—and perhaps with a rose,’ said Sari. The vaguest possible niggle came into her mind, a feather towards the collage in which all unwittingly she played so great a part. She suggested: ‘This rose that you think you threw away—’

‘Start by going out and looking for that?’ cried Rufie, enchanted at so promising an adventure. He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her up off the sofa. ‘Have we got a flash somewhere?’

‘Darling—one’s language!’

‘A torch, a torch, you fool!’ said Rufie, rootling about in kitchen drawers. ‘Yes, here’s one. Come on—out!’

They crept out like two giggling schoolchildren, Rufie stepping tremendously high with pointed toe, in the traditional mime of furtivity—to be brought abruptly to a halt as a large shape approached through the darkening evening and a voice enquired civilly: ‘Can I do anything for you, Madam?’

‘Oh, Sari, lucky you!’ said Rufie in a put-on pansy voice.

‘Shut up, Rufie! We were just looking for something,’ she explained and added, somewhat naively since the gentleman was dressed from head to foot in navy blue serge and wearing a pointed helmet, ‘Who would
you
be?’

‘Just keeping a routine eye on things, Madam—Miss,’ he corrected, in recognition of the young voice coming to him out of the dark. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Well—er—this gentleman dropped something here somewhere, and we came out to look for it.’

‘Oh, yes, Miss? Some time today, would that have been?’

‘Well, yes, it was. We’re—well, we’re the ones that found—well, you know. And we ran back to the flats and on the way he must have dropped his—’

‘My car keys,’ said Rufie, inspired.

‘You went out to look at Miss Morne’s car—carrying
your
car keys, sir?’

‘I happened to be on my way to the delicatessent,’ said Rufie loftily. ‘My car was parked next to hers and that’s how we... A hotted-up mini, The Tootler it’s called,’ he added, going off into peals of giggles.

‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ said Sari. ‘He’s been having a few drinks, that’s all.’

‘I understand. In fact I think I can smell on the gentleman’s breath what he’s been having. So these keys, Miss—?’

They went solemnly from flower-bed to flower-bed, considerably assisted by the light from the policeman’s highly superior electric torch, but there was nothing to be found—nothing but one poor, deep red rose, drooping on its cut stem—a curious intruder, perhaps, in a bed of pale pink Ophelias. But by a coincidence, just as Sari edged out a surreptitious hand to pick it up, Rufie with a glad cry grabbed out with his own hand and goodness!—came up with his car keys after all, complete with a little scrabble of still damp earth. The officer, mystified, was obliged to give them the benefit of the doubt and be content with making a somewhat cynical report to the station and resuming his vigil. Rufie dusted down the keys, returning them to his pocket, and they went back to the flat with their spoils.

Not crushed, not torn in any way, just very squashy and droopy after its long day—never mind how long a night: a deep red rose, dying, on a stem about two inches long.

Detective Chief Superintendent Charlesworth sat at his desk, an orderly scatter of papers spread before him—reports, timetables, maps, forms, lists of names and addresses and a growing crumple of doodles. ‘Come in, Ginger. Just before we crawl off to bed—I want to try to get this thing clear, I want another mind to talk it over with...’

You want another mind to talk it over
at,
thought Sergeant Ellis, and see what it sounds like when you say it all out loud. ‘Some man or other must present a wall,’ he submitted, by no means out loud but just so articulately that Charlesworth could hear him. He sent old Charles mad when he dropped little dabs of quotation.

‘What? What?’ said Charlesworth irritably. But he looked up into the rather pale round face. ‘Sit down. You look flaked out.’

‘And well I might,’ said Ginger, ‘considering the company I’ve been keeping.’ He had been trailing round for hours, checking alibis. He sat down, however, thankfully. The chair was rather too high for his short legs so that he must press his toes to the floor to keep himself steady, and the linoleum was highly polished and they kept skidding away from under him. He longed, resentfully, for home and a nice hot snack and bed.

‘Yes, well, first to clear things up—you saw the old woman?’

Vi Feather’s mum—a grudging old party, commonly filled with self-pity, to which had now been added an obscurely focused resentment. And who could blame her, poor old bitch? But it had all been wearing; wearing and tedious. Vi’s remoter past, Vi’s last months and weeks and days—Vi’s friends, Vi’s enemies. (‘Not that she’d an enemy in the world, Sergeant, a lovely girl she was, a lovely girl; except you might say that Lily Hopkins at the cinema, jealous she was because Vi got the cleaning there, but that was months ago, well, years ago now; and that conductress on the Intertown, she picked a quarrel with Vi because Vi lost her season ticket; mind, Vi had a bit of a temper when she got flared up...’) And Vi’s finances, Vi’s hopes and ambitions—though these, surely must have been on their last poor, scraggy legs?—Vi’s routine, any breaks in Vi’s routine... ‘To change one’s habits’, said Ginger thoughtfully to Charlesworth, though this time without intention to annoy, ‘has a smell of death.’

‘For heaven’s sake—what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘From the Portuguese, sir, I think; or Spanish.’

‘Never mind the Portuguese—’

‘It was her habit to come back by the Intertown bus. She had a season ticket. And last night she broke the habit.’

‘Oh,’ said Charlesworth, deflated. ‘And she duly died?’

‘Otherwise, sir—nothing. Now and again, she’d bring back a flower, keep it in a little vase, “rather special”. Lately, it’s mostly been a rose, a very dark red rose. Josephine Bruce is the darkest—’

‘All right, we don’t need the horticultural features.’

‘Nossir.’ A bed could be a horticultural feature, thought Ginger bitterly to himself, and I wish I was at home in mine. But he continued doggedly. ‘Doesn’t recall the name Sandra Burnsey, never saw her on the telly because she and Vi never had no telly and what did I think they were, the Aga Khan? Mind you,’ said Ginger, ‘she wasn’t all that unreminiscent of the old one, if you remember him?’

‘I’ve seen pictures of a stout, dark-avised elderly gent in tails and a topper, at the Ascot races.’

‘Well, she had no tails and no topper,’ said Ginger. ‘I wouldn’t know about Ascot.’

Since Sari’s single idea was that Vi Feather had been murdered in mistake for herself, it had seemed necessary to investigate the movements of her immediate circle. ‘Burnsey says she was at home all evening,’ said Charlesworth consulting a list, ‘swotting up a part for a television play—’

‘Through the Fields in Gloves,’ said Ginger, whipping up his flagging spirits into an eager-beaver attitude, bent a little forward, paws folded, knuckles together at his breast. ‘Frances Cornford.’

‘What are you yatting about now?’

‘The poem, sir. “O fat white woman whom nobody loves, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves Missing so much and so much?” About a wife out in Rhodesia who moves around among the natives and never speaks a word to them so that she never gets to know them. So when the time comes—’

‘OK, spare me the plot. Burnsey’s alibi is that she was at home swotting up her lines.’

‘Well, but that’s just it, sir, isn’t it?’ said Ginger, sweetly. ‘The woman in the film never speaks a word. So no lines.’

‘Oh. Well. I suppose they can just read the play and get to know what it’s about and so forth. At any rate—no witnesses. But also, no apparent connection with the crime either.’

‘Except that she knew both Morne and the departed Feather in the old days at the studio. And so did that Rupert Soames and so did Ethelbert Wendover—’

‘What names these people contrive to get for themselves! But anyway, those two cancel each other out, alibi-wise.’

‘M’mmmm,’ said Ginger.

‘An element of m’mm, I agree. The widow Winter spent the evening at a friend’s flat, complete with friend—’

‘M’mmmm?’ said Ginger on a different note.

‘No m’mm of that sort; a respectable clergyman who apparently duly checks. The Indian boy, Charley Something—?’

‘Flogging up his studies in the medical library. The attendants won’t account for him, they say three-quarters of the students there were coloured, which to them means indistinguishable from one another.’

‘They do put their hearts into it, these black chaps, don’t they?’ said Charlesworth. ‘You’ve got to respect them.’

‘Yessir,’ said the sergeant, who respected them anyway.

‘The Italian—?’

Pony had been spending the evening in a club with two little romps all fluttering eyelashes and tangled curls, so jangling with chains and bracelets that you could hardly hear what they said. ‘Not that it would matter,’ said Ginger gloomily, ‘you couldn’t believe a word either way.’

‘Yes, well...’ Charlesworth brooded over his enchantress and her circle of chums. ‘They’re a queer lot.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Ginger, going a bit pink. Bobsie and Ronsie had pronounced his red hair to be ad
or
able. ‘All the same, it’s a tight alibi. Everyone in the place swears he was there; there was some sort of stage appearance he was taking part in.’

Charlesworth passed a thumbnail down a list, much marked with ticks and crosses. ‘So that’s about the lot. There must be others in her circle, but they seem to be more outlying. So we come to the sixty million dollar one. Miss Sari Morne—did she or did she not change cars with a stranger, across the fallen tree?’ Charlesworth pretended not to notice his sergeant’s not very surreptitious glance at his watch. ‘Play it first that she didn’t—?’

The tree falls but she has already gone by. With or without the burden of Vi Feather’s body, she drives home, parks her car, and that’s that.

‘The time element shows that she couldn’t have spent much extra time on the way: not after leaving the pub. Not gone out of her way to get the woman, for example.’

‘We have only her flatmate’s word for the time she got home, though.’

Nothing had been discovered as to Vi’s movements after the cinema closed; on such a night, everyone was heads down, umbrellas up, battling against wind and rain. Only one thing was certain, she had not taken her usual Intertown bus. ‘Sari Morne knew the woman. Might she have given her a lift?’

‘We know she wasn’t in the car, sir, when Miss Morne left the pub. The man looked into the car.’

‘In the boot? Already dead and in the boot of the car?’

‘What, killed between the cinema and the pub?’ Ginger gave one of his vaguely Gallic shrugs. ‘There’s no evidence of anything having been in the boot, sir, ever; the car’s brand new. And anyway, why not have
left
her in the boot?—not hauled her out some time or other, and put her in the back of the car.’ On the other hand, the consensus of opinion was that the body had been placed there after death.

‘For that matter, why not just have tipped her out on the side of the road?’

‘The whole thing is quite, quite
mad,’
said Ginger. His hands flapped apart. Beyond bothering about, they seemed to say; let’s get back to our homes and have slices of dripping toast and hot milk and skip the whole bloody business...

‘Between the cinema and her flat,’ said Charlesworth, remorselessly, ‘she strangles the woman, drives her home, leaves the body in the back of her car and goes off to bed. The fall of the tree is fortuitous. But how did she even know about it? You’re too right, the entire thing’s sheer madness.’

‘If the tree fell just after she’d passed, she’d know. And that would give her the idea—to claim to have changed cars with some unknown man, and he must have returned hers with the body in it.’

‘How could he? By the time that tree would have fallen.’

‘Side roads?’ said Ginger with one of his neat gestures towards the plan laid out on the desk. ‘Some other way round? There’d be no hurry then.’

‘Yeah, well... The same thing would apply,’ said Charlesworth thoughtfully, ‘if her story was true after all. If she really had swapped cars. She could have gone out again after her chum was asleep and driven back to Wren’s Hill—she doesn’t admit the man gave her his address, just a ‘phone number; but he may have done—and left his car and collected her own.’

‘Only—why? If she knew about the body, it was all to her advantage to have it found in the stranger’s car—’

‘And if she didn’t, why go to the trouble of swapping back?’

‘Here we go round the mulberry bush,’ said Ginger; a path, he thought, which by no means leads me home to bed.

But Charlesworth was not risking a disquisition upon the life cycle of the silk worm. ‘The whole damn thing’s a great rigmarole of nonsense, look at it whichever way you will. I just wanted to hear someone else say so.’ He got up from his chair, with an enormous yawn. ‘Go on, hop it! You look absolutely all in!’ (
Ap
-solutely, his goddess would have said, giving it a faintly mocking, indulgent air. An extraordinary crowd; you simply couldn’t keep up with them.)

Ginger lowered himself, with relief, from his aching toes to the soles of his feet and stood, the earnest neophyte, still all brave and willing but dismissed by edict of compassionate God; inwardly, however, addressing Charlesworth with hideous imprecations for keeping a chap up, playing bloody silly games, when he was already half dead with weariness and ennui. ‘It’s been good of you to stay with it,’ said Charlesworth kindly, taken in by the look. ‘Great help talking it over. Cleared the air. Thank you.’