The Cherry Blossom Corpse (15 page)

“I imagine so. It would take longer to go to the bar and back than to go to the john.”

“But you don't
remember
that it was longer?”

“I've told you, no.”

“Or Mr. Mackay's trip to his room?”

“He took a long time. A lot longer than his damned little books deserved. But Maxwell was plumping up my cushions and passing me a drink. I don't remember
how
long.”

I gave up that line of questioning.

“Tell me, when did you first meet Amanda Fairchild?”

She registered the change of direction by putting a particularly disagreeable expression on her face and blowing smoke straight into my face.

“I first
met
(as you put it) Fairchild when she forced
herself upon me during my first dinner in this place. You all watched. You will remember.”

“I do indeed. So you had never met at previous conferences, or publishers' parties?”

“I've told you when we first met. I do not repeat information.”

I sucked in my lips and gazed at her sourly. She gazed at me sourly back. This interview was beginning to have its comic sides. I chanced my arm, opting to give rather than request information. I only hoped it was correct.

“You lived for a time in London, Mrs. Zuckerman.”

“Who told you that?”

For once the come-back was immediate.

“That doesn't matter. When was this?”

“I don't know.” She shrugged. “Some time in the 'sixties. ‘The swinging 'sixties!' Ha! London didn't swing for me.”

“What were you doing there?”

She went back to the long pause, sucking her gums.

“I was married. To an Englishman. For a time.”

“The marriage broke down?”

The smile, that I had seen before submerged in her face, for once broke out. It was the most unlovely smile I had ever seen.

“The man did. He was a wimp. Husbands always are, I suspect.”

“You've been married often?”

“Once. Just to say I'd tried it.”

“You stayed on in Britain for a while, did you?”

Pause.

“For a while.”

“What did you do for a living?”

“I had alimony payments. I . . . wrote.”

“Ah. You wrote romantic love stories?”

“I wrote many kinds of fiction. Romance among them.”

“Were you published by the Tamworth group?”

Pause.

“I don't recall that name . . . My agent long ago bought up my early titles . . . I wouldn't have had anything to do with my early publishers for years, and neither would he.”

“But you would remember the pseudonyms the books were published under, would you not? You seem to have a gift for names. Were any of your books published under the name Amanda Fairchild?”

“Emphatically not.”

“But you do use pseudonyms?”

“For different sorts of work I have different names. That's perfectly normal in this profession. But I always invent my own. I would not invent a name like Amanda Fairchild.”

“Why not?”

That disagreeable smile crossed her face again, briefly.

“It is too . . . happy-sounding. Too innocent. I don't like gilding the lily. I prefer a name with a touch of mystery . . . or danger. As with le Neve. Definitely guilty, wouldn't you say?”

“It's not a case I've gone into—not a very interesting one from a policeman's point of view. What about your career before and after your stay in Great Britain?”

A smoke-ring was blown impertinently to surround my nose.

“What
about
my career before and after my stay in Great Britain?”

“Perhaps you would care to tell me what you've done and when?”

“I would not, particularly.”

“I see. Is there any reason for your . . . reticence?”

“None. Except that I am a person who has always lived my life for myself, not for the benefit of other people.
I was here, immobile, for what I gather was the whole of the vital period. I can't see any reason why you should need the facts of my career, such as they are.”

“Put it down to idle curiosity.”

“I am not interested in other people's idle curiosity.”

“That's odd. Surely it's the basis of the fiction-reading habit. You should remember, Mrs. Zuckerman, that a policeman not only has a great deal of idle curiosity: he also has a great deal of power, when it comes to the gathering of information. I have no doubt that the major events of your life are set out in some computer data bank somewhere or other in your country or mine. I can get hold of the facts I need by contacting the FBI. What could you do about it? Do you have a host of powerful friends who would rush to intervene on your behalf?”

She stared stonily back. Then she said: “My publisher does what I tell him.”

“It would be much better for you if you told me voluntarily what I want to know.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, flicked a knob to eject the stub from the holder, and then—unusually for her—immediately put another one in and lit it. Finally, unemotionally, as if reciting facts entered upon a card, she said:

“I grew up in New York. My family were immigrants, German immigrants.
Not
Jewish . . . I went to the Juilliard School, sang a bit in opera. I joined the army in 1945. Served for nearly twenty years. I got out when I married this damned limey. His name was Poppleton—can you imagine? It was a relief to go back to my family name. But I stuck it for three years. Got tired of trying to give him some backbone. Started writing. War books, historicals, thrillers, romances. Found romance paid best. Stuck with it. Got darned sick of London. All the mess,
and the strikes. Went back to New York. Lived there ever since.”

It was like one of those entries in the one-volume edition of the
Dictionary of National Biography.
It told you everything and nothing. I took up, for convenience, her last point.

“Alone? Have you lived alone, until Miss Maxwell became your companion?”

“I have. Since I separated from my husband.”

“Have you had much contact with your fellow writers?”

“None. Practically none.”

“Nor done any of the promotional things that publishers like authors to do—lecture tours, signing sessions, television appearances, that sort of thing?”

“I once did a signing session at one of the big bookstores in New York.” She gazed viciously at me, freezing any potential laughter. “My publisher did not think that it helped sales.”

“I see . . . So you were not closely acquainted with any of the American or English writers at the conference?”

“No.”

“Not acquainted at all, in fact?”

“No.”

“Why did you decide to come to this conference?”

I dropped that one swiftly, and she took her time about answering, taking a long, vicious pull on her cigarette.

“I am an old woman. I have only a short time to live, so I'm told. I've sat alone in my flat, writing, for years on end. When I was young, in the army, I travelled . . . travelled all the time. Consumed new experiences . . . It's what I've used in my writing . . . I thought I should do it once more, now I have a companion.” A dim, mean sparkle suddenly illumined her eye. “My publisher paid for the trip.”

“I see.”

I felt like asking her if she'd been having a wow of a time up to now, but I refrained. I sat there thinking, but came up with very little that could lead to further questions.

“How often did you speak to Amanda Fairchild in the three days you were here together?” I asked her at last.

“Once.”

“The occasion you mentioned, at dinner on the first evening?”

She inclined her head.

“You've had no further indirect dealings with her?”

“None.”

“What was your opinion of her?”

“A fool.” That came out like a whiplash. If she'd wanted to she could not have stopped it, and she gave no sign that she regretted it. She went on, smiling that unpleasant smile: “You can write foolish books for foolish people without
being
a fool. She was one.”

But there, I thought, Lorelei showed that she was one of the ones who had been fooled.

 • • • 

Once out of Lorelei's sitting-room, I walked along the corridor to the little bedroom that had the direct telephone line out. Behind me I heard a door open and shut, and then another: Felicity Maxwell going straight in to Lorelei's suite. Once in the room I sat in the drab little desk chair and tried to do some hard thinking.
All
these people, and not just Lorelei, were so far from their home environments, so far from any easy checking and cross-checking of their statements. However little they told me—and Lorelei's account of herself could hardly have been more skeletal—I had either to take it on trust or go back to their home base to get it confirmed.

I didn't mistrust the Norwegian police, but I did like
working with my own people. I got on the 'phone to Inspector Joplin at the Yard, and asked him to get on to the FBI. The information I asked for was not just on Lorelei Zuckerman, but on Felicity Maxwell, Maryloo Parker and Patti Drewe. The whole American gang. Then, for the benefit of the Yard computer, I gave the names of the British gang as well. That more or less sewed it up, except for rogue elephants like Kenyans and Finns. And Norwegians. I remembered that I hadn't wised Stein and Svein up on Miss Ragnhild Sørby. Maybe I should, I thought.

B
EFORE I LEFT
that useful little room, with the telephone line that bypassed the guest-house switchboard, I rang Jan in Oppheim. I had had a message sent up to her that morning, but as she told me, that had been quite unnecessary.

“Everyone was talking about it at breakfast,” she said. “It had been on the radio news at half past seven. Apparently they have hardly any murders in Norway, apart from the occasional drunks who bash each other into oblivion, so there was a great twitter about it, and someone explained to me what they were going on about—very privately, so Daniel couldn't hear, as if it were one of the facts of life. I explained this was one of the facts of life he knows quite a bit about. The Norwegians say
they haven't been so excited about anything since the Swedish Prime Minister was assassinated. Oh dear: I
didn't
mean to be flippant about it. I didn't, funnily enough, dislike her.”

“Nor did I—at least, not most of the time.”

“I realized as soon as I heard that you would get roped in. Tell me the details.”

I gave her the barest possible account of the finding of Amanda's body. I usually did it when I was at home, so I was damned if I would be bound by any Norwegian police rules. Jan seized at once on the most picturesque detail.

“A bough of cherry blossom? But that must be terribly significant.”

“Or else supremely and deliberately irrelevant,” I countered churlishly.

“Well, yes—I can see that. Still, it does give one furiously to think, doesn't it? Leaving aside Lorelei, as the most obvious, and physically incapable anyway, who is it most likely to be? Granted the cherry blossom, I would plump for a Jealous Rival.”

“I thought you were discarding the obvious.”

“Oh, but a jealous rival does rather fit in with the whole
mise-en-scène,
doesn't it? Every romance has to have one. Even Jane Eyre has her Blanche Ingram.”

Jan knows a lot about the Brontës, though her acquaintance with most of the rest of the English classics comes from BBC television serials. Thus, she pretends to know
Bleak House,
but she knows nothing of Mrs. Jellyby.

“Which of the assembled competitors would you promote to Jealous Rival?” I asked, humouring her.

“Let me see . . . I think I'd plump for Arthur Biggs. I can imagine his innards being ge-nawed by an in-growing jealousy, can't you?”

“Indeed I can. However, there is one fatal drawback to your scenario.”

“What's that?”

“Amanda didn't write a single one of the books published under her name.”

“What?”

“She was merely a front figure, nothing more.”

“How many of the delegates knew that?”

“I don't know, though it may be necessary to find out. However, the one person who most certainly did know was, is, Arthur Biggs.”

“Hmmm. Get back to me, Perry, when I've had time to think this over. I need to chew on it.”

“Well, don't let it ge-naw at your innards. Love to Daniel.”

So that was Jan given something to do, as she wandered through the hills that were alive with the sound of music. I hoped she came up with something better than I had managed so far. It was time for me now to bring myself up to date on whatever Forensic had come up with, but first what I really needed was something to eat. I had had nothing since breakfast, and my stomach was reminding me that for the last few days I had eaten regularly and often, and that it had liked the fact. I wandered downstairs, and saw that practically the whole cast of suspects were seated around tables on the porch, over teapots and plates. The exceptions were, apart from the Zuckerman party, Cristobel and Bernard, who were probably holding hands on a rock somewhere in the grounds. I wandered to join the tea-party, and found that I was very much more welcome than I had been at breakfast. Which was just as well, because the eats consisted mainly of biscuits, and I ate most of them. They, after all, had doubtless had lunch, and anyway the biscuits were rather dreary. They sat around at their little
tables, like actors on a stage set, and watched me closely.

“I suppose it's not the slightest use asking you how things are going?” began Mary Sweeny. Many of the others looked at her with irritation. They had obviously been hoping to approach the topic with more subtlety.