The Cherry Blossom Corpse (18 page)

“It's an idea,” I said. Seeing he had run down, I stood up, and he followed suit. “Well, it's been most interesting. All that about Lorelei conforms pleasantly to type. I think I'd be upset if I learned that she contributed to Spastics, or Dumb Animals, or even Cancer Research.”

We went towards the foyer, through a maze of low, dimly-lighted, brown-carpeted corridors. Dulac seemed to be relapsing into his habitual obsession.

“Now what do I do? Follow up the chick I got half way with? Or try for something better? There's plenty here I could well think of going for a second round with. I suppose your Mary Sweeny wouldn't be around, would she?”

I was so surprised, because I had categorized the sort of women he was likely to go with, and certainly wouldn't have put Mary Sweeny in any of the categories, that I was for a moment speechless, and by the time I had thought of a question he was starting up the stairs with a wave of the hand. And I was prevented from going after him by a voice at my left hand, saying:

“Mr. Trethowan? Do you think we could talk?”

I
TURNED
. The speaker was a youngish woman, slim but wiry, almost without make-up, her hair clean but tangled. She had clearly been crying, but some time ago, and her expression suggested that she was now determined to face up to things bravely. Surely this must have been the female presence that I had been conscious of when I had been at the Scandilux Hotel earlier? But who was she? Her clothes told me nothing: they were about as nondescript and lacking in chic as it was possible to be—slacks, top, cardigan, shoes, all in a merely haphazard job-lot of colours: fawns, greys and muddy greens. But that, of course, marked her off from a great number of the delegates at the conference . . . Wait . . . Surely I
had
seen her before . . . And then there was that slight
twang to the voice that even the few words she had spoken had revealed . . . Got it!

“Of course,” I said. “You're the Australian publisher.”

She gave me a lop-sided smile, that in other circumstances might have made her nondescript face almost pretty.

“That's a somewhat grand way of putting it. It was Amanda's way of putting it. Actually I'm on the staff of the Australian end of the Tamworth publishing group. I have general charge of the romance section. If anything, I'm Amanda's Australian editor, though of course I don't have to do much beyond suggesting words or phrases that have another meaning to an Australian reader, or situations or descriptions that an Australian reader might find offensive. There are more of those than you might think.”

“I'm sure there are. Right. Well, it looks as if the sun is shining outside. Shall we go for a walk along the docks?”

The sun was indeed still shining, spreading liquid gold way out to sea. At the end of the promontory, the boat for England was in again, and we headed in its direction, threading our way past little boats and big, over ropes and round casks of fish, smelling the smells of a busy port.

“Right,” I said. “I gather you know me, but as far as I'm concerned we need to be properly acquainted. You know—name, age, place of birth, all that kind of thing.”

The formality seemed to perk her up.

“Name: Robyn Harben. Age: twenty-four years. Place of birth: Busselton in Western Australia. Occupation: tyro publisher. As you might have guessed, my job sounds more important than it actually is. I'm still very much learning the trade. Not that there
is
much of a publishing trade in Australia—though there's more than there was twenty years ago.”

“You plan to branch out into British publishing?”

“I
did.
I hoped so—at least for a time. I wanted to get the experience of a really big operation, just for a while. Now, I don't know . . .”

“You've been wanting to talk to me all day, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“Because I'm investigating the death of Amanda?”

“Yes. And especially since I heard that the Norwegian police had been going round the various conference delegates, talking to everyone whose name was Robert.”

Ah! I thought. Of course, I should have twigged it half a minute earlier. “Because you in fact are Robbie,” I said.

“Yes,” she said sadly. “I'm Robbie.”

I wanted to let her have a minute or two's silence, so I turned away from the docks and we crossed the road towards the Rosenkrantz Tower and Håkonshallen, guarding the peninsula and dominating it. When we were safely within this mediæval enclave, I said:

“Perhaps you'd better tell me how you got to know Amanda.”

“Of course,” she said, in her low voice as we strolled along through the tourists. “It's easily told. Though by the way, I always called her Maureen, or Mo. There weren't many people who did that. They all knew, and yet she was Amanda to everyone. She'd been swamped by that silly role. And of course often she had to play it while I was around. But when we were alone . . .”

She was nearly weeping again, and we walked on in silence, through the tower, and out on to the little patches of lawn around the hall.

“You asked me something?” she said, putting her hand to her forehead.

“How you got to know Amanda.”

“Yes, sorry. She came to Australia on a publicity tour. Naturally. The romance-reading audience is about the most conservative in Australia. They still prefer romances with a British background. They're the sort of reader who still refers to Britain as ‘Home.' Amanda is fantastically popular there. She did signing sessions all the way round from Western Australia to Queensland. In fact, she even had a signing stopover in Darwin on the way home, though she wrote to me later that it was like being beyond the world's end. Western Australia's my home, and I was with her from the beginning, up until Townsville.”

We sat down on the grass, and I let her think and tell me about it in her own way. There was something lost and childish about her, in spite of the fact that she had chosen a lifestyle very different from that of most women, and one Australians in particular were unlikely to look on kindly or generously.

“I was very sceptical about her at first, naturally,” she began. “I say naturally because of course she was performing all the time, playing that silly role. The Australian side of the business was not—emphatically
not—
in on the secret. But one evening, over dinner in a dreadful hotel in Albany, she told me. Something . . . I don't know . . . clicked between us, and she told me. And from then on she could be herself with me, when we were together and out of the public eye. This made a bond between us . . .”

“What was the difference between ‘Amanda' and ‘Maureen'?” I asked.

“Chalk and cheese! I'm sure that was deliberate, so that when she was Amanda she was always consciously playing, and wouldn't slip back into herself. That was the big danger. Even so, I've noticed at this conference that sometimes she said things that were just too sharp and intelligent for that Amanda persona.”

“I noticed that too.”

“That may be because I've been there: even though we knew each other so well, she did often still feel the need to impress on me that she did have a brain, whatever appearances might suggest to the contrary. Or it might have been that the impersonation was wearing very thin. Amanda was fun to do at first—she often told me that she really enjoyed it, got a kick out of the silliness, and being
convincingly
silly—but you can see that it must have been tedious and demeaning after a time.”

“You haven't told me what ‘Maureen' was like.”

“Oh—Mo was warm, witty, intelligent, and very interested in other people. That's why she could conduct such a good battle with that Sørby woman—she got her summed up very quickly, and she could attack her on her weakest points: her egotism, her delusions and generalizations about women. Mo would have made a good politician, and I mean that as a compliment. No, Mo was a marvellous person, and one hardly anyone knew about.”

“Except her . . . friends,” I hinted.

“Yes.”

“How did that come about?”

“Inevitably, I suppose you could say. You know how it is in Australia—oh, perhaps you don't. Well, if you're any kind of celebrity, every town you go to you have to give interviews: the local radio and television stations, the press, everything. And if you don't, the media are into you with sabres flashing, and that really is a charge of the heavy brigade. Then it's on to the next town, and the same round, the same questions, and so on. Amanda was a great catch and a good interviewee, but naturally she got exhausted. I changed the plan so that I drove her everywhere—from radio station to TV station and back to the hotel for the newspaper journalists and the woman from
Woman's Weekly.
That meant that at least we were alone in the car, and for that time we could be
ourselves. Soon, if we were in a decent hotel, we started eating in our bedrooms, so as to be alone. What followed just . . . came naturally from that.”

“Amanda was already a lesbian?”

Robbie Harben opened her eyes wide.

“But of course. This was only two or three years ago. She had had hetero affairs too, but predominantly she was a lesbian. There had been no one big affair, but she had a circle in Britain—just a few younger women, with whom she could be natural. Of course, they all knew about her double life—or else some just knew her as Maureen, and knew nothing of Amanda, though that was rare, since she was quite often on television.”

“So what happened when the publicity tour ended?”

“We said goodbye. That was always the arrangement.”

“And since?”

“I had three weeks in Britain last year. We went touring in Wales and Ireland. It was heaven. We were not ‘in love,' you know; just deeply fond of each other. And we were going to have some days together after the conference ended.”

“I know. And you had managed . . . time together since this conference began?”

My hesitation gave her the clue to what I was talking about, and after a moment she nodded.

“I was out once to the guest-house. Heavenly place. I went out the second evening, and Amanda met the bus. But mostly we were saving that for when we went up into the mountains after all this junketing is finished.”

“If you went out to the guest-house, she may have talked to you about the other delegates staying there.”

“She did talk about them, I don't remember whether it was then or some other time.”

“She didn't feel that any of them had a grudge against her—she wasn't
afraid?”

“Good heavens, no. Anyway, Mo was never afraid. And there was no reason why she should be—at least, none that she was aware of, otherwise she would have told me.”

“What and who did she tell you about, then?”

“That she was playing this tremendous game with Lorelei le Neve. This mock rivalry. She was enjoying that: it appealed to the actress in her. Losing gave her an even better part than winning. She said that Lorelei has a power obsession, and that if Lorelei won the game she could watch the obsession swelling her up, like a frog. She said Arthur Biggs had the same sort of obsession.”

“Did she, though?”

“Only secretly: she said he liked covert, underground power, whereas Lorelei would flaunt hers. He liked knowing things, and using them. Apparently he'd done something of that sort with the Amanda Fairchild impersonation.”

“He had—that's right.”

“She said that was the only way he knew of conducting relationships . . . What else? She said there was a nice little woman called Mary Sweeny who had written Amanda Fairchild books.”

“What?”

“Books or book, I forget which. Early ones, anyway. She had two tremendously professional ladies who do all of them now, and she'd met both of them.”

“She didn't say any more about Mary Sweeny?”

“No—just that.” She sat there twisting her handkerchief for a minute or two, and looking up at me, and then she added: “Another thing that Amanda said—forgive me—was that you had a dim little sister here, but that you were more sharp, and she kept giving herself away in front of you.”

“Chrissy's not as dim as she seems,” I protested loyally.
Then honesty compelled me to ruin the gesture by adding: “Though nearly. Anything else?”

“No . . . No, I don't think so . . .” She brushed a hand over her eyes, and together we got up and wandered out through the Rosenkrantz Tower (surely Shakespeare's Rosencrantz could never have managed to build a tower?), and out into the sun-littered streets along Bryggen. “But you will remember, won't you,” Robyn said, “that she wasn't stupid, and she wasn't pretentious or bitchy?”

“I never thought she was stupid,” I said. “Or anyway, not after the first evening. She always puzzled me.”

“She wasn't perfect. But she was clever, and funny, and very, very sharp.”

“She wasn't sharp enough not to make that assignation,” I said. “Do you know anything about that?”

“No. Had she made it when she was with me on the bus, in the afternoon?”

“I don't know. Probably the
note
came later: there was a very brief one, naming a time. But this almost certainly must have been a follow-up to something that had been suggested, or tentatively arranged earlier. I thought she might have mentioned something about it to you.”

“No . . . And yet, if it had been talked of, I think she would have told me. We talked about everything, you know, while we were together.”

We were back at the Scandilux, and we stood for a moment outside the main entrance.

“That's all,” I said. “If there's anything else I think of, I'll give you a ring.”