The Cherry Blossom Corpse (21 page)

“Very clearly set out,” I said. “You have missed out the Zuckerman ménage, I see.”

“They have not been much in communication with us,” said Mary Sweeny, “not since the murder. So we felt we couldn't do it reliably.”

“I see. I do sense a slight slant against the Zuckerman room on the night in question, even without an account of the ladies' movements. While the visits to the loo of those in the bar are always ‘short,' when they are not ‘very short,' those of Mr. Mackay and Mr. Leino are always of unspecified duration.”

“That's because we couldn't get independent verification,”
drawled Maryloo Parker. “That's why we had to leave the activities of your sister and her . . . Mr. Palterton vague: they thought they might have been here or there, at this or that time, but apart from the talk with you, and the chat with the boy from here, there was no independent verification.”

“No-o,” I said. “Except that Bernard vouching for Cristobel and Cristobel vouching for Bernard seems to me quite as valuable as Mrs. Biggs vouching for Mr. Biggs.”

There was a little squawk of protest, presumably from Mrs. Biggs, though possibly from Mr. Biggs. I heard Cristobel say, in her slow way: “I suppose that's true, isn't it?” I rolled the two sheets of paper into a tube, and tapped them in irritation on the back of a chair.

“You do realize, don't you, that these things that you've concocted are next to valueless?”

“They're not!” protested Maryloo. “They're very accurate, and properly witnessed.”

“They establish one thing fairly conclusively: that you, Mrs. Biggs, and you, Mrs. Drewe, could not have done it, having been in the bar the whole time. I think, you know, that I could have established that quite easily by dint of a little questioning. Otherwise—you've just got together in cosy cahoots, and said ‘yes' to whatever each other says about movements. A says, ‘I went to the loo,' and B says, ‘Oh yes, I remember,' and A says, ‘I wasn't five minutes—probably less,' and B says, ‘Oh no, I'm sure you weren't longer than five minutes.' That's how reliable it all is. Don't think you can pull the wool over my eyes. I've been in bars, I've been in loos. No one remembers how long people take. They
may
remember if they were away an especially long time—though even then their evidence won't be as reliable as a sober person's. But there's too much drinking, too much talking,
too much going on generally, for anyone to be as definite as you've made them. I really don't believe in B looking at her watch just when A goes to the loo, and remembering afterwards that she did so, and what the watch said. And looking again when A comes back. Keep that sort of thing for the story books.”

“I think you're being unduly cynical,” said Mary Sweeny. “You're not making allowances for the fact that there are lots of different
sorts
of memory—and some kinds remember these insignificant details as well.”

“And
you're being ungrateful, to boot,” said Maryloo.

“Ungrateful?” I said, mystified. “What have I got to be grateful for?”

“The fact that we missed out of our survey the most suspicious thing of all.”

“What was that?”

“The fact that between 9:25 and 9:40 your own movements are entirely unaccounted for.”

I
SPENT A TROUBLED
, restless night, and it wasn't due to uneasiness over the snide suggestion of Maryloo Parker. I knew I hadn't killed Amanda Fairchild—was confident, even, that I had not suddenly become a schizophrenic whose darker half had nipped off down to the boathouse to polish off Amanda between phoning Jan and returning to the bar. I was pretty confident, too, that (whatever some of that lot down there might think) no one in their senses would consider I had a motive for putting an end to la Fairchild.

The trouble was, I couldn't see that any of the others had much more of a motive than I had.

Other things were beginning to sort themselves out a little, to take on some sort of pattern. But motive . . .
The whole thing was beset by too many false trails, too much lying, too much concealing. These people pretended to be so straightforward and open, yet even the fact of Amanda's impersonation would not have come out if I had not wiggled it out—and that was a fact known to at least two, and I would guess probably four, of the people on my suspect list. As to the other, lesser lies and concealments, they were legion. I arose with a black, misanthropic hatred of all these people. How right I had been in the first place, when Cristobel first broached the matter, not to want to come among them!

I went down late to breakfast. This time they couldn't avoid me even if they wanted to, for I fetched a vast plate of this and that, and sat down in the midst of them to eat it. To be fair, they showed no signs of shunning me. As they ate or sipped their coffee, they threw quick, birdlike glances in my direction, and then looked back at their plates.

This time it was Wes Mackay who led the attack.

“Are you any forrarder this morning?”

I shrugged.

“Forrarder by a night's thought.”

“Is that night's thought going to get us out of this unofficial custody any the quicker?”

“I'm less worried about you getting out than about me getting out, but still—it might, it might.”

“What's the substance of your thinking?”

“That an awful lot of you are barefaced liars.”

There ought to have been a great outburst of protestations at this, but there was only a little apoplectic sound like a popping of a champagne cork from Arthur Biggs. Otherwise they did no more than suck in outraged breaths, or in some cases look down at the tablecloth. They knew my opinion of them already. And they knew they were liars before I told them.

“Since you've already acknowledged,” said Patti Drewe, “that I couldn't have done it—”

“I've done no such thing. I've acknowledged that you were in the bar for what was apparently the crucial time.”

“Well, that's enough for me. So I can ask: what lies have been told by us here?”

I could feel several people wanting to shush her, and holding back with difficulty.

“About you I have to admit I know nothing,” I said, turning to Patti. “Some of the others, too, I have no black marks against: Mr. Leino, for example, in so far as he has told me anything, seems to have told the truth. Most of you, however, have certainly either concealed something, or lied about something.”

I somewhat melodramatically jabbed my fork in the direction of Mary Sweeny, who neither jumped nor looked innocent, but continued looking at me in a stoic fashion that I thought did her credit.

“You for a start have lied about your knowledge of the Amanda Fairchild impersonation. You've known about it for years. You wrote one of the early books published under her name.”

She nodded, still not obviously discomposed.

“Yes—that's true. It was published in 1967.”

“So all you've said about Amanda and her books—we talked about them in the bus coming out here, I remember, and you waxed fairly eloquent—was lies.”

“Obviously I'd prefer some other word. Such as playing along with the fiction. Doing that was part of the agreement I made with the Tamworth group, the publishers. And I always got a lot of quiet fun from my knowledge.”

“You didn't also have a lot of quiet resentment towards the woman who had profited by your writing?”

“I did not. Why should I? Going by Amanda's nearness
with money, I would guess that she didn't profit that much. If I were inclined to indulge in resentment—which I am not—it would be the publishers I would fix on, not Amanda. But in fact the publishers and I came to an agreement, it was for me a perfectly satisfactory agreement, and I stuck to it. I felt no resentment for her, and was never tempted for a moment to give her away.”

“Not even to Marriott Dulac?” I said nastily.

“Marriott Dulac?” A slow, reminiscent smile spread over her face. “I really don't think so. We did have so much else of more interest to talk about and do. Marriott Dulac is rather a special sort of man.”

“You can say that again,” said Maryloo Parker, and she actually rubbed her hands. How shocked Ragnhild Sørby would have been!

“Yes,” I said, “I rather suspect that your account to me when we first met of Marriott Dulac's relationship to romantic woman writers was slanted if not inaccurate. You rather played up the grab on his part, and played down the throwing themselves on their part.”

“That sort of slanting has always been one of a woman's privileges,” said Maryloo coyly.

“Quite. And however hard I strain I can't see that the matter of both of you sleeping with a publisher is of relevance—even conceivable relevance—to Amanda's death. Arthur Biggs's misrepresentations, on the other hand, seem rather closer to the centre of the matter.”

“Misrepresentations?” Biggs said in an airy way, though snappiness seemed to underlie his tone. “I haven't misrepresented anything. You guessed from my book that the figure of Amanda was a fake and a fraud, and I confirmed the guess—in so far as I was able.”

“But in fact you were able to a much greater extent than you admitted, weren't you? You knew the full extent
of the publishers' little game, because in fact you have used your knowledge to blackmail yourself on to her publisher's list. That was the initial use you made of your knowledge. No doubt you used it subsequently to screw better terms out of them than your reputation as Lorinda Mason would warrant, to get more promotion and publicity than they'd otherwise be inclined to give you. You were more than cagey about that. You didn't even admit that you shared a publisher with Amanda.”

Arthur Biggs shrugged.

“It didn't seem relevant. And I may say—” he swelled a little at this, with distinct resemblances to a sandy and insignificant bullfrog—“that my books are held in very much higher esteem than you seem to think.”

“As witness the tribute to them in your
Happy Tears,
paid to you by your friend Mr. Manning. Well, I think I know how to estimate that at its true worth. And by the way, I don't believe for a moment that your wife and friend did not know the Amanda impersonation. Clearly you wouldn't tell many people, otherwise your hold over the publishers would be weakened; but those are two you would tell, presenting it as a matter of suspicion, not of certainty. You wouldn't be able to hide your cleverness in detection from them.”

Everard Manning shook his handsome, greased head vigorously, but Mrs. Briggs looked down, embarrassed, at the tablecloth.

“There are other people who have lied, and quite unnecessarily,” I went on. “One of them is Robyn Harben, Amanda's Australian editor.” I pushed my plate aside, without much regret, for all it now contained was a piece of the blandest cheese I had ever tasted in my life. “But the liar that I would like to talk to now is you, Mr. Mackay.”

He looked up jerkily, but it was clear that he had been steeling himself against this. I got up from the table, and gestured him out in advance. He went up the stairs to the lounge, his whole body expressing a disastrous draining away of confidence. When we got to the lounge he looked at me inquiringly, and I gestured up the stairs again. No cosy chats around the crocuses for us today. This was, after all, the biggest liar of the lot. We went upstairs without speaking, then along to my bedroom. I thought I'd get more out of him without the presence of Stein and Svein. I sat him in the armchair, squatted on the bed myself, and looked at him in what I hoped was an intimidating manner.

“Now we'll talk about all your lies,” I said.

“Concealments,” he conceded.

“Lies by implication. Let me make clear what I know. I know you and she have slept together since you arrived here. I know you went along to her room on the night of the murder. I know your acquaintanceship dates from way back—I would suspect from back in the 1960s—early on in them too. Am I right?”

“You're right. 1961,” he admitted, with frank admiration on his face. “Though how the hell you can know that—”

“Just tell it to me straight from the beginning. Then I might be able to tell you things that even you don't know.”

“Well, we met when she was on a British Council drama tour, playing Lady Macduff and Celia in
As You Like It.”

“That's what I guessed.”

“But how
did
you guess? Did she leave anything about me behind in her papers?”

“No. There was someone else here—it's a hell of a coincidence—someone else who saw her on that tour.”

“Maybe it's not so much of a coincidence as you think. Even in the larger African towns, tours like that are
the
cultural event of the year—of the decade. I tell you, I literally didn't see any real drama, any professional drama, for a decade after that tour. And when they come, everyone goes who has any pretensions to education. So if there's someone else here from any of the capitals they visited, it's perfectly natural that they saw her—almost inevitable.”

“And you not only saw her . . .”

“That's right. It was my last few months at school. I'd organized a school party to the matinée, and helped get together a band of prefects from the school to act as ushers for all the performances. I was head boy, you see. I'm the sort who becomes head boy and never greatly distinguishes himself thereafter. I was invited to the party after the third and last performance, and . . . well, I was lucky. She was older than me—twenty-four, she said. Close to thirty, I imagine. She'd played Celia that night, and I thought she was enchanting. I realize now that she probably wasn't a very good actress. Certainly she never had much of a career. But I was . . . dazzled. And we went back to her hotel, and she was the first white woman I ever had. She was quite . . . remote. Now I realize why, but then I thought it was marvellous. She was so . . . ethereal. I know now that she was heterosexual only on occasion, maybe as a favour, almost. But to me that remoteness was stunning.”