The Cherry Blossom Corpse (8 page)

“I say, I had no idea you were one of the Tre
tho
wan family. My friend here has just been telling me—”

It is an accusation I always have great difficulty in coping with. To remain polite in such circumstances has, over the years, required an effort that has become positively physical. I tried to make polite chat about my Uncle Lawrence and my Aunt Sybilla, and then this
frightful squirt Everard Manning came over too, and actually asked me questions about my father and his death. I felt I could with double justification, as policeman and as son, stonewall on that subject, and when he persisted I brusquely turned and began talking to Mrs. Biggs and Mary about handknitted sweaters. Anything would have been a relief. Then I talked to Patti Drewe, then I had a gay little sparring match with Maryloo which I won't go into, and we gradually made our way towards the stairs and up them, and then lingered in the open lounge by the main door. In the gathering gloom I saw Cristobel and Bernard making their way, hand in hand, down the path to the boathouse. Alone for a moment I found Maryloo at my elbow.

“Eleven-thirty, my room,” she whispered.

But, as you no doubt have anticipated, It Was Not To Be. Maryloo was just starting up the stairs, Arthur Biggs was heading for the telephone to get a taxi for his friend, the rest of us were saying our good nights, when the whole tableau was frozen by a terrible sound.

My sister Cristobel is used to finding bodies, and she knows exactly what to do. She goes off into a spectacular fit of hysterics.

A
MANDA'S BODY
, when Bernard and Cristobel found it, was face down in the fjord, one foot still on the landing-stage of the boathouse. The billowing pink dress meant that it was bobbing up and down in the water that lapped against the pillars of the boathouse. On top of the corpse had been cast a bough of cherry blossom.

By the time I saw it, it was looking rather different. I spent a minute or two trying to still Cristobel's yodelling shrieks, which were disturbing the squirrels and the waterfowl, but then I handed her over to Mary Sweeny and ran down the path to the water's edge. It was now almost completely night, but there was a lamp on the side of the boathouse, for the benefit of night fishermen, and there was a near-full moon which made parts of the
sea look like vanilla cream. Bernard had got Amanda out of the water on to the landing-stage, and was attempting to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was the most unromantic form of oscular contact, and I could see it was hopeless. So many remarkable instances of survival after drowning seem to have taken place recently, however, that I felt duty-bound to assist the operation.

“Go up to Cristobel,” I said, pushing Bernard aside. “She responds to common sense. And have someone ring the police.”

I went on with the process for three or four minutes, but there was no sign of life whatsoever. I let Amanda flop back on to the wooden slats and darted up the path again. By now Bernard and Mary had succeeded in calming Cristobel, but her cow-calls had inevitably roused the entire guest-house, even to the American family and the party of Bavarians. One of these last tried to barge past me down the path, but I shoved the palm of my hand against his chest, feeling rather heroic.

“Tod,”
I said.
“Ein Frau ermordet.”
Then, having exhausted my stock of something-like-German, I pointed to the ground. “You. Stop here. Stop them.” I gestured to the assembled guests, registering that all except Lorelei were there, even unto Felicity Maxwell, looking on from the balcony in the centre of the house, and the Finn, lolling against one of the pillars of the porch. The German seemed to understand, and be pleased to be given a position of responsibility and power. “Very well. I understand perfectly,” he said, in excellent English.

I walked down again along the slightly eerie dark path. I went carefully, but I knew that there could not be footprints. May was Bergen's only dry month as a rule, and the proprietress had told us that it had not rained
for ten days before our arrival. It seemed to worry her. Other traces of the murderer there might be, though, and I wanted nothing disturbed. For I was quite sure this was murder. How could Amanda simply have fallen in, and not been able to save herself? Anybody could simply have clutched on to the landing-stage—unless, of course, they had been forcibly prevented from doing so. I looked down at the soggy branch of cherry blossom, which after Bernard's efforts was lying beside the body. I looked around to make sure, and confirmed what I already knew: there were no cherry trees on the path down to the boathouse, or in its vicinity. The branch, therefore, must have been fetched there, placed deliberately there. My mind played around with the ambiguity of the clue.

But it was useless to speculate yet. The lamp on the corner of the boathouse cast a good light forward to the fjord and a dim sufficiency of light for a few yards behind the little wooden structure. I went into the undergrowth behind, taking the usual policeman's care. The Norwegians, I had already learned during my trip around Hardanger, are very careful with their countryside, treating it with all the finicky protectiveness of a house-proud housewife (and what right have we to sneer, on second thoughts—we, the casual chuckers-away of soft-drink cans, crisp packets, cigarette ends, beer bottles and broken toys, who treat our countryside as the garbage-tips of our tenth-rate technological civilization?). Anyway, this meant that, since most of the trade at
Kvalevåg Gjestgiveri
in the pre-summer season had been Norwegian, there was little of the usual detritus lying around. There was a plastic wallet such as travel firms enclose tickets in, there was an empty bottle, its strong smell of spirits contrasting oddly with the natural evening smells around, there was a local bus-timetable and a copy of
one of the hand-outs from the
Pamela
lecture—an incomprehensible collection of diagrams with headings like “Surface Pattern” and “Deep Structure.” It was a meagre haul. I went back again to the body.

Amanda, as I had noted earlier, had gone down to the boathouse
au naturel.
The body, as it lay on the latticed wood, soaked through with fjord water, showed signs of nothing more than the billowing pink dress with, underneath, the outlines of undergarments that I mentally characterized as “traditional.” Rather the sort of thing that I imagined ladies of easy virtue used if they were entertaining elderly tired businessmen. Now I noticed that, if the undergrowth around the landing-stage was nearly clear of rubbish, the water was not. I squatted on the edge of the stage, beside the one rowing-boat moored there, and picked out of the fjord a plastic container that may have held fuel for a motor boat, one of those horrible little plastic tubes that hold soft-drinks for children, some chocolate wrappings, and three pieces of paper. I retrieved everything, and was particularly careful about the pieces of paper. I took them into the boathouse, and laid them on the bench. One of the pieces seemed considerably less sodden than the others, and I was just wondering whether I could risk flattening it out when I heard noises from above: first the squeal of car tyres on gravel, then the sound of voices. I knew that sort of sound well. It said that the police had arrived.

Somehow it felt funny to be on the wrong end, as it were, of arriving police. I left the pieces of paper where they were, and toiled up the path again.

There were two police cars pulled up outside the front porch of the
Gjestgiveri,
and about five policemen cluttering up the lawn in a rather aimless manner. Their boss, however, seemed to be a mild-looking, fair-haired
man, of a slim, delicate build and inoffensive manner, who was talking to the proprietress of the guest-house and the Bavarian I had left as human barrier at the top of the path. As I approached, the proprietress gestured in my direction, and I saw the policeman's pale blue eyes turn and his sandy eyebrows raise themselves.

“Ah! Scotteland Eeyard!”

The Bavarian stared at me with a new interest.

“Ach! Schottland Yard!”

It was good to know that there were some British institutions apart from the monarchy and the pop groups that still commanded international respect. I shall not try to reproduce the policemen's English, however, which can get tiresome. I was told that Norwegians do a great deal of grammar and phonetics in school, and I can only say this does them remarkably little good.

“Yes. Scotland Yard,” I said, feeling like some character in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. I added firmly: “On holiday.”

“Ah . . .” The policeman looked around at the dark shapes of the assembled gawpers, illuminated eerily by the lights from the house. They had got together in a huddle now, as if to present a united front. “These are the romantic writers?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“You, in your spare time? . . .”

“No,” I said firmly. “My sister.” I drew attention to where Cristobel was sitting under a tree regarding him with a look of romantic defiance which had no basis in common sense. Bernard, beside her, seemed to be uttering reassuring words. “That is my sister and her . . . the gentleman who was with her when they found the body.”

“Ah . . . We go down?”

And so we plunged down the Stygian path, the policeman
taking one of his men with him. On the way down he introduced himself as Førstebetjent Bjørhovde and his second-in-command as Sergeant Jernsletten (I only learnt much later how to spell these names, and never learnt to pronounce them). I asked if they didn't have Christian names, and he said they were Stein and Svein. That seemed much easier, so we were forced into informality by linguistic considerations. Stein and Svein didn't seem to find Trethowan very easy either.

Stein, the inspector or førstebetjent, stopped before he got to the landing-stage, and surveyed the body laid out in the powerful light from the boathouse lamp.

“It was in the water when it was found,” I said. “With just a foot on the landing-stage.” He nodded.

“Who is she?”

“Her name is Amanda Fairchild. Well, no it's—I forget—Maureen Something-or-other. But she writes under the name, is
known
by, the name Amanda Fairchild. Romantic novels, of course.”

“Love stories for women,” agreed the inspector.

“I certainly haven't heard of many men who read them,” I said, stepping gingerly through the feminist minefield.

“Successful?”

“Very. One of the best-known in Britain, I'm told. Appears on television. Something of a personality.”

Stein pondered for a bit.

“Jealousy?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe. Certainly I imagine she earned a good deal more than most of the writers here. But why wait and do it at the conference, when it could be done much more easily back in Britain?”

“Perhaps it—what do you say?—
got
to someone, really hurt them, when they were all here together.”

“Maybe.” My tone betrayed my scepticism. “I scouted
round in the undergrowth behind the boathouse here. There wasn't much that I could see, but perhaps your men may find more. I retrieved some bits of paper from the water. Probably nothing, but I thought they might float off if I didn't get them.”

I gestured towards the boathouse, and he looked inside with his fair face impassive as usual. He nodded.

“Let them be. The laboratory chaps had better have them first.” He thought for a bit. “You say she was very successful. And very rich? Did she wear jewels? Did she carry a lot of money with her? Where is her handbag?”

“As to jewels, she wasn't wearing any that I could see when she came down here. I was in the guest-house, you see, phoning, and I saw her go through the lounge and out to the lawn. There was certainly no
obvious
jewellery on her—there could have been a ring, maybe. Come to think of it, she never wore much jewellery, which you might have expected her to do. And she wasn't carrying a handbag when she left the guest-house.”

“Did she usually carry a lot of money? There are other places to carry money, not just handbags.”

“Surely. Well, I wouldn't know. If so, she certainly didn't dispense it around very readily.”

“Dispense?”

“Shell out. Sorry—give it away, She was decidedly near . . . careful, in the matter of tipping, or paying her share. If you're thinking of robbery—”

“I was. Not very seriously, perhaps.”

“—then she certainly didn't
look
as if she had money or valuables on her. That rules out any casual thief, I would have thought. It would have to be someone who
knew
she had something on her worth stealing. Therefore, presumably, someone who
knew
her to some degree.”

Stein Bjørhovde nodded.

“And we must remember that the road from Bergen has been blocked,” he said.

“So I gather. For how long?”

“Since about a quarter to eight. A terrible accident—the sort we get when the tourist drivers start arriving. Here in Norway we are terrible drivers, but we know the roads and conditions. It's when the good drivers start coming that problems start. This one was an Austrian coach, and the road was blocked until twenty minutes ago. Of course, it's not conclusive. There may have been
fremmed folk
—what do you say?—people from outside here before the crash. What time do the gardeners go home, I wonder? Again, it could have been a local person. They sometimes come down here to the bar, I know. The road from Hardanger, too, was open . . . Still . . . it is interesting.”

“What are you thinking?”

He raised his white-sandy eyebrows.

“That it seems to be narrowing itself rather to the people at the guest-house. You are thinking this as well as I.”

I looked out on the shimmering oily-black and yellow of the water.