Tour de Force (11 page)

There was a loud chorus of admiration. ‘Elementary, elementary,' said Leo. ‘Come on, Mr Cecil – you have a go now.'

‘There's nothing left to have a go at,' said Cecil, a little bit put about by all this fuss and adulation over somebody else. ‘They talked across the table – not for very long, because the other person didn't sit down …'

‘There was nothing for them to sit on; they just had to stand up.'

‘They could have gone and sat on the bed,' said Cecil, crossly. ‘I mean, if it had been a real discussion, a real heart-to-hearter. Anyway, I say it was a short discussion, they quarrelled, the paper knife was on the table, because after all it was a paper knife and anyway it was new, she probably just put it down there to look at and gloat over a bit like one does with anything new: and the murderer picked it up and lunged at her, hence the tadpoles, and …'

‘Here, hoy, why “hence”? Explain your deductions, as the Inspector would say.'

‘Oh, but anybody knows,' said Cecil, his good humour returning, ‘that if you flick a paint-brush or a pen, the drops fall into a little round dobble that tails off
away
from the thing that's flicked. She was standing behind the table and the blood sort of – well, squirted out and the drops on the table do taper away from her, as it were. But it only confirms that she was standing behind the little table, facing towards the balcony door, and that we know.'

‘That we deduce,' said Cockie.

Cecil thought it was all too horrid, anyway, quite sickening, and that they should
hurry
on to the bathroom. ‘You won't find the bathroom any more attractive,' said Inspector Cockrill.

‘Well, as it happens the only interesting thing there is the bath-towel,' said Cecil. ‘I mean, obviously the murderer went in there and cleaned up; he may even have had a shower, he may even have washed his clothes, though how he could walk about afterwards all damp one doesn't quite see …'

‘Unless, of course,' said Cockie, sweetly, ‘he happened to be in a bathing dress.'

‘A bathing dress?'

‘My dear Mr Cecil – the six suspects chosen by the police of San Juan are sitting round this table at this moment; and at the time that the crime was committed – isn't it a fact that all of you were wearing bathing dresses.'

‘The six …? But, Inspector … I mean, you don't really think …?'

‘I don't think anything,' said Cockie. ‘I'm talking about what the people here think, and unfortunately it's what they think that matters. And I simply say that it is perhaps a slight – confirmation – that the murderer was able to wash himself clean of bloodstains and then walk about with damp clothes without attracting notice. It does suggest a bathing dress.'

‘Of course if it was one of the other hotel people, Inspector, they could have gone to their own room and changed.'

‘Yes, but Leo,' said Helen, ‘then surely they'd have gone and washed in their own room as well? Why stay on the scene of the crime?'

‘Because the scene of the crime was the one place where it was safe enough to leave traces of blood. Isn't that true, Inspector? If the murderer had gone to his own bathroom, there would probably have been some traces, however faint, and the police would have discovered them.'

Inspector Cockrill privately thought that the Hotel Bellomare could have been transformed to a blood bath before the police of San Juan would have taken the slightest notice. He agreed, however, that the murderer, as long as he was fairly safe from interruption, was wise to remove all traces of the crime on the spot. ‘Now, Mr Cecil – you were commenting on the bath-towel, and you're quite right to do so. Very damp; and with bloodstains all down one of the long edges, lengthways, that is.'

‘M'm,' said Mr Cecil. ‘Very damp. Well, bath-towels often are very damp; and we don't know that it wasn't Miss Lane herself who used the shower, before ever the murderer came near the room. But the thing is – the blood.' He gave a distasteful shudder at the ugly word, but was really too much concentrated upon the subject before him to do more than token service to his delicate susceptibilities. ‘There was blood on it – but only down one edge. And the other thing, that sort of goes with it, is that there wasn't much blood round the knife and the edges of the kimono and it seemed to be a bit diluted So, Inspector, I should say that – yes, that the towel was sort of folded, or rolled if you like and, as it were, ringed round the hilt of the knife; so that there wouldn't be too much blood spilled about when she was moved on to the bed. When she was on the bed, the towel was removed, her hands were put back round the knife – they were only quite laxly curled round it, they weren't gripping it – and the towel was chucked out into the bathroom.' He eyed Cockie like an alert sparrow; and Cockie reflected, as he had earlier reflected about the Gerente, that it never did to underrate people. He said graciously that that was very good indeed. Mr Cecil went quite pink with gratification, thought over the problem and said that that was all.

Cockie switched off his graciousness like a lamp. ‘All?'

‘I can't think of anything else of interest.'

Nobody else could either. ‘Good heavens I' said Cockie. ‘You amaze me.' You told them everything, you put the facts before them fair and square: they discussed them all intelligently, made some superficial but quite well-reasoned deductions – and then totally ignored the most interesting; possibly the most important, certainly the most unaccountable – of the lot. He was disgusted with them. He got up abruptly from the table. ‘Well, I shall go to bed now and get some rest. I advise you all to do the same. You're going to need it.' They understand nothing, he thought, marching away from them impatiently: they don't even understand the danger they're in. Well, I'm supposed to be on holiday – let them get on with it! He stood on one leg at his bedroom door, to crush out the stump of his cigarette on the sole of blue canvas, Juanese espadrille. There arose a repellent stench of burning rope.

Chapter Six

L
EO
R
ODD
sat on the edge of the four-poster bed, tugging with his one hand at the lace of his shoe and waiting, nerves scraped raw, for his wife to offer to do it for him. ‘In one minute – in one minute now, she'll stop fiddling with her hair and turn round and pretend to notice for the first time and say, “Shall
I
have a go?” as though it were some sort of competition, something that we could do about equally well, a sort of jolly puzzle …' He wondered whether a day might ever come when Louvaine would get on his nerves like this: sweet, feckless, gay Louvaine, with her casual hand put out now and again to his assistance, without concealment, without apology; would she too one day have evolved this grating formula of delicate tact, shall-
I
-have-a-go, let-
me
-try-darling, can-you-manage-all-right-my-pet …? ‘At any rate,' he thought, ‘she'd have done something by now, not stood there fiddling with her hair for the past half hour.'

Helen glanced at his reflection in the looking-glass, standing there combing and recombing her perfectly set brown hair. ‘Whatever I say will be wrong. If I offer to do it, he'll say that for God's sake, he isn't an infant in arms. If I wait any longer he'll ask if I happen to have noticed that he's recently lost one of his hands.' But one could not stand there all the morning. She put down the comb and turned away from the table, pretending to see for the first time that he was in difficulties. ‘Shall I do it, darling?' She knelt down and steadied his foot on her knee like a girl in a shoe-shop. ‘There you are. Give me the other one.' She stood up again and covertly looked him over to see that there was nothing more he needed. ‘Well, I'll go on down now, and wait for you on the terrace …' (‘And then you can meet your girl on the balcony, quite by chance,' she thought, ‘and start your day with a word of love – as you're longing to do.') She went out on the balcony and down the wooden steps to where the tables were laid for breakfast out on the terrace. Nobody was there yet but Mr Cecil, exquisite in white linen trousers and a peach coloured shirt. ‘My dear, did you hear the departures? They've all rushed off, quacking with excitement, down to the quay. Fernando has arranged for some of the smugglers' boats to take them out for joy rides and all I can say is, I hope they're sick, unfeeling beasts.'

‘One of them will be at any rate,' said Helen, smiling.

‘Poor Grim's had a terrible night, dear, positively haggard. Do you want me to order some of this repulsive bread and jam for you? – it's all there is.'

He fished out a book of Useful Phrases in Italian, Spanish, and Juanese. ‘This language! Wouldn't you think
despacio
meant “be quick”? But no, no, on the contrary it means slow, and heaven knows, there's no need to tell them that.' He contented himself with some signs which the waiter apparently understood for he departed with the customary
despacio
. ‘He'll be hours; but anyway, it'll be horrid when it does come, so why fret?'

‘You seem rather jaundiced this morning, Mr Cecil,' said Helen. It was a relief to have someone so easy to talk to.

‘I didn't have a very good night. Mrs Rodd,' said Cecil, suddenly, ‘was Miss Lane blackmailing you too?'

She went very white, putting her hand up to her long throat, holding it there very still, staring at him. ‘Blackmail?' It was as though the idea had never dawned upon her; but dawning, did so with a vivid and terrifying significance. ‘Well, no, Mr Cecil. What do you mean?'

‘Didn't Louvaine tell you?'

‘No,' she said. ‘She didn't tell us.'

‘She may not have told you,' thought Mr Cecil. He suggested, casually: ‘She may have mentioned it to your husband.'

‘Oh, no,' said Helen, quickly. ‘He'd have told me.'

‘I wonder,' thought Mr Cecil again. But Miss Trapp had come up, clutching her bag, and sought permission to join them. ‘Oh, yes, do, Miss Trapp – all poor criminals together, and all the rest have rushed off down to the sea in ships, mean things, revelling in their freedom. Do you want me to order you bread and jam? Mrs Rodd and I have been looking it up in the little book but we can't find anything except “I would like to be shown the toilet”, a horrible suggestion so early in the morning.' He repeated his pantomime for the benefit of the waiters. ‘Except that it's called the
excusado
, which I do think is rather charming. I was asking Mrs Rodd,' he went on, prattling gaily away without a pause, ‘whether Miss Lane had been blackmailing her too?'

‘Blackmailing?' said Miss Trapp, also apparently astonished.

‘Well, she was trying it on Louli Barker and me and you, so I thought …'

‘On me?' said Miss Trapp, her fist tight up under her chin clinging to the handles of the brown bag.

‘Well, wasn't she?'

‘Certainly not,' said Miss Trapp sharply. ‘What could she have to blackmail me about?'

‘I wouldn't know,' said Cecil. He thought back to that strange conversation up on the balcony when she had looked down at the four of them, standing talking on the terrace by the rock. ‘All of them with money – their own or somebody else's …' She had added that she knew what ‘miserable fortune' Miss Trapp hoarded up ‘in a gold-monogrammed bag.' ‘Louli's right,' he thought, ‘she doesn't go pale, she goes quite grey.'

Up in his room, Leo Rodd, listening, heard the quick, light step and the little cough and came out on to the balcony. ‘Louvaine!'

‘Oh, Leo – my love!'

‘We must talk quickly, darling. You realized that I couldn't come to the beach last night? You didn't go?'

‘I strolled about for a bit, just in the hope – but I knew it was quite insane. Can we to-night?'

‘God knows that if it's possible, I will. But the whole place is humming with spying and questioning, we'll have to be careful. If the worst comes to the worst, we'll just have to wait till all this is over and we get away from here.'

‘After all, there's no hurry – we have all our lives,' she said.

He stood by the door of his room, his hand on her wrist, looking down at her. ‘Oh, Louli – I wonder if really this is right?'

She was terrified. ‘You haven't changed your mind?'

‘No, no, my heart, of course, of course I haven't changed my mind. I only wonder.… There's a devil in me, Louli, ever since this – this business of mine. It's not really me, I used not to be like this, I was on the whole quite a decent-tempered chap. But now – I'm so afraid that one day I'll be unkind to you, too, like I am to poor Helen: drive you into a shell, make you afraid of me and then be angry with you for being afraid of me.'

‘I'm never afraid of things,' said Louvaine.

‘That's what I thought. You were always so – so particularly unafraid, Louli. But you see, already it's beginning. Last night at dinner, I was annoyed because you and Cecil fooled about …'

‘Yes, darling,' she said, ‘you
were
rather cross.'

‘And you were afraid, Louli. You looked frightened. It's simply haunted me.'

‘I'm afraid of not having you,' she said. ‘Not of anything else in the world. But I'm afraid of that.'

He raised her hand and kissed her clutching fingers; and felt, with a little pang of fear and presentiment of fear, how they shook within his grasp. But Mr Fernando came out of his room and their hands dropped guiltily, they started into motion, strolling with great unconcern towards the wooden steps. Fernando looked as though he too had slept badly, but he switched on The Smile and together they all went down to the breakfast table. Mr Cecil was sitting there gaily dispensing rolls and apricot jam and the frankly rather horrid coffee which everyone would recall as so infinitely superior to anything one got in England; but his companions seemed not enormously interested in his bright chatter. Helen Rodd looked up anxiously at her husband, not sparing any glance for his lady love, Miss Trapp raised lack-lustre eyes in response to a flash of ivory and gold. ‘Goodness,' said Louvaine, pulling out a square wooden chair and hitching it close to the table with herself caged inside it, ‘you do all look glum!'