Tour de Force (27 page)

‘Always?' said Helen.

‘Till towards the end. It is as I say, Mrs Rodd, it's hard for rich people to know who are truly their friends. I am sure Lady Bale had no more devoted and loyal friend – or servant, if you prefer – than I: and for nearly seven years. But – somebody spoke a word perhaps, or somebody else let her down and she grew suspicious of everyone about her: I don't know. Anyway, she began to – to question my intentions, Mrs Rodd. She suggested that I was faithful only because I hoped for something from her will. “Can you tell me, Miss Trapp,” she said, “that no such thought has ever entered your head?” Mrs Rodd – how could I say that now and again I had not wondered if, with so much herself and with no one to leave it to, she would not perhaps do something to make my old age just a little easier. God knows, I did not look for anything considerable or even really believe it possible: it was just a little dream I toyed with sometimes when I was weary and depressed. But I couldn't answer her question with a downright denial: and in the end, well, she decided to “rearrange her household”. But she gave me a most generous reference, I must be grateful for that: more than I've had upon similar occasions.'

‘This wasn't the first time then, poor Miss Trapp?'

‘I have been going out as governess and companion for thirty years,' said Miss Trapp simply.

‘And so you decided to go a little bust and cheer yourself up, before you started again?'

‘It was Lady Bale who suggested it,' said Miss Trapp, eagerly. ‘You see, Mrs Rodd – how truly kind she was, left to herself. She gave me a cheque, a most handsome cheque, and said I should take a short holiday abroad, and meanwhile I might leave my things at Park Lane until I had somewhere to move them to. And she actually suggested that I might have the use of her crocodile leather suitcase as I had not much of my own. She never uses it herself now, it is so much too heavy. So you see she was really kind and considerate to the end. It was only that she was too rich to know whom she might trust.'

Her ladyship's heart, thought Helen, had evidently smitten her when it came to the parting with one so patently, so patiently true. No doubt if one could tolerate her oddities of manner, Miss Trapp would be an excellent servant. I remember now, thought Helen, the way she automatically switched to a sort of sickroom attendant manner, after Vanda Lane hurt herself diving; impersonal yet firm, insisting on her lying down and relaxing, taking aspirin or brandy, all the rest of it: the complete companion-help to a rich old woman, probably a good old hypochondriac into the bargain. She said, gently probing: ‘Then this material help to Mr Fernando, Miss Trapp …?'

‘He needed some financial assistance,' said Miss Trapp. She added, gently smiling: ‘I told you I was making over to him everything I possessed in the world. You just didn't understand that it wasn't very much.' And she added with happy simplicity that it had been just enough.

Mr Fernando, sent ahead by his lady while she engaged Mrs Rodd, caught up with the others as they trailed, gloomy and motiveless, along the tiled pathways and pebble-patterned steps that led up through courts and gardens to the tall central tower. Miss Trapp's plan for universal acceptance of suspicion, had turned out only a qualified success. Faced with half a dozen alternatives, the Gerente had said simply that he had had instructions from the palace to perfect a case against Mrs Rodd; nothing had been said about anybody else and it was as much as his life was worth at this stage to introduce conflicting suppositions. Cockrill and Leo had in vain banged down exasperated fists until the hospitable glasses jumped on his great, dirty office table; in vain had argued, reasoned, threatened, implored. The Senora Rodd had killed the Senorita Lane, said the Gerente, hands outflung, shoulders up to his shiny hat brim with the excess of his sympathy and regret, and he had orders to take the senora into custody as soon as the case was complete. At sundown that evening, the case would be complete; for sundown that evening was the hour appointed by the Grand Duke. At that hour, witnesses would be in attendance who had seen with their own eyes, the senora creep up to the balcony and creep away again with the bloodstained knife.… No, no, not with the knife, simply with blood on her dress. Very well, then, on her bathing suit, he must make a note of that, the senora had not been wearing a dress, she had had on a bathing suit; he thanked them with perfect sincerity for calling his attention to it, and made another note in his book. Meanwhile, he must positively get down to the quay, there was some difficulty with the Interpol anti-smuggling people and unless he was there to mete out justice in person, one of his own boats was likely to suffer. Sick with frustration and despair, they had crept away. It was incredible, it was intolerable, it was indefensible, it was insane: but as Cockie had said, they were at the mercy of unreason and there was nothing more they could do.

Lost in miserable argument, they found themselves at last in the highest gallery of the tower. Roofed in with a myriad mosaics of azure and gold, its high arched windows looking out over the sun-gilt gardens, it formed the very topmost tip of the spire of the great cathedral rising out of the sea, that is the island of San Juan; and here, upon benches of mosaic and marble, they sat down to rest, wearily, acrimoniously wrangling, blind in their dread and frustration to the matchless loveliness all about them. Louvaine had developed a theory that Inspector Cockrill might have, unknown to himself, dropped off to sleep and so missed Fernando's return from the raft.… ‘All the new lot of tourists are saying that you hadn't paid the bills for the last lot of tourists you took to Siena.'

‘There was a misunderstanding,' said Fernando with dignity. ‘All is now arranged.'

‘With Miss Trapp's money,' said Mr Cecil, nastily.

‘Miss Trapp and I will be married,' said Fernando, his round brown face flushing beneath the layers of sun-tan, his eyes moist with wounded pride behind the yellow circles of his sun-glasses.

‘Yes. On account of her money,' insisted Cecil.

‘Her money will all be gone by then,' said Fernando. He held his stubby hands clasped together between his knees, looking down at the ruby and diamond chips a-glitter in his fat gold rings. ‘You think that I am – adventurer. Well, perhaps so. But I tell you – Miss Trapp is not one to make bargains, if Miss Trapp gives to her friend, she gives and asks not return. Miss Trapp would give me her all, which is not very great, but enough to help me out; and accept my thanks and no more and go on her way.' The soft big brown eyes stared back into Mr Cecil's mean little grey ones. ‘I marry Miss Trapp because she is kind and true and will keep me in future from being what – and I say, perhaps you are right – you call adventurer. I marry her when she is penniless. Thanks to me that she is penniless, yes – but I offer her not only gratitude, not only some recompense. I offer my heart.' He placed his hand upon the plump bosom covering that organ with a gesture oddly moving and dignified; and spoilt it with a second gesture, addressed to Mr Cecil, not dignified at all.

Mr Cecil after last night's exhibition had been almost back to his sunny self, allowing only for the gloom cast by Helen Rodd's predicament; which, however, could not but be mitigated by the knowledge of his own limpid freedom from suspicion. Diverted by Mr Fernando's simple red herring, he applied his recurrent spiteful irritability to his dear friend Louvaine. ‘One must remark, ducky, that if as you suggest Mr Cockrill was too sleepy to have observed Fernando's goings-on, ditto applies to you. Up to the veranda in a trice, dear, not nearly so far to go as the rest of us; do the horrid deed and down again, the Inspector still snoring. I mean, it cuts both ways, doesn't it?'

‘It cuts three ways,' said Louvaine. ‘Positively minces
your
alibi, for example. Because if he was asleep, so could you have gone up.'

‘But he says he wasn't asleep,' said Mr Cecil hastily. ‘That's my point.'

‘Which I was not,' said Cockrill. ‘Things are bad enough: Stick to what Miss Barker would call “the constants”. I did not go to sleep.'

‘So
I
could not have left the terrace.…'

‘And
I
could not have left the raft.…'

‘And
I
could not have left my rubber duck for a whole hour.…'

‘Well, and Mrs Rodd couldn't have left her sun-shed,' added Louli.

‘Yes, she could,' said Inspector Cockrill. ‘That's another constant, and we must not evade the constants. She could, in fact, have passed under the terrace, and, wide awake as I was, I need not have seen her.'

‘Anyway she's out because she had no reason to kill Vanda, and she couldn't really have mistaken Vanda for me.'

‘Mr Fernando mistook you for Vanda,' said Cecil significantly. ‘He mistook you both times.'

‘What then?' said Fernando. ‘What if I did mistake her? What has this to do with the murder? The Inspector himself says, once and for all, that I cannot have got from that raft.' The swimmy brown eyes behind the yellow lenses, turned upon Cecil, heavy with sarcasm. ‘Did I have perhaps a diving suit concealed in the pocket of my trunks, so that I could walk to and fro along the ocean bed?'

Far, far below them, two doll figures strolling along a flower-bordered terrace, deep in conversation, Helen Rodd and Miss Trapp appeared in sight. But Inspector Cockrill if, leaning in the arched white window of the tower gallery, he saw them, did not observe them. A diving suit! Had Mr Fernando then had a diving suit concealed in the pocket of his bright satin trunks, that he could have “walked to and fro upon the ocean bed” …? A diving suit!

‘… and anyway, I could not have left my rubber duck for an hour, the Inspector says so himself.…'

‘You could have, for a few minutes at a time,' said Louli. ‘The Inspector says that too.'

‘Up to twenty minutes perhaps, he says. But the murder could not have been done in twenty minutes, not with all that laying out and tidying up.…'

‘Well, perhaps,' said Louli casually, ‘you did it by instalments.'

Instalments! Perhaps you did it by instalments! Cockie looked down unseeingly at the two little doll-like figures far below and his mind was a reeling kaleidoscope of thought. Mr Fernando could have come ashore ‘in a diving suit'. Mr Cecil could have committed the crime ‘by instalments'. Mr Fernando, wallowing along beneath the surface of the water with the rubber frog-feet and the rubber under-water mask that Leo Rodd was ‘always leaving on the raft'; Mr Cecil, creeping up at the far side of the diving rock to commit murder – reappearing in his rubber boat, paddling idly along the shore with slowly reddening arms, paddling back round the rock to creep up once more, twice more perhaps, and cover up the outward signs of his guilt; never out of sight for more than a few minutes at a time. And Mr Cecil had been in some way under a blackmail threat concerning his ‘work'; and Mr Fernando had so bad a conscience that twice he had been ready to believe in ghosts: despite the unmissable, unmistakable blaze of the bright red hair. Nothing surely but a bad conscience could have taken the colour from that flaming red hair.…

Two cases, two real, positive possibilities at last: no ‘cooking up' of cases to match against the case of Helen Rodd, but two genuine possibilities, however bizarre, however absurd, in this whole bizarre, absurd affair; two cases either of which must surely triumph over the feeble, the impossible case against Helen Rodd. For Helen Rodd had not figured in the blackmail book, had had no reason on earth to wish to murder Vanda Lane: and though she might well, as Louvaine had just hinted, have wished to murder Louvaine, she could not have failed to recognize that hair. Helen Rodd could not have mistaken Vanda Lane for Louvaine. Only Mr Fernando had ever for a moment been taken in, only Mr Fernando had failed to see the bright red flame of the hair.…

He looked into the round brown face, the round brown eyes swimming moistly behind round yellow sun-glasses: and far, far away at the far, far back of his mind, stirred a memory: something about rose-buds, something about the brussels-sprouts, something about a hat.…

Below them the white courts gleamed, the gardens glowed, the little town huddled pink and white and dustily brown, tumbling down to the blue of the sea; beyond, the dark patch of the pines was threaded through with the cool white lines of the Bellomare Hotel. Inspector Cockrill saw none of it; he stood staring, staring, staring sightlessly down to where two figures walked, deep in their conversation on the terrace below. Yet he must have uttered some sort of involuntary exclamation, for they came and stood beside him, looking down also, Fernando and Mr Cecil and Louvaine, leaning upon the low white parapet under the delicately pointed curve of the arch. He put out his hand, wordlessly, and took Mr Fernando's glasses from him and held them for a moment before his own eyes, and handed them back; no need to look twice – for, sure enough, one glance down through those yellowy lenses into the rose-red gardens, and the colour was gone; scarlet and crimson and damask, geranium, oleander, bougainvillea, rose, hazed into a sort of Technicolor brightness of indeterminate yellows and greens and blues. He said quietly to Mr Cecil: ‘Try the glasses, too. Do you see what I see?'

Mr Fernando had put the glasses away in his left breast pocket of his linen holiday suit. Mr Cecil, the precious red attaché case tucked under his right arm, reached out with his left over Fernando's left shoulder and down towards the pocket. The movement perhaps attracted the attention of the two women walking below; for they glanced up and Cecil, fishing out the sun-glasses, said casually: ‘These are the same as Mrs Rodd is wearing.'

‘Mrs Rodd!' said Fernando. He jerked round upon Cockrill, ‘Mrs Rodd! She was … That day …' But in jerking, he had knocked against Mr Cecil. ‘Oh, sorry, I beg your pardon, the attaché case …'