Tour de Force (29 page)

Fernando and Miss Trapp arrived, running stumblingly towards them across the sand. ‘He's gone,' said Cecil. ‘He's miles out.' He swung round to the quiet figure on the rock. ‘But the Inspector?'

Like children afraid to approach some expected horror, they crept, massed together for proof against shock, up to the rock and, massed together, stood silently regarding the hunched-up form. Miss Trapp said, on a note of high terror: ‘Is he dead?'

‘No,' said Inspector Cockrill. ‘I'm not dead.'

Louvaine thrust through them, throwing herself half kneeling on the sand at his feet. ‘Inspector, do something – he's gone, he's swum out to sea, he's never coming back. Can't you
do
something?'

‘No,' said Cockie, very quietly. ‘What is there to do?'

Fernando too threw himself on his knees beside the low rock. ‘Has he hurt you?'

‘No,' said Cockie again. ‘Why should you think he had?'

‘But we saw him. He came round behind you. He stabbed down at you, we were up on the veranda, we saw him.'

‘A demonstration,' said Cockrill.

‘A demonstration?'

‘The wound in Miss Lane's breast,' said Cockie, ‘went from right to left, in a downwards direction. It must therefore have been made by someone right-handed, standing in front of her. Or so one assumed. Mr Rodd kindly demonstrated to me how it could have been done by a left-handed man.'

Louvaine had subsided almost full-length on the sand, dreadfully sobbing, dreadfully gasping for her agonized, labouring breath. She half raised herself now on one elbow, gazing up at him imploringly. ‘Don't sit here talking. Can't you
do
something?'

‘What do you want me to do?' said Cockie.

‘Get a boat, get something, get someone who can swim – go out and rescue him.' The rest of the hotel guests were coming now, streaming down the steps, with one or two of the waiters, white-coated, in their midst. She dragged herself to her feet. ‘Ask them. Perhaps someone can swim. They'll know where there's a boat.' She started running towards them.

‘Yes,' said Cockie at once and more briskly. ‘A good idea. We'll ask them. Fernando – you go: tell them what's happened, tell them you think he's not going to try to get back. Ask the waiters if they can get hold of a boat.' As Fernando, still rather dazed, lumbered up to his feet, he added: ‘Put on an air of hurry, look as if this is what we've all been trying to arrange.' To Louvaine, turning back as Fernando rushed past her towards the crowd, he said: ‘They can hurry as much as they like now. It's too late.'

And indeed the dark head was to be seen no more. Standing craning their eyes into the rapidly falling dusk, they did think that they saw for a moment a hand thrown up, and Louvaine screamed and hid her eyes. ‘It's for the best,' said Cockrill, doggedly. ‘It's what he wanted, it's for the best.'

She tore herself away from them and fled back down to the sea. ‘Leo! Leo!' Her despairing cry rent through the hush-shush-shush of the waves, she stumbled in through them again, flinging out helpless arms to where, for a moment, they had thought that they glimpsed that helpless arm. ‘Leo! Leo!' But there was no answer; only the slap and sigh of the waves on the cooling sand. She stumbled back again and, flinging herself down on the damp sand at the water's edge, abandoned herself to grief.

Fernando returned with the crowd loping at his heels. ‘All get back to the hotel,' said Cockie fiercely to them. ‘Back to the hotel!' He climbed up on the rock and addressed them and, for a moment, was Mr Cockrill on holiday no longer, but Detective Inspector Cockrill, the Terror of Kent, whose voice was the voice of accustomed authority backed by the law of the land. ‘You must leave the beach at once. If you want to know what has happened – well, a man has swum out to sea, intending to drown himself. The – inference – is that he was responsible for the murder committed here the other day. There is no use now in anyone swimming out after him, he's got too far and he had every intention of letting himself drown. None of us could swim, so we had to let him go. We've been wondering where we could get hold of a boat.' Fernando said something. ‘Oh. I understand that the manager, the Dirrytory, whatever he calls himself, has gone off to ring the police; and there's a boat in the next bay, he's getting that sent out. A pity,' said Detective Inspector Cockrill coolly, ‘that we didn't know about it before. Now – there's nothing else to be seen here; you will help everyone by simply going back to the terrace and getting on with your drinks.' He added, with a glance at the moaning, shuddering figure prostrate on the sand, ‘Including this poor girl.'

Their chivalry thus appealed to, and seeing, furthermore, that there was indeed nothing at all on the beach worth staring at, they drifted, gabbling with excitement, back to the hotel. Cockrill went and crouched on the sand close to Louvaine, and the others, helpless and compassionate, followed him. He did not touch her but he began quietly to talk and he talked only to her. After a little while, she raised her head. She said: ‘He did this for me.'

‘He did it because he was afraid to face the San Juan gaol,' said Cockie. ‘And I would have done the same.'

‘He did it for me.' She said imploringly, tears pouring down her face: ‘Don't take that, at least, away from me. He did it for me.' And she dragged herself up once more and stumbled forward into the waves again, screaming his name, Leo, Leo, Leo, come back come back …

No answering cry from the sea. She turned back to them, frantic with helplessness. ‘Where's the boat, why don't they get the boat? Is there nothing we can do?'

‘Nothing,' said Cockrill. ‘They'll bring the boat, but anyway, it'll be too late. That's how he wants it to be.' And he took her by the arm and forced her back up the beach to the drier sand and she collapsed once again and lay there sobbing; but she struggled no more. He said again, solemnly: ‘You must make up your mind to it. Leo Rodd was a murderer, he has done this because he has been found out; and that's all there is to it.'

Miss Trapp stood between Fernando and Mr Cecil, three huddled figures looking down with anxious eyes at the shuddering figure at their feet, and away to the unbroken monotony of the wind-ruffled sea. She said: ‘May we not hope at least that he did it to save Mrs Rodd?'

‘No,' said Inspector Cockrill. He shrugged. ‘You can say, if you like, that he has done it because Mrs Rodd would no longer save
him
.'

‘But Mrs Rodd …'

‘Mrs Rodd is a very gallant woman,' said Inspector Cockrill, ‘and very loyal too. And she is one of those people who give their hearts away just once in a lifetime; and never get them back however unworthy the beloved turns out to be and however clearly they see that he is unworthy. And protecting her husband had become second nature to her. But there must be a limit, even for the Mrs Rodds of this world, there must be a breaking point; and I thought that a night in the San Juan prison might bring her to it – facing a future of utter hopelessness, locked up all alone in a prison cell with no light but a star outside the little barred window and no sound except the sea against the rocks hundreds of feet below, and no movement but the trickle of moisture down the slimy walls; and no prospect of ever leaving it except to be not very expertly hanged in a public square. And all for a man like Leo Rodd.'

A man like Leo Rodd. A man used from boyhood to wealth and comfort earned by his own great gifts, a man accustomed to flattery and adulation, a man who had known nothing but the good life. Suddenly bereft of it all, forced to live upon the bounty of one woman, the woman he had married and whom he no longer loved – having for so long frittered away his heart upon other women. ‘He no longer had a heart to love with at all.'

‘He loved
me
,' said Louvaine.

‘Oh, yes,' said Cockrill. ‘While he thought you were rich.'

She shook her head drearily. ‘No, no, you're wrong, you've got it all wrong, it's utterly untrue. He loved me, he'd have loved me if I hadn't had a penny, he was going to leave a rich wife and run away with me.…'

‘Until he found out,' said Cockrill steadily, ‘that you were not rich after all.'

There was a commotion on the rough little beach the other side of the diving rock, a small boat nosed its way off the dry sand and was hauled by two bare-chested fishermen into the sea. Mr Fernando rushed down to the water's edge and hallooed to them, pointing out to where that terrible upflung white arm had been. They leaned on their oars, pointing, gesticulating, arguing, and at last rowed off obliquely across the bay. Louvaine dragged herself up to her knees to watch them, clasping her thin hands in an agony of subconscious prayer. Miss Trapp said to Cockrill: ‘All this is so dreadful for her. Don't you think …?' She could not approve Miss Barker's passion for a married man – but you could see that her heart was smitten at the sight of that bleak despair. ‘Don't you think she should be taken up to the hotel?'

‘I shall stay here,' said Louvaine.

‘But if anything … If they should … It will be very painful for her,' said Miss Trapp to Cockrill.

‘You can tie me with ropes and cart me away,' said Louvaine, ‘but I'll drag myself back. I'm staying here.'

‘Then, Inspector, do you not think that this distressing story …?'

‘This distressing story must be told some time,' said Inspector Cockrill. ‘It will be better for her if she can believe the truth.'

‘There's only one truth,' said Louvaine. ‘He loved me. Even – even after the murder, he still loved me, he still wanted to marry me.' She knelt, hands clasped on her breast, her gaze riveted upon the little boat toiling out across the bay. The brief twilight was over, it was growing dark, the men had lighted their lantern and it swung at the boat's prow, a twinkling beacon, inappropriately gay, throwing its pale gold disc of light down upon the heaving waters. She prayed: ‘Perhaps he's still safe, perhaps they can find him in time.'

‘He's dead,' said Cockrill. ‘He swam out there intending to die. He told me what he'd done and he showed me how he'd done it and then he told me what he meant to do: and in that very moment, it was too late to do anything to stop him. He was gone.' He shrugged. ‘No use flapping about like a fool at the water's edge, and I can't swim. He'd gone. I, for one, hope for his sake that when the boat finds him, he's dead.'

The breeze blew the red hair, dark now in the evening dark, back and away from the sorrowful face, wrapped the soft dress close about the lovely body that Leo had held in his arms. She said, ‘None of it's true. None of it's true.'

‘It's true,' said Cockie.

Fernando and Mr Cecil and Miss Trapp stood wretchedly by them, their anxious eyes on the boat. Miss Trapp said, miserably: ‘But why, Inspector, should Mr Rodd kill poor Miss Lane?'

‘Poor Miss Lane was a blackmailer,' said Cockie, sourly. ‘She blackmailed other people for the power it gave her over them, for the pleasure of seeing them wriggle on the hook. She blackmailed Mr Rodd for something different – she blackmailed him for love.'

Louvaine shrugged her shoulders with a weary, derisive movement, looking away out to sea where the little boat crept across the waters, her attention only half with him. Miss Trapp said, ‘For love?'

‘Or if not exactly that, to prevent his love from being given somewhere else. She told him that if he would not give up Louvaine, she would tell his wife that he had been planning to leave her.

‘Mrs Rodd is a very patient woman,' said Cockie, ‘and loyal. She had put up with innumerable flirtations because she believed that they gave her husband some comfort in his grief and frustration at the loss of his arm. She knew that he needed her, she knew that he always came back to her, she knew that even while they were going on, he himself never believed these affairs to be more than affairs. Mrs Rodd thought the thing with Louvaine was just an affair.'

‘And Miss Lane …?'

‘Miss Lane knew that it was not just an affair. That night down here on the beach,' said Cockie to Cecil, ‘when you and Miss Barker walked here talking, she told you all about their plans to run away together. I know, because I overheard you. And somebody else overheard you. Miss Barker said suddenly, “Here he comes!” but it was several minutes before Mr Rodd came. Somebody else had been moving down there, listening to the conversation – and that somebody else was Miss Lane.

‘The next afternoon, the afternoon of the murder, Mr Rodd lay on the beach and pretended to sleep. I said to-day that Mrs Rodd could have passed along under the terrace and I need not have seen her. The same applied to him. Not troubling, perhaps, a very great deal as to whether or not he was seen, Mr Rodd passed along under the terrace and up the little path in the corner of the diving rock and up the jasmine tunnel to the hotel. He was looking for Miss Barker. Miss Barker was with me on the terrace, but he didn't know that. You couldn't see the terrace from the sun-shed where he lay.

‘He'd missed seeing you before the bathe, Miss Barker – you told me you'd had a vague “date” but Mrs Rodd went with him and then your bathing dress tore and, one way and another, you weren't able to meet. So he went up to your room – I'm telling you now what
he
told
me
. You were not there. Your red shawl was over the back of the chair and he picked it up and held it against his cheek for a moment because it smelt of your perfume and reminded him of you. He was standing there with it in his hands, when Miss Lane came into the room.

‘She had heard a movement there, I suppose, and she thought it was you – come up to do some work, perhaps, in the quiet hour before drinks on the terrace. But it wasn't you; it was Leo Rodd, standing there in your room with your shawl held against his cheek. She couldn't bear it, she started to rail at him, she said that if
she
couldn't have him, nobody else should and that she would tell his wife and put an end to it all. She rushed into her room, and slammed the door. He followed her there, arguing with her, trying to persuade her to keep her mouth shut. His wife had to be told some time; but not this way.'