Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘I’m off.’ Jacko said. The cool air flowed in from the cupola. Warm from bed, I felt it on my face, but not at all through my thick jersey and anorak. In the dim light Jacko’s face looked like a clown’s, with sad eyes and tangled hair and Zapata moustache. I said, ‘I’m going back after five to have breakfast. You can bunk downstairs here, if you want to.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jacko morosely.

  ‘Without service and back-up facilities,’ I called after him, and heard him make a rude noise as I shut the door and swung up the bench and prepared the filter and plate for their holder. I heard his footsteps ring down the spiral stair, and then clack on the marble one lower. An inner door shut. He was going to stay.

  It had happened before. We didn’t bother each other. Work was work, and like Charles he occupied himself as a rule in the developing room, or reading, or listening to the British Forces Network or the Voice of America and making endless cups of coffee before turning in. I would be brought a mug and a sandwich, or perhaps join him in one halfway between exposures. But most times the place would be dark if I went downstairs, and Charles, or Jacko, asleep. Innes, who had been known to work all night on his Incubator, never came into the Dome in the evening.

  But tonight Charles was asleep in my digs and Innes, it seemed, tucked up in his, stoned to the eyeballs. For slights received, Timothy had taken vengeance.

  The telescope reared black above me, its cold metal bulk like a cannon, with the finder and guider tubes ranged alongside like gun barrels. The stepladder glinted in the starlight, and behind it stood the skeleton of the quarter-ton crane. Once a year, through the trapdoor below me, the mirror would descend for its aluminium coating. Mirrors are heavy, to avoid warping. I have known them to weigh almost a ton.

  I switched on the power for the rings and the green slot light which showed the declination numbers and pointer. The 50-Inch was an old one, with Roman numbers. I like Roman numbers. I set and clamped it.

  The right advancement is more difficult: you have to subtract the number twice from the sidereal clock before setting. I did it, and fine-set it and then undamped the main movement and pressed the switch which starts the telescope moving.

  However quick you are, you must always be accurate. The filter must be put in right side up, with the surface matt and not shiny. You must remember to uncap all three of your telescopes. You must remember to take the time as you slide in the plateholder, and to open the shutter at the end of the 50-Inch. Then you must watch, all through the exposure, that the telescope follows the arc of its subject, with the slow-motion button held in your hand.

  You learn as a student how to relax, how to look steadily with one eye and not to screw up and weary the other. At first, you are allowed to cover the idle eye with your hand. Then the knack comes to you and you can stare with one eye into the lens of a telescope while the other looks into darkness, seeing nothing. I have known Charles to move soundlessly across the Dome and touch me before I have been aware of him. It is, in a sense, a form of professional oblivion. It is less welcome when there are pleasanter things to do and to think of. And if you are in neither a state of depression nor a state of euphoria, it is the best source going of simple perspective.

  Footsteps came up the marble stair and the loo fizzed, and the same footsteps went down again. The restroom door shut. I settled down to my constellation.

  Normally, as I have said, there are no lights in an observatory after dusk. The outside door is locked, and once the door into the Dome has been closed and the bench raised inside, no one can interrupt the observer. For good reason, since the incident of the wrecked camera, Jacko had had locks put on the bathroom window and any others big enough to admit an intruder. There was no reason why anyone should come near me that night except Jacko with coffee; and Jacko always took good care to clatter up the stairs and yell first, to find when the next plate would finish.

  But Jacko was in bed. I gave myself a five-minute break at the end of the first two-hour session, and, taking my torch, opened the door and walked down to the ground floor through the most profound darkness and silence. The restroom door was firmly closed and a certain rhythmical obbligato which came through it indicated that Jacko had been treating his problems to Carlsbergs. I snitched a biscuit and a tumbler of Innes’s quellingly microbe-free milk and climbed back upstairs to the Dome, leaving the top staircase door madly open.

  That was how I first heard the footsteps so clearly.

  I was in trouble just then with the cross wire. As a star begins to decline it sinks toward the thick part of the atmosphere. Mine was dancing about in the haze. I heard the steps as I centred it with the slow motions. I finished what I was doing, and then, swearing, plunged over to shut the door before Jacko’s torchlight could hit my exposure and wreck it.

  I had my hand on the door when I realized the steps weren’t Jacko’s. To begin with, there wasn’t a light showing anywhere: the whole hollow building was in darkness. Then, as I moved, the footsteps had broken off suddenly.

  The Dome floor is noisy to walk over. The sound of my movements would have caused Jacko to come up and call to me. But, on hearing them this person had halted.

  I told myself I was hallucinating. The front door of the Dome was fast locked, and so were the windows. Jacko and I were quite alone. I was hallucinating, or else it was merely Jacko suffering the results of an excess of birras and unwilling to attract my attention.

  I looked at the black bulk of the 50-Inch, breasting unaided the vagaries of the Roman atmosphere, and with an unvoiced apology to the Trust I took two silent steps out of the door and then closed it firmly behind me. I couldn’t fake an equally firm tramp across the Dome floor to the telescope, but if anyone was there, I hoped he’d imagine it. I breathed as slowly and lightly as my heartbeats would let me, and waited.

  Nothing happened. Behind the door, the 50-Inch motor buzzed. The central heating creaked, and a tap dripped below in the developing room. One of the electric clocks gave a whirr and a grunt and fell silent. I bent down and, sliding off first one shoe then the other, I took three steps down the metal staircase and peered over.

  This time, I could see the front door. And the front door was slightly open. I could see moonlight, in a crack, down the standpost.

  So what?

  Yell for Jacko. It may be Jacko I have heard, opening the door and stepping out of the Dome to look at something.

  Unlikely. Even Jacko wouldn’t forget to shut the door and leave me protected. Besides, he has the key.

  Yell for Jacko. He may have heard a knock on the door and let someone in, forgetting to close it.

  But he wouldn’t have forgotten. See above. And then why the stealth?

  Yell for Jacko. Someone else may have got in, unknown to either of us, and is lurking now in the bathroom, the developing room, the stockroom, the offices, the kitchen.

  The staircase was clear. I drew a deep breath and raced down to the stairs to the ground floor, giving the front door a slam as I passed it. I burst into the restroom, yelling for Jacko.

  He lay on the bottom bunk, snoring, and the room stank of beer. I banged him hard on the funny bone with my torch and when he made a loud and incoherent protest I said, ‘There’s someone in the Dome. There’s your torch. Come on.’

  The kitchen was next door. I left him sitting ejaculating and ran there, switching on my torch and flinging open the door with some bravado. There was no one there that I could see, and the cutlery drawer was two paces away. I jerked it open, snatched a couple of knives and raced back to Jacko, who was upright, saying ‘What?’ with his torch on. I put a knife in his other hand, grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the hallway. ‘Not again!’ Jacko said.

  ‘Yes, again,’ I hissed at him, and switched the lights on. The hall and staircase were flooded with light. A rush of footsteps coming down the marble stairs came to a halt and then the steps changed direction and receded in great leaping strides upward.

  Jacko said, ‘Christ
, you were right,’ and took two bounds towards the foot of the stairs. Then he slowed down and said, ‘We’ve got him. He can’t get out. You phone the police and stay by the door. I’ll go up after him.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘He may be armed. He could hurt you. I’ll phone the villa.’ Then I thought and said, ‘Jacko. He could get out on the cupola.’

  It had been done. Every now and then the Dome sticks, and the workmen get up there and fix it. From there, the climb down to the ground isn’t impossible. Jacko said, ‘Hell,’ and then, ‘All right. I’ll follow him upstairs. You go outside and watch, and yell if you see him.’

  Upstairs, silence had fallen. I said, ‘I don’t think he’s gone up the iron stairs. I think he’s in one of the middle rooms, Jacko. Then if I go out and you go to the top, he can open the door here and walk out of it. We’ll stay together. We’ll go upstairs together and search every room till we get him. For example. . .’

  The lights went out.

  ‘For example,’ I said, ‘that’s one reason why he’s on the middle landing. He’s in the developing room.’

  It was like the repeat of a nightmare, only worse because there were only two of us. We didn’t run anymore, we walked up the stairs side by side, with our torches searching the landing, but our quarry was one step ahead of us. Before we reached the door and the developing room we heard the footsteps ringing on the spiral iron stair just above us, and the door to the telescope banged. A pang for my exposure blipped through the high-performance funk in six colourways which was gripping me: I switched off my torch and Jacko, from years of sheer bloody brainwashing, did the same.

  So we crashed through the door at the top of the stairs into darkness, and didn’t even stop to wonder why our intruder hadn’t paused to slide down the bench shelf that would bar it. The telescope loomed in its dome and the segment of sky, frosty with stars, twinkled behind it. Beside it was the lattice giraffe of the Eli Hoist Company of Philadelphia, with something solid and moving within it. A man was climbing the crane jib.

  I cried aloud. Jacko didn’t waste time on utterance. He jumped for the steps and caught the spring with the Dome switch and pressed it.

  There was a grinding roar and, above us, the slice of cold sky began dwindling. The roof of the Dome was rolling shut on its ratchets.

  The intruder realized it too. I have never seen a man move so quickly. He went up the crane like a lizard, one arm out flung to catch the spring switch and reverse it. Jacko jumped off the steps and dashed forward.

  I had a better idea. I hopped with one foot on the ladder and raced it across the full width of the Dome floor to jam him.

  I was never to get there. Just in front of the telescope the floor disappeared altogether. The stepladder dropped into nothing and threw me, and we went through the hole in the floorboards together.

  I have always had little use for screaming ladies.

  I was screaming that time without knowing it. I screeched as I fell through the trapdoor, and screamed again as one leg of the steps struck and trapped me.

  Everything stopped. The ladder stopped, jammed half through the opening. And I stopped, entangled in slippery alloy, and dangled there with a drop of three storeys beneath me.

  I heard Jacko’s footsteps racing over, and had enough sense to yell, ‘Mind the trapdoor!’ Then he arrived and plunged to his knees by my shoulders. He got one tough, cold hand around my wrist and he gripped it, while he tried to pull my limbs free with the other. The polished metal swung and slithered on the edge of the trap, and juddered and clanged with every move of my body. I got my second arm free. Then the hinges closed and the ladder slid through the opening, dragging my legs and my bruised body with it.

  Jacko grabbed my other hand and tumbled backward. There was a jangle of metal; a pause; and an almighty crash from the base of the building. Jacko and I, in a shivering heap by the hole, lay and listened to it.

  ‘Dear Mr Frazer,’ said Jacko, in a trembling voice. ‘Owing to an unfortunate accident, I am writing to requisition one new collapsible aluminium stepladder. . .’

  ‘Dear Jacko,’ I said. ‘Owing to an unfortunate accident, you were nearly writing to requisition a new collapsible female colleague.’ His moustache, not by accident, was moving toward me and we had a long and satisfactory kiss. Then he said, ‘I suppose the bastard’s got away,’ and helped me to struggle up, panting. That is the realistic, not to say sensible, streak in J. Middleton.

  The bastard had, of course, got away, and not out of the Dome ceiling either. As I fell through the trap, he must have nipped down the crane and fled past us. From that moment on, it was simple. While Jacko was hauling me out, a colliery band could have marched down the stairs to the front door, playing Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary if they knew it. When we had redeemed my plate and capped and clamped the 50-Inch for the night and retired to the kitchen for two therapeutic mugs of black coffee, we had reached a few shaky conclusions.

  The intruder must have had a key to the front door.

  He must be familiar with the Dome, to know about the trapdoor used for silvering.

  Since imagination boggled at the idea that two men could be impelled to visit us, it seemed likely that this burglar was the same as the previous one. That is, the survivor of the two from the Villa Borghese.

  In which case, what had he wanted? More pictures?

  ‘Couldn’t be,’ said Jacko. ‘He’d smashed Charles’s camera. In any case, if he’s clever enough to get hold of a key, he’s clever enough to find out that Charles had been in Naples and hasn’t developed any pictures here recently.’

  ‘Then what?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s search,’ said Jacko. ‘Then let’s call the police. That lark with the trapdoor wasn’t burglary. That, dearie, is what they call obsolescence planning. We’re in deep, and we’re not going to get any deeper.’

  I didn’t say anything, but I helped him search. Nothing was out of place and nothing, so far as we could see, had been taken. We flooded the building with light, even to the sacred precincts of the Dome, and all we found were the chips and scars from the fall of the steps, and the spray of castors and screw nails and hinges strewn about the ground floor by the wreckage. We began to clear it up.

  It was then that Jacko said, ‘Hullo?’ and I went over to look.

  He was holding up a key. ‘Look what I found in the shovel. Middleton’s deviant filing system. I knew I’d dropped it somewhere.’

  I toured my sweeping brush around a few boxes. ‘Keep going. You should find my entire nervous system down here somewhere. And what gold-plated coffer did that sacred key open?’

  ‘Fort Knox,’ said Jacko, ‘is quite safe from me. It’s the key to the plate store. The damn thing is empty in any case.’

  ‘Give,’ I said.

  He stood holding the key. ‘You don’t trust me.’

  ‘You’re quite right I don’t,’ I said, and caught it as he chucked it over. ‘And while we’re about it, what about my key for the front door?’

  ‘What, now?’ he said.

  ‘Bloody now,’ I said. He had saved my life but at that moment his lack of grip on the subject of keys had got on my nerves. I pocketed the new key he delved for and gave me, and then trudged pointedly upstairs to put the other key where it belonged. I said, over my shoulder, ‘How many new front door keys are there?’

  ‘Yours and mine,’ Jacko said, gazing upward. ‘One to Innes, for breakfast; one to Maurice because he paid the locksmith. You could defrost that thing while you’re about it.’

  I forbore to say that that was precisely my errand. I walked into the stockroom, which we had searched in some detail already.

  We kept our store of plates in the largest deepfreeze on the market, which happened to be an immovable tank of a meat safe. Stock are run-down at the end of the season, and the last plates transferred to the fridge.

  Once empty, the freezer is switched off and promptly defrosted. If, that is, you haven’t mislaid the me
ans to unlock it.

  I introduced Jacko’s key into the lock, turned it and dragged the big freezer door fully open.

  Inside, the safe was not empty. Inside, picked, packed, freeze-dried and dead as a cod steak in batter, lay the second man from the Villa Borghese.

  Your photograph is faded now

  The rose you picked me, flat and sere

  Your love-notes faint

  Your violin still

  And gone the bliss of yesteryear.

  We did not dream then, you and I

  As hand in hand we trod Life’s way,

  That here that warm and loving heart

  Would lie so chill (-18° C) in death today.

  SIX

  ‘So, Scotch-killed side in the meat safe. If you were in Wyoming, you could have a Wyoming steak fry,’ said Maurice next morning. ‘You’re not a prude, darling?’

  ‘She’s not a prude,’ said Johnson firmly. ‘But she doesn’t want to start her morning watching you get out of the bath either. Shut the door.’

  ‘She could do worse,’ Maurice said, his voice echoing comfortably from among all the verde antico and clouds of bath oil.

  He emerged, draped like Lucullus in terry bath sheet, and settling himself on his pillows said briskly, ‘Hostess corner, Timothy. Five coffees please, and nothing exciting on the sugar. This is our morning for being practical. Now, Ruth dear. Now, Jacko. Tell Maurice everything.’

  It had been my idea, after a long and heated discussion with Jacko, to telephone Johnson from the Dome at first light that morning. And it had been my misfortune that the voice from the villa which answered had been Maurice’s. Stonewalling an eminent and inquisitive playwright who wants to know why you are telephoning his house guest at seven in the morning is not very easy. In the end Jacko simply took the phone from my fingers and told him. As he pointed out to me afterwards, it was up to Maurice after all to decide what you did with a corpse in your meat safe. It was his house and his Dome and he was the permanent resident. Then we spoke to Johnson, and here we all were, in Maurice’s bedroom. The Pope, Johnson said, had cancelled his sitting that morning.