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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘He probably had a Message,’ said Maurice. ‘You must be quite, quite careful, you know. You can upset the balance of nature. A definite implosion of corpses.’

  ‘Two,’ said Jacko succinctly. He looked terrible, and he had had four more hours’ sleep than I had. We had never been in Maurice’s bedroom before. It was decorated like a carpeted tent, with a twelve-foot four-poster bed covered with the Rape of Persephone in petit point. The tables were crowded with skyphoi and kylikes and psykters and there was a bronze figure of a warrior in prayer, standing life-size by the drawn curtains: like the Romans, Maurice thought daylight unhealthy. Apart from the loot there were five modern works of art, one of which was plugged into an electric outlet on the skirting board. ‘You like it?’ said Maurice, who had earned his living, after all, by observing his fellows.

  It consisted of a panel of hardwood, thickly furred with fragile wire filaments. Timothy brought in the coffee and the wires shivered like dogs in the eddy. Then the door shut and the wires went on slowly twitching, individually and erratically, first in one quarter of the work and then in another. My eyes jumped about, trying to catch them at it. Maurice said, ‘Your coffee, darling. And was your second friend headless as well?’

  ‘He’d been shot,’ I said shortly. ‘A little, round hole through the temple.’

  ‘And out again?’ Johnson said. The filaments twitched.

  ‘And out again,’ Jacko confirmed. ‘And the wound wasn’t blackened, so we know he was shot from a distance.’

  ‘Well, of course he was,’ said Maurice. ‘He was shot when he was running away from the Dome four days ago after wrecking poor Charles’s camera . . . You have, I take it, settled your doctrinal differences with Charles?’

  I stared at Johnson and the bifocal glasses stared back at me blandly, lightly steamed up with coffee. Since my phone call Maurice had been brought up to date, it seemed, in the Dome’s affairs. I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And since the dead man was frozen quite solid,’ continued Maurice, selecting a cigar and preparing to light it, ‘he couldn’t be your second intruder, particularly as the meat safe had been locked and the key lost ever since the first break-in. How convenient, by the way.’

  Timothy, Johnson and I all looked at Jacko, who went beige under his coiffure and said, ‘Lovely; but don’t forget, I found it again.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Maurice, leaning back and blowing long, expensive smoke rings among the festoons of his canopy. ‘Your ally had failed to extract the body, and sooner or later the meat safe would be forced open for defrosting. Better divert suspicion from yourself immediately.’

  ‘Except,’ said Johnson, ‘that Jacko could have removed the body during any one of his duty spells with no trouble at all. Don’t be provoking.’

  Jacko’s face began to return to its normal colour. ‘If I can’t be provoking, I’m not going to play,’ said Maurice happily. ‘Timothy, ring up the police.’

  Coffeepot in hand, Timothy looked at him. ‘You know what will happen. Television cameras. Reporters.’

  Maurice breathed out cigar smoke, coughing, and glared at him. ‘Sunk in oblivion, neglected, dragging out my meagre existence in this stinking backwater, does it matter that the world has forgotten Maurice Frazer? It shall be reminded!’

  ‘You can’t do it,’ Timothy said, frowning. ‘You have two drinks parties, a Discussion Group at the British Council and dinner with the Marchese already.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Johnson gently, ‘there is a body to explain away. Who shot our friend from the Villa Borghese and why? Who took the key, and who returned it? Ruth?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. My head ached. ‘The murderer, I suppose, took the key, and came back last night to remove and dispose of the body.’ I looked towards Jacko for help. ‘Then he must have dropped it. When he bent over the trapdoor in the Dome, it must have slipped from his pocket. We found it below, in the wreckage. Jacko?’

  ‘Check,’ said Jacko. ‘Let’s call in the television cameras.’

  ‘You heard,’ said Johnson. ‘Maurice is busy today. Then who was the murderer?’

  Inspiration visited me. ‘Of course. The balloon man!’ I exclaimed.

  Everyone, it appeared, knew about Mr Paladrini and our chase up the Corso. There was a ripple of animation. ‘Except,’ said Johnson, ‘that one wonders how Mr Paladrini was able to find his way about the Dome. Even to locating a trapdoor in darkness?’

  ‘And.’ said Maurice, smiling bewitchingly, ‘to possessing a new key to open the front door with, my darlings.’

  ‘You had a key, Maurice,’ I said. ‘Who did you lend it to?’

  Not a hair in the white mink was disturbed. Smiling, Maurice gently applauded me, the cigar notched with grace in one finger, and said, ‘No one. But then, I can’t shoot. Italians can’t shoot either. They come here every Sunday, poor dears, with their elephant guns and the sparrows go berserk, but marksmanship, no. On the other hand . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ said Johnson. He had an envelope on his knee and was doing little sketches of Maurice with a red ballpoint pen: as I watched he gave him a cloud, a harp, a pair of wings and a halo.

  ‘Astronomers are perfectly unbelievable shots,’ said Maurice fondly. ‘All that work with the cross wires. I tell you. Take Ruth or Jacko or that other young man with the machinery to any rifle range and I guarantee you. Two shots out of three straight into the gold. Or the temple. I can’t of course speak with any certainty about Digham. But photography, I should have thought, needed the most accurate eye. I thought you sent for him?’

  ‘I did,’ said Johnson. I was beginning to change my mind, too, about Johnson. I had appealed to him that morning as to an ally. And since then, it seemed to me, he had taken altogether too much upon himself and his nasty bifocals. I said coldly, ‘He’s probably out shooting Landrace Cutters with a submachine gun.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter, dear,’ Maurice said. ‘Why shouldn’t it have been Charles on the Dome roof last night? He knows the observatory better than most. It was his camera, if I remember rightly, that our frozen friend wrecked. Might he not have been a little carried away the other night outside the Dome and shot him?’

  ‘He might,’ said Johnson. ‘Except that he hadn’t a key to the Dome. Neither had Ruth. And according to both Ruth and Jacko, a key was used to open the Dome door this evening. The lock hasn’t been marked or splintered or in any way forced.’ He paused and then said, ‘In any case, there is something we are all forgetting. Whoever entered the observatory last night opened that trapdoor deliberately, with the intention of killing either Ruth or Jacko, or both. It was only thanks to Jacko in fact that Ruth survived . . .’

  The wall panel twitched. Maurice suddenly ground out his cigar and said, ‘Yes. Then who else had a key?’

  ‘Innes,’ said Timothy dulcetly. He laid an arm along the back of Johnson’s chair and gazed at his drawing. ‘I emptied his pockets last night: keys make such a difficult bulge, and you can’t ask too much of bespoke work. Maurice, he’s got you exactly. And all those clouds, like my chintzy hop pillows. Maurice thinks I’m a fusspot, but I swear they make me sleep like a baby.’

  ‘Like Innes,’ said Jacko.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Timothy. ‘He was knocked out, you know. One had to try to revive him with something.’

  ‘Aftershave lotion,’ I said this time.

  ‘Yes,’ said Timothy. ‘Silly me.’

  Johnson contemplated his drawing and then, detaching the page, proceeded to fashion it into a splendidly contoured paper dart. ‘And do you think,’ he said, ‘that Innes, resuscitated from his aftershave, could have nipped about climbing cranes yesterday evening?’

  ‘No,’ said Timothy with regret. He opened his palms as Johnson launched the dart in a graceful parabola near him. The dart sailed past him and landed on Maurice’s bedcover. Johnson’s hand, at the extremity of its sweep, brushed the coffeepot and a full cup, poised just beyond it, tilted and emptied its contents aga
inst Maurice’s artistic wall.

  There was a flash of flame, a barking report and a wisp of smoke travelled lazily up to the putti. The thicket of filaments, arrested in mid-twitch, hung on the wall, inanimate as the corpse in the freezer. Make a wall happy this weekend. Johnson said, ‘Oh dear. What have I done?’

  There was a little silence. Then, ‘Made your point,’ said Maurice dryly. ‘Or do I mistake a subtle gesture of reproach when I see one? Take a note. Timothy: a telephone call to the electrician. Also, I think Lord Digham is trying to enter the room.’

  I got up and sat down again. It was true. The door had opened and Charles was standing there, his oldest cloak slung over his shoulders and, I suspected, his pyjama top lurking underneath his scarf and sweater. He said, ‘Ruth?’ and then, ‘Christ, I thought I’d never get in. I’ve been standing out there for fifteen bloody minutes, trying to get your bloody staff to knock on that door, Maurice. What do you need, the Keys of Saint Peter to get into the Throne Room?’ He said to me, ‘Are you all right?’

  I was used to urbanity. Not having urbanity was, I found, perfectly agreeable too. I said, ‘Yes, I’m all right. Why couldn’t you walk in yourself? Oh, Charles, of course. The Mouse Alarm?’

  ‘The revolting noise,’ said Charles, ‘that this former matinee idol in his dotage chooses to inflict on human beings because he is frightened of mice. I couldn’t get into the room. I couldn’t get anyone else to come in and tell you to switch the bloody thing off. All I know is that someone tried to kill Ruth in the Dome. What’s been happening?’

  ‘Dear Charles,’ said Maurice. ‘Matinée idol I may have been, but I don’t recall ever being reduced to using the word bloody three times in six sentences, even in someone else’s feeblest dialogue. If the noise offends you, why are you here entertaining us now?’

  ‘Because it’s stopped,’ said Charles. ‘It stopped this moment. Ruth? What happened?’

  Maurice sat up. ‘You’ve wrecked my Mouse Alarm,’ he said to Johnson.

  But Johnson, rising, was leading Charles gently to a seat beside me. ‘I’ve wrecked his Mouse Alarm,’ he said kindly. ‘It’s a long, long story and Ruth and Jacko will tell it. In the meantime—’

  The telephone rang and Maurice snatched it up pettishly. He said, ‘Pronto?’ and then held it out at arm’s length toward Johnson. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that you would ask your friends not to telephone before lunchtime. It spoils my appetite.’

  ‘For what?’ said Charles dulcetly. The urbanity, I was sorry to see, was making a comeback. Johnson, on the telephone, was saying, ‘Oh? Where? No, but I’ll remember. What number? Right. Thank you.’ He listened for a few moments longer and then said goodbye and hung up. We all looked at him.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

  ‘You’re going?’ said Maurice.

  ‘It was the Pope,’ suggested Jacko.

  ‘Actually,’ Johnson said, ‘it was a man who knows a man who had his photograph taken recently.’

  He wasn’t looking at anybody, but I got up and walked over to him. ‘Mr Paladrini? You’ve got Mr Paladrini’s address? Charles, the man who sold the balloons at the zoo. We’re going to find him.’

  ‘Why?’ said Maurice’s voice baldly behind us. ‘If, of course, one may ask.’

  It was a little difficult to recall why. I stared at Johnson and Johnson said cheerfully. ‘Because there was a message in the balloon Ruth received making a rendezvous of some kind at the Fall Fair. She got it clearly by accident, and didn’t even realize until later what it was. At any rate, we went to the Fall Fair and recognized the balloon trader in superior guise taking part in it. We chased him, and he ran away from us.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Maurice huffily. ‘And for no other reason you are going to call on this gentleman?’

  ‘Well, for one other reason,’ Johnson said. ‘The balloon may have been intended for one of the men from the Villa Borghese. It is, at least, a possible link with them. And anything which might lead to any explanation of what has happened so far in the Dome can’t be altogether a bad thing, I imagine. That is, unless you want to call in the police. Pacifists, vegetarians and anti-blood-sport enthusiasts, make your opinions known. I don’t like murders and I like nice girls like Ruth Russell, but we can all go home and finish our knitting if the majority verdict prefers it. Charles?’

  ‘To hell with knitting,’ said Charles. ‘I’ll come with you. But not Ruth. She’s had enough trouble.’

  ‘You can’t come,’ I said. ‘Charles, you have to retake all those pictures this morning.’

  Charles stared at me. ‘I’m coming,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Johnson said mildly. ‘I’m not asking for volunteers, merely a vote of confidence. Jacko? Timothy? Maurice? Paladrini or policemen?’

  ‘You don’t mean—’ said Timothy. ‘Not Mr Paladrini who was so nice to the weenies?’

  ‘The same,’ answered Johnson.

  ‘Oh but do go,’ said Timothy. ‘You have his address?’

  ‘Sit down, Timothy,’ said Maurice. ‘You aren’t going. I don’t see why anyone need go. Wheel the body out of your meat safe, and I shall tell the gardener to bury it. There are plenty of places in the garden.’

  ‘And the police?’ Jacko said.

  ‘This,’ said Maurice, ‘is nothing to do with the police. It is on my property and in my observatory.’

  ‘But leased to the Trust,’ I said quickly. ‘And if it all came out anyhow, think of the row. Why not take a half measure? Leave the man in the safe, and give us two more days to make some inquiries. If we can’t do it by then, Jacko will make his dramatic discovery of the body. How’s that?’

  ‘All right,’ said Jacko. Everyone nodded. Jacko added, ‘So who goes with Johnson this morning? All of us?’

  ‘It’s an interesting thought,’ Maurice said. ‘I take it you are trying to avoid the attention of the police?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Johnson, ‘I’m going alone. Don’t worry. I have on my tear-proof mascara.’

  There was the grinding noise of a number of people changing their minds. Then Jacko said, ‘Well, if you want to. I’ve got film to develop anyway. But Charles could go. You’ve forgotten, Ruth. He doesn’t need to retake all his photographs.’

  ‘Why?’ said Charles. He looked, poor darling, as if he could have done with some of our coffee.

  ‘Because we found the film on the body,’ Jacko said. ‘The film he took out of your camera, Charles, before he smashed it and ran out and got shot. He’d shoved it into his sock but it was rolled up and properly sealed. Ruth has it.’

  An elegant howl left Charles’s lips. ‘Madder music,’ he said, ‘and stronger wine: this is my birthday, love, today.’ I delved in my handbag, found the roll of film and tossed it to him.

  Johnson, rising between us, thoughtfully fielded it. ‘I’m terribly happy for you,’ he said, ‘but let’s keep our heads. If we have to call in the police, this is evidence. You know what’s in it, Charles. You don’t have to take these pictures again. I vote we leave the roll here with Maurice. I’ll sign it’ (he did so), ‘and put it out of sight . . . there.’

  There was a clink as he dropped the film inside an Attic vase rampant with satyrs and maenads intent on creative play projects which ought to have cost Maurice half the proceeds from his last West End run but probably didn’t. It seemed the right spot for Diana, if only in the negative, and Charles was perfectly complaisant. He turned in the doorway as we were leaving and, sinking his chin on his chest, delivered himself, I remember, of one of the gems of his collection:

  Sweet Mem’ry’s Chord

  Was Touched Today

  They Came and Took

  Your Teeth Away

  Your Wig has Gone

  Your Gas Limb Too

  The Plastic Joints

  That Rivet You

  Your Contact Lenses They Removed

  And All About You that We Looved.’

  I went
back and had breakfast with him, and then left him to go and finish my work in the Dome.

  But I didn’t go to the Dome. I waited at the gates of the villa and made Johnson take me to Rome to see Mr Paladrini.

  SEVEN

  I slept most of the way into Rome, curled up on the passenger seat beside Johnson. He drove fast and steadily and when I finally awoke we were through the Porta San Lorenzo and into our first bout of traffic jams. There was a rug over me which hadn’t been there before, and my cheeks were wet.

  I dried them, and Johnson said, ‘He’s in the Via Margutta, behind the Via del Babuino. But I think we deserve a drink at Renati’s first.’ He had made no fuss, to my surprise and relief, about taking me with him. He had not, come to think of it, even appeared amazed to see me. He was, of course, one of your homespun types, invincibly phlegmatic. Like me.

  It had begun to rain when we got to Renati’s. Johnson parked the car, presumably on somebody’s doormat, and joined me at a pink table. I had a gin fizz, and said, ‘I thought we were in a hurry. I thought you were going to rush to the Via Margutta, fling open the door and say, “Ha!”’

  ‘You can’t say, “Ha!” in Italian,’ Johnson pointed out patiently. ‘You say, “Ah!” Or perhaps, “Ciao!”’

  ‘Then he shoots you,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t you be painting somebody? It’s less dangerous, and presumably you get paid for it.’

  ‘In other words,’ said Johnson, ‘don’t go to the Via Margutta?’

  There was a pause. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I see. Then what,’ said Johnson, ‘are you suggesting instead? A high-stake rubber of contract?’ He stared at me, the black eyebrows raised above the obscuring bifocals, and then when I opened my mouth, forestalled me smoothly.