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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Sitting there in his shed, engaged in intergroup transactions with half the scientific establishment in Europe, no one could deny Innes was neatly placed: as central as the fish in my balloon. I wondered if he had put the fish in my balloon, and whom he had meant the message for. There were fish on the table, rather inefficiently cut out of cardboard, with the string and the rubber studs all ready for fixing. Beside me Diana, her hands stretched up high with the fingers pointed outward like Plate 193 of the Kama Sutra, said, ‘Don’t phone, Innes. The police know we’ve come here.’

  Innes smiled, his hand on the telephone. ‘Bluff,’ he said, and took down the receiver.

  ‘They do. Innes,’ I said with equal earnestness, not to mention mendacity. ‘Look, don’t make it worse. You can’t possibly overpower three of us and get away without anyone noticing. All we came for was to talk to Mr Paladrini.’

  The revolver was pointed straight at my head. Of course, for his work, Innes’s touch had to be steady, but I wasn’t keen on the spillover into small arms. He said, still smiling stiffly, ‘I have no idea who you are talking about. There was no one here when I arrived. The whole affair was a trick and I have no intention of overpowering anybody. I am simply going to call up the police.’

  ‘You are?’ said Johnson in tones of mild disbelief. His arms dropped and, as Innes’s hand whitened on the trigger, sprang straight again.

  ‘You think I won’t tell the Trust all about it?’ Innes said. ‘But I will. They’ll hear all you’ve been up to. I’ll tell them about the break-in at the Dome that was so cleverly hushed up. And they’ll want to know what you are all doing here. I don’t need to ask what this is. This is the hideout of the man who sold Ruth Russell and Digham that balloon.’

  There was a brief silence in honour of this earful of dazzling facts. Johnson was the first to recover. He said to Innes, ‘We’re here because we managed to track down the balloon man and thought that we’d trapped him. Why are you here?’

  Innes stood, the telephone still in one hand because he had not yet solved the problem of how to dial a number while keeping us all at his gun-end. He said, ‘Need you ask?’

  ‘Darling, he needs,’ said Diana gently. ‘Go on, tell him.’

  Innes stared at us all. He said stiffly, ‘I was telephoned by a Fall Fair official. He referred to the misunderstanding which led to my accident and invited me to this address for a drink and an apology from the Organizer.’

  ‘And when you came, no one was here,’ Johnson said.

  ‘I knew as soon as I opened the door,’ said Innes indignantly. ‘No one answered the bell, and when I found the door open I walked in. As you see, no one in their senses would take it for a fitting rendezvous for such a purpose. It is a street trader’s lodging and workshop. And the street trader, I have no doubt, is the dubious one you encountered. Naturally, I feared for my life.’

  ‘Then you heard us come up the stairs,’ I said. ‘But didn’t you guess who we were by our voices?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Innes. ‘But surely it is obvious that the source of the whole trouble lies with someone connected with the observatory?’

  ‘That’s what we thought,’ Diana said.

  Innes stared at her. The splendid certainty which had informed his every action to date ran out a little. His revolver hand slackened. Johnson said, still gently. ‘That’s why we wondered, you see, what you were doing here. Do you usually carry a gun?’

  Innes dropped his gaze and looked at it, and then at all of us. You could see the scientific brain assimilating the facts and then spewing out, with however much distaste, the deductions. He said, ‘You expected to find your balloon seller here?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Johnson patiently. ‘We got a photograph of him the other day by a fluke and I checked it with the authorities. This is the address we were given. But he seems to have gone. Do you usually . . .’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Innes irritably. He gazed at Johnson, and then at Di and then at me.

  Di said, ‘You can’t be the working man’s Maigret, darling, unless you keep your revolver pointing at the thing you’re shooting.’

  Innes looked down at it and said, ‘I got it off a card on the table.’

  ‘Super Bum-Bum,’ I said, trying not to burst into open hysteria. Innes threw me a look of dislike and dropped the hand with the gun in it. Then he slowly hung the telephone receiver back on the hook. It wasn’t much of a vote of confidence, but it was better than nothing. Johnson said, ‘You really did get a message to come here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Innes. He made as if to move away from the telephone towards us, and then stopped. He said to Johnson, ‘If you expected to find one of the criminals living here, how come you dragged the girls into it?’

  I said, ‘We dragged ourselves, Innes. I came to help because I don’t want the Trust mixed up in a scandal.’

  ‘And I came for other reasons entirely,’ Diana said, and stared at Johnson with that peculiar sexless stare that model girls assume for the camera. Johnson blew her a kiss, and I swear she reddened. She said quickly, ‘I take it, by the way, that Mr Paladrini-Susini has departed? You’ve checked the other room?’

  We all looked at the inner door. High above our heads, as if triggered off by the action, there was a sudden violent movement. In a response totally automatic, Innes flung up his fist with the gun in it and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a searing flame, an earsplitting explosion, and the glazed roof came down in a curtain of glass crystals and plaster, followed by the unimpeded weight of the whole drumming downpour. On the floor, twitching faintly on a bed of bright broken glass, lay a locust of monstrous proportions. A second one, emerald green and as large as a small bird, regarded us uneasily from an unbroken astragal and began cautiously to creep sideways, its tail quivering, its long wings vibrating with a dry crackling sound. ‘There’s a plague of them,’ I said. ‘You should get a bullwhip.’

  Innes dropped his gun and was standing, breathing heavily over the insect. He said, ‘But it was a toy gun. From the table!’

  ‘Then I hate to think,’ Johnson said from the table, ‘what you could manage with the Vampire Fingernails.’

  The rain beat on our heads, driving the plaster dust into our shoulders and soaking the showcards and beading the cards of toy sunglasses. Innes said, ‘It seems I owe you an apology. I can only say it was a genuine mistake. I was brought here under false pretences, and it is necessary to be careful. I do assure you I had no idea that thing was loaded.’

  ‘None of the others are,’ Johnson said. ‘All genuine guaranteed kiddie-fodder.’ He bent down, broke and examined Innes’s gun and handed it back to him. ‘There are still five bullets left. Why not hang on to it? You don’t know what we’ll find in the next room.’ And he walked to the inner door.

  He and Innes kicked it open in the end while I hung back with Di, less to avoid a volley of gunfire than to avoid seeing my third corpse in five days. But there was no one dead or alive in the bedroom, merely Mr Paladrini’s wardrobe with a few clothes still hanging inside it, and his bed, recently slept in, and a table and one or two chairs, all covered with a litter of cheap toys and fancy balloon shapes. Beside the bed. presumably to segregate it from the room with the stove, was a gas cylinder with a nozzle for inflating them.

  Everything was rather wet, as the skylight in his room had fallen in sympathy, and there were three dead locusts in various prayerful attitudes on the linoleum and another in the bathroom just off. Of Mr Paladrini there was no other sign, unless you counted a blue faded overall hung on the back of an armchair.

  Johnson lifted it up and began, not very enthusiastically, to search it. It was in one of the inside pockets that he found the cardboard fish, in a colour different from mine, but otherwise identical in shape and material.

  It had a message, too. It said, S.M. Capri 20/-1500.

  We all crowded around. We could hear people in the outer room, exclaiming over the hole in the ceiling, and
a steady pounding of more feet up the staircase as the neighbours rushed in to see what crime passionel had taken place among the toy sunglasses. Innes, who had a social conscience, looked over his shoulder at intervals and said, ‘In a moment.’

  I said, ‘It’s another appointment. Capri: it can’t be the Isle of, surely. And S.M.? And twenty?’

  ‘November twentieth?’ Johnson suggested. ‘Yes, maybe. But think. This was going into a balloon. It wasn’t an appointment that Paladrini was necessarily going to keep. It was one he was going to pass to someone else, inside one of his balloons. What we want to know is, who was he going to pass it to?’

  I said, ‘You’ll find out if you go to Capri at three p.m. on November twentieth and look for S.M., whoever that is.’

  ‘Shall I?’ said Johnson. ‘We don’t know where to go, or who to look for if we did. Mr Paladrini may not be there this time: the appointment may be between two perfect strangers. No. There’s only one way to be certain, and that is by watching who buys the balloon.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Innes, turning back from saying ‘In a moment’ again to the neighbours. ‘If you think Mr Paladrini is going to come back here, blow up a balloon and then proceed to the agreed place to sell it.’

  ‘Along with the mechanical mice,’ Diana said, a sign that her interest was dwindling.

  ‘I feel,’ Johnson said, ‘that Mr Paladrini has blown up his final balloon. But there seems no reason why we shouldn’t do the job for him.’

  ‘Us?’ Innes said.

  I said, ‘We don’t know when and where to take the cart. Assuming the cart is still there where he kept it.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Innes said. From among the litter of paper on the table he picked out a sheet from a notebook. On it, in rain-smeared Italian, was what appeared to be a rough timetable. He conned it. ‘Wednesday . . . ?’

  ‘Nothing for today,’ said Johnson, looking over his shoulder. ‘But tomorrow . . . Tomorrow, my children, you have a full day ahead of you. Look at it. The Colosseum, the Piazza San Pietro, the Castel Sant’ Angelo . . .’

  I said, ‘Look at the Castel Sant’ Angelo. There’s a number against it. Twelve. Do you suppose . . . ?’

  ‘That the cart was intended to be outside the Castel Sant’ Angelo at midday tomorrow, with the balloon prepared to hand to its new owner? I do,’ Johnson said. He turned to face the oncoming prow of the lady who undoubtedly had been the absent Mr Paladrini’s landlady. ‘Signora,’ said Johnson, ‘we came, you understand, to celebrate a christening and regard! The effects of the opening of the champagne. Fear nothing. It will be repaired; it will be paid for. On my cousin’s behalf, I guarantee it.’

  There was the slight change of air which results when many thousands of blanketlike lire float from one hand to another. ‘But of course!’ the landlady said, while, like fading detergent, the neighbours receded behind her. ‘You assure me that no one was hurt? And the bambino?’

  ‘With its little mother,’ said Johnson. ‘You understand. A young mother’s health must not be risked. But you may congratulate the happy father. See!’ And raising one implacable finger, he propelled Innes forward.

  ‘Ah! So young!’ said the landlady, and kissed him. ‘This is a great day, is it not? One you cannot celebrate here, in this rubbish. Since Marco is called away, why, I am your hostess. Follow.’

  We did, to the flat below, which was where all the neighbours had gone to, anyway. When we got out two hours later, weaving more than a little and with our pockets squeaking with blue sugared almonds, it took us two casts around the Piazza del Popolo to find Johnson’s car, and then a miracle to drive it to Velterra.

  Diana was weeping with laughter and even Innes cracked a smile now and then, which wasn’t surprising considering what I’d put in his squeezed lemon. Johnson sang all the way in between making up some obituaries which would have done Digham credit and some others which made Di begin to scream, so that we had to hammer her on the back.

  And I sat in the back, with a bullwhip. And a paper bag full of string, and coloured balloons, and a fish with an odd message on it.

  EIGHT

  I ate in the Dome that day, lunching off some of Innes’s bread and salami with a mug of black coffee steaming among the jars of hypo while I developed the plates from my night’s work. Johnson and Di had gone straight to Maurice’s villa, where Di appeared to be staying, and Innes was in Mouse Hall, after entering the Dome briefly with me to demonstrate how to trip a Wyoming steer with my bullwhip. This he managed to do after unhooking both the flanking bay trees from their tubs outside the door and reducing a spare chair to batons; I had been more generous with my doctoring than I intended. Then he wandered off to give Poppy her bran and water and Cuddle.

  It was then that I remembered the body in the meat safe and went off, not too steadily myself, to make the black coffee. If you have ever thought of working alone on an Italian hilltop with a corpse frozen hard in the meat safe, my counsel is not to. Sadly missed along Life’s way,/But quietly remembered every day. Then Jacko came in, carrying sensational news from point to point like a concrete mixer.

  Someone had pinched our frozen friend’s film from Maurice’s amphora, and Maurice was raising the roof about it. And someone, while Maurice was raising the roof, had been raking through all our belongings. My possessions and Charles’s were scattered all over the digs, Jacko said, and his own room was a shambles. He’d just been fixing it and trying to stop our landlady from calling the police when Maurice had rung to report the film stolen.

  ‘And I’ve just come from Innes’s digs,’ said Jacko virtuously. ‘In case there was trouble, you know. And his room is a sensation as well. He’ll blow his top when he sees it. When he sees it. Where have you types been spending the morning? Charles came in after breakfast to find you, and then came raging back this afternoon from the Villa Borghese in a froth because none of the models had turned up and you weren’t to be found in Rome either. His face when he saw his paisley underwear all over the floor was quite something, I can tell you. And his precious film missing. He’s going to have to take his shots all over again tomorrow morning.’

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ I said. ‘Johnson and I have work for him tomorrow morning.’ And I sat him under the red light in the developing room while I finished off what I was doing and told him all that had happened.

  What with that and the gin and the fact that the thing that mixes the emulsion had retired for the season, the results from that batch of plates were never to my mind what you would call totally reliable, which just goes to show that you should never get your astral bodies mixed up with the two other kinds. At the end Jacko, who had interrupted all the way through, jumping up and down like another bloody locust, said, ‘And Innes. Do you believe him?’

  I switched the light on and dried my hands. ‘Jacko, how do I know? I will admit, he gave me a few anxious moments. But his story rang absolutely true and he really did go sage green when the gun fired. Johnson thinks we should take him on the balloon truck expedition and just see what happens.’

  ‘Um. Ruth?’ said Jacko. I had hung up my lab coat and was switching off to go down to the office. Jacko followed me thoughtfully. He said, ‘We know you’re all right because you nearly got killed, and you know I’m all right because I was with you when it all happened—’

  ‘And saved me,’ I said. I stopped and issued him a kiss of merit with my fingers under his chin and then went on downstairs.

  ‘Well,’ he said, still following, talking. ‘But what do we know about Johnson?’

  ‘I thought of that,’ I said. I had reached the ground floor. I turned. ‘But everything checks. For one thing, we shouldn’t have traced the balloon man at all but for Johnson. And for another, he’s far too well known. Just try and work out how an internationally famous portrait painter could get mixed up in something as petty as this. Or would need to. He must be loaded.’

  ‘A fair description,’ said Johnson’s voice just behind me. I turned very slowly
and said, ‘How did you get in?’ and he smiled at me rather hazily and held up two keys for inspection.

  ‘Innes has gone home to have a good sleep, and Maurice says he doesn’t intend to be the only sober person at a portrait sitting. You promised that one day you would show me over the observatory.’

  I stared at those devious glasses. Then I got it. ‘Your room has been searched as well?’ I asked.

  ‘Right,’ said Johnson. ‘And after the signed film was stolen.’

  ‘And it occurs to you that perhaps the Dome has been turned over?’

  ‘It seems to me,’ Johnson said, ‘that two people are after that film. One of them has it, and the other is still trying to find it. And if the person trying to find it is the man who broke in the other night, he has a key, or access to one, remember?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Jacko said. He came down the last of the steps and stood frowning at Johnson. ‘If the film has gone from the vase, then one of us either took it or told about it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Johnson placidly. ‘The same applies to this character who’s now hunting it. He was too late in reaching the amphora . . . You’re quite right, you know. Even Maurice has his suspicions. You can see him, if you like, in raccoon collar and cuffs and a Stetson, limping about the grounds looking for footprints. I thought I would come and look for footprints as well.’

  But although we scoured every inch of the Dome, we found no trace of disturbance which means there hadn’t been one: whatever else we are not, Jacko and I are reasonably methodical. In any case, as we realized when we thought about it, Jacko had been in the Dome all the morning, and there had been the briefest of intervals between his departure and my fuddled arrival with Innes. At the end of the search, Johnson removed himself and his glasses from the fascinations of the developing room and said, ‘Right. That leaves only Mouse Hall.’