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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Old Mr Frazer, damn his eyes. She wouldn’t call him that, I can tell you, when she asked him. Or when he offered. Maurice has grown into the sort of dramatist who doesn’t need a stage anymore. He winds up people, and then lays them down and starts watching them. Innes arrived rather late, blushing, and was introduced, along with Johnson. Innes said, ‘What observatory are you with now, Miss Lindrop?’

  I didn’t know who she was with. I reckoned Bob and Eddie must have known, but they got off the subject so fast in Naples that I never discovered, and I didn’t choose to ask anyone else afterwards. I didn’t know that Johnson had asked them. I didn’t know how much he knew about Sophia Lindrop when he asked me so disarmingly that night to tell him about her. He was looking at her now, admiration printed all over his face around the bifocals, while Innes asked his gentlemanly question and Sophia opened her lips to reply to him.

  Johnson forestalled her. ‘Miss Lindrop is with the Finnish Observatory. The Finnish Observatory on Capri, isn’t that so?’

  I could feel veins standing out all over my eyeballs. Capri. We had to be in Capri on Monday. And so, it appeared, had Sophia. Sophia, who had been made out of tungsten steel in a doll factory. ‘You may not be so pre-Columbian in bed, darling,’ had said Charles to me, ‘but my God, at least you’re human.’

  So Sophia, who used to be engaged to Charles, was working on Capri, where the fourth and last meeting arranged by the late Mr Paladrini was to have been held. And Sophia, according to Bob and Eddie, had been meeting Charles a fortnight previously in Naples. And Johnson, the rat, had said nothing to me.

  I glared at him and he said to Sophia, without ever glancing in my direction, ‘We’re sailing for Capri on Sunday. Maybe we’ll see you there.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Sophia. ‘But you will be on holiday and I shall be working. It is possible, you know, for a woman to be serious about her career.’

  This aimed at me. She had a dimple in her chin and she took size 34C-cup brassieres when she wore brassieres. I knew because I found one in the laundry the week after Charles and I first shacked up together. Johnson stood there in his wrinkled bags with a hank of string hanging out of one pocket and his pipe bulging out of the other and said winningly, ‘But there should, I hope, at least be time for a drink?’

  ‘Of course there will,’ said Professor Hathaway heartily. I let her get on with finding out how Sophia was spending her weekend and dropped down beside Diana, who had flopped to the horizontal again and was being oiled with some enthusiasm by Jacko. The fact that she was watching Johnson all the time under her lashes escaped Jacko but not, I thought, either Sophia or Johnson, who was getting on like a house on fire with Sophia now I wasn’t there. I hoped his interest was professional but it was a weak hope. Sophia deciding to move in on somebody was a sight worth selling tickets for.

  Jacko went on oiling Di’s sun-kissed areas and asking leading questions about the frolic on Lipari, which was probably still going on but without Sappho, which had sailed empty with her working skipper and Di down to Taormina, passing us while we were tied up in Messina. I was making my contribution to the dialogue and dipping Ambre Solaire on to a Sicilian ant queue when the sudden silence told me that my party had retreated Maurice-ward into the hotel. I got to my knees ready to follow them, and found Sophia standing over me.

  It was an exciting sight. Her two eyelids were arcs of white paint where she was staring down at me, and her lipstick had disappeared altogether, because her mouth was pressed shut so purposefully. Then her lips came apart, blurred, and she said, ‘Your rich friends, your stupid friends, have gone away. And now I will have my property, please.’

  I looked around. ‘Jacko?’ I said.

  ‘Jacko,’ said Di firmly, ‘is out on charter already.’ She was lying on her face and Jacko was still preparing her deftly for fondue. Sophia continued to stare at me without moving. A few people on nearby towels lifted their heads, interested.

  ‘Charles?’ I ventured.

  ‘I have him already,’ said Sophia. ‘Whenever I want him. I am talking of that.’

  It was getting interesting, if a trifle public. Di heaved around to look and even Jacko glanced up from his brave massage. Sophia was pointing to my left hand.

  I looked at it, and so did Jacko and Diana. It was ringless. Part of the row Charles and I had had in Velterra had been over the fact that I won’t accept any rings from him. Our blank faces maddened Sophia.

  ‘That!’ she said, raising her voice considerably, and bending, seized my wrist and jerked my watch strap painfully forward.

  It didn’t come far, being a man’s leather strap and firmly buckled. I hauled my wrist back and gazed at Diana. Diana lifted her eyebrows, shrugged and flopped down again, abdicating. ‘Christ!’ I said incredulously, chafing my wrist, and then, as more heads began to turn in our direction, lowered my voice. I said to Sophia, ‘Come on. Sit down. It isn’t a play group. I’m wearing Charles’s watch and you want it. Is that it?’

  She didn’t sit down. Nor did she lower her voice. ‘I not only want it, I am having it. Together with anything else I have paid for that Charles has given you. Why do you need it?’ Sophia said. ‘Charles is in prison and your new lover is richer. Ask him for a wristwatch. I want mine back.’

  ‘Listen! Pipe down!’ said Jacko. He rose to his feet, a reasonable male, dealing reasonably with an unpleasant occurrence. ‘O.K., she’s got Charles’s watch on but you can’t demand it back and expect to get it, just like that. If you want to talk about it, for the Lord’s sake go inside.’

  The white-lidded eyes barely glanced at him. ‘Is it your affair?’ said Sophia Lindrop. ‘If you are frightened, run after your party.’ She said coolly to me, ‘Do you wish me to show you the invoice?’

  ‘Do you keep them?’ I said, fascinated. ‘Sophia, do you want it back for the money, or are you really still sold on Charles? He won’t come back. He really won’t.’ I was thinking of all the other things he had told me about her. I hadn’t forgotten the so-called meeting in Naples. But I was becoming surer and surer how it had happened.

  ‘Won’t come back?’ said Sophia, and smiled. She smiled all around, at Jacko and Diana and even had a little to spare for the audience. ‘He is back, darling Ruth. Didn’t you know? Where do you think he goes, when he must fly to those assignments in Livorno and Firenze? He goes there, yes, of course. You know it; you see the photographs. But he does not show you the photographs of what we do when we meet – in Capri, in Naples, in Ischia. I gave him that watch after the first twenty-four hours we spent together, and you will not have it, you stupid horse.’

  ‘Look here!’ Jacko said angrily. He turned to me. ‘Ruth, go in. There’s no need for you to listen to this.’

  It was good advice. I got off my knees, straightening my shift and trying to hang on to my dignity. I said quickly, ‘Look. If the watch means something special, Sophia, I’m sorry. But Charles only lent it to me, because the glass of my own one got broken. I’ll tell him you’re worried about it. You can ask him yourself for the thing, when they spring him. But I can’t hand over someone’s property to you, not just like that. No one would. Leave it, and we’ll sort it out later.’

  I was proud of that speech. I had the feeling that the whole sunbathing piazza was proud of it also. It came to Sophia that she had lost the sympathy of her audience. She took one step towards me and at the look in her eye, I retreated. Then I remembered the pool and stepped sideways beside Di’s gungy flask of sun lotion.

  Di stretched out a languid arm to protect it just as Sophia rushed forward. Sophia’s shins and Di’s forearm collided and Sophia hurtled on, straight for the water.

  Di and Jacko and I watched her disappear, head first, in her smart swimsuit. Then I went in to find Maurice’s suite and join the rest of my party. I don’t know when I’ve felt more justifiably cheerful.

  The parting was so sudden

  We often wonder why

  But the saddest part of all, dear,
/>   You never said goodbye.

  We dined that evening with Maurice and Timothy, by which time Di and Jacko had spread the glad tidings and Maurice, who liked little Finnish birds in his entourage as well as great helpings of portrait artists and astronomers, was clearly devising how to maintain his offer of a sail north for Sophia without putting out Di or the rest of us.

  He needn’t have worried. Di’s greatest enemy was boredom. She had already let herself be used by Sophia as a means of an introduction to Maurice. There was nothing Di would enjoy more than a couple of days pumping Sophia about her love life.

  And so long as Sophia was on Sappho, I can’t say I minded all that much now either. I had been worried about Sophia before I met her, but I wasn’t worried now – not in the slightest. If I am sure of my boyfriend, I don’t make dramas over possessing mementos. I had Charles. I didn’t care if she had his bloody wristwatch or not. But until Charles said she could have it, I wasn’t handing it over.

  We had a sparkling evening during which Maurice received fifteen people at his table and was photographed twice. We didn’t even glimpse my late colleague, Sophia.

  I cornered Johnson on the way downstairs to the rubber dinghy and he confessed that he had known she worked in Capri but hadn’t told me in case I jumped to conclusions. ‘If it pleases you to know it,’ said Johnson, ‘I have had her investigated. Her career is impeccable; her life is an open book. It would be interesting to know however whether Sophia or Charles arranged that meeting in Naples—’

  ‘Wasn’t it obvious?’ I asked sarcastically. Dolly and Lenny had been in Naples while Charles was there. Watching, I made no doubt, his every movement.

  Johnson was unperturbed. ‘All that was obvious was that they met by prearrangement. It was a short meeting, in the bar of the hotel where Charles had been visiting a client in connection with a photographic assignment. They separated half an hour later. Much of the time, I am told, they seemed to be arguing.’ We had emerged from the hotel and were walking down the tiled steps past the swimming pool. ‘I notice,’ said Johnson, ‘that the situation doesn’t disturb you. Do you think therefore that Sophia sought that meeting? Is she still in love with him?’

  I said, ‘I don’t think she’s in love with anybody. I think she wants him back because her pride is hurt.’ I thought and – since there didn’t seem any point, as Di would have said, about being coy over it – I added, ‘According to Charles, she is very Scandinavian in bed.’

  ‘And Finnish-type partners are hard to come by? I shouldn’t have thought she had far to look, on Capri. I should tell you,’ said Johnson, ‘that the Rome police have not yet been told about Sophia. We know she works on Capri. We know that Mr Paladrini was arranging for some exchange of what was possibly classified information on the twentieth in San Michele, Capri. We know Sophia has been meeting Charles. But we also know that from the outset Charles’s movements have been made to look suspicious. Sophia is scornful of Charles in jail on a gambling charge. How would she react to Charles in jail for something more serious? Would that salve her pride?’

  This was playing the field with a vengeance. I stared at him. Below, Lenny had brought the dinghy to the water’s edge and was steadying it, while I could hear Innes and Jacko and Professor Hathaway stepping out of the lift doors above us. Di was sleeping, or something, in the hotel.

  ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘is Sophia framing Charles somehow? I don’t know. She’s certainly inviting publicity: that little scene by the swimming pool will have flown all over Taormina by this time. The payoff, I suppose, would be Charles turning up at San Michele, all set apparently for the appointment. You’ve saved him from that, anyway.’

  For the first time, I was grateful that the Rome police had put Charles in clink and Johnson hadn’t done anything to rescue him. He had wanted ten days, Johnson said, to back his fancy. Six of the ten days had gone, and with Charles still in jail the yacht had been searched and I had been attacked and searched also. We had not, as we had hoped, surprised two of Mr Paladrini’s clients in the act of trading secrets but the more I thought about that, the more it surprised me that, without time and place, Johnson ever thought we should.

  Capri, of course, was another matter. San Michele meant the most famous villa on Capri, now a monument and a museum. And 1500 meant 3 p.m. One was still left wondering who, after all the police intervention after Mr Paladrini’s death, would be fool enough to meet there.

  Unless they had no alternative. Unless they had been advised well in advance and didn’t even know Mr Paladrini’s death had a bearing on the matter. Unless someone trying to frame Charles had invented the whole rendezvous with the intention of enticing Charles there from Naples, and then blowing the whole thing to the police.

  But you would have to be very deeply involved yourself, and very scared, to need to unload the blame like that on an innocent person. And Sophia’s life, Johnson had just said, was blameless. Nothing might now happen on Capri, which would be a pity. For everything that happened, every act of violence, every interference with us or our liberty, was a step towards finding the truth and freeing Charles.

  And that was a laugh. For the next act of violence did neither. It happened the next day in Taormina, the old, picturesque town on the mountain behind us.

  I explored Taormina with Innes and Professor Hathaway, having swooped up the hillside by cable car. We saw Johnson once through the arch of the clock tower and again hopping down one of the little steep streets with pink houses and wrought-iron balconies and coloured shutters and great earthenware pots of cacti and flowers and creepers streaming everywhere. Every time we came out of another old church we spotted Di going into another boutique, generally with Jacko protesting behind her. She was got up as Ariadne with a long floating caftan thing trailing behind her and dark glasses, which would have blown Theseus and made even Bacchus think twice, I shouldn’t wonder.

  Maurice and Timothy were easiest of all to find. They spent the day sitting on the paved edge of the Corso Umberto having coffee and diet pills and being universally admired. It wasn’t that the place was full of raven-haired bandits. In fact, there seemed no middle course between fat Sicilians with black berets and boleros and lissom Sicilians in long sprigged shirts and shrink-wrapped trousers who smiled at Timothy.

  Timothy, who was used to his reputation having preceded him, sat very correctly in his chair beside Maurice and played with a long, thin gold-plated ballpoint from Gucci which Maurice had given him for his birthday. The boys’ eyes followed it to such purpose that a kind of Inner Ring Road developed in the region and they had to rise periodically and change stations. At two o’clock, by prior arrangement, we all met to allow Professor Hathaway to feed us, which took, agreeably, most of the afternoon. At the end of it, Maurice announced that we were all going to the ruined Greek theatre.

  When Maurice mentions the word theatre, no one contradicts him. We all, dammit, went.

  The ruined theatre crowns the ridge at Taormina and commands, I suppose, one of the six most beautiful views in the world. No one told me. I plugged up a road behind Timothy. All the shops were selling Greek masks and Maurice walked past them with grace, faintly smiling. No one recognized him. At the top we paid at a ticket office and filed through a boulder-strewn yard to the monument. Bits of building loomed over us, patched together from thin, oblong red Roman bricks and dove-grey Greek marble. With all his Player King instincts Maurice plunged through a high arching hall lined with fragments of marble which proved to be the fastest way on to the stage.

  I was about to follow him when I noticed Johnson. With Professor Hathaway and Innes in close attendance, he had turned away from the arch and was climbing the steep flight of steps to the amphitheatre. I cast a glance after Maurice, who was swimming gently along with Di on one side and Jacko on the other, while Timothy ran with little cries from sculpture to sculpture. Then I too turned, and climbed the wide, shallow steps leading upward.

  We had, of course, like dried-out
alcoholics, become overconfident. Nothing had happened to us since Ischia. Lipari had been devoid of incident, unless you counted my involuntary swim. Taormina so far had been equally devoid of incident, unless you counted Sophia’s involuntary swim. From the top of an ancient Greek amphitheatre, at least none of us could fall into water.

  So no one stopped me when I hopped up the steps after Johnson, although at the top Johnson and his little party were nowhere to be seen, and I came to a dead halt myself from simple astonishment.

  I had stepped from the stairs onto the outer rim of the shelving amphitheatre, which plunged down to the ruined orchestra where I could see Maurice and his three companions picking their way, small among the blocks of pale grey and red fallen marble. Behind them towered the crumbling arches and walls of the scaena, the cracked white Corinthian columns shining against the wooded slopes of the mountains, spiked with poplars and dark green with orange groves, dropping through village and town to the scalloped blue rim of the sea. There was no horizon. Sea and sky met in a china blue haze in the sunshine and behind it all, glittering and magical, rose the snow-covered cone of Mount Etna.

  A bloody, stupid voice somewhere said, ‘You will now give me that watch.’

  I don’t think I was even frightened. I had been wrenched away from a private experience and I was angry. Irritated, exasperated, and this time, unforgiving. I looked about me.

  The terrace on which I stood was empty, and so were all the wooden benches below me. Farther down, the original marble seats were still there, the Greek names of their owners carved on the backs. Farther down still, on the municipal stage which filled part of the orchestra, Maurice had raised his stick and appeared to be lecturing. Everything he said floated with terrible clarity to where I was standing and beyond. He had just begun to realize this, and, as I stood there, tossed off a couple of accurate epigrams and a clerihew. The voice said, ‘My watch.’