There was an awed silence. ‘Intercourse with Italians?’ said Timothy.
‘Which Di bought at the Fall Fair from Mr Paladrini,’ I said. ‘Di. Of course. But Innes, you left.’
‘I left,’ said Innes with dignity, ‘in order to follow Diana in due course unobserved and witness what happened to the Baedeker.’
‘Which you might have done,’ said Johnson understandingly, ‘if . . .’
‘If Diana hadn’t given him the Organizer’s crocodile handbag,’ I said. I looked at Charles and then remembered he hadn’t been at the Fall Fair and collected instead Johnson’s modified approbation. ‘So he was pushed down the steps and . . .’
‘And drugged,’ said Innes coldly, ‘by Mr Harrogate.’
Timothy looked contrite. Maurice said, ‘By Timothy? What with? Timothy, I will not have you white-slaving in Italy.’
I said, ‘With Jungle After Shave, the Essence for Men Born to Conquer. Timothy didn’t mean any harm. Truly. But, of course, it allowed Di to get the message out of the Baedeker.’ Light broke upon me. ‘Innes! You dragged that Baedeker all through Ischia and Taormina. It doesn’t go any further south than Central Italy.’
‘I had a theory,’ said Innes coldly. ‘It proved wrong. I’ve already told you. I deeply regret what occurred in Ischia.’
Professor Hathaway sat up abruptly. ‘You are not referring to the fish tank?’
‘He is referring,’ I said, ‘to the two thugs he set on me at the Aragonese Castle. You thought I had the film from Maurice’s vase, didn’t you, Innes? Or was it even the contents of the Baedeker? At any rate, you paid these two characters to search me and they did rather more than you bargained for.’ I had been nursing, since I realized that, a rather endearing vision of Innes getting drunk on the strength of it.
Charles said, ‘Wait a minute. Innes, was it you who searched all our belongings? By God . . .’
His face, during the account of the attack in the Aragonese Castle, had been growing blacker and blacker, but at least he wasn’t smoking. Innes said, through a mild fog of tobacco ash, ‘Naturally, I was interested to see who had stolen the film. I searched the vase for the film as soon as I woke up and heard what had happened—’
‘I remember,’ said Maurice blandly. ‘You called to ask me to explain a line in Act Two of The Willowhunters.’
‘—And it had gone,’ said Innes stiffly.
‘Di,’ I said. ‘I suppose. Did she come and visit you, Maurice?’ I had a vision of Di next morning at Renati’s, drifting over and embracing Johnson. And another, too late, of something Johnson had told me already, in the Hotel Quirinale one evening.
‘She always comes to see me in the morning,’ said Maurice. ‘Came,’ he corrected himself. For a moment, as he studied the end of his cigar, his expression was less than regal. Then he looked up and drawled, his voice bright with malice, ‘So they tricked you, dear boy, into going to the balloon seller’s flat? How you must have surprised Di with your Dardick.’
‘I suppose I did,’ Innes said. He sounded undeniably sulky. ‘It was, of course, merely a device to throw suspicion on someone else. They did not know who I was at that time.’
‘More fool they,’ Johnson said. Under the glasses, his bruises were turning crimson and purple, but his pipe continued to burn with even placidity, and you would almost have said he was enjoying it. ‘Of course, after all the fun in the Corso and the photographing of Mr Paladrini they couldn’t afford to let him live. They killed him and faked the suicide note, and cleared the flat in a hell of a hurry. In so much hurry that they missed the fish with the Capri date on it. Then Di or a friend switched the gas cylinders. It was easy. Ruth was off duty after midnight on the Wednesday.’
I thought of Di switching the gas cylinders and then tried not to think of it. I said, ‘They forgot something else. They forgot the list you found, with the dates in Ischia and Lipari and Taormina.’
‘Ah,’ said Professor Hathaway. ‘Now I find this of extreme interest. You have just mentioned the route followed by Dolly?’
Johnson didn’t say anything nor did he look at me. I looked at Charles. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well. We didn’t tell you. But there was a timetable in Mr Paladrini’s flat which implied that the Capri date was the last of a whole series of meetings. Johnson thought we ought to pursue it. But nothing happened.’
Professor Hathaway said, ‘I wonder why nothing happened?’
‘Because I faked the list,’ replied Johnson mildly. He cleared a space in the smoke with his hand and looked with some concern at Innes, who had doubled up, sneezing and coughing. I said, ‘I think after the gas . . .’
‘Dear me. Of course, how thoughtless,’ Maurice said smoothly.
‘Johnson, put out your furnace. Do I understand the whole cruise on Dolly was a whimsy? Not that I am complaining. Your company and that of your friends was delightful. But the Tyrrhenian Sea in November . . . You have not been kind to Jacko.’
Nobody had been kind to Jacko. I think it was the first time it struck me, so self-centred had I become, that the person who must be suffering most from all this was Jacko. Retired in his chair, silent against the twitching wall panel, he had spoken to no one since he kissed me. It didn’t need much effort of the imagination to know what he must be feeling. He had loved Diana. Really loved her. And she had merely employed him.
‘I apologize,’ Johnson said, ‘to Jacko and to anyone else who may have regretted the voyage. But I did have a purpose, and that was to transport anyone who showed signs of wishing to attend the only assignation on that cruise which was genuine. The meeting in the San Michele Villa on Capri.’
‘Which I attended?’ said Maurice richly. ‘Timothy, you are being parsimonious with the brandy. I wish to mark the occasion when I outguessed a member – you are a member, I understand? – of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.’ He drew on his cigar and then, resting his smoking hand on the chair arm, smiled at us all with that fine actor’s smile, unchanging, timeless and triumphant.
‘You argued,’ he said, ‘rightly – let us give you all credit, with perspicacity – that no one in our presence would attend such a meeting. You argued that all the persons you suspected had, however, an excuse to pay one visit at least to the villa. So, you argued, the person with information to sell might quite possibly leave a message for the person intending to buy it. Hence your appearance with dear Ruth in advance of your party. Only it happened . . . It happened to those of us with experience of life, that another possibility presented itself.’
‘What?’ said Jacko baldly. Maurice cast him a look of melancholy dislike.
‘Human nature,’ he said, ‘is the dramatist’s business. One rounds one’s characters. One studies how they should behave. I felt Sophia Lindrop was behaving . . .’ He hesitated. ‘. . . theatrically.’
‘So?’ said Charles. I remembered he had been engaged to Sophia, and the things she had said to him on the quay, leaving Sappho.
‘So I followed her,’ said Maurice mildly, ‘to the barber’s. She was having her hair done in the feminine quarters. She didn’t see me, but it was quite possible to watch what she was doing. And that, of course, was talking to Diana Minicucci.’
‘They were friends,’ Professor Hathaway said. ‘At least—’
‘At least,’ I said, ‘Di appeared to put up with her, but most certainly gave her a ducking in Taormina. It put me off the scent, I can tell you. Maurice, what were they talking about?’
‘Now that,’ said Maurice regretfully, ‘I couldn’t tell you. But I can say the subject was distasteful. Sophia was plainly angry and Diana, after listening, became angry as well. In addition, something was passed to Diana. She studied it for a moment, and then tore it up. I was interested,’ said Maurice calmly, ‘and my barber was kind enough to save me the fragments. You saw them. A small piece of film of no significance.’
The pebble glasses of Professor Hathaway were trained on the pink face of Maurice. ‘Hence the anger,’ said Lilian Hathawa
y slowly. ‘But Sophia and Diana expected something different. What? There can be only one answer. The material which was concealed in the Baedeker.’
Charles said, ‘Or Ruth’s roll of film. It had disappeared, remember. Innes was looking for it. And Ruth, sweetie, you’re a hell of a liar. Even Johnson knew bloody well you hadn’t burned it.’
‘No,’ said Professor Hathaway. ‘That was a roll of film. This was a single negative. Large enough, when shot on an eight-millimetre camera, to encompass several pages of manuscript. And small enough to slip within the binding of a Baedeker.’ She turned her lean, adenoidal face upon Johnson, and Johnson, lying back, met her regard without flinching. ‘What Sophia had obtained was not what she had expected. Who, then, had substituted one film for the other?’
The electric fibres on the wall panel shivered. The used coffee cups littered the tables, between the skyphoi and the kylikes and the psykters. The tobacco smoke, lightly veiling the ridgepole, dropped again like Jupiter’s shower in search of a virgin. Johnson, rolling slowly to starboard, produced from one hip a small square of dark gelatin. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘This was what they all wanted.’
Even Maurice, I recall, straightened like an elderly spring and sat bolt upright, his cigar charring the bedcover. The rest of us stood up, jumped, or, like Charles and me, merely craned forward. ‘What?’ Innes said. Below the pale hair and the bruises his eyes were shining like dome screw covers. ‘What is it? Have you seen an enlargement?’
‘Yes,’ said Johnson. He sat back as he had done all along, his pipe in one hand, and held the film like a fag in the other. ‘You have to see it through an enlarger. That’s why Sophia didn’t know she had the wrong thing until she got it into the Capri Observatory. This is the stuff Innes was after. The leaked data from the Parassio Institute.’
‘That?’ said Charles disbelievingly through my hair. In the heat from the tall marble fireplace his arm around me had sealed itself to my cardigan. Where we had been two, we were one. Where we had been at odds, we were at peace.
‘Yes, that,’ said Johnson lightly. ‘You’re a photographer. You know how much they can cram on to one frame of movie film. Look.’ He held it up to the light. ‘You can see the pages on it. Like miniature postage stamps.’
‘May I see?’ said Charles, and, loosing me, crossed stiffly to Johnson. Bending, he took the film and held it, in his turn, against the light.
‘You can’t distinguish it,’ Johnson explained patiently. ‘To do that, you need an enlarger.’
‘I know,’ said Charles, and taking his hand from the lamplight he walked across to the fire and dropped the film, steadily and defiantly, into the flames.
Innes gripped his wrist as it fell. A second later Jacko, crying aloud, was on his knees beside him. I heard Maurice grunt and Timothy gasp and saw Professor Hathaway, the pouches deepening under her eyes, clasp her hands on the arms of the chair till the knuckles stood out like plaster beading.
As the film frizzled into gas, I sat and watched it and, unlike the others, had no impulse to move. Nor did Johnson.
Charles said, ‘I couldn’t let you. It’s the only evidence that Sophia was mixed up in it. I was engaged to her once.’ He looked as if he hadn’t had any stuffed pork in Parassio, or any food at all for a very long time.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Johnson said. Unlike the others he hadn’t even flushed with excitement: on his dark skin his bruises stood out like shadow cretonne on a chesterfield. Charles looked at him, and then at me, his mouth wry, his eyes appealing. He said, ‘She was a silly little cow. Always listened to the wrong people. I take it you will want to arrest both of us now.’
‘Should we?’ said Johnson.
Charles straightened and Innes released him. Jacko got up. Timothy, his kind face puzzled, was looking from Charles to Johnson and then, appealingly, back to Johnson again. Charles said, his voice tired and level and very final, ‘I had nothing to do with it. I suppose Sophia had. But what it was, she never told me.’
‘Then you have nothing to fear, have you?’ said Johnson with equal gentleness. Charles looked at me and dropped suddenly on the arm of my chair.
‘Poor dear,’ said Timothy, who had begun pouring out brandies. I saw Innes looking at the time. Maurice followed his glance and said, rather accusingly, to Johnson, ‘Aren’t you arresting anybody?’
‘Who would you suggest?’ said Johnson. His pipe, between his teeth, was giving him trouble. I recalled that, until pushed, Maurice had kept his counsel about the complicity of Di and Sophia with all the chivalry due to his station. But Lenny had gone after Di with his blessing, and I felt sure the wires from Naples to the British Embassy, one way or another, had been humming.
‘Well, there are a few little questions,’ said Maurice. Professor Hathaway glanced at the circling eyes of the blackamoor clock and took a brandy; Charles and Jacko were already sipping theirs. ‘Such as, where did Sophia find the negative she showed with such disgust to Diana on Capri?’
‘Surely you guessed that,’ said Johnson. He finished drawing his bonfire with a matchbox, laid the box down, took the pipe out of his mouth and said, staring into the bowl, ‘Of course, it was in Ruth’s borrowed wristwatch.’
I could feel, around my shoulders, Charles’s arm slacken with astonishment. The veil of smoke lifted as a number of people breathed heavily into it and then dropped again. Innes said, ‘Of course. Ruth’s wristwatch, which you made her give Sophia. Presumably,’ he added crossly, ‘you had already substituted a worthless film for the Parassio one?’
‘On the journey to Lipari. Professor Hathaway kindly gave Ruth phenobarbitone in the course of the evening. You tried to take her watch yourself just before breakfast, you may remember. Not to mention . . . Innes,’ said Johnson severely, ‘I did take exception to your making the poor girl swim about in her evening dress.’
‘It was Di who shouldered me in,’ I said rather colourlessly. They had all wanted the watch. I hadn’t quite realized it at the time. I hadn’t realized it until Sophia snatched at my wrist by the swimming pool.
Maurice said, ‘How fascinating it all is. Have I grasped it? At the Fall Fair, Diana receives the nuclear film in the Baedeker. It is then placed in Ruth’s wristwatch from which Innes, Di and Sophia successively attempt to remove it, not knowing that Johnson has already done so. The intention, one might suppose, was that Ruth should deliver the film to some other party, presumably in the Villa San Michele at three p.m. yesterday. But Ruth, poor dear, does not appear to know she is to deliver the watch to anybody, or that the contents of the watch have been tampered with. On the contrary, she goes so far as to allow Sophia to sink her teeth into her ear, an episode of unforgettable pageantry, in order to protect it. Therefore Ruth is an unwitting courier. Who, I wonder, was the Institute’s nuclear film intended for?’
‘Sophia, of course. Don’t be so script-minded, Maurice,’ said Professor Hathaway. ‘She ought to have had it, no doubt, the weekend Ruth and Jacko were to have spent down in Naples; I expect the San Michele rendezvous on the twentieth was a holding date, in case anything went wrong. In fact Sophia went into action, as we know, long before the twentieth.’
‘Premise accepted,’ said Maurice blandly. ‘Then, second question. Who placed the nuclear film in Ruth’s borrowed wristwatch?’
Charles took his arm from behind me and put his brandy glass down. His hand, I noticed, was perfectly steady. ‘The film wasn’t put into Ruth’s watch,’ he said. ‘It was put into the watch while I still had it.’ He turned to me. ‘I told you I saw Sophia in Naples? And that she wanted her presents returned?’
I nodded.
Charles said, ‘I made up my mind to take them. She knew I was coming with you and Jacko to visit the hill post that Saturday. I knew I should be able to find her, either in Naples or in Capri. Ruth, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but there was no point in dragging it all up. I was on my way to finish with her, and I’d never have seen her again. So on Friday I put on the watch, t
o take it to Naples.’
‘The Friday you were arrested,’ said Johnson.
‘Yes. Then Ruth discovered hers was cracked and, God help me, I gave her Sophia’s to put on. I remember getting a kick out of it. Through no fault of mine, I wasn’t going to have to see Sophia again. And instead of going back to Sophia, my girl was wearing her bloody timepiece.’
His voice split and he drank some brandy quickly. Innes said, lucidly, ‘Then when and by whom do you consider the nuclear negative was inserted?’
‘By Di,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve worked it out. While we were with the police after the balloon cart business on the Thursday, Di left Rome and went back to Jacko. The watch was in my digs. There was nothing to stop her from opening it.’
Everyone except Maurice and Professor Hathaway looked at Jacko, who blushed and went a shadowy white behind his moustache. He said, ‘That could be right. I don’t know when she actually got back from Rome. I was out having a bite to eat when she said she rang me. She came around to the Dome a bit later.’
‘For a photographic session?’ asked Professor Hathaway.
There was a lurid silence during which the disinterment of criminal nastinesses was replaced by the auguries of professional disaster. Jacko thought deeply, rapidly and wistfully and answered, ‘Yes.’
‘Ah. Of Diana, in various traditional attitudes,’ said Professor Hathaway, gazing at him through the pebble spectacles with the mesmeric firmness of one about to pin back the ears of a multitude. ‘Of course,’ said the Director of the Trust, glancing to the wan form slumped in thought on her left, ‘Doctor Wye had torn up all your pictures.’
I wondered through what grapevine she had learned that, and decided it was probably Johnson. Recollections of Poppy, smothered in Johnson’s three-ply Geelong underwear made me reach, in a sophisticated way, for Charles’s nearest hand. He let me take it then squeezed mine, at intervals, in between allowing Timothy to give him more brandy. Professor Hathaway said, ‘You have no idea, James, what a wide audience your studies of Diana have been reaching. Chile. Germany. Pretoria. Egypt. Okayama. Argentina. Zelenchukskaya even; or so I am told. Does it embarrass you?’
Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus Page 27