The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘Unnhh—not—’

  ‘This corpo is…interesting. Eh? The…back, woundings. Eh? Old woundings, what do you say—?’

  ‘Scars?’

  ‘Ecco.’

  ‘He whipped himself.’ Denton pantomimed using a cat-o’-nine-tails on his own back. ‘Flagellation.’

  ‘Ah, flagellante. Eh, d’accordo.’ The doctor tutted and shook the open fingers of his right hand up and down. He gripped Denton’s arm tighter. ‘About the blood. Interesting. I think—’ He cocked his head and frowned. ‘I look some more. Open the—’ He waved his fingers back and forth over his own head.

  ‘Skull.’

  ‘Eh. Lei a ragione. There must be—must was—more blood. Why no blood?’ He let go of Denton’s arm. ‘I do some things. You…come back. Eh? Seven days.’

  Donati came in rubbing his hands together; the doctor stepped away from Denton as if they had been caught planning an assignation. A minute later, Donati and Denton were out in the cold December air.

  ‘That was quite unnecessary.’ Maltby, his eyes red, was scolding Denton. ‘Not only did you take up the time of a Crown official, but you also confused the issue of what we’re about. I shall have no end of explaining to do at the consulate.’

  ‘You could blackball me from the Empire Club. If I’d applied to be a member.’

  ‘Don’t be uncivil, Mr Denton! I don’t let a difference in ages keep me from speaking out. What you did was most objectionable. I’m sure that you artists think us government wallahs stiff-necked, but I find looking at a dead man’s—you know—a display of prurience. I don’t know what I’ll say to my superiors.’ He leaned towards Denton. ‘All Britain is judged by what we do in places like this, and your looking at—you know—invites the worst kind of low laughter.’

  ‘“American Novelist Studies Severed Johnson”. I doubt it’ll make The Times.’

  They were swaying along the Via Toledo in their carriage again. Donati, sitting next to Maltby and across from Denton, laughed. ‘Where did you learn that very interesting bit of Italian, Mr Denton?’

  ‘Cazzo?’

  Donati nudged Maltby. ‘Mr Denton uses a vulgar term for the male organ.’

  Maltby set his jaw.

  ‘Va fan’ cula,’ Denton muttered. Donati roared. The driver coughed and might have been trying to cover a laugh.

  ‘I suppose that was meant for me,’ Maltby said, ‘and is also some sort of Italian vulgarism. I’m happy to say I’ve no idea what it means.’

  They rode in silence. The air was cold, thin winter sunlight casting unsure shadows on the pavements. The street was crowded with horse-drawn trams and carriages; on the pavements, middle-class men and women moved with what seemed to be purpose, while hawkers moved along more slowly—young women with silk flowers; men with cheap coral jewellery, probably the apprentice work of the coral factories; sandwich men with advertising boards; presepe sellers with trays of figures, animals, moss and stones and barked sticks for making the manger; here and there a breadman with breads and rolls carried head high on a board; girls with bits of lace and ribbon—many of them calling out or singing. It was both a spectacle and a symphony—but one given its downbeat by that harsh conductor, poverty.

  ‘The young ladies are very pretty,’ Donati said. He chuckled. ‘Until they reach five and twenty.’

  ‘Use a bath, most of them,’ Maltby said.

  ‘Ah, well, my friend, after all, it is the South.’

  They turned at Piazza Dante, a vast square with an impressive colonnade around the far side; after several small streets, each meaner than the one before, the people shabbier and their numbers greater—Denton was trying to recognise landmarks from the night before and failing—they stopped and the driver pointed with his whip and said, ‘Palazzo Minerva.’

  Denton wouldn’t have recognised it. The sense of distance was different in the daylight: the gateway and the courtyard beyond it looked smaller, scruffier. However, the same rat-like portiere now appeared and, when he saw Denton, nodded like a Chinese doll, not stopping until Donati said crisply, ‘Carabinieri. Le chiave al Palazzo Minerva!’ He stepped down and put out a hand, not even bothering to look at the portiere. Denton followed, then Maltby; by then, Donati had the keys and was saying something brusque to the little man, who shrank back into his lodge.

  Maltby looked around; he put his head back and turned a complete circle, holding his hat on with one hand. ‘Damned slum,’ he muttered. ‘Peer of the realm, living in a place like this.’

  ‘Naples,’ Donati said. ‘The great families sink or die out; their palaces become like the nests of ants—five to a room, ten to a room! The poor of Naples are like rats, waiting to run in and out.’ He had led them to the big door of the Palazzo Minerva. He looked up to read the hand-painted sign. ‘What is the brotherhood of Santo Simeone Stilites?’

  ‘Roman Catholic,’ Maltby offered.

  ‘Without doubt.’ Donati laughed. ‘This is Italy, after all.’ He smiled. ‘Barely.’

  Denton, who had actually read Gibbon, said, ‘Saint Simeon Stylites was an early hermit. Lived on a pillar, I think. Bowed all the time.’

  Maltby snorted. Donati said, ‘I hope we do not find that Lord Easleigh bowed himself to death.’ He opened the door.

  The entrance hall seemed hardly less dark than it had the night before; the windows were shuttered, and Denton’s eyes were accustomed to the brighter outside light. He saw for the first time, however, that the room was hardly furnished, the floor bare except for a trail of dirt left by the police and the gawkers. He pointed ahead and they stepped into the palazzo’s central hall, the two-storey space down whose staircase Fra Geraldo had plunged. Denton gestured at the stairs, then went ahead and showed the other two precisely where he had found the old man’s body. He sketched briefly what the first policeman had done, rearranging the legs and hiding the groin.

  ‘Quite right, too,’ Maltby said.

  ‘Bad police procedure,’ Donati murmured.

  ‘But absolutely justified,’ Maltby replied. ‘Admirable to find that sort of tactfulness in an other-ranks. The first bright spot I’ve seen in this sad affair.’

  ‘No blood on the stairs,’ Denton said.

  ‘No, no, ’course not.’ Maltby, like a tourist being shown the spot Where Our Gallant Captain Fell, had made short work of staring at a couple of boards. ‘Anything else we need to see?’

  ‘No blood?’ Donati said. ‘You expected blood on the stairs, too, Mr Denton?’

  ‘If I fell down a flight of stairs hard enough to break my neck, I’d expect to leave some blood behind.’

  ‘Ah. Hmm. Inevitably?’

  Denton mentioned the contusion on the old man’s forehead. Donati put his hands behind his back and went slowly up the stairs and down again, staring at the treads. ‘The broom was where?’

  Before Denton could answer, Maltby said, ‘Now see here.’ They looked at him. ‘I’ve important work waiting for me at the consulate. If we’re through here, I must move along. Seems quite straightforward to me, exactly as the local police made it. He was old; he took a wrong step; down he came. Finito. Medical boffin at the morgue bears it out—broken neck.’

  ‘You don’t want to see his rooms?’ Donati said. ‘Interview the other monks—?’

  ‘There are no other monks,’ Denton said. ‘I think that’s an invention.’

  ‘He wasn’t a real monk?’

  ‘You’d have to ask the Church.’

  Maltby said rather angrily, ‘He was a member of the Church of England! It’s neither here nor there what the monk stuff meant. My charge is to confirm the police report and get on with the Crown’s business.’

  Donati, one step above him, removed his eyeglasses and stared down. ‘Inventing his own brotherhood might be interpreted as a sign of questionable sanity.’

  ‘His sanity wasn’t in my charge.’

  ‘No question of inheritance—being of right mind, et cetera, et cetera—?’

  ‘I
don’t know anything about that. That would be for his heirs, surely. Not His Majesty’s responsibility. Leave that for the lawyers, if it’s ever an issue.’ He pulled a watch from his waistcoat. ‘I really must go!’

  ‘Then take the carriage, friend Maltby. We shall find another.’ Donati counted out some soldi. ‘The Italian share of the carriage ride.’ He held it out.

  Maltby was perplexed. The protocol of transportation costs hadn’t been taught him. He grappled with some inner anguish, at last said that he’d pay it himself, and rushed out. Donati smiled at Denton. ‘I daresay he would be happier in Africa, ordering black men about. Of course, he is very young.’

  Denton went back to explaining about the blood, the injury, the false notion of ‘instant death’. Donati, however, twisted the end of his moustache and lamented ‘the lack of evidence to the contrary’. He stared at the spot where Fra Geraldo had lain. ‘Evidence, evidence…’ He raised his head. ‘You are saying foul play?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything.’

  Donati prowled about the hall, now and then saying, ‘Mmmm,’ and staring into unswept, dark corners as if evidence might have washed up there. He opened the doors of an armoire, found it empty, pulled out the drawers of a sideboard, found them the same. ‘The brotherhood of Santo Simeone were not very clean,’ he said. He stood in the centre of the hall and looked up and down, looked at the stairs, looked at the bottom step. ‘I see no evidence,’ he said. ‘Let us look elsewhere.’

  Denton was thinking that his usefulness to Donati was ended; he was also bored. He suggested that he could leave.

  ‘No, no—you are the man on the spot! You are the authority, Mr Denton!’

  ‘You know everything I know.’

  Donati put the tip of a finger just below the left side of Denton’s collarbone. ‘You are the man who found the murderer, Satterlee. You pursued him and you found him and you shot him. You are, signore, very lucky, and perhaps rather clever. I will accept the contribution of either.’

  ‘But isn’t Maltby right? Even with my carping, isn’t the police version probably correct?’

  ‘“Probably”. Yes.’ Donati probed with the end of his stick in the angle where the bottom stair met the floor; when he had got a good purchase, he leaned on the stick. ‘But it is the Nnapulitan’ police, remember. First, they are not all of them very good—some yes, some no. Second, they are not all of them very trustworthy. There is a criminal entity here, the Camorra, who sometimes buy policemen the way other people buy biscotti. A false finding of accidental death would be quite cheap in Napoli, I am sure. And third, as you say, there are questions.’

  ‘But you don’t really think that the old man was connected with some criminal lot, do you?’

  ‘I think nothing. I ask, “What is the evidence?” Just now, I see no evidence. But we have not been exhaustive. Nor have the somewhat pathetic Neapolitan police.’ Donati straightened and lifted the end of the stick to point up the stairs. ‘Let us seek for evidence.’

  Denton shrugged and took it in good grace. There was still time before Janet would be ready to go out to meet the peculiar man, DiNapoli, at the Galleria. She had insisted on going with him. He said, ‘I can give you another fifteen minutes.’

  Donati flashed a smile. ‘Then we shall walk very quickly,’ and he bounded up the steps two at a time, suddenly boyish. Denton came more slowly, and then they strode along the corridor that Denton had walked the night before. They looked into the same rooms, found nothing that Donati seemed to consider evidence. The fish stew or whatever it had been intended to be was still there, starting to go bad. They agreed that it had been a monastery of one, only one room seeming occupied.

  The same was true on the next floor, which they reached by unpiling the furniture that blocked the lowest steps. The storeys above the ground had all been built to the same pattern: a corridor running the width of the house, which was wider than it was deep, with rooms along the rear house wall and, along the front, larger rooms or suites separated by short corridors that each ended in a floor-to-ceiling window. Despite these windows, the main corridor was gloomy.

  Most of the rooms were locked. Donati had the keys, found quickly that one key opened most of the doors, behind which were dust, cobwebs, rotted curtains, and apparently random pieces of furniture set here and there as if they had been merely dropped. They found no sign of recent use, no footprints on the dusty carpets.

  ‘No fingerprints,’ Donati said. ‘I adore fingerprints. I look towards the day when everyone on earth will have his fingerprints taken at birth. Then we shall have evidence!’

  ‘If the theory is correct.’

  ‘Oh, the theory is correct. I have made a study of it.’ Donati was leading the way to another stair upwards. ‘Above will be more of the same; however, we shall be able to say that we examined it.’

  They turned left from the stairs and found more of the same, indeed, minus the furniture, for up there the rooms were small and mostly bare, except for one that had a chair abandoned against a wall. Through their filthy windows, Denton could see over rooftops to the dome of a church, and beyond it the bulk of the hill below the Castel Sant’ Elmo. ‘A good view,’ he said to say something.

  ‘This is where they put the servants and the crazy aunties. The view was their consolation.’ Donati gestured with his stick at a flaking chromo of the Virgin that had survived whatever had emptied the rooms. ‘And of course the Holy Mother. Imagine creeping down all those stairs to eat and creeping back up three times a day because the great ones didn’t want to see you or listen to you. Holy Mother would be a consolation.’

  ‘Imagine creeping down three times a night to piss.’

  They had found primitive WC’s on the lower floors but none up here. Donati led him back to the stairs. ‘I must in fact creep down the stairs for the purpose just mentioned.’ He tittered.

  ‘There’s only four more doors up here.’

  Donati handed over the keys with a smile. ‘My need is urgent.’ He ran down the stairs.

  Denton opened three of the rooms and found nothing more sensational than a dead mouse, its odour long since absorbed into that of the dust. The fourth door resisted the key; this had happened at a couple of other doors, which, for some reason, needed another of the keys from the ring. He tried five before he got the right one, noted that it was brass, not iron, and that it had a good deal of wear. But the opened door showed him nothing any different from all the other rooms, except for an almost ceiling-high armoire that stood to his right. He opened it. It was empty, except for a wood shaving, which he studied and dropped back to where it had been lying. He closed it, went out, closed and locked the door.

  Something was not quite right.

  He opened the door again and looked at the armoire, then leaned out the door and looked along the wall, which ran to the end of the corridor and the outer wall of the house. No window gave him a view: the buildings here stood shoulder to shoulder, held each other up, shared this solid wall.

  He went back to the room and looked in. Something was off about the proportions—

  Donati was shouting from below. ‘Signore Detective, what have you found up there—another corpse?’ Donati’s voice was delighted with the joking use of ‘detective’. His footsteps rang on the bare boards as he ran up the stairs.

  ‘Nothing.’ Denton was annoyed by the mockery of ‘detective’. He held out the keys. ‘See for yourself.’

  Donati curled his upper lip in a bad-smell expression. ‘Now, I am more interested in looking at the primo piano, where so far I have seen only the staircase. Down we go.’ He tripped down, very light on his feet. Denton came more heavily.

  Only four spaces, it turned out, filled the ground floor, the largest a kitchen, the others two storerooms and what had once been perhaps an office. Whatever family life had gone on had been lived on the floors above; down here was, except for the stairway and the anteroom, utilitarian.

  Standing in the huge doorway of the house,
the keys in his hand as he was about to lock up, Donati said, ‘You insist the old man should have bled more?’

  ‘I didn’t insist; I said it was possible. Likely.’

  Donati slammed the door. ‘Detection is based on objectivity. We must not bring preconceptions. You, I believe, want there to have been a crime.’

  ‘The old man told me somebody was trying to kill him.’

  ‘You told the Neapolitan police he said ghosts were trying to kill him.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake—!’

  ‘We must be accurate, Mr Denton.’ Donati put out his hand. ‘We shall not meet again, barring the discovery of some new evidence. I shall not say I am satisfied—only a minute examination of the scene of crime would give us that, and we have not the resource—but I see no reason to return.’ He touched his moustache. ‘Will you share a carriage? No?’

  No prolonged parting followed. Seconds later, Donati was gone and Denton, pausing to make sure he went in a different direction, was on his way to the pensione.

  He said to Janet, ‘Nobody wants it to have been a crime. I don’t want it to be a crime, although that highfalutin ass from the Carabinieri accused me of it. But damn it! It could have been a crime.’

  ‘Is “could have been” worth getting worked up about?’

  He was sprawled in an easy chair, his hands pushed low in his trouser pockets. ‘It gravels me.’

  ‘It’s the old fellow’s “ghosts”, isn’t it.’

  ‘He comes to me and complains he’s being haunted or something, and then he’s dead. Donati says there’s no evidence, and I agree, but all Donati knows is evidence. He doesn’t have…a nose.’

  ‘And you do, and it smells evil deeds, and you’re just delighted.’

  ‘I’m not delighted; I’m in a funk. There isn’t any evidence; what there is, is a lack of evidence. There was blood on his head. There ought to be blood on the damned stairs! Without it—’ He wriggled still lower on the chair, his spine almost at the edge of the seat cushion.