by Allan Massie
“You have no idea,” the Commissioner said, “how tiresome this sort of business is. You have lived long in Rome, Marchesa?”
“I come and go,” Belinda said, “but almost twenty years.”
“Then you are closer to being a true Roman than I am myself …”
He sighed, and said, “Of course, you understand that this is merely a formality, this visit of mine. I must make a report, and, like nineteen out of twenty reports I make, it will contain nothing of significance. As for the twentieth, the significant one, what is its usual fate? Let me tell you: it disappears, it is lost; someone has found something in it embarrassing. This is the story of police work.”
He sat on a straight-backed chair, though Kate had indicated a more comfortable one, and he held himself upright, primly even, with his knees together and his dusky long-fingered hands resting one on each thigh.
“Yes,” he said, “so much of it is futility. Yet we must observe the formalities. What a charming room this is. And now coffee …”
He stood up and stepped aside to allow Kate to place the tray on the table.
“The work of the police would be impossible without coffee. Indeed coffee is the motor of Italy, is it not?”
“Of modern life, perhaps,” Kate said.
“Indeed. How pleasant it would be to sit and talk philosophy with you ladies. Your book, dottoressa, on the Belgian Nazi – a masterpiece. I so greatly admired your understanding of the criminal mind which does not recognise itself as criminal, inasmuch as it approves whatever seems rational and necessary at the moment, for the promotion of self-interest. But, alas … This unfortunate Mr Yallett – but why do I say ‘unfortunate’ when we do not know what his fortune may be, or may have been? – appears to me a disagreeable creature. Am I wrong?”
“Viewed from certain angles,” Kate said, “that would be so. You agree, Bel?”
Belinda thought: what we must do is be careful of our tenses. This man is clever and I have no doubt not half as sympathetic as he appears. She contented herself with nodding her head in agreement.
“I have to say,” the Commissioner continued, “that when these two English journalists, whom you no doubt know, first disclosed their concern, indeed their fears, we seemed to be occupied with a trivial matter. People are free to come and go as they please, are they not? This is what it means to be citizens of a liberal democratic Europe, a Europe without frontiers. It is admirable. Which of us would have it otherwise? But it makes police work more difficult. Indeed if it was not for modern technology … our colleagues in London are inquiring into Mr Yallett’s mobile phone records. That may yield something, but I am not hopeful. When intelligent people wish to disappear … Well, they don’t make use of devices so easily checked.”
“You think then,” Kate said, “that Reynard has simply disappeared, gone off somewhere, of his own accord?”
The commissioner sighed.
“Indeed yes. There is no indication to the contrary. I would be quite happy with that, all the more so because my colleagues in London, and also, as I understand, the Press there, have raised the possibility that he had good reason to do so.”
“So it would seem,” Belinda said, “if you can believe the newspapers.”
“Quite so. However there is another matter, with which, dottoressa, I am sorry to trouble you. The question has been raised of the young man, Kelly, who seems also to have disappeared at the same time as Mr Yallett who defended him, it appears, on a charge of murder …”
“Of which he was acquitted,” Kate said. “He had good reason to be grateful to Mr Yallett …”
“Certainly. But it is the coincidence of his disappearance that is interesting. He was staying here, I am informed.”
“Commissioner,” Kate said, “you were kind enough to say you liked my book on Klaes Boorkampf. I was intending to write a similar one about Gary Kelly, his case and background. That’s why he was staying here. You might like to know that I spent six weeks as lodger in the guestroom of the sanatorium where Dr Boorkampf was confined. I like to get close to my subjects.”
“But I understand,” he smiled. “I understand perfectly. But the question is – that which I am obliged to try and answer – where is this Gary Kelly now? You see?”
“It didn’t work out. There’s no book in his story. He was less interesting than I thought.”
Belinda lit a cigarette.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she said. “Or do you smoke yourself? I should have asked. You do? Good.”
She leaned forward to offer him one and then her lighter. His eyes were soft, long-suffering, gentle as a spaniel’s.
She said, “But the papers have it wrong. Forgive me for butting in as it were, but there is no coincidental disappearance. We don’t know what happened to Reynard Yallett, but Gary didn’t go off with him as they suggest. That’s nonsense. When Kate decided that there wasn’t going to be a book – it was a friendly decision, wasn’t it, Kate – Gary then went off south with two friends of ours, just for a few days.”
“So has the young man returned to Rome?”
“Well, no,” Kate said, “there would be no point.”
“So where is he now?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Kate said. “Either in France or back in England, I suppose.”
The commissioner frowned again. There was a long silence, broken only by the noise of the traffic from the avenue below.
Kate said, “I didn’t mention this to the journalists who asked me about him, because, well, in the first place, I see no reason why he should be bothered by them, and, secondly, I took a considerable dislike to Mr Trensshe.”
“I also,” Angeloni said. “Not a sympathetic type … These friends of yours? They have returned to Rome?”
“Well, no,” Belinda said. “Erik who’s a young American is back in the States. He’s an actor, and his agent had got him a part. And Tom Durward said he was going to spend a few days or weeks, I don’t know, on Capri. It was Capri, wasn’t it, Kate, not Ischia?”
“No, Capri.”
“Admirable. My colleagues there can speak with him. Not that it is of any importance that they should. Nevertheless … And, dottoressa, you didn’t see Mr Yallett after lunch on the Saturday. That is correct? Good. As I say, I regret to have had to trouble you with these formalities. Nevertheless it has been for me a pleasure to meet you both.”
He opened his briefcase, and produced a copy of the Italian edition of Kate’s book on Boorkampf.
“Perhaps you would be so kind as to sign this for me, dottoressa?”
“A nice man,” Belinda said, “but also, I think, a clever one. I hope I was right to play the Tom and Erik card.”
“Oh yes, we had to. Do you think he’ll think it odd we hadn’t – or I hadn’t – played it before?”
“Why should he? Why should you have? His was the first official enquiry after all.”
“That’s true. We’d better warn Tom to expect a visit …”
“Yes, but …” Belinda said, “perhaps not from your phone or even mine. I liked the commissioner, but he’s clever, I think. And a policeman.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “You can never be sure what they believe and what they don’t. And, from my observation, the sympathetic ones are the most sceptical.”
XLVI
At thirty, Camus wrote, a man should know himself like the palm of his hand … know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. Fair enough, Durward thought, but uncertainty returns with the years. What they had done couldn’t have been foretold, what he had done anyway, couldn’t speak for the others.
He might spend the winter on Capri. Why not? He had never done so. On his first visit in his Douglas period they had discovered and penetrated a subterranean vinaio frequented by old men who had been boys together on the island. All dead now, he supposed, and in any case vinai were denied him; but he had found it simpatico in those days. Two of the old men had been pall-bearers at Douglas’s
funeral.
Three letters had arrived that morning. He had stuffed them into his pocket; it was years since he had torn open an envelope on receipt. Now he called for another coffee, got his cigar going, and slid his thumb under the flap of the first, Belinda’s.
“It’s absurd,” she wrote, “that one hesitates to put things on paper, and yet one does. I suppose that’s evidence of guilt which however is far from what I feel. So I just wanted to say thank you and it does seem you have managed brilliantly. There’s so much to say, but it can wait till you return to Rome.”
The second letter was from Erik:
Dear Tom, it feels kind of strange to be writing a letter that I can’t e-mail. I wanted to say it was a great experience getting the chance to know you a little, though maybe it’s not so little considering everything. My agent told me I’d grown up! So maybe something shows. My part’s a real good one. I play a young psychotic killer! Kills his father actually! I had to laugh remembering you saying ‘happy as the boy who’s killed his father’, didn’t you say it was a German proverb or something. I wonder how Gary is making out with your Polish friend. Do you think we’ll ever see or hear from him again? I guess not. I never did find anything I could speak to him about, though I wanted to. But I guess I’ll play this part as if I was Gary, what do you think? I don’t know how to end this, so I’ll just say, Love, Erik.
P.S. Gehenna’s out on video and I watched it again yesterday. What a movie!! And I’ve finished The Charterhouse. Quel novel!! Che romanzo!! Maybe you should write our one.
Tom pictured the boy knitting his brows and licking his lip with a quick nervous gesture as he wondered how much he could dare write and so give himself away.
The third was from Stephen Mallany:
Dear Mr Durward,
Belinda kindly gave me your address. I’m sorry I was out of things while you were in Rome, and I gather from her and Meg that I have you to thank for what I can only call my deliverance. I shudder to think of what might have become of me if you hadn’t acted the Good Samaritan.
I think you remember who I am and even, or especially, a letter I wrote to you many years ago.
We have, I believe, two things in common even apart from alcoholism. (In that context I may say that I recognised you that evening you arrived at our meeting, and then I fled in terror and guilt.)
These two things are, I believe, that we both loved Jamie and have both held ourselves responsible in some obscure fashion for his death. I know I have; I let him down.
Besides thanking you, there are two reasons why I now write – I all but wrote, didn’t dare to write, and perhaps should have done so.
The newspapers have been full of stories about the disappearance of that terrible man, Reynard Yallett, and this gives me the courage to say what I lacked the courage to write almost twenty years ago: that Yallett was indeed the prefect I spoke of then who forced himself on Jamie and left him consumed with self-disgust and a deep sense of humiliation.
It is a terrible thing for a priest to write but I could wish that the suggestions made, obliquely, in some of the newspapers that Yallett may have taken his own life were true. I can’t believe them. The life-force of evil is so powerful. But if he has, then justice is served. The Lord is not mocked.
I do not think you will wish to see me to speak of these things, which is another reason why I write. And in any case I do not believe I would have the courage to engage you in conversation.
Emerging from this last appalling bout has left me trembling and fearful as I try to look reality in the face. But you will know all about that.
Please do not feel the need to reply to this letter. That would only embarrass us both. But if I am still in Rome when you return here, I hope we may meet and exchange those civil nothings which enable us to skate over the thin ice that covers the abyss.
Belinda and Meg have been wonderful to me, but both have their own cross to bear, and Belinda is, I fear, unhappy as I have never known her. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change – that is, our fundamental nature.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Mallany.
So there it was.
Earlier that morning he had had the interview which Kate had warned him of with the local police. Yes, he had said, the young man Kelly had come south with him and another friend; yes, another young friend. Yes, it had been a sudden decision; but why not? The idea had come up, when he had been speaking enthusiastically of a visit he had made to Calabria many years ago. They had none of them any obligations, and acting on impulse was pleasing, was it not? Indeed yes. And the young man Kelly? He had last seen him off on a train for France. No, he had no address for him. And the young American? Back in California, working. Il signor Durward was in the movie business himself? Had been, was now retired, more or less, inasmuch as a writer ever retires. The conversation was friendly. They drank coffee. Tom gave the policeman a cigar. These enquiries were routine, Signor Durward would understand. Indeed yes, again, formalities were necessary if tiresome.
And that was perhaps that.
He sat, idle, under a trellis of roses in flower, and, looking down and over to his left, his eyes feasted on the deep restfulness of the sea. Gleams of light shone reflected from its mirror-like expanse. Then, in the hour before sunset, he would stroll to the Arco Naturale, through which you see the long arm of the mainland by Sorrento swathed in a pale dying blue. Peace, he thought. Vengeance is mine, proclaimed Yahweh who liked to keep the best to himself. But Durward had enjoyed the dish too, eaten cold, as the Sicilian proverb recommends, and savoured.
XLVII
For weeks Reynard Yallett lay undisturbed. Undisturbed by men, women, or children, that is. Crows picked out his blue eyes. Scavenging dogs tore at his flesh. The rains of autumn washed the blood away. The little stream by which the body had come to a halt in its descent rose fast and high and poured over him. The waters subsided and it was then that two ten-year-old boys, Aldo and Peppino, playing truant from school, wandering at random and looking for a quiet place to smoke, came upon it. The sight alarmed them. They gathered branches, tearing off bushes and covered it up, then piled stones on top. It was another two weeks before Peppino started having nightmares, and these recurred so often, waking his mother with screams, that she questioned him diligently in an attempt to discover what it was that had so affected him. “You’ve always been such a calm happy child,” she said. “And now?” Even so it was Christmas before he confessed what he and Aldo had found and what they had done.
So his father and elder brother went in search of the body, but they looked in the wrong place, for the boy’s directions had been vague; and came on nothing.
“He’s imagining it,” the father said; and was relieved, not only because he thought this true, but because he had not wanted to find the body of which his son had whimperingly spoken. Such things spelled trouble.
Accordingly it lay there, decomposing, throughout the winter.
XLVIII
“With leaden foot Time creeps along
While Delia is away:
With her, nor plaintive was the song,
Nor tedious was the day …”
Yes, indeed: for Delia read Erik, and the poet’s first two lines were hers … with leaden foot. He spoke for her, this Richard Jago, a friend according to her Concise DNB – though how she had come into possession of these three volumes she couldn’t recall – of Shenstone and Somerville, and also, not surprisingly, a vicar. The following lines were less accurate. Erik’s tune was often plaintive, and no doubt there was a certain tedium in days of his company, days which nevertheless she wished restored to her.
It was ridiculous to think of him so often, so long and longingly to picture him leaning against the terrace wall or stretched in her bed with the sheet half-tangled round him. Ridiculous too to spend hours poring over her old Oxford Book of English verse, her sad father’s copy, the Quiller-Couch version. But there it was, she did. There she was, as J
ohnson remarked on the opposite page: “condemn’d to Hope’s delusive mine … our social comforts drop away.” Could Erik be described as a social comfort? Well, yes, perhaps; what else was love, her sort of love anyway, but that?
She wrote to him often, sent the letters but rarely, and then much amended, keeping the tone light, anything expressive of her yearning excised. When he replied, which he did, twice, the naivety with which he wrote made her feel the hollowness of her love and yet also its sharpness.
He said nothing of what she wanted to know: who was sharing his bed? She couldn’t believe he slept alone. When in the second letter he assured her that he would never forget her, she took that as signifying that he never expected to see her again, and assumed that even their barren correspondence would wither. But perhaps he didn’t see it as barren: that was her word, after all.
One day, in Stephen’s apartment, while he was in the kitchen making tea, she abstracted a photograph of the boy, slipping it into her bag. It showed him in an armchair, his head resting against flowered chintz. His lips were parted as if awaiting a kiss. His white T-shirt was rucked up in soft folds. She imagined the flat belly it concealed. At night she languished over the photograph, absurdly.
There were few people that autumn whose company did not irritate her. She spent more hours in the French church before the Caravaggios than in conversation with others. She understood now more than ever St Matthew’s reluctance and the incredulity of those he had been with, when Christ called him.
She still attended meetings, not sure why. Was it her imagination or did the others there now look at her with concern? It wasn’t entirely imagination, for one evening Bridget whispered, “Are you sure you’re all right? You don’t look yourself, you know.”