Photo-Finish

by Ngaio Marsh

Troy hurried away to get her sketching block, charcoal and conté pencil. Alleyn waited for her and together they went to the ‘music room’.

  It was entered by double doors from the rear of the main hall. It was, as Mr Ruby had once indicated, more like a concert chamber than a room. It were tedious to insist upon the grandiloquences of Waihoe Lodge: enough to say that the stage occupied one end of this enormous room, was approached from the auditorium by three wide steps up to a projecting apron and thence to the main acting area. Beautifully proportioned pillars were ranged across the back flanking curtained doorways. The musicians were in a little huddle by a grand piano on the floor of the auditorium and in the angle of the apron. They were tuning their instruments and Rupert, looking ill, was with them. The singers came in and sat together in the auditorium.

  There was a change now in the Sommita; an air of being in her own professional climate and with no nonsense about it. She was deep in conversation with Romano when the Alleyns came in. She saw them and pointed to chairs halfway down the auditorium. Then she folded her arms and stood facing the stage. Every now and then she shouted angry instructions. As if on some stage director’s instruction, a shaft of sunlight from an open window found her. The effect was startling. Troy settled herself to make a drawing.

  Now the little orchestra began to play: tentatively at first with stoppages when they consulted with Rupert. Then with one and another of the soloists, repeating passages, making adjustments. Finally the Sommita said, ‘We take the aria, darling,’ and swept up to stage centre.

  Rupert’s back was turned to the audience and facing the musicians. He gave them the beat conservatively. They played and were stopped by the Sommita. ‘More authority,’ she said. ‘We should come in like a lion. Again.’

  Rupert waited for a moment. Troy saw that his left hand was clenched so hard that the knuckles shone white. He flung back his head, raised his right hand and gave a strong beat. The short introduction was repeated with much more conviction, it reached a climax of sorts and then the whole world was filled with one long sound: ‘Ah!’ sang the Sommita. ‘A-a-a-h!’ and then: ‘What joy is here, what peace, what plentitude!’

  At first it was impossible to question the glory, so astonishing was the sound, so absolute the command. Alleyn thought: Perhaps it hardly matters what she sings. Perhaps she could sing ‘A bee-eye-ee-eye-ee sat on a wall-eye-all-eye-all’ and distil magic from it. But before the aria had come to its end he thought that even if he hadn’t been warned he would have known that musically it was no great shakes. He thought he could detect clichés and banalities. And the words! He supposed in opera they didn’t matter all that much but the thought occurred that she might more appropriately have sung: ‘What joy is here, what peace, what platitude.’

  Troy was sitting two seats in front of Alleyn, holding her breath and drawing in charcoal. He could see the lines that ran out like whiplashes under her hand, the thrown-back head and the wide mouth. Not a bit, he thought, remembering their joke, as if the Sommita was yawning: the drawing itself sang. Troy ripped the sketch off her pad and began again. Now her subject talked to the orchestra who listened with a kind of avid respect, and Troy drew them in the graphic shorthand that was all her own.

  Alleyn thought that if Rupert was correct in believing the players had rumbled the inadequacies of the music, the Sommita had ravished them into acceptance, and he wondered if, after all, she could work this magic throughout the performance and save poor Rupert’s face for him.

  A hand was laid on Alleyn’s shoulder. He turned his head and found Mr Reece’s impassive countenance close to his own. ‘Can you come out?’ he said very quietly. ‘Something has happened.’

  As they went out the Sommita and Rodolfo Romano had begun to sing their duet.

  The servant who had brought the Alleyns their breakfast was in the study looking uneasy and deprecating.

  ‘This is Marco,’ said Mr Reece. ‘He has reported an incident that I think you should know about. Tell Chief Superintendent Alleyn exactly what you told me.’

  Marco shied a little on hearing Alleyn’s rank, but he told his story quite coherently and seemed to gather assurance as he did so. He had the Italian habit of gesture but only a slight accent.

  He said that he had been sent out to the helicopter hangar to fetch a case of wine that had been brought in the previous day. He went in by a side door and as he opened it heard a scuffle inside the hangar. The door dragged a little on the floor. There was, unmistakably, the sound of someone running. ‘I think I said something, sir, “Hullo” or something, as I pushed the door open. I was just in time to catch sight of a man in bathing costume, running out at the open end of the hangar. There’s not much room when the chopper’s there. I had to run back and round the tail and by the time I got out he was gone.’

  Alleyn said: ‘The hangar, of course, opens on to the cleared space for take-off.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And it’s surrounded by a kind of shrubbery. The proper approach follows round the house to the front. I ran along it about sixty feet but there wasn’t a sign of him so I returned and had a look at the bush as they call it. It was very overgrown and I saw at once he couldn’t have got through it without making a noise. But there wasn’t a sound. I peered about in case he was lying low and then I remembered that on the far side of the clearing there’s another path through the bush going down to the lakeside. So I took this path. With the same result: nothing. Well, sir,’ Marco amended, and an air of complacency if not of smugness crept over his face, ‘I say “nothing". But that’s not quite right. There was something. Lying by the path. There was this.’

  With an admirable sense of timing he thrust forward his open palm. On it lay a small round metal or plastic cap.

  ‘It’s what they use to protect the lens, sir. It’s off a camera.’

  III

  ‘I don’t think,’ Alleyn said, ‘we should jump to alarming conclusions about this but certainly it should be followed up. I imagine,’ he said drily, ‘that anything to do with photography is a tricky subject at the Lodge.’

  ‘With some cause,’ said Mr Reece.

  ‘Indeed. Now then, Marco. You’ve given us a very clear account of what happened and you’ll think I’m being unduly fussy if we go over it all again.’

  Marco spread his hands as if offering him the earth.

  ‘First of all, then: this man. Are you sure it wasn’t one of the guests or one of the staff?’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Marco rapidly, shaking his finger sideways as if a wasp had stung it. ‘Not possible. No!’

  ‘Not, for instance, the launchman?’

  ‘No, sir. No! Not anyone of the household. I am certain. I would swear it.’

  ‘Dark or fair?’

  ‘Fair. Bareheaded. Fair. Certainly a blond.’

  ‘And bare to the waist?’

  ‘Of course. Certainly.’

  ‘Not even a camera slung over his shoulder?’

  Marco closed his eyes, bunched his fingers and laid the tips to his forehead. He remained like that for some seconds.

  ‘Well? What about it?’ Mr Reece asked a trifle impatiently.

  Marco opened his eyes and unbunched his fingers. ‘It could have been in his hands,’ he said.

  ‘This path,’ Alleyn said. ‘The regular approach from the front of the house round to the hangar. As I recollect, it passes by the windows of the concert chamber?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Mr Reece said and nodded very slightly at Alleyn. ‘And this afternoon they were not curtained.’

  ‘And open?’

  ‘And open.’

  ‘Marco,’ Alleyn said, ‘did you at any point hear anything going on in the concert chamber?’

  ‘But yes!’ Marco cried, staring at him. ‘Madame, sir. It was Madame. She sang. With the voice of an angel.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She was singing still, sir, when I returned to the clearing.’

  ‘After you found this cap, did you go on to the lak
eside?’

  ‘Not quite to the lakeside, sir, but far enough out of the bush to see that he was not there. And then I thought I should not continue but that I should report at once to Signor Reece. And that is what I did.’

  ‘Very properly.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And I,’ said Mr Reece, ‘have sent the house staff to search the grounds, and most of the guests.’

  ‘If I remember correctly,’ Alleyn said, ‘at the point where Marco emerged from the bush it is only a comparatively short distance across from the Island to that narrow tree-clad spit that reaches out from the mainland towards the Island and is linked to it by your power lines?’

  ‘You suggest he might have swum it?’ Mr Reece asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ Marco intervened. ‘Not possible. I would have seen him.’ He stopped and then asked with a change of voice. ‘Or would I?’

  ‘If he’s on the Island he will be found,’ said Mr Reece coldly. And then to Alleyn: ‘You were right to say we should not make too much of this incident. It will probably turn out to be some young hoodlum or another with a camera. But it is a nuisance. Bella has been very much upset by this Strix and his activities. If she hears of it she might well begin to imagine all sorts of things. I suggest we say nothing of it to the guests and performers. You hear that, Marco?’

  Marco was all acquiescence.

  Alleyn thought that if what was no doubt a completely uncoordinated search was thundering about the premises the chances of keeping the affair secret were extremely slender. But, he reminded himself, for the present the rehearsal should be engaging everybody’s attention.

  When he had gone, Mr Reece, with a nearer approach to cosiness than Alleyn would have thought within his command, said: ‘What do you make of all that? Simply a loutish trespasser or – something else?’

  ‘Impossible to say. Is it pretty widely known in New Zealand that Madame Sommita is your guest?’

  ‘Oh yes. One tries to circumvent the press but one never totally succeeds. It has come out. There have been articles about the Lodge itself and there are pressmen who try to bribe the launchman to bring them over. He is paid a grotesquely high wage and has the sense to refuse. I must say,’ Mr Reece confided, ‘it would be very much in character for one of these persons to skulk about the place, having, by whatever means, swimming perhaps, got himself on the Island. The hangar would be a likely spot, one might think, for him to hide.’

  ‘He would hear the rehearsal from there.’

  ‘Precisely. And await his chance to come out and take a photograph through an open window. It’s possible. As long,’ Mr Reece said, and actually struck his right fist into his left palm, ‘as long as it isn’t that filthy Strix at it again. Anything rather than that.’

  ‘Will you tell me something about your staff? You’ve asked me to do my constabulary stuff and this would be a routine question.’

  ‘Ned Hanley is better qualified than I to answer it. He came over here from Australia and saw to it. An over-ambitious hotel had gone into liquidation. He engaged eight of the staff and a housekeeper for the time we shall be using the Lodge. Marco was not one of these but we had excellent references, I understand. Ned would tell you.’

  ‘An Italian, of course?’

  ‘Oh yes. But a naturalized Australian. He made a great thing, just now, of his story but I would think it was substantially correct. I’m hoping the guests and performers will not, if they do get hold of the story, start jumping to hysterical conclusions. Perhaps we should let it be known quite casually that a boy had swum across and has been sent packing. What do you think?’

  Before Alleyn could answer, the door opened and Signor Beppo Lattienzo entered. His immaculate white shorts and silken matelot were in disarray and he sweated copiously.

  ‘My dears!’ he said. ‘Drama! The hunt is up. The Hound of Heaven itself – or should I say Himself? – could not be more diligent.’

  He dropped into a chair and fanned himself with an open palm. ‘"Over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough brier,” as the industrious fairy remarks and so do I. What fun to be known as “The Industrious Fairy", ‘ panted Signor Lattienzo coyly.

  ‘Any luck?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Not a morsel. The faithful Maria, my dear Monty, is indomitable. Into the underbrush with the best of us. She has left her hairnet as a votive offering on a thorny entanglement known, I am informed, as a Bush Lawyer.’

  Signor Lattienzo smiled blandly at Mr Reece and tipped Alleyn a lewdish wink. ‘This,’ he remarked, ‘will not please our diva, no? And if we are to speak of hounds and of persistence, how about the intrepid Strix? What zeal! What devotion! Though she flee to the remotest antipodes, though she, as it were, to go to earth (in, one must add, the greatest possible comfort) upon an enchanted island, there shall he nose her out. One can only applaud. Admit it, my dear Monty.’

  Mr Reece said: ‘Beppo, there is no reason to suppose that the man Strix has had any part in this incident. The idea is ridiculous and I am most anxious that Bella should not entertain it. It is a trivial matter involving some local lout and must not be blown up into a ridiculous drama. You know very well, none better, how she can overreact and after last night’s shock – I really must ask you to use the greatest discretion.’

  Signor Lattienzo wiped the sweat away from the area round his left eye. He breathed upon his glass, polished it and with its aid contemplated his host. ‘But, of course, my dear Monty,’ he said quietly, ‘I understand. Perfectly. I dismiss the photographer. Poof! He is gone. And now – ‘

  The door burst open and Ben Ruby strode in. He also showed signs of wear and tear.

  ‘Here! Monty!’ he shouted. ‘What the hell’s the idea? These servants of yours are all saying bloody Strix is back and you ought to call in the police. What about it?’

  IV

  Mr Reece, white with annoyance, summoned his entire staff, including the driver and the launchman, into the study. Alleyn, who was asked to remain, admired the manner in which the scene was handled and the absolute authority which Mr Reece seemed to command. He repeated the explanation that had been agreed upon. The theory of the intrusive lout was laid before them and the idea of Strix’s recrudescence soundly rubbished. ‘You will forget this idiotic notion, if you please,’ said Mr Reece and his voice was frigid. He looked pointedly at Maria. ‘You understand,’ he said, ‘you are not to speak of it to Madame.’ He added something in Italian – not one of Alleyn’s strongest languages but he thought it was a threat of the instant sack if Maria disobeyed orders.

  Maria, who had shut her mouth like a trap, glared back at Mr Reece and muttered incomprehensibly. The household was then dismissed.

  ‘I don’t like your chances,’ said Ben Ruby. ‘They’ll talk.’

  ‘They will behave themselves. With the possible exception of the woman.’

  ‘She certainly didn’t sound cooperative.’

  ‘Jealous.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Signor Lattienzo. ‘The classic situation: Mistress and Abigail. No doubt Bella confides extensively.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Well, she can’t do so for the moment. The ripetizione is still in full swing.’

  Ben Ruby opened the door. From beyond the back of the hall and the wall of the concert chamber but seeming to come from nowhere in particular there was singing: disembodied as if heard through the wrong end of some auditory telescope. Above three unremarkable voices there soared an incomparable fourth.

  ‘Yes,’ said Signor Lattienzo. ‘It is the ripetizione and they are only at the quartet: a third of the way through. They will break for luncheon at one-thirty and it is now twenty minutes past noon. For the time being we are safe.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on that one, either,’ said Ben Ruby. ‘She likes to have Maria on tap at rehearsals.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Alleyn said, ‘I think I’ll just take a look at the terrain.’

  The three men stared at him and for a moment said noth
ing. And then Mr Reece stood up. ‘You surely cannot for a moment believe – ‘ he said.

  ‘Oh no, no. But it strikes me that one might find something that would confirm the theory of the naughty boy.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What, for instance?’ asked Ben Ruby.

  ‘This or that,’ Alleyn said airily. ‘You never know. The unexpected has a way of turning up. Sometimes. Like you, I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  And before any of them had thought of anything else to say he let himself out and gently closed the door.

  He went out of the house by the main entrance, turned left and walked along the gravelled front until he came to a path that skirted the western façade. He followed it and as he did so the sound of music and of singing, broken by discussion and the repetition of short passages, grew louder. Presently he came to the windows of the concert chamber and saw that one of them, the first, was still open. It was at the end farthest removed from the stage, which was screened from it by a curtain that operated on a hinged bracket.

  He drew nearer. There, quite close, was the spot in the auditorium where the Sommita had stood with her arms folded, directing the singers.

  And there, still in her same chair, still crouched over her sketching block with her short hair tousled and her shoulders hunched, was his wife. She was still hard at work. Her subject was out of sight haranguing the orchestra but her image leapt up under Troy’s grubby hand. She was using a conté pencil and the lines she made, sometimes broadly emphatic, sometimes floating into extreme delicacy, made one think of the bowing of an accomplished fiddler.

  She put the drawing on the floor, pushed it away with her foot, and stared at it, sucking her knuckles and scowling. Then she looked up and saw her husband. He pulled a face at her, laid a finger across his lips and ducked out of sight.

  He had been careful not to tread on the narrow strip of earth that separated the path from the wall and now, squatting, was able to examine it. It had been recently trampled by a number of persons. To hell with the search party, thought Alleyn.