Murder in Venice

by L. B. Hathaway

  Two months.

  She must have looked lost inside her daydream, and indeed, her mind was following a new and suddenly arresting train of thought.

  It had been two months since Bella Alladice had made a Will. And two months since the spying and threats had started up. But was it a coincidence too far? Posie’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted: from somewhere nearby she heard something whispered very low, something extremely surprising. And her ears pricked up.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling, it will be all right now, you’ll see. Not long to go. Hold your nerve.’

  Posie turned just in time to see Dickie patting Lucy’s leg under the table, a gesture of reassurance. But reassurance of what exactly? She looked swiftly away. What had she just witnessed? Posie bit at her lip, absorbed, and then she heard a shout go up from their own table.

  ‘What the blazes?’

  Dickie Alladice was rising to his feet, looking into the main square.

  Out in the rain, a middle-aged man in a bedraggled wet black suit, all of a fluster, was running among the covered arches, coming in their direction. He was red in the face, and peering helplessly into the windows of each and every café and shop he passed by.

  ‘It’s Jones!’ Lucy declared, standing up. ‘He looks like he’s about to pass out. What on earth is wrong?’

  Dickie rapped on the window sharply and Jones looked up. Relief washed over his troubled face. He paused in the downpour, bent-double, hands on knees, out of breath, before straightening up and making for the gilded doors of the Florian.

  Posie suddenly felt ill. She tore through the passage to the front door, almost hauling Jones over the fancy tiled threshold. The gold grandmother clock in the Florian’s entrance hall was just striking eleven o’clock.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Posie demanded in as controlled a voice as she could manage. But she knew, and she knew that her investigation and the report which she was carefully compiling was too late. That it was all futile. It had been futile from the start.

  ‘It’s the Countess, isn’t it?’ she hissed at Jones, as the others came crowding out into the passage.

  ‘Aye, Miss. Mrs Persimmon sent me to look for you all.’

  He had got his breath back. Posie felt a sense of dread at the inevitability of it all. The black-and-white floor was rolling up at her in uneasy waves. Or was it just the whisky coffee?

  ‘Come on, man.’ Dickie Alladice was upon them. ‘So what is it?’

  ‘It’s your sister, sir.’ Jones collapsed in a wheezy ball.

  ‘What about Bella?’ Dickie’s voice had gone very high. It was barely a whisper.

  ‘Dickie.’ Posie touched his arm gently. ‘I’m very much afraid that she’s dead.’

  ****

  Ten

  On entering the guesthouse, they were met by Mrs Persimmon, flowery overall immaculate, but sick with fear; a self-appointed sentry to her own dining-room, holding the key high above her head as if she thought it might drop into a swirling flood. When she saw Posie and Dickie and Lucy and Aunt Minnie and Jones she almost collapsed with relief, her face telling its own horror-story.

  ‘Oh, thank goodness! I didn’t know what to do! I locked the room as soon as we discovered the Countess, me and Mr Jones that is. No-one has been in, and I’ve telephoned for that fancy fat fascist policeman who was here last night. But of course that may take time, everything here does! I hope I did right. Oh, the poor Countess! God rest her soul.’ She crossed herself dramatically. ‘And imagine! The poor young Count, he doesn’t even know as yet! I don’t know where to find him.’

  Posie found she had notepad and pencil in hand. Automatically she was taking charge. She reached for the dining-room key and nodded grimly as it was entrusted to her.

  ‘You did very well, Mrs Persimmon. You and Jones found the body together, you say?’

  ‘That’s right. We had gone in together to take away the coffee things. The Countess insisted on having a cup at nine-thirty sharp. We entered later, about ten-thirty, and found her like that. Terrible.’

  ‘Quite. But Commissario Salvarocca and the Count are just over the way, at the Romagnoli Palace. Perhaps Jones here would be so good as to fetch them? If he can bear to.’

  Jones nodded and disappeared in a flash, keen to escape.

  Posie looked over at Aunt Minnie who had collapsed on the bench in the hallway, gasping and gaping like some sort of dying moth. She would be no use at all here. Posie rounded up Lucy and Dickie in a business-like fashion.

  ‘I need you both to enter the room with me. I must warn you, it won’t be very nice. Don’t touch anything: the police will be checking for fingerprints later, but someone with some experience must have a look at Bella now. Every second which passes is crucial: evidence is literally ebbing away.’

  Dickie looked gobsmacked: ‘Evidence? By Gad, of what exactly?’

  Posie inserted the key without answering and opened the door. The green dining-room looked much as it had that morning at breakfast, but it was now cleared of all food and drink. On further inspection, a chair and table had toppled over and Bella was lying on the floor.

  They walked over, Posie leading, the other two bobbing behind reluctantly. Mrs Persimmon stood guarding the open doorway, anxious not to miss the drama.

  Accustomed to death as she was, Posie could never quite get used to it. She felt a horrid distaste at the job in hand. She wished that the Commissario could get along quickly.

  Posie dropped to her knees, aware of the others looming behind her, and the awful expectant stillness pressing down on them all. There were some urgent voices of new arrivals now whispering in the corridor outside, men, most probably, but Mrs Persimmon’s excited chatter was surging and rising above them all.

  Posie focused.

  Bella Alladice was lying on her side, one enormously fat hand above her head, clutching at the tablecloth, her ruby ring dazzling savagely even in here, a room with a bad light and no windows. The other hand was holding a silver hip-flask. Up close, Posie could see there was a carved inscription of ‘AA’ on the flask, and she frowned: the flask looked identical to the one Posie had borrowed from Lucy the night before, and which she had left outside Lucy’s door very early this morning by way of return.

  A pen and ink were scattered around the place haphazardly, together with a cup of coffee, empty of most of its contents. A bowl of pink Jordan almonds were dropped everywhere across the lurid swirls of the green carpet. It was obvious that Bella Alladice had had some sort of a seizure before dying. Her face was obscured by the black leather folio, lying open.

  On the floor behind Bella lay the Persian cat, Petrucci, curled up tightly and rigidly in death, but somehow looking a lot more peaceful than his mistress. Obviously his luck had run out and his ninth life had been his very last.

  Dickie dropped to his knees beside the body, carefully trying to avoid the pools of coffee and vomit about the place, panting with concentration. He was removing the folio from his sister’s face and taking off his exquisite pinstriped jacket at the same time, looking very much like he was about to cover his sister up with it, as if she had been dragged from the sea and was feeling the cold.

  ‘Dickie!’ cried Posie in alarm. ‘Please don’t touch the body, whatever you do.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but she looks so dreadful. Bella would have hated to be seen like this! Shall I put the folio back?’

  ‘No. You’d better leave it as it is now.’

  Posie looked at the dead girl’s face which was now exposed and she shuddered. Bella Alladice, never pale at the best of times, had gone to meet her maker the colour of a ripe tomato. Her eyes were bloodshot orbs and her mouth was frozen into a surprised ‘o’ of indignation. Vomit was splashed around liberally. Posie walked around the body carefully, at pains not to move anything, but trying to take in all the detail.

  Lucy made a sobbing noise. ‘Oh, my! Her drops!’

  Posie frowned. ‘Drops?’

  The girl wrung her hands bitte
rly: ‘Her heart drops! I wasn’t here to give them to her! This is my fault! They were for an emergency such as this, for a heart attack. I was in charge of Bella’s medicines, buying them and administering them. She had the drops with her, of course, in her jacket pocket, but she was useless at taking them herself.’

  Dickie Alladice’s normal high colour was now completely washed from his face. He had sat down on a nearby dining chair.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Lucy,’ he whispered softly. ‘Don’t tear yourself up about it. Maybe Bella didn’t have enough time to reach for them? It looks as if it was very quick, which is something.’

  Turning to Posie he shrugged and explained: ‘My sister had a weak heart. She was enormously fat, hideously fat. Knew she had to do something about it but kept guzzling anyway. She’d been prescribed medicine accordingly. Oh, Bella! You little fool. How I hate you! I hate you!’

  Posie stared at the man. Grief took people over in funny ways. He saw her unwavering gaze. ‘Oh, I know I sound foul. But I do hate her. I hate Bella for leaving me. She was all I really had in the world. My baby sister! She brought it on herself! For all her worries about stalkers! She killed herself…’

  Fortunately Posie saw the Commissario appear at the doorway and beckoned him over. He marched across the room with a quiet authority, dragging along Count Giancarlo, who seemed completely stunned.

  Posie offered her condolences to the Count, who had ignored the awful splashes of liquid and immediately sunk to his knees by the body, as if he were about to take his wife up in an embrace. He had to be dragged to his feet by Salvarocca.

  ‘Bella?’ the Count whispered in such a low voice that Posie could hardly hear him. ‘My Bella! Dead? Non capisco. I don’t understand.’ He wrung his hands. ‘How well we understood each other! Never will I find another like her.’

  ‘You mean you’ll never find another woman as rich?’ spat Dickie Alladice accusingly, who had sprung to his feet, riven by a sudden, intense, wholly-unexpected anger. He faced the Count head-on. ‘A woman who will overlook your wandering ways, you mean? You can rot in hell for all I care! And don’t think you’ll get another penny from her!’

  The Count raised an eyebrow and held his head high and imperious. Posie found herself liking the man the better for his show of sudden integrity. ‘How can you talk of money at such a time, Dickie? Of course I’ll get nothing. That was never the idea. I know that.’

  But Dickie was losing control, pushing up his shirtsleeves like a man possessed, like a man about to enter the boxing-ring.

  ‘You’ve got a great deal to answer for, Giancarlo,’ Dickie Alladice snarled. ‘Bella might have died a natural death here, but I’ll never forgive you for making the last few weeks a nightmare. Bella was miserable. What was going on? And that dreadful note about the hidden room! You sure as blazes reacted strangely over that. I hold you entirely responsible.’

  Posie looked from one to another of the men: she remembered Bella telling her that her husband Giancarlo had acted oddly when the hate mail had arrived.

  The Count was shaking his head vehemently, his hands up in denial: ‘My good man, you know you’re just upset. None of the awful things which happened recently have been anything to do with me. I loved Bella, in my way.’

  Dickie Alladice lunged. ‘In “your way”?’ Dickie spun out of control but hit his aim: ‘Take that!’

  The Count crumpled, nursing a bloody nose. The Commissario bent to help the nobleman, and Lucy was pulling at Dickie, ineffectively. Dickie resisted, for all the world looking as if he would spring another punch.

  ‘Enough!’ Posie announced from her position down by the corpse.

  But then she saw that a slight commotion had started over near the door, and among all the chaos of what looked like a great many uniformed policemen, the shapes of two men in civvies, both still wearing wet hats and raincoats, were hurrying into the room, taking form. As the men pushed further in, she realised it was Alaric and the secretary, Roger Valentine. Alaric was white-faced, ashen. She looked up at him, but he had sought out Dickie first, not her.

  ‘I say, old boy. Posie’s right,’ he said coolly. ‘That’s enough.’

  Alaric had grabbed Dickie by both arms, getting him into a sort of body lock.

  ‘I heard the stuff you were saying just now. It was all complete rot! I know you’re upset. This is a tragedy. But you can’t go around accusing people of things. Or attacking them. Not your brother-in-law, anyhow. You need to give it up, Dickie, old chap. See sense.’

  Posie watched, detached, as if in a dream, as Alaric brought out a gaudy-coloured, unfamiliar-looking packet of cigarettes – Mughals – and broke the seal of the new packet with his teeth. But the big police chief shook his head vigorously:

  ‘Please, Mr Boynton-Dale, don’t smoke. I don’t want any other substance or smells in the room. I have called for our Police Surgeon and we’re waiting on him now. I want him to view the body as it is. That’s why we haven’t covered the girl up, although it would be more dignified – I agree – to do so. In fact, it would be best if you all got out of here. Moved out, now.’

  ‘As you think best, sir.’

  But no-one seemed capable of moving. Like blurry images in a child’s kaleidoscope suddenly coming into focus, Posie looked around the room. She took in Alaric’s defeated shrug, and Dickie’s despair; she observed Roger Valentine and Lucy standing together, both very pale, talking in low undertones. The secretary kept throwing sickened, frightened looks over at Bella Alladice, as if his employer might get up off the floor at any minute and chide him for being late back from his morning out. Commissario Salvarocca was looking distinctly uneasy.

  ‘Come now,’ he was repeating firmly. ‘Everybody out.’ The group were slowly moving into the corridor.

  But that comment of his just now, about smells in the room, had started off a train of thought for Posie. Among the mess of the room her sense of smell was strangely heightened. It was very odd, but the awful death-scents surrounding the Countess seemed to shrink back, to peel away, and only one scent pervaded.

  Almonds. Bitter almonds.

  Posie glanced around. There were sugared almonds lying about everywhere, it was true. But when she leant in closely, there was no real scent coming off them. There was that wretched hip-flask, clutched tightly in Bella’s hand, probably containing the very same almond-scented liqueur which Lucy had offered the night before. But on closer inspection, Posie saw that the flask was closed, the screw-lid capped tight. There was not a drop spilled.

  The scent of almonds was getting stronger. Stinking, in fact. How was that possible? Was it due to the added number of people in the room, forcing the temperature up, and accelerating the decomposition processes of the corpse?

  Posie frowned. She forced herself to get nearer to the body, right next to the mouth. She thought she might be sick, but she took a good lean in.

  The dead could only speak through the clues they left behind, and the scent of bitter almonds was overpowering here, strongest of all, reeking up through the skin and mouth and nose of the dead girl.

  ‘Ugh!’

  Posie’s sense of unease was growing by the second. A scent as strong as that, even for someone who liked almonds, or almond-flavour in everything, was unusual. Unnatural.

  A quick sniff of the repulsive cat and Posie realised that it too was giving off the same almond-smell. It was reeking of it.

  She thought quickly of another case she had worked on. An author, a famous one, who had died on a hot English summer’s day, in a great stately home built of warm Oxfordshire yellow stone. A case very different to this. But there had been a smell of almonds there too.

  A poisoning.

  Posie was transported back to that time, two and a half years previously, to listen to another policeman, her favourite one of all, Inspector Lovelace, tell her about the scent of bitter almonds. The scent accompanied a certain type of drug used in poisoning cases, cyanides. In a flash Posie was certain of it
. She looked down at the body again, and sure enough, a blue tinge, rich as delftware, was beginning to colour the dead girl’s face, flushing the lips a deep indigo, working its way upwards over her face. Post-mortem blue flushing was usually a sign of cyanide having been used.

  So Bella Alladice had been murdered, in cold blood. Under their very noses. It was dreadful.

  And if, as seemed likely now, there was a killer in their midst, the most that could be hoped for was a successful murder investigation. The worst thing would be that the killer would strike again. Or escape. Posie had lost a prime suspect before, only that summer, in fact. It haunted her even now.

  Brought back to the present with a horrible jolt, she went up to Salvarocca, a ball of fear lodged in her throat. ‘Sir, listen to me. You need to get all of the people in this guesthouse together. Lock them up.’

  The big man stared at Posie, a flicker of misplaced humour playing across his face. ‘I’d be delighted to, Miss Parker, but can you tell me why?’

  Posie came right up to the man’s ear and hissed: ‘Foul play, sir. Again. This death is not natural. It’s murder. Get everyone to one central room while we make doubly sure. No-one should be allowed to leave.’

  Any humour disappeared fast from Salvarocca’s face.

  ‘But it can’t be! I’ve got young Pietro Corsetti locked up for causing the blaze at the Romagnoli Palace: he admitted it voluntarily last night! He’s been at my station ever since, and he can have had no part in this. The Countess only died this morning, and she was alone here, surely? Corsetti was in his cell then. How can anyone else have been involved? It’s a natural death, or at worst, a suicide…’

  Posie stuck to her guns. ‘It’s murder, sir, and the guilt rests within this house. I don’t know about this Corsetti chappie, but even if he is connected I believe he’s a red herring.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A false friend. Now will you do as I recommend or not?’