Tour de Force

by Christianna Brand

  ‘One must be forgiven for being just the least mite jittery; you may not know it, but one has been here before!’

  ‘What do you mean, here before?’

  ‘Oh, but a murder, ducky. Years ago, in Christophe’s, one of the girls, you can’t think how horrid. Police investigations and all sorts. I mean, what is Inspector Cockrill going to think?’

  ‘He’ll think that your many daughters will soon be orphans,’ said Louvaine, cheering up.

  Out of the chaos of the hotel staff, El Diretore organized a sufficient service to the improvised dining-room on the corner of the balcony. ‘Under the circumstances,’ said Leo Rodd as they settled themselves unhappily round it, ‘I suppose “Here’s to crime” would not be a suitable toast.’

  ‘I don’t know about anyone else,’ said Cecil, ‘but I for one am frankly a frightened boy.’

  ‘I think we should be five frightened people,’ said Leo.

  ‘But Mr Rodd …’

  Leo put out a hand for the cigarette his wife had lighted for him. ‘Look here, Miss Trapp – we simply must face the situation and it isn’t a comfortable one. Everyone else on the tour is definitely out, and so are the rest of the people staying in the hotel. Anyway – we were the only people who knew her at all: as it happened, our little group did seem to see a bit more of her than the rest, and of course we were the ones concerned – however remotely – with her last hours. She was bathing with us at half past four, at seven o’clock she was dead.’

  ‘Yes, but just because we casually spoke to her, on a conducted tour – I mean, how can any of us be connected with her in any way?’

  ‘I simply say that people are going to ask questions and we’d better team up and think what we’re going to answer.’

  Further along the balcony, Inspector Cockrill leaned against the rail looking on with exquisite disapproval as the politio of San Juan went about its task. Miss Trapp unhappily sipped at her Juanello. ‘The servants …’

  ‘He’s sent the servants away.’

  ‘Of course,’ suggested Cecil hopefully, ‘he may have sent them away to dungeons or somewhere.’

  ‘Nonsense, ducky, they’re roaring round with osso buco and ratatouille down on the terrace before your very eyes. And anyway,’ said Louvaine, ‘why should any of the servants have wanted to kill La Lane?’

  Miss Trapp thought there might be a dozen reasons. Everyone knew that foreigners were dishonest. ‘They might think she’d be down on the beach with the rest of us and go into her room …’

  ‘But why kill her?’ said Leo.

  ‘If she caught them pilfering …’

  ‘They wouldn’t kill her, surely?’ agreed Helen Rodd. ‘They’d only have to slip half the proceeds to the Gerente, to get away scot free, and I dare say all tourists are pretty fair game. And anyway, why her room rather than any of the others? None of the others seem to have been touched: and it wasn’t as if hers was the first or the last or anything: why begin there? – I mean, if they had been on a thieving expedition. And it isn’t as if she wore a lot of jewellery or had anything ostentatiously valuable.’

  ‘Mind you, that coat of hers is Victor Stiebel,’ said Cecil; it had always been a sore point.

  ‘Do you think the criminal community of Barrequitas would be likely to recognize that?’

  Mr Cecil cheered up at the thought that a Stiebel model might pass unnoticed. Louvaine said: ‘What you mean is that her things were expensive?’

  ‘You don’t wear a coat like that and have other things cheap. Fifty or sixty, Mr Cecil, would you say?’

  Miss Trapp thought it would be nearer sixty. ‘That’s a real Chinese silk tussore, Mrs Rodd. Christophe’s, I know, would charge sixty, if not more.’ She suddenly blushed scarlet. ‘Oh, but Mr Cecil could better speak of that.’

  Leo Rodd drew irritably on his cigarette. ‘Aren’t we getting away from the matter at issue?’ But in the gathering darkness, further along the veranda, Inspector Cockrill, all ears, thought to himself that maybe they were not so very far off, after all; and longed to know, as a matter of private interest, whether they were talking in shillings or pounds.

  ‘So, if not a pilfering servant, Miss Trapp – what then?’

  Miss Trapp looked down her long nose. There were – other things. A young woman, defenceless, alone …

  ‘But why kill her,’ insisted Leo. ‘Why kill her?’

  ‘If she put up a struggle?’

  ‘I don’t think she did,’ said Helen Rodd. She gave a little shuddering shake to her head, but she controlled herself at once, sitting upright on the wooden balcony chair, very cool and composed, a charming grey moth in her soft grey dress. ‘I – when we went in and looked at her, I looked at her hands. I always do seem to notice people’s hands. Her hands were – clasped round the hilt of the knife, you remember? They were very clean, like a little girl’s bands that have just been washed to go to a party: she kept her nails rather short, cut square, no nail varnish or anything. Well, they were perfectly clean too, not torn or broken or anything, and you could see her arms up to the elbows and they weren’t marked in any way. I’m sure she hadn’t – fought with anyone.’

  ‘And anyway,’ said her husband impatiently, ‘if just servants – why the ceremonial?’

  ‘The ceremonial?’ said Louvaine, blankly.

  ‘For Pete’s sake! The girl was laid out on that horrible bed, her bands folded, her feet together; her hair was spread out all round her head in a sort of fan – and underneath her had been spread a great red shawl. I say again – why the ceremonial?’

  ‘Well, but, ducky,’ said Louvaine, ‘the Spanish are a madly ceremonious nation.’

  He made a swift impatient movement. In the shadowed lamplight, his face took on the old angry, intolerant frown, he pushed away the plate of hors d’oeuvres before him with a movement of irritable revulsion. ‘This is so terribly serious – couldn’t we just for a moment be spared the double-talk?’ She flung up her head and met the hostility of his bright, dark eyes; and Cockie, watching them from his place along the balcony, thought that she looked back at him with something like terror. Helen said smoothly into the shattering silence: ‘But do you think it really was “ceremonial”?’

  He switched round upon her, obviously grateful for a less immediately – or less obviously – vulnerable object for his uncontrollable irritability. ‘Of course it was “ceremonial”. Laid out on that ghastly bed, wrapped in a thing like a – like a shroud.’

  ‘Yes, but was she in fact “laid out”? Don’t you think we may all have imagined it? After all, she was only lying on a bed. It happened to be a four-poster bed, that’s all.’

  ‘Why put her there at all?’

  ‘She may have fallen there when she was killed,’ said Cecil, going over to Helen’s side.

  ‘Of course she didn’t,’ said Leo. The waiter swooped, uncomprehending about them, gathering up the almost untouched plates of black olives and smoked ham. ‘She fell by the little table, right across from the bed in the corner under the window. The chair was pushed back, there was blood on it …’

  *

  It was a small, square, wooden table, a plain wooden chair. In the room along the veranda, the Gerente was even now examining them, with a splendid disregard for spattered blood and possible fingerprints: he had in fact been astonished to find that Scotalanda Yarrda seemed to set store by these extravagances. After all, blood was blood, a young woman had been killed in this room, they all knew that: and here was blood – but naturally, senor! As to prints, there had at one time been some powder and an insufflator down at the prison, but goodness knew where they were now. For after all, when you had gone to all that trouble, what then? He knew everyone in San Juan el Pirata without having to look at the tips of their fingers! The Gerente Inglese must not take him for a fool, said the Gerente de Politio, laughing heartily at the bare idea. Inspector Cockrill had scarcely time to note the shape of the splashes on the table, before a uniformed arm, sweeping casua
lly across them, smeared them half out of existence …

  ‘… you mean you think she was lifted on to the bed?’

  ‘Even if she was,’ said Helen, ‘that might not mean anything much. It seems to be a sort of instinct to lay dead people out flat – or injured people, for that matter, although it does the dead people no good and often makes the injured people worse.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Trapp. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘But that white shroud …’

  ‘It was only her kimono, Leo. She’d probably put it on when she changed out of her wet bathing things. I know, I lay down for the siesta just in a thin dressing-gown.’

  ‘I see, yes,’ said Leo, slowly. ‘They just heaved her on to the bed, pushed her feet together, which would be the normal instinct, I suppose; and her hands – well, her hands were on the hilt of the knife.’

  ‘She may have been trying to pull it out,’ said Helen, shuddering again.

  Inspector Cockrill looked and listened, grimly smiling. Very comforting, he thought: no shroud, no catafalque, no carefully laid-out body, nothing ugly, nothing inexplicable, nothing bizarre. He kept one wary eye upon the room where El Gerente went his slapdash way, but across the intervening space he tossed, with almost malicious pleasure, a pebble of discord into the still pond of their returning confidence. ‘Aren’t you forgetting about the shawl?’ he said.

  It was true. They had forgotten all about the shawl. Helen said quickly: ‘You don’t think that was – just an accident too? Like the bed being a four-poster.’ But she suddenly went very tense; she said sharply: ‘Only it wasn’t her shawl. It was …’

  Leo Rodd said something to her, savagely, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘It was my shawl,’ said Louli.

  Louli’s shawl. The chenille tablecloth that a few brief weeks before she had wheedled out of the Bognor aunt; the red chenille tablecloth with the gay white bobbles – laid out, smoothed out beneath the murdered body, a lake of blood for a floating corpse with outspread, dank dark hair. ‘It was my shawl. I thought you all realized.’ She moved a little closer to Cecil in a rather pathetic gesture of reliance upon that acidulate, bloodless comradeship that was all he had to offer her. ‘I must say, it makes me feel quite sick.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen, distressed. ‘I didn’t think what I was saying.’

  But Louvaine was not one to bear a grudge. ‘I know, ducky, don’t worry.’ She repeated’ ‘I thought you’d all have recognized it.’

  ‘What was it doing in her room?’

  ‘It wasn’t in her room,’ said Louli. ‘It was in my room. They – the murderer, must have got it. It was folded over the back of the chair.’ She added that her room was next to Miss Lane’s, number four. ‘I bagged it so as not to be next to Mrs Sick.’

  Mr Cecil did so understand that. ‘But how could they have got into your room?’

  ‘Well, just through the door,’ said Louvaine. ‘The door into the corridor wasn’t locked, I never lock doors; and the one on to the balcony was wide open.’

  ‘Nothing else was touched?’

  ‘No, I changed afterwards, out of my bathing dress. Nothing else was touched at all.’

  They were all silent, miserably considering it. Miss Trapp said at last: ‘Miss Lane had a shawl of her own, if they wanted a shawl. At least a stole – a blue and white one.’

  ‘Would it be the same size as Miss Barker’s?’

  ‘I think it was more a proper stole,’ said Louli. ‘I had to fold mine, actually, it’s square.’ And actually, she added, a tablecloth and not a stole at all.

  Presumably a murderer who felt compelled to lay out the victim according to some ritual of his own, might equally be obliged to choose a shawl of a certain shape and colour, might even find some horrid significance in preferring a tablecloth. But that presupposed some knowledge of where such a thing was to be found. ‘We’ve all seen the shawl, Louli,’ said Leo Rodd, forgetting in his concentration all about ‘Miss Barker’. ‘We saw it at Milan and you wore it the other evening in Siena. But here?’

  Louvaine considered. ‘No, I haven’t worn it here. It’s a stupid thing, actually, idiotically hot.’

  ‘So that the hotel staff wouldn’t know it? Or any of the hotel guests? They wouldn’t realize that you’d got such a thing in your room?’

  ‘The girl who does the rooms would,’ said Miss Trapp, clinging desperately to her own theory of a sort of inverted noblesse oblige.

  ‘Still and all,’ said Leo, ‘it does seem to narrow things down.’

  At ten o’clock, the murdered body of Vanda Lane was wrapped in a piece of black bunting, by no means thus employed for the first time, and carried off without undue ceremony to the prison, which apparently combined the functions of morgue and police station, as well as those of civil and criminal courts and dungeon gaol, the customary end of appearing there at all. Cockrill joined them at the table with a subdued Fernando who remained, faute de choix, suspect No. 1, but was permitted a restricted freedom on a sort of ticket-of-leave arrangement, Inspector Cockrill standing Prisoner’s Friend. ‘Have you all eaten yet?’

  ‘We’ve toyed with hors d’oeuvres. The Diretore’s whipping up a paella or something for us.’

  Appetites might be impaired but the paella when it came was hot and steamy, rich with pimento and tomato, with onion and garlic, with fish and chicken and dear little chopped up squids. ‘Eye of newt,’ said Louli, fishing out a rubbery tentacle tip, ‘is one thing, but toe of frog I simply will not! Have you heard, Inspector, that mass escapes have been taking place right, left, and centre?’

  Inspector Cockrill had been in the dead girl’s room during the commotion on the terrace, vainly trying to convince the Gerente that, before the body was removed, it might be handy to call in someone who could even roughly guess an estimate of the time of death. ‘The entire staff, Inspector, left in a body, and were all marched back again, positively clanking with hotel spoons and forks, and nobody seemed to mind a bit.’ But when the thus belated paella had been cleared away and the waiters, who certainly seemed not a whit the worse for their foiled excursion, had brought the little cups of thick bitter chocolate and bowls of thin sweet cream, and left them to themselves, all their forced hilarity ebbed away. ‘Now do tell us, Inspector, what on earth’s going on?’

  Above them the sky was dark with a clear, star-studded darkness like a spangled veil, below them the sea was a-glitter with the firefly lights of the fishing fleet, pair by pair; all about them the air was balmy, sweet with the scent of jasmine, mimosa, and rose. But Inspector Cockrill, heaving himself sideways to dive into his pocket for papers and tobacco, wished himself fervently back in England again, on a nice chilly, damp July evening, holidaying decently in a Herne Bay boarding house. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I can. It isn’t what I’m used to,’ said Cockie, resentfully, ‘but it seems to me that you’d better all know what there is to face.’ He completed the cigarette and lighted a small bonfire at its wispy end. ‘Very well. I will describe what I’ve seen; you can draw your own conclusions. First: the room.’

  ‘Just like all our rooms?’

  ‘Just like the rest of them. There are ten in a row, in this angle of the hotel building, and this was number five; that you know. A small, square room with nothing in it but a bed, standing out from the centre of one side wall, and along the other wall a built-in wardrobe. The balcony wall, as it were, has a central door and a small window on either side, rather high up. Under the window on the bed side, there’s a small dressing-table, under the other window there’s the small square table and a plain wooden chair. The floor’s uncarpeted, bleached white wood: and all the furniture’s in plain bleached wood. The curtains, the bed curtains, the counterpane, are all just white cotton stuff – the whole thing has a sort of monastic effect, presumably to be cool and clean. The back of the room is divided off to make a tiny bathroom, leaving a narrow passage to the corridor door. I take it your rooms are all much the same? – mine is.’

&
nbsp; Double or single, the rooms were all the same: into some a matrimona had been squeezed instead of a single bed, but that was all the difference. ‘Very well. In the bathroom there’s only a wash-basin and a shower: the shower is just an overhead sprinkler surrounded by a curtain, with a rim round the drain underneath.’

  ‘Whoever peddled those shower things through Italy,’ said Louvaine chattily, ‘did a wonderful job. They’re simply everywhere.’ The only thing was, last night she had forgotten her bath-cap and hair-dye had simply spouted all over her, positively rivers of blood …

  ‘At any rate they sold one to the Bellomare Hotel for Miss Lane’s bathroom,’ said Helen, pleasantly smiling, pleasantly leading back to the subject on hand. Her husband sketched her a tiny mock bow. ‘Thank you, my dear; your heart is in the right place – whatever they may say.’ But Inspector Cockrill thought that underlying the mockery was a gleam of purest gratitude: of rather astonished gratitude that for his sake, she should protect his love from so signally making a fool of herself at a moment when light-hearted folly was very much out of place: should protect himself from that first sick stab of disillusion and doubt. ‘You were saying, Inspector …?’

  Inspector Cockrill had, as it happened, finished with what he had been saying. ‘We come now to her possessions. They’re as I think you’d expect – very neat, nothing out of place: everything of excellent quality, no discrepancies in that respect. I was only able to have a very cursory glance round; but I could see that the dress she wore this morning was hung up in a wardrobe, there were some underclothes in a corner of the bathroom, presumably for washing. Her bathing dress and the rubber cap and shoes were rolled up in the white towel – a hotel towel – and hung over the edge of the balcony rail outside her door. There were two novels, closed, on a corner of her dressing-table, no sign anywhere of sewing things, manicure things, pens, pencils, paper, and so forth – they were probably in the dressing-table drawers.’ He eyed them with a glint of teasing. ‘You will make what you like of all this as I go along.