Tour de Force

by Christianna Brand

  ‘Now, the body. The body was lying as you saw it. There seem to be no marks of any kind, no scratches or bruises, nothing – except the one stab wound. This was made by the paper knife, as you saw. Several of the tourists bought these knives this morning in the town …’

  Mr Cecil had bought one himself, too divine for one’s desk at Christophe’s with that wrought black and gold handle, so decorative; and Louvaine had bought one, because Leo had admired it; and thought that one day she would give it to him and say, ‘Little did they realize when I bought it flat out in front of them all, that I was buying it for you …’ for on such foolish secrets her secret love of necessity for the time being fed; and Miss Lane had bought one. They were labelled exuberantly, ‘Butifull Toledo steel works, mad only in San Juan’, and it was not for tourists to enquire how Toledo steel came to be made only in San Juan, or where were the foundries and workshops necessarily implied.

  ‘The blade is five inches long,’ said Cockie, ‘and thin and sharp. It could penetrate the breast without undue force being used.’

  ‘You mean that a man or a woman …?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Cockie. ‘Now, the point of penetration is fairly low on the left breast, over the heart, but not more than an inch from the central line of the breast bone. The kimono thing she was wearing has straight edges; it would be tied round her waist by the sash and form a sort of deep V. The knife hasn’t penetrated the stuff, it has gone between the two edges of the V.’ He added that they could make what they liked of that: and furthermore that she had nothing on under the gown.

  ‘The coverlet under her is rumpled a bit, of course, and there are a few smears of blood on it. The disarrangement suggests that she was lifted on to the bed from the side away from the windows, which is a little odd because the shortest way from the spot where she was killed, in the table corner, would be to the other side of the bed. The front of the kimono is spotted and smeared with blood, but not as much as you’d expect; and the blood seems rather pale and watery there, as if it were diluted.’ He held up a hand to ward off premature interruptions. ‘The wound would probably have spurted blood. If she’d put up her hands to defend herself, her hands and arms would have had a good deal of blood on them; but in fact they seem quite clean except for a few small smears. The shawl underneath her is quite clean, except for a damp patch where her head lay; and as we know, her hair was still quite wet.

  ‘That’s the bed. Now, the table and chair. The table has been pulled out into the room a bit, and the chair is behind it: as you go in through the balcony door, they’re in the right-hand corner, but the table had been moved so that anybody sitting at it would be looking, as it were slantwise, towards the balcony door; and anybody standing half turned in the doorway would be talking to the person across the little table. The chair is pushed back as though someone rose quickly from it: I only say “as though” but I think Miss Lane was a very tidy person and in the ordinary way, she would probably have replaced the chair. The chair has a few smears of blood; but the table is spattered all over with blood – except for an oblong patch, roughly in the centre which is free of any blood marks at all. The spots of blood, as I stood in the doorway, were tapered in my direction, if you see what I mean.’ No one appearing to see what he meant at all, he amended crossly that they were shaped like tadpoles with their tails pointing towards him.

  ‘Couldn’t be clearer,’ said Cecil, sotto voce to Louli; but Louli had learned her lesson by now, and looking nervously at Leo, she mumbled to shut up and listen.

  ‘Turning to the bathroom,’ said Cockie, not deigning to throw them a glance, ‘I found blood smears almost everywhere. The shower had been used since the maid did the bathroom, the hand towels were damp and blood-stained, just dropped about anyhow. One of the bath-towels, we know, was outside on the rail with her damp bathing things: the other was rather interesting – it was very damp and it was stained with blood all along one edge. There were smears on the wooden floor between the bathroom and the bed, where blood had been washed off or water mopped up; and the same between the table and the foot of the bed.’ He stopped abruptly and tilted back his chair, his toes just touching the ground. A glass of grappa was standing full before him and he emptied it, coughing, at one gulp.

  Mr Cecil thought that it was all madly interesting, but didn’t tell them much.

  ‘It tells us a very great deal,’ said Cockie severely.

  Leo Rodd had a bash. ‘It tells us that – let’s see. She came up from her bathe – no, go back earlier than that. She came in from lunch, she changed into her kimono, possibly with her undies still on, and presumably lay down like the rest of us. Then she put on her bathers, tossing her underclothes, then or before that, into the bathroom to be washed. When she came back from the bathe, she put her wet things on the rail and slipped on her kimono with nothing underneath it. She pulled out the little table from the window a bit and was sitting there when …’

  ‘What for?’ said Cockie.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Why did she sit down at the little table?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know – to write some letters or something.’

  ‘But there were no writing things on the table,’ said Helen. ‘Or sewing things. Or manicure things.’

  ‘M’m. I see,’ said Leo.

  ‘Perhaps she was reading,’ suggested Louvaine, reasonably.

  ‘One doesn’t sit at a table to read,’ said Miss Trapp, ‘and her books were on the dressing-table. And anyway, she’d come in to lie down.’ Miss Trapp herself had sent her in to lie down.

  ‘Perhaps she had lain down. After all, she was in her room for two and a half hours before we found her. Then she got up and sat down at the table.’

  ‘I say again – what for?’ said Cockie.

  ‘Perhaps she sat down to talk to the murderer?’

  ‘Leaving him standing up? There wasn’t anything else in the room to sit on.’

  ‘That would suggest a servant,’ said Miss Trapp, eagerly; but nobody bothered about Miss Trapp and her servant problem any more.

  ‘Then what was on the table?’ said Cockie.

  ‘You’ve told us yourself that there was nothing on it,’ said Leo. But he remembered. ‘Ah! – but you said there was a patch that wasn’t spattered with blood – an oblong patch.’

  ‘Like ferns in a book,’ said Louvaine. She shied away from that dawning, irritable frown. ‘No, no, I’m not talking nonsense: don’t you remember when one was a child, one used to put leaves and things down on a clean page and spatter ink with a comb? It was heavenly. And then you lifted up the leaf and all the rest of the page was speckled.’

  A slight altercation followed between those who had never heard of it in their lives, and those whose childhood rainy days had been made exquisite with ink and comb. Mr Cockrill continued to draw on his wispy cigarette. He considered it his duty, in the very curious, not to say dangerous, circumstances in which they found themselves, to tell them the facts. If they could not trouble to use the information, that was no affair of his.

  Miss Barker, however, was getting quite well trained. She nervously brought the subject back from the realms to which her simile had consigned it. ‘I only meant that the square patch was like the leaf. In other words, Inspector, there was something on the table when the table was spattered with blood; and it’s been taken away.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cockrill.

  ‘Something square: a book or a box.’

  ‘Something oblong, actually; if a book, possibly an open book.’

  ‘There were two books in the room?’

  ‘Neither of them is bloodstained.’

  ‘Now that I do call exciting,’ said Cecil. ‘A book or a box – and the murderer’s taken it away. Whatever can have been in it?’

  Inspector Cockrill had a very shrewd idea of what might have been in the book or the box and thought Mr Cecil too might be less than sincere in his wide-eyed wonder. But they moved on, away from that particular pro
blem. ‘Well, anyway, Inspector, she was sitting there in her white kimono and the murderer came in through the balcony door …’

  ‘Why the balcony door, Leo?’

  ‘Because of the way the chair was facing, the way the table was turned. Aren’t I right, Inspector?’

  ‘You’d make a good detective,’ said Cockie; higher praise no man could bestow.

  ‘They faced each other across the table. The murderer was – was either a man or a woman,’ said Leo, slowing down. And he added, tentatively, but encouraged by Cockrill’s recent praise, ‘But probably a woman – or a man whom Miss Lane knew pretty well.’

  ‘Very good indeed,’ said Cockrill, surprised.

  ‘And about her own height or a little taller; and right-handed.’

  ‘Now you’re simply showing off,’ said Mr Cecil.

  ‘He’s doing very nicely,’ said Cockie. ‘But you’d better explain your deductions, Mr Rodd, to these simple minds.’

  Leo deprecatingly obliged. ‘As for the height and the right-handedness, you could see from the hilt of the knife, when she was lying there, that the thrust went from right to left and slightly downwards and any detective story tells you what that shows. As to the murderer being a woman or a man – well, it’s true that a man would be the likeliest to be taller; Miss Lane wasn’t short by any means.’ He gave them his bitter smile and added that he trusted they would balance the fact that he was the only man present of the requisite height, against the fact that he could hardly be called right-handed. ‘But I still think it may have been a woman, and that’s because of the kimono. If the knife didn’t go through the kimono, if it went between the two edges, then the kimono must have been fairly wide open, or anyway, open a long way down; and I should think Miss Lane was the sort of girl who would automatically pull it together if she was in the presence of a man – unless she knew him extremely well, and even then I think she’d probably just hitch herself tidy and comme il faut.’

  There was a loud chorus of admiration. ‘Elementary, elementary,’ said Leo. ‘Come on, Mr Cecil – you have a go now.’

  ‘There’s nothing left to have a go at,’ said Cecil, a little bit put about by all this fuss and adulation over somebody else. ‘They talked across the table – not for very long, because the other person didn’t sit down …’

  ‘There was nothing for them to sit on; they just had to stand up.’

  ‘They could have gone and sat on the bed,’ said Cecil, crossly. ‘I mean, if it had been a real discussion, a real heart-to-hearter. Anyway, I say it was a short discussion, they quarrelled, the paper knife was on the table, because after all it was a paper knife and anyway it was new, she probably just put it down there to look at and gloat over a bit like one does with anything new: and the murderer picked it up and lunged at her, hence the tadpoles, and …’

  ‘Here, hoy, why “hence”? Explain your deductions, as the Inspector would say.’

  ‘Oh, but anybody knows,’ said Cecil, his good humour returning, ‘that if you flick a paint-brush or a pen, the drops fall into a little round dobble that tails off away from the thing that’s flicked. She was standing behind the table and the blood sort of – well, squirted out and the drops on the table do taper away from her, as it were. But it only confirms that she was standing behind the little table, facing towards the balcony door, and that we know.’

  ‘That we deduce,’ said Cockie.

  Cecil thought it was all too horrid, anyway, quite sickening, and that they should hurry on to the bathroom. ‘You won’t find the bathroom any more attractive,’ said Inspector Cockrill.

  ‘Well, as it happens the only interesting thing there is the bath-towel,’ said Cecil. ‘I mean, obviously the murderer went in there and cleaned up; he may even have had a shower, he may even have washed his clothes, though how he could walk about afterwards all damp one doesn’t quite see …’

  ‘Unless, of course,’ said Cockie, sweetly, ‘he happened to be in a bathing dress.’

  ‘A bathing dress?’

  ‘My dear Mr Cecil – the six suspects chosen by the police of San Juan are sitting round this table at this moment; and at the time that the crime was committed – isn’t it a fact that all of you were wearing bathing dresses.’

  ‘The six …? But, Inspector … I mean, you don’t really think …?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ said Cockie. ‘I’m talking about what the people here think, and unfortunately it’s what they think that matters. And I simply say that it is perhaps a slight – confirmation – that the murderer was able to wash himself clean of bloodstains and then walk about with damp clothes without attracting notice. It does suggest a bathing dress.’

  ‘Of course if it was one of the other hotel people, Inspector, they could have gone to their own room and changed.’

  ‘Yes, but Leo,’ said Helen, ‘then surely they’d have gone and washed in their own room as well? Why stay on the scene of the crime?’

  ‘Because the scene of the crime was the one place where it was safe enough to leave traces of blood. Isn’t that true, Inspector? If the murderer had gone to his own bathroom, there would probably have been some traces, however faint, and the police would have discovered them.’

  Inspector Cockrill privately thought that the Hotel Bellomare could have been transformed to a blood bath before the police of San Juan would have taken the slightest notice. He agreed, however, that the murderer, as long as he was fairly safe from interruption, was wise to remove all traces of the crime on the spot. ‘Now, Mr Cecil – you were commenting on the bath-towel, and you’re quite right to do so. Very damp; and with bloodstains all down one of the long edges, lengthways, that is.’

  ‘M’m,’ said Mr Cecil. ‘Very damp. Well, bath-towels often are very damp; and we don’t know that it wasn’t Miss Lane herself who used the shower, before ever the murderer came near the room. But the thing is – the blood.’ He gave a distasteful shudder at the ugly word, but was really too much concentrated upon the subject before him to do more than token service to his delicate susceptibilities. ‘There was blood on it – but only down one edge. And the other thing, that sort of goes with it, is that there wasn’t much blood round the knife and the edges of the kimono and it seemed to be a bit diluted So, Inspector, I should say that – yes, that the towel was sort of folded, or rolled if you like and, as it were, ringed round the hilt of the knife; so that there wouldn’t be too much blood spilled about when she was moved on to the bed. When she was on the bed, the towel was removed, her hands were put back round the knife – they were only quite laxly curled round it, they weren’t gripping it – and the towel was chucked out into the bathroom.’ He eyed Cockie like an alert sparrow; and Cockie reflected, as he had earlier reflected about the Gerente, that it never did to underrate people. He said graciously that that was very good indeed. Mr Cecil went quite pink with gratification, thought over the problem and said that that was all.

  Cockie switched off his graciousness like a lamp. ‘All?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything else of interest.’

  Nobody else could either. ‘Good heavens I’ said Cockie. ‘You amaze me.’ You told them everything, you put the facts before them fair and square: they discussed them all intelligently, made some superficial but quite well-reasoned deductions – and then totally ignored the most interesting; possibly the most important, certainly the most unaccountable – of the lot. He was disgusted with them. He got up abruptly from the table. ‘Well, I shall go to bed now and get some rest. I advise you all to do the same. You’re going to need it.’ They understand nothing, he thought, marching away from them impatiently: they don’t even understand the danger they’re in. Well, I’m supposed to be on holiday – let them get on with it! He stood on one leg at his bedroom door, to crush out the stump of his cigarette on the sole of blue canvas, Juanese espadrille. There arose a repellent stench of burning rope.

  Chapter Six

  LEO RODD sat on the edge of the four-poster bed, tugg
ing with his one hand at the lace of his shoe and waiting, nerves scraped raw, for his wife to offer to do it for him. ‘In one minute – in one minute now, she’ll stop fiddling with her hair and turn round and pretend to notice for the first time and say, “Shall I have a go?” as though it were some sort of competition, something that we could do about equally well, a sort of jolly puzzle …’ He wondered whether a day might ever come when Louvaine would get on his nerves like this: sweet, feckless, gay Louvaine, with her casual hand put out now and again to his assistance, without concealment, without apology; would she too one day have evolved this grating formula of delicate tact, shall-I-have-a-go, let-me-try-darling, can-you-manage-all-right-my-pet …? ‘At any rate,’ he thought, ‘she’d have done something by now, not stood there fiddling with her hair for the past half hour.’

  Helen glanced at his reflection in the looking-glass, standing there combing and recombing her perfectly set brown hair. ‘Whatever I say will be wrong. If I offer to do it, he’ll say that for God’s sake, he isn’t an infant in arms. If I wait any longer he’ll ask if I happen to have noticed that he’s recently lost one of his hands.’ But one could not stand there all the morning. She put down the comb and turned away from the table, pretending to see for the first time that he was in difficulties. ‘Shall I do it, darling?’ She knelt down and steadied his foot on her knee like a girl in a shoe-shop. ‘There you are. Give me the other one.’ She stood up again and covertly looked him over to see that there was nothing more he needed. ‘Well, I’ll go on down now, and wait for you on the terrace …’ (‘And then you can meet your girl on the balcony, quite by chance,’ she thought, ‘and start your day with a word of love – as you’re longing to do.’) She went out on the balcony and down the wooden steps to where the tables were laid for breakfast out on the terrace. Nobody was there yet but Mr Cecil, exquisite in white linen trousers and a peach coloured shirt. ‘My dear, did you hear the departures? They’ve all rushed off, quacking with excitement, down to the quay. Fernando has arranged for some of the smugglers’ boats to take them out for joy rides and all I can say is, I hope they’re sick, unfeeling beasts.’