Rum Affair

by Dorothy Dunnett

  There were three men on that doorstep between the two bay trees, and two of them, thank God, were genuine policemen. Of the third I had a first impression only of a pair of bifocal glasses, their half moons bright in the light, and a smile of boundless vacuity. The senior officer said: “I hope you’ll excuse us troubling you, but it’s a matter of robbery with violence, and we’re making a door to door enquiry. Would you mind if we entered?”

  They came in, stumping past the hall wardrobe and into the sitting room. The fire was almost out, and in front of it, the table with the two empty champagne glasses made one think of underfinanced operetta. I said: “Please sit down. Just how can I help you?” Dear God, dear God who looks after coloratura sopranos, they hadn’t recognised me. I could be Miss Smith from Blackheath, visiting my brother-in-law. I listened hard, while the sergeant intoned.

  It was simple enough. Three flats in the nearby square had been broken into this evening, and Mr Bifocals, who rented one of them, had disturbed the thief and given chase, helped by the law. The fugitive had disappeared into Rose Street and could have entered two or three possible houses. This flat was one. Had I seen anyone, asked the police sergeant briskly? And would I object if they had a wee look, in case someone had come in unbeknownst? I was not, he enquired bluffly, the tenant? He was told that a Mr Chigwell normally lived here, although he sometimes lent it to friends . . . He was tactful in the extreme.

  I had been seen to enter, obviously, by the neighbours. Perhaps Kenneth had even been seen to depart. The question was, when had he left? Before or after the beastly figure in the wardrobe had arrived? It occurred to me that, unshaven as he was, the man who lay bundled behind that locked door hadn’t looked like a layabout. Could the thief have committed the murder, in a panic, then shoved the dead man in the wardrobe and left? But no one had left. The sergeant was saying so, comfortably. “It seems pretty clear from the enquiries we’ve made, that if the chap came into one of these houses, he’s still there. These front door locks would present no problem to him. But you’ve heard nothing, Miss?”

  I shook my head.

  “And you’re alone in the flat? Might I ask when you came?”

  I told him. He knew, obviously, already. A street of busybodies.

  “And I’m told that the gentleman Mr Chigwell sometimes lends the flat to, left a little before that?”

  There was a question in the voice. The champagne glasses, of course. “He’s my brother-in-law,” I said. “We were to meet here for a drink, but I found a note saying he’d been called out. I waited a bit in case he came back.”

  I held my breath but he didn’t pursue that. He was only concerned with the man he was chasing, after all. I gave him the name and Edinburgh hotel address of a fictitious Miss Smith of Blackheath and then stood like a dummy while he shut up his notebook and announced that he was now going to search the flat.

  “But there’s no one in it,” I said. “I would have heard them. I’m absolutely sure.”

  “Well now,” said the sergeant. He had a bass baritone voice of a kind I particularly dislike. “You were asleep for a bit, didn’t you say? And he’d make much less noise than a doorbell. You can be quite sure of that.”

  “It won’t take long,” said the other policeman brightly. He was a tenor. “And you’ll feel a lot safer, I guarantee, afterwards.”

  I could hear my voice rise a little. “But I’m not staying here anyway. I meant to leave long before this.” I followed the sergeant into a bedroom. “Look, do you need me any more now? It’s late. I’d like to go off.” They had moved into the kitchen.

  Someone took me by the arm and I jumped. A pair of bifocal glasses, topped by two black eyebrows, shone into my face. “They’ll only look under a few beds and then go off,” said my third visitor kindly. “Routine, you know. Why not let me make you a cup of tea while they do it, and then I’ll find you a taxi?” And, while I drew breath to answer, he had the effrontery to press my hand. The bifocals flashed.

  “You dropped this, Madame Tina,” he murmured. And closed my fingers, gently, over the pieces of Kenneth Holmes’ card.

  TWO

  My mind, I think, was perfectly blank while I sat there in front of the almost-dead fire staring at the champagne glasses and listening to the hiss of Bifocals filling the kettle in Mr Chigwell’s neat kitchen, and the soft sounds of the policemen moving all through the flat. Bedroom. Bedroom. Bathroom. Now there was only the hall. In the kitchen, I heard the rattle of cups. Since he had given me Kenneth’s torn up card Bifocals had spoken to neither policeman: why? He knew I was Tina Rossi, it seemed. It was to be expected. I am famous. He now knew, for the fragments were all too easy to read, with whom I had an assignation for tonight. Still, he showed no haste to expose me.

  I didn’t know whether my money or my virtue was in jeopardy, and I didn’t, immediately, care. I could deal with bifocal gentlemen if I must. I couldn’t deal with the law.

  And the law were now in the hall. Every nerve in my body heard that wardrobe door rattle and pause.

  “Miss Smith!” It was the sergeant. “D’you know why this door is locked?”

  I got up and went through. The hall wardrobe stood firmly locked as I had left it, the key in my bag. “No. I haven’t locked it,” I lied. “Mr Chigwell must keep it shut.”

  The sergeant rattled the door again. “It’s a sort of cloakroom, isn’t it? Funny place to keep locked.”

  “Keeps his golf clubs in it, I expect,” advised a mild voice from the kitchen. The bifocals appeared, pot of tea nursed in its hands, and leaned against one of the doorposts. “Amazing who’ll walk off with a golf club when you lend your flat to a pal. It’s like books. Some chaps have no conscience.”

  The policeman rattled the handle again. “All the same, it’s a roomy place: just the spot a fellow would hide in.”

  “It is, of course.” Bifocals, laying down the teapot, advanced and peered at the lock. The two policemen peered at the lock. I could not look. Almost anything now was going to give it away. A trickle of blood on the carpet: a blow on the door that would dislodge the body inside . . . The smell of blood, even . . . Except that there had been almost no blood. The sergeant said: “It’d be an easy lock to force, that,” and fetched a piece of wire out of one pocket. The telephone rang.

  It rang insistently, as irritating in its way as the doorbell had been, and as incongruously welcome.

  It rang steadily until the sergeant, listening, suddenly said: “That might be for me, Miss,” and got to his feet just as I fled through to the sitting room with another thought in mind: Kenneth. It might be Kenneth, with God knew what story to tell, and the police listening, here in the flat. I got to it first, and said: “Hallo?”

  It wasn’t Kenneth. It was a policeman, to say that they thought they had apprehended the thief. In two minutes, before my heart had stopped thudding, the two policemen were trading courteous farewells and admonitions. Bifocals, returned to nursing the teapot, enquired whether I should find it offensive if he remained to share a small cup of tea, assuming the law would allow him to identify the miscreant later.

  The law gave him the necessary dispensation, and so did I. The door shut behind the two departing police officers and in five minutes Bifocals and I were sitting like china cats, one on each side of a rebuilt and roaring fire, drinking strong Indian tea, a pursuit that may seem to possess no particular appeal unless you have been through what I had been through in the last hour and a half. I studied my undesired champion.

  He was difficult to place. Not, my God, a man about town, with that green knitted pullover and those socks and the pipe sticking out of one pocket. But a man who went to a really good barber about three weeks less often than he should, and who could afford a rented flat in the Square, and the kind of cash and camera and cufflinks a thief thought worth having. A member of the professions, perhaps: but which among these would rent a flat in Edinburgh in August in solit
ary state? A university don, perhaps, who took a pride in following the European festivals? A medical man? Some inquisitive, music-loving rector from a Surrey vicarage, with more money than sense? He was older than I was, but not old. The agile eyebrows were black, and the shining puff of Indian-black hair showed no grey as yet. He might as well have had no eyes or mouth, so dominating were the spectacles. “Thirty-eight,” he remarked.

  I jumped.

  “Painter. London. On holiday. Got your records. Who’s in the cupboard? Boyfriend? Body?”

  I had to trust him. I hadn’t any choice. “Body,” I said.

  Johnson, his name was. It didn’t ring any bells: not then. He listened without comment to my whole story, and seemed to find nothing antisocial in my desire not to be found by the tabloids alone in a love nest with a corpse. “No, no,” he said. “Another cup . . . ? It could ruin your winter programme. No, no. An anonymous phone call to the police once you are well out of town. That will do it, if the interests of justice are concerning you. Dr Holmes is, you believe, the murderer?”

  I couldn’t afford to snap, but I came rather near it. “Dr Holmes, I am quite certain, is not the murderer. On the contrary. He is a thoroughly responsible Government engineer of some repute.”

  “Oh. And who then was the corpse?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And if my burglar didn’t kill him and neither did your Dr Holmes, who was the murderer? Or did he kill himself, maybe?”

  I stood up. “I hadn’t thought of that. He could have; he was shot in the chest. If he did, there’d be a gun in the cupboard.” I opened my bag and stopped, key in hand. “But why on earth kill himself in a wardrobe?”

  “Tidy habits,” said Johnson. “Come on. Show me your body.”

  He was a remarkably casual little man. Together, we went into the hall. I gave him the key. Bifocals flashing, he unlocked and swung open the hall wardrobe door.

  It was empty.

  I remember, on stage, going to a cupboard where there should have been a prop bottle, and the shelves were all bare. There was the same feeling of cues abysmally missed, of interfering hands and unreliable minds. I said: “But he was lying there. All folded up, on the floor. I just flung him in anyhow and jammed the door shut and locked it. The key’s never been out of my bag.”

  “Well, see for yourself,” said Johnson. “Clubs, bats, brollies and rows of tatty old coats. Wait a bit. I saw a torch in the kitchen. Maybe he rolled when the bobbies were bashing the panel.” And he went off, chirpily. I don’t think he ever believed in that corpse.

  But I did. I had had it fall on me. And believe me, it was well and truly dead. I looked closer into the cupboard.

  It was very dark. The clothes rail with its dozens of hangers ran across the cupboard from left to right, and the recesses of the wardrobe behind were stuffed with sporting gear and a variety of shoes. There was a pair of shoes, too, near at hand, which seemed to have the socks still crumpled inside them.

  Then I realised that they had not only socks but feet and legs in them, and trousers above. Swaying gently from his hanger above me, his stiffening shoulders square in a coat, hung the cold, staring face of my dead man, the bullet hole black in his chest.

  I shrieked, then; and from among the coats something jumped out and struck me a hard blow on the neck that sent me flying down to the carpet. But the man who fell stumbling over me this time, kicked free, darted over the hall, and, wrenching open the yellow front door, fled out into the dark silent street was not a corpse. It was a little, spare man in a jersey and slacks with big, powerful hands and a single gold tooth that flashed as he drew in his breath. The person whom I had locked in with his victim before he could dispose of the corpse. The murderer, who had been in the flat with me all evening, of course.

  “What happened?” said Johnson, standing over me. He peered out of the open door, then closed it and came back. I explained. “Well, at least we’ve now got a corpse,” Johnson said. “I wonder where Chigwell went for his hangers. All the hooks come out of mine.”

  “You must ask him,” I said.

  Johnson just stood there, studying the corpse without even helping me up. “Not in this world,” he said, cheerfully. “I’ve just found a photograph in the bedroom. That’s Chigwell: your corpse on the hanger. He’s the chap who lent Holmes the flat.”

  We had another cup of tea, but it had got rather stewed, and it was Johnson who finally thought of the champagne. “Holmes won’t mind, will he?” he asked. “After all, it’s his reputation we’re protecting.”

  I gazed at him steadily. My dress, chosen for Kenneth, was plain but good: three layers of chiffon in coffee and white, slit from neck to waist at the back. While he was in the kitchen I had shaken out my hair, which was coming down anyway, and re-powdered my nose and done a small thing or two. I also put back the yellow diamond I had slipped off when the policeman arrived. Even tired and untidy I am beautiful; but I like to make the effort, as well.

  “You really mean you won’t report all this as you should? It could mean trouble,” I said.

  The cork had popped a moment before, but he didn’t seem to notice, and the foam ran all down his hand before he got some liquid into the glasses. “You know, it takes a bit of believing that you sing as well as all this,” he said. “Cheers. No, I don’t mind. Someone’ll notice, if it’s only the charwoman, and they’ll get on your little man’s track; but I’ll tip them off by telephone, to make sure . . . You’re certain there was a little man?” And as I frowned: “All right. I’m sure hallucinations are not in your field. In any case” – he rose from mopping up champers – “you said your friend Holmes was an engineer?”

  I nodded.

  “Queer things happen to engineers,” said Johnson. “For example, why should this table be bugged?”

  “What?”

  “This table,” said Johnson mildly. “It’s got a microphone under it. I wonder if that’s why your friend left so suddenly? Saw it and knew he was under surveillance?”

  I bent down. There was something wired under the table, but someone had found it before us. The wiring was broken, thank heaven. None of Johnson’s conversation or mine would be on record. “Did you know Chigwell had planned to be in the flat?” Johnson said.

  “No.” Neither had Kenneth. Chigwell’s presence must have been quite unexpected. Chigwell had been going to move out. But Kenneth left first. And before Chigwell could leave, he was murdered.

  “I wonder . . .” said Johnson, his second glass in his hand.

  “I wonder . . .” said I, at exactly the same moment. “I wonder if they thought Chigwell was Kenneth? But why should anyone want to kill Kenneth?”

  “Dunno,” said Johnson. He was, I saw, decidedly squiffed. “Engineers. Scientists. Iron Curtain after them every day.”

  I lifted my third glass. “I suppose so.” I was bored with the topic. And Johnson was the type who would hog your last bottle. I was watching him hard.

  To be candid, my recollection of the following half-hour is not perfectly clear.

  At three in the morning, having finished the champagne, we put out the lights, and leaving Mr Chigwell hanging in his wardrobe, drew the yellow front door gently behind us. We kissed, Johnson and I, at the side door of my hotel, because it seemed the polite thing to do, and I slipped up to my room while his bifocals were still all steamed over.

  I promised him, as I remember, my next album of records. Ah, silly, innocent youth.

  Next day there were more photographs, an interview for a Sunday magazine, lunch with a countess, a tour of the Castle, and a rehearsal for the evening programme with Thalberg, who had had a tiff with his secretary and kept taking the tempo too fast.

  There was nothing in the morning paper about a dead man in a wardrobe in Rose Street; and nothing in the evening paper either. I gave away the chiffon dress, wore a dressed-up piece from my wig box, and tried, without success, Kenneth’s London telephone number.

  There was anothe
r rehearsal, this time at the proper tempo: Michael fixed this. Musicians respected Michael for his Andrew Sinclair trousers and for an instinct for music that amounted almost to genius: his accent almost never slipped now. In between, I discovered from the AA that Rum is a small island off the Scottish west coast which can be reached by a hired boat from Mallaig, and that it takes practically all day to reach Mallaig from Edinburgh.

  I waited, and just before the evening performance, after drinks with the Festival Committee, I rang up the Scottish Nature Conservancy laboratories on Rum. Dr Holmes was there, but was not receiving calls on the phone.

  That was my biggest moment of relief. My fear had been that, afraid of involving me, or of some unknown persecutor, Kenneth might have vanished: taken himself somewhere out of my reach. Rum was bad enough, heaven knew; and how I should reach him there without the whole communications network being aware of it, I didn’t yet know. But recalling that corpse hanging alone in a wardrobe in Kenneth’s borrowed flatlet in Rose Street, I was going to have a bloody good try.

  The matter concerned me, but did not affect my singing, although Michael said I overlooked one of his precious rallentandos in the Alcina. I told Michael, as we prepared to go on to the Lord Provost’s supper party, that he would have to cancel this year’s Messiah. I simply couldn’t face all that fuss over the recitativi secchi again. He talked soothingly and helped Janine to put my hair properly up. Oh, Michael was useful. One could not deny that.

  One cannot eat much, of course, before a performance, and when we arrived at the supper party it was after eleven and I was therefore very hungry. I saw however as the introductions were made that the cold buffet appeared delicious, set among a perfect bower of flowers. These looked charming even after the City Parks and Gardens Department had removed the gladioli, which give me hay fever. I started, after the first flush of bailies, with a plate of cold salmon. I am fortunate in that I need rarely diet. That night, for example, I was wearing white broadtail, with a clip and earrings in baguette diamonds made for me by a little man in Stockholm who works for N.K. Very few singers can wear tailored fur. By nineteen or twenty the expanding voice has stretched the ribcage, the diaphragm, the muscles of neck and shoulders and bosoms. There is an overhang: an undertow. Except with Tina Rossi.