You Find Him, I'll Fix Him

by James Hadley Chase

  “No.”

  He tapped ash off his cigarette.

  “Grandi, who is handling the case, seems satisfied it was an accidental fall. He has only asked me to check with him because il Signor Chalmers is such an important man. It is unfortunate that there is a lover involved. If there was no lover, it would be pretty straightforward.”

  “It might not be necessary to mention him,” I said, looking out of the car window.

  “That is possible. You wouldn’t know for certain if she had a lover?”

  “I know practically nothing about her.” I felt the palms of my hands turn moist. “We mustn’t jump to conclusions. Until we have seen the body, we don’t know for certain it is her.”

  “I am afraid it is her all right. All her clothes and her luggage carry her name. There were letters found in her luggage. The description fits. I don’t think there’s a doubt about it.”

  We said nothing further until we were on the plane for Naples, then suddenly he said, “You will have to explain the position to il Signor Chalmers. The fact that she rented the villa under another name is bound to come out at the inquest. You understand there is nothing we can do to hush it up.”

  I could see he was worried about getting tangled with Chalmers.

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “That’s not your funeral nor mine.”

  He gave me a sidelong look.

  “Il Signor Chalmers has a lot of influence.”

  “He certainly has, but he should have used some of it with his daughter before she got tied up in a situation like this.”

  He lit another of his awful cigarettes, sank further down in his seat and went off into a coma of brooding. I went of into one of my own.

  I was surprised he hadn’t said more about Douglas Sherrard. This made me a little uneasy. I knew Carlotti. He moved slowly, but he also moved thoroughly.

  We reached Naples around noon. There was a police car waiting. Lieutenant Grandi of the Naples Police was standing by the car, waiting for us.

  He was a middle-sized bird with a hatchet face, dark solemn eyes and an olive complexion. He shook hands with me, looking just beyond my right shoulder. I had the impression he wasn’t overjoyed to have me in the party. He manoeuvred Carlotti into the back seat and me into the front seat beside the driver. He got in alongside Carlotri. During the long, fast drive to Sorrento, I could just hear his rapid Italian as he talked continuously, his voice barely above a whisper.

  . I tried to listen to what he was saying, but the noise of the wind and the roar of the car engine made that impossible. I gave up, lit a cigarette and stared through the wind shield at the unwinding road as it rushed continuously towards us, thinking of the previous night’s ride that had been so much quicker and so much more dangerous.

  We reached Sorrento. The police driver took us around the back of the railway station to a small brick building that served at the town’s morgue.

  We got out of the car.

  Carlotti said to me, “This won’t be pleasant for you, but it is necessary. She has to be identified.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  But it wasn’t all right. I was sweating, and I knew I must have lost colour. I didn’t have to worry about my appearance. Anyone could have looked the same in such circumstances.

  I followed him through the door of the building, down a tile-lined corridor and into a small, bare room.

  In the middle of the room stood a trestle table on which lay a body, under a sheet.

  We moved forward up to the table. My heart was beating sluggishly. There was a sickness inside me that made me feel faint.

  I watched Carlotti reach forward and turn back the sheet.

  III

  It was Helen all right, and, of course, she was dead.

  Although someone with a practised hand had cleaned her up, and had made her as presentable as possible, her face still bore the marks of the awful fall she had taken.

  It was pretty unnerving to stand there and look down at the dead, shattered face. I turned away, feeling bad. Grandi, who bad come up behind me, put his hand on my arm as Carlotti pulled the sheet back into place.

  I jerked away from Grandi and walked out into the corridor. The fresh draught of air coming in through the open doorway did a lot to help me pull myself together.

  The two detectives came out silently, and the three of us walked slowly back to the car.

  “Yes, if s her,” I said, as we reached the car. “No doubt about it.”

  Carlotti lifted his shoulders.

  “I have been hoping that there might be a mistake. This is going to be troublesome. There will be a lot of publicity.”

  I could see he was still very worried about Chalmers. He knew Chalmers had enough influence to lift him right out of his job if he put a foot wrong.

  “Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t sorry for him. I had too much on my mind at that moment to be sorry for anyone except myself. “I’ll have to send him a cable.”

  Carlotti lit another of his awful cigarettes. As he flicked away the burning match, he said, “We’ll go to the station now. You can use the telephone there.”

  We got in the car: Carlotti and Grandi behind and I with the driver. No one said anything while we drove through the traffic-congested main street to the police station. By the time we got there, I was feeling a little more like my old self, although I was still pretty shaken. They left me in an office while they went off to another office for a conference.

  I put a call through to Maxwell.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” I said, when he came on the line. “It’s Helen all right.”

  “Sweet grief! What do we do now?”

  “I’m going to send a cable to Chalmers. I’ll give him three hours to get over the shock, then I’ll call him on long distance.”

  I could hear him breathing like an old man with asthma.

  “I guess that’s all you can do,” he said after a long pause. “Okay, if there’s anything I can do…”

  “Look after the job,” I said. “It doesn’t mean that because Chalmers’s daughter falls off a cliff, the job stands still.”

  “I’ll look after it if you’ll look after Chalmers,” he told me. “There’s no need for me to shove my oar into this, Ed. You’re fitted for the job. He likes you. He thinks you’re sharp. He hasn’t much use for me. I’ll take care of the work here: you take care of Chalmers.”

  “Okay. Put Miss Valetti on the line, will you?”

  “Sure. Hang on a moment.”

  The relief in his voice was almost comic.

  A moment or so later, Gina’s cool voice came on the line.

  “She’s dead then, Ed?”

  “Yes. She’s dead all right. Have you got your book? I want you to send a cable to Chalmers.”

  “Go ahead.”

  That’s something I have always admired about Gina. No matter how big the emergency is, she never got rattled.

  I dictated a cable to Chalmers. I told him his daughter had met with an accident I regretted that she was dead. I said I would call him at his house at 16.00 hours European time with the details. That gave me three hours in which to get the details and find out how much the police had discovered. It would also give me time to cook up my end of the tale if it seemed necessary to cook up a tale.

  Gina said she would get the cable off right away.

  “Do that,” I said. “There’s a chance Chalmers will call before I call him. If he does, you don’t know a thing - understand? Don’t get tangled up in this, Gina. You don’t know a thing. Tell him I’ll call him at four o’clock sharp.”

  “All right, Ed.”

  It was good to hear her calm, matter-of-fact voice. I dropped the receiver on to its cradle and pushed back my chair. As I did so, Carlotti came in.

  “I am going to look at the place where she died,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

  I stood up.

  “Sure, I’ll come.”

  As I followed him out of the office
, I saw Grandi was waiting in the corridor. Maybe I was suffering from a guilty conscience, but I had an uneasy idea that the look he gave me was full of suspicion.

  PART FOUR

  I

  The police launch rounded the bend of the high cliff. I was sitting in the stern of the boat by Carlotti. He was smoking, and he wore blue-tinted sunglasses. It seemed odd to me that a policeman should wear sunglasses. I felt he should be above such luxuries.

  Grandi and three uniformed policemen were amidships. Grandi didn’t wear sunglasses: whatever he did would always be official and correct.

  As soon as we got around the bend, I recognized the tiny bay and the massive boulders on which Helen had fallen.

  Carlotti stared up at the cliff head. He made a little face. I could see he was thinking what it must have felt to have fallen from such a height. Looking up, I also thought the same thing. The distant cliff head up there made me feel like a pigmy.

  The boat chugged into the bay. As soon as it drew alongside the rocks, we scrambled out.

  Grandi said to Carlotri, “We haven’t touched anything. I wanted you to see it first. All we did was to remove the body.”

  He and Carlotti began a systematic search of the spot. I and two of the policemen sat on one of the bouiders, out of the way, and watched them. The third policeman remained in the boat.

  It wasn’t long before Grandi found the camera case I had tossed over the cliff. It was lying half-submerged in water, between two boulders. He fished it up. Both he and Carlotri examined it the way a couple of professors would have examined something that had fallen off Mars.

  I noted the careful way Carlotti handled the case, and I was thankful I had got rid of all my prints.

  Finally he looked over at me.

  “This must be hers. Was she interested in photography?”

  I very nearly said she was, but caught myself in time.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Most Americans on a visit to Italy bring a camera.”

  Carlotti nodded and handed the camera case to one of the policemen who put it carefully into a plastic bag.

  They continued their search. After about ten minutes and after they had climbed some distance from where I was sitting, I saw they had made another discovery. Grandi bent and picked something up from between the cliff face and a rock. The two men stood close together, their backs to me while they examined whatever it was they had found.

  I waited, smoking, aware that my heart kept thumping and my mouth was dry.

  Finally, after what seemed to me a lifetime, Carlotti made his way to where I was sitting. I pushed off from the rock and went to meet him. I saw he was holding what remained of Helen’s Paillard Bolex camera. It had obviously hit a rock in its fall down the cliff face. The telephoto lens had snapped off and there was a dent in its side.

  “This could explain how the accident happened,” Carlotti said, showing me the camera. “She was probably taking a picture; holding it like this.” He held up the camera and peered through the viewfinder. “If she had stood on the edge of the path up there, it would be easy for her to take a false step with this thing obscuring her view’.”

  I took the camera from him and looked at the little window panel at the back that showed how many feet of film you have run off. It showed twelve feet.

  “There’s a film in it,” I said. “From the look of the camera the water hasn’t got into it. Get the film processed, and you’ll know for sure if she was taking something from the cliff head.”

  This seemed to please him.

  All the time we had been driving down to the harbour and all the time we had been in the boat, heading towards the place where Helen had died, I knew he had been secretly worrying about the trouble Chalmers might make for him.

  “If she hadn’t called herself Mrs. Douglas Sherrard,” he said, taking the camera from me, “this would be a very straightforward affair. We will go to the villa now. I want to talk to the village woman.”

  We returned to the harbour of Sorrento, leaving two of the policemen to continue the search for clues. They seemed pretty depressed at being marooned on the rocks. I didn’t blame them. It was very hot out there, and there was no shade.

  When we reached the harbour, we took the police car and drove out to the villa.

  The trip back from the bay and the drive up to the villa took a little over an hour and a half.

  We left the police car at the gates and walked up the drive. The Lincoln convertible still stood on the tarmac before the villa.

  Carlotti said, “Did this car belong to her?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  Grandi broke in impatiently to say that he had already checked the registration plates. Helen had bought the car ten weeks ago: soon after she had arrived in Rome.

  I wondered where the money had come from. It puzzled me. I told myself that it was possible that she had cabled to her father, and he had sent her the money but, remembering what he had said about her keeping within her allowance, it didn’t seem likely the money had come from him.

  We trooped into the lounge. Carlotti asked me politely if I would sit down and wait while he examined the villa.

  I sat down and waited.

  They spent some time in the bedroom. After a while, Carlotri came out carrying a small leather box: the kind of box you buy in Florence when you’re hard put to give a friend at home a present.

  “You had better take charge of these,” he said, putting the box on the table. “They must be given to il Signor Chalmers. Perhaps you will give me a receipt?”

  He lifted the lid. In the box were some pieces of jewellery. There were two rings: one of them had a large sapphire stone; the other had three diamonds. There was a collar of diamonds and a pair of diamond ear-rings. I don’t know much about the value of jewellery, but even I could see that these would be worth quite a lot.

  “They are very nice,” Carlotti said. He sounded a little wistful as if he coveted the jewels. “It is fortunate no one broke in here while the place was unguarded.”

  I remembered the tall, broad-shouldered intruder.

  “Where did you find them?” I asked.

  “They were on her dressing-table for anyone to steal.”

  “They’re genuine? I mean, they’re not paste?”

  “Of course they are genuine.” He frowned at me. “I should say at a rough guess they are worth three million lire”

  While he was scribbling out a receipt for me to sign, I stared at the box and its contents. On her dressing-table for anyone to steal! I felt a little chill of uneasiness crawl up my spine. It didn’t seem then that the intruder I had seen had been a sneak thief. Then who had he been? The sound of the telephone bell startled me.

  Carlotti answered it.

  He said, “Si… si.… si.” Listened for a long moment, then grunted something and hung up.

  Grandi came into the room. His face wore an expectant expression.

  Carlotti lit a cigarette before saying to me, “They have just had the autopsy report.”

  I could see something had upset him. His eyes were uneasy again.

  “Well, you know how she died,” I said in an attempt to bridge ever the long pause that followed.

  “Yes, there is no doubt about that.”

  He moved away from the telephone. I could feel his uneasiness the way you feel the touch of a hand in the dark.

  “Is there anything else?”

  I was aware that my voice had sharpened. I saw Grandi turn to look at me.

  “Yes, there is something else,” Carlotti said and grimaced. “She was pregnant.”

  II

  It was close on three-thirty by the time Carlotti had completed his examination of the villa and his interrogation of the woman from the village.

  I didn’t see her.

  I could hear the faint sound of their voices as he talked with her in the kitchen. I remained in the lounge, smoking cigarette after cigarette, my mind a squirrel cage of panic.

&nb
sp; So Helen had been pregnant.

  That would be the final nail in my coffin if they ever found out who Douglas Sherrard was. I knew I was not only innocent of her death, but also of her pregnancy, but if ever the facts came out, no one would believe it.

  What a mad, crass stupid fool I had been to have ever got tangled with the girl!

  Who had been her lover?

  I thought again of the broad-shouldered, mysterious intruder I had seen the previous night. Was he the man? It was possible. It was obvious now that he hadn’t been a thief. No thief would have left three million lire’s worth of jewellery on the dressing-table.

  I went on turning this situation over in my mind, watching the clock on the overmantel, knowing in another half-hour I would have to give Chalmers the details of her death.

  The more I thought about it, the more acutely conscious I became that one false step would be my complete finish.

  Carlotti came into the lounge as the hands of the clock on the overmantel moved to three forty-four.

  “There are complications,” he said gloomily.

  “I know. You said that before.”

  “Do you think she was the suicide type?”

  The question startled me.

  “I don’t know. I tell you, I don’t know anything about her.” I felt compelled to drive this point home so I went on, “Chalmers asked me to meet her at the airport and take her to her hotel. This was about fourteen weeks ago. Since then I have scarcely seen her. I just don’t know anything about her.”

  “Grandi thinks it is possible that her lover deserted her.” Carlotti said. I don’t think he paid much notice to what I had said. “He thinks she threw herself off the cliff in despair.”

  “American girls don’t do that sort of thing. They’re too practical. You will have to be careful how you suggest a theory of that kind to Chalmers. He might not like it.”

  “I’m not suggesting it to il Signor Chalmers, I’m suggesting it to you,” Carlotti said quietly.

  Grandi wandered in at this moment and sat down. He stared at me with cold, hostile eyes. For some reason or other, he didn’t seem to like me.