“Make all the suggestions you like to me,” I said, looking steadily at Carlotti. “It won’t help you one way or the other, but be careful what you say to Chalmers.”
“Yes,” Carlotti said. “I understand that. I am relying on you for help. It seems there was a love affair. The woman has told me that the girl came here two days ago. She came alone. She told the woman that she was expecting her husband to join her the following day - that would be yesterday. The woman says there is no doubt that she was expecting him. She was very gay.” He broke off to stare at me. “I’m telling you what the woman said. Women are very often reliable concerning such matters.”
Go on,” I said. “I’m not arguing with you.”
“This man was supposed to be arriving at Sorrento from Naples at three-thirty. La signorina told her she was going to meet the train, and she was to come in at nine in the evening to dear up the dinner things. The woman left the villa at eleven in the morning. Between that time and the rime it was necessary for la signorina to leave to meet the train something happened either to prevent her from meeting the train or that made her change her mind about meeting it.”
“What kind of thing?”
He lifted his shoulders.
“She may have received a message. There is no record of her receiving a telephone call. I don’t know. I think it is very possible she learned somehow or other that her lover wasn’t coming.”
“You’re guessing,” I said. “You’ll have to watch out not to guess with Chalmers.”
“By then we may have some facts. I am trying theories.” He moved restlessly. I could see he was perplexed and unhappy with tile situation. “I am seeing if Grandi’s theory fits that in a fit of
depression she killed herself.”
“Does it matter?” I said. “She’s dead. Can’t this be put through as an accident? There’s no need to broadcast the fact that she was pregnant, is there?”
“The coroner will have the autopsy report. There is no way of keeping it quiet.”
Grandi said impatiently, “Well, I have things to do. I have got to find this man Sherrard.”
I felt as if someone had touched the back of my neck with a splinter of ice.
“I am going to call il Signor Chalmers,” I said, trying to make my voice casual. “He will want to know what is happening. What shall I tell him?”
The two men exchanged glances.
“It would be wise to tell him as little as possible at this stage of the investigation,” Carlotti said. “It would be unwise to mention this man Sherrard, I think. Couldn’t you say that she fell off the cliff while using her cine camera, that there will be an inquest and a full investigation and until then…”
The telephone interrupted him. Grandi lifted the receiver, listened for a moment, then looked across at me. “It is for you.”
I took the receiver from him.
“Hello?”
Gina said, “Mr. Chalmers phoned through ten minutes ago. He said he was flying out right away, and you are to meet him at 18.00 hours at the Naples airport to-morrow.”
I drew in a long, slow breath. This was something I wasn’t prepared for.
“How did he sound?”
“He was very curt and sharp,” Gina said. “He didn’t sound like anything except that.”
“Did he ask any questions?”
“No. He just told me the time he would be arriving and asked for you to meet him.”
“Okay, I’ll be there.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No. Go home, Gina. I won’t be needing you now.”
“If you do, I’ll be at my apartment all the evening.”
“Okay, but I won’t worry you. So long for now,” and I hung up.
Carlotti was watching me, his eyes frowning.
“Chalmers will arrive at Naples at 18.00 hours to-morrow,” I said. “Between now and then, you’d better get some facts. There’ll be no question of telling him as little as possible. He’ll have to be told everything, and in detail.”
Carlotti grimaced as he got to his feet
“We should be able to find this man Sherrard by to-morrow evening,” he said, and looked over at Grandi. “Leave your man here. He is to remain here until he is relieved. You can drive us down to Sorrento. Don’t forget the jewels, Signor Dawson.”
I picked up the leather box and slipped it into my pocket.
As we went down the steps and down the drive to the police car, Carlotti said to Grandi, “I’ll leave you in Sorrento. Try to find out if anyone knows Sherrard and if he was seen in Sorrento. Check up on all American visitors who arrived yesterday especially on any American travelling alone.”
In spite of the heat, I realized that the sweat on my face felt cold.
III
I got to the Naples airport at a few minutes to six o’clock. They told me the New York plane was on time, and was due in at any moment.
I went to the barrier, lit a cigarette and waited. There were four people waiting; two of them elderly women, the third a fat Frenchman and the fourth was a platinum blonde with a bust on her you only see in the pages of Esquire. She was wearing a white sharkskin costume and a small black hat with a diamond cluster ornament that must have cost someone a pile of money.
I looked at her and she turned. Our eyes met
“Excuse me: are you Mr. Dawson?” she asked.
“That’s right,” I said, surprised. I took off my hat.
“I am Mrs. Sherwin Chalmers.”
I stared at her.
“You are? Mr. Chalmers hasn’t already arrived, has he?”
“Oh. no. I’ve been shopping in Paris for the past week,” she said, her deep violet eyes searching my face. She had the hard beauty of a New York show-girl. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or four, but there was a worldliness about her that made her look older. “My husband cabled me to meet him. This is dreadful news.”
“Yes.”
I fidgeted with my hat
“It’s a terrible thing… she was so young.”
“It’s bad,” I said.
There was something in the way she kept looking at me that made me uncomfortable.
“Did you know her well, Mr. Dawson?”
“Hardly at all.”
“I can’t understand how she could have fallen like that.”
“The police think she was taking photographs and didn’t look where she was going.”
The sound of an approaching aircraft cut this uncomfortable conversation short.
“I think the plane’s coming in now,” I said.
We stood side by side, watching the aircraft land. After a few minutes, the passengers began
to alight. Chalmers was the first off the plane. He came quickly through the barrier. I drew back and let him greet his wife. They stood talking together for a few moments, then he came over to me and shook hands. He stared at me, then said they wanted to get to the hotel as quickly as possible, that he didn’t want to discuss Helen at this moment and for me to arrange a meeting with the police at his hotel at seven.
He and his wife got in the back seat of the Rolls I had hired for them and, as I didn’t get any encouragement, I got in front with the chauffeur.
At the hotel, Chalmers dismissed me with a curt, “See you at seven, Dawson,” and they were whisked away in the elevator up to the fourth floor, leaving me feeling a little breathless.
I had seen photographs of Chalmers, but in the flesh he was more than life size. Although he was short, fat and built like a barrel there was an atmosphere about him that reduced me and the people around him to the size of pigmies. The best description I can give of him is that he reminded me of Mussolini in his heyday. He had the same ruthless, jutting jaw, the same dark complexion and the same ice-pick eyes. It didn’t seem possible that he could have been the sire of a girl like Helen whose brittle, uncoarse beauty had been so fatally attractive to me.
When, at seven o’clock, Carlotti, Grandi and I t
rooped into the lush lounge that the Vesuvius hotel had provided for him, he had changed, obviously shaved and showered, and was now sitting at the head of a big table in the middle of the room, a cigar between his teeth and a glowering, dark expression on his hard face.
Sitting by the window was his wife, June. She had on a sky-blue silk dress that fined her like a second skin and her long, shapely legs were crossed, showing beautiful knees that attracted Grandi’s eyes and made his usually gloomy dark face take on a more animated expression.
I introduced him and Carlotti and we sat down.
For a long moment Chalmers stared fixedly at Carlotti. Then he said in his barking voice, “Okay, let’s have the facts.”
I’ve known Carlotti pretty intimately for the past three years. Up to this moment, I had never thought much of him as a policeman. I knew he was thorough, and he had a reputation for solving his cases, but he had never struck me as having any great talent for his job. But the way he faced up to Chalmers during the next twenty minutes gave me an entirely different opinion of him.
“The facts, Signor Chalmers,” he said quietly, “will be painful to you, but since you ask for them, you shall have them.”
Chalmers sat motionless, his freckled, fat hands clasped on the top of the table, his cigar, drifting smoke past his hard face, gripped tightly between his teeth. His small, ice-pick eyes, the colour of rain, stared fixedly at Carlotti.
“Never mind how painful it is,” he said. “Give me the facts.”
“Ten days ago, your daughter left Rome and flew to Naples. She took the local train from Naples to Sorrento where she paid a visit to an estate agent,” Carlotti said as if he had rehearsed this speech for some time, learning it by heart. “She introduced herself to the estate agent as Mrs. Douglas Sherrard, the wife of an American business man on vacation in Rome.”
I sneaked a quick look at Chalmers. He sat impassive, his cigar glowing, his hands slack on the table. I looked from him to his platinum blonde wife. She was looking out of the window and she gave no sign that she was listening.
“She wanted a villa for a month,” Carlotti went on in his quiet, excellent English. “She insisted on a place that was isolated, and the cost was immaterial. It so happened that the agent had such a place. He drove la signorina to this villa and she agreed to take it. She wanted someone to come in and look after the place during their stay. The agent arranged with a woman of a nearby village to do the necessary work. This woman, Maria Candallo, tells me that, on 28th August, she went to the villa where she found la signorina who had arrived a few hours earlier in a Lincoln convertible.”
Chalmers said, “Was the car registered in her name?”
“Yes,” Carlotti said.
Chalmers touched off the ash on his cigar, nodded, and said, “Go on.”
“La signorina told Maria that her husband would be arriving the following day. According to the woman, there was no doubt in her mind that la signorina was very much in love with this man whom she called Douglas Sherrard.”
For the first time Chalmers gave a hint of his feelings. He hunched his broad shoulders and his freckled hands turned into fists.
Carlotti went on, “Maria came to the villa at eight forty-five on the morning of the 29th. She washed up the breakfast things, dusted and swept. La signorina told her she was going down to Sorrento to meet the three-thirty train from Naples. She said her husband was coming from Rome on that train. Around eleven o’clock Maria left. At that time la signorina was arranging flowers in the lounge. That was the last time, so far as we know, that anyone saw her alive.”
June Chalmers recrossed her legs. She turned her pretty head and stared directly at me. Her worldly, violet eyes went over me thoughtfully: a disconcerting stare that made me look quickly away from her.
“What happened between that time and eight-fifteen in the evening is a matter for conjecture,” Carlotti said. “It is some-thing probably that we shall never know.”
Chalmers’s eyes became hooded. He leaned forward.
“Why eight-fifteen?” he asked.
“That was the time she died,” Carlotti said. “I don’t think there is any doubt about that. Her wrist watch was smashed in the fall. It showed exactly eight-fifteen.”
I had stiffened to attention. This was news to me. It meant that I was in the villa, looking for Helen, when she had fallen. No one, including a judge and jury, would believe I hadn’t had something to do with her death if it became known I had been up there at the time.
“I would like to be able to tell you,” Carlotti went on, “that your daughter’s death was due to an unfortunate accident, but at the moment, I can’t do it. I admit on the face of it, it would seem to be the solution. There is no doubt that she took a cine camera up on the cliff head. It is possible, when using a camera of this kind, to become so absorbed in what you are taking, that you could get too close to the edge of the path and fell over.”
Chalmers took his cigar out of his mouth and laid it in the ashtray. He stared fixedly at Carlotti.
“Are you trying to tell me that it wasn’t an accident?” he said in a voice you could cut a stale loaf on.
June Chalmers stopped staring at me and cooked her head on one side: for the first time she appeared to be interested in what was going on.
“That is for the coroner to decide,” Carlotti said. He was quite unflustered and he met the icepick eyes without flinching. “There are complications. There are a number of details that need explaining. It would seem there are two alternative explanations for your daughter’s death: one is that she accidentally stepped off the cliff head while using her camera; the other is that she committed suicide.”
Chalmers hunched his shoulders and his face congested.
“You have reason to say a thing like that?”
He conveyed that Carlotti had damn well better have a reason.
Carlotti let him have it without rubber cushioning.
“Your daughter was eight weeks’ pregnant.”
There was a long, heavy silence. I didn’t dare look at Chalmers. I stared down at my sweating hands that were gripped between my thighs.
June broke the silence by saying, “Oh, Sherwin. I can’t believe that…”
I sneaked a quick look at Chalmers. His face was murderous: the kind of face you see on the screen of some not-too-good actor playing the role of a cornered gangster.
“Hold your tongue!” he snarled at June in a voice that shook with violence. Then, as she turned to look out of the window, he said to Carlotti, “Is that what the doctor said?”
“I have a copy of the autopsy,” Carlotti returned. “You can get it if you wish.”
“Pregnant? Helen?”
He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He still looked awe-inspiring, tough and ruthless, but somehow he didn’t make me feel quite such a pigmy; some of his big-shot atmosphere had gone out of him.
He walked slowly around the lounge while Carlotti, Grandi and I stared down at our feet and June stared out of the window. “She wouldn’t commit suicide,” he said suddenly. “She had too much strength of character.”
They seemed empty words: unexpected words from a man like Chalmers. I found myself wondering what chance he had ever given himself to find out if Helen had had any character at all. No one said anything.
He continued to walk around the lounge, his hands in his pockets, his face set and frowning.
After several uncomfortable minutes had ticked by, he paused suddenly and asked the worldold question, “Who is the man?”
“We don’t know,” Carlotti said. “Your daughter may have purposely misled the estate agent and the village woman by telling them he is an American. There is no American in Italy of that name.”
Chalmers came over and sat down again.
“He’s probably not using his own name,” he said.
“That is possible,” Carlotti said. “We have made inquiries in Sorrento. There was an American, travelling alone, on the three-thir
ty from Naples.”
I felt my heart contract: it was a horrible feeling. I found difficulty in breathing.
“He left a suitcase at the station,” Carlotti went on. “Unfortunately the description of him varies. No one particularly noticed him. He was seen walking on the Sorrento-Amalfi road by a passing motorist. All anyone can be certain about is that he wore a light grey suit. The station clerk said he was tall. The motorist thought he was of middle height. A boy from a nearby village said he was short and thick-set. There is no clear description of him. Around ten o’clock in the evening he collected his suitcase and took a taxi to Naples. He was in a great hurry. He offered the driver a five thousand lire tip to get him to the station to catch the eleven-fifteen to Rome.”
Chalmers was sitting forward, his eyes intent. He reminded me of some beast of prey.
“The road to Amalfi is also the road to this villa?”
“Yes. There is a branch road.”
“My daughter died at eight-fifteen?”
“Yes.”
“And this fella took a taxi in a hurry around ten o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“How long would it take to get from this villa to Sorrento?”
“About half an hour by car, or walking, it’d take well over an hour and a half.”
Chalmers brooded for a moment.
I sat there breathing through my half-open mouth and feeling pretty bad. I expected him to come out with some devastating discovery after these questions, but he didn’t. Instead, he suddenly hunched his shoulders and said, “She wouldn’t commit suicide. I know that. You can put that theory right out of your mind, Lieutenant. It is obvious: she fell off the cliff while using this camera.”
Carlotti didn’t say anything. Grandi moved uneasily and stared hard at his finger-nails.
“That’s the verdict I expect to hear,” Chalmers went on, his voice harsh.
Carlotti said smoothly, “It’s my business to give the facts to the coroner, Signor Chalmers. It is his business to find the verdict.”
Chalmers stared at him.
“Yes. Who is the coroner?”
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