by Gavin Lyall
– and Berenice hadn’t been telling Gorkin anything. Or if she had, it didn’t matter now.
When he had fetched O’Gilroy, they stared down at the sprawled, half-clad figure at the foot of the bed. Gorkin looked pallid, wide-eyed – and bloody. You have to be very adept with a knife to avoid bloodiness, and Berenice hadn’t been. But she’d certainly been thorough.
“I told her if anything happened to Gorkin it would only make him a martyr!”
O’Gilroy shrugged. “Gave her a good reason, didn’t ye? Feller’s let down the Cause with his plotting and suchlike, but at least he can be a martyr.” He smiled lopsidedly. “She’s a dedicated kind of girl, that one.”
Ranklin said grimly: “He’s only a martyr if his death’s tied to the King – and us. She might have thought of that.”
“Mebbe she did.”
“Hm. But if he was just killed by a casual whore . . . that could happen to anyone.”
“Yer not going to give her to the flics?”
“Of course not: she’s tied to us, damn it, if anybody starts looking. All right, we’ll re-write his ending for him. Just stand there and look around. What can you deduce?”
“I’m no flic.” Offended.
“Just pretend you are, man.”
Somewhat mollified, O’Gilroy gazed around. “She waited until he was taking off his trousers. Feller with his trousers round his ankles can’t fight back. Then wham with a knife . . . Where is it?”
“The silly bitch must’ve taken it with her. I’ll see . . .” He went into the kitchen, found a selection of worn cooking knives, and called: “How long a blade?”
“Short, she’d be carrying it in her purse . . . Not too short, though. Got to be as deep as the wounds and nobody’ll know how much ’til they cut him open.”
Ranklin momentarily shut his eyes in exasperation, then brought two knives out. “Which, then?”
O’Gilroy judiciously chose one. Then he wiped it in Gorkin’s blood and tossed it to the floor. “Probly won’t bother too much: ye got knife wounds, ye got a knife, why make tests?” He resumed his gazing. “They had a drink first.”
There was a bottle of wine and one of absinthe on a little table, along with two used glasses. Ranklin asked: “Does the Préfecture use fingerprints yet?”
“Surely.”
“And was she wearing gloves?”
O’Gilroy thought, then shook his head. “Damned if I can remember. Likely worn through at the fingers anyhow.”
So Ranklin sniffed the two glasses, took the absinthe one to the kitchen and washed it out – a rather messy business if one is, quite properly, wearing warm-weather dogskin gloves. Then he tipped a little wine into it, tasted it to leave a blur on the rim, and put it back on the table. He wiped the absinthe bottle clean of fingerprints and put it back in a cupboard. Could she have touched the wine bottle as well? Best to be safe: he wiped that, then shut his mind to what he was doing and clenched Gorkin’s dead hand around it to replace his own prints.
O’Gilroy watched, then re-enacted her entrance – wiping the front door-knob and around it; then the bedroom door; sitting down – wiping off the wooden parts of the chair; then–“Would she go to the toilette?”
“Could have done.”
O’Gilroy found the bathroom, looked at it and said: “Jayzus!” because any cleaning was going to show up there. But he wiped delicately at just the most likely places, then came out holding a crumpled, stained length of toilet paper. “She wiped off the knife in there. Didn’t want blood insider her purse.” But the stains gave a good impression of the shape and length of the knife, and prompted him to choose a more suitable one from the kitchen and bloody that instead. Then he flushed the blood-stained paper away.
Ranklin had been exploring. A wardrobe held several of Gorkin’s suits including a set of evening dress tails, so the anarchist hadn’t been averse to a little capitalism. Or once hadn’t been: the suit was pretty old. Surprisingly, there was also a small clutch of women’s skirts, blouses and shawls. Relics of a semi-permanent mistress? Then he found a woman’s hat, heavily veiled, and remembered from Constantinople the stories of women going to clandestine affairs under cover of the veil. Perhaps there were some Parisian women who wanted to step out with Gorkin but not be recognised.
He turned to the paperwork in the living-room: he might just be lucky, but at the same time he was very cautious, because any sign of disturbance would lead to a far more thorough search by the police. He had had some idea of taking any notes about the King, but soon gave it up.
Nevertheless . . . “We still haven’t given them a motive. If they look for one, they’re bound to think of his involvement in the plot against the King.”
“Robbery? Whores do.”
Ranklin nodded, but left that to O’Gilroy who went through the rooms quickly and quietly, leaving an extraordinary mess for a haul of just the money from Gorkin’s pockets, his cufflinks, a few bits of cheap jewellery and a diamond pin that alone looked worth anything. It wasn’t much, but any detective would long since have stopped being amazed at how cheap life could be. O’Gilroy did it all very professionally, and Ranklin asked no questions. He just pocketed a bunch of letters and Gorkin’s passport and papers for the Bureau to study.
“We’d best be going,” O’Gilroy proposed.
But Ranklin hesitated. “You really don’t want any suspicion to fall on Berenice?”
O’Gilroy squinted at him curiously. “ ’Course not. The feller deserved the killing, and never mind her reasons. Why’re ye asking?”
“She’s short and dumpy. Suppose a tall, thin woman was seen going out of here?”
“Yer never going to get Mrs Finn down here to—”
“Good God, no. But there’s some woman’s clothes in the wardrobe, including a hat with a thick veil . . . and I’m short and dumpy.”
O’Gilroy was so appalled that his profanity deserted him. At last he croaked hoarsely: “Ye can’t ask me to do that.”
“I just thought it might help Berenice.”
“Anyways, how can I leave me own clothes here?”
“I can carry them out in one of Gorkin’s bags.”
“But I . . . Ye jest can’t . . .”
“If you can’t do it, you can’t. Never mind.” Ranklin’s face was all innocence; he might have been asking for the loan of a match.
“Ye connivin’, stinkin’ bastard . . .”
When the strolling gendarme was about forty yards from the apartment house entrance, Ranklin turned that way, put the bag down on the pavement, took out his pipe, and lit a match. That was the signal. The gendarme was only ten yards away when O’Gilroy came out, turned towards him, then abruptly turned about and hurried off the other way, skirt swirling and shawl clutched around his shoulders, face invisible behind the thick veil. He even had a surprisingly feminine tittuping scurry, given that he had to have kept his own shoes. First Connelly, now a Woman Of The Streets; next King Lear? Or even Portia?
And he had certainly impressed his audience. For a moment, the gendarme looked like hurrying after the “woman”, and Ranklin was ready to intervene with a query. Then the man checked and went back to strolling. But he should remember. (And would probably get a roasting for having failed to catch a murderess, too. Still, that would be a helpful lesson for him.)
Walking briskly after O’Gilroy but on the opposite side of the road, Ranklin wondered if he would ever put this in his report. Jay, in particular, would get a kick out of . . .
Damn. He kept forgetting.
Some people take a long time to die – in your mind, that is. Some people are struck off the memory immediately; you remember them only as dead. But others, you keep expecting them to come into the room, are constantly thinking “I must tell so-and-so that” before you remember. Unfair, really.
* * *
It took until Tuesday for St Claire to squeeze a passport out of the consulate for “Mrs Simmons”; strictly, she didn’t have to have one, but a
s Ranklin kept patiently pointing out, it’s the guilty who actually need paperwork to prove their innocence. He didn’t want her meeting any officials, French or British, without some proof of who she now was. If she got flustered and relapsed into Mrs Langhorn, they were both in trouble.
So they crossed the path of the King, coming in the opposite direction. Calais was daubed with crossed flags of the two nations and red-white-and-blue bunting (it was lucky the same colours did for both), with a royal train and Guard of Honour drawn up on the quayside.
The cross-channel steamer had been diverted to the other side, and Mrs Langhorn and Ranklin watched as the Royal Yacht Alexandra slid cautiously alongside, perhaps a hundred yards away. A band on the quayside struck up “God Save the King”. Ranklin and all the other Britons on deck stood stiffly to attention, of course, and indeed nobody seemed to be moving except the poor bugger on Alexandra’s foredeck who had made a seamanlike choice between securing the mooring-rope or standing rigid while royalty drifted away.
There was a bustle of people coming up the gangway, a flurry of salutes, and then a short, stocky figure in naval uniform with a lot of gold braid and a flat cap – he was wearing undress uniform – moving among them.
“What’s he doing?” Mrs Langhorn asked.
“Dishing out medals to the mayor and it looks like a couple of local generals.”
“What have they done?”
“Been here. Easiest honours they’ve ever earned. And they fight like cats for them.”
After a while, she said: “He does it very well.”
He leant back from the rail to look at her. She was watching intently across the scummy harbour water and looking . . . he could only describe it as “pleased”.
The party on the Alexandra broke up and trooped ashore. There were a lot of them, most of the men in uniform, and several women, including the unmistakably old-fashioned figure of the Queen. Then nothing for several minutes except some military shrieking. “What’s he doing now?”
“Inspecting the Guard of Honour on the quay.”
“And what’ll he be doing in Paris?”
“Meeting the President, of course, driving round in a carriage . . . big dinners here and there, seeing some army manoeuvres, some show at l’Opéra, the races at Auteuil, opening some exhibition . . .”
“Keeping pretty busy.”
“Not much time for a cup of coffee and a browse at the newspapers,” Ranklin agreed.
“I don’t think I’d’ve liked it much,” she said matter-of-factly.
There was a burst of cheering from the far quay, then the train let off a blast of steam, chugged hard and began to pull out. The band started “God Save the King” again and they all had to stand up straight. The train snaked slowly around the inner basin of the port and was gone, just a moving plume of smoke rising above the rooftops.
Their own steamer woke up with shouted orders and clanging bells, and passengers wandered away to the saloons or to wave goodbye to friends on the land side. Mrs Langhorn lingered by the rail and Ranklin waited politely.
“He wouldn’t know you were watching, would he?” she asked.
“No.”
“I bet he doesn’t even know what you’ve been doing for him.”
Ranklin just nodded.
“He certainly wouldn’t know I’d been watching.”
On an impulse, and because if he didn’t ask now he never would, Ranklin said: “Is Grover really his son?”
She looked back at the smoke drifting over the town. And finally she said: “You know . . . I honestly don’t know.” She looked at him and smiled perkily. “A girl’s got to make a living, hasn’t she?”