A Dead Man in Naples

by Michael Pearce

  Some were from Florence, a few from Rome. The recent ones were from Bessandro, which was the nearby army base. The most recent letter said:

  So, my dear, at last I am here. What a hell-hole! I shall escape to Naples at every opportunity. Vincente feels the same but at least he has his bicycle. No such respite for me! Thank God you, at least, are here. I miss the old crowd. Gabrieli has been obliged to fly to France. For ‘sexual misdemeanours’! How can a man be exiled for sexual misdemeanours? It is ridiculous. I said so to Alessandro but he doesn’t take that view. He says there is a point beyond which one should not go, especially if one is active in politics, where they are always looking for an excuse to do one down. Of course, he would take that view, being himself a politician. At least no one is ever likely to accuse him of sexual misdemeanours. But that is not enough: Caesar’s wife, too, should be above suspicion, which I am definitely not!

  And so, my dear, I, too, am sent into exile and told not to come back until I am spotless. This, I am afraid, could take some time. I have complained to Vincente but he is unsympathetic. Of course, he has his bicycling. And he still hopes to be sent to Libya. Listen, I told him, I am definitely not going there!

  ‘At least, for the moment, he is here, and so are you. You must take care, both of you, not to come to grief on these mountainous roads. My heart rises into my mouth every time I think of you both hurtling round these frightening bends. Do take care, my dear. I hope to see you soon.

  Yours, as ever affectionately,

  Luisa.

  While Seymour was at the consulate checking through Scampion’s desk a message came from Miss Scampion asking for Chantale’s name and the name of their hotel as she would like to invite her to tea. And perhaps he himself would join them?

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Miss Scampion when she saw Chantale. ‘She’s . . .’

  ‘Moroccan,’ said Seymour.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Miss Scampion, recovering. ‘Of course, Moroccan.’ Then, still slightly flustered: ‘I thought from the name that . . .’

  ‘De Lissac,’ said Seymour. ‘It’s a French name. Her father was French.’

  ‘Oh, how interesting!’ said Miss Scampion bravely. ‘French, is it?’

  ‘My father was stationed in Morocco,’ said Chantale.

  ‘An army officer? Well, that’s good. Very good. And . . . French.’

  Seymour had never really thought of Chantale as dark. She was dark, of course, in the way that Arabs and many southern Europeans are dark. Her eyes were brown and she had black hair and her skin was brownish. In the East End of London, where Seymour lived and worked, and where so many of the inhabitants were immigrants and Italians were at every street corner, she did not stand out at all. But Miss Scampion had at once made the identification.

  ‘De Lissac,’ she said now, stressing the ‘de’. ‘And does that mean that your father was a . . . of a good family?’

  ‘They think so,’ said Chantale shortly.

  In fact, her father had never got on with his family and had broken from them when he had married Chantale’s mother.

  ‘A military family, I expect,’ said Miss Scampion with approval.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It runs in families,’ said Miss Scampion. ‘English ones, too. We have soldiers in our family, but mostly on a different branch. My brother always regretted that he had not been a soldier. Indeed, he wanted to be attached to the Italian army when he heard they were going to Libya. But our Foreign Office was furious. I don’t know why. After all, in India, which was where my relatives served, there was considerable movement between the army and the civil administration.’

  She led them through the house to a small patio where a table was laid for an English tea.

  ‘How delightful!’ said Chantale.

  ‘One does try to maintain standards,’ said Miss Scampion, ‘no matter where one is. That was what my uncle, my army uncle, always used to say. One mustn’t let things slip. Of course, that was very important in India. You had to keep up to the mark and see that other people kept up to the mark. It was like that when he came back to England, too. As children, we found him very severe. He would fly into a rage over the smallest thing. If the cucumber were not quite crisp, for example. “It’s the servants,” he would say. “They don’t know their job. Now, in India . . .”

  ‘We used to laugh at him, of course, but I really think he would have been happier in India. He had been out there for so long. But then, as I’m sure you found, Miss de Lissac, life in a military garrison has such a special flavour.’

  Chantale had not, in fact, spent any time in a military garrison. She had been brought up by her mother among the souks and bazaars and mosques of Tangier, which was very different. But she thought it best not to say this. It was evidently easier for Miss Scampion to come to terms with the unpalatable fact of Chantale’s colour by dwelling on the other side of her origins, the army side, with which she seemed more at home and for which she seemed to have particular esteem.

  Chantale, primed by Seymour, exclaimed on the niceness of the house and asked if she could be shown round it.

  ‘Small, of course,’ said Miss Scampion. ‘But, then, consular salaries are small. And while in a place like Florence you get an allowance, here, in Naples, for some reason you don’t.’

  ‘It has charm,’ said Chantale, ‘and that is important.’

  ‘I think so, too, my dear,’ said Miss Scampion.

  Over the tea table, and once she had recovered from the shock, her manner towards Chantale had thawed and she was now calling her ‘my dear’. ‘Delightfully young,’ she whispered at one point to Seymour. ‘And a good family,’ said Seymour, who had never previously been known to offer any observation at all on Chantale’s family; at least, not on the distant military part of it. ‘It shows,’ said Miss Scampion approvingly.

  ‘And this is my brother’s room,’ she said.

  ‘May I go in?’ said Seymour.

  Scampion had allowed his sister the better of the two bedrooms. Hers looked out over a small garden with orange trees, his merely on to the opposite side of the street. The walls were covered with pictures of bicycles and bicyclists. Some of them were group photographs which included Scampion himself. Seymour studied them carefully.

  ‘Of course you did not know Lionel,’ said Miss Scampion. ‘You cannot really tell what he looked like from these – all helmets and goggles. This one gives you a better impression of him as a person.’

  A round, pleasant, innocuous face. Thinning hair. A little plump despite what must be a lot of exercise. Hard to judge his height. In some of the other photographs he looked quite small. In this one, with his arm around the other man, he seemed quite big.

  ‘That is, of course, Gabrieli,’ said Miss Scampion. ‘Gabrieli D’Annunzio.’

  She said it as if Seymour would at once know him.

  ‘D’Annunzio, of course,’ said Seymour.

  ‘A good man!’ said Miss Scampion with emphasis. ‘No matter what they say. Oh, he had his faults, I won’t deny that. And there have been peccadilloes. But is there any great man without faults?’

  ‘Miss Scampion,’ said Seymour, ‘would you mind if I glanced inside his desk? In the interests of – you know, the police may have missed something.’

  ‘Very likely,’ said Miss Scampion. ‘No, please go ahead. I am sure he would have had no secrets to hide.’

  Good heavens, yet more stuff to do with cycling! Brochures, catalogues, road maps, bicycling magazines. Two of them were in French, Le Vélo and L’Auto-Vélo. There were dozens of numbers of each. Miss Scampion opened one and showed an article to Seymour, pointing to the name of its author.

  ‘He only did the one,’ she said proudly. ‘I urged him to do more. I felt he had a knack for it. And it might have opened up a door to another profession for him. You know, if he had been obliged to leave the service over that silly business about the war.’

  ‘Certainly there seems to be talent there,’ agreed S
eymour, but I wouldn’t give up the day job, he thought.

  ‘Gabriel thought so, too. At least, I think he did. “I’d stick to prose if I were you,” he said, when Lionel showed it him. Meaning, I think, that he should not go in for poetry. Well, of course, Gabriel would know about that, being such a great poet himself.’

  ‘And you like his poetry yourself?’ asked Chantale, ‘D’Annunzio’s, I mean?’

  ‘Well, I can see it has great feeling,’ said Miss Scampion, slightly flustered. ‘But I have never entirely understood . . . The poetry is in the ideas, that’s what my brother used to say. But I didn’t quite understand that, either. Of course, the ideas are tremendous, sweeping – inspired, you may say.’

  Apart from the magazines, which spilled over from the desk to some nearby shelves, there wasn’t a lot in Scampion’s desk. A few letters from the family at home, correspondence with the Foreign Office relating to his pay, papers connected with the renting of the house, that was about all. Seymour tried the bank statements. Often when a man is murdered there is some reflection of it in his bank balance, but there appeared to be none in Scampion’s case. There wasn’t much money, but there weren’t many debts, either. Scampion seemed to have looked after his financial affairs with the same precise attention that he had given to organizing road races.

  A few personal letters, mostly from school friends; but nothing very intimate. There weren’t any further letters from the Marchesa. Was that accidental? Seymour wondered. Or did Scampion keep that side of his life separate from his sister? Or – another thought – had his sister, guardian of her brother’s flame, destroyed all the evidence of that side of his life after his death? Not, now that it was in her power to do so, admitting any other rivals for his affection?

  There was nothing that related to Scampion’s private, emotional life. Yet this was odd, seeing that the impression Seymour had gleaned of Scampion’s years in Florence had been that he was in the thick of things. What was it that Richards had said? That Scampion had been too much in the social whirl: a whirl that, again from the hints he had picked up, not least from the Marchesa, seemed to have had some nasty eddies in it.

  ‘You are puzzled, Mr Seymour,’ said Miss Scampion.

  ‘Not really. Or, at least, yes, I am, a little. I had expected to learn more about his relationships. Your brother clearly had many friends, Miss Scampion. Certainly when he was in Florence. Yet I find no trace of them. What happened to them when he came down here?’

  ‘He lost contact with them.’

  ‘All of them? Isn’t that a little surprising? I had the impression that in Florence he was very much in the thick of things.’

  ‘Oh, he was! He was.’

  ‘And yet . . .?’

  ‘As I say, he lost them when he came down here.’ She hesitated. ‘They were not, perhaps, deep friends, Mr Seymour. Friends of the moment, rather. And when Gabriel moved away, they all moved with him.’

  ‘Leaving your brother very much alone?’

  ‘Well, of course, he had his bicycling friends. And, in any case, it was just at that moment that they decided to move him.’

  ‘He must have felt very bereft.’

  ‘Oh, he did. For a time he was quite at a loss. I was really rather worried about him. But then he threw himself into bicycling again and suddenly it all seemed to come right once more. But there had been moments when I feared . . .’

  ‘Feared what, Miss Scampion?’

  ‘That he might be going to the Bad.’

  ‘The Bad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In what way, Miss Scampion?

  ‘I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I knew something was amiss. We had never had secrets from each other. But now I felt he was holding something back. And – and he was holding something back, Mr Seymour: this.’

  She produced a little slip of paper.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘A lottery ticket!’ she whispered. ‘I found it in his shorts this morning, the shorts he had been wearing when he was . . . They returned them to me afterwards. I had them cleaned and then put them away in a drawer. I couldn’t bear to look at them. I just put them away. But then this morning I decided I must do something about them, about all his clothes. I couldn’t just leave them for ever. Sooner or later I knew I would have to do something about them. So this morning I decided to face it. And I found – I found this!’

  ‘In his pocket? The pocket of the shorts he had been wearing when . . .’

  ‘Yes! It came as a shock, a great shock. Our family has always disapproved of gambling, Mr Seymour, and now to find – we have never had secrets from each other, Lionel and I, and now to find . . . to find that all the time he was . . .’

  ‘Well, it may not have been all the time, Miss Scampion. This may have been a solitary occasion.’

  ‘But to do it at all!’ she cried. ‘There was such a strong prohibition against gambling, not just in the family, but in our kirk. I couldn’t believe it. That my own brother . . .’

  ‘It may not be as you suppose, Miss Scampion. There may be a quite innocent explanation for this.’

  ‘I know, I know! That is what I have told myself. And one shouldn’t think ill of the dead. But, all the same, there it was, Mr Seymour. One must face facts. That is what my uncle used to say. And there it definitely was!’

  ‘In his bicycling shorts? The ones he had been wearing?

  ‘Yes. I had been going through his clothes. I thought that I must not just leave them there, I ought to put them to some use. I thought I might pass them on to the Church. They would know what to do with them, wouldn’t they? They must know of lots of deserving cases. Lionel had a friend who was a priest, a very nice man who knew about bicycles, a Father Pepe, Pepito, they call him. I thought I would speak to him.’

  ‘An excellent idea, Miss Scampion. And you’re right, it’s a task that should not be put off, however distressing. You have finished going through the clothes, have you? And found nothing further –’

  ‘Nothing! Nothing! It was such a shock. I had to sit down.’

  ‘I’m sure it was, Miss Scampion. Very distressing for you. But, as I say, you should not necessarily believe the worst.’

  Seymour picked up the slip. It was for the City Lottery. He couldn’t make out the date, the numbers had been smudged, probably in the washing, but it looked quite recent.

  ‘Do you mind if I take this, Miss Scampion?’

  He took the ticket round to the lottery office.

  ‘You’re a bit late, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, am I? I can’t make out the date.’

  ‘It’s for over a month ago. We’re on a different run now.’

  ‘Could you tell me exactly what was the date it had to be presented by?’

  ‘Probably.’

  The man took the ticket and examined it.

  ‘It’s certainly for last month and I would say it was for the eleventh. If you want, I can get it checked, but I doubt if it would be worth it. One’s eyes get pretty used to this sort of thing here. You wouldn’t believe how many people try to pull a fast one. Usually by altering one of the numbers. Not that I’m accusing you of anything,’ he added hastily.

  ‘I’m inquiring on behalf of a friend. Her husband died and she found this in a pocket and wondered if it was worth anything?’

  The official shook his head. ‘No such luck, I’m afraid. It never is, in my experience.’

  The eleventh of the previous month was the day on which Scampion had died. The ticket had been one of the few things in his pockets when he had been stabbed. Could he have been on his way to present it? Seymour wondered.

  Seymour was on his way back to the pensione when some cyclists passed him. They were not ordinary people on bicycles, but serious cyclists. They wore sporting kit, red shirts and socks, and were on what looked to Seymour like racing bicycles.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Giuseppi. ‘They’re roadsters, not the ones you ride in races. This isn’t the Racing Clu
b, it’s the Reds.’

  ‘Reds?’

  ‘Real Reds. Socialists, I mean. From Rome. They ride down to Naples occasionally to spread the word.’

  ‘They’d do better to stay at home,’ said his wife, who had come out into the street, too. ‘And so would you,’ she said severely, turning to her granddaughter.

  ‘I’ve only come out for a minute!’ protested Francesca. ‘I wanted to see the cyclists.’

  ‘At least she’s come out to see some real ones,’ said Giuseppi, ‘not those fancy poofters.’

  ‘They’re not as good,’ said Francesca critically.

  ‘Not as good?’ said Giuseppi, annoyed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They don’t ride as well.’

  ‘What the hell do you know about it?’

  ‘They’re not racers,’ said Francesca. ‘And the thing about racing is that skills are tested out at speed. That’s when you really find out if you’ve got them. It takes more skill to ride down a mountain fast than to do it slowly. You’ve got to show more control. Or else you’ll come off.’

  ‘Well, that’s daft, then, isn’t it? Riding more quickly than is sense.’

  ‘Too quickly to see the beautiful world that God has provided,’ said Maria.

  ‘For heaven’s sake –’ began Francesca.

  ‘Watch your tongue, my girl!’

  ‘That’s not the point of it.’

  ‘What is the point, then?’ demanded Giuseppi. ‘The Reds have a point when they ride down from Rome. They want to tell people about socialism. They want to rouse the workers. I can see plenty of point in that. But your racers –’

  ‘They’ve got a point, too. It’s just a different point.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘They’re doing it,’ said Francesca loftily, ‘for the sake of the challenge. For the thrills of the competition.’

  ‘Competition! Ah, now we’re getting to it. They’re training to be capitalists.’

  ‘A bicycle is not a factor of production.’

  ‘What?’ said Giuseppi, taken aback.

  ‘According to Marx,’ said Francesca. She wasn’t too sure about this, actually, but saw it as a possible telling blow.