“Oh, dear!” Freddie looked extremely troubled again. He was perfectly prepared, I saw, fairly to wallow in the doctrine of guilt by association. The more heinous proved to be the crime for which his absurd device had been borrowed, the more culpable would he himself feel.
“Mind you,” I went on drily, my sympathy with Freddie was momentarily at an ebb, “it might be worse. What it turns on is only incest – and that in what you might call the second degree. Rightly or wrongly, the fellow believed that his son by a former marriage was sleeping with his wife. So he fixed up your death by water for him. At least that’s the case the police will want to prove.”
“Phèdre,” Freddie said.
I stared at him blankly. It was very stupid of me – and perhaps showed that, like Freddie himself, I am not a literary type. “What are you talking about?” I said.
“Don’t you see? It’s like a hideous dream, Jonathan! For it’s the very story, isn’t it – the stepmother’s guilty passion, the father’s anger, the young man’s death? And even it’s being a death by water fits, for you remember how Hippolyte is killed. How utterly ghastly! At the very moment, it may have been, that I was imagining myself as receiving a profound imaginative experience – a spiritual experience, Jonathan – as a result of seeing Racine’s play, this filthy travesty of it was enacting itself in Golder’s Green. In Golder’s Green, Jonathan – and by a method straight out of my silly, vulgar book!”
I ought to have burst out laughing. It would have been the wholesome way to take this masochistic tour de force of Freddie’s. I could see that what he very accurately called his frivolity was involved; that he was concerned to vamp up an effect, to create a little dramatic moment, where a serious artistic intelligence would be altogether more analytically engaged. I felt as if I were involved in one of those tiresome French comedies full of actors and actresses who can’t stop acting. At the same time I had to recognise that all this was not incompatible with Freddie’s being in real distress. The present was genuinely his worst moment yet. Were he himself a Racinean character it would be now that he would exclaim, “O comble de misere!” And yet the cry would have been – at least by a little – premature. I realised this when, attracted by some stir behind me, I turned round in my chair. Something had happened which it was grave folly in me not to have foreseen. The British press had arrived in Venice.
Chapter Five
The girl was unmistakable – which makes all the less excusable my lack of presence of mind in the ensuing critical seconds. She walked straight through the restaurant to our table and addressed Freddie. “Mr Seston?” she said. “My name is Judy Green. I think I have an uncle who works on your staff.”
Freddie had stood up – and so had I without being aware of it. The girl shook hands with him confidently. He was bewildered and courteous. “Won’t you have some coffee with us?” he asked, and proceeded to introduce me to Miss Green with gravity. Miss Green’s uncle, I imagine, was not among the more exalted of Freddie’s colleagues. Perhaps he stoked the boilers in that art gallery and museum which was so accommodating in granting my friend long leave without pay. To this happy if tenuous connection with a victim of the moment, acutely communicated by Miss Green to her editor, Miss Green no doubt owed her exciting assignment in Venice. And to the unimpressive status of her relative – at least if I were right in my guess – she now owed the perfect politeness with which Freddie was evidently proposing to entertain her. “Have you,” he asked by way of an opening, “been in Venice long?”
“I flew in just under an hour ago,” Miss Green answered crisply. “I went straight to your hotel and didn’t find you. Then, as you’re such a famous and successful author, Mr Seston, I thought I’d try the most expensive restaurant first. And I was right.” She produced a cigarette case, took out a cigarette, and held it in a manner that obliged me to provide her with a light. “So I’m well ahead of the others. They’re just sitting around in that lounge, feeling impressed.”
“The others?” Comprehension was dawning on Freddie; he wasn’t a fool. “Are you from—from a newspaper?”
Miss Green named her paper, and I think I saw Freddie shudder. I reflected that he didn’t look at all, poor man, like a famous and successful author who treats himself as a matter of course to the most expensive restaurants. He didn’t look at all the sort of person who would accept Miss Green’s reference to this supposed proclivity as the compliment for which it had been intended. He looked exactly like what he was: the conscientious historian of certain phases of Venetian painting. He and Miss Green were quite comically incongruous; he had no notion of how to cope with her; and she, although self-evidently so smart a girl, would be entirely at sea with him. Not for the first time, I was made sharply aware of the quite specific oddity of Freddie’s double life. Miss Green was really after St Swithin – and St Swithin wasn’t, as they say on office telephones, available. Even if he had been, she would have remained puzzled. A thriller-writer to Miss Green meant someone like Raymond Chandler or Ian Fleming. Freddie and his romances belonged to a past age, when detective stories were approved reading on rectory lawns – and were even felicitously fabricated by dignitaries of the church. It had required this queer confrontation – of Freddie with the female emissary of a “national” newspaper – to point for me the plain fact of my friend’s positively antique quality. It would have been inadequate to declare of the St Swithin afflatus that it proceeded, like that of a more famous writer, from hiding-places ten years deep. Thirty would have been the truer measure. But I couldn’t have known, as I made this reflection, that it bore upon an odd development that yet lay before us.
Miss Green was looking with disfavour at the thimbleful of coffee that had been poured for her. “Might I have a dry martini?” she asked.
“But of course.” Freddie, having unwarily embarked upon hospitality, felt he had to carry the thing through.
“Five and one,” Miss Green said. She glanced at the expectant waiter. “Can you say that to him in Italian?”
Freddie’s anxiously attentive expression became puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”
“Five parts gin,” I murmured, “and one part vermouth.”
“I see.” Freddie looked at me almost with distrust, as if this familiarity with the vocabulary of contemporary compotation hinted at a new and sinister side to my character. Then he interpreted the order with great care. Having accomplished this he turned back to Miss Green. “I am very sorry,” he said firmly, “that I can’t be interviewed.”
“Of course, Mr Seston, that’s entirely for you to say.” Miss Green sat back comfortably. She knew – and so did I – that, at a pinch, the interview could already be considered as having taken place. “But I do want to tell you that my editor is a very great admirer of your books. He certainly wouldn’t want to print anything to embarrass you. And our paper always tries to maintain a responsible attitude in matters of this sort. I’ve instructions, Mr Seston, not to discuss the Golder’s Green murder with you in any way.”
“My dear young lady, I certainly wouldn’t discuss it with you, whatever your instructions.” Freddie got this out rather well. I began to think that he might hold his own with Miss Green until the early moment at which I could break up the encounter and get him back to that private room in his hotel. Only too evidently, we ought never to have ventured out of it.
“What I’ve been told to get is your purely personal story.” Miss Green took a first sip at her martini – with the result that the current of her thought momentarily changed. She turned to me. “Tell me,” she said rather wistfully, “can one do the Lido inside a morning?”
“Certainly. You can get there in no time at all.”
“I’ve always wanted to be able to say I’ve been to the Lido.” Miss Green produced this surprisingly unsophisticated remark apparently on a sudden impulse. “I have a friend who had her honeymoon there.” She paused, conceivably expecting that one of us would offer to escort her to the horrible resort on the
following day. But as only silence ensued she returned to business. “Particularly, Mr Seston, your personal story of how you first came to write crime books.”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about it.”
“But you must remember something! For instance, where did you begin? Was it in your picture gallery? Or at home?”
“I don’t mean that I don’t remember.” Freddie said this rather unconvincingly, so that it struck me he quite probably didn’t remember. “I simply mean that I don’t feel I want to talk about it.”
“That’s very understandable, of course – considering what has happened.” Miss Green offered this as a purely conventional remark. “When you wrote your first crime story, was it suggested by some actual crime?”
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t. But I must repeat—”
“Have you ever got ideas for crime stories from pictures, Mr Seston?”
“I don’t think so. I seldom go to the cinema.”
“I don’t mean those sort of pictures. I mean Old Masters, Mr Seston. You work with them a lot, I know. Have you ever got ideas about crimes from them?”
“Of course not!” Freddie was indignant. “What an absurd idea.”
Miss Green smiled soothingly. “Well,” she said, “perhaps I’m arriving somewhere by what they call a process of elimination. But it’s slow work. What I’ve got to get, you see, is just why, and just where, and just when, you came to write your first crime story. What prompted you to it? That’s the key question my editor has given me. You can see what he’s after. The difference between what prompts a man to a crime, and what prompts a man to a crime story. It should build up well.”
Freddie was staggered, I think, less by this outrageous project in itself than by the artless confidence with which the young person partaking of his rash hospitality adumbrated it. I had lacked the heart to give him my wife’s news that he was already in the English papers, and he must have been vaguely supposing that the calling in of his book before its actual publication would confine the damage within the field of his own more or less private discomfiture. He knew better now. He was looking forlornly at Miss Green’s glass. It must have been his idea that when she emptied it – and only when she emptied it – the civil moment for getting rid of her would have come.
“I suppose,” Miss Green said, “that gallery directors are not too happy on the pay packet. Perhaps you needed money, Mr Seston? We’ve checked that you’re not married, of course. But perhaps there are elderly dependent relatives? Perhaps your mother’s alive?” She took a calculatingly small sip at the martini. “Or were you just fired by the thought of fame? It’s something along those lines that I’ve got to get.”
This time Freddie plainly couldn’t believe his ears. And I saw that it was the moment to intervene – the more clearly because, quite shamefully, a sense of the merely comic aspect of the situation was stealing over me. I looked round for a waiter, being resolved to pay the bill, make Miss Green a short and if possible intimidating speech of a legal cast, and get Freddie safely to the shelter of his eminently respectable hotel.
But in that sort of restaurant a bill is always the hardest thing to get, and moreover, the place was now at its busiest. At its far end, amid a proliferation of flowers and palms, an orchestra discoursed Donizetti; the musicians, clothed from head to foot in dazzling white and obscured behind their bosky barricade, had the appearance of a band of frenetic surgeons operating al fresco. And on the piazza just outside, with that lack of moderation in such matters to which the Venetians are prone, a second orchestra, of a humbler and itinerant sort, was contributing a waltz by Strauss. This musical entente, although not aesthetically delectable, contented me well enough; the racket was sufficient to mask any scene that the thwarted Miss Judy Green might just conceivably put up. But we were to have more than Miss Green to cope with.
A small compact knot of people had entered the restaurant. My attention was called to them by the way in which they ignored the hovering presence of the chief functionary of the place. It was my first impression that we were about to witness, or even be subjected to, a robbery. There were three men – and it was straight from the cinema screen, so to speak, that they struck their familiar note. They wore mackintoshes – most inappositely on a warm Venetian night. They wore – they continued to wear – soft felt hats. From the mouths of two of them depended cigarettes. A moment later I realised that I had got these persons wrongly typed. They were colleagues – or rivals – of Miss Green’s.
But the men were not alone. They bore down upon us – Miss Green’s presence, I imagine, giving us instantly away – guiding or supporting or dragging in their midst a woman who seemed even more out of place than themselves. My first perception was that she wore carpet slippers, and that over one of these her stocking was beginning to fall in folds. And after that I seemed to know all about her in an instant. She had been snatched up by heaven knew what bribe or threat or promise from her kitchen in Golder’s Green – and here the triumphant scoop had landed her: an ignorant and helpless woman, suddenly involved in horror, then pounced upon by these inky vultures, borne through middle air, and now coaxed or hustled into this bewildering and pretentious place to be tumbled at the feet of Freddie Seston.
For that, incredibly, was what happened. I had a momentary impression of people standing up to stare, of the restaurant’s manager conferring urgently with an underling near the door, of the woman herself as crazed or frantic. Then there she was – kneeling, and holding up her arms in a sort of theatrical supplication. Whether she said anything, I don’t know. All I heard was a man’s excited voice crying “Hold it!” Then came two or three flashlight explosions and the click of cameras. I believe Freddie was unaware of them. For a moment he sat transfixed, staring at the women uncomprehendingly. Then he put out a hand. It seemed to be in some effort to make contact with her, perhaps to get her to her feet.
There was a moment’s near-silence in the restaurant; it was only emphasised by the unregarding vigour of the competing bands. Then a hum of questioning or exclaiming voices – Italian, German, American – grew around us. People nearby were aware that something odd was happening; those farthest off must have supposed merely that some celebrity was being photographed as he dined.
In London if a friend is involved in a disagreeable scene one calls a cab and gets him away in it. In Venice this can’t be done. The piazza, the piazzetta, and a stretch of the Riva degli Schiavoni had all to be traversed on foot in the course of any retreat we were prompted to make. I was wondering whether this outrageous pantomime would in fact be continued on a processional basis, when our situation was transformed by the sudden appearance of Inspector Cuff. He turned up as if from nowhere, and I have seldom seen a man more effectively furious. He had secured the presence, he had mysteriously secured the evident support, of a couple of policemen – and these, indeed, of the more impressive of the two species locally available. They wore cocked hats with feathers; they wore enormous swords. Nevertheless it was Cuff himself whose appearance was annihilating. The unfortunate woman’s appointed escort cannot have been, I imagine, among the less tough of their kind. They must have been well instructed in their relationship with the law; they must have been aware of the advantage they enjoyed in now operating upon foreign soil. Nevertheless the effect of their crumpling and fading was entire. No doubt they were the more ready to quit in that the essence of their mission was accomplished. And at least they took their supplicant with them.
If Cuff had been furious, so, more surprisingly, had been Miss Green. She seemed to feel that the photographic raid grossly violated those higher ethics of the profession of journalism which she and her own paper were concerned to maintain. So she had now become an ally. I even had an impression that when we left the restaurant, as we very presently did, she contrived to take Freddie’s arm. There was no means of telling whether this was compassion or strategy. No doubt she saw him as extremely elderly. She may well have felt that it became
her, at the end of this harassing episode, to support the tottering steps of age.
And indeed Freddie did almost seem to be in need of physical as well as moral support. The piazza was crowded with that numerous Venetian citizenry whose nocturnal business is to go round staring into each of the restaurants and cafes in turn; and through these we made a moderately unobtrusive retreat. Cuff walked ahead, plainly on the look-out for further impending outrage; set on a motor-bicycle, he would have been like one charged with preceding through a disturbed populace the conveyance of some royal or otherwise exalted personage. Behind us clanked the two policemen, so abundantly accoutred to vindicate the dignity of the Republic. On our left, St Mark’s spumed and glittered like a pile of bubbles blown with a novel iridescent soap; ahead, the campanile rose sheer into darkness from the brilliantly lighted square. Freddie kept stopping. He seemed to have some idea of returning to the restaurant, of finding the woman again. “But I don’t understand! “he said. “Who is she? What does she want?”
“She’s Mrs Fishley. She’s the dead man’s stepmother.” Miss Green gave this explanation. “And she’s pretty well round the bend by this time. You can see that.”
“You mean she’s the woman whose husband is supposed to have”—the very words were an agony to Freddie—”to have committed this murder?”
“Just that.”
Freddie was silent for a time. We were on the Ponte della Paglia before he spoke again. “But I don’t understand!” he repeated. “How did she get here? What does she want me to do?”
“A charter flight. And I have to admit it was a smart job.” Miss Green conceded this very reluctantly. “They’d have had to keep her on the run, or she might have dug her heels in.”
“They didn’t,” I said, “allow her any heels to dig with. She was in slippers.”
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Page 6