‘Do you disapprove?’
‘Not at all – sorry – just an idea.’
‘My wife writes detective stories,’ Payne explained, looking at her curiously.
‘Do you really? I love detective stories,’ said Camillo.
‘You could stay with us when you come to London.’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Antonia was aware of her husband looking at her sharply. Jealous, poor thing, she thought, amused. Well, the boy was terribly good-looking. ‘You could easily embark on a modelling or acting career.’
‘Thank you so much. Mrs Depleche also invited me to stay at her house at Eaton Square if I ever found myself in London.’
‘Did she now? You are all set then,’ Major Payne said somewhat stiffly. There was a pause. ‘If the Honourable Charlotte has an ounce of sense in her head, which I am not sure she has, she’d say no to this house deal and go back to Wiltshire. Post-haste.’
23
The Snow Queen
Some five minutes later they were walking across the hall towards the swing doors. There was no one about. The bearded concierge was not at his desk. Probably watching the firework display, Antonia thought.
Major Payne said that they were reaching the most dangerous part of their adventure. They were about to walk into the lions’ den. Did they have any alternative? Could they afford not to walk into the lions’ den? Could they toddle along to their room instead, have a shower, retire to bed, read a bit, then turn off the lights, wish each other a good night and go to sleep? The answer, they agreed, was no, a definite no – they couldn’t. They needed to investigate and they had to do it now. By tomorrow morning the body might no longer be in the deep freeze. Then they would never know if they had been right or not.
‘What shall we do if we do find the body?’ Antonia said.
‘No idea. No idea at all.’ Payne looked grim.
They had tried to ring England on their mobiles but, again, there was no network. The doors swung behind them and they found themselves walking along a beautifully carpeted if inadequately lit corridor. ‘Let’s hope we won’t run into one of Songhera’s goons,’ Payne murmured. Antonia noticed with some surprise that the walls were decorated with Rackham’s illustrations of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in silver frames. Ria had had a book of Andersen’s fairy tales in her room. Roman Songhera seemed to have bowed to Ria’s taste, or did he perhaps share it?
There they all were. The steadfast one-legged tin soldier gazing besottedly at his beloved paper dancer. The sinister Shadow. Little Ida and her flowers, looking faded and exhausted after their midnight ball. There was the ugly duckling and the emperor whose new clothes no one could see. The Snow Queen and little Kay. Antonia was familiar with them all and she remembered the Snow Queen’s chilling words, ‘Now you are not getting any more kisses, or else I’d kiss you to death.’
Ria seemed to have been a fervent Andersen aficionado. Her name might have come from an Andersen tale, Antonia reflected. Ria had read Andersen’s tales in bed. She couldn’t have been entirely rotten then. No person who liked fairy tales was ever irredeemably bad. Was that a logical argument? There was also something touching in the fact that Roman had gone to the trouble of having Rackham’s illustrations mounted so beautifully in their silver frames and hanging them on the wall in such a perfectly symmetrical way. It did look like a labour of love. Roman had gone out of his way to please Ria.
The first door they opened turned out to be a broom cupboard, but the second revealed a steep staircase leading down into what looked like a cellar. The storeroom that housed the deep freeze?
They started descending the stairs. Antonia leant on her husband’s arm. How sore and tired her feet felt. We are descending into the very bowels of hell, she thought. She was a little hysterical – she was extremely tired – one always exaggerated and said silly things like that when one was nervous – it was a defensive reaction of sorts. The lights flickered and there was a faint crackling sound. She hoped there wouldn’t be a sudden blackout. They had been warned about blackouts but of course one expected a place like Coconut Grove to be exempt from the kind of power cut that seemed to afflict Goa’s lesser mortals. Coconut Grove was after all the local Buckingham Palace. Roman Songhera must have his own generator.
The last step, thank goodness. No, the cellar at Coconut Grove did not bear a single similarity to hell. The temperature for one thing was lower than it had been upstairs; it felt pleasantly cool and airy. Antonia stood looking round. The walls were of a colour that brought to mind a winter sky in England and seemed to be covered in some insulating material since Hugh’s jocular ‘Point of no return’ sounded particularly strained and hollow in the silence. She wished he didn’t say things like that. If they started screaming for help, no one would hear them . . .
Everything was perfectly clean. Clinically so. There was the smell of some superior disinfectant in the air. A cool fresh fragrance. Alpine Breeze? They might have been inside a well-ordered private hospital. Antonia decided she didn’t care for the hospital association either. Major Payne pointed silently to the row of tall shining metal doors. The deep freeze, must be. There were six doors, taking up the whole of the long wall, each one sporting the New Millennium logo, same as on Ria’s fridge. Antonia’s heart began to beat faster. She didn’t like the idea of opening doors and finding out what was behind them – look what happened to Blue Beard’s young bride!
Most fairy tales were rather sinister and they frequently had the surreal logic of dreams. Some of them were highly unsuitable for children. Antonia’s thoughts turned to Andersen once more. To paraphrase what the roses said to little Gerda – She’s not dead. We’ve been in the ground, where all the dead are, but Ria wasn’t there. No. Antonia didn’t actually believe they would find Ria’s body in the deep freeze. This is all nonsense, she thought. A mare’s nest. We are on a wild-goose chase. It was ridiculous to expect the deep freeze to yield a corpus delicti. Out of the question. Ria was alive. She was hiding somewhere.
She saw her husband open the first door. ‘Ice cream. Vanilla. Belgian chocolate. Midnight cookies and cream.’
‘You don’t have to read aloud,’ she said.
‘Are you scared?’
‘Yes.’
He reached out for the second door. She stood beside him as he pulled it, but the door seemed to have got stuck, so he pulled again –
The caviar probably, Antonia thought. The next moment the door opened with a sharp crack. Antonia felt an icy blast.
Some long object, taller than either of them, fell out amidst swirls of steam.
It was the rolled-up white carpet.
Antonia cried out and stepped back. This is not happening, she thought as she watched her husband catch the carpet before it hit the floor and lay it down gently. This is only part of the nightmare.
Neither of them said anything. Major Payne started unrolling. The carpet had frozen and it felt stiff and unyielding to his touch.
The girl’s face was encircled by a sparkling aureole of ice and Antonia was put in mind of some strange flower that had grown in a glacier. The hair was no longer golden-brown but bluish-white with intricately patterned ice crystals. The cheeks were smooth and white. The lips were pale pink, slightly parted. She seemed simply asleep, an impression belied by her wide-open beautiful blue eyes.
The eyes stared back at them . . .
The fragrance of the flowers says the girls are corpses. Dingdong. The evening bell is tolling for the dead. Andersen had such a morbid imagination! A very strange man by all accounts, from what she had read about him. Antonia thought she smelled hyacinths. A sweet, sickly smell. The smell of death? That now was her morbid imagination. Or was it the disinfectant? Perhaps she had been wrong. Not Alpine Breeze but hyacinths –
Ria was wearing silk red-and-black Brook Brothers pyjamas with white pearl buttons. The top button was missing. Antonia suddenly felt like bursting into tears. Ria wasn’t wearing a brassiere under the top. Sil
ently they knelt on either side of the body. The throat was white, vulnerable, exposed. No, not entirely white. There were dark blue marks on either side of it, where somebody’s hands (Roman’s?) had squeezed the life out of her. So Julian Knight had told the truth. Ria was dead. She had been killed. She had been strangled. Oddly enough the face didn’t bear any of the usual signs associated with strangling – it had not turned purple, nor was it distorted or bloated –
Antonia spoke and her voice sounded harsh. ‘Julian Knight told me he saw Roman bang her head against the bedpost. He said he heard a crack. He didn’t say anything about strangling.’
‘Perhaps he got confused . . . Let’s check.’ Raising Ria’s head gently, Major Payne slipped his hand behind it. ‘There’s a swelling – at some point her head does appear to have met with some hard surface all right – though I doubt whether that was enough to kill her. Doesn’t feel that lethal. It might have made her pass out . . . I am no expert of course . . . A doctor would be able to establish the exact cause of death, but I see no chance of a PM, do you? Hello, what’s this?’
Payne reached out for Ria’s half-closed hand.
Antonia thought she heard a noise. Looking up, she was startled to see their distorted reflections in the freezer’s convex silver doors. Their faces looked ghostly, bug-eyed, ghoulish. But theirs weren’t the only reflections. There was somebody standing behind them, at the bottom of the staircase. A man –
‘Oh, my God.’ Antonia’s hand went up to her throat.
Major Payne turned round sharply. The next moment he was on his feet, his hands clenched into fists.
Roman Songhera was wearing a white dinner jacket and black tie. The theatrical turban had disappeared. He looked very sleek and suave. His hair was revealed as black and shiny. Oiled back. Too short – the long black hair on Ria’s pillow isn’t his, or he might have had a haircut, Antonia thought irrelevantly. Or had Ria slept with the James Bond taxi driver? That young man’s hair had been long and black all right – he’d had it in a pony tail! Antonia’s next thought was: Roman is bound to have a gun in his pocket. He’s going to shoot us.
Only he didn’t. What happened next was, in a way, rather unsettling. Roman Songhera hadn’t uttered a word. He wasn’t looking at either of them – they might not have existed. His eyes were fixed on the body in the red Brook Brothers pyjamas lying across the white carpet. Roman’s face was extremely pale. He took a step towards the body, then another. He held out his hand in a pleading gesture. Tears had started pouring down his cheeks. His shoulders shook. He took another step. He moved like a robot or a sleepwalker. He stopped beside the body.
Antonia and Major Payne moved away, to the left and to the right, respectively. They watched Roman Songhera bow his head and fall on his knees. The whole thing looked like some elaborate formal dance. Dance Macabre . . . The dance of death . . . Roman reached out for Ria’s left hand and held it in his with great tenderness. He stroked each finger with his forefinger. He then cradled Ria’s head on his lap. He was crying soundlessly; his tears were falling on Ria’s face, on her bosom. It was all unbearably sad. Would the tears soak into her heart and thaw out the deadly lump of ice, the way it happened to little Kay in the Andersen tale?
Despite herself, Antonia felt a lump in her throat. She reminded herself that Roman was a bully and a hoodlum, the worst of thugs and very possibly a murderer, that he kept crocodiles in a lake and didn’t deserve a scrap of sympathy, yet she couldn’t help being filled with terrible pity. Roman’s sense of loss was heartbreaking . . .
‘Ria,’ he said, then again, ‘Ria. Can the flames of the heart die in the flames of the pyre?’ He looked at Antonia, then at Payne, his eyes dimmed by tears. A more unlikely poetry quoter Antonia could not have imagined. ‘That’s what she read to me once – it was from one of those tales she loved so much.’
His voice sounded choked, flat and hollow among the insulated walls. Now he was stroking the dead girl’s cheeks, first one, then the other, very gently, with the tips of his fingers, as though she were a sleeping child. His hand then went up to her forehead and her hair. After that he touched her throat . . . They heard him gasp. He had seen the blue marks. He turned his head towards Antonia.
‘Who did this?’ he asked. When she didn’t answer, he repeated his question, on a threatening note. ‘Who did this?
’ ‘Look here, Songhera, don’t you think –’ Major Payne began, but Antonia pulled at his sleeve.
‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘We are trying to find out.’
‘You are trying to find out?’ Roman Songhera frowned – as though trying to collect his thoughts. His eyes held a dazed, hopeless, puzzled expression.
‘D’you mean you don’t know who killed her?’ Payne said.
There was a pause.
‘I kept ringing her, but there was no answer. She didn’t answer her mobile, nor her landline. I wanted to go and see what was going on, but I was very busy. The party – Charlotte – the fireworks. Ria didn’t want to come to the party, but she promised she would.’ Roman’s right hand now lay across the dead girl’s forehead. He spoke in a halting voice, simply, without any affectations, no longer with the faux English public school accent. Antonia thought he sounded American.
‘The party was about to start. I was expecting her. At first I was annoyed with her. I thought she wasn’t answering on purpose. I thought she had decided not to come. Sometimes she did things to annoy me. I was getting angry. At about ten past six I sent two of my men to her house, to see what was going on. The fools didn’t get back to me . . . I waited . . . They were making me wait! Why didn’t the fools ring and tell me at once she was dead?’
‘Perhaps they were afraid?’ Payne suggested. ‘Scared of what you might do? Shoot the messenger – that sort of thing?’
Roman Songhera stared back at him in astonished admiration. ‘Shoot the messenger? Yes. I might have shot the messenger all right. How did you know?’
‘Elementary psychology.’ In your highly idiosyncratic world, Payne thought, but didn’t say it.
‘You are jolly clever.’ Roman nodded slowly. ‘That was what Charlotte said. That you were jolly clever. I knew it the moment I saw you. I noticed the way you looked at my tie. No doubt you thought it was – what’s that phrase you use?’
‘De trop?’
Roman’s expression remained grave. ‘Not a caddish thing to do?’
‘That too. Wearing the tie of a school one didn’t go to was certainly considered not on in my day.’ Payne shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose that kind of thing matters any longer.’
‘Oh, but it does matter. It matters an awful lot to me. I do wish you worked for me, Major Payne, then you’d have been able to advise me. You are clever too.’ Roman turned towards Antonia. ‘You write detective stories. You can get into the killer’s head. You know how a killer’s mind works. You have a better chance of finding the killer than anyone else. Will you find Ria’s murderer for me?’
‘This is a matter for the police,’ Major Payne said. ‘Where we come from, the police would have been called by now.’
‘You mean Scotland Yard. The best police force in the world.’
‘That’s what foreigners think, but they aren’t that good, actually. They sometimes shoot innocent people dead.’
‘Our police do that all the time.’ Roman waved his hand dismissively. ‘Our police wouldn’t be able to find their own noses. Their post-mortem would be of a highly dubious order – even if they flew someone over from Delhi. No, I don’t want a formal investigation.’
Payne cocked an eyebrow. ‘You are loath to draw attention to yourself?’
‘I can’t bear the idea of a forensic pathologists putting on latex gloves and groping Ria – gawping at her – cutting her body and extracting blood and skin samples – photographers flashing their cameras at her. No. She will not be defiled . . . You will investigate.’ Roman pointed his forefinger at Payne, then at Antonia. With his florid dark good looks and p
ortentous manner he brought to mind a Mafia boss. ‘I want you to investigate. I will pay you. I will give you as much money as you want. Find the murderer. Tell me who it is. Give me a name, that’s all I want.’
‘Did you order your men to bring the body here?’ Major Payne asked after a pause.
‘I did. They didn’t tell me at once that she was dead. I got a message saying there was a problem, a serious problem. Then another message – Ria badly hurt. They knew how I’d feel. They knew I was mad about her. They knew I adored her –’ Roman broke off. His hand had gone up to his eyes.
‘I am sorry,’ Antonia said.
‘In the end they came out with it, they had to. I thought it was some mistake. How could she be dead? It was only last night we’d made love! But I knew they wouldn’t have dared say she was dead if she hadn’t been. I knew they were telling the truth. They had no idea how she had died, they said, though they thought there was something funny. They said nothing about –’ Roman pointed to the marks on Ria’s throat. ‘I told them to bring her here.’
4.Little Victim Page 16