4.Little Victim

by R. T. Raichev

  She had then got busy. She had pushed Ria’s body off the bed and she had kicked the body under the bed. She had then lain in the bed, among the cinnamon-scented silk sheets, admiring her legs made longer and slimmer by the high heels, waiting for Roman. She had heard the church bell chime midday. On a sudden impulse, she had got off the bed once more and started dancing around the room. It was at that point the beautiful boy had arrived. His face! He hadn’t seen any woman as beautiful as her before, that much was clear from his expression.

  Sarla halted. She saw two crows gorging on bright mangoes in a still, dust-green tree by the side of the road. Where had her feet brought her? She took stock of her surroundings. She knew this place. A white façade, which Roman had said was ‘Georgian’. A Union Jack. Not authentic Georgian since the building had been completed in the early 1970s by an enterprising Indian businessman, without any real permission from the company running the original Brown’s, which was in London. Dover Street, Roman had said. Roman had always pretended to have expert knowledge of everything that happened in England. She was standing outside the English hotel. Brown’s. Of course.

  This was where the killer was.

  How did she know the killer was there? Well, this was the only place the killer could possibly be. Sarla too, in her own way, had become an expert on things English. On English faces. Such a respectable-looking killer. Upper class, without the slightest doubt. Someone her father would approve of.

  ‘All I want is to say thank you and kiss your hand,’ Sarla rehearsed her words. She was certain the killer’s hands still held the Power. What she also wanted to know was how it had felt.

  The next moment she saw the killer through the window. Sitting in the foyer, drinking tea and scanning an English newspaper. Not looking like a killer at all.

  Sarla went in.

  26

  The Science of Deduction

  It was the following morning.

  The sun shone brightly and the sea sparkled, vast and green, and again, incredibly calm. Creamy waves curled up at the brink of the golden shore. The yacht Caspar, whose striped funnels brought to mind a children’s book illustration, was still moored not far from the Coconut Grove private beach. The landscape was lush with flamboyant trees, highly decorative palms and bulbous banana plants poking up in dense undergrowth. The scent of hot lime flowers, or something very similar, filled the air. Major Payne decided it smelled like honey. Apart from the agreeable cooing of cape turtle doves and pigeons overhead, the silence and sense of peace were absolute.

  ‘It’s not right at all for the view to look so lovely, if you know what I mean. I’d have preferred a black canopy of low and swollen clouds,’ he murmured. He sat slouched low in his wicker chair, legs straight out in front of him. ‘Should I ask for a double brandy perhaps?’

  ‘That would be most unwise.’

  ‘Too soon after breakfast? Can you think of something else then that might cheer me up?’

  ‘My book is going to be translated into Mandarin Chinese,’ Antonia said.

  ‘Really? How jolly. Are you serious? How do you know?’

  ‘Got a text from my agent.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just now.’ She waved her mobile. ‘Perhaps Tang will read my book. Make sure he gets the tobacco you promised him.’

  ‘I’ve seen to that. Manolo must be delivering the package at this very moment.’ Payne glanced at his watch. ‘So one can get texts. Are we allowed to send texts? I suppose we could text an SOS to Scotland Yard, if the worst should ever come to the worst?’

  ‘Not Scotland Yard, SAS.’

  ‘Then they could mount a rescue operation and get us out of here. They could bring choppers and things. Or is it the Task Force who do that sort of thing?’

  ‘What should we consider the “worst”?’ Antonia frowned. ‘Being dragged screaming to the lake with the crocs?’

  ‘He won’t do that. He needs us to find out who killed Ria.’

  Payne was feeling tired and dejected, in a strange sort of stupor. The night before he had had a nightmare in which funeral pyres, crocodiles, the Honourable Mrs Depleche and a sinister elderly man with sepulchral blackened eyes and whited face, like some figure from German Expressionist theatre or the horror films of Murnau and Pabst, had all played a part. Perusing the letters of the late Lord Justice Leighton to his daughter at bedtime had something to do with it, he had no doubt. He had the bundle with him now.

  They heard a distant church bell chime nine. They had been having breakfast on the smaller of the two terraces at the back of the house: sliced melon, bacon-and-eggs done to perfection, golden toast, Oxford marmalade, a pot of gentleman’s relish for him, fruit salad, freshly squeezed mango juice. They were sitting at a round marble-topped table under a large striped umbrella.

  Major Payne laid down the last letter, poured himself some coffee and lit his pipe. ‘De mortuis and all that, but the late judge does emerge as an impossible fellow. Obsessive, possessive, bigoted and didactic. He describes his sister Iris as “unreliable as the Poles and the Irish”. Apparently he caught her telling a lie once, and never forgave her. He says she is “adept at deceit” and that lying is “second nature to her”. Can’t see how anyone could have been fond of him.’

  ‘No saving graces?’

  ‘Can’t really see any. Oh, he is jolly fond of the theatre.’

  ‘What about his great all-consuming love for Ria?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Wasn’t he ennobled by it? Didn’t it make him appear human and vulnerable? More – likeable?’ Antonia looked up from her diary. She believed she had managed to crack the Knight conundrum – but if she was right, the mystery only deepened and became more fantastical. Who could that man have been – and why had he done it?

  ‘I wouldn’t say it made him more likeable, no. It was the wrong kind of love from start to finish. Possessive and controlling. Damned unhealthy. One can’t really empathize with Lord Justice Leighton, or feel sorry for him on account of his daughter earning silly money as a call girl and then graduating to gangster’s moll.’

  ‘How much did she earn, does she say?’

  ‘Three thousand pounds a night. Sometimes four.’

  ‘That’s more than the advance I get for a book.’

  ‘She might have exaggerated. She does appear to have led the judge on an awful lot. That’s what his letters suggest. I bet she made things up whenever her news was not sufficiently shocking. She seemed to have tantalized and tormented him – thrown provocative perversities at him – related her unspeakable exploits in some detail. It is perfectly clear that her heart did not belong to Daddy. I wish I were able to take a look at her letters.’

  ‘Perhaps one day they’ll be published?’

  ‘Perhaps they will be. The stepmother might decide to make a fast buck. Incidentally, the stepmother’s name is Lucasta . . . The judge complains about her . . . Lucasta drives him round the bend with her fussing and she tries to run his life . . . Or does he mean “ruin”?’ Payne peered down at one of the letters. ‘They should publish all the letters in one volume, both hers and his together. It would be the kind of correspondence that provides the gentle reader with a good cautionary tale. Ria’s was a kind of female rake’s progress all right . . . I think she as good as killed her father.’

  Antonia nodded thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps that was her intention all along?’

  ‘The judge’s deteriorating health is a recurrent theme in all his letters. He has heart trouble. He suffers from breathing difficulties and dizzy spells. He feels depressed for most of the day and when night comes, falls prey to insomnia. When he manages to go to sleep he has nightmares. He keeps thinking about his daughter. He writes that he would rather die than accept as truth the things she says she does.’

  ‘That might have been emotional blackmail, but the fact remains he did suffer a massive heart attack and died.’

  ‘Pulmonary embolism. That’s what the unreliable aunt writes.
I think the judge and his daughter deserved one another, don’t you? One destroyed the other and vice versa . . . Is that a terrible thing to say about people one has never met?’ Payne struck a match and lit his pipe. ‘I cannot help thinking that Lord Justice Leighton was to blame for the way Ria turned out in the first place, that he was the architect of his own misfortune . . . Each man kills the thing he loves . . . The Frankenstein syndrome . . . I may be completely wrong. I shouldn’t judge anyone, really. Still, look at him!’

  Payne had placed the photo, which he’d taken from Julian Knight’s desk, on the table. ‘He does look the part,’ Antonia agreed. ‘There’s something very creepy about him. It’s those boiled-gooseberry eyes, I suppose, but also the way he smiles . . . So his letters give no evidence of any flashes of humanity? No little heart-warming details?’

  ‘He refers to the fairy tales he used to read to her when she was little, which I suppose is warming in its own way. He mentions plays he and Lucasta went to. They were quite taken with an adaptation of Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, he says, which they saw in Chichester. He raves about the cleverness of Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, which they saw in Morecombe-on-Sea or some such place. Rep companies seem to like that sort of thing, don’t they? He refers to a DIY job he did in his study. He says his hands are still strong. He never fails to complete the Times crossword.’

  ‘How curious. You never fail to complete the Times crossword either.’

  ‘True. All right, he was not utterly nightmarish then.’

  ‘Was East Lynne the one where the disgraced Lady Isobel returns to her family home, disguised as a nurse, and is not recognized? Does anyone read Mrs Henry Wood nowadays?’

  ‘I don’t suppose they do. Unless for some Eng. Lit. university thesis on obscure Victorian writers. East Lynne is melodrama of the most turgid kind. It was on the bestseller list, apparently, when it first came out.’ Payne puffed at his pipe. ‘Am I right in thinking Agatha Christie used an equally improbable impersonation ploy in Murder in Mesopotamia? A woman marries the same man twice without realizing it? Husband number one becomes husband number two and, thanks to his intricate disguise, remains undetected?’

  ‘Yes. Though I wouldn’t have called Dr Leidner’s disguise ‘intricate’. He simply grew a beard and changed his name. Mesopotamia was one of Christie’s two duds in the 1930s. The other one is Dumb Witness – unless one is fond of dogs.’

  ‘I’ve always been fascinated by impersonation in detective stories. I have very mixed feelings about it. I don’t think impersonation would ever work in real life. I suppose it is easier for a young person to pass themselves off as an older one, or for a man to impersonate a woman convincingly – though not the other way round.’

  ‘Now then, do you want to hear my deductions in re Julian Knight or not?’ Antonia asked.

  ‘I most certainly do. I’ve been longing to hear your deductions. Last night you were damned mysterious about it all.’ Payne frowned. ‘He couldn’t have been dead and at the garden party at one and the same time. If that is what I think it is, it puts an entirely different complexion on this case.’

  ‘It most certainly does.’

  ‘You have reason to believe that the body we saw in the morgue was not that of Julian Knight, correct?’ Payne picked up the coffee pot once more.

  ‘That was Julian Knight all right. It was the man who spoke to me in the folly who wasn’t.’ Antonia glanced down at her diary. ‘Don’t interrupt now.’

  ‘According to the policeman, Julian Knight died yesterday morning between eleven and five past eleven in the morning. It was the partial solar eclipse that fixes the time of death so firmly in the mind. But Julian Knight was also alive and well at about six o’clock when he told me his extraordinary story about seeing Roman Songhera strangle his English girlfriend. Clearly,’ Antonia went on, ‘we are talking about two different men – one of whom, the real Knight – died earlier than we imagined.’

  ‘How do you know that was the real Knight?’

  ‘It wouldn’t make sense if it were the other way round. The man in the folly managed to persuade me that his life was in serious danger. He said that he had witnessed a murder committed by Roman Songhera, the uncrowned king of Goa. He was scared. He feared for his life. He was convinced he’d end up dead. And what happens? No sooner has he finished his tale than he is called away on the pretext of a telephone call. He never comes back. He vanishes into thin air. We set out to look for him and we discover Julian Knight’s dead body in the local morgue. He had been run over.’

  ‘Cause and effect, eh?’

  ‘That was the impression he intended to create, yes. You remember I couldn’t swear that the dead man was the same one who’d handed me the diary? Well, I still can’t. I did imagine he looked different, but then convinced myself that that’s what happened when people died.’

  ‘If the man in the folly wasn’t JK, who the hell was he?’

  ‘I believe that was the killer.’ Antonia said. ‘The real killer. After he strangled Ria, he came over here and told me it was Roman who had done it. His intention was to set up Roman. The killer had already managed to dispose of Julian Knight.’

  ‘By running him over? Did he have a car?’

  ‘No. By pushing him in front of a speeding car. He was walking with him. It happened in the morning at about eleven – at the time of the partial solar eclipse, when most people were looking up at the sky through smoked glass. Couldn’t have been difficult, given that Knight was an alcoholic, most certainly in an enfeebled state of mind and body.’

  ‘The veiled one. Good lord, yes. The killer disguised himself as a local woman! So the whole thing was carefully premeditated? The policeman mentioned a veiled one, didn’t he? After seeing Knight disappear under the wheels of the speeding car, the killer managed to escape into the crowd – but not before removing the Boy Scout diary from Julian Knight’s pocket?’

  ‘He might already have done so.’

  ‘Indeed he might. All that happened in the morning. The killer now has six hours to get ready for the next deception. He dresses up as Julian Knight, or rather puts on a shabby jacket, a soiled panama and enormous dark glasses. He gatecrashes the garden party, gets into the folly with you and makes an entry into the diary – describes how he has seen Roman Songhera strangle Ria and so on. Julian Knight wrote in block letters, clearly on account of his shaking hand, so imitating his handwriting must have been child’s play.’ Payne stroked his jaw with his forefinger. ‘So, my love, we are looking for a man in his early sixties. An Englishman of theatrical bent who loves dressing up and hates Songhera. Um. What else do we know about him?’

  Antonia glanced down at the open diary on her lap. ‘He is not in terribly good health. He kept sweating and I don’t think that was only because of the heat. And of course he is freshly arrived from England.’

  ‘How do you know that he’s freshly arrived from England?’

  ‘You referred to him as Old Zebra Face because of the white stripe across his forehead. At close quarters his face did appear mottled. He kept dabbing at it with a tissue. The tissue was extremely grubby. He left it behind, you see, dropped it inside the folly. I do think his tan was fake, like Camillo’s, it came out of a bottle or a tube –’

  ‘What a terrifying bloodhound you are! Thank you, Augusto,’ Payne said as the waiter placed a fresh coffee pot on their table. ‘Coffee, old thing? I must say the CG coffee is awfully good. As good as the coffee they make at your old haunt, the Military Club.’

  ‘No, no coffee for me, thank you. You’re drinking too much coffee. It’s bad for the heart. Coffee also makes one paranoid.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed. Does coffee make you paranoid? I suppose that’s conducive to the writing of detective stories of your kind.’ Payne poured himself a cup. ‘I wonder if Lord Justice Leighton drank too much coffee. Did the redoubtable Lucasta keep nagging at him to give up? Was coffee to blame for his deteriorating health and ultimate demise? Why oh why do I ke
ep thinking about the old horror? For some reason I can’t get him out of my mind. Where were we? Oh yes. The bogus Knight applies a bronzer to his face. Without it, his skin would have been too pale or too pink. His intention was to blend in – to create the illusion that he’d been living in Goa for a long time? ‘

  ‘Well, either it wasn’t a very good bronzer, or his skin wasn’t responding very well to it, because his face was streaked. I also thought his hands looked rather pale pink, the colour of monkey’s paws . . . All the locals, including the real Julian Knight, who had lived in Goa for some years, are deeply tanned. The man’s face in the morgue struck me as deeply tanned, under his deadly pallor.’