With a sly grin he took the tea bowl and placed it in front of Miss Rohan.
‘Do I drink?’ she said.
‘You should take three sips,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘And I would be honoured if you would look at the bowl. It is quite a simple one, as you see. Only a rough finish with the glaze allowed to run, but there is something of interest in the shape it has formed, is there not?’
Miss Rohan looked at the bowl.
‘Why, yes, there is,’ she said.
‘A controlled accident,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘Jntentionless intention. That is what your artist niece is trying to attain.’
‘Most interesting,’ Miss Rohan said.
She picked up the bowl and took three cautious sips.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She smiled a tight smile. Mr Utamaro put the bowl in front of Honor. Honor sipped.
‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘It really is. Can you get this tea in London, Mr Utamaro? It might make an interesting idea for the paper. We could build it up into a big gimmick. It’s certainly got something.’
‘There, she goes,’ said Gerry. ‘Getting excited over a tea party. She’s barmy. Tea gets her all wound up and drink leaves her flat. Look at her the other night. Sunday. What a wet blanket.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Rohan.
‘What do you mean “Oh dear”?’ Gerry said. ‘I’ve told you: you have to put up with us. Private life lived in public. Always has been.’
‘No, it wasn’t that,’ Miss Rohan said.
Quickly. A wave of embarrassment.
‘It was that party. The thought of it brought’itall back to me.’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Gerry. ‘You don’t want to be morbid. Look, Flaveen enjoyed herself then, didn’t she? It was probably the last good time she had. What’s wrong with that? Nothing to weep buckets over.’
‘It reminded me of the last time I saw her said Miss Rohan.
Starchily.
Mr Utamaro put the tea bowl in front of Mr Applecheek. He sipped carefully.
‘They tell me it was the last time anyone saw the poor creature alive,’ Miss Rohan said. ‘I wish it could have been a happier memory. Blowing one of those nasty things out of the window at me. And yet, do you know, somehow I felt her heart wasn’t in it. As if, perhaps, subconsciously she knew. She just blew the thing two or three times, only about half way out. Poor girl. I do believe we may be granted some sort of intimation, you know.’
She looked across the little hut at Mr Applecheek.
‘Can one have another go?’ Mr Applecheek said to Mr Utamaro, tapping the side of the tea bowl.
‘Certainly,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘there is plenty.’
‘Since we seem to have got back to the old subject,’ said Honor, ‘there is something I want to ask.’
She scrambled up and stood looking down at them. Her head not far from the light rafter holding up the thatched roof.
‘Mr Stuart,’ she said, ‘you told us just now you had nothing to hide.’
Alasdair looked up at her.
‘What is this?’he said.
‘Have you got anything to hide?’ said Honor.
An edge to her voice.
Mr Applecheek put down the tea bowl rather quickly.
‘Of course I haven’t got anything to hide,’ Alasdair said. ‘Why should I have?’
He heaved himself into a position where he could get up more easily.
‘If you had anything to hide,’ Honor said, ‘there would be one simple explanation. That you were hiding the fact that you knew Flaveen better than you make out and that you killed her.’
For an instant she took her eyes off him. She glanced at Mr Utamaro. Squatting easily on the floor beside Mr Apple-cheek’s sprawl.
Mr Utamaro looked up at her. Without expression. The eyes under the projecting black eyebrows calmly appraising.
‘Am I right?’ said Honor.
‘Are you accusing me of murder?’ Alasdair said.
He heaved himself to his feet.
‘I’m accusing you of lying,’ Honor said.
‘Lying?’
‘Yes.’
‘What am I supposed to have lied about? This is ridiculous.’
‘Chess,’said Honor.
There was a moment of silence.
‘I thought,’ said Mr Applecheek, ‘that she said chess.’
‘I did say chess,’ Honor said. ‘Well, Mr Stuart?’
‘I don’t understand you.’
But the note of confidence gone.
‘No? Come, what must the word chess mean to you?.’
No answer.
‘Not the time you played for Oxford?’ Honor said. ‘And were given your half-blue for it? Surely you would think of that: you spoke about it proudly enough the other night. Only as it so happens Oxford doesn’t award half-blues for chess. Cambridge does. There’s a big two-column story about it once a year in the fuddy-duddy Press. I remember things like that.’
‘Did I say I’d been given a half-blue?’ said Alasdair. ‘What could I have been thinking of? I must have –’
‘Oh, stop it,’ said Honor.
She walked across the hut to stand nearer to him. Picking her way through the jutting legs.
‘Don’t think you can talk your way out of this one,’ she said. ‘That was a plain lie. What have you got to hide, Mr Stuart?’
Alasdair’s white face. The heavy line of the jaw flabby, the large aquiline nose shining with sweat.
‘Come on,’ Honor said, ‘just who are you? Underneath that big bogus background, what is there? The man who knew Flaveen Mills, of course. That’s obvious. But what else? You might as well tell us. The game’s up.’
Around the two figures standing facing each other silently the others scrambled one by one to their feet.
Only Mr Utamaro sat on.
Honor took her eyes off Alasdair’s blood drained face and looked down at the Japanese.
Mr Utamaro looked contemplatively at the tea bowl beside him.
Honor frowned.
She turned back to Alasdair.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’re going to find out your squalid little secret, and you needn’t think we aren’t. Out with it.’
Alasdair looked round. Rapidly. The hunted beast.
The others looked at him. Magnetic attraction.
Nobody spoke.
The tiny hut full of people, their heads nearly touching the slim rafters. A crowd. The little charcoal fire glowing in its pit. The neglected tea things. The forgotten ceremonial. The charged atmosphere. Suddenly hot. Oppressive.
Alasdair looked from side to side again.
Mr Utamaro stood up. The lithe movement. Almost unnoticed.
‘We’re waiting,’ said Honor.
‘No.’
Alasdair’s shout. A denial. Illogical, absolute, hysterical.
He swung round on his heel, balanced for a moment on tiptoe, and launched himself through the thin paper walls of the hut.
The tearing, tangling paper.
Alasdair flung it aside, kicking it clear of his legs, staggering to his feet.
Mr Utamaro slipped across the hut as it sagged under the impact of Alasdair’s attack. Finding a path for his wide shoulders through the thicket of jostling elbows and arms without hesitation. He slid out of the door.
Alasdair looked round the lawn. Unfamiliar territory. He spotted the only way out, the rose-tangled archway.
And Mr Utamaro almost there.
Running, but without effort. A roller skater.
Alasdair ran too, but by the time he had crossed the small stretch of lawn Mr Utamaro was standing quietly a yard in front of the archway facing him. Feet a little apart, firmly planted on the ground, knees slightly bent. At ease.
‘Get out of my way,’ Alasdair shouted.
His black hair falling in long strands over his face, breathing heavily.
‘It would be better not to go,’ said Mr Utamaro.
Alasdair’
s white face suddenly flushed a dull, dark, heavy red.
‘I’m getting to hell out of here,’ he said, ‘and no one’s going to stop me.’
The others making their way out of the ruins of the hut.
Alasdair turned for a moment and looked at them.
The pursuers.
He turned back to face Mr Utamaro, put his head down and charged.
The heavy body hurtling forward.
A slight movement from the squat figure in the black kimono.
Alasdair lay on his back on the damp grass of the little lawn with Mr Utamaro looking passively down at him.
Chapter 17
‘In Judo,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘life has to be lived the Zen way. It insists on action without thought. It casts off the shackles of logic which tell us that a force directed towards one necessarily must strike. A force is only a force: it can go in any direction.’
‘Is that what happened?’ said Alasdair.
He looked up into the sky. The grey cloud was breaking up into large masses and through them the soft blue could be seen.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘that is what happened. It is a principle you should have realized. You were being attacked a few minutes ago but you were not bound to be felled.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Alasdair said. ‘But all the same I don’t see what I could have done.’
He swept his left hand, palm down, over the cool damp grass.
‘You shouldn’t lie there like that, Mr Stuart,’ said Miss Rohan. ‘The lawn is distinctly wet.’
Alasdair sat up.
‘I suppose it is,’ he said.’ But it was comfortable.
He knelt forward and lunged up.
‘And I have a feeling that I ought to take what comfort I can get.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘you are going to have an uncomfortable few minutes. But it will be worth it.’
‘All right,’ said Alasdair.
He looked at the others, standing in a semicircle on the wet grass.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘of course I never played chess for Oxford. I don’t really know what made me say I did. But I’m always doing things like that. I can’t resist the chance to appear in a good light. I was at Oxford, though, really I was.’
The small boy sincerity.
‘I don’t know a great deal about British life,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘but I am right, am I not, in thinking that Alasdair Stuart as a name is a bit too good to be true?’
‘Yes,’ said Alasdair, ‘that was my parents’ doing. They began it all and they were not very subtle. I’ve learnt a lot since then – though every now and again I forget some tiny inconvenient fact, like that business of chess half-blues.’
‘You’ll have to explain to me,’ Gerry said. ‘I don’t know a half-blue from a half-breed.’
‘It’s quite simple,’ Alasdair said.
A hint of the old lecturing manner.
‘My parents were named Schneider. They came to England from Germany in 1933. They were Jews, of course, although they never practised their religion. And from the moment they arrived in England they were determined that we all were to become as English as possible, but especially me. So they changed their name, choosing, I don’t really know why, as Scottish a one as they could. It was probably that they had read Scott as children, I don’t know.’
‘You’re a Jew, of course,’ said Gerry.
Sudden enlightenment.
‘I don’t know why I missed it. Come to look at you, it’s obvious. Hooked nose – or what they call aquiline – the lot.’
‘Some of my best friends are Jews,’ said Miss Rohan.
‘Yes,’ Alasdair said, ‘my poor parents – they are both dead now – couldn’t change my physical appearance. But I found that if I dressed and acted the part they had cast me for very few people noticed the actual physical signs of my race. But you were one of the few, weren’t you, Mr Utamaro?’
‘I was, Mr Utamaro said.’ I see what is there. But I have had little experience of Europe and was never really sure.’
‘Well,’ Alasdair said, ‘that’s about all there is to it. That’s what I was hiding. I never met Flaveen till last Sunday.’
A careless half shrug.
‘I am a pretender,’ he went on. ‘I have been all my life. I have devoted my best energies to plunging into the English atmos-phere. Sometimes I find myself really thinking like an Englishman, but at other times I wonder if I can go on.’
‘It would be easier to hit your target if it were really there,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘Really there?’
‘Yes, all these perfect Englishmen, or perfect Scots, you set out to copy, they are only copying each other or some ideal figure. They don’t really exist. Each one of them is only a person. You can never be exactly what you think they are, because they are not that at all.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I knew that really,’ Alasdair said. ‘Only I wouldn’t let myself think about it.’
He shook his head from side to side. Emerging from a fast flowing river.
‘I’m going up to my room now,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you all later on.’
Mr Utamaro stepped aside to let Alasdair go through the archway. A rose briar caught at the sleeve of his tweedy jacket.
*
The dining room. The bare trestle tables, white and scrubbed. On all but one of them the chairs up-ended, eight to a table. On parade.
The walls, two hundred years old. Mute witnesses of changing times. Never glowing to candlelight now. Three large unshaded bulbs hanging from the ceiling. A harsh light. Through the tall curtainless windows the last of the day. Giving up the ghost.
At the one occupied table, the one nearest the door to the kitchens, sat the students at the course (one week) on Zen Buddhism. Their instructor (and temporary warden, in the absence of Major Francis on annual leave) was at the head of the table.
Mr Utamaro. Wearing this evening European clothes. A blue suit, rather bright with a thin white stripe. Ready-made, too small across the shoulders, too slack at the stomach. A khaki shirt and a blue cloth tie.
A guy.
But the eyes under the jutting black eyebrows commanding. Completely devoid of restlessness, but moving from point to point seeing what was to be seen. The shaven bullet head with the two sprouts of coarse black hair was set at an angle. Inquiring, yet in repose.
At the six students of the course. Miss Rohan on Mr Uta-maro’s right. Opposite her Honor. Ndxt to Honor Mr Applecheek, sitting facing Alasdair. And at the end of the table Gerry next to Alasdair and Jim next to Mr Applecheek.
The first course of dinner. Shepherd’s pie.
Little conversation.
‘Could you pass the salt, please?’
‘Thank you.’
’I wonder if I could trouble you for the water.’
‘Thank you so much.’
‘More peas?’
‘No thank you. I’m afraid I don’t much care for them.’
‘No, neither did I. But one mustn’t grumble.’
‘No.’
Mr Utamaro put down his fork.
‘There is no making of decisions,’ he said.
They all turned to look at him. Nobody went on eating.
‘That is what you must learn to avoid,’ Mr Utamaro went on. ‘AH this business of making up your minds. All this asking yourselves: should I do it now? Should I do it this way? Ought I to do it? It is all wrong.’
‘Except that the Christian religion enjoins us to do just that,’ said Mr Applecheek.
‘For instance,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘although I know who killed Flaveen Mills, I do not torture myself with trying to decide whether I ought to say what I know. A time will come. Or it will not come.’
Six pairs of eyes looking at him. Six people holding their breath.
‘Did I understand that you are deliberately withholding some – some knowledge that has come to you about this murder?’ said Miss Rohan.
Outraged.
&n
bsp; ‘I am not withholding anything,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘To withhold something means that a decision has been taken not to disclose it. That is what I was warning you against. What you have got to aim at is not taking decisions. Not working at things with your minds.’
‘Admirable, admirable.’
Mr Applecheek softly clapped his hands together.
‘I wouldn’t have hoped for anything as good,’ he said. ‘A murder committed, the murderer discovered, and because the person who has made the discovery has subjected his mind to a series of mystical eastern disciplines he is perfectly happy to have this knowledge and do nothing about it. Charming, amazing, delightful. And who will tell Superintendent Padbourne?’
‘I won’t for one,’ Gerry said. ‘I may be a wicked lad, but at least I’m fly. How do we know that he knows? He probably knows damn all.’
He jerked his head in Mr Utamaro’s direction.
Mr Utamaro ate a mouthful of shepherd’s pie.
‘What is it exactly that you do know?’ said Honor.
Wary. Waiting to pounce.
‘I know who committed the murder and why,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘And have you got proof?’
‘What is proof?’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘A concoction of logic. No, I haven’t got proof.’
‘Then I don’t think we need be too disturbed,’ said Honor.
‘I did not ask you to be disturbed,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘In fact, I try to teach you not to be disturbed. That I know who killed Flaveen Mills makes no difference to anything. The murder hasstill been committed. The one who did it did do it, and what I know makes no difference to that. But, you know, it is no mere supposition I am indulging in. I am able to relate in broad outline just what happened from start to finish.’
Alasdair leant forward.
‘Has it occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that by telling us this you have put yourself in danger?’
‘Because the murderer may try to kill me to stop me telling what I know?’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘Exactly.’
‘But that is not important. I am indifferent to this question of killing – whether I am to be killed, or whether Flaveen Mills was killed. You must learn to detach yourself from that sort of thing.’
‘Oh, splendid,’ said Mr Applecheek. ‘Here we are at the very crux of a logical matter, at the point where the question arises of convincing a jury by logic that a certain event has happened, and what do we find? A complete denial that logic exists. Splendid beyond belief. And there is still the prospect of Superintendent Padbourne.’
Zen there was Murder Page 19