“Are you certain of that?” asked Dame Beatrice, deciding to play it by ear. Edmund grinned.
“Her father busted it up by coming into the kitchen at the wrong moment,” he said. “How did you know anything about it? He hasn’t come along here, has he? There was nobody out last night with me but Simon, and he’s a sport. Besides, he was busy somewhere else on his own account, so he couldn’t blow the gaff on me, even if he wanted to.”
“So this took place last evening,” said Dame Beatrice. “You know, my dear Edmund, if you must commit a man’s indiscretions you must also learn not to talk in your cups.”
“Oh, Lord!” said Edmund, taken aback. “Did I babble? Can’t remember a thing after I left the girl and went on the town. Can’t even remember at all clearly how I got back here, but I’ve some vague recollection of meeting up with Simon again some place or other. Oh, gosh! Is my father in on this? He’s a bit of a puritan, you know.”
“Your father knows nothing of it.”
“I say! You’re not going to tell him what I said when I got back?”
As Dame Beatrice had no idea what he had said when he got back, since she had been in her room and was probably asleep at the time, she was able to reassure the young man.
“In return,” she said blandly, “I would be glad if you would help me over something which really is my concern.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Oh, rather. It’s pretty decent of you not to . . .”
“What do you think has happened to Mrs. Cowie?” asked Dame Beatrice, cutting him short.
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Her disappearance is very mysterious. I am quite at a loss to understand it, and I should be very glad to have it explained. So, if you can tell me anything helpful . . .”
“Well,” said Edmund awkwardly, “she and the gov’nor had had a bit of a toss-up, hadn’t they? Don’t you think she was in a bit of a tizzy and sort of slung her hook to—well, to sort of show him? She’ll probably turn up again this afternoon all right. You’ll find her on board when the ship sails, I shouldn’t wonder. She’s simply dodging Dad so as to rub it in a bit.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Edmund. “To be perfectly honest, if the woman who fell over the cliff hadn’t been identified, I might have thought she was Mrs. Cowie. I’ll admit that.”
“Why might you have thought it was Mrs. Cowie?”
“Why?” Edmund avoided his interlocutor’s sharp black eyes. “Well, what I mean is—well, it seemed a bit odd that one woman tumbled over a cliff and another woman disappeared without (so to speak) trace, on the same small island and at roughly the same time.”
“I agree with you. It was almost more of a coincidence than one finds easy to credit. Tell me, dear child, do you ever practise ventriloquism?”
Edmund, obviously, was taken off his guard by the sudden change of subject.
“Me? Ventriloquism? Why?” he feebly asked.
“An interesting and sometimes, I feel, a somewhat mischievous art. Would you call it an art?”
“Well, no, I shouldn’t think it was an art. More of a sort of music-hall stunt, you know.”
“Nor mischievous?”
“Well, I suppose one can have a bit of fun with people over it. Kidding them along a bit, you know.”
“Such people as Mr. Dick, for example?”
“Oh, hang it all, it didn’t do any harm! He’s a bit of an old stick, you know. It was just for kicks we stirred him up. He’s a credulous old bird. Look at this expedition. He calls it a pilgrimage, I ask you!”
“We?”
“Oh, well, me, then. It was only a gag.”
“Perhaps Mr. Suffolk was implicated.”
“Oh, no, no. Not what you’d call implicated. He taught me how to pitch my voice and speak from the stomach and all that. He himself is very good at it. He could go on the halls or television except for one thing.”
“He can be seen using his lips,” said Dame Beatrice.
“How do you know?” Edmund looked surprised and impressed.
“Somebody who was on the cruising liner with us told me so, I believe. I know I heard it somewhere, and it was not from Mr. Suffolk himself, of course. What about Roger? Is he also an exponent of the art, or, as you would say, stunt?”
“Good Lord, no! Roger’s no good at it at all. He doesn’t begin to know how to pull it off. If he told you he does, he was kidding. He probably will tell you he can do it, because he’s sick to think he can’t, but the thing is not to believe him. Oh, he practises hard enough, but it’s hopeless. He just simply hasn’t a hope in hell of throwing his voice. He’s probably far too young.”
This vehemence impressed Dame Beatrice, although not quite in the way the speaker intended.
“To get back to a previous topic,” she said, “I wish you would give me your own account of what happened after your party left ours at Andritsena.”
“Happened? Well, nothing. We went to Patras and Mrs. Cowie wanted to stay the night, but we got a boat to Leukas and put up at a pretty God-forsaken hotel, and then our lot went botanising and the next we knew was that this woman had been picked up at the foot of those cliffs and that Mrs. Cowie had cut her stick.”
“So Mrs. Cowie did not accompany you on your botanising ramble. When did you miss Mary Cowie?”
“Miss her? As when?”
“That is what I am asking you. She turned up at Olympia, you know. Did she get as far as Leukas and come back to Olympia from there, or did she leave the party when it arrived at Patras?”
“I wouldn’t know. I mean I can’t remember. I didn’t even know she went to Olympia. I can’t say I missed her at any time.”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know. I’m not interested in her particularly.”
“It seems strange that, if she was missing from your party, you did not notice her absence.”
“Does it?” said Edmund carelessly. “Which day did she go to Olympia?”
“Let me see. It would have been last Tuesday or Wednesday, I suppose.”
“Oh, well, in that case, she’d certainly have come with us to Leukas. I mean, Mrs. Cowie would have raised Cain if she hadn’t been on the boat, wouldn’t she?”
“But you yourself have no recollection of her absence from your party?”
“Not the faintest. Roger and I were probably on the hills, or in the marshes, or somewhere, with the gov’nor. You know what he’s like when he’s on the hunt for plants.”
“May I ask you a very personal question?”
“Why, sure.” But Edmund looked somewhat alarmed.
“What was your feeling about the proposed marriage of your father to Mrs. Cowie?”
“Well, I can’t say I was sold on the idea. She wanted me to have a year doing social services (or some such rot) abroad before I went to Cambridge. Besides that, she wanted to bung Roger into some putrid public school and get rid of Suffolk.”
“As cut and dried as all that?”
“Oh, yes. The gov’nor stuck his feet in, but I think she’d have got her own way in the end simply by wearing him down. Fortunately this row they’ve had seems to have put paid to all that.”
“What did Mary think about the marriage?”
“I haven’t a clue. I know what the old man thought about adding Mary to the strength, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it?”
Dame Beatrice had only two main questions to ask Simonides before her party embarked after lunch that afternoon. To him she said,
“Dear child, the young are apt to confide in the young, and sometimes they prefer to confide in the young of the opposite sex. Has Mary, by any chance, mentioned her aunt’s disappearance to you? I am not asking you to betray any secrets, of course, but Mrs. Cowie’s absence from the party which returned from Leukas is causing considerable concern.”
“Yes, I know,” said the feline youth. “Mary has said nothing at all to me. If she spoke her mind to
anybody, my soul tells me that she would choose Julian.”
“And what about that lone journey of hers to and from Olympia?” was Dame Beatrice’s second question.
Simonides knit his black brows and his beautiful mouth curved into the smile of a faun.
“Ah, yes, that,” he said. “Very strange. One would think she knew that her aunt would not miss her, otherwise I do not think she would have dared.”
“That is a very interesting thought,” said Dame Beatrice. “But do you think, then, that her aunt disappeared from Patras, and not, as we have all assumed, from Leukas?”
“My soul gives me no assistance. I could not say. All I know is that a fast, specially-hired boat from Leukas, travelling through the night, could land a passenger at Pyrgos early in the morning, and a car from Pyrgos to Olympia would not take very long to make the trip.”
“But a journey like that would cost a good deal of money, and Mary, I think, has very little.”
“Ah, but Mrs. Cowie had a great deal,” said Simonides, with a sidelong glance, “and I think I heard that perhaps she did not take much of it with her when she went to look at Sappho’s Leap. She did go to Sappho’s Leap, did she not? And did not come back any more.”
“Well,” said Dame Beatrice, “there is an English saying that a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. You are a very intelligent young man.”
“And I do not think you are a blind horse. That is not your reputation. So—I give you my nod and my wink, but of actual knowledge I have none. I like simply—another of your English sayings—to explore all avenues. It is most mysterious, this disappearance. It is a conjuring trick, I think.”
Dame Beatrice did not ask him what he meant, but she was interested to note that his mind appeared to march at least some of the way with her own. The five who were to return by sea were driven in two cars to Piraeus. Dick drove with Dame Beatrice, Hero, and Mary, Henry took Julian and Roger and some of the women’s luggage to the ship. The farewells were brief and included promises all round of meeting again when both parties were in England once more, and then the two drivers returned to the hotel to wait for their flight home. Edmund and Simonides had bade the seafaring party a hearty farewell at breakfast, and they saw no more of them, neither did Dick and Henry wait to wave the ship goodbye. Dame Beatrice and Mary went straight to their respective cabins, but Hero strolled on deck with Julian and Roger and the five did not meet again until they joined forces in the dining-saloon that evening.
“It seems strange,” Julian said, “not to have Mrs. Cowie with us.”
“A strangeness I like,” said Hero.
“Wonder what made her go off like that?” said Roger. He looked across the table at Mary. “Didn’t she say anything to you about it?”
“Not a thing,” Mary replied composedly. “I think the upset she had with your father threw her off-balance and she acted on the spur of the moment.”
“Not much spur of the moment. If she’d been as sick as that with my father she’d have left us at Patras.”
“Oh, no, because of Sappho’s Leap. Her sole reason for agreeing to go to Corfu was that she would be able to take in Leukas on the way.”
“Seems a bit odd to me—well, more than odd—her vanishing suddenly like that. She goes off somewhere all on her own, and that’s the last we see of her.” He glanced at Dame Beatrice.
“She’ll be in Christchurch by the time I get back,” said Mary, thus closing, as she thought, the conversation.
“Mr. Owen told me that she left her handbag and her luggage behind,” said Dame Beatrice.
“Oh, looking after the luggage, including packing it, fell to my lot,” said Mary. “If she went off in a hurry, she would assume that I would see to it, as, of course, I have done.”
“And her handbag?” said Julian, looking up from his plate. “Did you have to look after that, too?”
“Oh, well,” said Mary, “she took her traveller’s cheques and most of her money. I don’t know why she left her handbag behind, except that I believe she had bought a new one. I suppose she transferred her effects to that. There isn’t any mystery about it. I do wish you’d change the subject. We’ve discussed her disappearance ad nauseam. You’ve no idea how tedious I’m beginning to find it. The fact is that my aunt was a thoroughly selfish, inconsiderate woman with no thought for anything but her own convenience, as you’d know if you’d had to live with her.”
“Oh, well, that arduous fate is not to be ours, it seems,” said Julian, “unless she thinks better of jilting Mr. Owen and comes back into the picture when we’re all at home again in England.”
“If that happens, out you go on your ear, old boy,” said Roger cheekily, “and I go to school and poor old Edmund goes out to some gosh-awful backward country and does social work, whatever that is.”
“It will do him good,” said Mary.
“And what will happen to you?” asked Roger. “I can’t see father putting up with another woman in the house, whatever Mrs. Cowie might say.”
“Oh, be quiet!” snapped Mary. “Didn’t I ask you to change the subject?”
“Sorry. Still, one has to think of these things,” said Roger. “I suppose, if it had been your aunt they found dead at Sappho’s Leap, instead of this gaol-bird woman, you’d be pretty rich, wouldn’t you?”
“Really!” Mary exclaimed. She turned on Julian Suffolk. “For goodness’ sake tell him to shut up! Whatever you’ve taught him, it doesn’t seem to have been good manners.”
“Sorry again,” said Roger. “I had no intention of getting your goat. I was just surmising.”
“Any more of it, and you’ll go and surmise somewhere other than in this dining-room,” said Julian. “Get on with your dinner. We’ve all finished this course except you.”
“What a mercy the chief steward gave us a table for four and allowed us an extra chair,” said Hero. “We could hardly have held any of this conversation in public.”
Nobody replied to this, and Dame Beatrice steered the conversation into another and a pleasanter channel. Her last recollection of the day was the wonderful sight of Cape Matapan thrusting a long black finger into the Mediterranean Sea as the ship, haying left the Aegean, began to head westward for home.
She was not surprised on the following morning when Mary, immediately after breakfast, asked whether she might have a word in private. She invited the girl to her stateroom and opened the conversation herself.
“You wish to make some amendments to the story you told me when we met at Olympia,” she said, “and I wish to ask you more questions about the mysterious disappearance of your aunt.”
Mary looked anxiously and timidly at her.
“I know I went hysterical and said I hoped—well, I wished Aunt Chloe was dead,” she muttered, “but it was only wishful thinking and of course I didn’t mean it.”
“I am sure you did,” Dame Beatrice declared. “I am also quite certain that the body they recovered on Leukas was that of Mrs. Cowie.”
“But how can you be so sure?”
“It was not in Mrs. Cowie’s nature to take herself off like that, without a word to any of you. She was essentially a person who dramatised herself. She also liked the centre of the stage. If she had intended, after her disagreement with Mr. Owen, to return to England immediately, she would have said so publicly and with histrionic emphasis.”
“But why should those Greeks have identified the body wrongly?”
“Because your aunt bore a remarkably close resemblance to her aunt, a Mrs. Metoulides, formerly Megan Hopkinson.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Possibly not. Well, now, suppose you recount whatever it is you came to tell me, and then I will relate to you a little of the seamier side of your family history.”
“Well, it’s only this,” said Mary. “I told you I left the others at Patras waiting for a boat. That wasn’t quite true. I went across the same day with them to Leukas and then, on that first
evening, when Aunt was in a temper and decided to go off somewhere on her own, I thought I saw my way clear to slipping off, too, and getting a man to take me back to Patras or Pyrgos and so to Olympia in a hired car.”
“Had you money enough for such a trip?”
“I told the boatman I would get my aunt to pay when we got back. I had just enough money for the taxi.”
“I see. But I think you are again attempting to mislead me. I think your aunt had a companion on her trip and that she went to Sappho’s Leap.”
“Well, anyway, I didn’t go. I was supposed to, but I’d set my heart on getting back to Olympia, so I pleaded a bilious attack. Aunt was sceptical and a bit cross, but, as I’d never walked out on her before, she concluded that my illness was genuine and I think she took Roger instead.”
“How incredible! She disliked the young boy intensely.”
“I suppose she felt any companionship was better than none. She was not a woman who enjoyed her own company. She probably bribed Roger to behave himself. That boy will do anything for money.”
“Really? An aspect of his nature which is new to me. What did the taxi-driver say when he discovered that your aunt had disappeared?”
“How should I know? He called at the hotel and made a bit of a fuss and then he shrugged his shoulders and said that as the proprietor of the hotel was his brother-in-law he would arrange to have the cost of the car-hire put on the bill which Mr. Owen would be paying. I was only too thankful to accept such a solution, of course. I shall pay Mr. Owen back, I need hardly say, as soon as I am in a position to do so.”
“And when, may I ask, will that be?”
“Why, as soon as—I mean, if my aunt really is dead—and that’s what everybody seems to think—I suppose I shall come in for something in her will.”
“You may have to wait some time before her death can be presumed, if her body has been wrongly identified in a foreign country. I doubt whether the Greeks would allow an exhumation, you know.”
“Oh!” said Mary blankly. “I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, until you seemed so certain that she was dead, I really hadn’t thought that perhaps I’m today a rich woman.”
Lament for Leto (Mrs. Bradley) Page 20