She said eagerly, “Is it all right?”
For a second, because there was so much else in my mind, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Then it came. The cigarette-case.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s all right.”
She treated that news as if it were cause for celebration. She put her arms around me and kissed me.
“Darling, I’m a terrible cook, but at least I’ve flung something together and it’s ready. So let’s eat. It’s something we haven’t been doing much of lately.”
She led me by the hand into the dining-room, where she had set the table with candles and a bottle of wine. What I had to do wouldn’t be easy, but it had to be done. I knew that. Things couldn’t be right again between us until I had proved once and for all that the terrifying doubts raised by Sheila and Callender were merely figments of my own anxiety. But how to do it without making Virginia think that the all-important bond of trust between us had been broken? I welcomed the delaying moments of bustle in which she carried dinner to the table.
We had settled down and she was leaning past the candles pouring wine into my glass when I said, “Do you know an Oliver Michaels?”
“Oliver Michaels?” She finished pouring the wine and put down the bottle, watching me, bewildered, through the little candle flames.
“In Paris,” I said. “When you were married to Olsen, did you ever know an Oliver Michaels?”
“Why, no,” she said. And then, almost defensively. “What’s all this about? Is it something Sheila put into your head?”
Careful! I said, “It seems that Quentin Olsen was well known in France two or three years ago under the name of Oliver Michaels. Didn’t you know that?”
“Quentin?” she said. “Quentin called Oliver Michaels? But of course not. He was always called Quentin Olsen. That was his name.”
As I hesitated, I could hear Callender’s voice, “There was this rich American dame … She’d got in with Oliver Michaels and he came to visit her—with a couple of babes.” Sooner or later I knew I would have to tackle that. I tried to eat. It was some kind of stew with mushrooms. She must have gone around the corner to market. That mundane little domestic fact helped to steady me.
I said, “Baby, would it bother you to tell me about your marriage to Olsen? Just the bare facts. Just to keep the record straight?”
I had been terrified that something would happen to her face then, that something I desperately didn’t want to be there would show itself. But she merely smiled her quick, warm smile.
“Why, darling, of course not. It’s been idiotic putting it off this long.”
The murder, if indeed there had been a murder, had taken place in Grasse “a couple of years ago”. That’s what Callender had said. Although I utterly refused to let myself believe it could have had anything to do with us, there it was. A couple of years! How maddeningly vague that was. Did it mean two years? Three years?
I said, “When did you marry him?”
“Exactly two years and ten months ago. In June.”
Two years? Three years?
“In Paris?”
“Yes. I told you. We weren’t at all rich. I mean, my parents. But an aunt died. She left me two thousand pounds. I’d always had a wide-eyed dream about Paris. I took off. I lived in a little hotel on the Left Bank. I went to the Ecole des Arts. I met Quentin at Les Deux Magots.”
“And he was a pianist then?”
“Oh yes. He played in some club near the Etoile. I’m sure you’ll find it hard to believe, but he fascinated me right away. He seemed so worldly, so sophisticated, all the things I’d associated with Paris in my naïve little Birmingham mind. He made a terrific play for me. I didn’t know whether I was on or off my feet. We were married a week after we met. There wasn’t any honeymoon. He just moved into my hotel room. That in itself should have given me a hint, but I was far too beglamoured to be in the mood for hints.”
Beglamoured! Quite unexpectedly, I thought of Olsen’s large hulking body, of his thick wrists with their sprawl of red hair. I could see the two of them in the little Paris hotel room, see the coarse hands fondling her. I struggled against the image. It was irrelevant, distracting. I mustn’t feel. I must just listen, hoping against hope that nothing she said would ring false.
She had taken a sip of her wine. She looked at me over the glass, her lips drooping in a self-mocking smile.
“It’s pitiful, really. There’s so little to tell. Almost immediately people started showing up at the hotel when he was out. The most extraordinary people they seemed to me, although I didn’t have a clue to the fact that they were either dope addicts or would-be call girls looking for a job. At least, not at first. One day one of the girls told me. I was stunned. I accused him when he came home. The next morning he skipped with what was left of my two thousand pounds. He’d persuaded me to put it in a communal account. It was the two thousand pounds, you see, that had interested him in the first place.”
She shrugged. “So there you are. Three and a half months of wedded bliss. It had cost me roughly forty pounds a day—minus, of course, the cigarette-case. I can’t imagine why he gave it to me. As a come-on, I suppose. But at any rate, I was lucky enough to have it with me when he checked out of my life.”
For the first time since I’d left Sheila, I let myself yield to relief. That was the truth. Of course it was. What could be more plausible than that familiar little saga of the naïve kid from the provinces and the slick city operator? Only three and a half months! In so short a time as that, why should she ever have suspected the existence of Olsen’s sinister second identity as Oliver Michaels?
Once again a memory from 79th Street came to jolt me. A memory from Hugo too. Sheila quoting Olsen: “Sitting at a table with Virginia Harwood!… Don’t you know that girl’s notorious all over Europe?” And Hugo: “The Byword of Rome.”
The candles were flickering slightly in the tall silver candelabrum which, incidentally, had been a wedding present from one of Beth’s aunts. Virginia was eating quite calmly now, as if it had never entered her head that this would be anything more than a casual conversation.
I said, “And then?”
“Then?”
“After he left you?”
She looked up abruptly from her plate. “Do we have to go into that?”
“I think so,” I said. “You see, Sheila told me something …”
The instant I’d said that I knew it had been a false note.
“Sheila, Sheila!” Suddenly she was furious. “What’s all this about Sheila? You told me you went there to accuse her. That’s what you said. You said she could have killed him, that it could have been she who’d put me into this impossible position. But you haven’t told me a thing about what happened. Not a word. You just sit there, staring at me, quizzing me …” I got up. I went around the table. I put my hand on her arm, but she tugged it away, jumping up, sending the fork toppling off her plate on to the floor.
“Virginia.”
“Virginia! Haven’t you the slightest idea what it feels like to know the police are crowding in on you, to know that you’ve done nothing, absolutely nothing, and yet that no one believes you? They talk, they smile, they pretend, but all the time … You, too. You’ve changed. You’re absolutely different. You’re like some—some sort of an inquisitor.”
Once again I tried to take her arm, only to be pushed violently away.
“Please,” I said. “I’ll tell you what happened at Sheila’s. Of course I’ll tell you everything. I was planning to anyway. But first I’ve got to know. It isn’t not trusting you. It’s having to know—for your own sake, to make sure no one can do anything to you.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”
“But it’s true.”
“For my sake? You want to know what I was doing after Quentin left me, long before I met you—for my sake? For my sake you want to pry and poke into something that has absolutely nothing to do with you?”
“But Virgi
nia …”
“All right,” she said, “you want me to tell you what happened after he left me? All right. I’ll gladly let you know.”
She hurried to the sideboard, found a cigarette and lit it.
“There I was in Paris, stranded without a penny. What to do? Go home? Let them know what an idiot I’d been? Not bloody likely. I worked. That’s what I did. I became a model. Is that what your charming mother-in-law told you—with heavy quotation marks around the word ‘model’? ‘Dearest Lewis, I think I should warn you that it seems in Paris she was a model’? All right. I wasn’t much of a model, but I worked when anyone would have me and if I wasn’t working and some man asked me out to Maxim’s … well, I had to eat, didn’t I? And if people had villas or yachts and invited me—was that so terrible? Is it criminal in the world of the Denhams to set foot on a yacht unless you happen to own it yourself? I worked when I could, I told you that. I worked and I saved because there was only one thing I wanted—to get enough money to bail out of that stupid, meaningless existence, to get a divorce, to go somewhere quite, quite new and try to find a simple, ordinary life with someone for me, someone I could love, someone …”
She was sobbing. I went to her, stricken. I put my arms around her. She pressed her head against my shoulder, clinging to me, trying to keep the sobs in control.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “So sorry.”
I held her closer, triumphantly sure then that the last barrier between us had been broken. “It’s all right, baby. Do you think I give a damn what Sheila said? It’s just that I had to know in case they …”
The telephone rang, wrenching me back to the perils of the moment. Virginia looked up at me, her face taut with anxiety. It sounded again. I went into the living room to answer it.
It was, as I might have guessed, Lieutenant Trant. “Oh, Mr. Denham, I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
Goddamn him. Why did he always have to say that? He was a policeman. Why couldn’t he act like a policeman?
“Yes,” I said. “You’re disturbing me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I thought I ought to call—just in case your wife hasn’t had time yet to catch you up on Olsen. You see, the first bulletin on him has come in from the Sûreté in Paris. It took a little time because he wasn’t known over there as Quentin Olsen. He was known as Oliver Michaels.” He paused. “I wonder if your wife was aware of that.”
The sarcastic “innocence” of that remark, which was transparently intended to rattle me, merely brought a rush of anger.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said. “But if you want to find out, there’s nothing to stop you from asking her.”
“Exactly,” said Trant. “However, it’s perfectly possible that she never knew about the Oliver Michaels alias because Quentin Olsen was his real name and no doubt he was still using it for domestic purposes. But be that as it may, Mr. Denham, I’m afraid he managed to deceive her about his character. She told me this evening that she had found him charming and good-natured, if somewhat ineffectual. As it happens, he wasn’t ineffectual at all. In fact, there’s a whole list of charges against him—dope-peddling, suspected blackmail. He was even wanted for questioning in a death which took place in the South of France two years ago.”
Two years! He had said two years. Eight months after Olsen had disappeared from Virginia’s life! But the comfort brought by that news was more than counterbalanced by the unmistakable threat in his tone.
Challenging it, I said, “That’s very interesting, I’m sure. Very interesting indeed. But what the hell has it got to do with us?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Trant. “I just thought you’d like to know how lucky your wife is to have got away from that sort of company. Oh, by the way, just to put her mind at rest, you might tell her that I’ve spoken to Mrs. Potter again about the cigarette case and she completely confirms your wife’s story.” He paused. “But then, maybe you know all that already, since Mrs. Potter’s butler tells me you stopped by the apartment earlier this evening. Well, so long, Mr. Denham, for the time being.”
He hung up. He had told me as plainly as if he had spelled it out that we had never, even for a moment, fooled him. He only knew what he knew, of course, and that at the moment was—what? That my address had been in Olsen’s pocket, that as Olsen’s ex-wife Virginia could be deeply implicated, that we had both been systematically lying to him. That perhaps was all as of now. But soon …
I turned to see Virginia standing in the dining-room door.
“Trant?” she said.
I looked at her and it seemed as if the huge cumbersome body of Quentin Olsen was once again lying on the carpet between us.
I said, “He’s softening us up. That’s his technique. He’s going to go on till we crack. Then he’ll arrest you.”
She pushed the dark hair back from her face. She was watching me bleakly.
“Then what are we going to do?”
Fight! It was only when I was fighting back that the energy came to combat the sickening apathy of defeat.
“Sheila,” I said. “She’s our only lead. She could have been lying. The question is … how to prove it?”
Half an hour later, we were in the living-room. I had told Virginia everything that had happened at Sheila’s, as much for myself as for her, because I knew that in recalling every word, every inflection of voice, lay my only hope of glimpsing what may have been the truth from behind what may have been their lies.
“She was being blackmailed,” I said, “That’s the main thing to cling to. She admitted it. That means she could have wanted to murder him. But what the hell could someone like Sheila have been blackmailed about?”
“Not about Ray Callender?” said Virginia.
“No. I’m pretty sure she’s only just met him and she made a point of saying that she’d been blackmailed for fifteen months.”
“If only we knew what she’d been doing fifteen months ago.”
“But we do know,” I said. “She was in Antigua.” It came to me then. “My God—fifteen months ago! Beth died fifteen months ago.”
That idea was so totally new, so overwhelming in its implications, that for a moment I was stunned.
Virginia’s voice came through to me. “Lew, you can’t think …”
I didn’t listen any more, because tiny, hitherto quite disconnected facts and phrases were starting to slide together like filings attracted by a magnet. Quentin Olsen at the table at the Club Marocain, playing, as Sheila had expressed it, “what he thought was a subtle game of cat and mouse” with her. Quentin Olsen, turning from Sheila to me and saying, “Oh, by the way, what a terrible tragedy about your wife. Let me give you my belated condolences.” That, and then Sheila that evening leaning back against the scarlet couch. “Once I tried to call his bluff. I don’t recommend it. The results were disastrous.”
Excitement was bringing beads of sweat to my forehead. I turned to Virginia.
“Listen. Fifteen months ago Olsen was blackmailing her. Don’t ask me why, but she admitted he had something on her, something which involved among other things a photograph. And she told me, she said it herself, that once she had tried to call his bluff. That means that on one occasion she refused to pay up, and the result, she said, was disastrous. When would she have enough courage to stand up to him? At the beginning, of course, before she got to know just how tough he could be. If, on the first occasion, she had refused to pay him off and if …”
I stopped. Was what seemed to be possible actually possible? For a moment it struck me as too fantastic for belief. And yet—why not? Sheila had never liked Beth and Beth had almost hated her.
“If?” echoed Virginia. “If-what?”
I said, “If Sheila had refused to pay, if he had threatened to expose her, if she’d said, All right, go ahead. And he’d told Beth.”
“Beth!”
“Why not? Her stepdaughter was the most obvious person to tell.” Another filing slid over to the magnet. “My God
, Beth called me that night. I’d already talked to her once but she called back when I was out, leaving a message for me to get in touch with her. I never did. But if Olsen had gone to her, I was the obvious person she’d think of to consult first. What if it had happened just before they set out for Guadeloupe? What if Beth, when I didn’t call back, had confronted Sheila with it on the yacht? Disastrous. That was the actual word Sheila used. Disastrous. Beth was a born disapprover. She was the last person to feel any sympathy for someone who had ‘broken the rules’, especially if that person was Sheila. What if there had been some sort of scene on the deck with Beth, for example, threatening to tell Uncle Gene, some kind of struggle—and then …”
I broke off as the inevitable image came, the image that had never stopped haunting me as a symbol of my own inadequacy as a husband but which now had a far more terrifying significance.
The hand thrusting up from the Caribbean, the hand with the freckles on the wrist …
Virginia was looking at me with an expression of awe.
“Then—then she murdered Beth?”
I got up. I started to pace back and forth. Why not? What was there that wouldn’t fit into this pattern? Olsen had been there in Antigua at the time, playing at the Beach Club. He must have been. Sheila had as much as admitted it. And yet … Well, that was easy to check.
I went to the telephone.
Virginia said, “What are you doing?”
“Calling the manager of the Beach Club in St. John,” I said. “I’m positive Olsen was there at the time but I’ve got to make sure.”
As usual, a call to the Caribbean was about as complicated as trying to contact the planet Mars. And when I finally got through, it was only to be told that the manager was not there. I left word for him to call the moment he got in. That then was all I could do now? We would just have to sit sweating it out until the manager called back?
I had got a drink for myself and one for Virginia when the phone rang. I jumped to answer it. It wasn’t Antigua. It was Hugo.
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