On impulse one day, a week after Sylvia had gone, Bertie took a spade into the garden and began to dig. It proved to be quite hard work, and he went down two feet before reaching the body. It was that of a cat, one he vaguely remembered seeing in the house, but Sylvia’s story of its death had been untrue. Its head was mangled, shattered by one or two heavy blows.
Bertie looked at the cat with distaste – he did not care for seeing dead things – returned it, and had just finished shovelling back the earth when he was hailed from the road. He turned, and with a sinking heart saw the local constable, P.C. Harris, standing beside his bicycle.
‘Ah, it’s you, Mr Mays. I was thinking it might be somebody with burglarious intent. Somebody maybe was going to dig a tunnel to get entrance into the house. But perhaps it was your own house you was locked out of.’ P.C. Harris was well known as a local wag, and nobody laughed more loudly at his own jokes. He laughed heartily now. Bertie joined in feebly.
‘But what was you doing digging in the next-door garden, may I ask?’
What could he say? I was digging for a man, but only found a cat? Desperately Bertie said, ‘I’d – ah – lost something and thought it might have got in here. I was just turning the earth.’
The constable shook his head. ‘You was trespassing, Mr Mays. This is not your property.’
‘No, of course not. It won’t happen again. I’d be glad if you could forget it.’ He approached the constable, a pound note in his hand.
‘No need for that, sir, which might be construed as a bribe and hence an offence in itself. I shall not be reporting the matter on this occasion, nor enquiring further into the whys and wherefores, but would strongly advise you in future to keep within the bounds of your own property.’
Pompous old fool, Bertie thought, but said that of course he would do just that. He scrambled back into his own garden, aware that he made a slightly ludicrous figure. P.C. Harris mounted his bicycle in a stately manner and rode away.
That was almost, but not quite, the end of the story. Linton House was empty for a few weeks and then let again, to a family called Hobson who had two noisy children. Bertie had as little to do with them as possible. He was very conscious of having been made to look a fool, and there was nothing he disliked more than that. He was also aware of a disinclination in himself to enter Linton House again.
In the late spring of the following year he went to Sardinia for a holiday, driving around on his own, looking at the curious nuraghi and the burial places made from gigantic blocks of stone which are called the tombs of the giants. He drove up the western coast in a leisurely way, spending long mornings and afternoons over lunches and dinners in the small towns, and then moving inland to bandit country. He was sitting nursing a drink in a square at Nuoro, which is the capital of the central province, when he heard his name called.
It was Sylvia, so brown that he hardly recognised her. ‘Bertie, what are you doing here?’
He said that he was on holiday, and returned the question.
‘Just come down to shop. We have a house up in the hills, you must come and see it. Darling, look who’s here.’
A bronzed Jimmy Purchase approached across the square. Like Sylvia he seemed in fine spirits, and endorsed enthusiastically the suggestion that Bertie should come out to their house. It was a few miles from the city on the slopes of Mount Ortobene, a long low white modern house at the end of a rough track. They sat in a courtyard and ate grilled fish, with which they drank a hard dry local white wine. Bertie felt his natural curiosity rising. How could he ask questions without appearing to be – well – nosy? Over coffee he said that he supposed Jimmy was out here on an assignment.
It was Sylvia who answered. ‘Oh no, he’s given all that up since the book was published.’
‘The book?’
‘Show him, Jimmy.’
Jimmy went into the house. He returned with a book which said on the cover My Tempestuous Life. As told by Anita Sorana to Jimmy Purchase.
‘You’ve heard of her?’
It would have been difficult not to have heard of Anita Sorana. She was a screen actress famous equally for her temperament, her five well publicised marriages, and the variety of her love affairs.
‘It was fantastic luck when she agreed that Jimmy should write her autobiography. It was all very hush hush and we had to pretend that he was off on assignments when he was really with Anita.’
Jimmy took it up. ‘Then she’d break appointments, say she wasn’t in the mood to talk. A few days afterwards she’d ask to see me at a minute’s notice. Then Sylvia started to play up—’
‘I thought he was having an affair with her. She certainly fancied him. He swears he wasn’t, but I don’t know. Anyway, it was worth it.’ She yawned.
‘The book was a success?’
Jimmy grinned, teeth very white in his brown face. ‘I’ll say. Enough for me to shake off the dust of Fleet Street.’
So the quarrel was explained, and Jimmy’s sudden absences, and his failure to return. After a glass of some fiery local liqueur Bertie felt soporific, conscious that he had drunk a little more than usual. There was some other question he wanted to ask, but he did not remember it until they were driving him down the mountain, back to his hotel in Nuoro.
‘How is your cousin?’
Jimmy was driving. ‘Cousin?’
‘Mr Wallington, Sylvia’s cousin from South Africa.’
Sylvia, from the back of the car, said ‘Alf’s dead.’
‘Dead!’
‘In a car accident. Soon after he got back to South Africa. Wasn’t it sad?’
Very few more words were spoken before they reached the hotel and said goodbye. The heat of the hotel room and the wine he had drunk made him fall asleep at once. After a couple of hours he woke, sweating, and wondered if he believed what he had been told. Was it possible to make enough money from ‘ghosting’ (he had heard that was the word) a life story to retire to Sardinia? It seemed unlikely. He lay on his back in the dark room, and it seemed to him that he saw with terrible clarity what had happened.
Wallington was one of the Small Bank Robbers, and he had come to the Purchases looking for a safe place to stay. He had his money, what Holmes had called the loot, with him, and they had decided to kill him for it. The quarrel had been about when Wallington would be killed, the sound that wakened him in the night had been Wallington’s death cry. Jimmy had merely pretended to go away that night, and had returned to help Sylvia dispose of the body. Jimmy dug the grave and they put Wallington in it. Then the cat had been killed and put into a shallow grave on top of the body. It was the killing of the cat, those savage blows on its head, that somehow horrified Bertie most.
He cut short his holiday, took the next plane back. At home he walked round to the place where he had dug up the cat. The Hobsons had put in bedding plants, and the wallflowers were flourishing. He had read somewhere that flowers always flourished over a grave.
‘Not thinking of trespassing again, I hope, Mr Mays?’
It was P.C. Harris, red-faced and jovial.
Bertie shook his head. What he had imagined in the hotel room might be true, but then again it might not. Supposing that he went to the police, supposing he was able to convince them that there was something in his story, supposing they dug up the flower bed and found nothing but the cat? He would be the laughing stock of the neighbourhood.
Bertie Mays knew that he would say nothing.
‘I reckon you was feeling a little bit eccentric that night you was doing the digging,’ P.C. Harris said sagely.
‘Yes, I think I must have been.’
‘They make a fine show, them wallflowers. Makes you more cheerful, seeing spring flowers.’
‘Yes,’ said Bertie Mays meekly. ‘They make a fine show.’
Dead Mountain Lion
Ellis Peters
Toiling up the ash-white traverses of the Langkofeljoch, with his eyes bent steadily on the zigzags of the path ahead, Edward Stanier
came over the brow of the pass and looked up from the sudden grey heaving of rock round his elbows, into a boiling cauldron of cloud. The cliffs of the Langkofel soared clean out of sight, foaming with leaden coils of cloud, and screaming with ravens.
Edward stopped and, turning his back on the forbidding cavern of the Langkofelkar, looked back down the dizzy chute of scree, into the rock town behind the Rifugio Passo Sella.
Down there was the warmth of July, and the drowsy sunset of Italy. Up here he stood on the edge of a slanting snowfield, with the vaporous hands of an imminent storm brushing damply at his shoulders. Against his will he felt a small contraction of discomfort inside him. It was all downhill now to the Rifugio Vicenza, low down there in the invisible bowl of the group. Surely there wasn’t a shadow of risk attached to the mere slither down the scree and snow to find it, and with it his bed for the night.
Still, he had to admit that he disliked the look of it almost as much as he disliked the idea of turning back. He could tackle anything, provided he could see it; but here the limit of vision went backward before him grudgingly, a step at a time. Between the twin copper cliffs the palpable presence of storm coiled and writhed, and the ravens screamed and wheeled in it invisibly.
He had come all the way up from Bolzano in the orderly manner he preferred, sticking to his timetable as tenaciously as he stuck to his syllabus all through a three-year tutorial; and if he did not reach Vicenza tonight his whole programme would be thrown out of gear. The very thought made him give a determined hitch to his rucksack and plunge on.
Within the darkening shelter of the Five Fingers a tall snowfield slanted upward and instantly he stopped in his tracks, for somehow at this hour he had not expected the Langkofelkar to be inhabited.
There was a girl on the snowfield. She was not paying any attention to him; she had not yet seen him, nor heard his approach. She was wholly absorbed in what she was doing, and to Edward’s staid mind her occupation was so astonishing that he became wholly absorbed in it, too, and stood staring like a halfwit.
She was dressed in slacks and a thick orange-coloured sweater, with her trouser-ends tucked into multicoloured socks above ski boots, and she was engaged in running full tilt up the steep snowfield as high as she could before losing impetus, and then sliding down again, eccentrically poised with spread arms on the dimpled and soiled surface.
She was playing devotedly, in the middle of a terrifying solitude of rock and stormcloud, as unimpressed by the vastness and violence of the Dolomites and the crying flight of the ravens as a child, or a cat. And, indeed, there was something of both child and cat in her perfect concentration and absolute unselfconsciousness. Edward held his breath, and did not realise that he was holding it for fear she should become aware of him, and be disconcerted. Children and cats do not like being watched.
She was young, and beautifully built, strong and slender. She had hair of the light, honeyed gold which is not uncommon in North Italy, and her face was oval and smooth, and tanned to a deep bronze-gold, noticeably darker than the hair. This gold and bronze colouring was all he could see of her, until she took a wilder plunging fall, rolled down the snowfield, and sat up in a flurry of white, beating snow from her sleeves. She was facing the rocks where he stood, and she saw him.
He need not have been afraid; she was not startled. She got up unconcernedly, and came towards him at a light run and said in a clear, rather high voice: ‘Buona sera!’ as if they were meeting and passing on some frequented road; and then as blithely, in case he had not understood: ‘Bon soir, monsieur! Good evening!’
Edward, who had never been more taken aback in his life, nevertheless managed to reply with correct gravity: ‘Good evening!’
He shifted his rucksack uneasily, and looked down the wavering track which was trodden downhill through the snow.
‘Where are you bound for?’ she asked.
‘The Rifugio Vicenza. And you?’
‘Oh, back to Sella,’ she said, shaking back the heavy, soft mass of her swinging hair. ‘I came up here only for an hour, to get an appetite for dinner. From where have you come today?’
‘From Pordoi.’ It did not sound a very impressive day’s work; he wondered how he had managed to take so long over it.
‘To Vicenza is too far,’ she said, shaking her head gravely. ‘The weather is not good, and it will be dark before you can reach the rifugio. You should turn back to Sella.’
‘How long does it take from here to Vicenza?’
‘Even in good conditions, more than one hour. Down to Sella it is only half an hour, and very easy. I think you should not go on tonight, it will not be safe. At the Rifugio Sella they will find you a bed. I am staying there myself. It is full, but they will not send you away.’
He knew that she was giving him sensible advice, but his mind could find only dismay in such an adjustment of his holiday.
‘I’m going back now,’ she said. ‘If you are wise, you will come, too.’ But she did not wait to see if he would follow her.
Edward turned resolutely, and walked across the almost level basin towards the next broken barrier of rocks. He began the descent gingerly, but maintained it for no more than five minutes. Darkness was closing too quickly upon the Langkofelkar. The girl was right, he ought to go back. It was the only sane thing to do.
He went down the slope more soberly than she had done. The first drops of a heavy shower spattered round him as he drew near to the large white bulk of the rifugio.
He clumped into the wide wooden hall. People and dogs were seething in and out of the doors as furiously as the cloud boiled in and out of the darkening blowhole of the mountain above. Most of the people, Edward judged, were Italians, and of a certain quite clearly indicated kind. Not the rich and fashionable, but the comfortably off and self-confident. The few who were just coming in, in climbing kit of the cheap, unaesthetic but efficient ex-army type, struck him as being the few foreigners, Austrian, German or English. The rest were better-dressed, but for admiration rather than action. As for the dogs, they were mostly a litter of half-grown boxers which seemed to belong to the house. Children shrilly pursued and tormented them. The din was almost confusing, after the immense quietness on the mountain.
He used his best German on a girl behind the counter in the little shop, where all the musical boxes and wooden toys from the Val Gardena waited for purchasers. She told him that the rooms were all taken, but hesitated and glanced at the darkening windows, and he knew she would not turn him away. There was a bed in one of the top landings.
It proved to be a large corner in a wilderness of dark recesses like open rooms, warm still from the hot sunshine which had poured upon the roof most of the day. A bathroom was not far distant, and the place had more privacy by far than he would have found in the chalet used by the climbers. He accepted it gladly, and shut himself into the bathroom to wash and shave, in some haste, for the gong had already sounded for dinner, and he was hungry.
The dining-room at the Rifugio Passo Sella was large, bright and noisy. As soon as Edward entered, he was met by a very diminutive waitress, with a flashing smile, who waved him after her to a table in a corner.
It was laid for six people, but only one person was yet seated, an elderly, lean-faced man, with cheeks the colour of teak, and far-sighted blue eyes. He was dressed in an ancient and disreputable tweed jacket, knickerbockers, and a khaki shirt without a tie, and his large hands, knotted before him on the plastic tablecloth, were like the roots of trees.
‘Good evening!’ said the elderly man. ‘Thought you were English! Sit down – where you like!’ He pushed the carafe of red wine across the table. ‘Staying long?’
‘Only overnight. I was a bit too late to get over to Vicenza, or I shouldn’t be here now. The weather was against me.’
‘Oh! Just walking!’ A little of the bright, speculative interest faded out of the blue eyes. ‘You don’t climb?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Pity! But you c
ouldn’t have better country for learning,’ he said, brightening. ‘I’ve got a couple of keen beginners up on the Grohmann today. I’d have been with ’em now if I hadn’t pulled a muscle on the Sella yesterday. Why not stay a few days, and join up with us?’
Edward devoted himself to his soup, and muttered apologetically that he had to get over to Siusi as soon as possible.
‘All your party are English?’ he inquired.
‘Yes. Palgrave and his wife have been coming out here with me – various places, you know – for several years. This year we brought out two of my undergraduates. Promising lads, too! Climbed with ’em in England often, but they’re new to the Dolomites.’
Edward warmed to find himself in the company of a fellow don. They exchanged names, and plunged into involved comparisons of provincial universities.
Professor Lacey’s light blue eyes roved round the room speculatively. ‘I see our star turn’s missing!’
Edward suppressed a guilty start, convinced for a moment that this sharp old gossip had probed the recesses of his mind, and surprised the image of the golden girl inconveniently insistent there. But when he followed the shrewd gaze he saw that his companion’s thoughts were elsewhere. He was watching the antics of a large party of obvious Italians, round a table in the middle of the room. They were all of them notably overdressed, and were making a considerable amount of noise. There was only one vacant place, a pretty, distrait little dark woman sitting anxiously beside it, her eyes forever on her watch.
Murder in Midsummer Page 20
