He came to her side very gently and warily, anchored her to the rock with a firm arm, and began to talk to her softly, choosing words so calm and tender that she had to hear their authoritative sound, if not their sense.
‘It’s all over now, you’re quite safe with me. I’ll take you down again safely. I’ll take you home. Don’t worry any more. I’m with you.’
She braced herself a little, and drew closer to him, huddling against his breast.
‘It wasn’t your fault. Don’t think of it, it’s all over now. Just hold on to me.’
‘He tried to kill me,’ she said indistinctly into his coat, her voice a child’s whimper of protest against injustice. ‘He leaned down to give me his hand and he took hold of the iron hold instead, and broke it out, and it fell – I don’t know what happened – he must have lost his balance—’
She detached one hand from its frantic clutch on the rock, and took hold of his coat instead, clinging convulsively. ‘He wanted to kill me!’ she sobbed, relaxing from her quivering rigidity into the sustaining circle of his arm. ‘He was smiling, and then he pulled the staple out and let it fall – and all at once he slipped, and the smile went away from his face – and then he fell, too—’
He held and soothed her until she ceased to tremble, and visibly drew herself together again, raising her face dazedly to his.
‘He was mad, wasn’t he?’ she said suddenly, when they were nearing the last stony cleft which brought them into the meadow. ‘It wasn’t his fault – he didn’t know what he was doing.’
‘No,’ said Edward tenderly, ‘he didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t normal.’
He knew he had to find the body. When they reached the grass he wanted to leave her sitting against the safe, solid rocks while he prospected to the left, where he was pretty sure it would have fallen; but though her knees were shaking under her, she would not be left alone. She followed at his elbow, her hand reaching out to him, so that he turned back impulsively and gathered her to him again. Her face was too still, her eyes too hectically bright in it. He was afraid she might collapse in the reaction from terror and shock.
What was left of Tonino was lying in a small, hard field of stones below the sheer face, about thirty yards to the left of the mouth of the cleft. He looked remarkably intact still, only without bones, as limp and abandoned as a rag doll, and insubstantial inside the deflated bulk of his windjacket. Not ten yards from him the iron staple was lying in the thin grass between the stones.
‘He’s dead?’ asked Olimpia, through stiff lips.
‘Instantly. Maybe before he even hit the ground. He wouldn’t know, Olimpia, he wouldn’t have time to feel anything but one great blow. You mustn’t think of it. You have to think of yourself now.’
‘I’m all right,’ she said, and swayed on her feet.
He got her to a comfortable spot with her back against a smooth stone, and wrapped her in her own jacket and his, and told her to shut her eyes and wait there while he ran to the rifugio, and not to try to move until he came back with help.
He thought for fully five minutes, as he ran across the meadow, that she was going to obey him. But at the end of that time, looking back again, he saw her stumbling after him at a reckless run, and calling after him with a sad little cry.
He turned back, sick with devotion, and took her into his arms. She was crying, the tears pouring from her eyes; and her face had recovered something of its live warmth with the relief of it. She was ashamed and apologetic, flushing under her tan as she entreated: ‘Don’t leave me behind! I’m sorry – I’m so sorry! But don’t make me stay there—’
He kissed her wet cheeks, not like a lover at all, more like a father picking up a hurt child; and slowly, gently, he helped and coaxed her all across the interminable waste of meadow towards the rifugio.
The porter, Edward, and four policemen, went out to bring back the remains of Tonino Montesanto. It was not quite noon when they picked him out of the blood-stained stones, and went carefully over his disarticulated body, picked up the fallen iron staple he had wrenched from its place the better to tip his wife to her death, and put together the whole story of the morning from Edward’s account.
The police officer in charge – Edward never knew what his title might be – felt at the deep inside pockets of the gaberdine windjacket before he unzipped it. His hand halted upon the left breast, felt along the outline of something hard there. He was interested.
What came out of the pocket was a small, snub-nosed revolver, which he lifted forth in the folds of a handkerchief, and regarded with alert satisfaction. The make and calibre, to judge by his face, was right. There was a silencer grooved into the barrel. The individual markings and the fingerprints, if any, should settle the matter.
Edward wondered where the gun would have been by now, if it had been Olimpia, and not Tonino, who had fallen. With all the terrace of the Sella for its grave, it would have taken some resurrecting.
Had Olimpia known more than she had confided to him last night? Had she discovered more since then, enough to make her death desirable for other reasons besides Othello’s demented vengeance? He was never going to ask her. She was alive, and out of her nightmare. That was all that mattered.
They carried the stretcher back to the rifugio, decently covered from sight, and it was taken into the little office and the policemen went in after it, and shut the door on all the rest of the world. And yet within an hour or two the news had gone round.
The gun which had shot Paolo Leoni was the one which had been found, wiped clean of all prints, in Tonino Montesanto’s pocket. There was no mystery now, it was all over. The murderer was dead, as dead as his victim. A wretched husband unbalanced by groundless jealousy – they knew well how to understand a tragedy like that.
Giulia Leoni came down in the afternoon, when it was quiet in the sun by the little chapel. She was drawn with weeping, but quiet and calm, her pretty dark curls conscientiously arranged about her little erect head. She went steadily out of the door, and over to where Olimpia was lying in a deckchair on the grass with Edward protectively beside her.
Olimpia had eaten nothing, but had obediently drunk the brandy he had given her. Giulia appeared beside the chair very gently and solicitously. She said: ‘Signora Montesanto!’ in the most limpidly sweet of voices, and poured out a flood of Italian far too rapid and unemphatic for Edward to follow. He thought how kind and how brave it was of her to come straight to her fellow victim like this, and offer her sympathy in this childlike manner.
Olimpia looked up, startled for a moment, through her long, bright-gold lashes, and a faint smile touched her lips.
Edward could not tell what she answered. He felt the play of certain feminine undercurrents.
Giulia had a quaint, vindicated dignity now, something she would perhaps never lose again. Drawing back a step or two for departure, she looked at him for a moment. She smiled. She made some last soft remark to Olimpia, and turned, still smiling, and walked back towards the house.
Olimpia sat looking after the slight, upright figure. She said tranquilly: ‘Giulia is very pretty, and quite sensible. She will not be a widow for long.’
He was trying to run to earth a word Giulia had used, and which he was almost sure he ought to remember.
He was still thinking warmly how good women could be to one another, when he went in to tidy himself for dinner. It was quite a shock to him, when he remembered and looked up the elusive word. He had heard it before, all right! A man in the market at Brescia had once said it in his hearing to a woman at one of the stalls, and it meant, quite simply, ‘whore’.
It gave him a nasty jolt to think how mistaken he had been in Giulia, and for a few minutes he was filled with an illogical fury against her. Then he remembered Olimpia’s compassionate forbearance, and recalled with shame the legacy of shock and grief under which the poor little woman was labouring.
Olimpia came down to dinner in the black silk skirt and another whit
e blouse, against which her bronzed arms and throat glowed enriched and polished in the lamplight. She sat at her table alone, declining, though graciously, all offers of company, even Edward’s; but for him she said, softening the brief banishment: ‘Afterwards we will go for a walk. Please! Then we—’
She never completed whatever she had been about to say. Her eyes had a look of astonished discovery, as if even the pronoun had taken her by surprise.
He sustained the eager questions of the English party, not long returned from their day’s climb to a mystery resolved, on the strength of that ‘we’.
Afterwards Olimpia rose, and in leaving the room turned and looked at Edward from the doorway.
She came down buttoning a short woollen jacket, and hugging soft kid mittens under her arm. As soon as they were on, she slipped her hand into his arm, and they went out together, and turned towards the saddle of the pass.
Olimpia halted suddenly, and her gloved hand was drawing his head down to her, and her lips feeling softly, imperiously for his mouth.
She shut her long, strong arms round him wildly, arched against him into violent stillness.
‘You saved my life,’ she whispered. ‘If I hadn’t known you were there, close to me, I should have died of terror. Oh, Edward!’ Feminine to the bone, she said self-reproachfully: ‘What must you think of me, that I throw myself into your arms like this, after so short a time?’
‘I think you love me – I know I love you. What has time got to do with it, when so much has happened to us?’ Was it really Edward Stanier speaking? His face flamed for his own audacity, but as much with triumph as embarrassment. Her hair was soft, like live silk; it seemed to quiver as it stroked his face, and smelled of lemon-blossom. He was faint and tipsy with the sweetness of her mouth, and her eyes, whenever he opened his own, opened responsively to receive the close, unfocused gaze, a luminous haze of gold, rapt, placid and satisfied.
‘A cigarette?’
‘Light it for me, please.’
They stirred out of the trance slowly, and stood apart, smiling. He lit the cigarette, and transferred it from his lips to hers.
He watched her fondly, still a little drunk; and it was in the absorbed solemnity of drunkenness that he found himself dwelling upon the little elaborate glove in the glow of the cigarette. A pretty little mitt, the palm of black kid, the back of cherry-red, the wrist encircled with a thin black kid strap about eight inches long, two half-loops of chromium or steel making an unusual buckle in front.
For an instant the night was absolutely silent, with a silence which hammered his senses like the explosion of a gun. He held his breath, and his fingers felt instinctively at his inside pocket, where he had left something lying quite forgotten all day. He slid his gaze down, wincingly, reluctantly, towards her other hand, which at that very moment was rising innocently to touch his cold cheek. He felt the sweat break out along his hairline as chill as frost.
There was no little black kid strap on this wrist; only a few frayed threads of silk along the seam marked where it had once been.
When he closed the door of his room his legs gave under him, and he had to sit down quickly on the edge of the bed. Heat broke out through his body as intense as the first bitter cold. He wiped his face, and watched his hands trembling. The taste of her love-making, terrifyingly sweet, was still on his lips.
So Giulia had known what she was talking about, after all. The rest might say that the Lion had pestered Olimpia without result, but Giulia knew better. There had been results, all right! Once, at any rate! Yes, probably only once, that was what had baffled the Lion. He couldn’t realise that there could be a woman who lived just as he did, taking whatever she wanted wherever she found it, and then throwing it away.
She had been quite ready, perhaps, to jettison Tonino, but not for an easy creature like Paolo Leoni. And a man like that might easily become a serious nuisance to a woman who dared to tire of him before he tired of her. Maybe he only bored her. Maybe he threatened, in his baffled indignation, his offended maleness, to talk to her husband, since he couldn’t talk sense into her. Either way, he got his one more meeting. And he was dead.
Edward thought of Olimpia as he had first seen her, pleased with her solitude, eased of her encumbrance, gambolling in the snow with all her heart and mind. The gun must have been in the pocket of her slacks then, the gun she had planted on Tonino this morning, when for five minutes she was left behind with his body.
And Edward knew the rest of it, too, the part Giulia didn’t know. It wanted only one bit of the puzzle orientated correctly, and all the rest fell into place. The summons of her eyes pulling him after her to the mountain, the chosen witness – not only for his lovesick gullibility, but also as a sort of favour, because he had already been chosen for something more than a witness. Olimpia liked him.
She had persuaded him back to Sella in the first place as much because she liked him as to avoid the possibility of a premature discovery of the Lion’s body. This time she even liked him enough to shrug off Tonino in his favour, it seemed, especially as Tonino was beginning to offend her a little with his tragic forbearance and his tedious unhappiness.
It had been childishly easy; he saw that now. The pitch of the climb carefully chosen, the husband unwarily leaning to give her a hand. A little jerk outward when he was least expecting it, and the iron hand-hold wrenched from its already precarious anchorage on the rock and tipped down after him. Yes, after him! Edward realised now more clearly the order of that fall. And then she had nothing to do but stand there huddled against the rock, screaming delightedly into her own shoulder, her eyes closed in the satisfaction of artistry, until the sweet besotted fool of an Englishman came panting to her rescue.
But who was going to believe it now? What was there to show for it all but a little black kid strap from a glove, and if it was what he said it was, and he’d found it where he said he had, why hadn’t he handed it over to the police? And in any case, whose word was there for it but his?
He thought of what it would be like to come out with this accusation before Olimpia’s wide, wounded eyes, and a fiery sweat broke out all over him. Even if he could do it, even if he had the courage, even if they believed him, it could never be made good against that invulnerable serenity of hers. She would have nothing to do but fold her hands, and endure the torrent of words, and make it clear in her lovely, resigned silence that he had attempted to extort for his services a reward she was not prepared to grant, and had taken this method of avenging his slighted masculinity. She wouldn’t even have to say it; that was the kind of conclusion to which people leaped where Olimpia was concerned. And at the end of everything, with her wild, candid kisses still burning on his lips and cheeks, did he even want the truth at that price?
So when everything was said and done, there was only one course open to him. Only one! Ignominious but inevitable!
He packed his rucksack, and lay down fully dressed on his bed, and even slept a little. At dawn he washed and shaved, and crept down to the office to wait for the porter. They were used to people rising and paying bills at short notice, and the police were no longer interested. By seven o’clock he was striding down the valley towards Plan de Gralba, to catch the early bus over the Passo Gardena for Brunico and the north.
He went down the road as if the devils were after him for the first mile, and then inexplicably his feet began to drag. He could hardly feel proud of himself. He was turning his back on a duty, he was going to be haunted for years by uneasy speculations about all the other poor devils who were destined to blunder along after Paolo and Tonino, and come to the same sticky end. But what else could he do? He was astonished to find that his walk had slowed to a stubborn crawl and, at every panicky spurt he put on, his implacable conscience jammed on the brake. But they’d never believe him. Why should they?
It was at this point that it dawned upon him that he was afraid of her. He stopped in his tracks, digging his heels indignantly into the turf by the r
oadside. He could throw overboard all the arguments of chivalry, for do what he would, Olimpia needed no help to protect herself from him. He just hadn’t the courage to face her.
The realisation fired his gentle heart into a totally unexpected anger. Not only had she made use of him as an assistant in disposing of her husband and her lover, and fooled him to the hilt, but she had brought him face to face with a mirror he had probably been avoiding all his life. He was afraid to tell the truth, because it was going to put him in a dubious position, and he might not be believed! As if that altered the fact that it was truth! So he was that kind of timorous soul, was he?
It confused him a little to find that he had turned, and was striding back up the white road as hard as he could go. He didn’t pause to examine his motives too closely, and it was never at all clear to him whether the deprived ghosts of Paolo and Tonino had really had any hand in turning him, or whether his own galled self-esteem had done the job single-handed. He hoped it was his sense of duty to society, but he wasn’t going to look too closely. He had more than enough on his mind.
The first climbers were out in front of the chalet when he reached the rifugio, and Professor Lacey was sniffing the air and measuring with his alert old eyes the day’s possibilities. A terrifying air of normality had already settled over the house.
Before his courage could fail him, he approached the Professor, with so abrupt and strained a note that the old man stared and bristled like a pointer.
‘My dear chap, the porter said you’d left. Did you miss the bus?’
‘Not exactly. I had to come back. Professor, would you mind coming and interpreting for me? I’ve got to talk to the police.’
‘The police? Something new?’ The blue eyes brightened with glee and widened with anticipation. ‘Surely they’ll have gone by this time? But, of course, anything I can do—’ He abandoned his study of the weather and was through the door ahead of Edward, and panting at the office doorway in a moment.
Murder in Midsummer Page 23
