Photo-Finish

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Where were you bound for?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters, you ass. Ask yourself.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I left something. Downstairs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The score.’

  ‘Of The Alien Corn?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Couldn’t it wait till daylight? Which is not far off.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to burn it. The score. All the parts. Everything. I woke up and kept thinking of it. There, on the hall fire, burn it, I thought.’

  ‘The fire will probably be out.’

  ‘I’ll blow it together,’ said Rupert.

  ‘You’re making this up as you go along. Aren’t you?’

  ‘No. No. Honestly. I swear not. I want to burn it.’

  ‘And anything else?’

  He caught back his breath and shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure you want to burn it?’

  ‘How many times do I have to say!’

  ‘Very well,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No. I mean there’s no need. I won’t,’ said Rupert with a wan attempt at lightness, ‘get up to any funny business.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Anything. Nothing. I just don’t want an audience. I’ve had enough of audiences,’ said Rupert and contrived a laugh.

  ‘I’ll be unobtrusive.’

  ‘You suspect me. Don’t you?’

  ‘I suspect a round half-dozen of you. Come on.’

  Alleyn took him by the arm.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Rupert said and broke away.

  ‘If you’re thinking I’ll go to bed and then you’ll pop down by yourself, you couldn’t be more mistaken. I’ll sit you out.’

  Rupert bit his finger and stared at Alleyn. A sudden battering by the gale sent some metal object clattering across the patio down below. Still blowing great guns, thought Alleyn.

  ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve got to be bloody-minded but you might as well take it gracefully. We don’t want to do a cinematic roll down the stairs in each other’s arms, do we?’

  Rupert turned on his heel and walked out of the room. They went together, quickly, to the stairs and down them to the hall.

  It was a descent into almost total darkness. A red glow at the far end must come from the embers of the fire and there was a vague, scarcely perceptible luminosity filtered down from the lamp on the landing. Alleyn had put Troy’s torch in his pocket and used it. Its beam dodged down the stairs ahead of them.

  ‘There’s your fire,’ he said. ‘Now, I suppose, for the sacrifice.’

  He guided Rupert to the back of the hall and through the double doors that opened into the concert chamber. When they were there he shut the doors and turned on the wall lamps. They stood blinking at a litter of discarded programmes, the blank face of the stage curtain, the piano and the players’ chairs and music stands with their sheets of manuscript. How long, Alleyn wondered, had it taken Rupert to write them out! And then on the piano, the full score. On the cover The Alien Corn painstakingly lettered, ‘by Rupert Bartholomew’. And underneath: ‘Dedicated to Isabella Sommita.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Alleyn said. ‘This was only a beginning. Lattienzo thinks you will do better things.’

  ‘Did he say so?’

  ‘He did indeed.’

  ‘The duet, I suppose. He did say something about the duet,’ Rupert admitted.

  ‘The duet it was.’

  ‘I rewrote it.’

  ‘So he said. Greatly to its advantage.’

  ‘All the same,’ Rupert muttered after a pause, ‘I shall burn it.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’m just going behind. There’s a spare copy, I won’t be a moment.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’ll light you.’

  ‘No! Don’t bother. Please. I know where the switch is.’

  He made for a door in the back wall, stumbled over a music stand and fell. While he was clambering to his feet, Alleyn ran up the apron steps and slipped through the curtains. He crossed upstage and went out by the rear exit arriving in a back passage that ran parallel with the stage and had four doors opening off it.

  Rupert was before him. The passage lights were on and a door with a silver star fixed to it was open. The reek of cosmetics flowed out of the room.

  Alleyn reached the door. Rupert was in there, too late with the envelope he was trying to stuff into his pocket.

  The picture he presented was stagey in the extreme. He looked like an early illustration for a Sherlock Holmes story – the young delinquent caught red-handed with the incriminating document. His eyes even started in the approved manner.

  He straightened up, achieved an awful little laugh, and pushed the envelope down in his pocket.

  ‘That doesn’t look much like a spare copy of an opera,’ Alleyn remarked.

  ‘It’s a good luck card I left for her. I – it seemed so ghastly, sitting there. Among the others. Good Luck! You know?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t. Let me see it.’

  ‘No. I can’t. It’s private.’

  ‘When someone has been murdered,’ Alleyn said, ‘nothing is private.’

  ‘You can’t make me.’

  ‘I could, very easily,’ he answered and thought: And how the hell would that look in subsequent proceedings?

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s got nothing to do with what happened. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me,’ Alleyn suggested and sat down.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know you’re doing yourself no good by this,’ Alleyn said. ‘If whatever’s in that envelope has no relevance it will not be brought into the picture. By behaving like this you suggest that it has. You make me wonder if your real object in coming down here was not to destroy your work but to regain possession of this card, if that’s what it is.’

  ‘No. No. I am going to burn the script. I’d made up my mind.’

  ‘Both copies?’

  ‘What? Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve said so. Both.’

  ‘And where is the second copy, exactly? Not in here?’

  ‘Another room.’

  ‘Come now,’ Alleyn said, not unkindly. ‘There is no second copy is there? Show me what you have in your pocket.’

  ‘You’d read – all sorts of things – into it.’

  ‘I haven’t got that kind of imagination. You might ask yourself, with more cause, what I am likely to read into a persistent refusal to let me see it.’

  He spared a thought for what he would in fact be able to do if Rupert did persist. With no authority to take possession forcibly, he saw himself spending the fag end of the night in Rupert’s room and the coming day until such time as the police might arrive, keeping him under ludicrous surveillance. No. His best bet was to keep the whole thing in as low a key as possible and trust to luck.

  ‘I do wish,’ he said, ‘that you’d just think sensibly about this. Weigh it up. Ask yourself what a refusal is bound to mean to you and for God’s sake cough up with the bloody thing and let’s go to bed for what’s left of this interminable night.’

  He could see the hand working in the pocket and hear paper crumple. He wondered if Rupert tried, foolishly, to tear it. He sat out the silence, read messages of goodwill pinned round the Sommita’s looking glass and smelt the age-old incense of the make-up bench. He even found himself, after a fashion, at home.

  And there, abruptly, was Rupert, holding out the envelope. Alleyn took it. It was addressed tidily to the Sommita in what looked to be a feminine hand and Alleyn thought had probably enclosed one of the greeting cards. It was unsealed. He drew out the enclosure: a crumpled corner, torn from a sheet of music. />
  He opened it. The message had been scrawled in pencil and the writing was irregular as if the paper had rested on an uneven surface.

  Soon it will all be over. If I were a Rossi I would make a better job of it. R.

  Alleyn looked at the message for much longer than it took to read it. Then he returned it to the envelope and put it in his pocket.

  ‘When did you write this?’ he asked.

  ‘After the curtain came down. I tore the paper off the score.’

  ‘And wrote it here, in her room?’

  Yes.’

  ‘Did she find you in here when she came for you?’

  ‘I was in the doorway. I’d finished – that.’

  ‘And you allowed yourself to be dragged on?’

  ‘Yes. I’d made up my mind what I’d say. She asked for it,’ said Rupert through his teeth, ‘and she got it.’

  ‘"Soon it will be all over",’ Alleyn quoted. ‘What would be over?’

  ‘Everything. The opera. Us. What I was going to do. You heard me, for God’s sake. I told them the truth.’ Rupert caught his breath back and said: ‘I was not planning to kill her, Mr Alleyn. And I did not kill her.’

  ‘I didn’t think that even you would have informed her in writing, however ambiguously, of your intention. Would you care to elaborate on the Rossi bit?’

  ‘I wrote that to frighten her. She’d told me about it. One of those Italian family feuds. Mafia sort of stuff. A series of murders and the victim always a woman. She said she was in the direct line to be murdered. She really believed that. She even thought the Strix man might be one of them – the Rossis. She said she’d never spoken about it to anyone else. Something about silence.’

  ‘Omertà?’

  ‘Yes. That was it.’

  ‘Why did she tell you, then?’

  Rupert stamped his feet and threw up his hands. ‘Why! Why! Because she wanted me to pity her. It was when I first told her that thing was no good and I couldn’t go on with the performance: She – I think she saw that I’d changed. Seen her for what she was. It was awful. I was trapped. From then on I – well, you know, don’t you, what it was like. She could still whip up – ‘

  ‘Yes. All right.’

  ‘Tonight – last night – it all came to a head. I hated her for singing my opera so beautifully. Can you understand that? It was a kind of insult. As if she deliberately showed how worthless it was. She was a vulgar woman, you know. That was why she degraded me. That was what I felt after the curtain fell – degraded – and it was then I knew I hated her.’

  ‘And this was written on the spur of the moment?’

  ‘Of course. I suppose you could say I was sort of beside myself. I can’t tell you what it did to me. Standing there. Conducting, for Christ’s sake. It was indecent exposure.’

  Alleyn said carefully: ‘You will realize that I must keep the paper for the time being, at least. I will write you a receipt for it.’

  ‘Do you believe what I’ve said?’

  ‘That’s the sort of question we’re not supposed to answer. By and large – yes.’

  ‘Have you finished with me?’

  ‘I think so. For the present.’

  ‘It’s an extraordinary thing,’ said Rupert. ‘And there’s no sense in it but I feel better. Horribly tired but – yes – better.’

  ‘You’ll sleep now,’ Alleyn said.

  ‘I still want to get rid of that abortion.’

  Alleyn thought wearily that he supposed he ought to prevent this but said he would look at the score. They switched off the backstage lights and went to the front-of-house. Alleyn sat on the apron steps and turned through the score, forcing himself to look closely at each page. All those busy little black marks that had seemed so eloquent, he supposed, until the moment of truth came to Rupert and all the strangely unreal dialogue that librettists put in the mouths of their singers. Remarks like: ‘What a comedy!’ and ‘Do I dream?’ and ‘If she were mine.’

  He came to the last page and found that, sure enough, the corner had been torn off. He looked at Rupert and found he was sound asleep in one of the VIP chairs.

  Alleyn gathered the score and separate parts together, put them beside Rupert and touched his shoulder. He woke with a start as if tweaked by a puppeteer.

  ‘If you are still of the same mind,’ Alleyn said, ‘it’s all yours.’

  So Rupert went to the fireplace in the hall where the embers glowed. Papers bound solidly together are slow to burn. The Alien Corn merely smouldered, blackened and curled. Rupert used an oversized pair of bellows and flames crawled round the edges. He threw on loose sheets from the individual parts and these burst at once into flame and flew up the chimney. There was a basket of kindling by the hearth. He began to heap it on the fire in haphazard industry as if to put his opera out of its misery. Soon firelight and shadows leapt about the hall. The pregnant woman looked like a smirking candidate for martyrdom. At one moment the solitary dagger on the wall flashed red. At another the doors into the concert chamber appeared momentarily and once the stairs were caught by an erratic flare.

  It was then that Alleyn caught sight of a figure on the landing. It stood with its hands on the balustrade and its head bent, looking down into the hall. Its appearance was as brief as a thought, a fraction of a fraction of a second. The flare expired and when it fitfully reappeared whoever it was up there had gone.

  Bert? Alleyn didn’t think so. It had, he felt sure, worn a dressing gown or overcoat but beyond that there had been no impression of an individual among the seven men, any one of whom might have been abroad in the night.

  At its end The Alien Corn achieved dramatic value. The wind howled in the chimney, blazing logs fell apart and what was left of the score flew up and away. The last they saw of it was a floating ghost of black thread-paper with ‘dedicated to Isabella Sommita’ in white showing for a fraction of a second before it too disintegrated and was gone up the chimney.

  Without a word Rupert turned away and walked quickly upstairs. Alleyn put a fireguard across the hearth. When he turned away he noticed, on a table inside the front entrance, a heavy canvas bag with a padlock and chain: the mailbag. Evidently it should have gone off with the launch and in the confusion had been overlooked.

  Alleyn followed Rupert upstairs. The house was now very quiet. He fancied there were longer intervals between the buffets of the storm.

  When he reached the landing he was surprised to find Rupert still there and staring at the sleeping Bert.

  Alleyn murmured: ‘You’ve got a key to that door, haven’t you?’

  ‘Didn’t you get it?’ Rupert whispered.

  ‘I? Get it? What do you mean?’

  ‘She said you wanted it.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After you and the doctor left my room. After I’d gone to bed. She came and asked for the key.’

  ‘Did you give it to her?’

  ‘Yes, of course. For you.’ Alleyn drew in his breath. ‘I didn’t want it,’ Rupert whispered. ‘My God! Go into that room! See her! Like that.’

  Alleyn waited for several seconds before he asked: ‘Like what?’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Rupert asked. ‘You’ve seen her. A nightmare.’

  ‘So you’ve seen her too?’

  And then Rupert realized what he had said. He broke into a jumble of whispered expostulations and denials. Of course he hadn’t seen her. Maria had told him what it was like. Maria had described it. Maria had said Alleyn had sent her for the key.

  He ran out of words, made a violent gesture of dismissal and bolted. Alleyn heard his door slam.

  And at last Alleyn himself went to bed. The clock on the landing struck four as he walked down the passage to their room. When he parted the window curtains there was a faint greyness in the world outside. Troy was fast asleep.

  III

  Marco brought their breakfast at eight o’clock. Troy had been awake for an hour. Sh
e had woken when Alleyn came to bed and had lain quiet and waited to see if he wanted to talk but he had touched her head lightly and in a matter of seconds was dead to the world.

  It was not his habit to use a halfway interval between sleep and wake. He woke like a cat, fully and instantly, and gave Marco good morning. Marco drew the curtains and the room was flooded with pallid light. There was no rain on the window-panes and no sound of wind.

  ‘Clearing is it?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. Slowly. The lake is still very rough.’

  ‘Too rough for the launch?’

  ‘Too much rough, sir, certainly.’

  He placed elaborate trays across them both and brought them extra pillows. His dark rather handsome head came close to theirs.

  ‘It must be quite a sight – the lake and the mountains?’ Alleyn said lightly.

  ‘Very impressive, sir.’

  ‘Your mysterious photographer should be there again with his camera.’

  A little muscle jumped under Marco’s olive cheek.

  ‘It is certain he has gone, sir. But of course you are joking.’

  ‘Do you know exactly how Madame Sommita was murdered, Marco? The details?’

  ‘Maria is talking last night but she is excitable. When she is excitable she is not reasonable. Or possible to understand. It is all,’ said Marco, ‘very dreadful, sir.’

  ‘They forgot to take the mailbag to the launch last night. Had you noticed?’

  Marco knocked over the marmalade pot on Troy’s tray.

  ‘I am very sorry, madame,’ he said. ‘I am clumsy.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Troy said. ‘It hasn’t spilt.’

  ‘Do you know what I think, Marco?’ said Alleyn. ‘I think there never was a strange photographer on the Island.’

  ‘Do you, sir? Thank you, sir. Will that be all?’

  ‘Do you have a key to the postbag?’

  ‘It is kept in the study, sir.’

  ‘And is the bag unlocked during the time it is in the house?’

  ‘There is a posting-box in the entrance, sir. Mr Hanley empties it into the bag when it is time for the launchman to take it.’

  ‘Too bad he overlooked it last night.’

  Marco, sheet-white, bowed and left the room.