Photo-Finish

by Ngaio Marsh

  Mr Reece was alone in the study. He said at once in his flattest manner that he had found the letter on his desk under a couple of business communications which he was to sign in time for Hanley to send them off by the evening post. He did sign them and then read the letter.

  ‘It was ill-advised,’ he said, cutting the episode down to size. ‘She had been over-excited ever since the matter of the intruder arose. I had told her Sir Simon Marks had dealt with The Watchman and there would be no more trouble in that quarter. This letter was abusive in tone and would have stirred everything up again. I threw it on the fire. I intended to speak to her about it but not until after the performance when she would be less nervous and tense.’

  ‘Did you throw the envelope on the fire too?’ Alleyn asked and thought: If he says yes, bang goes sixpence and we return to square one.

  ‘The envelope?’ said Mr Reece. ‘No. It was not in an envelope. I don’t remember noticing one. May I ask what is the significance of all this, Chief Superintendent?’

  ‘It’s really just a matter of tidying up. The half-burnt envelope stamped and addressed to The Watchman was in the ashpan under the grate this morning.’

  ‘I have no recollection of seeing it,’ Mr Reece said heavily. ‘I believe I would remember if I had seen it.’

  ‘After you burnt the letter, did you stay in the study?’

  ‘I believe so,’ he said and Alleyn thought he detected a weary note. ‘Or no,’ Mr Reece corrected himself. ‘That is not right. Maria came in with a message that Bella wanted to see me. She was in the concert chamber. The flowers that I had ordered for her had not arrived and she was – distressed. I went to the concert chamber at once.’

  ‘Did Maria go with you?’

  ‘I really don’t know what Maria did, Superintendent. I fancy – no, I am not sure but I don’t think she did. She may have returned there a little later. Really, I do not remember,’ said Mr Reece, and pressed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alleyn said, ‘I won’t bother you any longer. I wouldn’t have done so now but it just might be relevant.’

  ‘It is no matter,’ said Mr Reece. And then: ‘I much appreciate what you are doing,’ he said. ‘You will excuse me, I’m sure, if I seem ungracious.’

  ‘Good Lord, yes,’ said Alleyn quickly. ‘You should just hear some of the receptions we get.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Mr Reece heavily. ‘Very likely.’ And then with a lugubrious attempt at brightening up. ‘The sun is shining continuously and the wind has almost gone down. Surely it can’t be long, now, before the police arrive.’

  ‘We hope not. Tell me, have you done anything about Marco? Spoken to him? Faced him with being Strix?’

  And then Mr Reece made the most unexpected, the most remarkable statement of their conversation.

  ‘I couldn’t be bothered,’ he said.

  III

  On leaving the study, Alleyn heard sounds of activity in the dining room. The door was open and he looked in to find Marco laying the table.

  ‘I want a word with you,’ Alleyn said, ‘not here. In the library. Come on.’

  Marco followed him there, saying nothing.

  ‘Now, listen to me,’ Alleyn said. ‘I do not think, indeed I have never thought, that you killed Madame Sommita. You hadn’t time to do it. I now think – I am almost sure – that you went into the study yesterday afternoon intending to put the photograph you took of her, in the mailbag. You saw on the desk a stamped envelope addressed in typescript to The Watchman. It was unsealed and empty. This gave you a wonderful opportunity, it made everything safer and simpler. You transferred the photograph from its envelope to this envelope, sealed it down and would have put it in the bag but I think you were interrupted and simply dropped it back on the desk and I dare say explained your presence there by tidying the desk. Now. If this is so, all I want from you is the name of the person who interrupted you.’

  Marco had watched Alleyn carefully with a look, wary and hooded, that often appears on the faces of the accused when some telling piece of evidence is produced against them. Alleyn thought of it as the ‘dock-face’.

  ‘You have been busy,’ Marco sneered. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘I’m right, then?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said casually. ‘I don’t know how you got there, but you’re right.’

  ‘And the name?’

  ‘You know so much, I’d have thought you’d know that.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Maria,’ said Marco.

  From somewhere in the house there came a sound, normally unexceptionable but now arresting. A door banged and shut it off.

  ‘Telephone,’ Marco whispered. ‘It’s the telephone.’

  ‘Did Maria see you? See you had the envelope in your hands? Did she?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She might have. She could have. She’s been – looking – at me. Or I thought so. Once or twice. She hasn’t said anything. We haven’t been friendly.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I went back to the study. Later. Just before the opera and it had gone. So I supposed someone had put it in the mailbag.’

  There was a flurry of voices in the hall. The door swung open and Hanley came in.

  ‘The telephone!’ he cried. ‘Working. It’s the – ‘ He pulled up short, looking at Marco. ‘Someone for you, Mr Alleyn,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll take it upstairs. Keep the line alive.’

  He went into the hall. Most of the guests were collected there. He passed through them and ran upstairs to the first landing and the studio where he found Troy and Dr Carmichael. He took the receiver off the telephone. Hanley’s voice fluted in the earpiece: ‘Yes. Don’t hang up, will you? Mr Alleyn’s on his way. Hold the line, please.’ And a calm reply: ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll hold on.’

  ‘All right, Hanley,’ Alleyn said. ‘You can hang up now,’ and heard the receiver being cradled. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Alleyn speaking.’

  ‘Chief Superintendent Alleyn? Inspector Hazelmere, Rivermouth Police, here. We’ve had a report of trouble on Waihoe Island and are informed of your being on the premises. I understand it’s a homicide.’

  Alleyn gave him the bare bones of the case. Mr Hazelmere repeated everything he said. He was evidently dictating. There were crackling disturbances on the line.

  ‘So you see,’ Alleyn ended, ‘I’m a sort of minister without portfolio.’

  ‘Pardon? Oh. Oh, I get you. Yes. Very fortunate coincidence, though. For us. We’d been instructed by head office that you were in the country, of course. It’ll be an unexpected honour…’ A crash of static obliterated the rest of this remark. ‘…temporary repair. Better be quick…should make it…chopper…hope…doctor…’

  ‘There’s a doctor here,’ Alleyn shouted. ‘I’d suggest a fully equipped homicide squad and a search warrant – can you hear? – and a brace and bit. Yes, that’s what I said. Large. Yes, large. Observation purposes. Are you there? Hullo? Hullo?’

  The line was dead.

  ‘Well,’ said Troy after a pause. ‘This is the beginning of the end, I suppose.’

  ‘In a way the beginning of the beginning,’ Alleyn said wryly. ‘If it’s done nothing else it’s brought home the virtues of routine. I’m not sure if they have homicide squads in New Zealand but whatever they do have they’ll take the correct steps in the correct way and with authority. And you, my love, will fly away home with an untouched canvas.’ He turned to Dr Carmichael. ‘I really don’t know what I’d have done without you,’ he said.

  Before Dr Carmichael could answer there was a loud rap at the door.

  ‘Not a dull moment,’ said Alleyn. ‘Come in!’

  It was Signor Lattienzo, pale and strangely unsprightly.

  ‘I am de trop,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. I thought you would be here. I find the ambiance downstairs uncomfortable. Everybody asking questions and expressing relief and wanting above all to know when they can go away. And behind it all – fear. Fear
and suspicion. Not a pretty combination. And to realize that one is in much the same state oneself, after all! That I find exceedingly disagreeable.’

  Dr Carmichael said to Alleyn: ‘They’ll be wanting to know about the telephone call. Would you like me to go downstairs and tell them?’

  ‘Do. Just say it was the police and they are on their way and the line’s gone phut again.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That’s a very nice man,’ said Troy when he had gone. ‘We never completed our bedmaking. I don’t suppose it matters so much now but we ought at least to put our gear away, don’t you think?’

  She had managed to get behind Signor Lattienzo and pull a quick face at her husband.

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ he said obediently and she made for the door. Signor Lattienzo seemed to make an effort. He produced a rather wan replica of his more familiar manner.

  ‘Bedmaking! “Gear"?’ he exclaimed. ‘But I am baffled. Here is the most distinguished painter of our time whom I have, above all things, desired to meet and she talks of bedmaking as a sequence to murder.’

  ‘She’s being British,’ said Alleyn. ‘If there were any bullets about she’d bite on them. Pay no attention.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Troy assured Signor Lattienzo. ‘It’s a substitute for hysterics.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Signor Lattienzo and as an afterthought seized and extensively kissed Troy’s hand. She cast a sheepish glance at Alleyn and withdrew.

  Alleyn, who had begun to feel rather British himself, said he was glad that Signor Lattienzo had looked in. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,’ he said, ‘but with all the excursions and alarms, I haven’t got round to it.’

  ‘Me? But of course! Anything! Though I don’t imagine that I can produce electrifying tidings,’ said Signor Lattienzo. He sat down in the studio’s most comfortable armchair and appeared to relax. ‘Already,’ he said, ‘I feel better,’ and took out his cigarette case.

  ‘It’s about Madame Sommita’s background.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘She was your pupil for some three years, wasn’t she, before making her debut?’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘You were aware, I expect, of her real name?’

  ‘Naturally. Pepitone.’

  ‘Perhaps you helped her decide on her professional name? Sommita, which is as much as to say “The Tops", isn’t it?’

  ‘It was not my choice. I found it a little extravagant. She did not and she prevailed. You may say she has been fully justified.’

  ‘Indeed you may. You may also say, perhaps, that the choice was a matter of accuracy rather than of taste.’

  Signor Lattienzo softly clapped his hands. ‘That is precisely the case,’ he applauded.

  ‘Maestro,’ Alleyn said. ‘I am very ignorant in these matters, but I imagine that the relationship between pedagogue and pupil is, or at least can be, very close, very intimate.’

  ‘My dear Mr Alleyn, if you are suggesting – ‘

  ‘Which I am not. Not for a moment. There can be close relationships that have no romantic overtones.’

  ‘Of course. And allow me to say that with a pupil it would be in the highest degree a mistake to allow oneself to become involved in such an attachment. And apart from all that,’ he added with feeling, ‘when the lady has the temperament of a wild cat and the appetite of a hyena, it would be sheer lunacy.’

  ‘But all the same, I expect some kind of aseptic intimacy does exist, doesn’t it?’

  Signor Lattienzo broke into rather shrill laughter. ‘ “Aseptic intimacy", ‘ he echoed. ‘You are a master of the mot juste, my dear Mr Alleyn. It is a pleasure to be grilled by you.’

  ‘Well, then: did you learn anything about a family feud – one of those vendetta-like affairs – between the Pepitones and another Sicilian clan: the Rossis?’

  Signor Lattienzo took some time in helping himself to a cigarette and lighting it. He did not look at Alleyn. ‘I do not concern myself with such matters,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t but did she?’

  ‘May I first of all ask you a question? Do you suspect that this appalling crime might be traced to the Pepitone-Rossi affair? I think you must do so, otherwise you would not bring it up.’

  ‘As to that,’ said Alleyn, ‘it’s just a matter of avenues and stones, however unlikely. I’ve been told that Madame Sommita herself feared some sort of danger threatened her and that she suspected Strix of being an agent or even a member of the Rossi family. I don’t have to tell you that Marco is Strix. Mr Reece will have done that.’

  ‘Yes. But – do you think – ‘

  ‘No. He has an unbreakable alibi.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I wondered if she had confided her fears to you?’

  ‘You will know, of course, of the habit of omertà. It has been remorselessly, if erroneously, paraded in works of popular fiction with a mafioso background. I expected that she knew of her father’s alleged involvement with mafioso elements although great care had been taken to remove her from the milieu. I am surprised to hear that she spoke of the Rossi affair. Not to the good Monty, I am sure?’

  ‘Not specifically. But it appears that even to him she referred repeatedly, though in the vaguest of terms, to sinister intentions behind the Strix activities.’

  ‘But otherwise – ‘

  Signor Lattienzo stopped short and for the first time looked very hard at Alleyn. ‘Did she tell that unhappy young man? Is that it? I see it is. Why?’

  ‘It seems she used it as a weapon when she realized he was trying to escape her.’

  ‘Ah! That is believable. An appeal to his pity. That I can believe. Emotional blackmail.’

  Signor Lattienzo got up and moved restlessly about the room. He looked out at the now sunny prospect, thrust his plump hands into his trouser pockets, took them out and examined them as if they had changed and finally approached Alleyn and came to a halt.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Evidently you are familiar with the Rossi affair.’

  ‘Not to say familiar, no. But I do remember something of the case.’

  Alleyn would have thought it impossible that Signor Lattienzo would ever display the smallest degree of embarrassment or loss of savoir-faire but he appeared to do so now. He screwed in his eyeglass, stared at a distant spot somewhere to the right of Alleyn’s left ear and spoke rapidly in a high voice.

  ‘I have a brother,’ he proclaimed. ‘Alfredo Lattienzo. He is an Avvocato, a leading barrister, and he, in the course of his professional duties, has appeared in a number of cases where the mafioso element was – ah – involved. At the time of the Rossi trial, which as you will know became a cause célèbre in the USA, he held a watching brief on behalf of the Pepitone element. It was through him, by the way, that Isabella became my pupil. But that is of no moment. He was never called upon to take a more active part but he did – ah – he did learn – ah – from, as you would say, the horse’s mouth, the origin and subsequent history of the enmity between the two houses.’

  He paused. Alleyn thought that it would be appropriate if he said: You interest me, strangely. Pray continue your most absorbing narrative. However, he said nothing and Signor Lattienzo continued.

  ‘The origin,’ he repeated. ‘The event that set the whole absurdly wicked feud going. I have always thought there must have been Corsican blood somewhere in that family. My dear Alleyn, I am about to break a confidence with my brother and one does not break confidences of this sort.’

  ‘I think I may assure that whatever you may tell me I won’t reveal the source.’

  ‘It may, after all, not seem as striking to you as it does to me. It is this. The event that gave rise to the feud so many, many years ago, was the murder of a Pepitone girl by her Rossi bridegroom. He had discovered a passionate and explicit letter from a lover. He stabbed her to the heart on their wedding night.’
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  He stopped. He seemed to balk at some conversational hurdle.

  ‘I see,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘That is not all,’ said Signor Lattienzo. ‘That is by no means all. Pinned to the body by the stiletto that killed her was the letter. That is what I came to tell you and now I shall go.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The Police

  ‘From now on,’ Alleyn said to Dr Carmichael, ‘it would be nice to maintain a masterly inactivity. I shall complete my file and hand it over, with an anxious smirk, to Inspector Hazelmere in, please God, the course of a couple of hours or less.’

  ‘Don’t you feel you’d like to polish it off yourself? Having gone so far?’

  ‘Yes, Rory,’ said Troy. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘If Fox and Bailey and Thompson could walk in, yes, I suppose I do. That would be, as Noël Coward put it “une autre paire de souliers". But this hamstrung solo, poking about without authority, has been damned frustrating.’

  ‘What do you suppose the chap that’s coming will do first?’

  ‘Inspect the body and the immediate environment. He can’t look at my improvised dabs-and-photographs because they are still in what Lattienzo calls the womb of the camera. He’ll take more of his own.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Possibly set up a search of some if not all of their rooms. I suggested he bring a warrant. And by that same token did your bedmaking exercise prove fruitful? Before or after the envelope-and-ashes episode?’

  ‘A blank,’ said Dr Carmichael. ‘Hanley has a collection of bedside books with Wilde and Gide at the top and backstreet Marseilles at the bottom but all with the same leitmotif.’

  ‘And Ben Ruby,’ said Troy, ‘has an enormous scrapbook of newspaper cuttings all beautifully arranged and dated and noted and with all the rave bits in the reviews underlined. For quotation in advance publicity, I suppose. It’s got the Strix photographs and captions and newspaper correspondence, indignant and supportive. Do you know there are only seven European Strix photographs, one American, and four Australian, including the retouched one in The Watchman. Somehow one had imagined, or I had, a hoard of them. Signor Lattienzo’s got a neat little pile of letters in Italian on his desk. Mr Reece has an enormous coloured photograph framed in silver of the diva in full operatic kit – I wouldn’t know which opera except that it’s not Butterfly. And there are framed photographs of those rather self-conscious, slightly smug walking youths in the Athens Museum. He’s also got a marvellous equestrian drawing in sanguine of a nude man on a stallion which I could swear is a da Vinci original. Can he be as rich as all that? I really do swear it’s not a reproduction.’