Tour de Force

by Christianna Brand

  ‘Well, so what?’ said Leo, impatiently. ‘It was Louvaine I was going to meet – not Vanda Lane.’

  ‘Are you so sure,’ said Cockie, and his voice was very grave, and very kind, ‘that your wife knew that?’

  When at last they went up together to the hotel, they went in silence; what they had to say to one another had been said. At the door of his room, Leo paused. ‘Well – thank you, Inspector. I still don’t believe it; but either way, you’ll do your best for us?’ He said again, ‘Thank you,’ and pushed open the door.

  She made an instinctive movement warning him to silence, motioning him to close the door; but Inspector Cockrill had seen her standing there, deathly pale, with the red blood staining the white sleeve of her dressing-gown.

  She must have moved in her sleep, half awakened perhaps by the softly-opening door. The knife had gone through the fleshy part of the right upper arm, pinning her in sickening helplessness to the bed. The room had been dimmed by the closed shutters for the siesta hour; startled into terrified awareness, she had seen nothing but the soft closing of the balcony door. She had struggled to release herself, fallen back fainting with the pain and horror of it, come to again, and a second time fainted away. She could not tell how long she had lain there, how long ago the attack had been made; except that she had been still asleep, and it was not like her to have gone on sleeping for more than an hour or so. ‘On the other hand, it was hot, I’d been having bad nights; I might well have slept on.’ She dwelt upon the contradiction a little insistently, Inspector Cockrill thought; and for some reason avoided her husband’s eye.

  The wound had been made with a steel paper knife, identical with the one that had killed Vanda Lane. Cockie picked it up gingerly, handling the hilt with loving care. ‘I suppose, though, you’ve been handling it yourself? – trying to pull the thing out, poor girl!’ He looked at her with kindness and with admiration. ‘You’re a brave woman, Mrs Rodd.’ He thought of the fuss some women would have been making by now, and wondered what further reserves of courage might be there for him to draw upon.

  The injury was not serious. Once she had got the knife out, she had staunched the bleeding effectively with cold water and he bound it up for her now with torn hotel towels. He seemed in no hurry to rush off and spread the glad tidings; and she said to him at last, hesitantly: ‘I suppose it wouldn’t be possible to – to say nothing about it to the police here?’

  It was what, above all things, he wished for; but he was startled into asking sharply: ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, rather uncertainly. ‘I just hate – fuss.’ She leaned back against the pillows on the four-poster bed. ‘It doesn’t hurt too much now; I could wear a long sleeve and I don’t think anyone need know anything.’

  ‘Just go about as if nothing had happened?’

  Leo Rodd sat perched against the dressing-table, his legs straight out in front of him, looking at the toes of his shoes. ‘Suppose they try again?’

  She attempted a light shrug and desisted, wincing with the pain. ‘There can’t be an unlimited supply of Toledo steel daggers. Miss Lane and I account for two.’

  ‘The Gerente has the one that killed Miss Lane,’ said Cockie. ‘This one …’ He looked at it fondly. ‘If I could get it back to England, you see – we might yet find fingerprints. But if we tell them here, I shan’t have a chance.’

  ‘Who else bought these knives?’ said Leo Rodd.

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Cockie. He left them but returned a couple of minutes later. ‘Miss Barker and Mr Cecil bought them at the same time as Miss Lane did. Their rooms are empty at the moment – so I just looked in. The knives are there.’

  ‘Of course other people may have bought them?’

  ‘It’s a little unlikely,’ said Cockie, ‘that they’d have concealed the fact after Miss Lane’s death; unless of course they intended this second attack.’ He added thoughtfully that there would have been no opportunity to buy one since then, for no one had been let out of the hotel grounds.

  ‘Until to-day,’ said Leo.

  ‘To-day?’

  ‘When we got back from the funeral.’

  When they got back from the funeral they had caused a sort of jolly havoc among their guards by dispersing about the little town, kicking their heels for a few minutes in the joy of freedom from surveillance. Mr Cecil had laid it on, darting about the deck of the vaporetto, all excitement and boyishness. ‘All split up and go different ways as soon as we get off the gangway, there are seven of us and only two of them and they won’t know which to follow, it’ll be too amusing for any!’ Mr Cockrill had complied by simply walking on doggedly up to the hotel which was the only place he had any particular desire to go to, and he remembered that at the time he had been a little surprised at the avidity with which the rest had embarked upon so remarkably childish a proceeding. But meanwhile it meant … It meant that any of them might have been long enough alone to have slipped into the shop that sold the Toledo steel knives.

  He left Rodd on guard over his wife and went down to the shop, full of a tarradiddle about an Inglese who had recommended him to buy a similar knife to one purchased that day. The tarradiddle was not entirely lucid, since his attempts at the Spanish-Italian argot of the island consisted in speaking very loudly in pidgin-English and adding an ‘a’ after arbitrarily chosen syllables. A Juanese-speaking customer clarified matters a little and went his way, leaving the shopkeeper not much the wiser, but Inspector Cockrill unhappily aware that there had apparently been a ceaseless traffic in the knives all day, and that they were all identical anyway, so it did not matter what his friend had recommended. He abandoned the tarradiddle and to the measureless astonishment of the shopkeeper threw himself into an impersonation of Miss Trapp. The shopkeeper, unable to keep his good fortune to himself, went to his back door and yelled for his esposa. Juanita took one look and rushed off to fetch the children.

  By the time two stout, brown little boys had appeared, Inspector Cockrill had grown weary of Miss Trapp. His first attempts at hugging an imaginary handbag up under his chin had resulted only in a frantic search along the shelves for the cardboard boot-box in which the safety-razors were kept and a further demonstration with a bag borrowed from the counter, in an unseemly tussle with the proprietor who had evidently concluded that he must be a dangerous kleptomaniac. He gave up Miss Trapp and turned his attention to Leo Rodd, raising his voice to a frustrated bellow and sawing away at his upper arm with great abandon, finally hitching up his shoulder so that his arm disappeared into the sleeve leaving it dangling, apparently empty. The proprietor, understanding English no better when it was shouted than when it was more moderately spoken, looked blankly on; but the little boys were enchanted and, taking off their jackets altogether, hung them over their shoulders and prowled about the shop, gorilla fashion, swinging the long, empty sleeves before them. Cockie, understandably irritated, gave up Leo Rodd also, and directed his powers to a verbal and visual description of Mr Fernando, alternately crying, ‘Senor! Gibraltar! Much gold!’ baring his teeth in an ear-to-ear grin and pointing into his mouth. Juanita, delighted to make herself useful, produced a tin of denture fixative.

  And yet surely, if any of these three had been into the shop that afternoon and bought a knife, the man must have recognized the key to the whole absurd affair? Inspector Cockrill gritted his dentures, and went doggedly on. He could think of no more original way of explaining Louvaine than to waggle his hips and draw patterns in the air about his own meagre figure, emphasizing the higher lights of the well-developed female form. The armless wonders shuffled back quickly into their jackets, alert for business, for now the whole matter explained itself. ‘Jeeg-a-jeega? Senor want jeeg-a-jeega? Very pretty girl, big sister, I go fetch?’ Not waiting for an answer, they dashed off in different directions, crying, ‘Maria! Marietta!’ at the tops of shrill voices, their parents now wreathed in smiles at having so puzzling an episode happily settled to the profit and satisfacti
on of all.

  Inspector Cockrill was horrified. ‘No, no (good gracious me, what people!), no, no, not jig-a-jig, all mistake, call boys back, come on, call the wretched kids back …’ But it was hopeless. ‘Well, never mind the young lady. I said, never mind. Niente! No importa!’ He lost patience. ‘Now, look. Listen. Try and use some sense if you’ve got any which I’m beginning to doubt.’ He looked despairingly into their happily smiling faces, picked up the knife from the counter and once again launched into the whole routine. ‘A knife-a. Like this-a. This afternoon, well, just before lunch, what the hell do you call it, collartsiony – you understand collartsiony? – no, no, no, I don’t want something to eat, for goodness sake stay still for one minute and listen!’ He raised his voice again speaking very slowly and patiently, clarifying the words with descriptive gestures worthy of Fernando himself. ‘Before – you understand “before”, m’m? – before – collartsiony – to-day – was a knife – knife-a, like this – bought by a senor? – very thin, thin like this; pale face – hair yellow, well, gold – look, hair like this picture frame here – very, er, very …’ He broke off, exhausted. ‘Senor like senorita …’

  ‘Si, si,’ said the shopkeeper eagerly. ‘Senor like senorita. Boys go fetch.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want any senorita, I tell you this senor, this senor who bought the knife, he is like a senorita, he look like senorita, understanda? Senor – looka – like senorita …’ He pulled a lock of his grey hair as far down as it would go over his forehead, gave a pansy wriggle and turned out his hands in the immemorial gesture of the effeminate male.

  Juanita simply could not wait to rush out and recall the little boys.

  And yet he could not believe that, if in fact any of those five people had that day bought a knife, the whole episode, however ridiculous, could have failed to ring a bell. He went out into the steep, cobbled, sun-baked little street and down to the quay and bought a bag of peaches from an old woman, and sat there eating them, perched on a bollard, pitching the stones into the harbour between the close-packed prows of the fishing boats. Later he must pry and question, must sort out movements, alibis, all the rest of it. But he had little faith in anything of importance resulting. The hour after lunch was the hour, above all, when people were alone – unseen and unseeing, asleep after their heavy meal behind their closed shutters, true to the sacred tradition of the Spanish siesta. It had been about half-past three when Leo Rodd had left his wife sleeping, alone in their room; for an hour after that, anyone who had seen him pass across the sunlit slats of their own shutters, might have felt confident of creeping along, unobserved, to where she lay. And the question was – who? Who on earth could have wished to kill Helen Rodd? Why on earth should anyone have wished to kill Helen Rodd?

  He could think of only one answer; and, chucking the last of the peach stones into the scummy water, he knew that it was not over-indulgence in fruit which was causing that uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. For Inspector Cockrill also had seen Leo Rodd move over to his wife that day, and hold out his injured hand to her like a troubled child.

  He smoothed out the crumpled paper of the bag in which the peaches had been. He drew a potato-figure and clothed it in a large, triangular skirt. He divided the skirt into a maze of oddly-shaped pieces, and darkened some and left some plain. Outside the shop once more, he waylaid two day-trippers from the mainland, jabbering in mixed Italian and English as they strolled through the sunny street. He launched into another of his tarradiddles, this time more successfully. He had arranged to meet a young lady at the shop where the knives were sold. She had been wearing a skirt like this – a skirt of bold patchwork, a skirt you couldn’t help seeing, an unmistakable skirt. Would the day-trippers, of their charity, go into the shop – without him, if they didn’t mind – and ask the proprietor if a young lady had been there within the last three or four hours – wearing a patchwork skirt.

  But it was odd, the day-trippers said to each other when, their errand of kindness concluded, they went on their way, that the gentleman should look so delighted when they told him that no such young lady had been to the shop.

  Chapter Ten

  LEO RODD received a summons next morning. He was to go up to the Palace of the Hereditary Grand Duke; the Grand Duke wished to see him. No, the Grand Duke did not wish to see Detective Inspector Cockrill, he did not wish to see Fernando Gomez, he wished to see nobody but the Senor Rodd. A carriage would be sent for Senor Rodd at midday, the Gerente would conduct him to the pallatio. Nothing was said about who would bring him back.

  The palace on the hill was a fairy-tale thing, a cobweb of fretted white marble, glittering in the sunshine on its topmost tip of the pinnacle of the rock; but Leo Rodd remembered what happens to flies who venture upon cobwebs and his heart was sick within him as, abandoned at the gateway by the Gerente, he followed the cloaked and sabred guard alone – through the great archway and the lovely cloistered courtyards, up the wide stairways, past the pools and the fountains and many-flowered patios, over the great, broad pebbled pavements, intricately laid. There had been long and anxious discussion as to whether or not he should come: he knew and they all knew that there was very little that could be done about it, if he did not return. Oh, well, he thought, I’m here now so I’d better Be British and put a decent face on it, stiff upper lip and all.… But what in God’s name could the spider want with this particular fly? He saw him in his mind’s eye, El Exaltida, Gran Ducca del San Juan el Pirata – old and obese, crouching, a fat, hairy spider at the far-away end of some great, echoing, gilt and marble room, across which the poor fly must drag itself with that wrenching, shoulder-forward gait, under the scrutiny of cold eyes, greedy and malign. Oh, well – I’m here, and that’s the end of it.…

  There were sharp orders, the posse of guards reeled back against the wall on either side of a small, arched doorway, as though they had been flung there, their captain lifted aside the curtain with the point of his sword. The fly crept in.

  It was a room about the size of a suburban bathroom, with just enough space to squeeze past the bath to the wash-basin at the far end. In the centre was a small, cheap wooden office desk and on a wooden chair, squeezed in between the desk and the wall, sat the most enormous young man Leo Rodd had ever seen. He wore a faultlessly-tailored dark-blue suit and an Old Wykehamist tie. His hands, ablaze with jewelled rings, were folded across the ends of the tie, his chin sunk on his breast; and under the hyacinthine, heavily-curling hair, the brooding face was so magnificently handsome as to be beautiful. He lifted his head for a moment and looked Leo Rodd up and down, and sunk his chin again upon his chest. A small grey man sitting at his left hand (where the wash-basin would have been) got up and placed a chair. Nobody spoke.

  There was a miniature bird-cage on the desk, of gold, with a tiny humming bird in it, set with semi-precious stones, turquoise and topaz and tiny white seed pearls. The Grand Duke moved his hand; the door of the cage flew open, the humming bird stooped and pecked up a cigarette, civilly handed it to Leo Rodd and, enraptured with its own cleverness, burst into the tinkling strains of Au Clair de la Lune. The secretary came round with a lighter and squeezed back into his place again. He riffled through the pages of a notebook and said suddenly: ‘Mr Rodd?’

  ‘None other,’ said Leo. Damn it all, he thought to himself, this is not going to get me down. He gestured with his cigarette. ‘And this gentleman would be El Exaltida?’

  A very small quirk appeared at the corners of the secretary’s grey mouth. He made a little bow. ‘None other.’ El Exaltida, unrelaxed, brooded over his tie. The secretary riffled the pages of his book again and began to speak.

  El Exaltida, said the secretary in stiff but excellent English, was not pleased about the murder at the hotel. El Exaltida had read foreign press reports and these would be bad for the tourist trade. The matter must be settled at once and Odyssey Tours must remove their clients without any further delay.

  Mr Rodd could assure El Exaltida t
hat nothing would give Odyssey Tours more pleasure; to say nothing of the happiness of said clients.

  ‘On the other hand, El Exaltida feels that we must retain – a hostage.’

  ‘I see,’ said Leo. ‘WeIl, I’m sure I shall be very comfortable.’ He did not, however, feel comfortable at all.

  ‘El Exaltida has studied the matter. He thinks highly of some notes of Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard. It seems to El Exaltida that there can be only one answer to this crime.’

  ‘That makes it as good as answered, I’m sure,’ said Leo.

  ‘Mr Rodd – it is understood that Inspector Cockrill claims to have seen you lying asleep on the beach during the hours when the murder would have been possible: half under the sun-shed, but with your head covered with a piece of paper. El Exaltida suggests that all the Inspector really saw was – a piece of paper.’

  Inspector Cockrill had suggested the same thing to Leo that afternoon. ‘Does the Exaltida suggest that I was not under the paper?’

  ‘El Exaltida asks why anyone should lie underneath a sun-shed, which is expressly designed to give shade where it is needed, and then put his head out into the sun and cover it with a sort of cocked hat, made of paper.’

  ‘I am an Englishman,’ said Leo. ‘Let him be thankful that it wasn’t a handkerchief, knotted at the four corners.’

  The jewels flashed sparks on El Exaltida’s great hands, but no other spark appeared to be ignited. ‘El Exaltida suggests,’ said the secretary steadily, ‘that you were not under the sun-shed at all. That you waited until your wife slept and then went quietly across the beach and up to the hotel.’

  ‘Leaving the paper-cocked hat there, to deceive the more wakeful?’

  The Grand Duke put out a hand and drew the secretary’s notepad towards him; the grey man waited alert and respectful while he unhurriedly wrote. He translated. ‘It is suggested that you would at that time have no particular wish to deceive anyone but your wife. Everyone else knew that you were conducting – I beg your pardon – an affair with Miss Barker. Miss Barker was not on the beach.’