Tour de Force

by Christianna Brand

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’d been hoping to catch him alone for a second, you see. Not for anything; we’d just had a sort of optimistic date. In those days, the chance of just one word …’ She broke off sadly. ‘Well, so I’d better go on now?’

  ‘All right,’ he said. She was terribly white; for once she wore no rouge and he was suddenly smitten with pity for her, pity and fear. He remembered that first meeting which now seemed so fantastically long ago, when she had clung to him, green to the gills, because the aeroplane was descending, had ‘moulted all over him like a red setter …’ As she turned, he said on an impulse: ‘You really intend to go on?’

  She looked at him blankly. ‘Go on?’

  ‘We could stop this whole business here and now.’

  ‘I don’t think we could,’ she said. ‘We have to think of “the life of the wife”, don’t we?’ And she gave him a smile, whose helplessness and hopelessness smote at his heartstrings. ‘But thank you.’ She went off down the steps and he saw again the flicker of the red and white suit, passing beneath the bougainvillea boughs.

  Miss Trapp and Fernando had been peering out of their respective doors, awaiting their cue. They advanced, he in his orange satin trunks, she a near-Victorian figure, in saggy stockinette, and went on down the steps and along the terrace. Mr Cecil appeared in his turn and came and leaned with the Inspector on the rail. Under his reedy arm with its sunburned front and lily white back he carried the red attaché case. ‘What now?’

  ‘I’ll go into number five and come out as though I were Miss Lane. You must stay here and be yourself and me. I’ll come over to you and we can stand here for a bit and then I’ll go off down to the rock as she did, and you remain here. Watch carefully to see exactly what we saw from here when we looked down at the rock. Now – I’m Miss Lane.’

  He turned towards the closed door of number five; and the door of number five opened and Louvaine, who a moment before had passed out of sight beneath the bougainvillea boughs – stepped out of the room and walked quietly towards them.

  Close cap, tight, satiny, blue-black bathing dress, black rubber beach shoes, roll of white towelling startling against the swallow-wing sheen of the black. Pale face, devoid of make-up. Hooded blue eyes. No touch of colour – none; save for one red curl, escaped from the hard ridge of the black bathing cap, straying across the pale cheek. She put up her hand and pushed it back; and they saw the bright red of the painted nails. She came across to them.

  Below them and to their left, Fernando and Miss Trapp emerged from the jasmine tunnel and out on to the lower terrace, where the Rodds stood silently with their guard, at the top of the rock. Inspector Cockrill said: ‘So bang go all the alibis, all the witnesses, all the rest of it. She was dead before any of you ever came out of your rooms?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Louvaine. ‘She had been dead for an hour. She came to my room during the siesta time, to work. I killed her then.’

  Mr Cecil stood staring as though his pale eyes would start out from his ash-pale face. He stammered: ‘But how could … You’ve just … But Louvaine …’

  ‘Louvaine Barker’s just passed you and gone on down the steps in a very, very small Bikini,’ said Louli. ‘I’ve got it on under this.’ She pulled aside the strap of her bathing dress and showed the gleam of white satin underneath. ‘Make-up off – just the lipstick really, you were so used to Louvaine being painted up that you wouldn’t notice, you’d take it for granted she was made-up like a clown. Bathing cap over red hair. Rubber shoes over painted toe-nails.’ She gave a grotesque little bow. ‘Miss Vanda Lane.’

  ‘And hands curled up into fists,’ said Cockie, ‘while you talked to us here on the rail: to hide your manicure. Nail varnish, I take it, doesn’t go on and off as easily as lipstick?’

  ‘Not varnish,’ she said. ‘Long nails. To have them varnished would really have been too risky.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘If you remember, Inspector, I applied the varnish as I sat at your feet later on!’

  ‘So you did,’ agreed Cockie, equably. He did not appear immoderately surprised. ‘A quick change artist indeed!’

  ‘I had it all ready. I simply went down the steps and in through the doors, which are always open, of the salons under the balcony, and nipped through into the main hall and up the stairs and so along the corridor to my room.’ She unrolled a corner of the white towel and they caught a glimpse of glossy red plastic. ‘I chucked all this into the bathing hut, the one next to where Louli Barker was supposed to be lurking – nobody’d seen her go in there, by the way, but I could say I’d slipped round unobtrusively because of my split brassiere. When I got back from the dive – everyone had gone on down to the beach by then, I’d seen to that – I went in and stripped off this black and was back in the Bikini. Slapped some lipstick on my face, stuffed all this wet stuff into the plastic bag, and dashed down to the beach to join in the jolly fun.’ She said to Inspector Cockrill: ‘I don’t believe you’re surprised?’

  ‘No,’ said Cockie. ‘Not very.’

  ‘You mean you knew?’

  ‘There was one fact,’ said Inspector Cockrill, ‘that didn’t fit in; one brick that hadn’t got a place in any other explanation I built up.’ He had placed the brick under their noses long ago, on the evening of the murder, when he had described the dead girl’s bathing things, rolled up in the towel, slung across the verandah rail. She was supposed to have just got back from a bathe and taken them off. Why should she have rolled them up in the towel, shoes and rubber cap and all? You hang out a wet bathing dress to dry, you don’t roll it up.’ He had a sudden memory of Louvaine – leaning casually back on her elbows against the veranda rail while the rest clustered, with increasing anxiety, round the door of the room where the girl lay dead. ‘You put them there then?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Louli. ‘You were all milling around the door. I fished them out of the bag, sort of behind my back, and just humped them over the rail. Nobody would notice; the rail was festooned with things hanging out to dry.’

  ‘I noticed,’ said Cockie, austerely. ‘These things were, in fact, not hanging out to dry.’

  There was a hail from the rock. Leo Rodd was waving to them and shouting. ‘We’re getting behind-hand with the schedule,’ said Louli. ‘I’d better go on.’

  ‘Surely …’ protested Cecil.

  But she broke from his outflung hand and ran off down the steps and this time they watched her to the end of the terrace. ‘Let her go on with it,’ said Cockrill. ‘She is, “not only letting justice be done, but letting it be seen to be done” – as long as it is seen by Leo Rodd. For that, I take it, is the object of this exercise.’

  ‘It’s a strange way to go about winning back a man’s love,’ said Mr Cecil.

  ‘Not if you love him as she loves Leo Rodd,’ said Cockie, soberly. He thought it all over for a moment. ‘I think perhaps, though, we’d better go down to the rock. No use our staying here now. We’ve seen – what we were brought here to see.’

  Down the wooden steps, along the terrace past open doors leading into the great cool salons, down shallow steps tunnelled over with jasmine, out on to the far end of the lower of the two terraces, where the bathing huts clustered at the level of the top of the diving rock, with its path to the board. They watched the slender figure, unhurried, emerge from the cool darkness of the tunnel, into the sunlight; they saw the four startled faces suddenly blanching, the uncomprehending stares of the guard. Again there came into Mr Fernando’s eyes the look that had come there when she had stood, hair pulled back, in the doorway of the little room; he burst into a Spanish gabble of imprecation or of prayer, which broke off abruptly as she walked quietly past him and up to Leo Rodd. The red curl had escaped again and was blown softly by the scented breeze across her white face. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and instantly it was blown forward again. She said to Leo Rodd: ‘So now you know it all.’

  It was terrible to see a man in such an agony of pain – of be
wilderment and doubt and pain. He turned his head from side to side, away from the thought of it, from the knowledge of it, beads of sweat gathered on his forehead and trickled unheeded down his face. He kept saying, ‘Not that …! Not that …!’

  She closed her blue eyes against the pain of witnessing his pain. ‘It was because of you, Leo. Both of us were in love with you; from the first moment we saw you, both of us were in love with you. We quarrelled, she threatened me, the knife was there …’ He made a movement away from her. ‘Don’t turn away from me, don’t look at me as though you loathed me, Leo. It was because I love you: and because I love you, I’m doing this.’ She lifted her head and looked across at Helen, standing incredulous and appalled, a little apart from them. ‘I’m doing it to save her.’

  Miss Trapp’s eyes were nearly falling out of her head. ‘She was dead there, dead in her room – and you – you staged this masquerade?’

  ‘I took her place, that’s all,’ said Louvaine, impatiently. She gave a wan smile. ‘After all, we’d both acted parts for most of our grown-up lives, we’d both lived in a sort of private-theatricals world of interchange; and as for the rest, fiction was our business, the whole thing unfolded itself as I went along like the plot of a story.’ She looked up, pleadingly, to Leo. ‘Well – the story’s come to an end now, though I doubt that I shall “live happy ever after” – if I live at all.’

  He did not speak. She turned away from him and now he moved swiftly, he caught her by the wrist. ‘For God’s sake – where are you going, what are you going to do?’

  She said wearily, ‘Well – just give myself up. What else? These men can take me, and then you can all get out of this horrible place and go home.’ She said to Helen: ‘The worst thing I did was accusing you, letting you suffer in my place. That really was the worst thing of all. But I won’t let you suffer any more.’ And she lifted her head and went if possible a shade more pitifully pale. ‘There’s the Gerente himself, up by the hotel. He’s coming down here; so I can just tell him now.’

  The little cold wind sighed through the pine trees, the sea below them flickered and shimmered with a million, million, million dancing lights. Up on the terrace by the diving rock, nobody stirred. The uniformed figure was passing, blue cloak flying, under the twisted grey boughs, plunging down the tunnel of jasmine and the shallow steps. And Helen Rodd said suddenly: ‘Quick! In here!’ and, seizing Louvaine by the forearm, thrust her into one of the bathing cabins and, crowding in after her, closed the door.

  The Gerente, emerging from the jasmine tunnel, was met by an eager jabbering from the guard. ‘They can’t make it out,’ said Fernando, uncertainly translating. ‘They say we all started off to bathe and then stood and talked instead. They say we all seemed much upset. They say the two ladies have just bolted into the cabina, apparently at sight of him.’ The Gerente spoke and he added unhappily: ‘He now asks why.’

  ‘Tell him.… Tell him,’ said Leo, inspired, ‘that it was Miss Barker who took my wife there. Tell him that my wife was – was naturally afraid that he had come to arrest her.’

  Miss Trapp was distressed and uncertain. ‘Is this right? What would Mrs Rodd feel?’

  ‘Mrs Rodd has just deliberately saved Miss Barker from being arrested,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘If she can do that, we had better just try to follow her lead.’

  ‘But if he really has come to arrest Mrs Rodd …?’

  ‘If he has, we can reconsider the matter,’ said Cockie.

  Fernando translated. The Gerente, terribly frowning, spoke at some length. ‘He says … He demands to know what is going on. Why are we pale and anxious-looking, why has Miss Barker been speaking strangely to Mr Rodd, why have we all changed into bathing things and come down here to the diving rock? Why have none of us dived?’

  ‘We didn’t come to dive,’ said Leo. ‘Just to bathe.’

  ‘He says that if we want to bathe, the way to the beach is down the central steps. He says this is the place where the girl was last seen alive. He says again, what is going on, if we came here to dive, why haven’t we dived?’

  ‘Tell him to mind his own bloody business,’ said Leo. ‘Why the hell should we dive if we don’t want to? We don’t like diving, we don’t want to dive, none of us can dive; we just like this way to the beach, that’s all, we’ve got a Thing against the central steps.’

  ‘He says again then, what were we speaking of, what is going on? He says,’ stammered Fernando wretchedly, ‘that if he gets no explanation, he will arrest Mrs Rodd this moment and take her back to gaol.’

  The door of the little cabin opened and Helen Rodd came out; and, clad in the poppy-starred white Bikini, red hair blazing, white face painted to a travesty at least of the gay, painted face of other days – Louvaine followed her and stood with smiling mouth and unsmiling eyes, blinking at the Gerente in the sun. Leo took one step towards them. He stammered: ‘Louvaine …’ and then broke off. He said to Helen: ‘I will love you and thank you for ever – for doing this to save Louvaine.’

  The Gerente looked at the guards and looked at Louvaine and looked at Helen: ominously. Inspector Cockrill moved forward. He held up his small brown, nicotined-stained hand for silence. He said quietly: ‘Mr Fernando – tell the Gerente that the guards have misunderstood. We’ve all been talking about the murder, naturally; we’ve all been discussing ways and means, making up theories, making up stories to fit with our theories. As for Miss Barker and Mr Rodd – Miss Barker has been telling Mr Rodd a story and naturally, she being a writer of fiction, her story has been the best of all. And as to the diving – what Mr Rodd says is true: none of us can dive. It just so happens that none of us here can dive. I can’t, Mr Cecil can’t, you yourself can’t, or anyway you don’t. Mr Rodd can’t because of his arm, Mrs Rodd can’t because she dislikes it, Miss Trapp can’t because she can’t swim. And Miss Barker can’t – Miss Barker least of all. Miss Lane could: Miss Lane could run out along a razor-backed ridge high over the sea, she could stand teetering at the tip of a diving board, twenty-five feet up. But Miss Barker can’t.’ And he plucked an imaginary auburn hair from the sleeve of his jacket. ‘One thing one literally cannot control,’ said Inspector Cockrill, ‘is a horror of heights. And I happen to know that Miss Louvaine Barker has an almost pathological horror of heights.’

  But Miss Louvaine Barker was already lying in a dead faint at the feet of Leo Rodd.

  Chapter Thirteen

  MR CECIL assisted at the ritual of Louli’s return to consciousness and life. She had been carried up to her room and there laid propped against white pillows, on the four-poster bed. He trotted between bed and dressing-table, laden with pots and bottles and mirrors and powder puffs and bursting with expert advice. ‘A thorough good strip down with the cleansing cream, ducky, there’s nothing like it after a scene: and then lots and lots and lots of astringent lotion patted well in, we don’t want crows’ feet by the time we’re thirty, dear, do we?’ She was so right always to wear huge hats. ‘Honestly, one was mad, my dear, ever to have come to this terrible climate, ruination to the skin, we shall all look like alligators by the time it’s over, I wouldn’t be surprised.’ And talking about being surprised, he added, honestly one had been utterly, but utterly bouleversé’d by all this business about the heights.…

  ‘Me too,’ said Louli, ruefully.

  ‘But had you forgotten?’

  ‘No, I just thought I never would get to the diving. I thought I’d appear before you all and you’d say, “Oh, that’s how it was done?” and it would never occur to anyone that I couldn’t have gone on and dived, to save my life. Because of course, that’s true – I’ve got this Thing, I just can’t bear heights.’

  ‘If that’s true,’ said Cecil, cautiously.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, it’s true enough. I mean, old Cockrill saw me on the plane.’

  And it was true. He too had seen for himself how green she had gone – she had been all right while they were flying at height, when there had been n
othing to suggest, as it were, a drop; but as they descended, as the little houses and fields came up to meet them, she had shuddered and turned pale, her hands had shaken as she clung to the little man. You couldn’t counterfeit that, and anyway, why should she have done so? She could have had no intention then of murdering her cousin, neither of them had yet had time – surely? – to fall in love with Leo Rodd; nor, supposing the remote likelihood of an earlier motive, of a preconceived plan, could she have anticipated the lay-out at the hotel, the open salon doors leading into the hall and stairs, the cabins at the diving rock, the diving board? Unless of course … ‘You didn’t know this place before?’ he said casually.

  She laughed. ‘No, no. Never even been into Italy. You can see from my passport. Doubting Thomas!’ she added.

  All the same, he thought, the whole masquerade had fitted in with the facts remarkably snugly. He passed her the mascara brush. ‘Just a weeny bit up at the ends of the eyebrows, ducky, yes, that’s wonderful, too Après-midi d’un Faune for any!’ He looked into the hand mirror; a touch of Après-midi wouldn’t do his own face any harm either, and he applied it with little expert sweeps of the brush. ‘Quite too perfect, we look like a couple of dear little Bambis, all wide-eyed wonder, just out of the wood.’

  ‘Are we out of the wood?’ said Louli.

  ‘You are. I mean, I do think this fabrication of yours does utterly blow up over the diving business. After all, having this Thing, you wouldn’t ever have learnt to dive, would you? So even if you’d conquered it for the moment and driven yourself to go out along the board – well, one can’t just hold one’s nose and jump off that sort of height, can one? One comes a belly-flopper and it does one no good at all, and the thing is that nobody mistakes one for La Lane, who was quite too terrific.’ But the eyebrows would not do, alas, and he dabbed them off with spit on a piece of cotton wool. Some of his sun-tan came too. ‘My dear, I look quite leprous, Max Factor pancake this minute, where can I find it?’ Somewhat to her horror, he rubbed the cotton wool on the surface of the pancake. ‘But what I want to know is, what were you going to do next?’