“We will accept,” said Sarturo, “that he can prove what he says.”
“I can go into it in detail,” I offered.
“No need,” he said. He turned back to me with the sort of apologetic smile that a hangman would level at you through his noose. “You were saying?”
“That I can prove, by the sequence of the light in that room and the radio dial, that she put them off, and also that she used the switch on the wall. Fifty minutes after she put them off, she came out of the building. And I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand, first, why she had put off the light, if he’d been there with her.”
“In the dark?” he murmured.
“In the dark. I assumed it meant he just wasn’t there. You get my point?”
“Clearly.”
“And there was no reason for the light to go off at all. All it needed, to fix my attention, was for the light to keep on, with perhaps the odd shadow across the curtain. But they went off, light and radio, and when I pressed her on it she came up with something about having done it purposely, to make Henry jealous.”
“That could be a dangerous thing to do,” Sarturo observed.
“I gathered that. It’s been done before?” I was probing.
“Not purposely. In fact, the reverse. They tried to run away together.” He sighed. “As though that’d be possible. Nowhere in the world…”
“Henry found them?”
He shrugged. “The foolish man is buried in Italy. Enrico brought her back. She was very…quiet for a long time afterwards.”
Her voice suddenly burst in, bitter and vicious. “How could I speak? My jaw was broken.”
“I see,” I said. “It would’ve been dangerous, then, for herself and for Larry. But that was what she intended — that it should get back to Henry. But Larry didn’t agree. He couldn’t understand why she’d put off the light. He made several attempts to pump me on it, and get my own opinion. Only I hadn’t got one, because my brain wasn’t working too well. I was busy trying to decide why he’d wanted an alibi, because, you see, I was sure that it all came down to that — an alibi for him. And then, tonight, I discovered that he was in the room when she arrived there — and probably left immediately afterwards. He told somebody else that he was there when she arrived, and I remembered that she had hesitated over the fact of her having a key. Of course she didn’t have a key. It wouldn’t be necessary.”
“I had a key!” she cried, but neither of us looked at her.
“And if she didn’t have a key, then I saw at last why she’d put out the light, and also why she didn’t put it on again before she left. She put it out, perfectly naturally, by mistake. And she didn’t put it on again because she couldn’t.”
“You mean?” he asked. His voice was dead now, no feeling in it at all.
“I mean she put out the light in the same way as anybody else would, without thinking, as she walked out of the door. And she closed the door behind her — a Yale lock — and probably realised, in that second, what she’d done. But she couldn’t undo it. I was there, she knew, watching, and the best she could do, after it was over, was to be seen leaving. Even if she couldn’t put the light on.”
“After it was over?” he whispered.
His lips seemed to rustle against each other.
“It would be easy for her to make her way along the backs of those houses and come out at the top of the street, pick up her car, and drive home to kill Henry. I understand why, now. Perhaps her jaw still aches to remind her. Then drive back and be seen leaving, finally, at twelve-thirty. If one person could leave that room undetected, she’d probably worked out, so could two. And it would’ve worked if pure instinct hadn’t caused her to reach for that light switch as she left.”
I turned, at last, to her. She hadn’t given in. Her eyes blazed at me, her mouth curled in complete contempt for my explanation.
“Theories!” she sneered. “You couldn’t prove one word of it.”
“But,” I said, “arising from it was the difficulty with Larry. You had to find an explanation for having put off the light. That was when I started pressing you on it, and when I said I could prove you were alone. All right, you thought, it doesn’t matter so much that I believed you were alone, just as long as I accepted you were there. So you produced the jealousy idea. That seemed to explain why you put off the light, though not why you failed to put it on again. But better than that, it showed that you’d been calculating the effect it would have on Henry. It showed you were thinking of his actions in the future, and proved you didn’t know, at the time, that he was dead. Or even had any idea that he was about to become dead.”
She sneered, opened her bag to reach for her cigarettes, then waved the pack at me. “Theories! You’re full of them.”
I returned my attention to Sarturo. He was watching her with fixed attention, considering her, perhaps even believing her. She was not screaming hysterically at me and demanding that he should kill me. He seemed to find her control very convincing. I saw his hand move slightly, and the four yobbos were very still. Slowly his eyes turned to me. There was hatred in them.
“The trouble was,” I explained, “that Larry also wondered about the light. Not straight away, mind you. When I saw the light go on again, it was early the next morning, and of course he was just returning, and not getting up as I’d assumed.”
“Are we interested in this?” he demanded.
“You will be. You see, returning at that time, he wouldn’t be surprised that the light switch was off. She’d have naturally put it off when she left, and as long as she stayed until after the robbery, he’d accept it. But I saw him and I told him it went off only a quarter of an hour after she got there. I told him her explanation, and he obviously didn’t like it. It didn’t fit with their relationship. He pestered me about it. He tried to contact her, but she did not dare to discuss it. And it was obvious that eventually he’d come to the obvious conclusion — that she’d left the room soon after he did. And this possibility terrified her. But what could she do about it? She tried to get me to see him, with a new version of it that he might accept. But I refused. Then she was desperate. She’d understood from me that I was close to a meeting with a member of the gang. She arranged that it should be Larry. She arranged that you, Sarturo, should remove him for her. Now…ask yourself. Did she come to you? Did she tell you that you’d lose the drugs unless you acted quickly? Did she get you to make contact and arrange for Larry to be their messenger, and with an empty van? And did she tell you that Larry had shot your son? If she did, then you must know that it was for her benefit you had him killed. Not for yours.” That, perhaps, hit him the hardest, that he’d been used by a woman. He swung quickly to face her, condemnation in every grouted line of his face. One gesture from him and four guns would have been emptied into her.
She withdrew a cigarette calmly from the pack and turned it in her fingers. Casually, she shrugged. “He was out that night. I thought he’d gone to Henry. Larry was…stupid. He made something special out of our relationship. Of course, I tried to reason with him, but he hated Henry. Emilio, I really thought he’d killed him.”
For a moment her life hung poised on Sarturo’s decision. Her eyes glazed with the strain. I saw that the cigarette, between first and second fingers, was gradually flattening. But that and the eyes were the only signs of what it cost her.
Sarturo said: “Mr Coe, she believed he was my son’s killer. I must accept that.” He looked at me with almost an apology, his aged eyes deep with distress — for himself? for me? He spread his hands, palms down, on the surface of the table.
The most unnerving thing about it was that he was quite sincere. From plain stupidity, or maybe a refusal to face it, he couldn’t see the glaring fallacy of what she said. But she’d been his son’s wife. Above all, he must batten it down beneath his inflexible honour. My flesh was creeping. I tried to speak, but he halted me by raising three fingers from the table surface.
“And
unless you can produce something more convincing, then I’m going to believe her. And of course, I can’t allow you to go around spreading stories like this…”
Sweat stood out on my upper lip. I’d been confident. Her nerve could never be that good…I lifted my head, and tried it. My last chance.
“There’s the waistcoat.”
And Berenice gave a scornful, choked laugh, so close to a sob that I winced.
“The waistcoat,” I insisted. “When he was found, Henry was gripping the front edges of his jacket as though he’d been holding it open. The fact that there was no hole in the jacket when there was one in the waistcoat seemed to confirm it. We thought at first that he was displaying the fact that he was not wearing a shoulder holster, but he didn’t own one. Couple that with the fact that he was just about to go out — ”
“How d’you know he was going out?” Sarturo demanded, so coldly that my beaded lip chilled and my mouth creaked when I answered.
“Because your courier was stopped with your £50,000. He was heading away, and fast, and the assumption was that a handover had gone wrong. Henry was dead. His own car keys were on the dressing table, so I’d make a guess that he was intending to meet your money-man, perhaps be picked up by him, and act as a sort of guard. And perhaps a bit more. You’re a clever man, Sarturo. You’d spread the knowledge around. One man had the money, and the other — Henry — knew where to take it.”
He nodded slowly, death in his eyes.
I glanced briefly sideways. The cigarette was poised, but still unlit. There was just a delicate tang of her fear in the air.
I said “So the handover was a washout, because Henry died. And Henry was wearing his waistcoat. If he’d been wearing his gun instead, then he wouldn’t have died. But he couldn’t wear both. Henry carried his gun stuck in his waistband. The waistcoat covered the waistband. So…whoever killed him knew that the waistcoat indicated that he wasn’t wearing his gun. In fact, when he opened his jacket, that was exactly what he was indicating. But would he indicate that to Larry? Would he even expect Larry to understand what the waistcoat meant?”
“You bastard!” she whispered.
“But,” I said, “assume that Berenice was going back to the flat in order to kill him. She’d know he was going out at midnight, and she wouldn’t want him carrying his gun. So she asked him not to, although he’d be guarding £50,000. Wear your nice new waistcoat, she’d say, having bought it specially for that purpose. Promise me. And then she turned up, just before he was due to leave, and he thought she’d come back just to check he hadn’t got his gun with him, and he opened his jacket. Look darling, I’m wearing your waistcoat! Then she shot him through the heart.”
There was a time-lag of perhaps two seconds whilst Sarturo weighed whether he would accept it. In the corner of my eye I saw that Berenice was at last reaching for her lighter. Her control was so inhuman that I almost sprang, finally demoralised, to my feet. But then I saw the verdict rise in Sarturo’s eyes. A split second before his lips moved, I brought up my stick and levelled it at his right eye.
“No,” I said. “I’m taking the girl.”
He was calm. He thought I was merely using the stick for emphasis. “I promised you that. So take her.”
And I knew — as she had to — that Berenice was doomed.
“You may not realise it,” I said, “but I anticipated trouble. So I brought my shooting stick. Because there is trouble. You’re not going to like it, Sarturo, but I’m taking Berenice, too.”
“Shooting stick?” he asked, unimpressed. “I thought people sat…”
“This one shoots. Only one shot, but at this range it can kill.”
His eyes widened. I thought for one galling moment that he would throw back his head and laugh. But he said mildly: “It has a rubber ferrule.”
“The barrel’s behind it.”
He held up his hand for silence because there’d been a rustle. With sick despair I realised that my pathetic bluff had failed. The best I could hope was that their scathing laughter would affect their aim. Then Sarturo reached out and plucked off the rubber ferrule and peered, leering, at the end.
“I see no hole.”
I poked him in the contact lens.
His hand came up as he gave a squeak of pain. It came up with the same automatic gesture that Berenice had used on the light switch, and as it reached his face I heard a crack behind me, a brittle sound, and the bullet passed through the soft flesh between his thumb and first finger, burying itself in his throat. He gave a choked protest, began to fall forward, and the second shot made a neat hole in the centre of his forehead.
Berenice had completed the action she’d started, reaching for her lighter, but what she had produced was the Mauser I’d been dying to discover. Though I wasn’t keen on discovering it to be levelled at me, as it was when I whirled round. But, as I moved, I brought the stick round, not particular just at that moment where it landed. It missed the gun, and as she moved in reaction it caught her between the shoulder and the throat, in the curve of the neck. She choked, and the gun’s muzzle fell, and I flung myself at her, my whole and complete endeavour aimed at that weapon. It came from her grasp simply, easily, as though at last she surrendered.
I looked up and around me. The four goons stood as though a film had snapped, locked in the last instruction Sarturo had given — his raised hand.
“Relax,” I said. “The man’s dead. It’s all finished.”
Like a group of dolls when their ventriloquist has gone for a pint, utter relaxation claimed them. They became limp and inoperable. Their existence had been snatched away.
But all the same I didn’t take my eyes from them as I collected Carol. She was shivering and moaning, though in her own personal misery, I thought. Berenice sat and stared at her father-in-law, and there was no light in her eyes.
I backed to the door and kicked it open.
“Out,” I said to Carol, and she moved. I backed down the steps, then turned.
After the light inside, I could see nothing. But I could feel the movement, like a restless herd of cattle. I spoke into the blackness.
“Slowly, Grace. Easily. There’ll be no trouble. Sarturo’s dead.”
Then, I think, I passed out.
CHAPTER XIII
When I opened my eyes I was sitting with Grace in the back of her car, so I must have done.
“I thought you were never coming round,” she said.
I was aware that the car was still parked in the field. There was activity all around us, but it had a terminal lassitude. It was the tidying-up.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked, struggling to sit up.
“We’ve taken her in, along with the thugs. As you said, there was no trouble.”
“I meant the other girl.”
“She’s in one of the other cars. She’s your problem, George.”
I grunted. That was nice — another problem. “Have you searched the caravan?”
“And his car.” She sounded weary and defeated. “But nothing. No money and no drugs. But why would he need two dozen pistols?”
“You get ‘em cheaper.” I was thinking about it as my brain stirred and began to move about. “There was one of his gunmen missing.”
“I wasn’t counting. What’s one, more or less?”
“That wasn’t what I meant. He must have been off on the pick-up. Remember before, when you stopped that chappie with all the cash? Well — I reckon they’ve got together, the moneyman and the yobbo, and they’ve gone to collect the drugs. Tonight. That’s what I reckon.”
“You don’t think they’ll come back here?”
“Not a chance of that.”
Outside, it was still raining steadily. A copper in a peaked cap came to the window and Grace wound it down while she had a quick word with him. It gave me a minute to sort it out.
“Grace,” I said, when she’d finished, “I found out that Henry Saturn was on his way out, the night he was shot. I guessed it, b
ut Sarturo as good as told me he was.”
“Later, George, later.”
“No. Let me say it. Saturn was obviously going to meet the money-man, then they were going on to the rendezvous. It makes the cassette significant.”
“The symphony? He was leaving his gun behind and toting Tchaikovsky?”
“Something like that. You’ve got to understand Sarturo. He was living in his own little dream world of fantasy, in which he had the romantic notion that he was a master criminal.”
“He was an evil, vile…”
“I know, Grace, but he was other things too. Such as an organist. But he was old, and everything was slipping away, and he knew it. He knew damned well that his gang was nothing but a pitiful and loutish crew. But he had to keep the illusion alive. He wrapped things up in paltry little secret arrangements, partly for his own security, but mainly for the effect. Grace, I think that cassette was one of his embroideries. Just think of it. Saturn and the money-man were on their way to a rendezvous…”
“I haven’t got much time, George.”
“Perhaps less than you imagine. There were these two on their way, and Sarturo didn’t want any slip-ups. What say there were two recordings of the sixth symphony? One held by Saturn, one by the gang that’d pinched the drugs. Then, you see, whoever got there first could play theirs, and this’d be a sign to the others when they arrived that there was no slip-up or trap. It’s the sort of thing Sarturo would love, and being a musician…”
“George, you’re not helping.”
“But I am. Listen. They’d have to be meeting somewhere they could play the damned things, a quiet, deserted house, but with a powerful cassette deck and equipment, one where the owner had been bribed with drugs rather than money to keep out of the way…”
“Antrim’s!” she cried.
“Exactly. And you’ve got a recording of it, and if it’s not too late, and you can get there first, you might just be able to lure both lots into a trap. Eh?”
A Glimpse of Death (David Mallin Detective series Book 7) Page 14
