‘Only of course, sir, like you were saying the other day—the important thing is not to have a picture in your mind. Not preconceived.’
‘Quite right, quite right,’ said Charlesworth, resorting in extremity to kindly patronage. ‘All I mean is that there is a picture—the picture of exactly what happened. And with all these bits and pieces, that’s what you’re trying to put together.’ And a picture, he suggested, in the end proves to have been based upon a certain composition. The same with a crime. The motive. Or a state of mind. Or simply some impulse, generated by fortuitous opportunity. ‘Something triggers off a murder, something impels it on forward and follows it through. That’s what’ll show up, that’s what forms the composition of your picture. Once get the composition, the shape of your collage, and all the little bits and pieces begin to fall into place. Like an archaeologist, building up the whole structure of ancient man from a single tooth. From the tooth he deduces the size of the jaw, and from the jaw he deduces the shape of the head, and from the head—’
A minute ago it had been chips of stone and scraps of fur not to mention the haddock, to be reduced down to a collage; now it was a single tooth to be built up to all the bits and pieces comprising a skeleton. ‘Yessir,’ said Sergeant Ellis reverently, just not quite physically twiddling his thumbs.
Mr Charlesworth, perhaps a mite hastily, abandoned pithecanthropoid man in favour of return to the picture. For the great thing was, he said, that one must remember that the very smallest piece of material, however insignificant, apparently colourless, apparently shapeless, however much just a scrap of the general hopeless muddle - was never too unimportant to be considered. Who knew that this or that tuft of feather, this or that fragment of coloured glass, might not be at the very basis of the pattern they were searching for...?
He might have instanced—had he been there to hear it—Sari’s discussion with Rufie about the present for Nan.
Down on the tarmac they were swarming all around the Halcyon, measuring, photographing, fingerprinting, easing out the terrible, stiffened figure from its cramped quarters, carrying it, grotesquely shaped beneath its mercifully covering sheet, to the waiting ambulance. In the big flat, seven storeys up, above the glowing vistas of the Heath, Chief Superintendent Charlesworth stood, somewhat dazed, and looked them over.
A rather pretty, plump early-middle-aged woman in garments so conventional as to seem positively outré in this improbable setting, hanging on to her control but in a terrible condition of nerves and upset. A younger woman, very pretty indeed with the prettiness of the enormously fat, wrapped in a sort of loose cover, brilliantly green, wobbling like a blancmange in an abandonment of hysterical tears. A tall thin man, dark, balding a little, dressed in the height of male fashion—unless, like Mr Charlesworth, you considered the height of male fashion to be a decently cut suit, fresh shirt and sufficiently agreeable tie. An Italian, very small and neat, at least more conventionally garbed; query Queer? And a short, slender man of about thirty—no query about him—with a curiously, white skin and a pale, pale flame of red hair, who sat in a sort of stupor, staring ahead of him, one trembling arm, a-jangle with gold and silver bracelets, round the exquisite shoulders of Miss Sari Morne.
And Miss Sari Morne.
If a middle-aged, heavily married Detective Chief Superintendent of Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police Force may be permitted to have fallen in love at first sight, let alone with Suspect (so far) Number One, Detective Chief Superintendent Charlesworth had fallen in love. He concealed his passion with practised control—from nobody but himself. Those present were all too well aware of the immediate response, when confronted with Miss Sari Morne, of the infatuate male.
Nor was Sergeant Ellis deceived. Sergeant Ellis had packed into his comparatively short life a quite astonishing amount of reading, travel and experience and was no man’s fool. He was a rotund young man, oddly short in the leg from the knee down, full of rather endearing mannerisms of speech and habit, and with a cropped mop of hair of a colour which caused him to be known far and wide with no great originality as Ginger. He took one look at Mr Charlesworth’s sagging face and thought with unwonted straightforwardness (for he had a somewhat corky mind): Poor old bugger, he’s gone and got it again.
‘I’d better talk to you, Miss Morne, first, please. If your friends could wait somewhere else.’ It had all been gone over in a general gabble of information but now things must be sorted out. ‘Sergeant—?’
Ginger whipped out his notebook and pencil and stood with slightly bowed head, a greyhound in the slips. He habitually enlivened his daily round with small private jokes and it amused him intensely to put on such hardly discernible parades of self mockery.
‘We’ll go into the dining-room, Sari?’ suggested Etho.
Rufie looked miserably at Sari. ‘Can’t I stay with her? I don’t like her being on her own. I mean, you don’t know how horrible—’
Sari, however, had emerged from her original condition of total shock into something almost frighteningly like euphoria. ‘I’m all right, darling, ap-solutely. You look after poor Nan, she’s the one that needs it, she’s not used to this kind of thing.’
‘Well, it’s hardly an everyday affair for us either,’ said Rufie, rather tartly. Damn it, Nan had not had to see it—that pink and blue spider with its horribly bent arms and legs. And the great splodge of blood that had turned out to be... Turned out to be... Something stirred in his mind, an uneasy feeling of something that had happened—that he had done something, moved something, changed something which now in all the shock and terror had clean gone out of his mind. Perhaps Sari would remember. He’d have to ask her afterwards, secretly—you got into trouble if you interfered with things ‘at the scene of the crime’.
Sari, left alone with the law, sat curled at one end of the long studio couch, chain-smoking as usual. She had changed her clothes—the bare thought of that dead claw brushing against her trouser leg!—and was now in deep blue linen jeans, whose fit played havoc with Mr Charlesworth’s efforts to remain unmoved; and another of her vast sweaters, this time in emerald green. ‘Now if I might have some details? You call yourself Miss Sari Morne but you are really—?’
‘La Carissima—Principessa di San Juan el Pirata,’ said Sari crisply.
‘Principessa—? ’
‘Sacarissima, Carissima, Altessissima; and Perla del Isla to boot. I never know whether Sacarissima means the holiest or the most sugary.’
‘Sacred or profane?’ suggested Sergeant Ellis, almost entirely to himself. Sari bent upon him an appreciative eye.
‘You have the title of Princess, Miss Morne?’
‘I was married to Aldo Lorenzo, the heir to the dukedom of San Juan. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it, but like Liechtenstein and Andorra and for that matter Monaco—it’s there.’
‘Where exactly is there?’ said Mr Charlesworth.
‘In the Mediterranean, off the coast of Italy. Somewhere round Elba and those islands. I wouldn’t know exactly, I’ve never been there. But it’s a great mix-up of Spanish and Italian and they speak Juanese which nobody but themselves would even want to understand. Except for the aristocracy who speak practically everything but. In fact Aldo’s mother isn’t Juanese at all—I believe she’s French.’
‘You don’t seem very closely familiar with your in-laws?’
‘No, no, I married their precious Principe somewhat under the rose, appropriately enough as the rose is the emblem of San Juan. And where is the said Principe now? you may well ask. Well, frankly, I don’t know. He may be in San Juan itself, where in every sense, I must say, he belongs, but on the other hand, he may well be over here, hunting me down with the aid of his own dear private and personal Mafia. The Red Mafia they call it, to distinguish it from the ordinary Italian Mafia, Mafia Rossa—as I said, the rose is the national emblem of the island.’
‘And the Prince is over here?’ said Charlesworth, his head lightly spinning.
‘Well
, more likely in Italy in fact. He’s in the process of becoming engaged—betrothed we call it in our more exalted circles—to an Italian young lady of lineage reputed more ancient than his own, give or take a thousand years or so.’
‘More give than take,’ suggested Sergeant Ellis, tempering the intrusion by making a little offering of information to his superior, like a cat laying a dead mouse at the feet of its master. He recited like a schoolboy: ‘The island of San Juan was appropriated as a stronghold in 1762, so only a couple of hundred years—by Juan Lorenzo, a Spanish pirate—’
‘—and his fearsome crew,’ said Sari. ‘Which is what they remain to this day, including my dear husband, the unregretted Aldo.’
‘Oh,’ said Charlesworth, more and more disturbed by all this gratuitous flippancy; and indeed not too sure that the lady—let alone his own sergeant—was not having him on. He suggested: ‘I take it that you are no longer married to him?’
‘No, that lasted about one minute. So we can drop him and his titles and go back to the number you first thought of. My name and address? My name is Sari Morne and this is my address and that is not my car.’
‘But your real name—before marriage, I mean—?’
‘Maria Bloggs,’ said Sari. She repeated: ‘And this is my address and that is not my car.’
‘So you explained to me earlier. Could we go through it all again please, now that things have—calmed down.’
‘I’m sorry if I was slightly hysterical at first.’
‘This was all a total shock and surprise to you?’
‘As my chum has just remarked,’ said Sari, ‘not exactly a daily occurrence.’
Almost as though to reassure himself, Charlesworth looked at the traces of the tears that had ravaged that beautiful face. An extraordinary girl. Everyone else had made a dive for the decanter and duly showed signs of it, but not she. Arriving within a few minutes of their ‘phone call, he had watched her shudderingly pulling herself together, by slow degrees forcing herself to this resolute, this almost cynical display of tranquillity, even of levity. ‘Well—now, once again, from the beginning.’
They had been over it, all of them, though sketchily, several times already. ‘You drove down to Wren’s Hill—why?’
‘To see myself in this picture I made four years ago. I told you.’
‘You went alone?’
‘One doesn’t want one’s Eight Best Friends around, all saying how marvellous one was and thinking how one has gone off since.’ She concentrated on lighting the next cigarette from the one she was smoking.
‘And while there you spoke to the deceased?’
‘I passed a few remarks, as the deceased herself would certainly have expressed it. She’d been a dresser at the studio when I was working here and in Italy. I hadn’t seen her since.’
‘But you knew her quite well at the time?’
‘No, I didn’t. She was a horrid little thing, even then. But there she was, so I said hallo.’
‘Just hallo?’
‘Well, yes. She told me she’d given up the job and was living with her pore old mother, tried to touch me for a fiver, I gave her a quid and walked away, and that was about the lot.’
‘She asked for money?’
‘Unlike her more recent appearance, that would be an everyday occurrence.’
‘Did anyone overhear this conversation?’
‘People came and bought tickets but I don’t suppose they tickly listened. It was hardly a riveting exchange.’
‘Did anything else occur at the cinema?’
‘No. Well, I banged into a man and said sorry and he said sorry and then I sat through the film and came away by a side entrance, not particularly desiring to bang into Miss Feather as well.’
‘And you didn’t see her again?’
‘No, nor anyone else. At least not to speak to,’ said Sari carefully.
‘But you did see somebody?’
‘I saw somebody following me,’ said Sari, ‘when I was driving home. But there’s no use telling you that. I told you before and you didn’t believe me and I’m sure you won’t now.’
‘In what way, following you?’
‘In a very dangerous way, following me.’
‘But who would this be?’
‘I don’t know. But I should imagine the Red Mafia, with Aldo at their head, or rather prodding them on from a safe place in the rear.’
‘Something to do with your marriage, then?’
‘It began about that time,’ said Sari. (In Rome: making the picture on location in Rome—those odd, sharp-shouldered, olive-complexioned men always around every corner, dodging out of sight... Someone in the cinema last night had dodged out of sight. As she was buying her ticket, seen vaguely out of the corner of her eye. But that hadn’t been some impersonal hired assassin, there had been something vaguely familiar, a flash of colour, had it been?—something vaguely close to home...)
‘And over the four years since then, people have been—following you?’
‘Only on and off,’ said Sari. (The same sort of strange men hanging about the convent when she’d been having... The nuns had been angels of goodness, keeping her safe and close, keeping her secrets: her secrets and Aldo’s.)
Charlesworth sat in the big armchair, staring back at her. He said at last: ‘But these people—your husband’s people—?’
‘The marriage was not precisely the event of the year for them, was it? Their princeling and heir with a tuppenny little film starlet. They’re fabulously rich, unimaginably rich and, pirate ancestor or not, nowadays terribly grand.’
‘Yes, but—’ He said again, helplessly. ‘People in that sort of position—you were divorced from their son, you were over and finished with: what harm could they wish you?’
‘They could wish me dead,’ said Sari.
But it was Vi Feather who was dead.
Vi Feather. Dead, murdered, lying scrunched up and horrible in that narrow space at the back of the car. Sari lifted her head. She said: ‘So you see it was all true, wasn’t it? They did want to kill me, didn’t they? Only they got poor Vi Feather by mistake.’
The long afternoon waned away and with it something of that almost chilling frivolity and insouciance. He took her through the adventure of the tree, her return home, and she answered quietly and rationally. No stranger turned up, meanwhile, to collect the Halcyon; she seemed to have the wrong telephone number, she had thrown the piece of paper away. She refused absolutely to remember her own registration number, couldn’t find the log book, had never had any log book, was ap-solutely certain... The Halcyon was a brand new model, just out, and specifications of owners had not yet found their way into the police machine. He’d check it in the end, of course, but meanwhile—what a nuisance women were! He sent her back for a further search of the big, scattered, untidy apartment and talked in turn briefly to the widow, to the fat girl, to the Italian. The Italian came from the south, had met them only recently—through Mr Rufie Soames who had spoken to him at a—well, at a club. Mr Ethelbert Wendover, however, had known her from her filming days, conceded cagily that she had been a bit difficult—she was a nervy, temperamental creature and had made like a film star and, so early in her career, didn’t get away with it. Yes, it was true about the young prince—a very young prince indeed; she had met him at the studio, through a friend, and really he had been at the root of the trouble, always tempting her to play hookey. Yes, one understood that she had actually married him. Divorced? Well, annulled: there was no divorce in San Juan which was a Catholic country. Mr Charlesworth opined airily that anyway, with these papists, it was just a matter of handing over a bundle of used notes, wasn’t it?—and the Pope fixed all the rest. Mr Ethelbert Wendover smiled upon him with a kindly pity.
The Chief Superintendent put them all on ice and sent for Rufie.
Rufie had swallowed down about a million tranquillisers but they hadn’t mixed too well with the first frantic swiggings of brandy and he simply couldn’t ge
t back into self-control. Beneath the pale flare of Shelley-like locks, his face was ashen, white hands clenched so tightly that the rings bit sharply into his shaking fingers. Yes, he’d gone round to Etho’s last night, just to—well, just to talk and play records. Yes, despite the weather; he didn’t mind storms—some people were terrified of storms but he thought they were rather fun, and after all, how many of all the millions of people ever got struck by lightning? ...Yes, he’d known Sari from her filming days, only slightly then but he’d got in touch through Etho when she came to London and kept up with her ever since; she was so gorgeous, so sweet, so ap-solutely special... Yes, he supposed you could say he’d known Vi Feather in those days too but not tickly well, not as a person—he’d been working on the costume designs and after all she’d been only a dresser. No, for heaven’s sake, never set eyes on her since, not until—not until today... No, the Halcyon hadn’t been there when he got home last night, he’d already told them that a thousand times; and yes, Sari had arrived back soon after he did. Yes, she told him about the stranger and the fallen tree. And about being followed. He fell suddenly into a terrible weeping. ‘We never believed her when she said all these things about being followed, people wanting to kill her and all that. But see what’s happened now!’ And he looked as though he would be sick, would vomit up into the hand clapped over his mouth; blue eyes blurred and staring. ‘Supposing it had been Sari! All huddled up there, so—disgusting... We were all so wrong, we did nothing to help her.’ Suppose it had been Sari, lovely, beautiful, darling Sari! He got up and blundered away so that the handsome Chief Superintendent shouldn’t see him blowing his nose, so unromantic! ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, returning, the tears drying on his white cheek bones. ‘I took all these pills and on top of alcohol you simply go beresk.’ Rufie’s top favourite word with the Eight Best Friends was beresk; they were terrified of his finding out that he said it wrong and always used his pronunciation themselves, considerably to the astonishment of those outside the secret.
Rose in Darkness Page 5
