Photo Finish ra-31

by Ngaio Marsh

  She opened the bedroom door into the sitting room and in two glorious notes sang, “Rupert!”

  Rupert had been coping with her fan mail. When he came in he found that Mr. Reece had laid out a number of glossy, colored photographs on the bed. They were all of the island lodge.

  The Sommita was enchanted. She exclaimed, purred, exalted. Several times she burst into laughter. Ben Ruby arrived and the photographs were reexhibited. She embraced all three men severally and more or less together.

  And then with a sudden drop into the practical, she said, “The music room. Let me see it again. Yes. How big is it?”

  “From memory,” said Mr. Reece, “sixty feet long and forty wide.” Mr. Ruby whistled. “That’s quite a size,” he remarked. “That’s more like a bijou theatre than a room. You settling to give concerts, honey?”

  “Better than that!” she cried. “Didn’t I tell you, Monty, my dar-leeng, that we have made plans? Ah, we have cooked up such plans, Rupert and I. Haven’t we, caro? Yes?”

  “Yes,” Rupert said with an uncertain glance at Mr. Reece. “I mean—. Marvelous.”

  Mr. Reece had an extremely passive face, but Rupert thought he detected a shade of resignation pass over it. Mr. Ruby, however, wore an expression of the deepest apprehension.

  The Sommita flung her right arm magnificently across Rupert’s shoulders. “This dear child,” she said, and if she had made it “this adorable lover” she could have scarcely been more explicit, “has genius. I tell you — I who know. Genius.” They said nothing and she continued. “I have lived with his opera. I have studied his opera. I have studied the leading role. The ‘Ruth.’ The arias, the solos, the duets — there are two— and the ensembles. All, but all, have the unmistakable stigmata of genius. I do not,” she amended, “use the word stigmata in the sense of martyrdom. Better, perhaps, to say ‘they bear the banner of genius.’ Genius,” she shouted.

  To look at Rupert at this moment one might have thought that martyrdom was, after all, the more appropriate word. His face was dark red and he shifted in her embrace. She shook him, none too gently. “Clever, clever one,” she said and kissed him noisily.

  “Are we to hear your plan?” Mr. Reece asked.

  The hour being seven o’clock, she hustled them into the sitting room and told Rupert to produce cocktails. He was glad to secrete himself in the chilly pantry provided for drinks, ice, and glasses. A few desultory and inaudible remarks came from the other three. Mr. Ruby cleared his throat once or twice. Then, so unexpectedly that Rupert spilled Mr. Reece’s whiskey and soda over his hands, the piano in the sitting room sketched the opening statement of what he had hoped would be the big aria from his opera, and the superb voice, in heartrending pianissimo, sang: “Alone, alone amidst the alien corn.”

  It was at that moment with no warning at all that Rupert was visited by a catastrophic certainty. He had been mistaken in his opera. Not even the most glorious voice in all the world could ever make it anything but what it was — third-rate.

  “It’s no good,” he thought. “It is ridiculously commonplace.” And then: “She has no judgment. She is not a musical woman.”

  He was shattered.

  Chapter two

  The Lodge

  i

  Early on a fine morning in the antipodean spring the Alleyns were met at their New Zealand airport by a predictably rich car and were driven along roads that might have been ruled across the plains to vanishing points on the horizon. The Pacific was out of sight somewhere to their left and before them rose foothills. These were the outer ramparts of the Southern Alps.

  “We’re in luck,” Alleyn said. “On a gray day when there are no hills to be seen, the plains can be deadly. Would you want to paint?”

  “I don’t think so,” Troy said after considering it. “It’s all a bit inhuman, isn’t it? One would have to find an idiom. I get the feeling that the people only move across the surface. They haven’t evolved with it. They’re not included,” said Troy, “in the anatomy. What cheek,” she exclaimed, “to generalize when I’ve scarcely arrived in the country!”

  The driver, who was called Bert, was friendly and anxious for his passengers to be impressed. He pointed out mountains that had been sheep-farmed by the first landholders.

  “Where we’re going,” Troy asked, “to Waihoe Lodge, is that sheep country?”

  “No way. We’re going into Westland, Mrs. Alleyn. The West Coast. It’s all timber and mining over there. Waihoe’s quite a lake. And the Lodge! You know what they reckon it’s cost him? Half a million. And more. That’s what they reckon. Nothing like it anywhere else in N’yerzillun. You’ll be surprised.”

  “We’ve heard about it,” Alleyn said.

  “Yeah? You’ll still be surprised.” He slewed his head toward Troy. “You’ll be the painting lady,” he said. “Mr. Reece reckoned you might get the fancy to take a picture up at the head of the pass. Where we have lunch.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely,” Troy said.

  “You’re going to paint the famous lady: is that right?”

  His manner was sardonic. Troy said yes, she was.

  “Rather you than me,” said the driver.

  “Do you paint, then?”

  “Me? Not likely. I wouldn’t have the patience.”

  “It takes a bit more than patience,” Alleyn said mildly.

  “Yeah? That might be right, too,” the driver conceded. There was a longish pause. “Would she have to keep still, then?” he asked.

  “More or less.”

  “I reckon it’ll be more ‘less’ than ’more,‘” said the driver. “They tell me she’s quite a celebrity,” he added.

  “Worldwide,” said Alleyn.

  “What they reckon. Yeah,” said the driver with a reflective chuckle, “they can keep it for mine. Temperamental! You can call it that if you like.” He whistled. “If it’s not one thing it’s another. Take the dog. She had one of these fancy hound things, white with droopy hair. The boss give it to her. Well, it goes crook and they get a vet and he reckons it’s hopeless and it ought to be put out of its misery. So she goes crook. Screechin’ and moanin’, something remarkable. In the finish the boss says get it over with, so me and the vet take it into the hangar and he chloroforms it and then gives it an injection and we bury it out of sight. Cripes!” said the driver. “When they told her, you’d of thought they’d committed a murder.” He sucked his teeth reminiscently.

  “Maria,” he said presently, “that’s her personal help or maid or whatever it’s called — she was saying there’s been some sort of a schemozzle over in Aussie with the papers. But you’ll know about that, Mr. Alleyn. Maria reckons you’ve taken on this situation. Is that right?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Alleyn. Troy gave him a good nudge.

  “What she reckons. You being a detective. ’Course Maria’s a foreigner. Italian,” said the driver. “You can’t depend on it with that mob. They get excited.”

  “You’re quartered there, are you? At the Lodge?”

  “This is right. For the duration. When they pack it in there’ll only be a caretaker and his family on the Island. Monty Reece has built a garage and boathouse on the lakeshore and his launch takes you over to the Lodge. He’s got his own chopper, mind. No trouble. Ring through when required.”

  The conversation died. Troy wondered if the driver called his employer “Monty Reece” to his face and decided that quite possibly he did.

  The road across the plains mounted imperceptibly for forty miles, and a look backward established their height. Presently they stared down into a wide riverbed laced with milky turquoise streaks.

  At noon they reached the top, where they lunched from a hamper with wine in a chiller kit. Their escort had strong tea from a thermos flask. “Seeing I’m the driver,” he said, “and seeing there’s the Zig-Zag yet to come.” He was moved to entertain them with stories about fatal accidents in the Gorge.

  The air up there was wonderfu
lly fresh and smelled aromatically of manuka scrub patching warm, tussocky earth. They were closer now to perpetual snow.

  “We better be moving,” said the driver. “You’ll notice a big difference when we go over the head of the Pass. Kind of sudden.”

  There was a weathered notice at the top. “Cornishman’s Pass. 1000 metres.”

  The road ran flat for a short distance and then dived into a new world. As the driver had said, it was sudden. So sudden, so new, and so dramatic that for long afterward Troy would feel there had been a consonance between this moment and the events that were to follow, as if, on crossing over the Pass, they entered a region that was prepared and waiting.

  It was a world of very dark rain forest that followed, like velvet, the convolutions of the body it enfolded. Here and there waterfalls glinted. Presiding over the forests, snow-tops caught the sun but down below the sun never reached and there, threadlike in its gorge, a river thundered. “You can just hear ’er,” said the driver, who had stopped the car.

  But all they heard at first was bird song — cool statements, incomparably wild. After a moment Troy said she thought she could hear the river. The driver suggested they go to the edge and look down. Troy suffered horridly from height vertigo but went, clinging to Alleyn’s arm. She looked down once as if from a gallery in a theatre on an audience of treetops, and saw the river.

  The driver, ever informative, said that you could make out the roof of a car that six years ago went over from where they stood. Alleyn said, “So you can,” put his arm round his wife, and returned to the car.

  They embarked upon the Zig-Zag.

  The turns in this monstrous descent were so acute that vehicles traveling in the same direction would seem to approach each other and indeed did pass on different levels. They had caught up with such a one and crawled behind it. They met a car coming up from the Gorge. Their own driver pulled up on the lip of the road and the other sidled past on the inner running with half an inch to spare. The drivers wagged their heads at each other.

  Alleyn’s arm was across Troy’s shoulders. He pulled her ear. “First prize for intrepidity, Mrs. A.,” he said. “You’re being splendid.”

  “What did you expect me to do? Howl like a banshee?”

  Presently the route flattened out and the driver changed into top gear. They reached the floor of the Gorge and drove beside the river, roaring in its courses, so that they could scarcely hear each other speak. It was cold down there.

  “Now you’re in Westland,” shouted the driver.

  Evening was well advanced when, after a two hours’ passage through the wet loam-scented forest that New Zealanders call bush, they came out into more open country and stopped at a tiny railway station called Kai-kai. Here they collected the private mailbag for the Lodge and then drove parallel with the railway for twenty miles, rounded the nose of a hill, and there lay a great floor of water: Lake Waihoe.

  “There you are,” said the driver; “that’s the Lake for you. And the Island.”

  “Stay me with flagons!” said Alleyn and rubbed his head.

  The prospect was astonishing. At this hour the Lake was perfectly unruffled and held the blazing image of an outrageous sunset. Fingers of land reached out bearing elegant trees that reversed themselves in the water. Framed by these and far beyond them was the Island and on the Island Mr. Reece’s Lodge.

  It was a house designed by a celebrated architect in the modern idiom but so ordered that one might have said it grew organically out of its primordial setting. Giants that carried their swathy foliage in clusters stood magnificently about a grassy frontage. There was a jetty in the foreground with a launch alongside. Grossly incongruous against the uproarious sunset, like some intrusive bug, a helicopter hovered. As they looked, it disappeared behind the house.

  “I don’t believe in all this,” said Troy. “It’s out of somebody’s dream. It can’t be true.”

  “You reckon?” asked the driver.

  “I reckon,” said Troy.

  They turned into a lane that ran between tree ferns and underbrush down to the lake edge, where there was a garage, a landing stage, a boat house, and a bell in a miniature belfry. They left the car and walked out into evening smells of wet earth, fern, and moss and the cold waters of the Lake.

  The driver rang the bell, sending a single echoing note across the Lake. He then remarked that they’d been seen from the Island. Sure enough, the launch put out. So still was the evening they could hear the putt-putt of the engine. “Sound travels a long way over the water,” said the driver.

  The sunset came to its preposterous climax. Everything that could be seen, near and far, was sharpened and gilded. Their faces reddened. The far-off windows of the Lodge turned to fire. In ten minutes it had all faded and the landscape was cold. Troy and Alleyn walked a little way along the water’s edge, and Troy looked at the house and wondered about the people inside it. Would Isabella Sommita feel that it was a proper showplace for her brilliance and what would she look like posing in the “commodious studio” against those high windows, herself flamboyant against another such sunset as the one that had gone by?

  Troy said, “This really is an adventure.”

  Alleyn said, “Do you know, in a cockeyed sort of way it reminds me of one of those Victorian romances by George Macdonald where the characters find a looking glass and walk out of this world into another one inhabited by strange beings and unaccountable ongoings.”

  “Perhaps,” said Troy, “the entrance to that great house will turn out to be our own front door and we’ll be back in London.”

  They talked about the house and the way in which it rose out of its setting in balanced towers. Presently the launch, leaving an arrowhead of rippled silk in its wake, drew in to the landing stage. It was a large, opulent craft. The helmsman came out of his wheelhouse and threw a mooring rope to the car driver.

  “Meet Les Smith,” said the driver.

  “Gidday,” said Les Smith. “How’s tricks, then, Bert? Good trip?”

  “No trouble, Les.”

  “Good as gold,” said the helmsman.

  Alleyn helped them stow the luggage. Troy was handed on board and they puttered out on the Lake.

  The driver went into the wheelhouse with Les Smith. Troy and Alleyn sat in the stern.

  “Here we go,” he said. “Liking it?”

  “It’s a lovely beginning,” said Troy. “It’s so lovely it hurts.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed,” he said lightly.

  ii

  Perhaps because their day had been so long and had followed so hard on their flight from England, the first night at the Lodge went by rather like a dream for Troy.

  They had been met by Mr. Reece’s secretary and a dark man dressed like a tarted-up ship’s steward, who carried their baggage. They were taken to their room to “freshen up.” The secretary, a straw-colored youngish man with a gushing manner, explained that Mr. Reece was on the telephone but would be there to meet them when they came down and that everyone was “changing” but they were not to bother as everybody would “quite understand.” Dinner was in a quarter of an hour. There was a drinks tray in the room, and he suggested that they should make use of it and said he knew they would be angelic and excuse him as Mr. Reece had need of his services. He then, as an apparent afterthought, was lavish in welcome, flashed smiles, and withdrew. Troy thought vaguely that he was insufferable.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I refuse to be quite understood and I’m going to shift my clothes. I require a nice wash and a change. And a drink, by the way.”

  She opened her suitcase, scuffled in it, and lugged out a jumpsuit, which was luckily made of uncrushable material. She then went into the bathroom, which was equipped like a plumber king’s palace. Alleyn effected a lightning change, at which exercise he was a past master, and mixed two drinks. They sat side-by-side on an enormous bed and contemplated their room.

  “It’s all been done by some supe
r American interior decorator, wouldn’t you say?” said Troy, gulping down her brandy-and-dry.

  “You reckon?” said Alleyn, imitating the driver.

  “I reckon,” said Troy. “You have to wade through the carpet, don’t you? Not walk on it.”

  “It’s not a carpet; it’s about two hundred sheepskins sewn together. The local touch.”

  “All jolly fine for us to snigger. It’s pretty smashing, really, let’s face it. Not human, though. If only there was something shabby and out of character somewhere.”

  “Us,” Alleyn said. “We’re all of that. Drink up. We’d better not be late.”

  On their way downstairs they took in the full effect of the hall with its colossal blazing fireplace, display on the walls of various lethal weapons and hangings woven in the Maori fashion, and a large semiabstract wood sculpture of a pregnant nude with a complacent smirk. From behind one of the doors there came sounds of conversation. An insistent male voice rose above the rest. There followed a burst of multiple laughter.

  “Good lord,” said Alleyn, “it’s a house party.”

  The dark man who had taken their baggage up was in the hall.

  “In the drawing room, sir,” he said unnecessarily and opened the door.

  About a dozen or so people, predominantly male, were grouped at the far end of a long room. The focal point seemed to be a personage with a gray imperial beard and hair en brosse, wearing a velvet jacket and flowing tie, an eyeglass, and a flower in his lapel. His manner was that of a practiced raconteur who, after delivering a mot is careful to preserve an expressionless face. His audience was barely recovered from its fits of merriment. The straw-colored secretary, indeed, with glass in hand, gently tapped his fingers against his left wrist by way of applause. In doing this he turned, saw the Alleyns, and bent over someone in a sofa with its back to the door.

  A voice said, “Ah, yes,” and Mr. Reece rose and came to greet them.

  He was shortish and dark and had run a little to what is sometimes called expense-account fat. His eyes were large, and his face closed: a face that it would be easy to forget since it seemed to say nothing.