Thus Was Adonis Murdered

by Sarah Caudwell

  ‘I’m rather doubtful,’ said Timothy, ‘about the timing. You rang the Corkscrew at about twenty past eight, Cantrip. So I take it the news must have been on the teleprinter by quarter past. If the murder happened after dark, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Cantrip. ‘Depends what time it gets dark in Venice.’

  Timothy paid the bill. We rose to leave.

  ‘By the way,’ said Selena, ‘if you don’t mind, I’d still like to get to Heathrow in time to meet the flight Julia should have come back on.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Timothy. ‘If it turns out she’s on it after all— ’

  ‘That, certainly, would be a great relief. But if she isn’t, then I think, you know, in the light of what Cantrip’s just been suggesting, that I’d like to be sure that all the other Art Lovers are.’

  It was thus at a comparatively early hour on Saturday morning, considering the lateness of our retirement, that Selena collected me from my borrowed residence in Islington. She had received, but not yet had time to read, a further letter from Julia, evidently posted on Wednesday. She proposed, by reading it aloud, to improve the otherwise idle hours at Heathrow.

  Taking my place beside her, I resigned myself to being driven through the traffic of North London at the pace she describes as brisk. Still, we arrived without accident at Middle Temple Lane.

  Timothy had already spoken by telephone to Julia’s travel agents. They had confirmed that their customer, Miss Julia Larwood, was experiencing certain difficulties with the Venetian police, but were happy to reassure him that she was not actually in custody: she had merely been asked to surrender her passport and not to leave the Veneto. Arrangements were being made for her accommodation. Relieved, I dare say, to find that they were not solely responsible for the poor creature, they had given Timothy the name and address of their representative in Venice – that was to say, Graziella – and had promised that she would give him every possible assistance in his efforts on Julia’s behalf.

  To save Selena an unnecessary detour, Cantrip had offered to make his own way to Ragwort’s house in Fulham, where we would collect them both. It had not been, perhaps, a wholly altruistic offer: Ragwort is known to make excellent breakfasts. Indeed, I had rather hoped – but Cantrip had already finished the scrambled eggs, and Selena did not think we had time for coffee.

  Ragwort and Cantrip joined me in the back seat of the vehicle and we continued westwards, Selena negotiating with wonderful insouciance – I suppose that is the expression I am looking for – the series of roundabouts which seems designed to prevent the motorist, once in London, from ever leaving it.

  Cantrip had also been making telephone calls. Claiming the privileges of a part-time employee, he had used the information service of the Scuttle to find out the time of sunset in Venice. It was eight o’clock.

  ‘In that case,’ said Timothy, ‘the mistaken identity theory must be out of court, mustn’t it?’

  ‘Local time,’ said Cantrip. ‘The Italians are an hour ahead of us. So by London time it would only be seven. And then I rang this chap I know at the news agency and asked how long it would take for a story like that to get on the teleprinter. I said I’d got a bet on about it. And he reckons they’ve got a chap in Venice who’s hot stuff newshoundwise, so once someone called the fuzz it’d be on the wire in an hour or so.’

  ‘Still cutting it fine,’ said Timothy.

  ‘Not that fine,’ said Cantrip. ‘Look, the way I see it is this. Friday evening, about quarter to eight Italian time. This American bird and her husband changing for dinner. There’s a row – you know, starting with an argument about who left the top off the toothpaste or something and going on from there. And as you’d expect, Julia’s name crops up. “And on Sunday afternoon,” says Stanford, “when I found you and Julia lying on the bed in a newt-like condition, don’t you tell me she was just explaining an interesting point of Chancery procedure. Pigs might fly,” says Stanford. “There were goings-on going on.” And Marylou says all right, if that’s his attitude, she is happy to say that she and Julia actually spent the whole afternoon in nameless debaucheries— ’

  ‘We are given to understand,’ said Ragwort, ‘that that is not the case.’

  ‘That wouldn’t stop her,’ said Cantrip. ‘I mean, when a girl’s having a row with her husband, she’s not going to admit that all the years they’ve been married she’s been absolutely faithful to him – too humiliating. So they always say they’ve been having it off with someone else, even when they haven’t. Of course,’ he added with some bitterness, ‘this often causes a lot of distress and embarrassment to innocent third parties. But they don’t think about that.’

  ‘We defer to your experience,’ said Ragwort, ‘as a potential co-respondent.’

  Cantrip construing this remark as offensive, there ensued a scuffle.

  ‘Please,’ said Selena, ‘this isn’t Monday morning in the Companies Court.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Cantrip. ‘Where was I? Oh yes – Marylou says that as a matter of fact Stanford is quite right and she spent Sunday afternoon in bed with Julia. Going on to say that if he really wants to know this was about seventeen times more fun than anything along similar lines with Stanford. Good exit-line, so she sweeps out of the matrimonial bedroom and goes down to dinner. And Stanford, in a frenzy of jealous passion, seizes the nearest weapon – the dressmaking scissors or whatever – and goes off to Julia’s room to avenge his honour.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Selena.

  ‘No use your saying “surely not” like that – Americans get jolly steamed up about these things. Meanwhile Julia’s lured the chap from the Revenue to her bedroom – made a lot of wild promises, I expect, about submitting her returns on time and so on – and had her way of him. Feeling, in consequence, all bright and breezy and full of the joys of spring – you can defer to my experience on that, too, Ragwort – she is now having an invigorating shower. Singing, I dare say.’

  ‘Singing?’ said Ragwort, apparently deeply shocked.

  ‘Well, she thinks it’s singing, poor grummit. Her voice doesn’t actually go up and down much the way it’s supposed to, but you can’t tell her that. Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether she’s singing or not, the point is she’s having a shower. And the chap from the Revenue is still lying on the bed. Enter Stanford, in a frenzy of jealous passion as aforesaid. It’s just got dark, but he doesn’t turn the light on, because he wants to creep up on Julia without her knowing. He’s a simple-minded sort of chap, the way these executives mostly are, and he thinks whoever’s in Julia’s bed must be Julia. So he stabs the chap from the Revenue. Exit Stanford. Julia comes out of the shower, still singing, I expect, and goes over to the bed with a view to burbling a few affectionate words at the Revenue chap – “How about a swift drink?” or something. And after a bit she notices there’s a lot of blood about the place and the chap seems to be dead. She screams – well, she makes a sort of gargling noise, the way she does with spiders – and goes out into the corridor. Where shortly afterwards someone finds her pootling up and down saying “I say, there seems to be a corpse in my bed.” Enter the fuzz and arrest her. And that could all happen in a lot less than ten minutes, so there’d be plenty of time for the agency chap to have it on the wire by quarter past eight London time.’

  We considered this Jacobean sequence. Selena relaxed her usual pressure on the accelerator and surrendered to a taxi her position in the fast lane.

  ‘I was under the impression, Cantrip,’ said Timothy, ‘that you regarded Bruce as the principal suspect – the man Eleanor was talking about.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cantrip, ‘but I didn’t know then that Julia’d been found in a compromising situation with the American bird. My money’s on Stanford now – I don’t mind an each-way saver on the Bruce character. Who are you backing, Ragwort?’

  ‘I am not addicted,’ said Ragwort, ‘to the vice of gambling. But it seems to me that this mistaken ide
ntity idea is an unnecessary complication. I would have thought the girl herself was a more likely suspect.’

  ‘The American bird?’ said Cantrip. ‘Why?’

  ‘Let us by all means accept,’ said Ragwort, ‘that Julia’s relationship with this girl was of pellucid innocence. From Julia’s point of view. It will not have escaped your notice, however, that the chain of events which led to Julia being in a state of déshabillé on Marylou’s bed, with Marylou’s head on her shoulder – and our knowledge of anatomy, assisted, in Cantrip’s case, by personal recollection, reminds us, in this connection, that Julia’s shoulder is an area closely adjacent to Julia’s admirable bosom – that each of that chain of events was initiated by Marylou?’

  ‘She only offered to mend Julia’s skirt,’ said Cantrip.

  ‘Oh, quite so,’ said Ragwort. ‘There is a perfectly innocent explanation for everything she did and it is of course our duty, as Cantrip so rightly points out, to assume, if we possibly can, that it is the correct one. Were we, however, briefly to be dispensed from that charitable obligation – ’ Ragwort leant back and gazed up at the roof of the car with a very spiritual expression, probably wasted on it.

  ‘Let us grant ourselves,’ said Timothy, ‘a hypothetical dispensation.’

  ‘Ah well, in that case, as I have already suggested, one might see what she did in a rather different light. And it would then be material to notice that Julia’s own behaviour, as described by herself, could have been construed as not wholly discouraging. She had paid the girl compliments. She had kissed her on the nose outside the Casa Rezzonico. She had talked to her about the Renaissance and the Chancery Bar. There had been, in short, nothing in Julia’s manner to indicate that she would recoil from an advance with loathing and abhorrence. If, indeed, that is what she would have done.’

  ‘If you mean,’ said Selena, stepping rather severely on the accelerator and overtaking the taxi again, ‘that Julia is not the sort of woman who would wantonly wound anyone’s feelings, particularly those of a girl who had been kind to her and was alone and friendless in a strange country – ’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ragwort, ‘that is exactly what I mean.’

  ‘So the way you see it,’ said Cantrip, ‘this American bird got a lech for Julia and fancied her chances?’

  ‘I would not have expressed it,’ said Ragwort, ‘with quite such felicity. But that is the essence of what I am suggesting. And if Marylou is a romantic sort of girl, who might take such an attachment seriously, then it seems not impossible, if she discovered Julia’s interest in the man from the Revenue, that she might make use of her dressmaking scissors to dispose of her rival.’

  ‘Doesn’t work,’ said Cantrip. ‘Because whoever did in the chap from the Revenue left things set up so that Julia got clobbered for it. I mean, either they wanted her to get clobbered or they didn’t mind her getting clobbered. If the American bird was keen on Julia, she wouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Ragwort, looking at Cantrip in great surprise, ‘Oh, don’t you think so? I cannot pretend, of course, to your worldly experience; but I would rather have thought it was precisely what she might do.’

  The tedium of securing a parking space at Heathrow and of the checking-in procedure I have fortunately no need to share with my readers. When it was done with we managed to find a table in one of the airport bars overlooking the area into which passengers from Venice would emerge to find transport.

  ‘Selena,’ said Timothy, ‘what was it you were saying last night about Eleanor Frostfield?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Selena, casually, ‘there were one or two things about Eleanor which I thought quite interesting. The first was the excellence of her tax arrangements. She has taken, it appears, every step Julia can think of to minimize the claims of the Revenue on her personal income every step, that is, except marriage to an impecunious husband. One may perhaps find it a little surprising – or one may not, I leave it entirely to you – ’ Selena spread one hand in a gesture illustrating the liberality with which she offered us this choice – ‘that a woman so admirably advised should allow such a defect in her arrangements to go unremedied. Then there’s this matter of the row with Kenneth Dunfermline. The sort of row, as Julia rather perceptively remarks, which usually occurs only between persons on terms of some intimacy. One gathers,’ she added, as off-handedly as a Persian cat not noticing the cream, ‘that Kenneth is an artist. It is, of course, a notoriously unremunerative profession.’

  ‘I say,’ said Cantrip, ‘are you suggesting that Eleanor and this Dunfermline chap are married to each other?’

  ‘My dear Cantrip, I am suggesting nothing. I am merely drawing attention to one or two matters of possible interest. If they seem to you to point to any particular conclusion – ’ she spread both hands, in a gesture of even greater generosity.

  ‘But if they were married,’ said Cantrip, ‘why were they pretending they’d only just met?’

  ‘I don’t think they were,’ said Selena. ‘Julia assumed they didn’t know each other because they weren’t sitting together on the plane. Everything after that suggests at least an acquaintance. A marriage, if one of mere fiscal convenience, they might well choose not to publicize; but that’s another matter.’

  ‘Even if you were right,’ said Timothy, ‘would it get us anywhere?’

  ‘No,’ said Selena, absent-mindedly, ‘no, I suppose not. But one can’t help thinking, can one, about that conversation between Kenneth and Eleanor, when he seems to have been insisting on carrying on with some plan or other against her wishes. Some plan involving a friend of his. And at the Lido, Ned says that Kenneth has plans to make both their fortunes. It rather sounds, doesn’t it, as if Kenneth were engaged in some kind of commercial enterprise which he expected to be profitable – and in which, for some reason, Ned was an essential participant. Of course,’ said Selena, in a manner so casual as to suggest that she had almost lost interest in the subject, ‘if Eleanor had married Kenneth for reasons of fiscal advantage and he were then, after all, to earn a large sum of money, the effect on her tax position would be quite catastrophic.’

  The suggestion that Eleanor Frostfield had done away with Ned to safeguard the marginal tax advantage of a hypothetical marriage to Kenneth Dunfermline may seem to my readers, seeing it in the coldness of print, too fanciful to be entertained for a moment. My readers, however, have not been exposed to the oblique seductiveness of Selena’s advocacy.

  ‘My dear Selena,’ said Timothy, ‘it is a most attractive and ingenious hypothesis. It might even, I suppose, be right. But would you care to estimate my chances of persuading the Italian police that it is probable? No, Selena, it won’t do. Remember, we don’t have to find out who did the murder – all that matters as far as we’re concerned is satisfying the police that Julia didn’t. But if I do have to start suggesting alternative suspects, I’d rather it was someone reasonably obvious.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Selena. ‘But there isn’t anyone obvious.’

  ‘Oh surely,’ said Timothy. ‘Statistics show, I gather, that if one is going to be murdered it will probably be by one’s spouse or lover. Presumably there’s no doubt, in Ned’s case, that that means Kenneth Dunfermline? It’s difficult to imagine any other reason why two such dissimilar young men should be travelling together.’

  The possibility that Kenneth had committed the crime had long since occurred to me. But I had misgivings: Venice is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city – her police force, I felt, would not take a less than worldly view of Ned’s connection with Kenneth, nor would they be unfamiliar with the criminal statistics. I feared, if they did not regard Kenneth as the obvious suspect, that they must have some excellent reason not to suspect him at all.

  The public address system announced the arrival of the flight from Venice. We began to give closer attention to the stream of returning passengers.

  ‘They won’t be out for ages,’ said Cantrip. ‘They’ll have to hang about for their luggag
e to come through on that turntable thing.’

  But it was only a few minutes later that we caught sight of a rather subdued little group which seemed to correspond to Julia’s description of the Art Lovers: a handsome, middle-aged woman, whose figure had that unyielding symmetry achieved only by a substantial corset; a muscular young man, sombre of feature; a pretty girl with pale blonde hair; and, close beside her, another young man, square-shouldered, who gave the impression of a certain aggressiveness towards the world.

  ‘I say,’ asked Cantrip, ‘do you think that’s them?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Selena. ‘Those labels on their hand luggage – they’re the same kind as the travel agents gave Julia. But where’s the Major?’

  ‘I think,’ said Timothy, ‘that the Major must have undertaken to act as porter. If he’s collecting all their suitcases from the conveyor belt, that would explain how the rest of them have got through Customs so quickly. It looks as if they’re coming up here to wait for him.’

  The Art Lovers came up the staircase and through the door of the bar. At our first unobstructed view of the American girl, Ragwort gave what sounded almost like a whistle. We regarded him with surprise: Ragwort is notoriously unsusceptible.

  ‘The dress,’ said Ragwort, ‘is Yves St Laurent. The shoes and handbag are Gucci. The scarf is Hermes. And if that young woman,’ said Ragwort, admiration for her elegance contending with puritan disapproval of its cost, ‘is wearing a penny less than six hundred pounds on her back, I’ll be – I shall be very much surprised.’

  The Art Lovers sat down several tables away, too far for us to hear any conversation between them. Not that it would have been informative: apart from telling Stanford what they would like from the bar – at any rate, he went off there and returned with a tray of drinks – they hardly exchanged a word: it was plainly not a festive gathering.

  Better placed than they for this purpose, we perceived before they did the arrival in the area below of a tall man pushing a loaded baggage trolley: he was deeply suntanned; he had a white moustache; he was wearing Bermuda shorts.