The Corpse with the Silver Tongue (24 page)

“Why are there cellars down there?” I couldn't imagine.

“When the Palais was built it was as a hotel. The guests would demand the finest wines, so they built a web of cellars to keep large amounts of wines at the right temperatures. They built the cellars out of stone blocks above the ground, before they built the Palais, then they covered the tunnels they had built with the soil they removed when they dug the foundations for the hotel itself.”

“What a clever idea,” I commented. “It seems it was all very well planned.”

“Yes, the architect of this building was a very clever man, and he had used this method in other places before he did it here.”

As we turned our backs on the main gardens and continued through a couple of cool arbors quite close to the residents' parking area at the front of the building, I observed, “You seem to know a lot about the history of this building. Why is that?”

“Ah, it is old, and I like old things. And it is beautiful, and I very much like beautiful things.” His words seemed to be laden with hidden meaning: I was hoping his emphasis was on “beautiful,” not “old”; and maybe, even if he meant
both
, then I was in with a chance!

“It's not really your era, Beni, surely . . .”
I couldn't shut up, could I
?

“No, this is true. At one time I thought I might come here to live, so I read about the place, and spoke to a few of the older residents about it.”

“Did you know about the remains that were found when they were digging the foundations for the building?” Had Beni made the connection between the different phases of the life of the stolen necklace?

“I have heard some rumors, but I think that this is all. Often there are rumors about buildings such as this one—of how many men died building them, or of things that were found at the time. I do not believe everything I hear,” he replied quite jovially. I wondered if that joviality was just a bit forced, or if his eyes were creasing up because we were back in the sunshine again. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but the magical walk through the greenery was over, and we had to face the obnoxious Tamsin.

Ah well—I told myself that into every life a little rain must fall. It had been a very informative morning, and fun too, with Beni playing his part of the dashing Italian romancer to the hilt, and me getting all googly in the car. I had to put my game face on and get ready to take another chance to poke around the apartment where Alistair had died—I knew I hadn't seen it all. I wondered how I could convince Tamsin to give me a guided tour. It might not be easy, but I was ready to give it a go.

As we mounted the steps to the imposing front door, I couldn't help but imagine poor old Gerard tumbling down them in the early hours of the morning. They were good, solid, wide steps, and I wondered how he'd managed it. He'd had a poor night's sleep the night before, and a long day, and it was very late at night, so maybe he'd just lost his balance and slipped on the edge of a step . . . those steps he'd been climbing his whole life. Maybe I was beginning to see crimes where none existed, so I told myself to concentrate on the crimes I knew were real enough.

“You do not speak much, Cait, but I believe you think a great deal,” observed Beni as Tamsin buzzed us into the building.

“If you keep your mouth closed, people might
think
you're a fool, but if you open it, they might
know
you are,” I replied, quoting my mother. I even used her voice—we'd always sounded alike, and the words echoed in the voluminous hallway. It freaked me out a little.

“Ha! This is very true,” replied Beni, laughing, his booming voice overwhelming the echoes of my mother's warning.

His laughter carried us up in the elevator to the third floor, where we were met by Tamsin's pinched little face peering around her own front door. She motioned to us to come quickly, and we reluctantly did so. She stood there in her bare feet, wearing more black garb of some sort: maybe she was going to take a Victorian stance on mourning dress, and wear nothing but black, ever again. She slammed the door behind us, dragged us into the kitchen and finally spoke.

“I'm sure I'm next! They'll get
me
next, I know it!” She looked terrified.

Ah, so
that
was it. Tamsin had decided that there was a “they” and that “they” were out to get her.

Beni took a deep breath and adopted his “uncle full of bonhomie and comfort” voice. He reassured Tamsin that she would be just fine, that no one was out to get her, and reminded her that while there had indeed been two murders, Gerard's misfortune was just that—an accident, and she wasn't to let it upset her. I was gobsmacked that it took a slip-and-fall to reduce her to a gibbering wreck, as opposed to her husband's cold-blooded murder but was probably just me being “judgmental” again.

“Have you eaten today?” asked Beni solicitously.

“I ate bread. With Alistair gone there didn't seem to be any point making toast, so I just ate bread . . .” Her whiny voice trailed off pathetically.
Good grief—is it such an effort to put bread into a toaster and push a button?

“I will make you food,” said Beni, taking control. He moved Tamsin to one side and pulled open the door to the refrigerator.

“There's not much there, I checked yesterday,” I commented. “There's enough cheese in there to probably feed the entire building, and there were eggs. I'm assuming it's all still there.” I couldn't imagine that Tamsin would know what to do with an egg, other than eat it once it had been prepared for her.

“I don't know what's there, and I don't care . . . What's the point of it all? He's gone, and I'm all alone. I don't think I can go on . . .” Again, she did that trailing off thing with her voice. I ground my teeth. It was safer than letting my mouth form words.

“It is noon already—we will all have lunch,” declared Beni, as though Tamsin and I were in the apartment next door. “I shall cook. You ladies, you will let me do this!”

I wasn't going to object, nor, clearly, was Tamsin. I saw a chance and jumped at it.

“Hey, Tamsin—if we're banished from the kitchen, what if you show me around the apartment? I'd love to see it all. I bet it's pretty special upstairs, eh?” I tried to jolly her along. It was hard work, and I wasn't sure I was that good an actress, but she bought it—or else she too was gritting her teeth and just being polite to me in front of Beni. Either way, I didn't care, so long as I got to see the rest of the place. I wanted to see what hiding places there might have been for that necklace, and I wasn't going to achieve that by only ever seeing the kitchen, balcony, downstairs, and bathroom. I'd already laboriously recalled those areas in my mind's eye to establish where the wretched thing might have been secreted, with
no luck.

“Oh, alright,” Tamsin replied, very quietly for her.

I walked out of the kitchen and asked, “Is it okay if we go upstairs?”

“Yes, feel free, but it's just the
TV
room, and our bedroom and bathroom. It's not very exciting, you know.”

The sight that met my eyes at the top of the stairs might not have been very exciting, but it wasn't something I had expected. I took a moment to take it all in. The rooms looked as though a bomb had exploded in the back of a truck full of clothes, which had been left to lie where they fell. I
swear
every surface was littered with clothing of one type or another. The floor, the sofa in the
TV
room, the
TV
itself, the bed and the chairs in the bedroom, the floor of the bathroom, the bath, and even the toilet—all covered in skirts and pants and blouses and shirts, scarves and tops and sweaters and dresses and more skirts. If you could wear it, it was there.

Shoes, sandals, and boots, either singly or in pairs, were dotted in among all the clothes, making crossing the floor something of a challenge. As I walked I picked up and gathered a pile. Tamsin, proceeding beside me, opted for the “kick it to one side” routine. I wondered if that was how this mess had started, and pondered how long it might have been there. I figured that Alistair probably wouldn't have stood for it, so maybe she'd managed to create all this chaos since his death. If it hadn't been so frightening, it would have been impressive.

The only reason I wanted to see upstairs was to evaluate possible hiding places. Given that I could only see Tamsin's detritus, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't going to get much out of this particular foray. Just as I was planning a strategic retreat, Tamsin called to me from the bedroom, asking me to come to look at something. Dreading what it might be, I entered the room reluctantly, cautiously navigating through the mess on the floor, to find her holding a silver-framed photograph of her and Alistair. It looked like it had been taken on their wedding day. He was smiling like the cat that's got the cream, and she was gazing winsomely at the camera, with a circle of flowers in her hair and a rock the size of Gibraltar on a heavy chain around her neck. I didn't dare think it was a diamond, but it certainly looked like it.

Tamsin was looking at the photograph with what I could only describe as true love in her eyes. She said, “Ally liked giving me necklaces—he said I had a pretty neck. He got that one from a man in South Africa and gave it to me for our wedding. It's in the bank now. He never let me wear it. I might get it out and wear it to his funeral. It's so pretty.”

As I looked at her I knew that the love on her face and the wistfulness in her voice weren't for Alistair—they were for the jewelry.

“Do you know how he gave it to me?” she asked.

“No,” I said sweetly, shaking my head with disbelief. She seemed to think I was encouraging her.

“He had the caterer make a raspberry jelly for me—or do you call it ‘Jell-O' because you're a Canadian now? You're weird, you know, sometimes you sound Welsh and sometimes you sound . . . well, almost American . . . It's like you're a fake—you know, what Ally would have called ‘jumped up' . . . Why do you talk like that? Is it so you sound more clever?”

Good grief, this woman didn't need anyone or anything else to distract her—she could do it to herself, very easily.

I replied as calmly as possible. “I guess it's because I can't quite shake off my Welsh accent, or the British words I grew up using, but sometimes, having lived in Canada for more than ten years, my new vocabulary and accent kick in. It's not something I'm conscious of—it just happens. I suppose that sometimes it depends on who I'm speaking to: you're English so I suppose I might use the word ‘suppose' instead of ‘I guess' . . . or maybe not. Does that help?”

Tamsin thought for a moment, then replied, “No, not really. I don't understand. Anyway, like I was saying, raspberry is my favorite flavor, and it was a ‘very special' dessert for the feast we had the night before our wedding. At least, that's what Alistair called it . . . and he hid the necklace in the jelly, so it
was
very special . . . I found it with my spoon! Oh, it was fun! It was a bit messy too, of course, but Ally cleaned it all off for me and then put it around my neck. I wore it for the wedding. After that he made me put it in the bank. I've got another one—look!”

Out of a drawer in her bedside table, Tamsin pulled what looked like the necklace in the photograph. “Ally said he'd spent a small fortune on the real thing so it was worth spending a few bob on a fake that was good enough to fool pretty much everyone. Wasn't he clever! I feel different when I know I'm wearing the real one. And the pearls too.” With that, she pulled a jumble of strands from the same drawer. “
And
the black pearls.” I suspected that she could have gone on for a while: Alistair might, for all I knew, have been some weird sort of fetishist, considering what a fuss he'd clearly liked to make of his wife's neck.

“He
loved
my neck,” cooed Tamsin, cupping tangled jewelry in her tiny little hands and sliding them over her aforementioned body part.

“Lunch!” called Beni from below us, and she dropped the lot on the bed and took off. My God, her attention span lasted about as long as that of a two-year-old.

I looked at what she'd carelessly discarded and wondered how much of it was real and how much was fake. It started me thinking about Alistair and his patterns of behavior. I was sure I'd just learned something very useful—and it wasn't that Tamsin was disorganized, messy, or easily distracted—because I'd known all that before we'd come up to see her boudoir.

AS I FOLLOWED TAMSIN OUT
onto her balcony, it was a joy to see the beautiful city below us, and the sea beyond, spread out in the midday sun. I couldn't imagine it was a view of which one would ever,
could
ever, tire. I'll admit I felt a pang of jealousy that Tamsin saw it every day, and I didn't. At least one of the good things about my type of memory is that I can always sit and hum myself back to a place or a time that I have especially loved, and it's real to me once again. I suspected I'd be revisiting this particular scene on quite a few winter nights in years to come.

Beni jarred me out of my thoughts by shouting “Lunch!” quite close to my ear.

“Yes, we're all here!” I replied, probably quite snappily.

“I am calling Chuck—he said to call when the food was ready,” Beni replied, smiling at my scowl.

I was mystified. “Don't you think he meant for you to call him on the
phone
?” I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question.

I'd hardly managed to finish my pithy observation before Chuck's head popped out between the open shutters a couple of floors above the balcony. He called down to us, “Won't be a minute! And I'll bring the bread.”