Tour de Force (10 page)

Above them the sky was dark with a clear, star-studded darkness like a spangled veil, below them the sea was a-glitter with the firefly lights of the fishing fleet, pair by pair; all about them the air was balmy, sweet with the scent of jasmine, mimosa, and rose. But Inspector Cockrill, heaving himself sideways to dive into his pocket for papers and tobacco, wished himself fervently back in England again, on a nice chilly, damp July evening, holidaying decently in a Herne Bay boarding house. ‘Well, I'll tell you what I can. It isn't what I'm used to,' said Cockie, resentfully, ‘but it seems to me that you'd better all know what there is to face.' He completed the cigarette and lighted a small bonfire at its wispy end. ‘Very well. I will describe what I've seen; you can draw your own conclusions. First: the room.'

‘Just like all our rooms?'

‘Just like the rest of them. There are ten in a row, in this angle of the hotel building, and this was number five; that you know. A small, square room with nothing in it but a bed, standing out from the centre of one side wall, and along the other wall a built-in wardrobe. The balcony wall, as it were, has a central door and a small window on either side, rather high up. Under the window on the bed side, there's a small dressing-table, under the other window there's the small square table and a plain wooden chair. The floor's uncarpeted, bleached white wood: and all the furniture's in plain bleached wood. The curtains, the bed curtains, the counterpane, are all just white cotton stuff – the whole thing has a sort of monastic effect, presumably to be cool and clean. The back of the room is divided off to make a tiny bathroom, leaving a narrow passage to the corridor door. I take it your rooms are all much the same? – mine is.'

Double or single, the rooms were all the same: into some a
matrimona
had been squeezed instead of a single bed, but that was all the difference. ‘Very well. In the bathroom there's only a wash-basin and a shower: the shower is just an overhead sprinkler surrounded by a curtain, with a rim round the drain underneath.'

‘Whoever peddled those shower things through Italy,' said Louvaine chattily, ‘did a wonderful job. They're simply everywhere.' The only thing was, last night she had forgotten her bath-cap and hair-dye had simply spouted all over her, positively rivers of blood …

‘At any rate they sold one to the Bellomare Hotel for Miss Lane's bathroom,' said Helen, pleasantly smiling, pleasantly leading back to the subject on hand. Her husband sketched her a tiny mock bow. ‘Thank you, my dear; your heart is in the right place – whatever they may say.' But Inspector Cockrill thought that underlying the mockery was a gleam of purest gratitude: of rather astonished gratitude that for his sake, she should protect his love from so signally making a fool of herself at a moment when light-hearted folly was very much out of place: should protect himself from that first sick stab of disillusion and doubt. ‘You were saying, Inspector …?'

Inspector Cockrill had, as it happened, finished with what he had been saying. ‘We come now to her possessions. They're as I think you'd expect – very neat, nothing out of place: everything of excellent quality, no discrepancies in that respect. I was only able to have a very cursory glance round; but I could see that the dress she wore this morning was hung up in a wardrobe, there were some underclothes in a corner of the bathroom, presumably for washing. Her bathing dress and the rubber cap and shoes were rolled up in the white towel – a hotel towel – and hung over the edge of the balcony rail outside her door. There were two novels, closed, on a corner of her dressing-table, no sign anywhere of sewing things, manicure things, pens, pencils, paper, and so forth – they were probably in the dressing-table drawers.' He eyed them with a glint of teasing. ‘You will make what you like of all this as I go along.

‘Now, the body. The body was lying as you saw it. There seem to be no marks of any kind, no scratches or bruises, nothing – except the one stab wound. This was made by the paper knife, as you saw. Several of the tourists bought these knives this morning in the town …'

Mr Cecil had bought one himself, too divine for one's desk at Christophe's with that wrought black and gold handle, so decorative; and Louvaine had bought one, because Leo had admired it; and thought that one day she would give it to him and say, ‘Little did they realize when I bought it flat out in front of them all, that I was buying it for you …' for on such foolish secrets her secret love of necessity for the time being fed; and Miss Lane had bought one. They were labelled exuberantly, ‘Butifull Toledo steel works, mad only in San Juan', and it was not for tourists to enquire how Toledo steel came to be made only in San Juan, or where were the foundries and workshops necessarily implied.

‘The blade is five inches long,' said Cockie, ‘and thin and sharp. It could penetrate the breast without undue force being used.'

‘You mean that a man
or
a woman …?'

‘Certainly,' said Cockie. ‘Now, the point of penetration is fairly low on the left breast, over the heart, but not more than an inch from the central line of the breast bone. The kimono thing she was wearing has straight edges; it would be tied round her waist by the sash and form a sort of deep V. The knife hasn't penetrated the stuff, it has gone between the two edges of the V.' He added that they could make what they liked of that: and furthermore that she had nothing on under the gown.

‘The coverlet under her is rumpled a bit, of course, and there are a few smears of blood on it. The disarrangement suggests that she was lifted on to the bed from the side away from the windows, which is a little odd because the shortest way from the spot where she was killed, in the table corner, would be to the other side of the bed. The front of the kimono is spotted and smeared with blood, but not as much as you'd expect; and the blood seems rather pale and watery there, as if it were diluted.' He held up a hand to ward off premature interruptions. ‘The wound would probably have spurted blood. If she'd put up her hands to defend herself, her hands and arms would have had a good deal of blood on them; but in fact they seem quite clean except for a few small smears. The shawl underneath her is quite clean, except for a damp patch where her head lay; and as we know, her hair was still quite wet.

‘That's the bed. Now, the table and chair. The table has been pulled out into the room a bit, and the chair is behind it: as you go in through the balcony door, they're in the right-hand corner, but the table had been moved so that anybody sitting at it would be looking, as it were slantwise, towards the balcony door; and anybody standing half turned in the doorway would be talking to the person across the little table. The chair is pushed back as though someone rose quickly from it: I only say “as though” but I think Miss Lane was a very tidy person and in the ordinary way, she would probably have replaced the chair. The chair has a few smears of blood; but the table is spattered all over with blood – except for an oblong patch, roughly in the centre which is free of any blood marks at all. The spots of blood, as I stood in the doorway, were tapered in my direction, if you see what I mean.' No one appearing to see what he meant at all, he amended crossly that they were shaped like tadpoles with their tails pointing towards him.

‘Couldn't be clearer,' said Cecil,
sotto voce
to Louli; but Louli had learned her lesson by now, and looking nervously at Leo, she mumbled to shut up and listen.

‘Turning to the bathroom,' said Cockie, not deigning to throw them a glance, ‘I found blood smears almost everywhere. The shower had been used since the maid did the bathroom, the hand towels were damp and blood-stained, just dropped about anyhow. One of the bath-towels, we know, was outside on the rail with her damp bathing things: the other was rather interesting – it was very damp and it was stained with blood all along one edge. There were smears on the wooden floor between the bathroom and the bed, where blood had been washed off or water mopped up; and the same between the table and the foot of the bed.' He stopped abruptly and tilted back his chair, his toes just touching the ground. A glass of grappa was standing full before him and he emptied it, coughing, at one gulp.

Mr Cecil thought that it was all madly interesting, but didn't tell them much.

‘It tells us a very great deal,' said Cockie severely.

Leo Rodd had a bash. ‘It tells us that – let's see. She came up from her bathe – no, go back earlier than that. She came in from lunch, she changed into her kimono, possibly with her undies still on, and presumably lay down like the rest of us. Then she put on her bathers, tossing her underclothes, then or before that, into the bathroom to be washed. When she came back from the bathe, she put her wet things on the rail and slipped on her kimono with nothing underneath it. She pulled out the little table from the window a bit and was sitting there when …'

‘What for?' said Cockie.

‘What for?'

‘Why did she sit down at the little table?'

‘Well,
I
don't know – to write some letters or something.'

‘But there were no writing things on the table,' said Helen. ‘Or sewing things. Or manicure things.'

‘M'm. I see,' said Leo.

‘Perhaps she was reading,' suggested Louvaine, reasonably.

‘One doesn't sit at a table to read,' said Miss Trapp, ‘and her books were on the dressing-table. And anyway, she'd come in to lie down.' Miss Trapp herself had sent her in to lie down.

‘Perhaps she
had
lain down. After all, she was in her room for two and a half hours before we found her. Then she got up and sat down at the table.'

‘I say again – what for?' said Cockie.

‘Perhaps she sat down to talk to the murderer?'

‘Leaving him standing up? There wasn't anything else in the room to sit on.'

‘That would suggest a servant,' said Miss Trapp, eagerly; but nobody bothered about Miss Trapp and her servant problem any more.

‘Then what was on the table?' said Cockie.

‘You've told us yourself that there was nothing on it,' said Leo. But he remembered. ‘Ah! – but you said there was a patch that wasn't spattered with blood – an oblong patch.'

‘Like ferns in a book,' said Louvaine. She shied away from that dawning, irritable frown. ‘No, no, I'm not talking nonsense: don't you remember when one was a child, one used to put leaves and things down on a clean page and spatter ink with a comb? It was heavenly. And then you lifted up the leaf and all the rest of the page was speckled.'

A slight altercation followed between those who had never heard of it in their lives, and those whose childhood rainy days had been made exquisite with ink and comb. Mr Cockrill continued to draw on his wispy cigarette. He considered it his duty, in the very curious, not to say dangerous, circumstances in which they found themselves, to tell them the facts. If they could not trouble to use the information, that was no affair of his.

Miss Barker, however, was getting quite well trained. She nervously brought the subject back from the realms to which her simile had consigned it. ‘I only meant that the square patch was like the leaf. In other words, Inspector, there was something on the table when the table was spattered with blood; and it's been taken away.'

‘Yes,' said Cockrill.

‘Something square: a book or a box.'

‘Something oblong, actually; if a book, possibly an open book.'

‘There were two books in the room?'

‘Neither of them is bloodstained.'

‘Now that I do call exciting,' said Cecil. ‘A book or a box – and the murderer's taken it away. Whatever can have been in it?'

Inspector Cockrill had a very shrewd idea of what might have been in the book or the box and thought Mr Cecil too might be less than sincere in his wide-eyed wonder. But they moved on, away from that particular problem. ‘Well, anyway, Inspector, she was sitting there in her white kimono and the murderer came in through the balcony door …'

‘Why the balcony door, Leo?'

‘Because of the way the chair was facing, the way the table was turned. Aren't I right, Inspector?'

‘You'd make a good detective,' said Cockie; higher praise no man could bestow.

‘They faced each other across the table. The murderer was – was either a man
or
a woman,' said Leo, slowing down. And he added, tentatively, but encouraged by Cockrill's recent praise, ‘But probably a woman – or a man whom Miss Lane knew pretty well.'

‘Very good indeed,' said Cockrill, surprised.

‘And about her own height or a little taller; and right-handed.'

‘Now you're simply showing off,' said Mr Cecil.

‘He's doing very nicely,' said Cockie. ‘But you'd better explain your deductions, Mr Rodd, to these simple minds.'

Leo deprecatingly obliged. ‘As for the height and the right-handedness, you could see from the hilt of the knife, when she was lying there, that the thrust went from right to left and slightly downwards and any detective story tells you what that shows. As to the murderer being a woman or a man – well, it's true that a man would be the likeliest to be taller; Miss Lane wasn't short by any means.' He gave them his bitter smile and added that he trusted they would balance the fact that he was the only man present of the requisite height, against the fact that he could hardly be called right-handed. ‘But I still think it may have been a woman, and that's because of the kimono. If the knife didn't go through the kimono, if it went between the two edges, then the kimono must have been fairly wide open, or anyway, open a long way down; and I should think Miss Lane was the sort of girl who would automatically pull it together if she was in the presence of a man – unless she knew him extremely well, and even then I think she'd probably just hitch herself tidy and
comme il faut
.'