Tour de Force (12 page)

‘Yes, we are glum; and if you want bread and jam, Louli, you can order it yourself, I'm worn out with Dumb Crambo. But imagine, ducky,' said Mr Cecil, pushing back his brassy hair, ‘we've been talking about blackmail and neither Mrs Rodd nor Miss Trapp had any
idea!
'

Louvaine opened her blue eyes very wide and gave Miss Trapp a startled glance, as though over the tops of a pair of spectacles. Leo Rodd said sharply, ‘Blackmail?'

‘Hadn't you told Mr Rodd, dear?'

‘No,' said Louli, ‘there hasn't been a chance.'

‘Blackmail?' said Fernando. ‘Miss Lane?'

Cecil pushed back his hair again with a comb of white fingers. ‘I thought you were telling people, Louvaine?'

‘I was going to, but how could I? The murder happened and there's been nothing but ta-ta-ta about that, ever since.'

Leo Rodd had no truck with Dumb Crambo. He called over a waiter, pointed to Fernando, Miss Barker, and himself and said loudly, ‘El café, el pan and el jam if you haven't got anything else and
despacio
, no I mean the other thing,
de prisa!
Oh, sorry, Fernando, I'd forgotten you could do it but never mind, he's gone now,' To Louvaine he said: ‘You didn't think that all this – about blackmail – might have fitted in with the ta-ta-ta about murder?'

‘I thought it might fit in most uncomfortably,' said Louvaine. She added that anyway, she
had
told Inspector Cockrill before the murder. ‘He said she probably wasn't a blackmailer, really; she probably only enjoyed seeing people wriggling on the hook.'

‘Oh, well,' said Leo. You could see the care falling away from his shoulders.

‘Some people are like that,' said Helen Rodd. No doubt Miss Lane had thrown out little hints about Miss Barker's goings-on, had thrown out little threats of what she could tell the injured wife. It was extraordinary, she thought drearily to herself, how people always assumed that the wife went through it all blinkered by blindness and stupidity – as though one wasn't always the very first person to know, sometimes before even the guilty parties themselves! ‘It gives them a kick,' she said, ‘to think they have the power of making other people unhappy.' Did they suppose, she wondered, that they had the monopoly in that?

Inspector Cockrill came down the veranda steps, a trifle self-conscious in the panama hat and a suit of crumpled alpaca. He looked with repulsion upon the remains of the rolls and jam, and the cups of thick coffee. He was sick of Abroad. ‘You go to your Dirrytory,' he said to the waiter, loudly and clearly, ‘and tell him to arrange a pot of tea for me and some bacon and eggs, bacon and eggs, understand? – bacona and eggsa.' He sat down heavily in one of the square wooden chairs. ‘Well?'

Mr Fernando had spent a busy night getting things worked out and he now had a plan to put before Inspector Cockrill. All the Gerente wanted, he said was – a culprit. But supposing it could be proved to the Gerente that not even a culprit was needed. He heard, Fernando heard, for the first time this morning, that yesterday Miss Lane had given herself away – had allowed two people, and one a policeman, to learn that she was a blackmailer. She had run off and had her bathe; but later, in the quiet of her room, thinking it all over – must she not have been overwhelmed at the realization of what she had done? The moment they returned to England, the Inspector would warn the authorities; investigation would be made – not only was her future means of livelihood reft from her, but her past would come surging up, and what would be left to her but prison and disgrace? What horror, what despair, cried Fernando, all teeth and eyelashes. She sits there at her little table, her head in her hands. Her eye falls upon the knife. She lies down upon her bed and composes herself for death: one sharp thrust – and all is over.

‘Does she then get up and fetch the red shawl?' asked Cockie, fascinated by this résumé, ‘or did she get it first? And why the sacrificial sprinkling of the table? And what has happened to the oblong object that was on the table? And why did she mop up the floor and why did she do all that washing in the bathroom, and how did she manage it after the stab wound – which has every appearance of having caused almost instant death – had been made?' He added, agreeably, that he only wanted to know.

‘Ah,
you
want to know, Inspector,' said Fernando. ‘But the Gerente wants to go out in his boat with the fleet. These inconvenient questions will not trouble him.' He looked at his friends, his Helpless Ones. ‘You are all on a jolly holiday: would it not be best if the Gerente were to accept this solution? After all – she was a blackmailer: do you care so much who killed her? Do you really wish that for this, someone should rot away in the San Juan gaol? Say nothing to the Gerente of this blackmail: I will tell him we all believe she committed suicide. Inspector – you agree? What Scotland Yard says will be of importance.'

‘If you don't mention the blackmail,' said Cockrill, ‘what motive will you suggest for the suicide? Or won't the Gerente care about that either?'

Fernando thought that the Gerente would care about nothing but getting on with his smuggling. He shrugged and smiled. ‘Young ladies fall in love. A hopeless affair …?' He put his head on one side. ‘Mr Rodd – was not the lady just a little devoted to yourself?'

‘She may well have been,' said Leo. ‘Most ladies with nothing else to do at the moment, fall in love with my missing arm. But I've never had a suicide on my hands yet – or shall we say my hand? – and I'm not going to begin now. You can look elsewhere for your motive. However, I'm all for saying nothing about blackmail and lots about suicide, and getting out of San Juan as quick as we can go. Upon which proposition, I suggest a show of hands.'

Through a forest of hands, Inspector Cockrill watched the approach of the Gerente, down the veranda steps. He looked very splendid, the sun glinting on the black patent leather hat and the silver chasing of his ancient gun, the blue cloak flowing about rumpled trouser legs, innocent of any creases save those of much wear. He was followed by the hotel manager, carrying a small brown book.

Five feet from the breakfast table, he stopped. He motioned to the Diretore. The Diretore stepped up to his side and opened the little book. He held it out in front of him like a choir boy with his musical score, and began to read. ‘Meesa Trappa,' read the hotel manager, unhappily contorting his face over the difficult, clipped English syllables. ‘Ochenta Parka Lana, speenister …' He broke down, he read out several lines in a rapid gabble in his own tongue. ‘She writes that Miss Trapp appears rich,' translated Fernando, muttering anxiously to his friends, ‘she says that she carries her – her treasure – in a brown bag, she says – she says that the monogram on the bag is not – is not …' He broke off, wretchedly faltering. He said to Miss Trapp: ‘She writes that the initials on the bag are not yours.'

The Gerente stopped the flow. He stubbed a dirty finger towards the bottom of the page. El Diretore looked at it, hesitated over it, finally announced: ‘Poundsa cincuenta.' But something more puzzled him. He turned the book round and showed it to Mr Fernando, pointing with his finger to a large figure circled in ink, at the bottom of the page. ‘Fifty pounds,' read out Fernando in a sick voice. ‘With a question mark.'

‘With a question mark? What on earth can it all mean?'

‘It can only mean one thing: is Miss Trapp's secret good for fifty pounds?'

The Gerente silenced them with a commanding hand. El Diretore turned over a page. ‘Meester Thetheelah. Ch-rees-topy …' But he could not. ‘No importa,' said the Gerente. He stubbed with his finger again. The Diretore, one eye on Fernando for guidance, read out: ‘Poundsa ciente?'

‘A hundred pounds,' said Fernando.

‘A hundred pounds –
me?
' said Cecil. His pale face was dreadfully white, his hair was the brassy gold of ormolu against the colour of old ivory. ‘Ask him – don't ask him what it is, just ask if – if she – thinks she knows anything against me?'

The manager translated the English slowly to himself, repeated it in his bastard Spanish. ‘He says, yes,' said Fernando, retranslating. ‘He says it is about – your shop. He says …'

Louvaine came loyally to the aid of a friend in trouble, perhaps about to be shamefully (though they could not all help rather longing to know!), exposed. ‘Don't let him read it out. It's no business of ours.'

El Diretore had settled for the easy way out. He turned over the pages and translated to himself and so to Fernando. ‘This one is about you, Miss Barker,' said Fernando. ‘You come on the last page. Your name, your address.' He listened attentively. ‘Then much about …' His eyes slid round to Leo Rodd.

‘Don't tell me, let me guess,' said Louli. ‘But – how much?'

‘Feefty pounds,' said the Diretore. He turned a page. ‘Meesees Roddha.'

‘No,' said Helen quickly.

Fernando listened again. ‘He says nothing against you, Mrs Rodd. Much about – Mr Rodd. She asks …'

‘Never mind what she asks,' said Helen.

‘She asks only if you love your husband, Mrs Rodd. She asks what would be your attitude if you knew …'

‘That's enough,' said Helen, sharply.

‘At the bottom of the page is written five hundred pounds.' The Diretore tipped the book so that they could see it written there; but this time there were no question marks. ‘It might seem,' suggested Fernando, ‘that this was not to be so much a price for silence as a price for speaking.' He turned another page. He said quietly: ‘And here is Fernando. There is something against me too. And the figure fifty pounds.'

‘And me?' said Leo.

The Gerente took the book. He flicked the pages and showed them the heading ‘Leo Rodd'. There was very little more, and there was no figure at the bottom of the page. He turned another page and put the book into Inspector Cockrill's hands.

His thumb stuck in the open place, Cockie turned the book over. It was a morocco bound notebook, more or less square: he observed that, lying open, it might well have covered the oblong space on the table that had been protected from blood splashes. It was written throughout in the elegant, upright, Italianate script which it had recently become fashionable to adopt, especially among those with uninteresting or illegible hands of their own: easy to learn and, with practice, fluent and quick. It was exceedingly neatly set out, the headings underlined, the margin regular – and theirs were by no means the only names in it. He turned back to the open page, headed with his own.

Miss Lane had a pretty turn of phrase. For a moment the Terror of Kent had a glimpse of himself as others saw him – a dusty brown sparrow that had somehow got mixed up with migratory birds and was ill at ease and unhappy in the raw, red, sun-drenched countryside, far from his English lanes. He was a Detective Inspector (a Det. Inspec., she wrote it), he was small and stooping, and his hair was grey: and after this was a query and an exclamation mark. There were little digs at the ever-present mackintosh, the detective stories, his dentures which he had hitherto held to be quite secret, the purchase of the too small panama hat. Beyond this, however, there was nothing: no hint of illicit passions, of false pretences of wealth or position, no reference – he breathed a sigh of relief – to certain small adventures in pelire in the tobacconists' shops of Barrequitas which did business, open and unashamed, trafficking in currency there. But at the bottom of the page was a figure, ringed in an ink circle: fifty pounds. And the white paper was flecked with brown marks, a school of little brown tadpoles, disturbed and wriggling away from him, across the open page. He had seen dried blood too often before this, not to know what the brown marks were.

They went for a bathe that morning. It was terribly hot and anyway there was nothing else they could do. Leo Rodd and Helen swam, Mr Cecil and Louvaine Barker and Miss Trapp went through their routine bobbing and screaming, Fernando gambolled in his porpoise fashion from the shore to the raft and back. Inspector Cockrill hitched up the stove-pipe trousers of his alpaca suit and went for a long, long paddle all by himself, the straw hat perched on the top of his noble head.

And afterwards, they lay in a long line under the sun-shed, drawn together by their common situation, and talked and talked and talked. Cockie, coming back from his paddle with ankles pink and puckered from their long immersion, stopped and looked down at them. Miss Trapp and Mr Fernando lay side by side, muttering together, he a vast, quaking, reddy-brown sea anemone, naked and anything but ashamed, she wrapped in striped towelling like an angel on horseback, a very thin prune in a very large rasher of streaky bacon. Mr Cecil lay on his back, his front still sore from yesterday's sunbathing: as Louli had said, you could see, literally, a line of demarcation where the pink ended and the white began – could see too the little daubs of suntan make-up in the wrinkles round his eyes, and the false tint of the yellow hair that flopped away from his head on to shoulders as white as a girl's – as white as Louvaine's own white shoulders, lying next to him with her red head on her forearm, scratching ‘I love you' in the sand for Leo Rodd to see and, seeing, smooth over with a warning frown. Helen Rodd was at the end of the row, lying with eyes closed behind round yellow sun-glasses, Dutch doll legs and arms spread-eagled, half in, half out, of the sun. And one of them thought Inspector Cockrill – a murderer. For there was no escape now – no easy talk of servants, of intruders bent upon plunder or rape, no nonsense about suicide. The book had been on the table, the book that had held their names and against their names, some of their names at least, details of secrets known to the murdered woman. No Spaniard, no Italian, no San Juanese could have known what the book contained, or, knowing, need have troubled to hide it away. The Gerente had found it, tucked under the lining of a drawer of the wardrobe; he had told his blood brother so much, but refused any glimpse of the contents, marching off proudly with his booty back to his gaol. ‘He says he will come again,' Fernando had translated; and doubtless he would. Doubtless he would come again. And meanwhile one of them – one of these six people lying chitter-chattering like a row of starlings, under the sun-shed – arguing, guessing, confiding, playing half-seriously at being anxious and terrified but not nearly as anxious and terrified as they had every right to be – one of them was, in fact, a murderer. But he did not know which; and since it did not then occur to him that by just glancing once more at them, with a little more attention, he should have been able to tell, he left them to it and went back up to the hotel.