Tour de Force (22 page)

Helen Rodd looked at the scraggy figure perched uneasily on the little chair, the pinched, pale face bent over the brown bag. ‘It's very, very kind of you, Miss Trapp. Thank you.'

‘And I'll just add,' said Miss Trapp, clutching still more tightly at the leather handles, ‘that of course I don't for one moment believe that you killed that woman.'

‘Well, thank you for that too,' said Helen. ‘Though I don't know why you should be so definite about it. After all, one of us did kill her: doesn't it sound extraordinary, Miss Trapp? – “one of us did kill her”. But it's true: one of us, one of seven people – six if you exclude Inspector Cockrill, which we surely must, and only five if we leave out Miss Barker too, because she certainly was with him. But even counting her in, that's only six – Miss Barker, Mr Cecil, Mr Fernando, my husband, and you and me. And after all, more than all of us I may be said to have had – provocation.'

‘Not to kill Miss Lane,' said Miss Trapp.

‘They suggest that it wasn't Miss Lane I intended to kill.'

‘You would not have killed the other one either,' said Miss Trapp, firmly. ‘It would not be your way.'

‘It hasn't been my way so far,' agreed Helen. She sat back against the high bed, her hand on the wooden poster, her weary head resting against her upraised arm. ‘But then, this time was different. This time I was being betrayed.'

‘You must have faith,' said Miss Trapp. She remembered the two faces staring at one another down on the terrace below the bougainvillea boughs, the angry face and the frightened face. ‘You must have faith. He will come back to you.'

‘Faith isn't a thing you can switch on and off like a light,' said Helen. ‘It requires some – co-operation on the other person's part.'

‘Do you think so?' said Miss Trapp. She relaxed her grip a little on the handles of the brown bag, gradually it slid into her lap and she let it lie there, only fiddling with the straps. ‘I think that that's the very quality of faith, you know – that it grows of itself: it's almost a definition to say that to have faith is to believe without a reason.' She paused, toying with the brown straps. ‘If – if I might intrude my personal affairs for a moment, Mrs Rodd – you know that I and Mr Fernando …?'

Helen looked up quickly, impetuously protesting. ‘Oh, Miss Trapp – no!' She added, as quickly: ‘Well, forgive me, I ought not to say that.'

Miss Trapp smiled a little sadly, a little ruefully. ‘You think Mr Fernando is – an adventurer?'

‘I like Mr Fernando, Miss Trapp. But I do think that you – that you don't know him very well yet.'

‘All the more reason to have faith,' said Miss Trapp. She smiled again. ‘I thought I would tell you, as a sort of example of what I mean, you know – that everything I have in the world, I am making over to Mr Fernando.'

Helen bowed her head. ‘I can only say that you must be very much in love'

‘Well, no,' said Miss Trapp, ‘I am not in love, Mrs Rodd. And so you see, as I can't offer love, I think that I must offer perfect trust, perfect faith. One must give something when one is receiving so much.'

‘But what can you be receiving, Miss Trapp; I mean, what is there that Mr Fernando can offer
you?
'

‘Only not to be lonely any more,' said Miss Trapp.

‘But with a man you hardly know, a man you can't know anything about yet, a man of his – well, of his type … Supposing it doesn't last? Then you'll be lonely again, and poor into the bargain.'

‘Well, I shall have had something,' said Miss Trapp. ‘Up to now, I've had nothing. Mr Fernando you know is not just entirely what he appears to be; any more, Mrs Rodd, than any of the rest of us are. And, for the moment at any rate, he has need of me; materially, yes, but, I flatter myself, in other ways too – he really, he actually has need of me. Nobody has ever needed me before in all my life and if I were to lose all I have and suffer for the rest of my days, this one little hour of being necessary to somebody will have been worth it to me. But I shan't lose and I shan't suffer. He'll repay me – in other ways, perhaps, but anyway in happiness. If I didn't have faith in that, I'd have no light to be accepting what he is offering me.'

The thin hands had relinquished altogether their grasp on the handbag, they lay in her lap, palms up, fingers crooked, a little pathetically, like the claws of a dead bird. But for once they were still, relaxed and still. Helen thought: She means what she says. She's got faith in him. She said: ‘I can only say that I hope you'll be very happy; and that you deserve to be.'

‘You'll be happy too,' said Miss Trapp. ‘He'll come back to you.'

‘I don't think so,' said Helen. ‘You see, this is something different. He really loves her.'

‘He hates her,' said Miss Trapp. ‘He's talking to her now, down on the terrace; and there's hate in his face.' She gathered up the brown bag and began to fiddle with the handles again. ‘She's done you an injury, you see, she's placed you in danger and now all his love for you comes back, he wants only to protect you, he's afraid for you.' The old, nervous grip on the handles reinforced itself, she hugged the bag up under her chin as though to preserve it from a world full of villainy. ‘She thought that by getting you out of the way, she could have him for herself. But she was wrong. Through this one action, she's lost him for ever.' And she smiled a strange smile, oddly exalted, oddly at peace. ‘You're like me, Mrs Rodd – you may suffer, you may have lost everything, you may even lose your liberty or your life. But you haven't lost in the end. She's lost. You've won.'

Louvaine Barker met Cockrill at the gate when, with Fernando, he got back to the Bellomare Hotel. She had been hanging about there awaiting his return and now intercepted him with a casual air which ill masked some deep and desperate inner resolve. Fernando, all regretful excitement, poured out the history of their unsuccess and hurried forward to meet his beloved, agog with sensational bad news. Cockrill slowed down his pace to Louli's since she was obviously anxious to talk to him. She said: ‘So you think it's pretty hopeless?'

‘We are at the mercy of unreason,' said Cockrill.

‘Leo will have to have another try with the ineffable boy friend.' She spoke lightly but he knew that she hung on his answer with desperate anxiety. ‘After all, he
is
an Old Wykehamist or something.'

‘The veneer appears to crack rather readily,' said Cockrill, dryly (for he is not, himself, a public school man), ‘under pressure from several centuries of depravity and rape. The Hereditary Grand Pirate is reverting quite simply to the code of his forefathers which is to say to a hereditary conviction that everything in life can be settled very nicely if someone can be found to walk a plank.'

They turned a corner that brought them within sight of the great, ever-open front doors of the hotel. A line of battered carriages was drawn up there, the horses, with their long sad faces beneath shabby straw sun hats, looking as though at any moment they would catch up trugs and secateurs and wander off into the gardens remarking that the oleanders were far better two or three days ago if only one had been there then.… The succeeding wave of tourists was frothing about them, the Battle of the Beige raging round a question of amatory precedence, the new guide darting hither and thither like a Cardiganshire corgi nipping at the heels of a herd of refractory cows. ‘History is repeating itself,' said Louli. ‘Not even giving themselves time to murder one another, Odyssey Tours is off on an expedition round the island.' She added, carelessly, ‘So we have the place to ourselves.'

‘What for?' said Cockie.

‘What for?'

‘What is this leading up to, Miss Barker?'

‘Oh, do you still call me Miss Barker?' said Louli. ‘People never do.' All she was leading up to, she said, was wouldn't it be a good idea to have a reconstruction of the crime, people always did in detective stories and why not they?

‘In order that you shall make a dramatic appearance as Miss Lane?' said Cockie. ‘And demonstrate that you murdered her yourself, stabbing her in the few moments that you were together alone, up at the top of the rock: but only sufficiently for her to be able to stagger up to her room, lay herself down on the bed and there die with her characteristic decorum.'

‘What,
me?
' protested Louli, laughing.

‘And thus offering yourself, a willing sacrifice, to save the life of the wife of the Man you Love, and win back his devotion and respect: even if you're no longer in a position to benefit by it.'

She was silent for a moment. Then she said lightly, ‘That phrase about the life of the wife is tricky to say.'

‘The life of the wife will not be saved this way,' said Cockie. ‘Because I shall not permit it.'

But public opinion was against him. Leo Rodd, frantic with anxiety about Helen, cut off from her by a barrier of resentful reserve, was crazy for action, for anything to vary the endless round of discussion and argument and guesswork and surmise, the ceaseless inward gnawing of self-questioning and self-reproach. ‘It can't do any harm. Something may come of it.' And Helen would perforce be winkled out from her self-imposed solitude, must surely be broken down into some sort of responsiveness, must at least be made aware of, if she still would not accept, his agony of protectiveness, of pity, of pain. ‘For God's sake, let's get on with it, let's do it, what harm can there be?'

‘Who is to play the part of Miss Lane?' said Cockie bleakly.

‘Well, we thought that Louli …'

‘I am not staging any theatrical entertainment for the exhibition of Miss Barker's talents.'

Leo flushed an angry red. ‘It's nothing of the sort.'

‘Are you telling me that this is not Miss Barker's idea, from beginning to end?'

‘She suggested it, certainly. Good God, she's only trying to make up for some of the harm she's done. If she doubles the two parts, we may, at least, prove that no one could really have mistaken her for La Lane.'

‘We are already all convinced of that,' said Cockie. He was fed up with the lot of them. ‘Your proposal then is that you should run through the events of that afternoon, so as to demonstrate when and how and of course by whom the murder was committed?'

‘To try to demonstrate it,' said Leo, sullenly.

‘Under the eyes of the two members of the Politio now guarding Mrs Rodd's every movement: and only too eager to dash off back to the Gerente with news of anything new.'

They had forgotten the guards. ‘Oh, well – they won't understand what they hear and they probably won't know enough, to be able to draw any reasonable conclusions from what they see.'

‘The Gerente is not interested in reasonable conclusions,' said Cockie.

‘The Gerente wants to get my wife into his filthy prison,' said Leo, impatiently, ‘and if you can think of a better plan to find out the truth and keep her out of it, we'll try it. If you can't, we'll go ahead with this.'

‘Very well,' said Cockie. But he did not like it. ‘On your heads be it.' He gathered them all together on the veranda outside the line of rooms. ‘You will all do exactly what you did on that afternoon, timing it as nearly as you can. Miss Barker can play her own part up to the time she joined me on the lower terrace; after that, she was under my eye for the rest of the afternoon, so she can be counted out; and she can proceed up to Miss Lane's room and we'll act out the various theories. I'll walk through Miss Lane's part to the time she was last seen alive – which was at the top of the rock, going back to her room to lie down after her second dive.' He added without humour that he would omit the actual diving, and further added that if they cared to include him with the suspects, which they were at liberty to do, it could all be acted over again later with someone else walking through Miss Lane's part. And having himself now wasted half an hour in vain argument, he adjured them all to stop hanging about and get a move on with their precious demonstration or the Odysseans would be back and the place cluttered up with people before they had even begun.

They went off to change.

It was half past four. In the sky the sun was high, glittering down upon the curly blue-green tiles of the hotel roofs, on the long lines of the walls, studded like a dovecot with rounded arches of windows and doorways, facing out over the sea. Behind the white buildings, the chill pines whispered together, mourning their lack of the colour and scent of the rose and geranium, the jasmine and myrtle, massed on the many-coloured, pebble-patterned terraces below: and it seemed to Inspector Cockrill, who on the whole is not given to fancies, that something of its cold breath struck through the windless heat of the afternoon. Despite his mistrust of the forthcoming performance, he found he could not stifle a rising excitement oddly at war with a sense of foreboding and dread. He wished he had fought harder against it, forbidden it altogether; but they would have acted without him anyway, and it was best that at least he should be there. As the minute hand of his watch touched the half hour, he took up his position at the rail of the balcony and called out, ungraciously: ‘All right. You can begin.' The die was cast.

Helen Rodd had changed in her new room and walked along the inner corridor to join Leo, followed at a respectful distance by her guard. In obedience to the summons, they emerged, doll's-house figures walking out, mechanical and stiff, from a doll's-house door. She wore her neat, dark bathing dress, he carried the frogman's outfit and wore as usual a folded towel, thrown across his maimed shoulder. A little self-conscious, not speaking to one another, they crossed to the steps that led from the balcony to the terrace and went quietly down. He saw them turn left and pass under the bougainvillea creeper that roofed the terrace in, en route for the jasmine-covered steps leading down to the end of the lower terrace and the cabins at the top of the diving rock. Louvaine came out of number four.