Tour de Force (28 page)

With a cry of horror, Mr Cecil grabbed wildly at it as it fell; but, soft and slithery, it skated across the smooth marble of the parapet's edge and hung for a moment, teetering, over space. Louvaine lunged after it and, perilously balancing, just managed to clutch at the tab of the metal zip; but in doing so, hauling the case triumphantly up, ripped open the zip. A shower of white sheets of drawing paper belched out in one conglomerate mass and, slowly drifting apart, in ones and twos and threes, fluttered down to the gardens far below.

Slowly, slowly, into the breathless afternoon sunshine, hanging and fluttering like tiny white gliders launched on a windless day – the priceless store of pencil sketches, the hastily scribbled, secret sketches that, perfected when one was in reach of easels and paints and varnishes once more, were to take the world of fashion by storm …'

White sheets of paper, lazily fluttering, lazily turning, lazily drifting down to the flowers, the fountains, the lily-pools below. White sheets of paper that should have held hurriedly-scribbled pencil sketches – each with its finished design, inked, painted, varnished, all the rest of it – as, ready completed (by somebody else), Mr Cecil had brought them with him from home.

He gave one choking, chopped-off, terrible cry; and fell in a dead faint on the blue-glazed tiles of the floor.

Inspector Cockrill did not even glance his way. A face raised to look up from the terrace below them; an arm stretched forth to take a pair of sun-glasses from a breast-pocket; a hand flung out to catch a falling case that showered gay paintings upon the gay gardens below.… Fool, fool, fool that I've all this time been, thought Inspector Cockrill, fools, fools, fools that we've all of us been.…!

For now he knew.

Chapter Fifteen

T
HE
Gerente came that evening for Helen Rodd and she went with him, very pale, saying nothing, making no demur. Inspector Cockrill apparently did not oppose her going. To the others, clamorous with horrified uncertainty, he refused to comment. ‘You had better all of you get packed to-night. We leave to-morrow morning.'

Leo Rodd came out of his room and walked across the balcony and down the wooden steps; they approached him diffidently, trying to offer some word of sympathy, something to express the horror in their breasts, but he merely said, Thank you, thank you, in a toneless voice and went on; Louvaine's outstretched hands he utterly ignored, almost literally shouldering her aside, walking on, threading his way through the tables of the other tourists on the upper terrace and down the long flight of steps; they saw him emerge, a sombre figure in the failing twilight and move with bent head across the lonely beach, to sit down at last, very still, on a hump of rock close to the edge of the sea. After a while, Inspector Cockrill followed him there.

Nobody obeyed the instruction to go and pack. Wretched and bewildered, reunited by their common unease, they huddled together at the balcony rail, looking over the heads of the carefree tourists sipping at their Juanellos and Americanes on the terrace below, and away to the two lonely figures, dark against the evening sky. Mr Fernando held Miss Trapp's crabbed hand in his strong, protective grasp and she, in an agony of anxious and indecisive sympathy with the absent Helen, was content to leave it there. Louvaine leaned with her elbows on the rail, silent, her face in her hands. Mr Cecil, the ormolu lock casting a strange, hollow shadow in the middle of his forehead, tried to cheer them up with promises of unsolicited favours to come when they should all, please God, be home again and under the civilized wing of Christophe et Cie. Miss Trapp should have her wedding costume made for her there, a present from himself with extravagant good wishes; yes, and a hat too, madly becoming, he had just the thing in mind, a little nest of lilies and roses to perch on the bridal head.… ‘And no brussels-sprouts?' said Mr Fernando, wanly joking. But there they were back with it all again: the yellow sun-glasses that had taken the red from the wreath of rosebuds and turned them into brussels-sprouts, that for him had taken the colour from a stray curl of red hair. Could it be true, could it honestly be true that Mrs Rodd, deceived by those horrible glasses …? Yet apparently the Inspector was content to let her go with the politio, no more had been said of their refusal to abandon her in San Juan.… The poor lady …

‘On the other hand – if she really did kill Miss Lane,' faltered Miss Trapp wretchedly, ‘should one sympathize?' It was all so terrible, one didn't know what to think. She tailed off into indeterminate whimperings.

‘And me, Cecil, will you design a dress for me too? San Juan inspired?'

Now, horrid thing,
not
to be catty about poor Mr Cecil and his designs! ‘I do take home ideas, lots of them, you've seen me doing the very sketches.'

‘But not the ones you'll show to Christopher et Cie? Come on, now, tell – who really does them?'

‘Well, a girl called Jane Woods if you must know,' said Cecil, shamefacedly. ‘Only
ab
solutely not to tell, any of you: you do swear?'

‘Oh, we won't tell,' said Louli.

‘It's what that bitch said that day up here, right here on this very spot. Old Bevan, you know, who owns Christophe's, I met him abroad – years ago it was now, of course; and perhaps one did show off a little, one was so young then, I mean really quite a child. But he suddenly showed a bit of interest and I was caught on the hop, I happened to have some sketches of Jane's with me that I'd been cop – er – that'd I'd been sort of modelling my work on; and on an impulse – I let him think they were mine. He was impressed and, on the strength of them, he opened Christophe et Cie. So – well, there you are, my dears, it suits Jane, she gets the money, I get the credit, she wouldn't get as much for them without me behind her, I wouldn't be where I am without her. And the two of us rolled together, well – genius,' said Mr Cecil modestly; but the idea of being rolled together with large, plushy Jane, who was quite too dreadfully feminine, was a little embarrassing, and he gave a small private shudder.

‘And the “inspiration”?'

‘Well, we work it all out of course, sometimes she takes her holiday early and goes to wherever we've decided to be inspired by, sometimes we just cook it up out of books. Then she does the designs and I bring them away with me and come back with them. I always have a studio booked somewhere, you see,' explained Cecil, ‘where I'm supposed to finish them off. Then they appear in all their glory. Rome, it was supposed to have been this time.' He spoke with a simplicity that suddenly made him almost human.

‘And Vanda had found this out?'

‘She was a devil,' said Cecil. ‘I'm sorry if she was your cousin, ducky, and all the rest of it; but she was a devil. Though how she could have found out …'

‘She watched people, that's all,' said Louli. ‘It was her job.' She added pleasantly, ‘So you up and slew her – to keep your ghastly secret?'

Mr Cecil's voice took on once again its shrill note. The secret, he said, and not unreasonably perhaps, would have caused unpleasantness if it had come out, if Mr Bevan had got to know of it. But no more than that. The business was established now, it would have been all Mr Bevan's loss to have discredited one, to have dispensed with one's services for so trivial a reason. What did Mr Bevan care, who it was who actually did the designs? It was Mr Cecil who put them across, Mr Cecil who had cultivated acquaintance with half the fashionable women of London and New York, who called duchesses by their pet names and had actually come by a glossy magazine in which, against an article by himself on Designing for Our Fairy Tale Princess, someone had scribbled in pencil, ‘But he never has designed for me!' At least Mr Cecil swore that it was ‘for me'; of course it
might
have been ‘for her'. But honestly, duckies, horrid and mortifying, of course and
not
to tell, like pets and angels as they were! – but really not something to murder a person about.

‘And yet you fainted when we saw the drawings!'

‘I faint very easily,' said Mr Cecil growing pink.

‘I see. So we're back to the dear old mix-up, then,' said Louli. ‘You thought she was me.'

‘Why should I have wanted to murder
you?
' said Mr Cecil, looking, however, not disinclined for it now.

‘Lots do,' said Louli, cheerfully.

‘And anyway I do not wear sun-glasses; and it does seem quite obvious, my dears, that the sun-glasses do take all the red out of Louli's hair and that if anyone killed La Lane in mistake for her, it was because they had sun-glasses. Like you,' he said sweetly to Fernando.

‘I had no cause to kill either of these ladies,' said Fernando. ‘All this is settled now, surely? Your secret is out, Mr Cecil – mine too. And neither had anything to do with the murder.' He made apologetic movements with his hands. ‘I do not like to say it at this time; but if we are to regard the evidence of the sun-glasses – there is only one other person who wears them. And that is Mrs Rodd.'

‘Poor Mrs Rodd,' said Miss Trapp. ‘Where is she now? One can't help wondering and worrying. Such a fastidious person, always so elegant and correct – not used to roughness and ugliness! What is she doing? – now, at this moment, while we stand here on this pleasant balcony looking out at the lights of the fishing boats beginning to twinkle on the water. What is she doing now? Where is she now?'

‘Not where she will need sun-glasses,' agreed Fernando, glancing back over his shoulder to where the dank prison loomed over its rocky foundation, falling away steep and sheer to the sea.

‘Not that she always wore them by any means,' went on Miss Trapp, unhappily twittering. ‘I think, on the whole,
Mr
Rodd had the use of them more often than she did. I remember particularly on that afternoon …' And suddenly her hand tightened on Fernando's warm grasp, she stammered out: ‘That afternoon … That afternoon …'

‘You are right,' said Fernando. ‘That afternoon – the one who had on the sun-glasses – was Mr Rodd.'

As though he had heard the words, far away down on the beach, Leo Rodd rose suddenly to his feet. They watched him stand there, quietly, beside the little hunched figure perched like a gnome on the hump of the rock, not looking up at him, staring out to sea. And then … The slow inching round, the almost imperceptible, stealthy, crab-like movement that was bringing him round behind the rock. Inspector Cockrill sat on; did not move, did not look up, seemed utterly unaware that behind him there stood now a figure, silent and motionless, with upraised hand. But suddenly, swiftly, he turned: and the arm came down, came forward and down with a jabbing, thrusting, stabbing movement that, if the hand had held a knife, must surely have found the heart.

If the hand held a knife.

Miss Trapp screamed, one short, sharp squeal of horror and buried her face in Mr Fernando's shoulder. Louvaine cried out, ‘No! No!
No!
' on a rising note of terrified repudiation. Mr Cecil caught at her wrist and, immobilized by shock and horror, they stood there, staring down. On the terrace below them, attracted by the sound of Miss Trapp's scream, the hotel guests looked up and, following their panic-stricken gaze, away to the beach; and, with a concerted upsurge of movement, crowded forward to the balustrade. It was as though at the rail of a ship's deck, impotent to assist, they watched the death-throes far away down in the water, of a drowning man.

And away on the beach, in the gathering dusk, the dark figures moved again and fell apart. The one sitting on, hunched and, after that one shifting jerk, motionless: the other – the other without a backward glance, running out over the sand, with that familiar, sideways lurching gait, out across the sand, into the ripples at the edge of the shore, running, running, splashing out into the sea, throwing itself full-length into the waves, swimming, first jerkily, splashily and then with a rhythm of swift, strong strokes, steadily away and away from them, swimming out to sea.

Louvaine broke from Cecil's immobilizing hand. ‘Leo!
Leo!
' She flung herself down the wooden steps and across the terrace, thrusting through the gaping crowd. ‘Get out of my way, get out of my way, let me through …' Down the long central flight of steps, down through the scented gardens, across the lower terrace, down pebbled steps again, out across the sand. Mr Cecil followed close at her heels, Mr Fernando with feverish impatience had caught Miss Trapp by her upper arm and was hurrying her, clutching and falling, down the steps after them. The crowd on the terrace, stunned by the shock and inexplicability of it all, had not yet sufficiently found its wits to follow.

Across the white sand, sick and sobbing with terror and pain, Louvaine came stumbling at last to the edge of the sea. ‘Leo! Leo! Leo, for God's sake come back …!' Her throat was harsh with the terrible gasping for breath after her flight down the steps but she forced it to shrillness, screaming out over the gentle lisp of the waves. ‘Leo, Leo – for God's sake, Leo come back! Come back!' But the dark head, glimpsed only now and again in the trough of the night-dark waves, moved steadily on and on, away from her. She began to tear off her frock, wading out into the sea, floundering in after him. ‘Leo, Leo! Leo, come back, come back!' Mr Cecil rushed after her and catching her by the arm, pulled her back out of the water. ‘Don't be a fool, Louvaine, what good can you do?' But she struggled with him, ‘Let me go, let me go after him, I must get him back, can't you see he's – he's swimming away, he's not coming back!' She collapsed to her knees in the water, supported only by his grip under her arm. ‘For God's sake do something, isn't there someone who can swim after him, isn't there a boat …?'

‘There's no boat, Louli, no one can swim.' He hauled her up to her feet. ‘Come on, come back.' Wet and exhausted, she let him lead her, still half supporting her, back to the sandy beach and the hump of rock.