Tour de Force (31 page)

‘Just saying good-bye,' said Mr Fernando, surprised.

Chapter Sixteen

‘F
ASTEN
your safety belts, please,' said the air hostess. ‘We're coming in to land.' The green fields surged up towards them, the long, low sheds of the airport buildings stood recklessly waiting to be hit, the aeroplane was so extravagantly tilted that it would quite certainly meet the ground at too steep an angle, stand on its nose, turn turtle and go up in flames.… ‘All come this way, please,' said the air hostess, standing at the open door. Inspector Cockrill was Home.

The telephone call had, with sufficient difficulty, been put through and they were met and personally conducted through the airport routine: a sad little group among all the gay amateur smugglers, furtively limpid-eyed. ‘Nothing to declare,' said their guide, sweeping a gesture over the long line of luggage so hastily packed the night before. The customs officer sketched a salute and scribbled with his coloured chalk. ‘I've arranged for a room to be put aside for you,' said the official, and to Cockie: ‘The C.I.D. want to sort things out, before you all leave the airport and disperse. You can interview them here.' He led the way briskly. Transport had been laid on for them and would afterwards take them to their homes.…

Helen Rodd had not spoken during the voyage. She wore a thick veil after the fashion of mourning in San Juan and behind it her face was quiet and pale. Miss Trapp, repulsed in her efforts to offer comfort, had gone back to her ceaselessly clucking, kindly care of Louvaine. Louvaine wore no veil. Oblivious of care and curiosity alike, she walked with the rest of them like an automaton, Miss Trapp's hand on her arm. Her eyes were bright and dry, tearlessly blue, her hair hung heavy and out of curl about a face so colourless that the crude make-up, left over from last night, or this morning carelessly applied, stood out in painted patches like a clown's. They followed an official along narrow corridors. He opened a door and stood aside for them. Two police officers rose and came forward to meet them.

A man was sitting in the far corner of the room. He did not move until, the tiny crowd parting a little to make way for her, Louvaine, walking in her dream of pain, came wandering blindly in. Then he got up and went and stood before her. She took one tottering step towards him, hands outflung. He raised his own one hand and struck them down.

‘Don't touch me, Vanda Lane,' said Leo Rodd.

A door slammed in her mind, slammed to with a crash and a clatter that shattered the last vestiges of her tormented self-control: and she was on the floor at his feet, weeping and gibbering, sobbing, shivering, whimpering, at last falling silent, crouched there at his feet in the stony ring of their horror and recoil. And the door blew open again and with its opening a silence fell and she was sitting again at the little table in the room at the Bellomare Hotel, with the sky and the sunshine for a moment blocked out because her cousin Louise had come in through the open door and was standing there smiling: her cousin Louise who through all the years of adventure and success had been ‘Louvaine Barker', her partner and her friend. Louli – standing there in her white Bikini suit while the rest of the hotel slumbered away the long, drowsy, hot hour of the siesta; Louli – her partner and friend, standing there smiling, a little diffidently, speaking the words that meant that the friendship was over, the partnership dissolved: that she was going to start life all over again – with Leo Rodd.

But she had known all that; had known it and was prepared. ‘I am not going to let you do it.'

‘You and I can go on, Vanda, just as before.'

Just as before – watching them together, watching Louvaine and Leo as she had watched them and spied upon them through this past week of hell: watching Louvaine enjoy with casual happiness the rapture of love and belonging that she, Vanda, would have given her soul to possess. ‘I won't let you do it, Louvaine; that's all.'

Louvaine had been astonished, had been hurt and bewildered: had been adamant. ‘Nothing matters to me except Leo. If you won't agree …'

‘If I don't agree you're penniless, and you and Leo can do nothing. You'll have no job, you're not trained to anything, and he'll never work again, he hasn't a farthing of his own …'

But Louvaine had said, as she had said on the beach that night: ‘I'll make the farthings.' Had added, as she had added, unthinking, then: ‘You think I can't, but I can; you'll see.'

‘You!' she said, coldly sneering, standing there balancing the knife in her hand, the knife of Toledo steel that she had been idly playing with when her cousin came in. ‘You! What can you do? You're nothing without me.' And to prevent this, to prevent Louvaine from having him, she would end it all, would smash up the partnership, expose ‘Louvaine Barker', face disgrace and ruin, sacrifice it all. ‘I'm rich enough, Louvaine, if I never write a word again, I shall be all right. But you – what can
you
do?'

‘I can write,' said Louvaine.

‘You write? Write what?'

‘Write a novel,' said Louvaine.

‘You write a novel! My poor girl – wait till you try.'

‘I have tried,' said Louvaine.

‘And tried to find a publisher?'

‘I've got a publisher.' She said: ‘I did it for fun at first, Vanda, to see if I could. And then it seemed too good just to chuck it away. But I knew you wouldn't like it, you'd think it was dangerous, you've got such a bee in your bonnet about this exchange of ours. So I didn't tell you; and, besides, it was nice to have a little secret money, all of my own. Quite a lot of money, actually. So you see, you can do nothing: and Leo and I …'

The knife flashed out and down and into her breast, slitting through the flowered white satin Bikini top. Blood spurted over the table between them and on to her own white kimono. The chair fell with a clatter behind her and she grabbed at it automatically and righted it with a blood-smeared hand; and crept out from behind the table and looked down at what lay on the white, scrubbed floor.

How long she crouched there, she did not afterwards know: motionless, petrified with horror by the side of the still body sprawled in the poppy-starred white Bikini on the white wooden floor; staring down at the painted face that, robbed of its smiling vivacity, was so very much like her own …

So much like her own.

A girl called Vanda Lane dies: a quiet girl, without friends, without family save for a lunatic mother wearing away her sad life in a half-world of unreality and doubt. A girl called Louvaine Barker lives on and is reborn – reborn with all her own great gifts, with Vanda Lane's own gifts, and with so much more: a ready-made reputation for looks and charm, a ready-made character for gaiety and dash and a high self-confidence, a ready-made host of friends: a ready-made love.

A ready-made love. Leo Rodd is in love with Louvaine and how many thousand thousand times have I wished that I were Louvaine. And now.… If I could be Louvaine …

Her mind, trained to action, took over from her heart, banished emotion, banished fear and dread, began very coolly and clearly to sketch out a plot. And at hand were all the accessories of a plot: the paints, the dyes, the false eyelashes, the padded brassieres, the plastic nails, all the paraphernalia of an imposition that now needed only to be destroyed – destroyed and re-created anew, with a double twist. If I were Louvaine, and Louvaine were me …

She dragged the poor, gangling body through into the little bathroom and set to work, wiping away rouge and lipstick and eye-shadow and eyebrow-pencil, loosening the fixative from eyelashes and nails, thrusting the bright head under the shower to rinse out the famous yolk-of-egg hair-dye washing away in rivulets of rusty red. It was gruesome to hold the lax hand in her own and cut and file at such of the long nails as had been Louli's own; but there was no time now for sensibility. She wiped them free of varnish and turned her attention to the manicured toes. Stripped of her gay artificialities, stripped of the flutter of gesture, the easy laughter, the beating of the loving and generous heart, it was a poor thing, after all, that lay here at her mercy in its puddle of blood and water on the bathroom floor. It gave her courage to see it lying there, inert and helpless and unlovely in death: courage and strength to drag it through to the bedroom again, to strip off the bathing costume and wrap the body in her own blood-stained kimono. The wound had long ceased to pulse out blood but the movements of the body jerked the knife so that it horribly sucked and shifted in its sheath of flesh and bone; she folded about it a towel from the bathroom while she set about drying the hair.

But the hair would not dry; and the terrible wobbling of the lolling head made her feel sick, she was afraid she might fail altogether if so early in her vast undertaking she put too great a strain on her physical endurance. Moreover, the dye had not been altogether washed away, it was coming out, a reddy-brown stain on the hotel towel. She took the towel through to Louvaine's own bathroom where a stain of hair-dye would excite no comment; and, returning with a dry towel, noticed the shawl.

It lay across the back of a chair: Louli's red shawl – that was the point: a red shawl. The damp head would make a dark stain on the red shawl, but if the stain were darker with the stain of the hair-dye it would not show on the shawl – because the shawl was red. And to account for the shawl – a pretence at some sort of ceremonial, some sort of laying out, a disposing of the body in a formal way. She spread the shawl on the bed, heaved up the slight form grown in death to a sickening weight, composed feet and hands, spread out the damp hair so that as much as possible it would dry, took away the folded towel from the hilt of the knife. The blue eyes stared up into her own: she turned her head from the horror of their witless, unwinking reproach. Will anyone pause to wonder, she thought, resolutely forcing her mind to material things, will anyone pause to wonder how her hair – my hair – could have got wet all over, under the tight black rubber cap?

She rinsed the blood from the satin Bikini and mopped up the floor of the room. The chair remained thrust back from the table, smeared with blood; but she left it alone. After all, it is I who am supposed to have been attacked. I would have been sitting there, Vanda Lane, the occupant of the room, sitting there at the table. The attacker is the other one, the one who has come in and is standing on the other side of the table with his back to the door. It is Vanda Lane who is killed, sitting here at the table, getting up to face the intruder, pushing back the chair; tumbling, bleeding, against the chair.

But sitting there doing – what? Scribbling in her book, as it happened – in her ‘character book', the book she kept of jottings about people she met who might one day serve as pegs to hang her fictional characters on. That belonged in Louvaine's room (with the pencils and notebooks and scribbling-pads, she must remember those) – in Louvaine's room with all the impedimenta of a writer. But the book was bloodstained: and how to dispose – when there was so much else to be done – of a give-away bloodstained book?

Where would you hide a leaf? In the forest. Where hide a bloodstained object? Where there is already blood. The book must remain then, with undisguised bloodstains upon it: but how disguise the book?

She picked up her pen which had rolled to the floor, and at the bottom of each page wrote a figure and drew a ring round it. She collected pens, pencils, papers, and took them through to the other room. The book she tucked under the lining-paper in a drawer, as though it had been hurriedly thrust out of sight. In so much that was furtive, there was something more furtive than all in the sly, quick thrusting out of sight of the book; she glanced over guiltily at the bed and the dead girl was watching her, lying there softly on the crimson shawl, with wide, unwinking blue eyes.

The dead girl, Louvaine, had been a great one for actual physical rehearsals. ‘Let's run through it, Vanda, let's do that scene ourselves, let's see that you've really got it true to life.' O.K., she thought, I'll run through it, if it'll please you, since you're taking such a kind interest in it all.… She took up her place behind the table. This is Vanda Lane who is lying dead on the bed, it was Vanda Lane who was murdered. So here I am, Vanda Lane, sitting in the corner, hemmed in by the oblong table. Someone comes in, there's a quarrel, the intruder attacks: that's the point, it's Vanda Lane who is attacked and Vanda Lane is the person who belongs in the room. So it's the intruder who attacks. The knife's on the table, he picks it up, he strikes, the blood spurts across the table …

Can they tell from the shape of the bloodstains on the table which side the victim stood when the blow was struck? For if so – then they'll know that it was the murderer who stood in the corner behind the table: and into their minds will come the first moment of doubt.

She stood for a long time, staring down at the tell-tale stains: and then she picked up the little table and turned it round. And she made a little bow to the body lying quietly on the bed. ‘Thank you, Louvaine: you were right to insist,' she said.

And, through in Louvaine's room which was now to be hers, everything at hand to rebuild the imposture which now had been destroyed – rebuild it on a new foundation not too impossibly unlike the old. The destruction was completed: she had closed the door upon the dead body of Vanda Lane, that friendless, loveless, secret creature who had not known how to use her life: here, in this room, filled with a sense of suddenly triumphant power, she laid hands upon the materials that were to build up the new. The hair-dye first, the wonderful quick-drying hair-dye that could be changed half a dozen times a day, ‘only the egg part was so revolting'. She rubbed the stuff in and rolled up into tight curls the mouse-brown locks that for so long had been ruthlessly brushed flat, manicured her toenails, stuck on with their own adhesive the long plastic nails that Louli wore whenever, as all too frequently happened, she broke her own. But she dared not paint them: I must make an opportunity to do that later, bang out in front of them all, if possible – Louli was always doing that kind of thing.