Gently Continental (3 page)

Right thus far at all events, and much mystery understood: but another man has visited the American while Stody is taking the air of the cliff-top. He is a man with sharp tools and a sharp mind and a disciplined stomach and a good degree and more experience of police-work than he needs or in fact has time for: by name, John Halliday, f.r.c.p.(Ed.), general practitioner in that district. Halliday is waiting by the Police House when Stody returns from the cliffs. He is outside his car, leaning against it, smoking his pipe with slow puffs. A neat man, with a face that looks as though the skin is too tight for it, showing the structure of the bones; and quick, hypnotic, brown eyes. He comes round to Stody's car. Hallo, Jim, he says. Good morning, sir, Stody says, climbing, helmetless, out of the Morris. Jim, Halliday says, I've seen the body, and in a way I wish I hadn't. A nasty sight, sir, Stody says. I wish I hadn't seen it either. Jim, Halliday says. Stody waits. Halliday smokes. Jim, Halliday says, he dropped off the cliff, did he – you'll have been up there, taken a look? Just this moment, sir, Stody says, I was up there with Brother Fred. Have you any ideas, Jim? Halliday says. Well, sir, Stody says, it might have been either way. I'd say most likely it was intentional, but it could have been an accident. There's not much to go on. What was on the body? Halliday asks. Stody lifts out the grip, shows Halliday what's in it. Halliday picks up a tiny penknife, opens it, closes it, drops it back. He says, Have you found anything on the cliff? Only this hat, Stody says, exhibiting it. Nothing else? Some signs perhaps? Stody shakes his head, no, nothing. Halliday smokes for some while, then: Well, Jim, he says, well. The deceased died from head injuries and a broken neck, one or both. The deceased has bruises on the chest and also on the jaw and both wrists, and the deceased has a group of twenty-two shallow incisions, made shortly before death, in the abdomen. That's the substance of the matter, Jim, leaving out a few minor abrasions. His brown eyes flick at Stody. Stody, without his helmet, stares. Incisions, sir? Cuts, Jim. Twenty-two. Through his shirt. You mean, like stabs, sir? No, not stabs, incisions, not more than half an inch deep. Stody wrestles with this idea. Halliday smokes a little faster. Still, the image of an inscrutable American is present in a corner of Stody's mind. Could they have been – self-inflicted, sir? Halliday shrugs. Quite easily. With that – penknife? Not very likely. No signs of the blade being used lately. But they could have been. . . Then suddenly it strikes Stody, as though a sea-mist is lifted, leaving naked, no longer inscrutable, no longer essentially American, the dead man: exposing him, for the first time in Stody's mind, to the full exercise of professional logic, as though it were anyone, says Brother Fred, lying beneath the sacks in the thatched summer-house. You're thinking, sir – ? Halliday shakes his head. I'm doing no thinking for anyone, Jim. But the bruises – Are where I said they were, don't come to me for interpretations. But there were other signs, sir? He'd been down on his back. There were bents and bits of ling stuck to his jacket. Did you examine his nails, sir? He used to bite them, nothing useful there. His knuckles? Abraded in the fall. That's the lot, Jim. I'm off to breakfast. And he gets in his car, Doctor Halliday, having thrown his bomb at poor Stody, in his this-year's Rover, brightly gleaming, which glides away towards the village. Oh Stody, Jim Stody, now what panic's in thy breastie? With the coroner's court fading, changing, into an assize of cross-question? Constable Stody, did you efface, or cause to be effaced, certain bloodstains? Will you, Constable Stody, explain to the court why you saw fit to erase the footprints? Did you remove this hat from the place where you found it? What was your object, Constable Stody? In your opinion, is it not a fact, can you suggest any alternative? These dark thoughts, in simultaneous passage, hold Stody watching the departing Rover, keep him standing some moments longer, the grip, the hat in his hands.

B
UT IF THE
formula is dead, long live the formula – it is but substituting a different process for one tried and found inadequate. Or rather, it is expanding the first, simple figure, composed of Stody, Halliday and the coroner, into a more complex structure, an inverted pyramid, of which Stody is the base. To be reared how high, how wide? Till its shadow covers the dead American: when it will certainly be overspreading the Hotel Continental, the Breskes, their staff and forty-four guests. For if the American did die by another, and not decently alone, then his pyramid, financed by the tax-payers, will amaze the appetite of pharaohs. Not Cheops, in all his glory, will die as famously as Wilbur Clooney. Stody, first block in that pyramid, and already feeling himself overlaid, sits down in the office in the Police House and puts through a call to H.Q. The call is received and considered. It merits the attention of C.I.D. It relieves a Detective Inspector, Herbert Shelton, from the routine boredom of a breaking-and-entering. Then, shifting smartly up the pyramid, H.Q. inform London, and London inform Grosvenor Square, who request the documents of their dead national. Construction lines rising everywhere! Messages chase back and forth. Clooney's passport, his single document, departs for London by special messenger. Then a grape-vine, no matter whose, catches a passing echo, no matter which, and alongside the first pyramid rises, in an instant, a second and complementary structure. Headlines flame in the lunchtime editions: Ritual Slaying of American Tourist? Gashed American Found Dead. Dead American – Witchcraft Victim? And the Street hums, for news is slack, and those twenty-two incisions are pennies from heaven. Before Herbert Shelton, not as yet aware of the spotlights training on him, can do more than initiate a preliminary discussion with the Breskes and their staff; cars are beginning to scorch the gravel, the bell of the reception desk rings frantically, and a clutch of determined pressmen, cameras poised, are desiring, requiring and insisting on statements. Shelton, much photographed, is dumb. This thing has not before happened to him. In great alarm he backs into the office, slams the door, rings H.Q. It'll be the Yard for this one, says the oldest press-man, who has seen more homicides than hot dinners, and in a moment they know, are sure, are certain, and begin furbishing Yard To Be Called? paragraphs. If no news happens, go out and make some.

News, however, is making itself, beneath the eagle in Grosvenor Square, where a young attaché, Cyrus Fleischer, has been passed the lonely American's one document. Fleischer is not much interested in the document. Fleischer has lately dated a blonde. All day Cy Fleischer has been in a daydream about this blonde, whose name is Elizabeth. He has seen Elizabeth on a series of documents, in the conference room, in the restaurant, a couple of times in the toilet, and now on the buff pages of the one document. But oddly, while staring at the one document, he finds other images disturbing Elizabeth's, like a swinging ball that knocks down buildings, bulldozers, trucks, sweating negroes. Then other images still, like himself when young (not long ago), and a girl called Cecile, Cecile Legrande, who sure as hell had no connection with Elizabeth. But there he goes, through the dust and debris, a callow kid on his first date, Cecile Legrande, a tenement girl; Pop would have tanned his hide if he'd known. But why think of that? What brought it up? Cy wrinkles his still-freckled nose. Elizabeth fades, he sees the one document, calls up a moment of official attention. Then – wow! The ball, the bulldozers, the negroes, the trucks, Cecile Legrande, they whirl again in a startled picture, and Cy whoops, This goddam passport's phoney! Because there isn't any East 115a Street, and he, Cy Fleischer, knows there isn't. Didn't he hang around, watching them knock it down, when he was running after the girl out of the tenements? Yes sir, it was flattened, wiped out, razed, in the re-zoning project in '57, became a garden-greenbelt precinct, has never been East 115a Street since. And this goddam passport – look at the date! Stamped January 5 of this year, address 78 East 115a Street, which came down before Cy went to college. Whadya know about that? The goddam passport
must
be phoney. Under no conceivable set of circumstances or procedure can it be anything else but phoney. And it is phoney – oh yes! Security tears it to small shreds. A nice fake, very nice, but look at that paper, ink, stamp. Good work, Cy, you'll make the grade, boy. Cy Fleischer. Sweating on a blonde.

And the American who had that one document, which turns out to be no document, barely cold, though removed now from the sacks and the summerhouse, he's suffered the last of his indignities, has had his very identity stripped from him, is now not Clooney, perhaps not American, only certainly alone. Alone, and unnamed. A piece of carrion with no handle. Shorn of all points of departure from which to imagine something, anything, to clothe his great nakedness. No name, no nation, no birthplace, no domicile, no shared culture, no relatives, no friends, nothing. X, torn from his equation. From his short masquerade. His make-believe. His attitude of separation, of maintaining a distinct ego. X, a dangerous picture, the residuum left in the crucible.

So Grosvenor Square ring Whitehall with this news of non-identity, requiring at the same time, now or sooner, a very close description of X; his height, weight, colouring, marks, teeth, prints, estimated age, together with information of his accent and manner, when he was alive, and all other information whatever; with the precise mode of his dying, and preferably the names of those responsible. Whitehall reply with polite brevity, having none of this information by them, then ring the local H.Q., who in turn ring the beleaguered Shelton. Shelton, by now, is beginning to appreciate the weight of the pyramid he is supporting, and he counters H.Q. with a request for assistance. Alas for Shelton! This day he has shed many illusions. He has been pushed around by a bunch of reporters who have found out a good deal more than he has. It was they, not he, who discovered the hotel was locked up by 11.30 p.m., and that the guests, all
forty-four
of them, and the staff, could each show themselves to have been inside it. It was they, not he, who elicited that the American set out, it must be, after 10 p.m., as he did by habit, always alone, usually northward along the cliffs. It was not that Shelton would not have made these discoveries, but that he did not get the chance, there being only one Shelton, assisted by his sergeant, as against fourteen reporters; fourteen reporters, furthermore, who knew what to ask as well as Shelton, and wasted no time in asking it, or in collating the answers. And yet, after all, it is not very much, removed from the context of banner headlines, and promises to lead to no more in the useful future. Rather it is scraping the bottom, of which Shelton is miserably aware; it is likely no one will ever know more, or very much more, than he does at present. It may even be that the lonely American did indeed slay himself. Hence, being found in this frame of mind, Shelton makes a quick decision: he has done his best, in the limits and conditions, and if more is required, let others come after it, and because his point of view, so stated, would find no favour with authority, he translates it into an irresistible form: I'll need more men. What for? At least, to let him start level with the press! To enable him, within a reasonable time, to cope with three-score-and-ten interrogations. Though, as Shelton craftily insinuates, it will probably be winnowing chaff only, he has no reason to anticipate, as it leaves him, that further interrogations will produce anything. Pause, discussion at H.Q. Has he, H.Q. asks, come to any conclusion? Not a conclusion, Shelton replies hastily, but a feeling, you know how it is, that if anyone did murder the American, which is far from being established, then that someone is outside the scope of the present inquiries. Not a local person, Shelton says daringly, nobody in the hotel or the village. Someone out of the American's past. If the American, indeed, were murdered. More discussion at H.Q. Have you found the weapon? H.Q. ask. Shelton is obliged to admit he hasn't, though he has had Stody tramping the cliff-top all day. Any thoughts about that? H.Q. ask. Shelton has many thoughts about that. In the first place, he has dragged out of Halliday the general proposition that suicides often try two or more methods. Thus it is far from unlikely that the twenty-two incisions were self-inflicted, a sort of bungled hara-kiri, which the American had not the courage to consummate; while as for the weapon, Halliday agreed that a piece of broken glass would suffice, and Shelton himself, on an excursion along the cliff-top, had counted eight discarded bottles, two of them broken. Any glass he might have used? Not exactly, but it proved nothing. He may have made the incisions somewhere else, say on the beach, where there were also bottles. Then, if it chanced to have been on the foreshore where the American abandoned his bloodied glass, the next tide would have removed it, buried it, or if neither of these, at least unbloodied it. Shrewd Shelton! What a plausible picture he is building up for H.Q., or rather, letting H.Q. draw from him, goaded by his request for more men. The cleverer, because H.Q. will want to believe it, to cut the case down to coroner-size, to return Shelton to his breaking-and-enterings and to keep the crime record tidy. On the one hand, sensational murder, straining resources and offering no credit; on the other, a routine suicide, with credit to Shelton for pricking the bubble. Can they hesitate? Not for long! Report back in, they tell Shelton.

So Shelton has been clever, Shelton has an explanation for everything, except, and Stody annoyingly put it in his report, Stody's reservation about it being dark, and except certain bruises on the body which may, or may not, offend the coroner. Stody's point is a good one. The American must needs have projected himself from the cliff-top. Yet if it were dark (and the night was moonless), how could he have aimed so precisely at the pill-box? Had he been anticipating the jump during his stay at the hotel, directing his stroll to the spot each evening, measuring, calculating the event? So much so, that on a night when the pill-box below was invisible, he could yet, exactly, position himself, and, exactly, leap over? Incredible, not to be believed; except for the rude, unwinking fact. Yet, as Shelton is quick to see, the difficulty is no objection to a concept of suicide, because if murder is postulated, the difficulty remains, as much for the murderer as for the American. If not X, then Y must have measured and calculated; and Y (O Shelton!) would have had the greater difficulty, having to heave another, and not himself. So that, if any conclusion is to be drawn (thus Shelton, on the wings of inspiration), it is that Stody's point, if it can't be ignored, by a feather, favours suicide. Fine reasoning, and H.Q. is half-disposed to accept it. But there are still the bruises outstanding, and Shelton must reason around those too. And here Shelton's inspiration flags, because the bruises' story is so obvious, saying to him, as to any policeman, This man was held down, with a knee on his chest. Ignore them? Brazen it out with the coroner? H.Q. shakes its head regretfully. Suppose . . . Shelton supposes hard, can make no contact with the divine spark. It lies with the bruises, H.Q. says, everything stands or falls by them; we can't pretend they were self-inflicted; they are evidence of an attacker. But – a thousand things, Shelton says, an attacker may not have been a murderer, it may have been (inspiration flickers bravely), may have been an attack that triggered off the suicide. You have evidence of this, H.Q. says. There is no evidence either way, Shelton pleads, and furthermore a man can bruise his own wrists, as, for example, by struggling while in hand-cuffs. You have evidence –, H.Q. begins, but Shelton knows he has shot his bolt, is even (he is a good policeman) beginning to realize that his defence of suicide is an indictment of it. There's a case to answer, and he knows it, has all this time played the devil's advocate, would dearly have loved to have got away with it, finds the bruises blocking his way. Right, he says, like Stody before him: he is re-aligned with the formula. But if it's murder, he says, he's getting nowhere, and has a strong suspicion there's nowhere to get, unless (and provided the murderer is a hotel inmate), unless someone breaks down under interrogation. Because the picture there is formidable, a picture of credible cross-alibis, with no pointer, not one, connecting the American with any individual. He is a stray bird who flew down there, a rare exotic, strangely plumaged, viewed suspiciously by the resident birds and common migrants alike, tolerated, because he was quiet, and permitted to pick a little with the others, but making no friends, no enemies; probably pining; at last, dying. He had no handle, that American! He had given a vague London address in the register. He had on him money enough to pay his bill, but no indication of where more would come from. You'd say he'd simply come there to die, to die unknown and untraceable: so well would suicide fit the bill, if he'd kept his wrists away from bruises. And if no connection, no motive. Not a shade of a motive has Shelton uncovered. X remains unqualified, no sign stands against him, no suggestion of mode of relation with a postulated Y. If indeed the equation exists, it is remote from our knowledge, Shelton avers.