Tour de Force (24 page)

The Gerente looked at the guards and looked at Louvaine and looked at Helen: ominously. Inspector Cockrill moved forward. He held up his small brown, nicotined-stained hand for silence. He said quietly: ‘Mr Fernando – tell the Gerente that the guards have misunderstood. We've all been talking about the murder, naturally; we've all been discussing ways and means, making up theories, making up stories to fit with our theories. As for Miss Barker and Mr Rodd – Miss Barker has been telling Mr Rodd a story and naturally, she being a writer of fiction, her story has been the best of all. And as to the diving – what Mr Rodd says is true: none of us can dive. It just so happens that none of us here can dive. I can't, Mr Cecil can't, you yourself can't, or anyway you don't. Mr Rodd can't because of his arm, Mrs Rodd can't because she dislikes it, Miss Trapp can't because she can't swim. And Miss Barker can't – Miss Barker least of all. Miss Lane could: Miss Lane could run out along a razor-backed ridge high over the sea, she could stand teetering at the tip of a diving board, twenty-five feet up. But Miss Barker can't.' And he plucked an imaginary auburn hair from the sleeve of his jacket. ‘One thing one literally cannot control,' said Inspector Cockrill, ‘is a horror of heights. And I happen to know that Miss Louvaine Barker has an almost pathological horror of heights.'

But Miss Louvaine Barker was already lying in a dead faint at the feet of Leo Rodd.

Chapter Thirteen

M
R
C
ECIL
assisted at the ritual of Louli's return to consciousness and life. She had been carried up to her room and there laid propped against white pillows, on the four-poster bed. He trotted between bed and dressing-table, laden with pots and bottles and mirrors and powder puffs and bursting with expert advice. ‘A thorough good strip down with the cleansing cream, ducky, there's nothing like it after a scene: and then lots and lots and lots of astringent lotion patted well in, we don't want crows' feet by the time we're thirty, dear,
do
we?' She was so right always to wear huge hats. ‘Honestly, one was mad, my dear, ever to have come to this terrible climate, ruination to the skin, we shall all look like alligators by the time it's over, I wouldn't be surprised.' And talking about being surprised, he added, honestly one had been utterly, but utterly
bouleversé'
d by all this business about the heights.…

‘Me too,' said Louli, ruefully.

‘But had you forgotten?'

‘No, I just thought I never would get to the diving. I thought I'd appear before you all and you'd say, “Oh, that's how it was done?” and it would never occur to anyone that I couldn't have gone on and dived, to save my life. Because of course, that's true – I've got this Thing, I just can't bear heights.'

‘
If
that's true,' said Cecil, cautiously.

She laughed. ‘Oh, it's true enough. I mean, old Cockrill saw me on the plane.'

And it was true. He too had seen for himself how green she had gone – she had been all right while they were flying at height, when there had been nothing to suggest, as it were, a drop; but as they descended, as the little houses and fields came up to meet them, she had shuddered and turned pale, her hands had shaken as she clung to the little man. You couldn't counterfeit that, and anyway, why should she have done so? She could have had no intention then of murdering her cousin, neither of them had yet had time – surely? – to fall in love with Leo Rodd; nor, supposing the remote likelihood of an earlier motive, of a preconceived plan, could she have anticipated the lay-out at the hotel, the open salon doors leading into the hall and stairs, the cabins at the diving rock, the diving board? Unless of course … ‘You didn't know this place before?' he said casually.

She laughed. ‘No, no. Never even been into Italy. You can see from my passport. Doubting Thomas!' she added.

All the same, he thought, the whole masquerade had fitted in with the facts remarkably snugly. He passed her the mascara brush. ‘Just a weeny bit
up
at the ends of the eyebrows, ducky, yes, that's wonderful, too
Après-midi d'un Faune
for any!' He looked into the hand mirror; a touch of
Après-midi
wouldn't do his own face any harm either, and he applied it with little expert sweeps of the brush. ‘Quite too perfect, we look like a couple of dear little Bambis, all wide-eyed wonder, just out of the wood.'

‘Are we out of the wood?' said Louli.

‘You are. I mean, I do think this fabrication of yours does utterly blow up over the diving business. After all, having this Thing, you wouldn't ever have learnt to dive, would you? So even if you'd conquered it for the moment and driven yourself to go out along the board – well, one can't just hold one's nose and jump off that sort of height, can one? One comes a belly-flopper and it does one no good at all, and the thing is that
no
body mistakes one for La Lane, who was quite too terrific.' But the eyebrows would not do, alas, and he dabbed them off with spit on a piece of cotton wool. Some of his sun-tan came too. ‘My dear, I look quite leprous, Max Factor pancake this
min
ute, where can I find it?' Somewhat to her horror, he rubbed the cotton wool on the surface of the pancake. ‘But what I want to know is, what were you going to do next?'

‘I've told you,' said Louli. ‘I was going to give myself up. You see, I thought …' She looked down at her hands and Cecil saw that they were actually trembling. ‘I thought Leo hated me – because of what I'd said about Helen, getting her into all this trouble and danger. I thought it had made him realize that it was really her he loved. And if that was so, I simply didn't care what happened to me, I thought I might at least reinstate myself in his eyes by giving myself up to save her.'

‘Greater love hath no man than this,' said Cecil, ‘that he lay down his life for his friend – to impress someone else.' He suggested delicately that, anyway, it had worked and without going to all those lengths either.

‘I'd got it all wrong,' she said. ‘He was angry with me, yes – but that's different, that's not hating. And he was sorry for her and anxious about her – but that's not loving. You heard what he said – after she'd hidden me from the Gerente in my Vanda Lane get-up: he said, “I'll thank you for ever – for doing this for Louvaine.” For
Louvaine
.' She closed her lids over the blue blaze of her eyes. ‘You'll never know, nobody will ever know, what those words meant to me.'

‘So you decided not to go on with the act?'

She shrugged against the white pillows. ‘Inspector Cockrill decided for me. I was flat out by then. But I couldn't go on with it: he'd shown it was all a nonsense – which it was.'

‘Was it?' said Doubting Thomas.

She couldn't help laughing. ‘No use hoping, ducky! I know it would be more exciting if it could be true, but I'm afraid Mum's Out. I can't dive and I couldn't have dived: but that day she died, Vanda executed two beautiful dives.' She acknowledged that for the rest it had all fitted in absurdly well. It had been like planning a story in the old days, with poor Vanda. ‘You settle on the main plot, what the book's about; and having done so, you usually find that you're stuck with certain “constants” and you have to weave your story so as to take those constants in. In my case, the main plot was simply that I look like Vanda and I could have impersonated her. The constants were things like the lay-out of the hotel, the timing, that thing about the rolled-up bathing towel and so forth. I had to work them all in and it was really almost exciting if it hadn't been so horrible and frightening, to find how it all fell into place. I mean, what a bit of luck, for instance, that Vanda wore bathing shoes. And that business about her clenching her hands on the rail: I couldn't know that, I just relied on taking off the varnish and hoping you wouldn't see that my nails were long while hers were always short.' She laughed again. ‘And meanwhile, clever old Inspector Cockrill had had it worked out, and discarded it, long ago. I wonder how he's feeling about it now?'

Inspector Cockrill in fact was feeling exceedingly relieved in his mind – or in his heart, rather, for his brain, he admitted crossly to himself, had little to do with it – at the escape of his pet from the noose which her own folly had set for herself: from that dark threat which in his anxiety for her, he had permitted to overhang his heart at the initiation of her experiment. It was better to let it go through, he said to himself; she had to do her piece for him, and I could always save her in the end. Why he should care about it all, he hardly knew; like Leo himself, he found her nowadays often only tiresome and silly and ill-behaved and certainly her accusation of Helen, however much the outcome of shock and hysteria, had been an unendearing episode. And yet – he looked back upon the line of pretty girls who, in his crabbed old age, had made his own arid heart beat for a little while a little more warmly: and thought that of them all, not least had been Louvaine – Louvaine as she had been in those first few sunny days, so gay and so honest, so hopelessly lost in love.

Meanwhile, however …

Leo Rodd came out of the hotel and across the terrace to his table and pulled up one of the scrubbed wooden chairs and sat down. He sent a waiter scurrying for a Bitter Campari and when the man had gone, hit the table with a triumphant hand and said, ‘Yes. You were right. Bills everywhere.'

Cockie sipped calmly at his Juanello. ‘Has he paid now?'

‘Not yet,' said Leo. ‘But promised – and with chapter and verse, apparently, they're all quite satisfied. Camillo – that's this new guide who's brought on his party from Venice – passed through Florence and Siena and they were full of it. I rang up Rapallo and the Flora in Rome, and by a miracle somehow got through. Odyssey Tours have never stayed at the Flora before, but we were booked in there as you know. He owes at the two hotels I rang up in Rapallo and everywhere in Siena – you remember that ghastly
albergo
in Siena?'

The waiter came scooting back with the Bitter Campari, scooped up his money and departed at his own more accustomed stroll. Leo said eagerly, ‘How did you guess?'

‘I don't guess,' said Cockie, irritably. ‘I deduce. We'd been promised in the prospectus, “first-class hotels”. Well, that means good second-class – we all know that. But what did we get? We got tip-top luxury in Rapallo, we got the lowest kind of pension in Siena, we were due for tip-top class again in Rome. So there was some reason why he couldn't take us to the intermediate ones and one good reason could be that he hadn't paid his bills there on previous tours. He's been using Odyssey funds for his own purposes.'

‘Would the hotels give him credit?'

‘I suppose so. Odyssey's a big firm, they'd know that they'd get their money in the end and there must be lots of reasonable excuses for a courier not paying on the nail – money not arrived from England, that kind of thing. An awful lot of fiddling goes on no doubt, with currency; he'd spin some yarn.'

‘And of course he's actually a director; or so I believe.'

‘Do you indeed?' said Cockie, with ferocious pity.

‘Well, isn't he?'

‘All talk. He's a courier, my dear fellow, no more, no less. Mind you, these chaps have responsibility – they handle a lot of money, thirty or forty people travelling through the continent for two or three weeks, that costs money; and then no sooner have they got rid of one lot than they pick up another. Fernando's probably been this way several times already this season. And he'd have a lot of freedom too, with the arrangements – bookings and so on, why arrange it from England when you've got people actually on the spot …?'

The new courier appeared upon the terrace and sat down rather furtively all by himself, only to be besieged a moment later by his eager flock. It was pitiful to see the interested smile switched on, the listening ear inclined to recitals of Mrs A's pleasure in this afternoon's excursion, Mrs B's dissatisfaction with it, Mrs C's loss of a bracelet of exclusively sentimental value and her evident confidence that he would rush off forthwith and comb the unsavoury streets of Barrequitas for it; to watch the guarded skirmishings to avoid a jolly old glass of Jewanello with Mr D in favour of Hoo-warne-ellyo with refined Miss E. Leo Rodd said – reluctantly, for hope was rising within him like yeast and he was loath to pick holes in a case which might even yet shift the load of suspicion from Helen: ‘Wouldn't the hotels confide in the courier who followed him on these trips?'

‘I don't suppose couriers do follow each other. This would be Femando's beat, the others would be conducting tours taking in other places. This business has thrown them all out, probably Camillo would never have come through Siena and Florence otherwise, they've had to reorganize because of Fernando being out of commission.'

‘Yes, of course,' said Leo. He sat twiddling his glass in his one hand and tried not to be glad that suspicion was shifting to Fernando, who after all was a good enough fellow, a rogue if you liked, but a cheerful, well-meaning rogue. And yet – there was Miss Trapp; that didn't seem quite so well-meaning and jolly. ‘I'm sorry for the old girl,' he said.

‘Foolish woman. He's obviously getting money out of her.'

‘Yes. Hence the promises to the hotels.'

‘They didn't say what form the promises took?'

Leo laughed. ‘No. They were startlingly frank about the rest, but they got a bit cagey at that stage: both to Camillo apparently from what he's just told me, and to me on the telephone. I dare say they think it's coming from illegal sources and the less they know about it at this stage the better.'

‘She couldn't have got money from England so soon.'

‘If at all, surely?'