“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” he said. “There’s been a little difficulty. Just coming.”
Mr. Reece glanced at him with contempt. He gave a nervous titter and withdrew only to reappear and stand, door in hand, to admit Maria in the grip of Mrs. Bacon.
“I’m extremely sorry, Mr. Reece,” said Mrs. Bacon in a high voice. “Maria has been difficult.”
She released her hold as if she expected her catch would bolt and when she did not, left the arena. Hanley followed her, shutting the door but not before an indignant contralto was heard in the halclass="underline" “No, this is too much. I can take no more of this,” said Miss Dancy.
“You handle this one, eh?” Hazelmere murmured to Alleyn.
But Mr. Reece was already in charge.
He said: “Come here.” Maria walked up to him at once and waited with her arms folded, looking at the floor.
“You are making scenes, Maria,” said Mr. Reece, “and that is foolish of you: you must behave yourself. Your request is to be granted; see to it that you carry out your duty decently and with respect.”
Maria intimated rapidly and in Italian that she would be a model of decorum, or words to that effect, and that she was now satisfied and grateful and might the good God bless Signor Reece.
“Very well,” said Mr. Reece. “Listen to the Chief Superintendent and do as he tells you.”
He nodded to Alleyn and walked out of the room.
Alleyn told Maria that she was to provide herself with whatever she needed and wait in the staff sitting room. She would not be disturbed.
“You found her. You have seen what it is like,” he said. “You are sure you want to do this?”
Maria crossed herself and said vehemently that she was sure.
“Very well. Do as I have said.”
There was a tap on the door and Sergeant Franks came in.
Hazelmere said: “You’ll look after Miss Bennini, Franks, won’t you? Anything she may require.”
“Sir,” said Sergeant Franks.
Maria looked as if she thought she could do without Sergeant Franks and intimated that she wished to be alone with her mistress.
“If that’s what you want,” said Hazelmere.
“To pray. There should be a priest.”
“All that will be attended to,” Hazelmere assured her. “Later on.”
“When?”
“At the interment,” he said flatly.
She glared at him and marched out of the room.
“All right,” Hazelmere said to Franks. “Later on. Keep with it. You know what you’ve got to do.”
“Sir,” said Sergeant Franks and followed her.
“Up we go,” said Alleyn.
He and Hazelmere moved into the hall and finding it empty, ran upstairs to the Sommita’s bedroom.
iii
It was stuffy in the wardrobe now they had locked themselves in. The smell was compounded of metallic cloth, sequins, fur, powder, scent, and of the body when it was still alive and wore the clothes and left itself on them. It was as if the Sommita had locked herself in with her apparel.
“Cripes, it’s close in here,” said Inspector Hazelmere.
“Put your mouth to the hole,” Alleyn suggested.
“That’s an idea, too,” Hazelmere said and began noisily to suck air through his peephole. Alleyn followed his own advice. Thus they obliterated the two pencils of light that had given some shape to the darkness as their eyes became adjusted to it.
“Makes you think of those funny things jokers on the telly get up to,” Hazelmere said. “You know. Crime serials.” And after a pause. “They’re taking their time, aren’t they?”
Alleyn grunted. He applied his eye to his peephole. Again, suddenly confronting him, was the black satin shape on the bed: so very explicit, so eloquent of the body inside. The shrouded limb, still rigid as a yardarm, pointing under its funeral sheet — at him.
He thought: But shouldn’t the rigidity be going off now? And tried to remember the rules about cadaveric spasm as opposed to rigor mortis.
“I told Franks to give us the office,” said Hazelmere. “You know. Unlock the door and open it a crack and say something loud.”
“Good.”
“What say we open these doors, then? Just for a second or two? Sort of fan them to change the air? I suffer from hay fever,” Hazelmere confessed.
“All right. But we’d better be quick about it, hadn’t we? Ready?”
Their keys clicked.
“Right.”
They opened the doors wide and flung them to and fro, exchanging the wardrobe air for the colder and more ominously suspect air of the room. Something fell on Alleyn’s left foot.
“Bloody hell!” said Hazelmere. “I’ve dropped the bloody key.”
“Don’t move. They’re coming. Here! Let me.”
Alleyn collected it from the floor, pushed it in the keyhole, and shut and locked both doors. He could feel Hazelmere’s bulk heaving slightly against his own arm.
They looked through their spy holes. Alleyn’s was below the level of his eyes and he had to bend his knees. The bedroom door was beyond their range of sight but evidently it was open. There was the sound of something being set down, possibly on the carpet. Detective Sergeant Franks said: “There you are, then, lady. I’ll leave you to it. If you want anything knock on the door. Same thing when you’ve finished. Knock.”
And Maria: “Give me the key. I let myself out.”
“Sorry, lady. That’s not my orders. Don’t worry. I won’t run away. Just knock when you’re ready. See you.”
The bedroom door shut firmly. They could hear the key turn in the lock.
Alleyn could still see, framed by his spy hole, the body and beyond it a section of the dressing table.
As if by the action of a shutter in a camera they were blotted out. Maria was not two feet away and Alleyn looked into her eyes. He thought for a sickening moment that she had seen the hole in the sunflower but she was gone only to reappear by the dressing table — stooping — wrenching open a drawer — a bottom drawer.
Hazelmere gave him a nudge. Alleyn remembered that he commanded a slightly different and better view than his own of the bottom left-hand end of the dressing table.
But now Maria stood up and her hands were locked round a gold meshed bag. They opened it and inverted it and shook it out on the dressing table and her right hand fastened on the key that fell from it.
Hazelmere shifted but Alleyn, without moving his eye from the spy hole, reached out and touched him.
Maria now stood over the shrouded body and looked at it, one would have said, speculatively.
With an abrupt movement, more feline than human, she knelt and groped under the shroud — she scuffled deep under the body, which jolted horridly.
The black shroud slithered down the raised arm and by force of its own displaced weight slid to the floor.
And the arm dropped.
It fell across her neck. She screamed like a trapped ferret and with a grotesque and frantic movement, rolled away and scrambled to her feet.
“Now,” Alleyn said.
He and Hazelmere unlocked their doors and walked out into the room.
Hazelmere said: “Maria Bennini, I arrest you on a charge—”
Chapter nine
Departure
i
The scene might have been devised by a film director who had placed his camera on the landing and pointed it downward to take in the stairs and the hall beneath where he had placed his actors, all with upturned faces. For sound he had used only the out-of-shot Maria’s screams, fading them as she was taken by the two detective sergeants to an unoccupied bedroom. This would be followed by total silence and immobility and then, Alleyn thought, the camera would probably pan from face to upturned face: from Mr. Reece halfway up the stairs, pallid and looking, if anything, scandalized, breathing hard, and to Ben Ruby, immensely perturbed and two steps lower down, to Signor Lattienzo with his eyeglass stick in a white mask. Ned Hanley, on the lowest step, held on to the banister as if in an earthquake. Below him Miss Dancy at ground level, appropriately distraught and wringing every ounce of star quality out of it. Farther away, Sylvia Parry clung to Rupert Bartholomew. And finally, in isolation Marco stood with his arms folded and wearing a faint, unpleasant smile.