Miss Bellman shook her head sadly.
‘It was one of those pick-ups,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘She picked him up at a dog show—Crufts, I think it was— the spring before she came here in the September. He’d gone to draw dogs, and she’d gone to show a couple of Pekes. Then they met again lifting potatoes.’
Before she sought out Miss McKay, Dame Beatrice had a word with the college secretary.
‘Yes,’ said the secretary, in answer to a question, ‘a letter did come for Mr Basil. Only one. I re-addressed it to the hospital.’
chapter twelve
See Naples and Die
‘… our road led us suddenly into the most delightful country you can imagine.’
Ibid.
« ^ »
Vesuvius, with its pillar of cloud by day and its lurid glow by night, dominated the sky to the south of the city and gave a Satanic welcome to travellers, reminding them of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the state of their own souls.
In the end, it was Carey who had accompanied Dame Beatrice to Rome and southwards, for Miss McKay had decided (reluctantly, she admitted), that it would be unseemly and frivolous for her to leave Calladale in the middle of term in order to disport herself in Italy.
Before leaving the college, Dame Beatrice had had a long talk with her and had ascertained that the absent Mr Basil was in hospital in Scotland; that he had broken his leg by falling down in the Cairngorms; that Miss McKay thought it most unlikely that he would have attempted to take a girl student as his sole companion on holiday, but that she was prepared to believe anything of anybody in these days; that he would have been in no jeopardy of losing his post at the college as long as the student had gone with him voluntarily; that the college was a nursery for plants but not for silly girls, and that, if the students of agriculture and dairy farming did not know enough to come in out of the wet, she felt inclined to wash her hands of them and their affairs and write the college off as a failure.
‘But would your staff know that those are your views?’ Dame Beatrice had enquired. Miss McKay had shrugged the question aside, with an intimation that it was scarcely the sort of thing about which she could be expected to make a public announcement.
‘Of course, if parents or guardians complained, I should have to take a line,’ she had concluded, and had added, as an afterthought, that it was all a great nuisance.
‘I expect your absence from the college in the middle of the term is also a great nuisance,’ Dame Beatrice remarked to her nephew, as, in a taxi driven by an extremely fat Neapolitan, they took the road southwards on the morning after their arrival in Naples from Rome. They were driving to the hotel at which Biancini’s relative was known to have worked.
‘I say, though,’ Carey had volunteered, at one point, before they left England, ‘is our journey really necessary? This holiday the Biancinis took doesn’t cover the time of the murder. That came after their return.’
‘Yes,’ Dame Beatrice had replied, ‘that is the case, certainly.’ But, in spite of her ready acceptance of the fact, she still seemed to think that the visit to Naples was necessary. Carey, pleased with the chance of a short break in routine, had said no more. He had gone sightseeing by himself in Rome while, for three days, Dame Beatrice visited her learned friends, and now he was prepared to escort her to what he thought would turn out to be a hostelry of only modest if not actually of dubious type.
In this he was mistaken. After the squalor of some of the city streets, the lines of washing hung high from tenement to tenement, the careless heaps of fish and fruit in the markets, the Hotel Vittorio came as a pleasant surprise. Its façade was gloomily magnificent. Its interior gave the impression of a monastery, and this was not at all strange, as that is what it had been up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was cool and pleasantly shadowed. The clerk at the desk greeted them in English.
‘Good-day. You have reservations?’
They had reservations. Dame Beatrice was shown to a stone-flagged chamber, immensely vast, which contained, besides the bed, a washstand of nineteenth-century veneered mahogany and a dressing-table in bog-oak. There was also a wardrobe of indeterminate wood, capable (she thought) of housing ghosts, coffins, corpses or the whole of the hotel’s store of linen.
She unpacked, bathed and changed, and was downstairs before Carey was ready to join her. The hotel possessed a long balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples. An elderly waiter came up.
‘The signora would care for some wine? Lachryma Christi, perhaps? Orvieto? Santa Catarina? Chianti?’
Dame Beatrice, with memories of a honeymoon of long ago spent at Amalfi, plumped for Santa Catarina, and sat for half an hour watching the Neapolitan sea.
‘Tell me,’ she said to the hovering, elderly waiter when he had reappeared to tell her the time of the next meal, ‘have you had here a Signor Biancini and his wife?’
‘And daughter, signora. Yes, yes. The wife and daughter are English, a second marriage, as I understand from Giovanni Biancini, who works here but is off duty today. The daughter is of her mother’s first marriage, and was born, one would suppose, when the woman was very young.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘She was of thirty years, this daughter. Giovanni Biancini told me so, and one could well believe it.’
‘Indeed? It is this daughter in whom I am interested.’
‘The signora is thinking of engaging her as a companion? But that needs one who is virtuous and of a quiet and docile disposition. This young woman was not quiet or docile. I have heard her revile her mother. Besides, unwisely she liked her stepfather, I think. The signora will understand. It is not nice to explain.’
This remark terminated the conversation and Dame Beatrice went to the dining-room.
‘You seem very quiet tonight,’ said Carey, as they sat, after dinner, on the terrace with their coffee. ‘Scarcely a cheep out of you during the whole of the evening. Are you tired?’
‘By no means. I have found out what I came to find out, but how much use it will be to me and to the police is problematical.’
‘You haven’t been long about it. Does that mean we go home tomorrow?’
‘No, no. Why should we not enjoy ourselves here while we can? The news I have gained will not stale for the keeping. We will visit Pompeii. We will study Herculaneum. We will climb to the crater of Vesuvius and go to see the bubbles of volcanic mud at Solfatura. We will demand spaghetti cooked as they do it in Sicily, with bacon, mushrooms, onions, garlic, black olives and anchovies, with the Parmesan cheese on a separate dish. We will eat pollo in padella con peperoni and pigeons prepared after the Roman fashion. If we can get it (but the time of year may not be right) we will have a hare washed in vinegar and sauté in butter with sliced onions, ham, sugar and vinegar, grated chocolate for colouring, almonds shredded fine and some raisins.’
‘I can hardly wait. What about going to Amalfi, Sorrento and Capri? I know everybody does, but I like tripperism. Anyway, I’m glad we don’t have to leave at once. I must give my young ladies time to miss me from the piggeries. I should think my predecessor’s leg must be on the mend by now, though. I don’t much want to be at the college after Christmas.’
Characteristically, he did not ask his aunt what it was that she had managed to find out since they had been at the hotel. It was not that he took no interest, but he felt sure that she would tell him when she was ready to do so. She told him as they came out of the church of Santa Chiara in Naples, on their return journey to Rome, which they made in a hired car.