‘I note,’ she said, ‘that with your usual delicacy and the amour propre we have come to expect of you, you have forborne to ask me what it was that I came to Italy to find out.’
‘I knew you’d tell me when you were ready, if it was possible to tell me at all,’ said Carey, with his slight smile. ‘That doesn’t mean I haven’t been curious, of course. I always thought there was some particular method in this madness that you hadn’t mentioned.’
‘It was the discrepancy which puzzled me first.’
‘The alleged age of the corpse?’
‘Yes. It couldn’t have been the body of a twenty-two-year-old that we saw, and yet the mother identified it as that of Mrs Coles, chiefly because of the college blazer, it seems.’
‘So…?’
‘I guessed at once that there must have been another daughter, an older one, but sufficiently like Mrs Coles for the mother, in her natural grief and agitation, to have confused them—and certainly to have confused us.’
‘English is a wonderful language. Well, your guess turned out right, as your guesses are apt to do, being not so much guesses as a species of second sight, but you didn’t come to Italy to prove there had been two Miss Pallisers. You knew that before you came.’
‘Quite so. I did want to establish that it was the elder daughter who was here on holiday, though, and, in doing so, I was given a very broad hint from the waiter that she made herself a nuisance to Mr Biancini.’
‘Probably she was led on. These amorous Italians!’
‘Quite. But you see what follows?’
‘If the waiter noticed what was going on, so did Mrs Biancini. Oh, ho! Quite so! Mrs Biancini had it in for elder daughter, did her in, and deliberately confused the issue by identifying the corpse as that of the younger daughter, with whom it could be proved she had no quarrel at all.’
‘The daughter who fled from home, in fact, rather than live in the same house as Biancini.’
‘Well, well, well! Of course, the snags are pretty obvious.’
‘The biggest snags are the college blazer—Norah Coles surely would not possess more than one of those at a time— and the extraordinary choice of a hiding-place for the body. It seems highly unlikely that Mrs Biancini would have known of the existence of that coach.’
‘Norah Coles might, at some time, have mentioned the Highpepper rag in which it figured. I’ve had students at Calladale tell me about it, you know.’
‘Yes, certainly it seems to have been regarded as a classic. All the same, even if she knew of it, I cannot see her choosing the coach as a hiding-place.’
‘What shall you tell the police about Carrie Palliser now?’
‘I shall not mention Biancini yet, if at all. I don’t want to set them on what might well turn out to be a false trail. All I shall tell them at present is that Carrie saw Naples and died.’
As soon as she was back in England at the Stone House, Dame Beatrice sent a reply-paid telegram to Mrs Biancini:
Which daughter was with you in Italy query Bradley.
The reply she received was equally succinct.
Carrie why query Biancini.
She thought the message oddly cool, but concluded that it had come from Biancini himself and not from the dead woman’s mother. In any case, another conversation with one or both of the Biancinis appeared to be necessary before she went again to the police.
Accordingly, she called on them next day. Biancini was out, but his wife welcomed her with what seemed to be an air of relief.
‘We couldn’t make head or tail of your telegram, Dame Beatrice,’ she said. ‘Of course it was Carrie we had with us. It couldn’t have been poor Norah, as I thought you knew, her being with her aunt at the time.’
‘Sit down, please, Mrs Biancini,’ said Dame Beatrice, who had been given a chair whilst her hostess remained standing on the hearthrug in the fireless, over-furnished little parlour. ‘What I have to say may give you a shock.’
‘Nothing to do with Carrie would give me a shock. She’s been a bad girl, bad through and through. It was only me paying back the money as quick as I did that saved her from prison, you know. I did it for poor Norah’s sake, not to ruin her career by having a sister behind bars. If it hadn’t been for that, and me wanting to marry Mr Biancini, I don’t know but what it wouldn’t have taught her a lesson to have let her go to gaol.’
‘She has received the last lesson she will ever be taught in this world, Mrs Biancini. Tell me, when you were called upon to identify your daughter’s body, did it not seem to you that you were looking upon Carrie and not Norah?’
Mrs Biancini did not answer for a full minute. Then she said, in tones husky from shock:
‘But—but she was wearing the college blazer. I never thought—I hardly glanced—it was all too much for me. They were ever so alike to look at. I never could understand why their natures should be so different. But—I mean, are you telling me it’s Carrie who’s dead?’
‘I do not think there is any doubt of it.’
‘Then where is my Norah?’
‘That is a question for the police,’ said Dame Beatrice sadly. ‘I do think, Mrs Biancini, that you would be well advised to tell me all you know.’
There was a struggle going on in Mrs Biancini’s mind. It showed in her face. At last she said:
‘Perhaps I’d better tell you. My Carrie was a real bad lot. Biancini—Tony, you know—always thought we could reform her, but I felt I knew her better. But what you’ve just told me has knocked me all of a heap. So where is Norah? And is she dead or alive?’
‘It is impossible to say, Mrs Biancini. We must hope that she is alive, but it would not do to build on it. There is one ray of hope. You identified the body wrongly; you say the girls were much alike. It is possible—mind, I have nothing to go on in saying this—but it is possible that somebody else made the same mistake and that Carrie was killed instead of Norah.’
‘But nobody on earth would want to hurt Norah!’
‘What about Carrie?’
‘That might be a different kettle of fish.’
‘But you know nothing definite? You cannot think of anyone who might have had a motive for compassing Carrie’s death?’
‘I couldn’t say. We’d been out of touch until Tony suggested having her with us for this holiday in Italy. His idea, I think, from what he said, was to get her a job as hotel receptionist or perhaps in a tourist office. She’d learnt Italian, you see, when she knew I was set on marrying him, and she’d taken French at school, my first husband being alive until she was nearly nineteen.’
‘Mr Biancini took sufficient interest in her, then, to think about her future? What sort of work had she been doing before this holiday in Italy?’
‘School-teaching. Oh, not at a proper school, you know. She was at one of these little private boarding schools where they employ the staff term by term.’
‘Term by term?’
‘Yes. You get the sack at the end of every term so they don’t have to pay you for the holidays. Then you apply again at the beginning of the next term and they take you on again, automatic, as it were.’
‘But,’ said Dame Beatrice, who had heard of this hand-to-mouth system before, ‘isn’t it true that the summer holiday at such schools can last as long as ten weeks?’
‘Oh, yes, with a month at Easter and three weeks at Christmas. Either Carrie used to get a holiday job or else go on the Unemployment. She managed somehow, or else got into trouble with debts and stealing, which I had to see to, as I told you.’