Dolly and the Singing Bird (19 page)

She got up, her leathery face shining with recent tears and present admiration, in the light reflected from Napoleon’s tall brow. “It’s being cosmopolitan that gives you the insight. We were going to Jersey ourselves for our holidays, a couple of years back, and then the Baby Blake seeped in its sea valve during the Tobermory races, and it all came to nothing again. Thanks.” She bent, and amazingly planted a prune-like kiss on my cheek. “You’re a good friend,” she said. Then she’d gone.

I rose, too, from the chair arm where I was perched, below the row of prints depicting the Emperor at Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland and Wagram. What about Falkirk was so non-cosmopolitan, when Barra could produce a Rupert Glasscock to order? Duncan’s Peggy, who had never left Castlebay, lacked neither polish nor insight. How was that? By the same token, it did not suit Rupert to be applauded in Falkirk. He went for admiration to Duncan’s Peggy, who mostly withheld it. It occurred to me that I was beginning to understand Johnson, too.

I was alone. I went out, and quickly and quietly continued through the rooms in that wing, looking for Michael.

It was not a house for the weak-nerved. In the drawing-room, all was glazed chintz and tapestry and slim, painted French furniture, but outside in the hall something glimmered in the half-dark: the carcass of a white rabbit, stuffed at the feet of a golden eagle, claws spread, yellow eyes staring at me in the gloom. There, beyond other glass cases, an armed Siamese suddenly faced me: he guarded a doorway, with his carved wooden twin opposite. I opened the door, and it swung shut behind me.

Books, from floor to ceiling: the library. A desk, furnished with leather books and bridge boxes, all stamped with the name of the house. A framed photograph of the steam yacht, the
Rhouma
, which I lifted to look at. Cold in my hands, the glass lit suddenly, scarlet as coal. As I dropped it, I heard the thing smash. And behind me, a voice said chidingly, “
Be careful
!”

I spun around.

Outside Kinloch Castle, the trees were quite black. They filled with darkness the tall study windows, and the windowed roundel of the small alcove-turret behind me. It was from the alcove that the voice spoke. And as it spoke, the alcove filled with red light, that light I had just seen, reflected, in the glass of the
Rhouma
’s dark picture. The glare came sliding over the room, from a pair of eyes set between a vast spread of bronze wings. Eight feet high, alone in the alcove, a bronze eagle reared over me, snarling; and by his great claws apes twisted and writhed.

“Be careful,” the voice hissed again; and out of the turret stepped the small, woolly figure of Bob Buchanan, swinging the red bulb of a torch. “Oh, it’s you; what a shame—I’ll have given you a right fright. I was after your young friend, Rupert. My goodness, those were the days! Fancy scaring their after-dinner guests with yon thing!” He laughed, switching his torch from the red bulb to white, showing the determined grin and the bony ridge round his eyes: Bob Buchanan hadn’t slept much either. “It works from a wee red bulb in the ceiling, but you can get just the same effect with a torch… Have you seen Nancy?”

“She’s looking for you. She thought you were upstairs with the humming-birds.”

“I’d better go, then. I was, but I thought I’d come down. D’you know what they’ve got up there? A—”

He never did tell me. Before he could speak, the hideous rumbling began.

I know the sound of disaster. I have heard a building about to fall. I know the ringing, clamouring thump a steam cylinder makes when it is about to explode. When a roar like that begins inside a house one should run, and run fast.

I threw myself at the door, flung it open and flew out into the lightless hall.

There the clamour was frightening. Men’s voices, shouting, weaved through and above it, echoing among the panelled grotesqueries. The house vibrated with thunder. I saw, huddled under the staircase before me, four silent figures: Hennessy, Ogden, Johnson, and Nancy Buchanan, their faces glowing with inexplicable light. My ears roared with groaning air under pressure. The eruption heaved up noise from its guts like a geyser, druming tinnily between gasps. I fell on my knees beside Johnson.

The shuddering combers of sound rose, coalesced, fell into vast and shivering order and became, inflated beyond all human tolerance, the
intermezzo
from
Cavalleria Rusticana
, played on the organ. Played on an Imhof & Mukle electrical organ, from a roll of unwinding red paper, fitted under the stairs. Dumbly, with the others, I gazed.

Behind glass doors, the organ pipes glistened. And above, throbbing with passion, a triangle, two drums and a cymbal sat emoting for ever. The orchestration belted breathily into some climax; the triangle moved; and at the height of its palsied
fortissimo
, invisibly directed as Punch slamming a policeman, the row of truncated drumsticks jerked forward to pummel the drumskin, while, unasked, the cymbals quivered and clashed. Deafened we watched it flog itself hysterically through such a crisis. Trumpets blared; invisible hands pounded invisible keyboards; the drumsticks vibrated, halted, vibrated like flyweights boxing a punchball. Jangling, roaring, shuddering, the whole Teutonic nightmare landed with a thud back on to its tonic, and Johnson turned, his bifocals steamy with tears, and said, “We were trying to turn on the lights.”

It was then, as the machine uncoiled an oily
legato
, and Nancy giggled, and Bob exclaimed and Hennessy craned purposefully into the mechanism, that we heard Kenneth’s voice far above, shouting.

I was first on the stairs, with the other four pounding after me. Johnson was nearly level. I hissed as we ran, “I thought you were to stay with him?” He did not answer. There were eight people in that house—nine, if Rupert was there. Could no one guard Kenneth? I could have cried with sheer rage, as we ran.

At the top, we hesitated; until another cry guided us. “The lab. wing,” said Johnson shortly, and led across the width of the house to where Kenneth’s room was. We turned the corner, and stepped into a searing dazzle of light. In this wing, every lamp was lit, every door was open, and at the far end of the passage Kenneth stood, unhurt, his hand on the doorpost, and silently showed us, as we reached him, the chaos inside.

His locked laboratory had been opened and ruined. The original object, perhaps, was to search. If so, what happened next was the result of disappointment and temper. I knew from Kenneth that nothing of importance had been left locked here when he was taken to Rona. But whatever the reason, the vandalism was something that shocked. There was no fitting, no pane of glass, no piece of equipment left undestroyed. Papers littered benches and floor, some burnt, some destroyed with acid and ink. Every drawer and cupboard was open, everything of Kenneth’s own, even his spare clothes, his blankets and sheets, had been ripped and scattered about. It was the work of an obsessive, a feminine, vindictive and familiar mind. I, of all people there, knew at once that it was the work of Michael: my Michael Twiss. I left them there, while they turned over debris and exclaimed at it; and I ran back through the house to find Michael this time, alone.

I did not turn switches, although the lighting, I realised, must now be on. I ran along the high gallery ringing the hall, where the saffron windows barely lit the dark ruby walls, and beside me, half-seen
bizarreries
alternated with the big secretive cabinets, heavy with doors. Glass glinted—the humming birds. I was on the first storey now, heading for the bedrooms, dressing rooms, bathrooms in the dark, silent wing where no one was sight-seeing, exclaiming over the period niceties; where Michael, surely, was waiting. Did he guess that Kenneth meant to unmask him? Did he know, I wondered, that soon the
Sioras
would be leaving the jetty to make rendezvous in mid-loch with the ferry from Mallaig—to receive post and to place on the ferry any mail, any parcels, any visitors wishing to return quickly from Rum to the mainland?

It was very quiet. I followed the corridor round, and round again. On my right, faintly, metal glimmered high on the wall and drew my eye to a display of weapons—swords, daggers, boomerangs, inlaid
samurai
. I turned my back on it and called, hardly stirring the air. “Michael! Come out!”

Silence. Below someone had found the switch for
Cavalleria Rusticana
and turned the automaton off. Distantly, from Kenneth’s room, I could hear voices arguing. An owl called thinly outside, and the trees sounded through the glass like a soft breaking sea. I said again, ‘“Michael?”

Opposite me was the dark mouth of a room. I had no wish to draw the others. On the other hand, it was only with an effort of logic that I found I could make myself walk through that door. In my hand was the little torch I had brought all the way from
Dolly
, switched to a thin, pencil light. It shone on a death’s-head.

It was only a painting, a macabre motif. After a moment, I moved the beam, and it showed me a Jacobean four-poster, dark and carved, with the painted symbol of death at its head and foot, under the crown and dark drapes. The curtains hid nobody. The room, as I lit it inch by inch with my torch, was sparsely furnished and empty. I went out, and into the next.

I don’t know how many I searched before I came to the bamboo-furnished bedroom. There, for the first time, when I called I sensed some kind of presence. I called again, and waited. When no one replied, I went right inside.

It was a big bedroom this time, with vast cupboards lining each wall. A bamboo lattice-work decorated the neat bed and its suite. But the sound I had heard came not from here, but from the bathroom beyond. It smelled damp. I paused there, controlling my breath, and then I said for the last time, “Michael! I know you are here. Michael, come out and talk.” And when he did not reply, I switched on my torch.

Curtains. Ceiling-high cupboards. A wash-basin with wrought-iron legs. A bath, hooded man-high in mahogany, and tiered with knobs like an organ for every hydraulic device known to Edwardian man. I had got so far when the white light above me burst into unexpected, brilliant life. I gazed, dazzled at this wonderland bath; and gradually I realised why, tonight, Michael Twiss did not come when I called. For Michael was here, in the bath; and his Trumper haircut was all ruffled and soaked, and his Lobb footwear fatally stained.

He was dead.

The torch in my hand was still on. I put it off, staring at the occupied bath. It did not occur to me to see who had switched the bedroom and bathroom lights on. I was gazing at Michael.

He had been shot. The light, dove-grey quilted coat which he bought with such pride for a long weekend with a marquess, was all spoiled and charred, and a spreading stain had soaked irregularly, like a bad dye, into the fabric. The untidy hair was unlike him, but there was no great change in the smooth face, which I supposed most people would call handsome; which in five years or less would have begun to show, under the skin, the traces of gross self-indulgence which had not yet marred his trimness. He had seated himself, one would guess, gun in hand, on the edge of the massive bath, under the knobs labelled
wave
and
douche
, and holding the gun to his heart, had fired and fallen tidily backwards, organised in death as in life.

So one would guess, except for two things, Michael was a man—had been a man—of no great courage and of immense spite. He was also a man of vainglorious ambition, who above all things loved life. If you knew Michael Twiss, you would know that of all men he was the least likely to kill himself.

You would also know that he did not smoke. And you would wonder why, therefore, the closed air of this bathroom held, as well as the faint unpleasant odours of cordite, of mustiness, of sweat, and of freshly shed blood, a tinge, already vanishing as I traced it, of recent smoke. I thought this; and a sharp voice at my shoulder said, “
What have you done
?” and I turned to face Hennessy, just as I thought: Kenneth smokes.

Then Hennessy said, “What have you done?” again, and, stepping forward, shook me alive. I suppose my face was quite blank. There was suddenly so much to consider, so quickly. When did it happen? Not while I had been searching: I should have heard the sound of the shot. A little before, then. Of course… while the organ was playing. A machine-gun could have fired then and none of us would have heard it. And Kenneth was then upstairs. I realised that Hennessy was staring at me, his two hands still on my shoulders, my loose hair tumbled over them from the shaking. A little blood had come through the white bandage over his ear, and he was pale. It was not a nice sight, Michael folded into the bath. “Tina!”

My eyes focussed on him, I felt his grip and I stirred. “I haven’t done anything—I’ve just come. Stanley, it’s his own gun. He’s killed himself.”

His eyes still stared into mine—cold eyes, of a chilly grey-blue, now the charm was turned off. “Why?”

I said quietly, “I told him not to come near me. I didn’t want him as my manager any more… It was Michael who shot at you on South Rona, Stanley. He was jealous—of Kenneth, of you. That’s why he followed me. And when he found it wasn’t any good…” I bit my lip.

“Don’t cry, sweetheart. It isn’t your fault.” His tone had quite changed.

It was not hard to let my voice shake. I said, and it was true, “I don’t feel sorry. I ought to feel sorry for him, and I don’t feel anything. I worked with him for years… He made me everything I am,
and I didn’t like him and I’m not sorry he’s dead
!”

I burst into tears, and Hennessy held me; and then Johnson’s voice, cool in the background, said, “Can three play? Who’s dead? Oh, I see. The late Mr. Twiss.” His bifocals, gleaming in the bright doorway, were bent on the bath and then, grieving, on me. “Madame Rossi. You’ve been a bad girl, haven’t you? Well, let’s telephone the police.”

Hennessy snapped at him. “She didn’t do it. It’s suicide.”

“Is it?” The black eyebrows shot up. “There’s blood in the bedroom. Suicides don’t usually shoot themselves in one room, and then run quickly backwards and jump into the bath. It was meant to look like suicide, let us say. By someone with a rather poor torch.”

I couldn’t see his eyes, but his voice was colder than Hennessy’s. Behind him in the bedroom Rupert had suddenly appeared. Beside me, I felt Hennessy fractionally recoil. He said harshly, “Is that true?” And then, “The gun’s there, in the bath. Fingerprints would show… Tina said it was the gun that shot me.”

“Very likely. She would know,” said Johnson softly. “After all, he was her manager and intimate friend, was he not? Who was just about to give to the world, wasn’t he, Tina, all the sordid and unprestigious details of your warm friendship with Kenneth Holmes? Was that kind, Tina? You may have saved your own reputation, but where has poor Kenneth’s hope of exculpation now gone?”

It was then, for the first time that I could remember, that I began to feel a true, chilling fear. “Where’s Kenneth?” I said sharply.

“Here. They’re all here,” said Johnson agreeably, and I saw that they were, huddled behind in the bedroom: Nancy, Bob, Ogden and Kenneth. Only Kenneth moved quickly forward, pushing past Johnson and Rupert and Hennessy to my side, where no one wished to be, and said hurriedly, “Valentina! You didn’t do it, of course? You couldn’t have!”

It sounded like a cry from the heart, and my mind boggled and the blood ran from my heart. For if Kenneth himself had abandoned me, my only bulwark had gone.

Except myself. I was alone when I was born, and I am no worse off now. Use your common sense, Tina. I said, “If he was shot in the bedroom he must have been carried here. I couldn’t do that.”

“He’s a small, lightly-built man.” Johnson’s tone was one of gentle conjecture. “And as a singer, you are an agile, muscular woman. He was not afraid to stand close, either, to the person who shot him.”

“Do you think, after all that has happened, that Michael would want to stand close to me? In the dark, anyone might have crept up to him without his knowing.”

“Exactly,” said Johnson, and I felt my colour rising along with my fear of him. I said quickly, “Another thing. I was with someone else all the time until just before the organ was stopped. I heard it stop while I was standing beside those wall weapons. I hadn’t time to shoot him.”

“You had, provided you went straight to this room.”

Damn him to hell. “But I didn’t. And I can prove it,” I said. “Mr. Hennessy came in here behind me. He can swear that I had just arrived when he switched on the light.”

There was a short silence, and I felt the cold closing in on me again. Surely, surely Hennessy saw me? If I was at the far end of the corridor when the organ stopped I couldn’t have been here, killing Michael. On the other hand, he might have run along the long gallery in the dark, as I did, and unlike me, have simply turned in to the first room he saw, seeing nothing of me or Michael until he switched on the light. I looked at him: his well-brushed waving fair hair, his smooth skin rosily tanned from Caribbean beach and Riviera golf course, his sailing, his shooting; his whisky. The charm was utterly absent, and I knew, suddenly and absolutely, that my last guess was right—and that he had no alibi for me.

Then he said, laying his hand gently on the black stuff of my arm, “She’s right. I didn’t think of it at the time, but of course I saw her. I followed her in.” He hesitated. “It looked to me for a moment as if she’d come back to fix something, maybe; but she did come from the other direction. If she was right up the corridor as she says, she couldn’t have done it unheard.” And on my arm, his grip tightened. I did not look at him. He was giving me something more precious than diamonds, and I did not want to see him fling his triumph at Kenneth. But Kenneth, surely, had no hopes of me now.

For a moment, again, there was silence. The others, standing behind in the doorway, had not spoken. Behind us, in this island of light, the whole Castle with its impedimenta lay lightless and empty, its trees tossing blackly about it, the rain beating on the parkland, the hills and the bay.

Somewhere out there, the four boats were rocking: Victoria, asleep in her bunk, the tearstains still on her face; Lenny, impassive, frying the mackerel he had caught and wondering why we were so long.
Binkie
was empty. On
Symphonetta
, the three lads would have exhausted their hymn of hate and, ill-fed from Hennessy’s sparse larder, would have curled up to sleep. While out in the loch, by now
Sioras
would have made her routine trip to the ferry, and laden with mail and parcels and maybe one or two passengers, the ferry would have turned and made for the mainland.

Without Michael. He would not have wished to die on an island. There is no status in that.

I was tired. I had had some sleep, but the others —the Buchanans, Kenneth and Rupert, Hennessy and Johnson and Ogden—had had very little, sailing watch by watch through the night and then driven by their various natures ashore here on Rum.

I looked at Johnson and wondered how much he believed Hennessy: how much, now, he would trouble to protect me over that other murder, in Rose Street. Day by day, I realised, too late now, Johnson’s grip on my life had been growing. Already, I was in his power far more than I had been in Michael’s. I wondered now, not for the first time, what reward Johnson meant to exact. Or if this was his reward. The pleasure of seeing me wronged.

Then Johnson said, “All right. I accept that. But if Madame Rossi didn’t kill Twiss while the organ was playing, we reach the next question: Who did?”

This time the silence was absolute. After a moment Johnson continued. “Food for thought, I observe. Suppose we all move downstairs to the Hall, and consider the question in comfort.” And as Hennessy, lingering, gave a glance at the ungainly lumber which sprawled still in the bath—“Put the light out and leave it. Mr. Twiss will not mind.”

It was cold downstairs. The lights, now switched on everywhere, merely emphasised the scale and emptiness of this museum set in a wilderness. The two ranks of oriel windows, yellow on black, transmitted to us tinnily the onslaught of rain. It would be stormy, outside.

We were seated, at Johnson’s request, on chairs drawn over the shining parquet in a semi-circle before the great fireplace in the galleried hall. On the hearth, a heap of wet logs, resurrected from the caretaker’s premises, had been lit and was greasily smoking. We sat uneasily; Hennessy and I next the fireplace and facing the windows; Nancy and Bob together, facing the fireplace, their crêpe soles flat on the floor; and completing the circle, back to the window, Cecil Ogden and Kenneth, his face lined with strain and with weariness.

Behind us, in the centre spaces of the room, Rupert was roving. And before us, gazing abstractedly into the stark yellow stare of the lion, was Johnson, who had so suddenly taken command, and whom not even Hennessy had questioned. He stood and waited, the new smoke circling round his Navy-issue trousered legs, his reefer open, over a thick, high-necked jersey. In our hands, awkwardly, each of us held a tin cup from the three thermos flasks the Buchanans had produced, with tidy forethought, from the damp satchel at Bob’s foursquare feet. The tea in it was hot, and stewed, and without milk and sugar, but we all sat nursing and drinking it, to remedy our coldness and misery. All except Johnson and Rupert, who had become so imperceptibly alien. There was thus enough to go around. For there were eight of us only, now.

We felt, I suppose, that you cannot merely walk out of a house in which there has been a murder. I do not know what we expected. In any case, Johnson did not waste time. He said, suddenly decisive, “I make no apology for keeping you. If you are concerned about the race, the running order will not be affected. In fact, something much more serious has intervened. A man has been killed in this house tonight, and the murderer is one of you six.”

For the third time, Hennessy’s temper broke through. “Why the hell don’t you phone the police then, and cut out all this poppycock? If there’s a murderer here, I’d feel a damned sight safer, and so would the women, if he were under good strong lock and key… And I’d remind you there are eight, not six of us here. If you’re fool enough to count in the women, then you and Glasscock are as suspect as any of us. Or what about outsiders, while you’re at it? There are forty odd people on this damned island, not to mention your man, and the girl on
Seawolf
, and my three examples of modern youth out there. Couldn’t they equally well have sneaked in?”

“No. This house is surrounded,” said Johnson. “It was sealed when the last of us entered, and it will remain sealed for as long as I say. I should introduce myself. As well as taking part in your cruise, and painting Madame Rossi, I have some responsibility for the submarine
Lysander
. Under my special brief, I am the law at this moment, and in this particular case.”

I could feel the blood in my brain: a peculiar phenomenon. For a moment it deafened me, and I could not think at all. When I forced my mind to its duty, I found Bob Buchanan was speaking. “Is that why—?”

He broke off, and flushed. It was why, of course, he. and Nancy had been handled with that hurtful indifference by those in authority. Hennessy scowled. And Ogden, lying back loose-jointed in his chair, drumming his tin cup on its fine rosewood carving, pointed at Johnson and said, “That’s how they let Holmes leave South Rona! The rumour all over Skye was that he’d been a bad boy with his blueprints, and the Official Secrets Act was going to knock him into next week.”

“Is that so?” Hennessy’s voice came sharply and quick. “He’s been your decoy, has he, flushing out allies? Is that what the Twiss affair is all about?”

“Nearly. Michael,” said Johnson, taking out his pipe without looking at anybody, “was a blackmailer. And blackmailers can get into an awful lot of trouble without necessarily, of course, being spies.” He struck a match and held it to the tobacco. “Who, for example among us here—and you can take it, Hennessy, that Rupert and I may quite properly be excluded—who among you six might be a profitable victim of blackmail? And who, besides Madame Rossi, had the opportunity to kill Michael Twiss?”

Bob Buchanan suddenly shifted on his sofa. “I don’t know what you mean, you have a responsibility for the
Lysander
. You’ve been a good friend to the R.H.C.C, Mr. Johnson, any time you’ve come north, but I never knew about this. Still, men have had undercover jobs I suppose, before now… I just want to say, I’m with Mr. Hennessy. I think before we go any further we should call in the police. There’s someone been shot already, and to my mind the whole thing’s too risky. And in case you think me and Nancy have some vested interest in stopping you, I may say that anyone trying to blackmail me would have pretty poor pickings. After
Binkie
’s kept running and paid for, there’s nothing much left in our kitty. And there’s nothing we’ve done we’re ashamed of. I’ve got strong views on a number of subjects, I don’t mind saying, but that’s what’s wrong with the world today: no one willing to stand up and say what they think about serious matters. I do. Just you ask any of the committees I’m on and they’ll tell you. My life’s an open book, and so’s Nancy’s. The thing we did last night on South Rona harmed nobody but ourselves. We’re getting on, Nancy and I, for that kind of publicity stunt, but sometimes a gesture is needed. You have to give a lead—the young ones aren’t used to it.”