Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus by Dorothy Dunnett
‘Explosives, eh?’ said the bald-headed man reflectively. Johnson removed his fingers from his ears and stared at him. I looked at Charles. Charles, who had been hugging an armful of balloons, let them go and they swirled into the air, which became full of a crossfire of bullets, intent on bursting them. The policeman with the rifle had it up to his ear, loosing off at the ones that got away. A bullet went through the flap of my handbag. ‘I think,’ said Johnson apologetically, drawing me off to the ditch where he had already laid his jacket, ‘that we should take cover.’
Charles joined us there at that, but the bald-headed man stood stoically in the centre of the mayhem, as his gunmen demolished the last of the floating escapees. As the last one popped, he strolled through the thick smoke towards us and said, ‘It seems likely, Signor, that you were mistaken. But the Roman police always like to make certain. You would like to take the last shots?’
There were four red balloons left still tied to the pole of the toy truck.
Johnson shook his head speechlessly. So did Charles. I was incapable of shaking anything except, perhaps, a very strong Bloody Mary. The bald man smiled again in a commiserating way, and, snapping his fingers, received and raised the police officer’s rifle. He aimed at the pole of the toy truck and fired it.
I suppose we all hoped he’d miss, but he didn’t. He hit the first red balloon plumb in the centre.
There was a burst of white heat like Hiroshima, a sheet of red, an uprush of black smoke, and the sort of explosion they put on the sound track of war films. The toy cart rose in the air and dispersed in the direction of Pluto.
Johnson said, ‘Christ,’ very, very slowly.
The bald-headed man didn’t say anything at all. He just turned, equally slowly, and looked at the Mercedes-Benz in a very considering fashion.
We spent a long time after that at the Questura, and had our statements taken down and read back to us, and we all signed them. No one could have been more helpful or cooperative than the Commissioner. We were in no way to blame. We were even excused responsibility for our collisions. The Commissioner was happy to have known us.
He was happy to have known Innes, too, when they pulled him in and got him to sign his statements. Innes, who hadn’t known about the body in the meat safe, lent the right air of horrified disbelief when the Chief of Police arrived at that part of the late Mr Paladrini’s confession. Charles, by artistically refusing to believe it at all, went too far and nearly roused police suspicions. I sat beside Johnson and wished it was all over and I could go back to the Dome.
Then I remembered what else, besides a body, was back at the Dome. I siphoned in a breath that caused high tide at Ostia, and Johnson patted my hand. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We phoned Jacko.’
‘The gas cylinder?’ I said weakly. ‘Charles? The gas cylinder at the Dome?’ It was Jacko’s day to do his developing, intermittent gaseous burst valve said the label on that cylinder. And when Jacko switched it into the fluid, it certainly would.
‘I phoned Jacko,’ said Johnson again. ‘Ruth? I phoned him.’
‘The telephone rang,’ said the bald-headed man reassuringly. He was drinking a mild cup of coffee.
‘And a girl answered,’ said Johnson, equally reassuringly.
‘Di?’ I ventured. We had left Di at the Castel Sant’ Angelo saying Hey. I remembered Maurice passing by in his car, and the look on Di’s face, and it wasn’t very hard to conjecture just how Maurice came to pass in his car. Or indeed why Di hadn’t been disturbed to come all the way to the police station to make her statement. She was Bernadette Mayflower’s daughter and the heiress of Prince Minicucci. Di had gone straight to the Dome and to Jacko.
‘How did she sound?’ I said, as Johnson nodded.
He considered. ‘As if she’d made it with North, South, East and West and one of them had declared. You can relax. No intermittent gaseous burst valve has a dog’s chance alongside your rutting photographers.’
We all laughed, ha-ha, and Charles threw in an obituary:
‘Her life was full of kindly deeds
A helping hand to all in need
A happy smile, a heart of gold
The finest lay this world could hold.’
You would think our troubles were over.
You would. I knew that they weren’t.
The next day, the Director of the Trust arrived from England to find out what exactly had been occurring in Maurice Frazer’s Tibur Hill observatory, and Charles’s flatmate Sassy Packer was arrested for illegal gambling. So Charles roared off to Rome to bail him out and protect his Sedan Chair Bar from the carabinieri while I remained in the Dome kitchen with Jacko, chain-drinking coffee and awaiting a summons from Maurice.
We knew the Director had gone straight to the villa, provided with a short, well-sharpened stiletto. Within limits, the Zodiac Trust would do anything to further the causes of astronomy. But allotting work to a group of shifty astronomers who established their dead in a meat safe was a different matter. A strong feeling that the Trust’s sacred projects were in quite the wrong hands had brought Professor Hathaway to the Villa Sansavino that morning.
Innes, in solitary vigil, spent the morning in Mouse Hall grooming Poppy and listening to the names of all the quiz winners on ‘Rischia Tutto’. At lunchtime he turned up at the Dome and we all three had some more coffee and a tin of crumble cookies from Innes’s grandmother which Jacko had pushed to the front of the shelf. There was nothing else because no one had gone shopping. The gas cylinder had been taken away and so had the body but it wasn’t like home. And Johnson, report said, had been sent for by the Vatican to continue the portrait of the Pontiff.
At least, we hoped that was why the Vatican had summoned him. I spent some time comforting Jacko, who had never been christened. Innes said he knew someone who would do a quick job and Jacko was hilariously grateful but wrote the name down carefully in his diary. The 50-Inch got blessed every Candlemas.
Then the phone rang and it was Timothy, asking us all three to come to the villa and take after-lunch coffee with Maurice and the Director. With sober clothes and clean shirts and alimentary canals brimming with coffee, Jacko, Innes and I shuffled over.
The Director of the Zodiac Trust is a woman. Everyone in astronomy has worked at some time with Professor Lilian Hathaway, who is an experimental genius and right out of my field. She is, in fact, right out of the Trust’s field too, if the truth be known. The Trust chugs along while Lilian Hathaway sits at her desk constructing original theories and occasionally propounding them at meetings with other top-level astronomers. The fact that the prime job at Herstmonceux had just been filled over her head by another female astronomer seemed to have escaped her notice. The occurrence of a suicide, two murders and a near-fatal accident in or around the Frazer Observatory might have escaped her notice as well, if our luck had held.
We walked across the marble halls of the villa and up the marble staircase and were welcomed in whispers by Timothy, in a black suit with a stunning lace cravat, chastely pinned with a diamond. Jacko said, ‘Who’s winning?’
‘Darlings, you can’t be worried,’ said Timothy. ‘Maurice is devoted to you. You know he is, and look how he’s aching to be painted by Johnson.’
‘Ah!’ said Jacko. ‘Do I understand that Maurice and friend Johnson have had a heart-to-heart?’
‘You can take it from me,’ said Timothy, ‘that they understand one another perfectly.’ He didn’t look at Innes and his eyes glided over me as well. It took me one minute, and then I got it. Timothy was on standby this morning. Timothy wanted one thing for Christmas and Timothy thought he was going to get it. Timothy wanted Charles.
Maurice kept us waiting five minutes, and then he and Professor Hathaway received us in the Charles Stuart Room. Scotsmen have been known to burst into tears on entering this chamber, which is carpeted in Royal Stuart tartan and laddered with crossed swords all over the panelling, and targes above them like kneecaps. The rest of the s
Some of them were originals. In the heyday of his hang-up Maurice used to travel about every anniversary laying wreaths in the cathedral at Parassio and the Villa Stuart and below all the monuments in St Peter’s. He had since moved on to worship Neil Armstrong. It was, in fact, a subtle sign of belligerence on Maurice’s part to receive anyone in the Stuart room. I wondered if Professor Hathaway knew it.
Beside the white mink and Famille Rose beauties of Maurice, Lilian Hathaway looked like an advertisement in Field and Stream for budget hairdressing. She was lean and sloped like an unpadded clothes hanger. Her glasses, which were strong, divided a long, adenoidal face with a top feathering of fluffy grey hair under which her sugar-pink scalp showed all over. She had on a jersey suit and was sitting in a silk brocade armchair talking about Red-shift Discrepancies. While we watched her she moved on to recent developments in the theory of Degenerate Dwarfs. I could see Timothy hanging on every word.
Maurice said, ‘Ah, children. The Director is agog about our little Orgia di Cadaveri: come and tell her all about it. Ruth darling, you look like a cover girl. Innes, how is Poppy? Jacko, you appear exhausted. You must not give so much, dear boy, to your work.’
Maurice, doing the wicked sophisticate. Innes threw him a glare of active dislike and sat down. Jacko lowered himself into a straight-backed chair with a royal coat of arms in the back. His moustache made it difficult to tell what he was thinking but he looked at a guess as if he wanted to lie down flat in the men’s room. I said, ‘Good morning, Professor Hathaway. I’m sorry you had to be dragged over. We all did our best to keep the Trust out of it.’
‘You’re mad, quite mad, darling,’ said Maurice cheerfully, indicating a chair between himself and Professor Hathaway and waiting while I sat on the edge of it. ‘Chasing miscreants up and down the Corso, breaking into flats and firing off guns on the premises; stealing a toy-vendor’s truck and chasing the Chief of Police half through Rome in it. Not to mention selling him a balloon filled with highly volatile explosive.’
Maurice was a bastard who had gone over to the enemy. I said icily, ‘You knew as much about it all as we did.’
‘My dear child, I observe,’ said Maurice, sitting down airily. ‘I do not report, like you; my reporting role in the world is now over. I do not advise. I do not interfere. I merely watch the antics of my fellow men and now and then stretch out a willing hand to help them. Coffee?’
‘No, thank you,’ I said. Jacko also refused. Innes accepted and then sat with his cup rattling like a tin lid on a spin-drying machine; after a while he put it down. The Director’s pebble glasses, which had been glinting obediently at each of us as we spoke, settled on Maurice.
‘Dear Mr Frazer,’ she said. ‘Alarming though you contrive to make it all sound, we are not yet off—off Broadway, or even on it. You will help us, indeed, by remaining quite calm. Ruth, my child. You appear to be having environmental problems. Suppose you tell me how it all happened.’
Good Old Lilian. Everyone always said Good Old Lilian. You could see it written all over Jacko’s face, and even Innes’s. It didn’t do to forget that once the mirrors were all in alignment and you had her attention, Good Old Lilian was a very sharp cookie indeed. Unhappily, I embarked on a full account of my environmental problems. I.e., the murders.
It sounded just great, every word of it. How Charles and I had lit out after finding the corpse in the zoo toletta. How we had kept to ourselves the break-in which ended in the trussing of Jacko and the smashing of Charles’s camera. How we had gone sleuthing around after the Fall Fair as Maurice had said, pursuing the balloon man and taking his place when we found his flat empty. Maurice said, ‘And don’t forget the night you found the body in the meat safe.’
He was not only a bastard, he was a rat. I said, ‘We didn’t tell the police about that. You wanted to bury the man in the garden. Remember?’
Maurice smiled. He spread his pink hands towards Professor Hathaway and lifted one shoulder of his embroidered smoking jacket. ‘If they had only listened,’ he said.
Jacko sat up slightly. ‘Well, listening to you wouldn’t have saved Ruth from falling through the floor of the Dome,’ he said. He had strong feelings about what happened that night. ‘You didn’t hear about it till afterward.’ He turned to Professor Hathaway. ‘We knew about the meat safe because Paladrini broke into the Dome one night Ruth and I were both there and tried to get to the freezer to remove it. We chased him. He lifted the cupola trapdoor and Ruth almost fell through.’ He paused. ‘We didn’t tell the police either that we found Charles’s film on the body. Maurice kept it here, in his room, but it was pinched back. By Paladrini, I suppose.’ He said to me, ‘Did Charles get it back? The police must have found it.’
I shook my head from side to side, glaring at him. He winced. He didn’t mean any harm. But I was trying, Jacko . . . I was trying to keep Charles’s affairs out of it. The Prof wrinkled up her short nose under her spectacles and then looked at me through them. ‘I am sorry, of course,’ she said, ‘for Lord Digham’s difficulties with his film. I am rather more sorry, my dear, that the Trust’s name had to become involved with them.’
And here it came. I said, ‘You can’t be more sorry than we are. It was the purest accident that the two cameras got mixed up in the Dome in the first place. It might have happened anywhere.’
Lilian Hathaway put her two sets of fingers together and smiled, as if I were at the wrong end of a telescope. ‘But it was perhaps a little more liable to happen since Lord Digham was a frequent visitor, I imagine, to the observatory,’ she remarked. ‘He may perhaps even have developed some of his pictures there. Using, I am sure, his own materials and taking every care not to inconvenience you or Jacko . . . You are about to tell me, of course, that it is quite customary in astronomy for husbands and wives to stay on duty together, and that we must all move with the times.’
I had been about to tell her exactly that. Well, not perhaps exactly that, but near enough. Jacko’s moustache moved convulsively, heralding an impulse to tell Professor Hathaway, I imagined, that he had it off with Di regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the developing tank, and she could announce it in the trade press if she felt like it. Innes took a rattling drink of his coffee, and I could tell he was thinking of Poppy. I said quickly, ‘I suppose, Professor Hathaway, the quality of our work is what we hope you will judge us by.’
‘I shall certainly do that,’ she said, smiling. ‘I shall take the plates back with me this weekend. Nor are we so unfeeling, Ruth, that we expect to discipline the private lives of any scientists outside their work programme. But I don’t need to tell you intelligent people that while you are in Italy, you are ambassadors not only of the Trust and of your profession, but of England. The conventions for unmarried women are different in Italy, and there is a strong case for not openly flouting them. As for any irregularities involving the criminal classes, the Embassy is there to advise you. This time the authorities were lenient . . . Next time, you may not be so fortunate.’
‘My dear lady,’ said Maurice. He had lit another eleven-inch cigar, ejecting the flame from a Ronson encased in a replica of one of Prince Charlie’s dress pistols. ‘I can tell you this much. If this sweet child hadn’t been sharing a bed with Charles Digham, I should have had half the eligible bachelors in Rome breaking down the doors of the observatory to get at her. The Frazer Observatories have drawn loyalty and devotion from this stable and happy household of two loving young people, and, but for an unhappy accident, would have continued so to draw it. Compare Ruth with that sex-starved neurotic, Jacko Middleton, whom you see before you. And poor Innes, who has to transfer his fixations to the animal kingdom. The life I have led,’ said
‘Indeed,’ said Professor Hathaway mildly. She opened a handbag and taking therefrom a square case, extracted from it and lit a seven-inch black cigar, whose aroma, curling towards the smoke-blackened targes, immediately overwhelmed and extinguished that of Maurice’s. She peered at him over her glasses. ‘You have the look, now I come to see you, of a strong family man. I’m glad to see it. I came over from England, Mr Frazer, thinking that my nominees had been taking unpardonable liberties with your property. It now appears that a good deal of it was at your instigation.’
‘Mine!’ said Maurice. ‘My dear lady, you flatter me. An old man of sixty, hardly able to move from my bed to my chair. The theatre takes its toll, takes its toll. Astronomy, it is well seen, is kinder.’
He was seventy, if he was a day. I saw Jacko’s face turn a bright scarlet. Professor Hathaway, blowing an unperturbed cloud of brown smoke, said, ‘It makes calls on the intellect, certainly, which in quite mature years may still hope to be answered. I trust the young people were helpful. I should prefer, however, to consider the scenario ended.’
‘With the chief actor so newly arrived?’ said Maurice, and extended a gallant pink hand, his eyebrows rising into the mink. I stared at them both with my mouth slightly open. I could hear Jacko breathing, and Innes was sitting with his hands clasped so tightly together that his nails had gone white. As a dialogue, one had to admit, it had a certain paralyzing quality. Professor Hathaway, it was abundantly clear, hadn’t nipped over from England wholly because of our unworthy conduct. She had come over because she knew Maurice Frazer’s little habits and thought it was high time to check them.
And Maurice, damn him, was enjoying it. He leaned back in his chair and stretched out a hand. Timothy, gliding noiselessly forward, caught an inch and a half of Corona ash in a Prince Charlie snuff box and retreated. Maurice said throatily, ‘Tell me, Professor Hathaway. Are there not times when you find the study of the stars a little too cold and distant? A little inhuman?’