Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus by Dorothy Dunnett
Sophia, of course. I looked around again. I had seen, a moment after I came in, Professor Hathaway appear far below and vanish into a ruined corner of the Parascaenium, Innes beside her. There was still no sign of Johnson. A low broken wall lay between me and the seats. Between this and the outer wall, also broken, were a number of odd tumbled buildings with weeds and bushes growing beside them. I began to walk very slowly from one horn of the terrace around to the other. I wasn’t afraid of Sophia. Or at least I wasn’t afraid of a private discussion, however nasty, with Sophia. I didn’t want another public battle, if I could help it. The voice of Maurice, quoting Sappho, intoned:
‘This is the dust of Timas, who died before she was married and whom Persephone’s dark chamber accepted instead.
After her death the maidens who were her friends, with sharp iron cutting their lovely hair, laid it upon her tomb.’
I ask you. If ever there was a moment when I didn’t want to hear an obituary, that was it. Good for Timas. If Sophia cut my throat in the next two minutes, Di wouldn’t so much as chuck me an Asiatic bang from Elena’s.
However, I have never yet heard of trained astronomers giving way to crimes passionels over a wristwatch, so I soldiered on. I got halfway along, too, and was just circumventing a low Roman blockhouse, or perhaps ticket office and candy stall, when someone came up and grabbed me.
It was Sophia, with her long yellow hair coming out of its ribbon and her face livid under the suntan. I tried to drag my arm out of her grip but she had such a tight hold of me that I couldn’t do it. I said, ‘You silly twit; I don’t care whether you have it or not, but it isn’t mine to hand over. Ask Charles for it, if you’re so thick with him.’
It made sense to me, but it didn’t seem to reach Sophia. She not only continued to hang on, but struck my free hand out of the way with a blow that made my eyes water and proceeded to scrabble with my watch buckle, her hair hanging all over the place. My wrist sawed up and down as I hauled it away from her and she dragged it back, still unfastening it. I continued to reason with her until I saw that she really had got the leather half out of the buckle and then I did what I should have done in the first place: swung my elbow around sharply.
It caught her just under the chin. As her jaws snapped shut, I kicked her legs backward from under her and she went down, dragging me half on top of her. I could tell she’d never played hockey at school. Down below, Maurice, pleased with the sonority of his vowels, had begun on Pindar, of which he seemed to know a great quantity. He had started to throw in some gestures. I scrambled to my knees, whipped my hand at last from Sophia’s slackened grip and got to my feet quickly.
I had got two paces away from her when her hand around my ankle brought me down again. I no sooner hit the ground than she was over me grimly, one hand grasping my forearm and the other attempting to drag off the wristwatch. Her teeth were sunk in her lip, and covered with Waikiki Coral Ultracreme lipstick. I foiled her that time by dragging my hand to my waist and folding over it, so that she couldn’t get at it properly. I said, gasping, ‘Sophia, I’m not giving it to you. Why on earth do you want it?’
She was so excited that she answered in Finnish. Then she said, ‘Because you stole Charles from me. You shall not have my present. You have taken him and spoiled him and dragged him down. Look at what you have done to him! He cannot marry. You will not let him meet other girls. What can he do, but have sordid, illicit affairs and then come home to you, like a fat German hausfrau, always there, always waiting. He worries about his parents, his family. His friends are married; there is nowhere he is not invited. What does he say? I have no wife because I have an old mistress who will not go away and I am sorry for her. May I bring her? Her manners are quite good.’
It hurt all right. It hurt a lot, as a matter of fact. But you had to allow for the Northern sense of drama. There wouldn’t be any Ingmar Bergman films, for God’s sake, if Nordics didn’t go on like this as a hobby. I said, ‘Well, this bloody hausfrau is going to hang on to her gigolo’s wristwatch, Sophia. And if it gets into the papers, it will all be too bad. Because the person it will damage most is your precious Charles. Think of it,’ I said, hissing at her. ‘He might even be forced to ask me to marry him. And I might even have to accept him.’
Which was a mistake, and it was too long since I had seen any Scandinavian movies at that. Sophia leaned forward and sank her teeth in my left ear, and as I yelped and flung up my left hand to stop her, she whipped off the watch and raced off with it.
I staggered on to my feet and zigzagged after her. Through the fingers clapped over my ear, I could feel the blood pouring down inside my collar. It didn’t stop me from running. Sheer blazing fury, quite apart from the pain, kept me belting after that Finnish maniac until our pounding feet drew even the attention of Maurice. He broke off in the middle of saying, ‘I wonder, Timothy. A little rebuilding, dear boy, and I think my old Mistress in China might do here . . .’ and looked up, put out, at the terracing. Innes turned, guidebook in hand, and Jacko shouted ‘Yoo-hoo!’ smiling and waving.
I suppose he thought we were playing catch-as-catch-can. Di, who was wearing a crochet cap with swinging bead drops and her Ariadne outfit, stared up at us without moving but without shouting ‘Yoo-hoo’ at us either. Professor Hathaway and Johnson and Timothy were nowhere visible.
Sophia didn’t know the geography of the place. She probably didn’t know what to expect at the sides of the amphitheatre, and it was on the cards, of course, that any exit there might once have been would have collapsed long ago into a low stack of stones, or a hole. It was because she slowed up, looking about her, that I caught up. That, and the fact that, before or since, I have never run so fast in my life. I got my hand out to grip her just as she hesitated at the end of the terrace. In front of her was a platform with a choice of two possible exits. Beside her was a sheer drop of about thirty feet. At the bottom, looking upward, was the author of Mistress in China, the next lot of Pindar struck from him.
She heard me coming behind her. She stopped dead and turned, and I thought she was going to scratch me. She didn’t. She put out both arms and came at me, her hair flying, her aim perfectly plain. She was going to push me over the terrace.
She struck me before I could stop her. I felt myself thrown staggering backward. I was thinking of Maurice’s poor white mink scalp when a hand gripped my arm over the elbow and, swinging me around like a rotary blade, dragged both my feet on to paving again.
It was Johnson. I think Sophia saw him. I think only then, probably, did she realize what she was doing, because I saw her eyes go suddenly all white, as if the blue bit had vanished under her lids. She was running strongly herself, with her own impetus, but I think she could have stopped herself if she had wanted to.
I saw her decide suddenly not to want to. She went plunging right on to the edge and Johnson, releasing my arm, made one stride after her, found her hair flying past him, and grabbed it.
It was, if you thought of it, a comic tableau. For a moment she looked like a figurehead, bosom forward, chin up and hair straining back in the sea breeze. He had a good grip on it; the full hank with his two hands tight around it. It must have hurt like the devil and she screeched, I was delighted to discover, a damned sight louder than I had. Then she turned her head and came lurching backwards, and slithering down at his feet, sat on the paving and had screaming hysterics.
‘Silly girl,’ said Johnson.
He wasn’t talking to me, but I yelled at him. ‘Did you see all that?’
‘Yes,’ said Johnson.
‘Then why didn’t you stop it?’
‘I did,’ said Johnson. He had taken off the jersey and was wearing a very old cellular shirt with a scarf in it. His bifocals stared at me glassily.
I breathed gustily. ‘Why didn’t you stop it,’ I said, ‘before she bit my bloody ear off?’
I took my hand away. Blood still poured from my lacerated earlobe. Sophia, still howling helplessly, continued to si
‘Yes,’ I said with some venom. ‘After you’ve looked at my ear.’
Johnson peered at my ear, and then, taking out and folding a handkerchief, proceeded to tie it around my head and neck with the aid of another. It hurt like hell but he did it so carefully that I began to feel, despite everything, faintly mollified. Then I caught the look in his eye behind the glasses.
‘I once read something—’ said Johnson conversationally, ‘I’m sure I read something about a sow’s ears during sex. It makes you think. I take it the sow finds it’s worth it.’ He slapped Sophia’s face lightly on either cheek and she stopped screaming and continued merely to whimper.
‘Dear me,’ said Professor Hathaway, emerging from the staircase and picking her way to the scene. Behind her and pulling out eagerly to overtake were Di and Jacko and Timothy. Maurice, leaning on his stick, was staring upward with some disapproval. Innes was reading his guidebook. With mice, these untidy events just don’t happen.
Sophia cried into Professor Hathaway’s shoulder and Jacko sat me down on his cardigan on a nice block of marble and Di said, ‘Good God,’ rather blankly, and removing her eyes from my bloodstains, added, ‘Don’t tell me it was all because of Charles’s stupid watch.’
‘Yes,’ I said rather curtly. ‘Thank God he hadn’t lent me his diamond earrings.’
‘Who has it?’ said Johnson. ‘The watch, I mean. Did Sophia take it?’
‘She did,’ I said. ‘But I got it back.’ It was the first thing I did when she sat down. I had it stuffed in my bra, and it was going to stay there.
‘I wonder,’ said Johnson mildly, ‘if that was sensible.’
We all looked at him. Even Sophia’s head suddenly lifted and her bunged-up eyes peered through the hair at my friend the portrait painter.
‘I think it was very sensible,’ I said with great distinctness. ‘In fact, I can think of no possible alternative.’
‘Of course, keepsakes are special,’ said Timothy. You could tell that, like Maurice, he didn’t hold with untidiness, but his curiosity was absolutely overpowering.
‘Yes. Well, this was Sophia’s keepsake, not Ruth’s,’ said Johnson kindly. ‘Ruth, hand it back to Sophia.’
‘What?’ I said. I quacked. I barely, in fact, made myself audible.
‘Do you want,’ said Johnson, ‘Sophia to have a nervous breakdown? Do you want Charles’s name smeared all over the papers? Do you want your other ear bitten?’
I sat, stunned. Stunned and betrayed. ‘Yes, no, no,’ I answered.
‘Then,’ said Johnson, ‘give the watch back.’
I stared at him. My ear throbbed. My throat felt tight and tears began to work their way into my eyes. I said, ‘I won’t. It belongs to Charles. He lent it to me. If she wants it back, she can go and ask Charles for it. You don’t even know that she gave it to him.’
‘Don’t you?’ said Johnson, and stared at me with those impersonal, indecent glass eyes, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. ‘Then why else should she want it back?’
For a soft, woolly, indeterminate, badly dressed Englishman, he was the hardest man I ever met in my life. I knew it wasn’t any use for me to argue. I knew, and he knew, that he was going to get his own way.
I fished inside my sticky bra and brought out the watch and held it out, hot and filthy and covered with blood, to Sophia.
For a moment, I thought she was going to snatch it and fling it into the orchestra. She took it and clutched it for a moment, her nose running and her lips pressed together. Then she got to her feet and walked off, her head turned aside, her clenched hand still pressed to her bosom.
We watched her go. Then everyone looked down at me and began cooing.
I said a very, very bad word and stalked down the stairs and out of the Taormina Greek theatre. Mistress in China might do all right, as Maurice said. But Mistress in Rome had been a hell of a failure.
FIFTEEN
And that, no one will be surprised to learn, was the moment I decided I was going back to Rome. The too-marvellous-for-words beauty of this happy piece of earth had had it, so far as this scientific observer was concerned, and so had whatever non-event was awaiting us all in the Villa San Michele, Capri. I wanted to take my ear back to safety and Charles.
Everyone agreed this was reasonable. It should have made me suspicious. Even Johnson, on whom I was running out, listened to me with patience as we walked two-by-two along the half-made highway from the cable car and said only, ‘It’s up to you. But you know Capri may be our last chance of finding evidence which will vindicate Charles absolutely?’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘And I hereby invest you with full plenipotentiary powers to deal with it. You might have better luck than you had at the Aragonese Castle.’
The bifocals turned on me reproachfully. ‘I wasn’t expecting an outside attack on you.’
I said, ‘I wonder what you were expecting?’
‘Sparks,’ said Johnson. ‘We got those. Just enough to show, perhaps, where the fire is.’
All good, enigmatic stuff but it didn’t make me burst into tears and beg to be landed on Capri. I left Johnson and, moving up to Maurice, requested a passage on Sappho to Naples. Maurice, putting a gentle ringed hand on my shoulder, said he would adore to have me on Sappho, and he and Timothy and Lilian Hathaway were coming too. Professor Hathaway, drawing abreast of us, remarked that she also would be happy to get back and see what Bob and Eddie were up to in Naples. And that she would give the girl Lindrop a talking to.
My mouth dropped open, which drew a pang from my ear. The ear is one of the most difficult parts of the anatomy to bandage. That is, if you don’t mind a bandage tied right around your head, including your nose and your mouth, it is easy. I said, ‘Is Sophia Lindrop still sailing on Sappho?’
Professor Hathaway said, ‘I had forgotten. It would be rather bad psychology, wouldn’t it, to place you two together? But you know, Ruth, that Lindrop child does need help. She feels rejected. She had seen her fiancé throw her over for another woman. I won’t say Lord Digham was wrong, but it has damaged her view of herself as a person. She needs her ego re-established.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘They’re not your ears.’ And, ‘Johnson,’ I said, as soon as we had boarded Dolly, ‘please, Johnson, will you take me straight to Naples?’
He wouldn’t, the rat. He was still fixated on that bloody fish and the probably non-existent appointment on Capri.
‘Johnson,’ I said. ‘Dear Johnson, will you take Sophia Lindrop then, instead?’
Those chilly, twin-arched bifocals inspected me. ‘You look after your life cycle,’ Johnson said, ‘and I’ll look after mine. Sophia Lindrop is travelling on Sappho.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I am spending the night at the hotel. And tomorrow I am flying to Naples. Kindly ask Lenny to load my case into the speedboat.’
At the hotel landing quay a page was waiting, asking me what my name was. A Lord Digham was calling from Naples.
It was Charles. The lawyers had sprung him. He was in Naples, he said, crackling furiously over all the Italian wiring, because I had said I was bloody well going to be there with Jacko and the others. He had had to telephone Maurice’s villa to find out where to find me.
You cannot dispatch waves of deathless emotion across a communications system that sounds like an earthquake. In any case I could hardly speak from bewilderment and excitement. The case against Charles had been dropped, and there was no hint, as Johnson had warned, of a worse one. Charles was free. The laborious circuit on which Dolly was launched didn’t matter. Someone else had committed those murders: someone else was involved in international spying but as far as I was concerned they could get on with it. Or perhaps the police had caught the real culprits already.
I didn’t try to ask any questions; the line was too terrible. I yelled that I would catch the next plane to Na
I hoped he would be reassuringly upset, but I wasn’t prepared for a stunned silence. Charles said, ‘What?’
‘Here in Taormina,’ I said. ‘Sophia. Fought me for your watch. Became friendly with Maurice. He’s dropping her on Capri on Monday.’
‘It was your watch,’ said Charles. It came over very plainly, and sounded just beautiful. ‘What the hell does that bloody bitch want with your watch?’
‘She says she loves you!’ I yelled. An elderly Italian couple, walking slowly past, turned and gave me a stare.
A lot of swearing came over the line, followed by an inquiry. I said, reassuringly, ‘Capri on Monday, but it doesn’t matter. Let it go. It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you tomorrow in Naples.’
It transpired that he didn’t want to see me tomorrow in Naples. He wanted to get to Capri tomorrow to tear the guts out of Sophia when she landed on Monday.
I didn’t want Charles on Capri on Monday. Even if he were now free as air I didn’t want Charles anywhere near anything that might happen on Capri on Monday. But if it was a toil blowing kisses over that god-awful telephone, it was a mind-blowing flop trying to argue. I shrieked that I would see him in Naples and he shrieked that he was going to Capri. I finally shrieked that I would go to Capri therefore on Dolly, and he could look out for me also on Monday. I wasn’t going to leave him alone with Sophia, even for the purpose of mincing her.
I cancelled my room and semaphored for Dolly’s speedboat. It was Johnson himself who came in it. Before he tied up I’d told him the story and he agreed, reloading my suitcase, that I might as well go to Capri on Dolly. He didn’t seem either surprised or apprehensive, just cooperative. I said, ‘I didn’t want him on Capri, but he insisted. He was furious. Furious with Sophia. If you hadn’t given her the watch he couldn’t have wanted to go. But if the police have freed him, they can’t be suspicious. Does it matter?’