Читать книгу Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 11: Photo-Finish, Light Thickens, Black Beech and Honeydew - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 16

By midday Troy’s jet-lag had begun to fade and with it the feeling of unreality in her surroundings. A familiar restlessness replaced it and this, as always, condensed into an itch to work. She and Alleyn walked round the island and found that, apart from the landing ground for the helicopter and the lawnlike frontage with its sentinel trees, it was practically covered by house. The clever architect had allowed small areas of original bush to occur where they most could please. On the frontal approach from the lake to the Lodge, this as well as the house itself served to conceal a pole from which power lines ran across the lake to a spit of land with a dado of trees that reached out from the far side of the island.

‘For the moment,’ said Troy, ‘don’t let’s think about what it all cost.’

They arrived at the bathing pool at eleven o’clock; drinks were being served. Two or three guests had arrived at the same time as the quartet of players who turned out to be members of a South Island Regional Orchestra. The musicians, three men and a lady, sticking tight to each other and clearly overawed, were painstakingly introduced by Rupert. The Sommita, in white sharkskin with a tactful tunic, conversed with them very much de haut en bas and then engulfed the Alleyns, particularly Troy whose arm and hand she secured, propelling her to a canopied double seat and retaining her hold after they had occupied it. Troy found all this intensely embarrassing but at least it gave her a good opportunity to notice the markedly asymmetric structure of the face, the distance between the corner of the heavy mouth and that of the burning eye being greater on the left side. And there was a faint darkness, the slightest change of colour on the upper lip. You couldn’t have a better face for Carmen, Troy thought.

The Sommita talked of the horrible letter and the touched-up photograph and what they had done to her and how shattering it was that the activities of the infamous photographer – for of course he was at the bottom of it – should have extended to New Zealand and even to the Island when she had felt safe at last from persecution.

‘It is only the paper, though,’ Troy pointed out. ‘It’s not as though the man himself was here. Don’t you think it’s quite likely that now the tour of Australia is over he may very well have gone back to his country of origin, wherever that may be? Mightn’t the letter have just been his final effort? You had gone and he couldn’t take any more photographs so he cooked up the letter?’

The Sommita stared at her for a long time and in a most uncomfortable manner, gave her hand a meaningful squeeze and released it. Troy did not know what to make of this.

‘But,’ the Sommita was saying, ‘we must speak of your art, must we not? And of the portrait. We begin the day after tomorrow, yes? And I wear my crimson décolleté which you have not yet seen. It is by Saint-Laurent and is dramatic. And for the pose – this.’

She sprang to her feet, curved her sumptuous right arm above her head, rested her left palm upon her thigh, threw back her head and ogled Troy frowningly in the baleful, sexy manner of Spanish dancers. The posture provided generous exposure to her frontage and gave the lie to any suggestions of plastic surgery.

‘I think,’ Troy said, ‘the pose might be a bit exacting to maintain. And if it’s possible I’d like to make some drawings as a sort of limbering-up. Not posed drawings. Only slight notes. If I could just be inconspicuously on the premises and make scribbles with a stick of charcoal.’

‘Yes? Ah! Good. This afternoon there will be rehearsal. It will be only a preparation for the dress rehearsal tonight. You may attend it. You must be very inconspicious, you understand.’

‘That will be ideal,’ said Troy. ‘Nothing could suit me better.’

‘My poor Rupert,’ the Sommita suddenly proclaimed, again fixing Troy with that disquieting regard, ‘is nervous. He has the sensitivity of the true artist, the creative temperament. He is strung like a violin.’

She suspects something, Troy thought. She’s pumping. Damn.

She said: ‘I can well imagine.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ said the Sommita with what seemed to be all too meaningful an emphasis.

‘Darling Rupert,’ she called to him: ‘if your friends are ready perhaps you should show them – ?’

The players gulped down the rest of their drinks and professed themselves ready.

‘Come!’ invited the Sommita, suddenly all sparkle and gaiety. ‘I show you now our music room. Who knows? There may be inspiration for you, as for us. We bring also our great diviner who is going to rescue me from my persecutors.’

She towed Troy up to Alleyn and unfolded this proposition. Her manner suggested the pleasurable likelihood of his offering to seduce her at the first opportunity. ‘So you come to the salon too,’ she said, ‘to hear music?’ And in her velvet tones the word ‘music’ was fraught with much the same meaning as ‘china’ in The Country Wife.

Troy hurried away to get her sketching block, charcoal and conté pencil. Alleyn waited for her and together they went to the ‘music room’.

It was entered by double doors from the rear of the main hall. It was, as Mr Ruby had once indicated, more like a concert chamber than a room. It were tedious to insist upon the grandiloquences of Waihoe Lodge: enough to say that the stage occupied one end of this enormous room, was approached from the auditorium by three wide steps up to a projecting apron and thence to the main acting area. Beautifully proportioned pillars were ranged across the back flanking curtained doorways. The musicians were in a little huddle by a grand piano on the floor of the auditorium and in the angle of the apron. They were tuning their instruments and Rupert, looking ill, was with them. The singers came in and sat together in the auditorium.

There was a change now in the Sommita; an air of being in her own professional climate and with no nonsense about it. She was deep in conversation with Romano when the Alleyns came in. She saw them and pointed to chairs halfway down the auditorium. Then she folded her arms and stood facing the stage. Every now and then she shouted angry instructions. As if on some stage director’s instruction, a shaft of sunlight from an open window found her. The effect was startling. Troy settled herself to make a drawing.

Now the little orchestra began to play: tentatively at first with stoppages when they consulted with Rupert. Then with one and another of the soloists, repeating passages, making adjustments. Finally the Sommita said, ‘We take the aria, darling,’ and swept up to stage centre.

Rupert’s back was turned to the audience and facing the musicians. He gave them the beat conservatively. They played and were stopped by the Sommita. ‘More authority,’ she said. ‘We should come in like a lion. Again.’

Rupert waited for a moment. Troy saw that his left hand was clenched so hard that the knuckles shone white. He flung back his head, raised his right hand and gave a strong beat. The short introduction was repeated with much more conviction, it reached a climax of sorts and then the whole world was filled with one long sound: ‘Ah!’ sang the Sommita. ‘A-a-a-h!’ and then: ‘What joy is here, what peace, what plentitude!’

At first it was impossible to question the glory, so astonishing was the sound, so absolute the command. Alleyn thought: Perhaps it hardly matters what she sings. Perhaps she could sing ‘A bee-eye-ee-eye-ee sat on a wall-eye-all-eye-all’ and distil magic from it. But before the aria had come to its end he thought that even if he hadn’t been warned he would have known that musically it was no great shakes. He thought he could detect clichés and banalities. And the words! He supposed in opera they didn’t matter all that much but the thought occurred that she might more appropriately have sung: ‘What joy is here, what peace, what platitude.’

Troy was sitting two seats in front of Alleyn, holding her breath and drawing in charcoal. He could see the lines that ran out like whiplashes under her hand, the thrown-back head and the wide mouth. Not a bit, he thought, remembering their joke, as if the Sommita was yawning: the drawing itself sang. Troy ripped the sketch off her pad and began again. Now her subject talked to the orchestra who listened with a kind of avid respect, and Troy drew them in the graphic shorthand that was all her own.

Alleyn thought that if Rupert was correct in believing the players had rumbled the inadequacies of the music, the Sommita had ravished them into acceptance, and he wondered if, after all, she could work this magic throughout the performance and save poor Rupert’s face for him.

A hand was laid on Alleyn’s shoulder. He turned his head and found Mr Reece’s impassive countenance close to his own. ‘Can you come out?’ he said very quietly. ‘Something has happened.’

As they went out the Sommita and Rodolfo Romano had begun to sing their duet.

The servant who had brought the Alleyns their breakfast was in the study looking uneasy and deprecating.

‘This is Marco,’ said Mr Reece. ‘He has reported an incident that I think you should know about. Tell Chief Superintendent Alleyn exactly what you told me.’

Marco shied a little on hearing Alleyn’s rank, but he told his story quite coherently and seemed to gather assurance as he did so. He had the Italian habit of gesture but only a slight accent.

He said that he had been sent out to the helicopter hangar to fetch a case of wine that had been brought in the previous day. He went in by a side door and as he opened it heard a scuffle inside the hangar. The door dragged a little on the floor. There was, unmistakably, the sound of someone running. ‘I think I said something, sir, “Hullo” or something, as I pushed the door open. I was just in time to catch sight of a man in bathing costume, running out at the open end of the hangar. There’s not much room when the chopper’s there. I had to run back and round the tail and by the time I got out he was gone.’

Alleyn said: ‘The hangar, of course, opens on to the cleared space for take-off.’

‘Yes, sir. And it’s surrounded by a kind of shrubbery. The proper approach follows round the house to the front. I ran along it about sixty feet but there wasn’t a sign of him so I returned and had a look at the bush as they call it. It was very overgrown and I saw at once he couldn’t have got through it without making a noise. But there wasn’t a sound. I peered about in case he was lying low and then I remembered that on the far side of the clearing there’s another path through the bush going down to the lakeside. So I took this path. With the same result: nothing. Well, sir,’ Marco amended, and an air of complacency if not of smugness crept over his face, ‘I say “nothing”. But that’s not quite right. There was something. Lying by the path. There was this.’

With an admirable sense of timing he thrust forward his open palm. On it lay a small round metal or plastic cap.

‘It’s what they use to protect the lens, sir. It’s off a camera.’