Flowers Stained With Moonlight (23 page)

There always remains the final possibility, which is
almost certain to turn into a necessity; I shall have to go home and corner Sylvia. Yet I fear that this final, drastic step may not prove very definitive. What shall I do if she simply speaks to me of a casual acquaintance with whom she played the fool for a few weeks, without even knowing his real name, perhaps? As for the idea that this person could possibly have anything to do with the murder of her husband, it seems clear, unless I understand nothing of Sylvia, that it has not occurred to her for an instant.

Yet – I cannot get around the fact that she lied. Yes, she lied; she told me she had not met anyone special in Paris – and even if her foolish behaviour, observed by so many, constituted nothing of emotional importance to her, she took care to hide it nevertheless. Unquestionably, there is a mystery associated with Sylvia and her behaviour, and the point will come when I shall
have
to elucidate it!

Yours ever,

Vanessa

My dearest twin,

After I wrote to you yesterday, Arthur and I returned to the hotel; our visit to the Russian Embassy had left us feeling foolish, gloomy and at a loss which the dimness of the evening did nothing to dispel. However, as we stopped at the front desk of the hotel to ask for our keys, the young employee plunged his hand into my pigeonhole and extracted not only a key, but also a white envelope.

‘Un télégramme pour vous,
mademoiselle,’ he said respectfully, handing it over.

I tore it open at once.

‘It’s from Pat!’ I cried, and Arthur and I read it together. Pat had expressed himself without heed to expense.

‘How strange,’ I said, struck by this message and forgetting my troubles. ‘Arthur, look what it says. It is peculiar that they can’t find any trace of him. After all, no matter who the mysterious young man is, surely he
must
have arrived in Calais somehow!’

‘It probably just means that the French police are not putting a lot of energy into it,’ he replied, reading over the telegram glumly. ‘And even if they are, don’t you think it must be practically impossible to find anyone who can remember one particular person in such a large crowd of people as the passengers who take the ferry every day?’

I reflected for a moment.

‘Well, I don’t know. There are all kinds of people working around a boat; someone must have sold him the ticket, there are people loading luggage, someone welcomes the passengers on board, and he was noticed
on
the boat, after all, so why not on the way there?’

‘But the people on the boat are shut in with this person for a certain length of time. Even if the boat is rather large, it makes sense that several of them remember seeing him. But in the port, on the quay, you’re looking for someone who caught sight of him as he walked past for a brief moment. That seems much harder.’

‘Well, but he was observed by many people on the train in England, and the English police traced him up from Dover easily enough.’

‘True,’ he said. ‘But one will remember one’s fellow passengers in a train just as one does in a boat. At most, assuming the police have done their work correctly, it’s fair to conclude that he did not arrive in Calais by train.’

‘How then? By balloon? On horseback? Not by cab – he can hardly have taken a cab from another city!’

‘Perhaps he was already in Calais. Or he drove there in a friend’s carriage,’ he said, thinking aloud.

‘But a person cannot descend from a carriage directly onto the gangplank! He must necessarily have had to walk some distance along the quay, and how could he not be observed then, with that red cloak of his?’

‘Ah, the cloak – I had forgotten about that. Why, that’s the reason he was so amply observed everywhere he went.
That makes it simple, Vanessa! He arrived at the boat carrying the cloak over his arm or something; it’s probably a different colour on the inside. And then once he was in the boat, he slipped it over his shoulders.’

‘But why?’

‘Well, that cloak business sounds awfully like he wanted to be observed, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, it really does! But Arthur, why
should
he want to be observed? It sounds mad, impossible! Would
you
want to be observed on your way to commit a murder? Why – everyone knows exactly where he came from because of it!’

‘No, that’s not true at all. We don’t know where he came from.’

‘Well, you know what I mean. We know he came over from France. And why would he want anybody to know even that?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It would help, maybe, if we knew more about the exact moment he was first observed. Then perhaps we could guess why he wanted to be observed in that particular place.’

I glanced down at the telegram. ‘Oh, Arthur, do let us go out and see if we can buy the newspaper! Pat must have written an article about this.’

‘You think he means the
Cambridge Evening News
?’

‘Oh – well, I assume so! That’s his newspaper.’

‘You’re right. I thought he just meant the British newspapers had somehow gotten wind of the mystery and were writing about it.’

‘Well, let us buy several,’ I said anxiously, and handing
our keys back to the surprised bellhop, we returned out into the streets.

We walked some distance before locating a kiosk with sufficiently international tendencies to carry newspapers of several nationalities, but eventually we discovered one, in the vicinity of Gustave Eiffel’s metallic pointed tower, under whose gigantic spreading feet tourists of all nationalities congregate like flies. The editions were of course those of the day before, but that was just what we wanted. We selected three, and carrying them away, we sat down on a bench to peruse them.

‘There’s nothing about it in these,’ said Arthur at length.

‘Well, at any rate, here is Pat’s article,’ I answered, folding back the pages of the
Cambridge Evening News
to show it to him.

‘What can the meaning of it be?’ I said thoughtfully, as Arthur finished reading over my shoulder.

‘I still can’t believe it means much,’ he answered with a deprecatory wave of his hand. ‘So nobody noticed an ordinary-looking fellow walking past at an ordinary pace, in the middle of a large crowd of people milling around. I probably wouldn’t have noticed a thing myself.’

‘But you’re a mathematician!’ I exclaimed. ‘You never do notice anything, when you’re thinking about some problem. If he was really in the middle of a crowd, then he was surrounded by dozens of people who are
not
mathematicians, and who
might
therefore have spotted him. How is it possible that no one has?’

‘The police cannot really have tracked down and questioned most of those people, can they?’

‘I don’t know. There must be a great many people who are not just passing by, but work there around the boats and are there every day. Oh, Arthur – do you know what we should do? We should go and talk to this Monsieur Lemaire and find out exactly how seriously they really did search! We mustn’t miss the opportunity – we’re taking the boat back Sunday – we could go to Calais on Saturday!’

‘But how could we persuade the certainly very busy Monsieur Lemaire to receive us?’ he said.

I thought for a moment.

‘I know! We’ll wire him and say we have important information about the young man. Either he or some other high-ranking person
must
receive us then! And we’ll pump him.’

‘He’ll pump us, more likely. What if he starts by asking for your information?’

‘Oh dear – well, we’ll set him off on a wrong tangent with some story about Prince Yousoupoff. That can’t be so very bad, can it? The worst that can happen is that they go and see him, and make fools of themselves with him, and he gets even redder and more annoyed than he was with us, and shakes his stick at them.’

Arthur sighed.

‘I’ll come with you, Vanessa, but I leave it to you to do the talking and pumping,’ he said. ‘You might be persuasive enough to find out what you want, although I can hardly see what that could be. I must say – we’ve been here nearly two weeks and I can’t see that we’ve made any progress at all on finding out anything whatsoever.’

‘Oh, I do feel grateful when you say “we”,’ I cried. ‘No, we haven’t failed completely, really we haven’t. We know that Sylvia was going about with
someone
, and that person still has a good chance of being the one we’re looking for. If no one else can identify him for us, she still can, and if push comes to shove, she must be made to.’

‘It isn’t completely certain that even Sylvia is aware of his real identity, is it? And furthermore, if we draw her attention to him, she will certainly realise (even if she has not yet wanted to think about it or admit it to herself) that he is either guilty or at the very least, in danger.’

‘That’s why questioning her is a last recourse. But it could be tried, I think, with enough tact – and Camilla should be questioned, too. She
must
know something, and she would be more inclined to understand the reality of Sylvia’s own danger than Sylvia herself would. Still, it would have been so infinitely much better to have been able to find out more here! Whether or not she knows who he is, it is bound to be horrible for her; can you imagine? Feeling that it was her fault, not wanting to betray … yet, a murderer!’

‘It is fishy,’ mused Arthur. ‘I mean, if she knows who he is and remained in contact with him, then how could she not suspect? Can she, after all, be shielding him as the police believe? But if she lost contact with him and it has never occurred to her that he may be the murderer, then how can she have been important enough to him to make him murder someone for her? What a muddle. Well, we will be back in England on Monday and can think about all this then,’ he added, taking my hand. ‘Let us content ourselves with planning our next step, purchasing our tickets to Calais and wiring Monsieur Lemaire. That makes tomorrow our last day here in Paris, then. Are you sad to leave?’

‘No! Oh, Arthur, I want to go home! I haven’t been here for my pleasure, and even the pleasure I did get from admiring all the beauties of this splendid city cannot be compared to what I feel when I’m surrounded by the small things of England – the ancient stones, the cathedral spires, the wild flowers, the fresh breezes and the little birds, the flavour and savour of it all. I miss home.’

‘So do I,’ he said very softly, kissing my hair.

‘Really, Arthur? And you, are you not sorry to leave? For the mathematics, at least?’

‘Not at all. We’ve done some glorious work, but I think we have plenty to go on with for the moment. We have to think things out and let them develop; it will take time. The ideas have got to be nurtured slowly, and that can only be done in peace and quiet. No, I want to go home, but I want you near me, and safe.’

We rose and walked together to the telegraph office. I did not answer Arthur’s last remark. Oh dear, I am rather afraid that it is not merely a brief visit to the tempestuous City of Lights that has not proved conducive to an atmosphere of peace and quiet, but rather something to do with my own activities. But what can I do? Nothing, except try to finish as quickly as I can with this dreadful story.

Your very own,

Vanessa

My dear twin,

I am writing to you in the evening, from a little hotel in Calais, which is modest enough yet incomparably more pleasant than the miserable tenement in which I stayed with Emily and little Robert four years ago. Ah, how I remember my anguish and terror then, and how different my life is now; how lovely altogether, except for my single-minded obsession with discovering the identity of Mr Granger’s murderer.

Having arrived here by train early on, the main effort of
our day was to meet with M. Lemaire, which we duly did. He received us graciously enough, considering that (as it soon transpired) he was very near to the point of dismissing the whole story of the murderer’s having arrived in England from Calais as a perfect fiction. Still, he showed himself willing to listen to the ridiculous tale of Russian princes and casinos which I poured out to him as a preliminary condition to asking him questions. He paid careful attention to each detail. I skipped over the embarrassing interludes concerning Mr Vassily Semionovich Kropoff and the elderly prince himself, confining myself to recounting hearsay. When I had finished what I hoped sounded like a convincing demonstration that we were well on the way to discovering the identity of the criminal, and that a little help from the police was all that would be needed to complete the task, he said,

‘But mademoiselle, as you may know, our police have excluded the possibility that the person who was supposedly observed on the ferry to Dover and subsequently on the train to this town, what is it called, where the murder took place, could have come from Paris, or from any other town, or even from Calais itself.’

‘But, monsieur,’ I responded politely, ‘that is very hard to believe. How can you be sure of it?’

‘We have questioned an enormous number of people around the docks at the time of the departure of the ferry,’ he replied. ‘This man was observed on the boat and on the train in England. Why was he not observed coming to the boat? Something is wrong.’

‘Well,’ I said hesitantly, glancing at Arthur, ‘we thought that perhaps he was observed so frequently after he put on the red cloak that has been mentioned in all the newspapers, and perhaps he arrived near the boat without wearing it.’

He laughed.

‘You take the police for children, mademoiselle! Do you think we went about asking people if they had observed a young man in a bright red cloak?’

‘But supposing he was not really such a noticeable kind of person,’ I persisted, ‘how can you be sure that he would have been observed at all? Perhaps he was already living in Calais, or simply arrived here in a friend’s carriage, and then walked to the boat, and nobody noticed him.’

He smiled indulgently.

‘Mademoiselle, we have considered every possibility, including the ones you now raise. We wished to see if a person could cross the port and accede to the ferry without being noticed at all. You will, I suppose, admit that the young man must have done so, according to the British theory at least. So we devised a little test, and sent one of our agents, dressed in the most normal way possible, walking quietly across the quay to board the same ferry as our unknown gentleman. We then waited some days, and then proceeded to question as many as possible of the people who were present at the time he went.’ Pausing, he reached for a sheaf of papers and shuffled them. ‘Here are the statements of the witnesses. I will not lie to you; of sixty people that we interviewed, only seven claimed to have seen the person we described, and of those, only three were finally able to identify our agent
from a group of similar young men. One of them is an old woman who sits in the sunshine near the quay for most of every day, selling nuts and crumbs of old bread to feed the pigeons. When we questioned her about our agent, she said that she had seen a young man of his description and described his clothing. We were not completely convinced as the description was somewhat vague and could conceivably have corresponded to a different person, but she then picked him out among ten others.’ Selecting a paper from the pile, he continued, ‘The same woman is one of our main witnesses in the question of the young man in the red cloak, and the other is the mother of a family of small children. Of everyone we questioned, only these two are of any interest whatsoever. Let me translate the first statement for you.

‘“I watched the passengers walking up the …” (how do you call it?) “gangplank. I saw a young man with dark hair, wearing a red cloak standing on the gangplank, moving up among the people there. He was standing next to some children. I do not know where he came from. I had not seen him before I noticed him on the gangplank. He definitely did not walk past me going there. Not even without his cloak. I would have noticed him. He had a handsome, youthful face and his hair was noticeable, thick and very dark with waves or curls.”

‘Now, here is the other statement, from the mother of the children just mentioned.

‘“We had just reached the foot of the gangplank and were about to walk up it onto the boat when my little son said to me ‘Maman, look at the lovely cape.’ A young man
came out in front of us wearing a red silk cape like I have never seen. He smiled and said a word or two to my son. Not much, something like ‘
ça te plaît
?’ He walked up in front of us and gave his ticket to the man. We saw him later on the boat. We would certainly recognise him if we saw him again. But we had definitely not seen him before then, as we were walking up towards the boat.”

‘“When you first saw him, why do you say he came out in front of you?” we asked her.

‘“He came out from the other side of a pile like that one.” She pointed to a large heap of barrels and crates which were being stocked on the boat.’

M. Lemaire put down the paper. ‘Certainly, there are such piles of merchandise in front of the boat, being loaded, every day,’ he said. ‘So what she described is natural enough. But where did he come from before being there? We do not know.’

‘What do you conclude?’ I asked, rather at a loss.

‘Our first thought was of a disguise. One could ask whether he was disguised before taking the boat or on the boat. Now, as I just told you, there are always great piles of crates or barrels being loaded or unloaded on the docks around the boats, and he could certainly have hidden briefly behind one of them. But people pass there all the time. It is not a hiding place. Nothing prevents passengers going to the boat from walking behind the heaps, and the dockworkers come to take them. So if he went there before coming out in his red cloak, it is more likely that he quickly removed a disguise than that he actually put something particular on, apart from the cloak itself, of course.’

‘That makes sense,’ I agreed. ‘It is a very good idea – it
must
be right.’

‘But it has a great flaw in it. Do you not see it?’

‘No,’ I replied, feeling stupid.

‘What about the disguise, Mademoiselle? The disguise!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where is it? We expected to find something – some package of clothing, some abandoned objects! We searched the entire area, questioned dozens of people, put up notices. We went to the office of found objects, and carefully inspected everything that had been given in there. There are many, many things in that place – you cannot imagine!’ He pulled out a list and scanned it with annoyance. ‘A child’s coat – ah, children! They always lose things. Children’s toys – a doll. Several scarves for the neck, of both men and women. A lady’s hat. A shoe – bah! How can a person lose one shoe? A cane. We were very interested in the cane. We asked our pigeon lady and other people if they had spotted a man
with a cane
– even an old man, stooping, with white hair. But it gave no result. There were men with canes, to be sure, but they all seemed to be accounted for.’

‘We-ell,’ I said, considering the list, ‘he must have carried the disguise off with him.’

‘But none of the witnesses say he was carrying any kind of a bundle.’

‘The disguise must have consisted of something quite small.’

‘Such as?’

I stopped to reflect, trying to visualise the situation.

‘Suppose – suppose that he quickly wiped off grease-paint
from his face with a handkerchief, and brushed up his hair which had been slicked down with oil, or covered with a hat or cap which he then stuffed into a pocket. Maybe he was wearing something noticeable – one of those scarves around his neck, for instance – which he took off and dropped there. Then he would just wrap himself up in the cloak he’d been carrying rolled up over his arm.’

‘Mademoiselle, what you say is possible, but believe me, it is not very likely. A man wearing sufficient grease-paint to really hide his features would be very noticeable on a sunny day; you may not realise it is there when you see an actor upon the stage, but outdoors it is completely different. He would look like a clown. We heard no hint of anything so strange. We are stymied, as you English say. I do not see what further researches we can now do here. I could contact my colleagues in Paris and Deauville in order to attempt to identify the young man you speak of, but it is unfortunate that we have no element at all linking him either to the crime or even to a trip to Calais. It is difficult to undertake a serious investigation on these grounds. It would be much better for the British police to simply find out his identity from the woman you told me about, the wife of the murdered man. Then his background could be checked and we might get somewhere.’

M. Lemaire rang a bell as he spoke, and instructed the young man who poked in his head respectfully to escort us out.

‘He was really very kind, don’t you think?’ I asked Arthur, as we reached the street.

‘I don’t much appreciate being dismissed that way,’ he said. ‘But he was nice enough, I suppose. Still, it is all
dashed unhelpful. We seem to be at a dead end once again.’

‘Yes,’ I sighed. ‘He’s right about the grease-paint, I’m afraid. And yet, there must be something in the disguise idea. There isn’t anything else that could explain it!’

‘I still think it could be explained by the simple fact that he was there and nobody noticed him,’ he grumbled.

‘No. I believe him. There really are too many people standing around the boat all the time; that old pigeon lady was sure of herself. Oh, he must have done something quite special to just appear there so suddenly, all ready and dressed up – and if he did it, we can find it! I must think.’

Indeed, I must think. Oh, Dora, it is so strange. There is something in the back of my mind – something I have heard recently which has some bearing on this absurd conundrum. Is it something to do with disguising? Have I had any discussions about disguising lately? I cannot remember any. Have you noticed anything of the sort in my letters?

Your greatly puzzled

Vanessa