Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (11 page)

Mr Pickering looked at the sea and saw on its brilliant surface, four hundred yards from shore, a long dark boat, narrow like a canoe, piled high with what seemed to be a system of wrecked hen-coops.

‘There go the craw-fish boys,' he said. ‘Setting their pots. That's another thing I have to do—spear craw-fish.'

‘It's all red now,' Mrs Pickering said. ‘Look!—it's all red like fire.'

‘You suppose they do catch craw-fish?' Mr Pickering said. ‘Could be they didn't—you know, it could be!——' he suddenly got up from the seat, descended the small flight of steps that had been cut into the black rock of the promontory and went down to the edge of the sea.

Over by the thin brown reef the boat had stopped. Mr Pickering peered across the green-red sunset waters and watched as one after another the hen-coop craw-fish pots were pitched into the sea. He could see in the boat two brown-skin boys wearing tattered grey shirts and sombre trilby hats. He could see clearly the splash of each craw-fish pot whitening the delicate surface of the sea. Then the rock of the reef itself seemed to leap up from the surrounding liquid fire with such striking solidity that Mr Pickering was suddenly overwhelmed with the brilliance of an astounding idea.

‘Look—that's it, that's it,' he said. ‘I bet you a million to one that's how Maxted hid it. Torgsen says it's under the sea—and I bet all the tea in China that's how it got there.'

A double echo of his voice, strangely contrived between rock and sea, brought back to him the sudden realisation that he was speaking to himself. He ran back up the steps. Mrs Pickering was standing in a posture of bent rapture against
the low concrete wall built round the top of the little cliff. Mr Pickering, running in rubber-soled shoes, seized her elbow so suddenly that she gave a short cry, startled.

‘Oh! you scared me. You really did—I was watching the sun just disappearing—look at it, you can see it moving. Look—it's going down.'

‘I just figured it out,' Mr Pickering said. ‘It's simple really. Obvious. Maxted liked these rare fish. He loved poking about these reefs—used to spend days at it, Torgsen says. So what does he do? he puts the stuff there—there are millions of these damn reefs and cays where you could hide stuff and nobody would ever know. Well, nobody—somebody knows. Torgsen knows.'

‘It gets dark so quickly,' she said. ‘Look, there's only a tip of the sun now. It's just like a fingernail—just like a red lacquered fingernail. Don't you think so?'

‘Ah-ah,' he said. ‘That's beautiful. You see the craw-fish boys are going back now. Funny how they always come just at the same time.'

The scarlet upper tip of sun slid with arresting swiftness below the horizon, leaving the sea smouldering with wavelets of pure orange touched by strokes of eucalyptus green. The air fell suddenly so dead calm that the dip of the single stern oar of the craw-fish boat threw a distinct snap in the air as it flipped at the sea.

‘It won't be long now before the fire-flies are out,' Mrs Pickering said. ‘I love it when the fire-flies begin.'

Until this long southern vacation Mrs Pickering had never seen fire-flies before, and her first sight of them in the hot sub-tropical darkness, like dancing gas-green glow-worms, had startled her almost as much as the crab had startled Mr Pickering when he first saw it in the sand.

‘And that reminds me. You know, I found out something about them,' she said. ‘I was reading it in a magazine while you were over at the island this afternoon. Those lights they have—they're signals.'

‘What of?' Mr Pickering said. ‘Danger?'

‘No. It's like morse-code—I mean semaphore. Each of these flashes is in a sort of code—either it's one, two, one or it's two, one, one or something like that and it's a signal from the female to male.'

‘About what?'

‘About love. About mating and all that. The male one flies around on his own wave-length or whatever you call it, one, two, one, until he finds a girl-friend on the same wave-length making his signal.'

‘Then they clinch, I suppose?'

‘I think it's the most beautiful thing,' she said.

Mr Pickering did not answer this time and his wife sat with enraptured patience looking at the sea. All its colours were dissolving and softening down to one colour—at least you thought it was one colour until you looked, as she did now, with eyes of half-closed penetration, and then you saw that it was an iridescence of fifty colours, perhaps a hundred, perhaps more, each small wave with its smeared brush-stroke of tenderest coloured light.

‘You know, it's funny,' Mr Pickering said. ‘You mention this murder and they all start talking about the price of bananas or some damn thing. Nobody wants to talk.'

‘I can understand that,' she said. ‘It's ten years ago, so why not let it rest? It's over and done with. And a good thing.'

‘Not on your life,' Mr Pickering said. ‘The murderer's here on this island. And don't tell me that's a good thing. They sometimes do it again, you know that.'

‘All right. Have you a theory?'

‘Not yet,' he said. ‘But I probably will have after I've been over to Cat Cay tomorrow. That's just a lump of reef and sand over on the other side of Rock Island. You don't see it from here. But I'll bet my office to a nickel that's where the other part of the gold is.'

‘Nearly dark now. Only blue and tiny bits of yellow on the water. You can feel the wind turning, can't you?'

During the day-time the wind, the trade-wind, fresh and warm and illuminating the dark blue water with bars of snow foam, came from the sea. At night it blew from the mountains.

‘Didn't they try a man once for it and let him off?' Mrs Pickering said.

‘They did.'

‘Then don't you think they'd have tried someone else if the murderer is here on the island? After all it's so little. Just a few thousand people, that's all.'

‘You got it there,' Mr Pickering said. ‘It's little—so everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows something. Everybody knows and everybody keeps his mouth shut.'

Mrs Pickering straightened up at last from her position of enraptured patience by the concrete wall. The sea was almost dark now, pure indigo, the sky above it a soft-washed green fading, far up, to palest night blue. The colours of the parasite orchids could not be seen in the incense trees. The palms and the big striped aloes on the hotel terrace were simply blackened shadows.

‘I think that's what you should do,' Mrs Pickering said. ‘Keep your mouth shut.'

‘I got a sort of feeling we came here just in time,' Mr Pickering said. ‘A year or two back you'd never have gotten the chance of this stuff. Plenty of money about. They were
holding on. Now money's getting tight. Plenty tight. So they're unloading. It's the ground floor.'

They had begun to walk down the rocky path from the high point of the promontory towards the hotel and the shore. Sea and sky were now almost joined in one dark blue mass together and the mountains, with their lower fringes of enormous palms, seemed to be on the point of stumbling into the sea.

‘I still don't get why all these people have got these gold dollars and sovereigns to sell anyway,' Mrs Pickering said.

‘You got to pay to keep mouths shut, haven't you?' he said. ‘See?'

‘I see.'

Mr Pickering laughed in the warm darkness. A sudden turn of wind, like the enlarged echo of his voice, woke in the brittle fronds of the hurricane-bent palms a metallic chatter that ran out towards the dark surface of the sea.

‘Oh! Look!' Mrs Pickering said. ‘The fire-flies! Making their signals!'

Lying on the sand the following afternoon, Mrs Pickering watched the crab continually emerge from its neat hole with the same sinister caution as before. Several times during the afternoon it ran from the hole as much as ten or fifteen inches before it became aware of her and scuttled back. There was something horribly repulsive, she thought, about the way a crab ran backwards. Nor did she feel easy about the grotesque, upraised periscope eyes that seemed almost to swivel on the little yellow head. Each time they left her with the chilling impression that the crab was really a monster that time had dwarfed.

She wished all afternoon that Mr Pickering would come. She had something to tell Mr Pickering. She did not know
whether it was important or whether it was one of those things women just said for the sake of saying something, but she had been talking after lunch to a Mrs Archibald, a Vermonter. She had always understood that Vermonters were queer birds—somebody had once told her that Vermonters had all the eggs and butter and cream that they wanted during war-time simply because the idea of rationing was something no Vermonter could possibly stomach. She thought that was disgraceful and also that this Mrs Archibald was the type that buttonholed you in corners and kept you there whether you liked it or not.

It was about the Maxted murder that Mrs Archibald had spoken. She and her husband had been on the island three years before and on that occasion there was a young woman from Chicago or St Paul or somewhere who was investigating the case—not officially, Mrs Archibald said, just poking her nose in.

‘And her they found wrapped up on the sea-shore,' Mrs Archibald said. ‘In a sack.'

As she heard this Mrs Pickering felt a stab of coldness drive through the centre of her spine. She guessed it was really that same feeling, uneasy and nervous and chilling, that she re-experienced every time the crab ran backwards towards its hole.

By five o'clock she had begun to be uneasy too about Mr Pickering; she was certain he ought to be back. She was uneasy also about being alone on the deserted shore. Most people seemed to lie on their beds in the afternoon and for nearly three hours there had been no one on the sand but herself and the crab.

Then soon after five o'clock she saw that in the quietness two herons, a young one and its mother, had come to fish
along the shaken edge of sea. They were so delicate and pretty: so graceful, so unlike the crab. The mother had a dark dove-coloured sheen on her feathers and her legs were blue. The young bird had feathers of bottle green and its smaller body seemed cast on the water like the shadow of the larger bird.

The sight of the birds, so delicate and undisturbed, calmed all of her feelings about Mrs Archibald, the crab and the young woman who had been found in a sack: so that when Mr Pickering at last appeared she had nothing to say but:

‘Oh! Ed dear, look at the birds. Look at their legs—just the colour of the sea so the fish won't see them. And look at the baby one, the way it does what its mother does. Oh! I've had fun watching them.'

‘Sorry I'm late,' Mr Pickering said. ‘But wait till you hear——'

‘Oh! that's all right. I've had such fun watching the birds. What did you do?'

‘The darnedest thing,' Mr Pickering said.

‘On Cat Cay?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Right along the coast here.'

‘Oh! Look at the herons. Just look. The young one's trying to catch something——'

‘Met a fellow named Wilson. Quite a piece of dark blood in him—you can see that. Just a nobody. Torgsen says his mother kept a house on the waterfront—this Wilson fellow was the result of some damn Glasgow deck-hand dropping in one time. Just scum.'

‘The young one is so pretty,' Mrs Pickering said. ‘What about him?'

‘Incredible,' Mr Pickering said. ‘He's living like Croesus. Like Rockefeller. He's got a palace along the coast here with onyx bathrooms and Louis Quatorze toilets and God knows
what. He owns three sugar mills and two banana plantations and a steam yacht—Oh! and that reminds me, I knew there must be a woman in this somewhere.'

‘Why?'

The two herons had paraded far along the shore and now had turned and were dreamily coming back.

‘Because Maxted was mad on them. He ran five or six at a time. You know what?—he'd hang about the harbour until he saw some popsie in on a cruise-ship that he fancied and then he'd take her home and give her a house and set her up. Not satisfied with one or two—but five or six. The big possessor.'

‘And is Mr Wilson fond of the ladies too?'

Mr Pickering laughed.

‘You're pretty smart, aren't you, Mrs Pickering?'

‘I just thought.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Mr Wilson is fond of the ladies. And it seems Mr Wilson and Mr Maxted were once fond of the same lady. A girl named Louie. In fact the week before Maxted was murdered they all spent a weekend on Maxted's yacht. And now Louie is Mrs Wilson.'

‘That's no surprise. Did you see her?'

‘No.'

‘And what made you go to see Mr Wilson anyway instead of going to Cat Cay?—Oh! look, the little heron is lost. It's turned around the wrong way and can't see its mother.'

‘Seems he'd heard of me, that's all,' Mr Pickering said. ‘He's got big connections in insurance—and seems he'd even heard of us. Said he'd like to see me.'

‘And just you think, there are people who kill and stuff those lovely things and put them in glass cases—Oh! look at them!——'

‘You know what I think?—and I told Torgsen so. I think Louie killed Maxted.'

Along the shore the parent heron, gazing down with dreaminess at the blue-green evening sea, seemed to be waiting for its young, and Mrs Pickering gave a quick cry of maternal delight.

‘They're so intelligent too,' she said. ‘You see, she knows!'

‘Fascinating, isn't it?' Mr Pickering said. ‘Of course it might not be. But before Maxted was murdered Wilson hadn't a bean. Just a hanger-on. But Louie had—Maxted had seen to that. And now Wilson has all the beans he needs and Louie too.'

Suddenly along the shore the herons were flying. Mrs Pickering gave a cry of dismay and saw that two bathers were running down, carrying white and scarlet wraps, from the hotel to the sea.