Rum Affair (25 page)

There was a short silence, and I felt the cold closing in on me again. Surely, surely Hennessy saw me? If I was at the far end of the corridor when the organ stopped I couldn’t have been here, killing Michael. On the other hand, he might have run along the long gallery in the dark, as I did, and unlike me, have simply turned in to the first room he saw, seeing nothing of me or Michael until he switched on the light. I looked at him: his well-brushed waving fair hair, his smooth skin rosily tanned from Caribbean beach and Riviera golf course, his sailing, his shooting; his whisky. The charm was utterly absent, and I knew, suddenly and absolutely, that my last guess was right – and that he had no alibi for me.

Then he said, laying his hand gently on the black stuff of my arm: “She’s right. I didn’t think of it at the time, but of course I saw her. I followed her in.” He hesitated. “It looked to me for a moment as if she’d come back to fix something, maybe; but she did come from the other direction. If she was right up the corridor as she says, she couldn’t have done it unheard.” And on my arm, his grip tightened. I did not look at him. He was giving me something more precious than diamonds, and I did not want to see him fling his triumph at Kenneth. But Kenneth, surely, had no hopes of me now.

For a moment, again, there was silence. The others, standing behind in the doorway, had not spoken. Behind us, in this island of light, the whole Castle with its impedimenta lay lightless and empty, its trees tossing blackly about it, the rain beating on the parkland, the hills and the bay.

Somewhere out there, the four boats were rocking: Victoria, asleep in her bunk, the tearstains still on her face; Lenny, impassive, frying the mackerel he had caught and wondering why we were so long.
Binkie
was empty. On
Symphonetta,
the three lads would have exhausted their hymn of hate and, ill-fed from Hennessy’s sparse larder, would have curled up to sleep. While out in the loch, by now
Sioras
would have made her routine trip to the ferry, and laden with mail and parcels and maybe one or two passengers, the ferry would have turned and made for the mainland.

Without Michael. He would not have wished to die on an island. There is no status in that.

I was tired. I had had some sleep, but the others – the Buchanans, Kenneth and Rupert, Hennessy and Johnson and Ogden – had had very little, sailing watch by watch through the night and then driven by their various natures ashore here on Rum.

I looked at Johnson and wondered how much he believed Hennessy: how much, now, he would trouble to protect me over that other murder, in Rose Street. Day by day, I realised, too late now, Johnson’s grip on my life had been growing. Already, I was in his power far more than I had been in Michael’s. I wondered now, not for the first time, what reward Johnson meant to exact. Or if this was his reward. The pleasure of seeing me wronged.

Then Johnson said: “All right. I accept that. But if Madame Rossi didn’t kill Twiss while the organ was playing, we reach the next question: Who did?”

This time the silence was absolute. After a moment Johnson continued. “Food for thought, I observe. Suppose we all move downstairs to the hall, and consider the question in comfort.” And as Hennessy, lingering, gave a glance at the ungainly lumber which sprawled still in the bath – “Put the light out and leave it. Mr Twiss will not mind.”

It was cold downstairs. The lights, now switched on everywhere, merely emphasised the scale and emptiness of this museum set in a wilderness. The two ranks of oriel windows, yellow on black, transmitted to us tinnily the onslaught of rain. It would be stormy, outside.

We were seated, at Johnson’s request, on chairs drawn over the shining parquet in a semi-circle before the great fireplace in the galleried hall. On the hearth, a heap of wet logs, resurrected from the caretaker’s premises, had been lit and was greasily smoking. We sat uneasily; Hennessy and I next to the fireplace and facing the windows; Nancy and Bob together, facing the fireplace, their crepe soles flat on the floor; and completing the circle, back to the window, Cecil Ogden and Kenneth, his face lined with strain and with weariness.

Behind us, in the centre spaces of the room, Rupert was roving. And before us, gazing abstractedly into the stark yellow stare of the lion, was Johnson, who had so suddenly taken command, and whom not even Hennessy had questioned. He stood and waited, the new smoke circling round his Navy-issue trousered legs, his reefer open, over a thick, high-necked jersey. In our hands, awkwardly, each of us held a tin cup from the three thermos flasks the Buchanans had produced, with tidy forethought, from the damp satchel at Bob’s four-square feet. The tea in it was hot, and stewed, and without milk and sugar, but we all sat nursing and drinking it, to remedy our coldness and misery. All except Johnson and Rupert, who had become so imperceptibly alien. There was thus enough to go around. For there were eight of us only, now.

We felt, I suppose, that you cannot merely walk out of a house in which there has been a murder. I do not know what we expected. In any case, Johnson did not waste time. He said, suddenly decisive: “I make no apology for keeping you. If you are concerned about the race, the running order will not be affected. In fact, something much more serious has intervened. A man has been killed in this house tonight, and the murderer is one of you six.” For the third time, Hennessy’s temper broke through. “Why the hell don’t you phone the police then, and cut out all this poppycock? If there’s a murderer here, I’d feel a damned sight safer, and so would the women, if he were under good strong lock and key . . . And I’d remind you there are eight, not six of us here. If you’re fool enough to count in the women, then you and Glasscock are as suspect as any of us. Or what about outsiders, while you’re at it? There are forty odd people on this damned island, not to mention your man, and the girl on
Seawolf,
and my three examples of modern youth out there. Couldn’t they equally well have sneaked in?”

“No. This house is surrounded,” said Johnson. “It was sealed when the last of us entered, and it will remain sealed for as long as I say. I should introduce myself. As well as taking part in your cruise, and painting Madame Rossi, I have some responsibility for the submarine
Lysander.
Under my special brief, I am the law at this moment, and in this particular case.”

I could feel the blood in my brain: a peculiar phenomenon. For a moment it deafened me, and I could not think at all. When I forced my mind to its duty, I found Bob Buchanan was speaking. “Is that why—”

He broke off, and flushed. It was why, of course, he and Nancy had been handled with that hurtful indifference by those in authority. Hennessy scowled. And Ogden, lying back loose-jointed in his chair, drumming his tin cup on its fine rosewood carving, pointed at Johnson and said: “That’s how they let Holmes leave South Rona! The rumour all over Skye was that he’d been a bad boy with his blueprints, and the Official Secrets Act was going to knock him into next week.”

“Is that so?” Hennessy’s voice came sharply and quick. “He’s been your decoy, has he, flushing out allies? Is that what the Twiss affair is all about?”

“Nearly. Michael,” said Johnson, taking out his pipe without looking at anybody, “was a blackmailer. And blackmailers can get into an awful lot of trouble without necessarily, of course, being spies.” He struck a match and held it to the tobacco. “Who, for example, among us here – and you can take it, Hennessy, that Rupert and I may quite properly be excluded – who among you six might be a profitable victim of blackmail? And who, besides Madame Rossi, had the opportunity to kill Michael Twiss?”

Bob Buchanan suddenly shifted on his sofa. “I don’t know what you mean, you have a responsibility for the
Lysander.
You’ve been a good friend to the RHCC Mr Johnson, any time you’ve come north, but I never knew about this. Still, men have had undercover jobs I suppose, before now . . . I just want to say, I’m with Mr Hennessy. I think before we go any further we should call in the police. There’s someone been shot already, and to my mind the whole thing’s too risky. And in case you think me and Nancy have some vested interest in stopping you, I may say that anyone trying to blackmail me would have pretty poor pickings. After
Binkie’
s kept running and paid for, there’s nothing much left in our kitty. And there’s nothing we’ve done we’re ashamed of. I’ve got strong views on a number of subjects, I don’t mind saying, but that’s what’s wrong with the world today: no one willing to stand up and say what they think about serious matters. I do. Just you ask any of the committees I’m on and they’ll tell you. My life’s an open book, and so’s Nancy’s. The thing we did last night on South Rona harmed nobody but ourselves. We’re getting on, Nancy and I, for that kind of publicity stunt, but sometimes a gesture is needed. You have to give a lead – the young ones aren’t used to it.”

He looked up at Johnson, nervous but firm. “I shouldn’t like a worthy cause to be affected, Mr Johnson, because of some mud that gets mistakenly thrown here tonight. I had nothing to do with the Twiss fellow, and neither had Nancy.”

“And yet you had the best opportunity of all. For you were both in the dark here with Michael, long before the rest of us arrived on shore at all . . . And there’s something else. Don’t you remember, Tina? Hennessy? Don’t you remember hearing the sound of a shot when we were all in the Chief Warden’s house? We put it down to a stalker, or I did. But think.
No one shoots on a Sunday in Scotland.”

Buchanan’s mouth opened. He was so palpably stupid and honest: I wondered why Johnson wasted time on him. Could he be foolish enough to expect another scapegoat like me? Nancy said, her hands shaking a little as she held a half-empty thermos: “Cecil was here too. He came back with a torch. But we hardly saw Mr Twiss. Once we were inside he took one wing and we took the other.”

“You didn’t hear a shot, then?” said Johnson.

Bob answered slowly. “No. But it’s a big house, you know. Though, come to think of it, we did hear a bit of banging about at the top there. Where Dr Holmes’ room is.”

“That would be Twiss. He almost certainly caused the destruction in the lab,” said Johnson mildly. “And I think, in fact, that big as the house is, you would have heard something as loud as a shot. There was no silencer. We should, of course, need to experiment. Later, none of us were so far away from that bedroom that we would not have heard shooting, except in the one period when the organ was on. Then you, Bob, came out of the library with Madame Rossi and joined us. Ogden, Nancy and Hennessy here were with me at the organ already. Dr Holmes was upstairs – you were worried, Tina, weren’t you, about that? There was no need. Rupert took over watching him from the moment I wanted to leave off.

“We know Dr Holmes didn’t kill Michael. Michael was killed either soon after he entered Kinloch Castle, when the party inside the house was small and widely scattered, and might not have noticed the shot; or he was killed in the moments between our all meeting upstairs when Holmes called for us, and the switching off of the organ just after. Incidentally, who switched it off?”

Cecil Ogden had sunk back in his chair, his empty cup capping one bony dungareed knee. “I did. Can’t stand Mascagni anyway, and Mascagni with bronchitis seemed altogether too much. I had a job finding the switch. Thought I’d got it, behind a pillar, and the light came on instead.”

“I saw the light over the gallery. Saw you leave Dr Holmes’ room too,” said Rupert briefly. He had stopped his roving and had come to rest on the lionskin, his fingers between the white, dusty teeth. “You must have gone straight downstairs: there was no time to do anything else. Ogden exculpated. Who else left the lab before the organ stopped?”

“Tina,” said Johnson. “And Hennessy. That was all.” He gazed at the mess in his pipe, and finding it cold, bent to knock it out on the logs, which were burning, reluctantly, with a great deal of spitting and smoke. “Both have motives. A wealthy singer is fair game for any blackmailer, particularly one in intimate touch with her daily life. And I don’t suppose, when we look into it, that Mr Hennessy’s past has been blameless. There was a business in Uruguay which had them all rather bothered at headquarters a year or two back. He is also meat for blackmail, and has money.

“On the other hand, he had no need to perjure himself, as he did, to improve Madame Rossi’s alibi. A murderer would not have done that. It gives him no advantage, other than the obvious gratitude of Madame Rossi, and might jeopardise all his other activities if it were disproved. Then, of course, far from being the golden goose of her manager, Madame Rossi has been the victim during the cruise of his hysterical desire to get rid of her. You could say, of course, that blackmailers take fright and kill when their victims threaten exposure, and that in self-defence, the victim sometimes strikes back. But I am happy to say that we know for certain that this is not the case this time. Madame Rossi was in fact followed by Rupert from the moment she went out of the lab and her account of her movements in the bedrooms is unequivocally correct.”

My thudding heart died. It was not Kenneth. And now, this. I said weakly: “Then what made you . . .” and it clashed with Hennessy’s rich, angry voice. “I heard you accuse her, you bastard! You accused her, up there, of shooting the fellow. And now you try to say you knew it wasn’t Tina at all? Do you know what you’re doing, any of you? Because it doesn’t sound like it.” He got up, a big man, confused and short of sleep, his head aching from the pain of his ear I expect, and a little fear in him, somewhere, on account of all those things Johnson had mentioned. “If you won’t phone the police, I’ll do it myself.”

Johnson did not even move. “When the lab was wrecked, the phone was put out of commission. It doesn’t matter. You forget – the nearest policeman is at Mallaig, a nasty sixteen-mile journey by sea. I should think the wind is too strong now for a helicopter. If you contacted the coastguards, you might get a fishery cruiser, but not before well into tomorrow; and a naval launch would take almost as long. This is an island, my dear man. A douce research station for the exercise of pure science among the birds and the bees. The Warden looks after the birds and the bees. I say it again. As far as we are concerned,
I
am the law.”