The Cherry Blossom Corpse (13 page)

“I must be getting back,” I said. “They should be serving lunch upstairs. A very good cold table, with a glass of wine. Two if you're clever. I should think you could count as a substitute delegate.” He had jumped up enthusiastically. “If you can stand the company, that is.”

“Dear chap, the company's all in a day's work. Charming people, many of them, and they talk no more tosh than most other sorts of writer. Lead me to it!”

In fact I took him into the foyer and directed him to the fifth floor via the lifts. He bounced into one, with every appearance of lively anticipation. As I turned and headed towards the swing doors, through which I could see Bryggen and the wharfs drenched in sunlight, I suddenly got the most curious sensation, from the corner of my eye, of being watched. I stopped and turned in the direction the feeling came from, but saw nothing but a skirt disappearing up a staircase. I waited, looking around, but nobody seemed to be taking any notice of me whatever. I shook my head, dissatisfied, and went out into the sunlight, to walk off the whisky before I got back into the driving seat of the police car. Had I but known it, I was already over the Norwegian legal limit.

W
HEN I GOT BACK
to Kvalevåg, negotiating the Norwegian roads with a confidence born of a little experience and a little alcohol, the first person I saw there was Wes Mackay. He was walking around the circular patch of lawn in front of the house, but he was looking up to the mountains on one side, or out to the fjord on the other, as if he were itching to be away from the petty irritant of murder, to become part of The Big Outdoors.

As very probably he was. I sat in the driving seat for a moment, fiddling with road maps, and looking at him as if for the first time—looking at him, in fact, in the light of a suspect. He certainly, at first glance, impressed one principally as an outdoors man: no more than average height, but broad, tough and capable. I guessed
him to be a bit over forty. The face was moustached, to give it that slight look of Hemingway that outdoors people seem to cultivate, though why they should wish to look like that appalling phoney is beyond me. In the case of Wes Mackay, the rugged image, the feeling that he had in his time taken on lions single-handed, was complicated by the fact that for a living he wrote sentimental love stories. But then so did Ernest Hemingway.

I got out of the police car and went over to him.

“How go things?”

He pulled at his bushy brown moustache.

“Pretty jumpy. That's why I came out to get a breath of air. The police want us to stay around the house, but the gardens are still within bounds. Except for the boathouse, but that's one place I don't feel like visiting anyway.”

“I can understand that. I expect they'll restrict you for a day or two, and then you'll be free to do pretty much as you like.” I added cunningly: “Especially you four in Lorelei Zuckerman's room. You ought to be able to alibi each other, put everyone in the clear.”

Wes Mackay shrugged.

“Pretty much, maybe. Tell you the truth, I'd thought of doing a little experimenting in how long it would take to get from her room or from the bar, down to the boathouse, murder the poor woman, and then get back. But the thought of how
that
would look to the cops if they came upon me holds me back. They're pretty sure to do their own experiments anyway.”

“Sure to. So you weren't
all
in her room
all
the time until you heard about the murder?”

“Not one hundred per cent of the time. Mrs. Zuckerman—
is
it Mrs., by the way?—”

“You ought to know, if anyone. Being so pally with her.”

“Consulting her professionally, not personally pally.
Anyway, Lorelei was, but the rest of us were in and out at least once.”

“Let's get this straight. What exactly was the set-up? You were all four in her sitting-room, right?”

“That's it: Martti, Felicity, Lorelei and me.”

“What were you doing?”

“Talking about markets, agents' percentages, current trends—and drinking.”

“You were all participating?”

Wes thought.

“We were all drinking. I don't remember Martti contributing to the conversation. But he was there all right. Felicity chipped in with her contribution now and then, but mostly it was me and Lorelei. Kenya is pretty remote from writing circles, you see, and I'm trying to use every minute of this trip to wise myself up. As far as the commercial side of the romance business is concerned, Lorelei is the bee's knees.”

“I think I get the picture. Now what about when you left the room—the three of you who did.”

“I left twice: once very briefly, to go to the loo. The other time I went to get some copies of my books. They're published by a firm in Cape Town, though I've also sold one or two to an American publisher. We were talking about production standards, and I wanted to get Lorelei's opinion on the sort of job the South African people did.”

“How long did this take?”

“The Norskies asked me that, of course. At most ten minutes. They weren't in the drawer, as I thought. I found I hadn't unpacked them, so I had to get my suitcase down from on top of the wardrobe. Probably about five minutes, but at most ten.”

“And the other three were there when you left, and there when you came back?”

“Yes, they were.”

“You can't know that they didn't leave the room while you were away.”

“That's true . . . But Felicity had just got drinks . . . you're not suggesting Lorelei nipped out, down to the boathouse, drowned Amanda and nipped back—all while I was away?”

“I'm just keeping possibilities in mind.”

“Remember that she wouldn't expect me to be away so long. And even if her illness is a fake—which I
don't
believe—she is still a woman of—what?—sixty-five? Rather more, I'd have guessed. If you can see it, I must say I can't.”

“And Felicity Maxwell?”

“She went to the bar to get fill-ups when necessary.”

“How long did that take her, roughly?”

“I didn't notice. I was deep in conversation. You'd better ask her yourself.”

“And the Finn?”

“Twice or three times to the loo. My impression—it's only that—is that these were fairly short visits. He came back, or wavered his way back, to his glass.”

“Right. That seems fairly satisfactory. And you were all four in the room until the body was found?”

“That's right. As far as I was concerned, it was a really useful session. But the party was in fact just breaking up when we heard . . . well, when we heard your sister doing her nut. Very understandably, of course.”

We had come to a stop near the path that led down to the boathouse. We turned for a moment and looked back to the house. Figures disappeared from the windows: I was still the observed of observers. I said:

“I must confess, a male writer of romances who is a white man from Kenya still strikes me as an oddity. No—sorry, I didn't mean to say anything rude: it strikes
me as in need of some explanation. It's something so unusual that it makes me curious. Would you mind telling me something about yourself?”

Wes Mackay said slowly:

“No . . . I suppose I
am
a bit of an oddity, though I've never thought of it like that . . . I should say that I'm not a member of the filthy-rich, gin-slinging and wife-swapping Kenyan aristocracy that you're always reading about these days—the people who created such glorious scandals and juicy murders back in the 'thirties. If it wasn't for Independence I'd hardly be on speaking terms with that lot, let alone visiting terms. But as it is they've decreed that all whites should stick together, so all the barriers are broken down (which doesn't mean we're unconscious of them), and I get to put my toe over the stately thresholds now and again.”

“What did your family do, if they didn't sling gin?”

“My grandfather owned a general store in Bura. My father was a younger son, and he organized safaris, acted as local rep for British and American travel firms. We're Scottish, very provincial, and in my grandfather's case, very narrow-minded. Like most of the whites in Kenya, we've weathered Independence without too many problems. We're not on any gravy-train any longer, but we jog along pretty comfortably.”

“And you? What did you do before you took up . . . writing?”

“Oh, all sorts. Took tourists up in two-seater planes. Worked on a game reserve, and in the hotel business. But you're not really asking about that, are you? You're curious how I came to take up writing mush.”

“I suppose it was a roundabout way of getting on to that.”

“It's quite simple, though I suppose a bit unusual. I should tell you that I've always been a bit of . . . well,
what used to be known as a ladies' man. More than a bit, actually. Which is one way I do fit into the Kenyan settler tradition. Women have always been at the centre of my life, one way or another. Every sort of affair, from one night stands upwards. But I've only ever loved once or twice . . . maybe three times . . . And the big love of my life, the woman I lived with for nearly five years, died . . . of leukemia. I don't want to talk about it, but I used to visit her in hospital, for months, until the end. You know what it's like if you go in the afternoon and evening, month after month. When you've asked what they had for lunch, and talked about the temperature outside, there's not much to say, however much you love them . . . And I had to go in . . . I had to see her . . . Before long, when she was in too much pain to hold a book, I started to read to her, the sort of books she loved. You can sneer, but I didn't.”

“I'm not sneering. So you got to know the product?”

“That's right. Well, books aren't always easy to get hold of in Africa. The merest hint of an exchange crisis and the supply tends to dry up. And Lilian always remembered, always knew if she'd read something before, which was surprising, when they're all so similar. There came a time, three or four months before the end, when I realized that we were going to run out . . . And when I got home from the hospital that night, I sat down to write one. I did it in three evenings, on small paper I could slip inside a paperback. She never noticed . . . liked it . . . so I wrote another, and another, and I was reading one of mine to her when she died. That's the whole story.”

“I see. So you even found you preferred it to taking tourists on safari, and suchlike?”

Wes Mackay shrugged.

“I don't know. Safari—yes; tourists—no. The sort who
want to go pretend big-game hunting are really . . . But the point was that most of the jobs we whites had been doing in Kenya for fifty or sixty years were being taken over by the blacks—naturally enough, but it didn't make it any less bitter. They definitely don't want whites in a lot of jobs because it hurts national pride. Now here was a job where I would be independent of government, independent of corruption, political change, and independent of any sort of boss except the Great Reading Public. And if I had to leave the country, I could go to any-bloody-where on the globe and still have the same career. That was the crucial factor, because life is pretty uncertain anywhere in Africa these days. And it's turned out very satisfactorily. It's turned out great, in fact.”

“I see. Yes, that does make it easier to understand. Tell me, what kind of contact have you had with other romantic writers, before you came here?”

“None.”

“Never been on this sort of jamboree before?”

“No way. This is the big treat of my writing life so far. This sort of jaunt costs money, you know.”

“So you knew no one here before you arrived?”

“I tell you, these people were just names to me. When I got the delegates' list I went along to the library and looked them up in
Twentieth-Century Romantic Novelists.
It may seem incredible to you, but this is my job, and so far I've been doing it thousands of miles from anyone who's doing the same thing. Soon I'll go
back
to being thousands of miles from anyone doing the same thing. I want gen, tips, I want to know about trends in the market, I want
contacts.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I'd better get this thing sorted out, or you'll be chafing at the bit at all the wasted time.”

“Oh, I wouldn't mind if we could just be allowed to go walking in the mountains a bit,” Wes said, as we
walked back towards the house. “And there are one or two people here who still have plenty to give me.” He added, without looking at me: “That Maryloo Parker seems to know a thing or two.”

“Yes,” I said. “You've hit the nail on the head there. If I were you I'd get on to Maryloo Parker.”

We parted in the lounge, and I mounted the stairs towards Lorelei Zuckerman's rooms. It seemed as well to get this quadruple alibi sorted out as early as possible. However, when I knocked on the door of the suite's sitting-room, Felicity Maxwell opened the door and slipped out into the corridor.

“Mrs. Zuckerman is in the middle of her afternoon rest. She always sleeps around this time.”

“Ah,” I said. “I wanted to talk to her about last night. But of course I wouldn't want you to disturb her.”

“The question doesn't arise,” said Felicity. “I never disturb her.”

She looked me straight in the eye, and I considered myself snubbed. She was a rather gauche, provincial creature, in her square-shouldered linen dress and the string of artificial beads, but there was a certain strength about her too—both moral and physical. She had something of my sister Cristobel's obstinacy, though I guessed there was a sharper brain behind it.

“Perhaps we two could talk, then,” I suggested. Felicity Maxwell considered.