Spotted Hemlock

chapter twelve

See Naples and Die

‘… our road led us suddenly into the most delightful country you can imagine.’

Ibid.

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Vesuvius, with its pillar of cloud by day and its lurid glow by night, dominated the sky to the south of the city and gave a Satanic welcome to travellers, reminding them of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the state of their own souls.

In the end, it was Carey who had accompanied Dame Beatrice to Rome and southwards, for Miss McKay had decided (reluctantly, she admitted), that it would be unseemly and frivolous for her to leave Calladale in the middle of term in order to disport herself in Italy.

Before leaving the college, Dame Beatrice had had a long talk with her and had ascertained that the absent Mr Basil was in hospital in Scotland; that he had broken his leg by falling down in the Cairngorms; that Miss McKay thought it most unlikely that he would have attempted to take a girl student as his sole companion on holiday, but that she was prepared to believe anything of anybody in these days; that he would have been in no jeopardy of losing his post at the college as long as the student had gone with him voluntarily; that the college was a nursery for plants but not for silly girls, and that, if the students of agriculture and dairy farming did not know enough to come in out of the wet, she felt inclined to wash her hands of them and their affairs and write the college off as a failure.

‘But would your staff know that those are your views?’ Dame Beatrice had enquired. Miss McKay had shrugged the question aside, with an intimation that it was scarcely the sort of thing about which she could be expected to make a public announcement.

‘Of course, if parents or guardians complained, I should have to take a line,’ she had concluded, and had added, as an afterthought, that it was all a great nuisance.

‘I expect your absence from the college in the middle of the term is also a great nuisance,’ Dame Beatrice remarked to her nephew, as, in a taxi driven by an extremely fat Neapolitan, they took the road southwards on the morning after their arrival in Naples from Rome. They were driving to the hotel at which Biancini’s relative was known to have worked.

‘I say, though,’ Carey had volunteered, at one point, before they left England, ‘is our journey really necessary? This holiday the Biancinis took doesn’t cover the time of the murder. That came after their return.’

‘Yes,’ Dame Beatrice had replied, ‘that is the case, certainly.’ But, in spite of her ready acceptance of the fact, she still seemed to think that the visit to Naples was necessary. Carey, pleased with the chance of a short break in routine, had said no more. He had gone sightseeing by himself in Rome while, for three days, Dame Beatrice visited her learned friends, and now he was prepared to escort her to what he thought would turn out to be a hostelry of only modest if not actually of dubious type.

In this he was mistaken. After the squalor of some of the city streets, the lines of washing hung high from tenement to tenement, the careless heaps of fish and fruit in the markets, the Hotel Vittorio came as a pleasant surprise. Its façade was gloomily magnificent. Its interior gave the impression of a monastery, and this was not at all strange, as that is what it had been up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was cool and pleasantly shadowed. The clerk at the desk greeted them in English.

‘Good-day. You have reservations?’

They had reservations. Dame Beatrice was shown to a stone-flagged chamber, immensely vast, which contained, besides the bed, a washstand of nineteenth-century veneered mahogany and a dressing-table in bog-oak. There was also a wardrobe of indeterminate wood, capable (she thought) of housing ghosts, coffins, corpses or the whole of the hotel’s store of linen.

She unpacked, bathed and changed, and was downstairs before Carey was ready to join her. The hotel possessed a long balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples. An elderly waiter came up.

‘The signora would care for some wine? Lachryma Christi, perhaps? Orvieto? Santa Catarina? Chianti?’

Dame Beatrice, with memories of a honeymoon of long ago spent at Amalfi, plumped for Santa Catarina, and sat for half an hour watching the Neapolitan sea.

‘Tell me,’ she said to the hovering, elderly waiter when he had reappeared to tell her the time of the next meal, ‘have you had here a Signor Biancini and his wife?’

‘And daughter, signora. Yes, yes. The wife and daughter are English, a second marriage, as I understand from Giovanni Biancini, who works here but is off duty today. The daughter is of her mother’s first marriage, and was born, one would suppose, when the woman was very young.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘She was of thirty years, this daughter. Giovanni Biancini told me so, and one could well believe it.’

‘Indeed? It is this daughter in whom I am interested.’

‘The signora is thinking of engaging her as a companion? But that needs one who is virtuous and of a quiet and docile disposition. This young woman was not quiet or docile. I have heard her revile her mother. Besides, unwisely she liked her stepfather, I think. The signora will understand. It is not nice to explain.’

This remark terminated the conversation and Dame Beatrice went to the dining-room.

‘You seem very quiet tonight,’ said Carey, as they sat, after dinner, on the terrace with their coffee. ‘Scarcely a cheep out of you during the whole of the evening. Are you tired?’

‘By no means. I have found out what I came to find out, but how much use it will be to me and to the police is problematical.’

‘You haven’t been long about it. Does that mean we go home tomorrow?’

‘No, no. Why should we not enjoy ourselves here while we can? The news I have gained will not stale for the keeping. We will visit Pompeii. We will study Herculaneum. We will climb to the crater of Vesuvius and go to see the bubbles of volcanic mud at Solfatura. We will demand spaghetti cooked as they do it in Sicily, with bacon, mushrooms, onions, garlic, black olives and anchovies, with the Parmesan cheese on a separate dish. We will eat pollo in padella con peperoni and pigeons prepared after the Roman fashion. If we can get it (but the time of year may not be right) we will have a hare washed in vinegar and sauté in butter with sliced onions, ham, sugar and vinegar, grated chocolate for colouring, almonds shredded fine and some raisins.’

‘I can hardly wait. What about going to Amalfi, Sorrento and Capri? I know everybody does, but I like tripperism. Anyway, I’m glad we don’t have to leave at once. I must give my young ladies time to miss me from the piggeries. I should think my predecessor’s leg must be on the mend by now, though. I don’t much want to be at the college after Christmas.’

Characteristically, he did not ask his aunt what it was that she had managed to find out since they had been at the hotel. It was not that he took no interest, but he felt sure that she would tell him when she was ready to do so. She told him as they came out of the church of Santa Chiara in Naples, on their return journey to Rome, which they made in a hired car.

‘I note,’ she said, ‘that with your usual delicacy and the amour propre we have come to expect of you, you have forborne to ask me what it was that I came to Italy to find out.’

‘I knew you’d tell me when you were ready, if it was possible to tell me at all,’ said Carey, with his slight smile. ‘That doesn’t mean I haven’t been curious, of course. I always thought there was some particular method in this madness that you hadn’t mentioned.’

‘It was the discrepancy which puzzled me first.’

‘The alleged age of the corpse?’

‘Yes. It couldn’t have been the body of a twenty-two-year-old that we saw, and yet the mother identified it as that of Mrs Coles, chiefly because of the college blazer, it seems.’

‘So…?’

‘I guessed at once that there must have been another daughter, an older one, but sufficiently like Mrs Coles for the mother, in her natural grief and agitation, to have confused them—and certainly to have confused us.’

‘English is a wonderful language. Well, your guess turned out right, as your guesses are apt to do, being not so much guesses as a species of second sight, but you didn’t come to Italy to prove there had been two Miss Pallisers. You knew that before you came.’

‘Quite so. I did want to establish that it was the elder daughter who was here on holiday, though, and, in doing so, I was given a very broad hint from the waiter that she made herself a nuisance to Mr Biancini.’

‘Probably she was led on. These amorous Italians!’

‘Quite. But you see what follows?’

‘If the waiter noticed what was going on, so did Mrs Biancini. Oh, ho! Quite so! Mrs Biancini had it in for elder daughter, did her in, and deliberately confused the issue by identifying the corpse as that of the younger daughter, with whom it could be proved she had no quarrel at all.’

‘The daughter who fled from home, in fact, rather than live in the same house as Biancini.’

‘Well, well, well! Of course, the snags are pretty obvious.’

‘The biggest snags are the college blazer—Norah Coles surely would not possess more than one of those at a time— and the extraordinary choice of a hiding-place for the body. It seems highly unlikely that Mrs Biancini would have known of the existence of that coach.’

‘Norah Coles might, at some time, have mentioned the Highpepper rag in which it figured. I’ve had students at Calladale tell me about it, you know.’

‘Yes, certainly it seems to have been regarded as a classic. All the same, even if she knew of it, I cannot see her choosing the coach as a hiding-place.’

‘What shall you tell the police about Carrie Palliser now?’

‘I shall not mention Biancini yet, if at all. I don’t want to set them on what might well turn out to be a false trail. All I shall tell them at present is that Carrie saw Naples and died.’

As soon as she was back in England at the Stone House, Dame Beatrice sent a reply-paid telegram to Mrs Biancini:

Which daughter was with you in Italy query Bradley.

The reply she received was equally succinct.

Carrie why query Biancini.

She thought the message oddly cool, but concluded that it had come from Biancini himself and not from the dead woman’s mother. In any case, another conversation with one or both of the Biancinis appeared to be necessary before she went again to the police.

Accordingly, she called on them next day. Biancini was out, but his wife welcomed her with what seemed to be an air of relief.

‘We couldn’t make head or tail of your telegram, Dame Beatrice,’ she said. ‘Of course it was Carrie we had with us. It couldn’t have been poor Norah, as I thought you knew, her being with her aunt at the time.’

‘Sit down, please, Mrs Biancini,’ said Dame Beatrice, who had been given a chair whilst her hostess remained standing on the hearthrug in the fireless, over-furnished little parlour. ‘What I have to say may give you a shock.’

‘Nothing to do with Carrie would give me a shock. She’s been a bad girl, bad through and through. It was only me paying back the money as quick as I did that saved her from prison, you know. I did it for poor Norah’s sake, not to ruin her career by having a sister behind bars. If it hadn’t been for that, and me wanting to marry Mr Biancini, I don’t know but what it wouldn’t have taught her a lesson to have let her go to gaol.’

‘She has received the last lesson she will ever be taught in this world, Mrs Biancini. Tell me, when you were called upon to identify your daughter’s body, did it not seem to you that you were looking upon Carrie and not Norah?’

Mrs Biancini did not answer for a full minute. Then she said, in tones husky from shock:

‘But—but she was wearing the college blazer. I never thought—I hardly glanced—it was all too much for me. They were ever so alike to look at. I never could understand why their natures should be so different. But—I mean, are you telling me it’s Carrie who’s dead?’

‘I do not think there is any doubt of it.’

‘Then where is my Norah?’

‘That is a question for the police,’ said Dame Beatrice sadly. ‘I do think, Mrs Biancini, that you would be well advised to tell me all you know.’

There was a struggle going on in Mrs Biancini’s mind. It showed in her face. At last she said:

‘Perhaps I’d better tell you. My Carrie was a real bad lot. Biancini—Tony, you know—always thought we could reform her, but I felt I knew her better. But what you’ve just told me has knocked me all of a heap. So where is Norah? And is she dead or alive?’

‘It is impossible to say, Mrs Biancini. We must hope that she is alive, but it would not do to build on it. There is one ray of hope. You identified the body wrongly; you say the girls were much alike. It is possible—mind, I have nothing to go on in saying this—but it is possible that somebody else made the same mistake and that Carrie was killed instead of Norah.’

‘But nobody on earth would want to hurt Norah!’

‘What about Carrie?’

‘That might be a different kettle of fish.’

‘But you know nothing definite? You cannot think of anyone who might have had a motive for compassing Carrie’s death?’

‘I couldn’t say. We’d been out of touch until Tony suggested having her with us for this holiday in Italy. His idea, I think, from what he said, was to get her a job as hotel receptionist or perhaps in a tourist office. She’d learnt Italian, you see, when she knew I was set on marrying him, and she’d taken French at school, my first husband being alive until she was nearly nineteen.’

‘Mr Biancini took sufficient interest in her, then, to think about her future? What sort of work had she been doing before this holiday in Italy?’

‘School-teaching. Oh, not at a proper school, you know. She was at one of these little private boarding schools where they employ the staff term by term.’

‘Term by term?’

‘Yes. You get the sack at the end of every term so they don’t have to pay you for the holidays. Then you apply again at the beginning of the next term and they take you on again, automatic, as it were.’

‘But,’ said Dame Beatrice, who had heard of this hand-to-mouth system before, ‘isn’t it true that the summer holiday at such schools can last as long as ten weeks?’

‘Oh, yes, with a month at Easter and three weeks at Christmas. Either Carrie used to get a holiday job or else go on the Unemployment. She managed somehow, or else got into trouble with debts and stealing, which I had to see to, as I told you.’

‘Did she ever spend her holidays, or part of them, with you?’

‘No. It wouldn’t have done, once I’d married my Tony.’

‘But you were sure that it would work when you agreed to having her join you in Italy?’

‘It seemed safe enough at the time. She told us she was engaged.’

‘To whom?’

‘She never said, and we didn’t press it. We didn’t think it could be to anybody very much, or else she’d have been the first one to crow about it. Putting two and two together, we reckoned it might be to a garage hand or a barman, or something of that—that is, if it was true, and not just a tale she’d made up.’

‘Did anything transpire during the holiday which caused you to think that she might be in any trouble, difficulty or danger?’

‘Not without it might have been the man who kept following us around. And, of course, she was a nuisance with Tony. But this man — ”

‘Indeed?’

‘Yes. We noticed him first when we went to visit Pompeii. I don’t understand these old ruins and things, but Tony was very proud of them and insisted on me seeing them all. I suppose it was because I wasn’t interested that I noticed this man and pointed him out to Tony. But Tony seemed to think he was only creeping in on our party to hear what the guide had to say. Personally, I thought the man was up to no good, but, as he behaved himself and even gave the guide a tip at the end, I couldn’t do anything, and tried to persuade myself it was just my fancy.’

‘Quite so. Did your daughter seem to notice the man particularly?’

‘No, I can’t say she did, but you couldn’t ever tell, with Carrie, from quite a little girl, what she noticed and what she didn’t. She never gave herself away.’

‘Except over Mr Biancini, I think you hinted.’

‘Even then, I’ll admit, I never noticed anything. I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to me. It was Tony himself tipped me off and told me she was getting embarrassing, so, of course, I made a bit of a scene and turned her out.’

‘That, surely, was drastic treatment?’

‘You didn’t know Carrie. Half-measures didn’t mean a thing to her. I told her to get back to her boarding school and be quick about it. She got short shrift from me, I can tell you.’

‘Was it your first visit to Italy—this holiday?’

‘Yes. Tony and me had often talked about it, and then, quite suddenly, he said his relations had invited us over, and he’d like to go, and what about me. Well, I wasn’t all that keen, but I could see he was dead set on it. Of course, Italians are great family people, even if they do get excited and quarrel with each other, and I could tell I’d better say yes. But, oh, dear! When we got there! Well, really, Dame Beatrice, I couldn’t tell you! To begin with, there were dozens of them, all living (if you can call it that!) in one of those dreadful tenement houses in the back streets of Naples.’

Dame Beatrice made sympathetic noises and suggested that it depended upon what one was accustomed to in the way of living accommodation.

‘I packed it up at the end of the third day,’ Mrs Biancini continued. ‘I told Tony he’d got to find us a hotel. I will say for him that he did see it my way, and so we went to the Vittorio, and, my, what a nice change that was!’

‘He chose the Vittorio, I believe, because one of his relatives worked there.’

‘That’s quite right. It was out of the season, I suppose, and his brother Giovanni got us special terms, but, I must say, that didn’t seem to make any difference to the way we were treated. Always respect shown, and doors opened for you and a light for your cigarette, just as it might be the Ritz or anywhere else. I really enjoyed myself.’

‘And your daughter Carrie was with you all the time?’

‘Well, until I gave her her return tickets and sent her back to Naples until the boat sailed. Mind you, the noise and smells and dirt didn’t seem to get on her the way they did on me, but then, as she said, being used to crowds of kids, and the stink of everlasting cabbage, and not being able to get housemaids, it wasn’t so very different from the boarding school. She gave me plenty of cheek before she went.’

‘She preferred the Vittorio, I take it?’

‘I suppose so. Anyway, she paid her own bill. I insisted on that. “You can’t expect Tony to treat you. He isn’t made of money,” I said. She said Tony had invited her and that if we’d stayed with the relations, as was the first arrangement, it wouldn’t have cost her anything, because he’d paid her fare. First I’d known of that, I must say, although I ought to have known when he handed me three sets of tickets. Anyway, I thought I had to put a stop to her nonsense. “You can take it from me, my girl,” I said, “that, what with treating them to cigars and drinks, and taking them for outings and giving them parting presents, you spend quite as much staying with relations as you pay at a posh hotel. What’s more,” I said, “at the hotel you don’t have to help wash up and make the beds.” She saw it my way, in the end, I suppose, although I can’t see her doing much for her keep or giving presents, either!’

‘Yes, I see. So you all three travelled home together? She joined you on the boat at Naples?’

‘Yes, but we said good-bye at Victoria.’

‘Oh, yes? And did you see Carrie after that?’

‘No. I wasn’t having her in my house again! There was quite a bit of her school holiday still to run, and she’d got a job as temporary shop-girl, or so she said.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘Well, you couldn’t rely on her word, exactly, but she said it was the B. and T. shop in Canby New Town.’

‘The B. and T. shop?’

‘Babies and Toddlers. I don’t know it myself. She said it was a new shop in a nice district, and they were going to pay commission over and above her wages, and that the shop had been opened in response to a big demand for babies’ and toddlers’ clothes and toys and that.’

‘I see.’

‘They—they won’t dig Carrie up, will they? To know whether it is Carrie, I mean.’

‘Not at present. As things stand, your identification of the body as that of your younger daughter will not be challenged.’

‘Then…’

‘It is obvious, isn’t it, that if we find Norah, it will prove that Carrie is dead,’ said Dame Beatrice gently. ‘What can you tell me about that? Have you no idea at all where Norah might be?’

‘You’d better ask that young Coles. Do you think he really married her? He never seemed the marrying sort to me.’

‘It should not prove impossible to obtain a copy of the marriage certificate, if such a document exists. Just one more question, Mrs Biancini, if you won’t resent it. Do I understand that Carrie was left out of her father’s will?’

‘You do, and serve her right. “If she can lift the money off somebody else, she can do without mine,” he said. “It’s for you and little Norah,” he said. “You’ve been a good wife to me,” he said, “and if you can find a man to suit your fancy, that’s quite all right with me,” he said, “and it won’t make any difference to the way I leave my money.” Well, I waited seven years, Dame Beatrice, before I took up with Tony, so nobody can’t say I didn’t respect a good man’s memory.’