The Shortest Way to Hades (25 page)

“My dear boy,” I said again, striving with some difficulty to maintain that evenness of tone which is desirable when dissuading the young from behavior they may afterwards regret, “my dear boy, you don’t imagine that I believe your
mother
had any hand in Deirdre’s death?”

He seemed to relax a little, and the knife blade receded by about a millimeter; but then he grew tense again, as if fearing that I spoke from expedience rather than from conviction.

“If she was there when Tancred did it and didn’t say anything, she’d be an accessory, wouldn’t she?”

It was in the abstract sense a not unattractive theory, which under happier conditions I would have commended for its ingenuity. I had no doubt that the solicitor had formed for Dolly a passionate attachment of the kind which she was accustomed to inspire, and to encourage, perhaps, to an extent which might be misunderstood by both admirer and husband. If Deirdre had become aware of it—and to do so would have been not uncharacteristic of her; if she had seen an opportunity for profit or malevolence—and again, it would have been not uncharacteristic; if all three of them had been gathered together on the roof of Rupert’s flat… psychologically, however, it was inconceivable; besides—

“It is,” I said, “an ingenious suggestion. But it won’t do. It does not explain, you see, the most curious aspect of the whole episode. It does not explain how it happened that Deirdre fell to her death while your brother Lucian was still attentively watching the race from the balcony—and your brother did not see her fall.”

From above came the sound of voices: I was able to identify them, with some relief, as those of Selena and Sebastian.

“Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas very quickly, still holding me pinned at knife-point in the dark corner between the wall and the staircase, “you wouldn’t be so foolish, I hope, as to call out.” His lapis lazuli eyes shone like a cat’s in the darkness. I believed, however, that he would not wish to cut my throat without knowing my explanation for the curious circumstance to which I had just referred.

Then there was another voice, seeming to come from much closer at hand: a voice of great beauty and resonance, which I had never heard before but had no doubt was that of Constantine Demetriou. He spoke as if ill or injured, in halting and disjointed phrases which I could not think to be characteristic of him; though in his actual tone I could detect no note of alarm or anxiety.

“Is that you?… Sebastian?… I’m down here… Can you help me?… Sebastian… I’m down here.”

I tried in vain to imagine where he could be. His voice had seemed to come from within the underground chamber of which I supposed Leonidas and myself to be the only occupants. Although the further end of the room was in shadow, the darkness was not so impenetrable as to have concealed his presence; besides, it did not seem to me that his voice came from that direction. I could only suppose that he had descended the staircase unheard by Leonidas and myself, had stumbled perhaps on the last step, and was now lying hidden from our view by the projection of the supporting wall.

“Sebastian… I’m down here… Can you help?” The same disjointed phrases in the same even and unagitated tone.

“Constantine? Is that you? Don’t worry, I’ll be down in a few seconds.” I could hear Sebastian’s voice sufficiently clearly to know that he had already begun the descent. There followed a slithering of stones, the sound of a fall and of the mild imprecations to be expected from a young man of gentle and poetic disposition who has missed his footing and been thrown headlong on to a hard, uneven surface.

I must have made some involuntary movement as if to go to the assistance of my unfortunate young colleague: a slight increase in the pressure of the boy’s hand on my shoulder and the pricking of the knife point against my skin suggested that this would be imprudent.

“Sebastian, what’s happened? Are you all right?” Selena’s voice also was now clearly audible.

“More or less—I’ve tripped over some kind of netting and I can’t get free. And I can’t see Constantine—Constantine, are you there?”

He was answered by silence. My perplexity deepened, since he was now in the only part of the chamber which was hidden from my own view.

Not doubting that Selena would accomplish the descent with her customary elegant agility, I was astonished, a few seconds later, to hear further sounds of stumbling and a cry of vexation which suggested that she also had fallen.

I became conscious that one of the meager sources of light had been partially obscured. A tall, dark figure, holding what seemed to be a spear, stood in the embrasure nearer to the stairway: not Constantine: Camilla.

“Amazing how easy it is to trip on those stairs, isn’t it?” said Camilla. “Specially if someone’s chucked a bit of old fishing-net over the bottom step. Don’t try to move, by the way—Sebastian’s tummy’s just nicely in line with the point of this fishing-spear, and it’s sharp enough to go straight through.”

“Camilla,” said Sebastian, “what on earth do you think you’re doing? And where’s Constantine? We heard him calling out from here less than a minute ago.”

“Oh,” said the girl, “you don’t need to worry about Constantine. That was just a sort of selection of the great man’s conversation put together on my dinky little tape-recorder. I didn’t think you’d come down here if it was me you heard calling, so I spent a day last week getting it ready. Quite clever, don’t you think?”

“Most ingenious,” said Selena. “You have evidently been to some trouble to arrange this little gathering. And to some risk, if you got up there from the pathway. It’s quite a precipitous climb, and a long way down to the rocks.”

“Oh,” said Camilla, as if deprecating any praise for her athletic accomplishments, “that wasn’t difficult. I left a rope hanging down there earlier this afternoon, the same time I fixed up the ‘No Entry’ sign to make sure we weren’t disturbed. So when I was certain you were on your way up here, I just came round the other side and shinned up it.”

“Did you,” asked Sebastian, “have any particular purpose in making these arrangements?”

“So that I could kill you, of course,” said Camilla.

The boy and I remained equally motionless: I had hardly noticed, so entirely was my attention held by Camilla, the moment when he ceased to hold the knife to my throat; but when he drew breath as if to speak, I had put my hand to his mouth. My friend Sebastian, a glimmering patch of white in the shadows at the foot of the staircase, lay helpless at the mercy of Camilla’s spear; and I did not doubt, as Leonidas may have done, that she was wholly in earnest. I thought that it would require no little circumspection to ensure that any of us left the chamber alive.

“Are you sure,” asked Selena at last, in a pleasantly conversational tone, “that that is a very good idea? The consequences, if you happened to be found out, would be rather disagreeable; and it is not immediately clear what advantage you hope to obtain.”

“You must be joking,” said the other girl. “You don’t think I’m going to spend the rest of my days letting you two blackmail me, do you? I suppose you thought you’d have a meal-ticket for life, once my great-grandmother died and I came into the money. Well, you’ve picked the wrong woman for that game—I know what to do about blackmailers.”

“What on earth makes you think—?” Some warning movement by Selena, I supposed, discouraged Sebastian from completing the question.

“Oh, don’t start trying to pretend you weren’t going to blackmail me, I know what you were up to. It makes it absolutely justifiable to get rid of you in any way I can—every one agrees that blackmail’s worse than murder. And no one’s going to find out about it. You’re going to have a nasty accident due to fooling about too close to the edge of that opening.” She pointed towards the embrasure facing southwards.

“Rather like Deirdre,” said Selena, sounding interested. “You don’t feel that people may begin to make unpleasant remarks about the inflationary effect of your presence on the fatal accident figures?”

“Why should they? When Deirdre fell off the roof of Daddy’s flat I was down in the drawing-room, with half a dozen witnesses to prove it.”

“Ah yes, so you were,” said Selena thoughtfully. “How did you manage it? It sounds rather clever.”

“Yes, it was rather, though I says it as shouldn’t. Specially as I didn’t have time to plan anything properly—I didn’t know I was going to kill her, you see, I’m not even sure I really meant to. Afterwards, of course, I saw it was the only thing I could have done. She’d been all excited and pleased with herself all through lunch, but I didn’t know why. And then afterwards, when we were alone on the roof, she told me she’d found out—well, the same thing as you two, of course. She was gloating and crowing over me fit to burst, you’d have thought she
wanted
to get herself murdered. Anyway, I got so riled I just went for her, and before I knew what had happened there she was with her neck broken, silly little beast. So I had to think pretty quickly what to do about it. The first thing I thought of was chucking her straight over on to the pavement, but then I thought it might mean some embarrassing questions. So I pitched her over the side on to the bedroom balcony—it sticks out a bit further than the roof—and went downstairs to watch the Boat Race on television. When it got to the exciting bit and everyone was concentrating on it, I muttered something about going to the loo, and went and tipped her over on to the pavement—from the end of the balcony, of course, so it would look as if she’d fallen from the front of the building. It didn’t take a minute, I don’t think anyone even noticed I was gone. Not bad for the spur of the moment, don’t you think?”

“Extremely quick-witted,” said Selena. “But how did you persuade Dolly to say that Deirdre was still on the roof when she went up there again?”

“Oh, Dolly didn’t go back on to the roof. She was having a touching farewell scene in the study with old Tanks—she’d let him squire her about for a few weeks before Costas came over to London and he’d fallen for her in a big way. The twins were covering for her, the way they always do. So when Dolly came back into the drawing-room, she pretended she’d come down from the roof—and of course she thought Deirdre was still up there.”

“From your point of view,” said Selena, “a rather fortunate combination of circumstances.”

“Yes, it was rather, because it meant no one twigged that I was the last person who’d been alone with Deirdre. Mind you, it’s a good thing I wasn’t counting on it—Costas got the idea it was his fault Dolly hadn’t been on the roof at the right time to stop Deirdre falling off it, and she got in a tizzwozz and started thinking she ought to set his mind at rest by saying where she really was. But I managed to persuade her he’d be happier feeling bad about Deirdre than knowing about the little fling with Tancred.”

Looking at the boy Leonidas, I noted that his expression was one of relief. His satisfaction in being assured of his mother’s innocence was no doubt very commendable; I hoped it would not render him for too long impervious to the danger of our present position.

“The sailing accident,” said Selena, “was also most ingenious. You arranged a suitable compass deviation, I suppose, with the assistance of a transistor radio or some other magnetic object, and left Leonidas obediently steering straight for the rocks of Parga. So when you went overboard, you knew just where you were and what point to swim for. You were wearing a wetsuit, I expect, under the famous black pajamas, and I suppose you had a face mask and flippers and so forth—it would have been too dark for Leonidas to see what you were wearing. You’d have had to dispose of them, of course, before you went ashore—that must have been rather nerve-racking. How disappointing, after so much risk and effort, to find that your cousins had all survived.”

“I had the rottenest luck,” said Camilla. “It was a super plan, and the conditions were simply perfect. That’s the important thing—seeing one’s opportunities and making the most of them. Well, that’s what I did, and if it hadn’t been for those damned fishermen it would have worked perfectly.”

“Still, as you say, it was an excellent plan—with the particular merit that whatever happened no suspicion could possibly attach to yourself. That’s why I’m surprised at your putting yourself in this awkward position so far as Sebastian and I are concerned.”

“I wouldn’t say I was the one who’s in an awkward position,” said Camilla.

“Oh, don’t you think so?” Selena seemed to find this a novel and interesting point of view. “I thought the idea was that we would appear to have fallen by accident. That means, surely, that you have to persuade us to go close enough to the edge to be pushed over; and your only means of persuasion is that fishing-spear.”

“I think,” said Camilla, “it’ll be quite an efficient form of persuasion.”

“Do you think so? But if we’re supposed to have died by accident, you see, it really won’t do for us to be found with spear-wounds: all sorts of questions would be asked, and you can’t risk that, can you? That’s what I mean by your being in an awkward position: you can’t expect to achieve much by threatening us with a weapon which we both know you can’t afford to use.”

“Don’t kid yourselves,” said Camilla. “I’ll use it if I have to.”

“I find it hard to believe,” said Selena, with a smoothness which she generally reserved for the Court of Appeal, “that you would do anything so… unintelligent. Do you really prefer the prospect of twenty years in a Greek prison to paying Sebastian and myself a modest retainer in exchange for our continued discretion?”

“Ah,” said the other girl triumphantly, “you admit you were going to blackmail me.”

“In the circumstances, it would clearly be useless to deny it. But what makes you think it would be so very unpleasant? You don’t imagine, surely, that we would make demands which would reduce you to unaccountable penury or raise ourselves to unaccountable affluence? Anything on that scale would lead inevitably to our exposure, and we don’t share this taste of yours for spending long periods in prison. We would content ourselves, in our own interest, with a very trifling proportion of your total income, such as you would happily expend on services of far less value. Moreover, since you are the only potential purchaser of our discretion, we would naturally have your welfare very much at heart: our own safety and prosperity would depend on yours, and we could be expected, in our own interests, to use for your advantage whatever talents and influence either of us may possess.” A wistful note came into her voice. “It’s still very difficult, you know, for a woman to achieve recognition at the Bar, whatever her abilities. It makes all the difference if one has someone whose help and support can be absolutely relied on—not simply for the sake of friendship, which may be capricious and half-hearted, but because there is a genuine identity of interest.”