so it continued, just as he had planned it: he, the troubled young soul in search of guidance; she, rising to the role of guide. She was less sure-footed when he turned the conversation to her, her life, her husband. He tried to show interest while listening to her tales of love and marriage and a happiness born in heaven—lies which invigorated him, entitling him to proceed.
When she rose to fill their glasses, he followed her to the larder and told her that he had never met anyone like her. She handed him his glass and told him not to be silly. When he took her hand and raised it to his lips, she snatched it away before he could kiss it. He was tall for his age, more man than boy, and she seemed to sense this now. Pushing past him out of the larder, she said that she had to get back to her weeding before the rain came, and suggested that he hurry home to avoid a drenching. He didn’t reply; he just looked at her. When she asked him firmly to leave, he asked her about the bald man.
The colour drained from her face, but she recovered quickly, pleading no knowledge of a bald man. When forced to concede that he did exist, she claimed that he was her brother. When he enquired if she thought it normal for a woman to spend two hours in a darkened bedroom with her brother every Tuesday afternoon, she began to grasp the hopelessness of her situation. She tried to wriggle off the hook a couple more times, first appealing to his conscience, then defiantly ordering him to go ahead and do his worst. But they both knew that they were edging inexorably towards a trade. She asked him what he wanted for his silence. Something I’ve never had before, he replied.
He might not have known what he was doing, but he was big, and he assumed that counted for something. He knew he was big because he had seen the other boys in the showers at school after games, as they had seen him, and they had remarked respectfully on his size.
It didn’t seem to give Mrs Beckett much pleasure. But he wasn’t thinking of her; he was thinking of himself, watching himself moving in and out of her and wondering if this was what all the fuss was about. Looking to improve on the experience, he manoeuvred her into a number of different positions, which helped a bit. Her passivity gave him no satisfaction, but neither did it hamper his performance. He did what he had come to do then he got dressed and left. He turned at the bedroom door and reassured her that her secret was safe with him. He wanted her to know that he was a man of his word. She was sobbing quietly into a pillow and didn’t look up.
The storm broke as he was crossing the meadow. Lightning scythed the sky, thunder echoed off the hills, and the rain sheeted down in warm torrents, soaking him to the skin. And yet he remained strangely immune to this assault on his senses, caught up in dark thoughts, wondering what he would have to do, just how far he would have to go before he finally felt something stir in him.
He wasn’t to know it at the time, but the answer lay only a little way off, in Bad Reichenhall.
Max was at his desk, taking a red pen to a news item, when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver distractedly, irritably.
‘Yes?’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘Freddie.’
‘Bad morning?’
‘That new chap we took on, you met him at the party…’
‘Pemberton.’
‘Turns out he thinks he’s Shakespeare.’
‘He’ll learn. You did.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘Listen, Max, I know who she is.’
Max’s smile died on his lips. ‘The girl…?’
‘She has a name now. Carmela Cassar. Her father was here earlier and identified the body. It’s as we thought, another sherry queen.’
‘You spoke to him?’
‘Don’t worry, I was very discreet.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Yes it is. Have you got a pen?’
Max scribbled down everything Freddie had gleaned, both from the official paperwork at the mortuary and from his conversation with the father. Carmela lived with her parents in the family home on the hillside near Paola, just up the slope from Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery. She always got back from work late, between one and two in the morning, but in the five months she had been working at the Blue Parrot she had never once failed to return.
Max knew the Blue Parrot, not intimately, and not of late. It was one of the few dance halls in the Gut reserved for officers, which meant that the establishment was slightly more spacious than most, the floor show moderately superior, and the drinks vastly more expensive. He’d been there several times soon after his arrival on the island, when the star attraction, the big draw—the very big draw—had been an act from Hungary.
Budapest Bessie hadn’t been graced with either the build or the poise of a prima ballerina, but this hadn’t prevented her puffing her way through her version of ‘The Dying Swan’ before the disbelieving eyes of Britain’s officer classes. For some reason, veils had been a feature of her routine, he remembered, angina the reason for her sudden retirement from the stage. Ammunition was scarce even back then, but a couple of the shore batteries had been ordered to fire off a salute when the frigate bearing Bessie to a gentler life in Gibraltar had slipped out of Grand Harbour.
Max hadn’t been back to the Blue Parrot since that time, but he could see the flaking gilt of the mirrors in the narrow dining room, the greasy velvet upholstery and the tired palms dotted about the place.
‘Did she work anywhere before?’
‘I didn’t ask. Should I have?’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. Something that doesn’t make sense. She left for work on Thursday afternoon at five o’clock—she always allowed an hour for the walk, apparently—but she wasn’t found till the Saturday morning.’
‘Where exactly was she found?’
‘A backstreet in Marsa. Marsa was on her route home, but she can hardly have lain out there for a whole day without anyone seeing her.’
Max weighed a range of explanations, rejecting each in turn. Only one withstood the test, and it didn’t sit happily in the head.
‘She was held somewhere for twenty-four hours…’
‘It looks that way.’
‘Or maybe she was already dead; he just couldn’t dispose of the body for whatever reason, maybe it was too risky.’
As explanations went, it wasn’t quite as grim as the thought of her being held hostage for those missing hours, with the disturbing images that accompanied it.
‘The rigor mortis suggests otherwise. It was well set in when I first saw her on Saturday around noon. It generally peaks somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours after death, closer to twelve in this kind of heat.’
Which
