I nodded, rose, left, knocked on the first door on the right and went inside in response to a barely heard murmur. Judith Haynes was sitting propped up in her bed with, as Conrad had predicted, a dog on either side of her-two rather beautiful and beautifully groomed cocker spaniels: I could not, however, catch any trace of smelling salts. She blinked at me with her rather splendid green eyes and gave me a wan smile, at once tremulous and brave. My heart stayed where it was.
“It was kind of you to come, Doctor.” She had one of those dark molasses voices, as effective at close personal quarters as it was in a darkened cinema. She was wearing a pink quilted bedjacket which clashed violently with the colour of her hair and, high round her Deck, a green chiffon scarf, which didn’t. Her face was alabaster white. “Michael said you couldn’t help.”
“Mr. Stryker was being overcautious.” I sat down on the edge of the mattress and took her wrist. The cocker spaniel next me growled deep in its throat and bared its teeth. “If that dog bites me, I’ll clobber it.”
“Rufus wouldn’t harm a fly, would you, Rufus, darling?” It wasn’t flies I was worried about but I kept silence and she went on with a sad smile: “Are you allergic to dogs, Dr. Marlowe?”
“I’m allergic to dog bites.”
The smile faded until her face was just sad. I knew nothing about Judith Haynes except what I’d heard at secondhand and as all I’d heard had been from her colleagues in the industry I heavily discounted about ninety percent of what had been told me: the only thing I had so far learnt with any certainty about the film world was that back-biting, hypocrisy, double-dealing, innuendo, and character assassination formed so integral a part of its conversational fabric that it was quite impossible to know where the truth ended and falsehood began. The only safe guide, I’d discovered, was to assume that the truth ended almost immediately.
Miss Haynes, it was said, claimed to be twenty-four and had been, on the best authority, for the past fourteen years. This, it was said darkly, explained her predilection for chiffon scarves, for it was there that the missing years showed: equally, she may just have liked chiffon scarves. With equal authority it was stated that she was a complete bitch, her only redeeming quality being her total devotion to her two cocker spaniels and even this backhanded compliment was qualified by the observation that as a human being she had to have something or somebody to love, something or somebody to return her affection. She had tried cats, it was said, but that hadn’t worked: the cats, apparently, didn’t love her back. But one thing was indisputable. Tall, slender, with wonderful Titian hair and classically beautiful in the sculptured Greek fashion, Miss Haynes, it was universally conceded, couldn’t act for toffee. Nonetheless, she was a very hot box office attraction indeed: the combination of the wistfully regal expression, which was her trademark, and the startling contrast of her lurid private life saw to that. Nor was her career in any way noticeably hindered by the facts that she was the daughter of Otto Gerran, whom she was said to despise, the wife of Michael Stryker, whom she was said to hate, and a full partner in the Olympus Productions company.
There was nothing much wrong with her physical condition that I could see. I asked her how many tablets of various kinds she had consumed in the course of the day and after dithering about helplessly for a bit and totting up the score with the shapely and tapering forefinger of her right hand on the shapely and tapering fingers of her left-she was alleged to be able to add up pounds and dollars with the speed and accuracy of an IBM computer-she gave me some approximate figures and in return I gave her some tablets with instructions as to how many and when to take them, then left. I didn’t prescribe any sedatives for the dogs–they looked okay to me.
The cabin occupied by the Count and Antonio was directly opposite across the passageway. I knocked twice, without reply, went inside and saw why there had been no reply: Antonio was there all right, but I could have knocked until doomsday and Antonio would not have heard me, for Antonio would never hear anything again. From the Via Veneto via Mayfair to die so squalidly in the Barents Sea: for the gay and laughing Antonio there could never have been a right or proper or suitable place to die, for if ever I’d met a man in love with life it had been Antonio: and for this cosseted creature of the sybaritic salons of the capitals of Europe to die in those bleak and indescribably bitter surroundings was so incongruous as to be shocking, so unreal as to momentarily suspend both belief and comprehension. But there he was, just there, lying there at my feet, very real, very dead.
The cabin was full of the sour-sweet smell of sickness and there was physical evidence of that sickness everywhere. Antonio lay not on his bunk but on the carpeted deck beside it, his head arched impossibly far back until it was at right angles to his body. There was blood, a great deal of blood, not yet congealed, on his mouth and on the floor by his mouth. The body was contorted into an almost impossible position, arms and legs outflung at grotesque angles, the knuckles showing ivory. Rolling around, the Count had said, sick, a man on the rack, and he hadn’t been so far out at that, for Antonio had died as a man on the rack dies, in agony. Surely to God he must have cried out, even although his throat would have been blocked most of the time, he must have screamed, he must have, he would have been unable to prevent himself: but with the Three Apostles in full cry, his cries would have gone unheeded. And then I remembered the scream I had heard when I’d been talking to Lonnie Gilbert in his cabin and I could feel the hairs prickling on the back of my neck: I should have known the difference between the high-pitched yowling of a rock singer and the scream of a man dying in torment.
I knelt, made a cursory examination, finding out no more in the process than any layman would have done, closed the staring eyes and then, with the advent of rigor mortis in mind, straightened out the contorted limbs with an ease that I found vaguely surprising. Then I left the cabin, locked the door and hesitated for only a moment before dropping the key in my pocket: if the Count were possessed of the delicate sensibilities he claimed, he’d be glad I’d taken the key with me.
2
“Dead?” Otto Gerran’s puce complexion had deepened to a shade where I could have sworn it was overlaid with indigo. “Dead, did you say?”
“That’s what I said.” Otto and I were alone in the dining saloon: it was ten o’clock now and at nine-thirty sharp Captain Imrie and Mr. Stokes invariably left for their cabins, where they would remain incommunicado for the next ten hours. I lifted from Otto’s table a bottle of raw firewater on which someone had unblushingly stuck a label claiming that the contents was brandy, took it to the stewards” pantry, returned with a bottle of Hine and sat down. It said much for Otto’s unquestioned state of shock that not only had he not appeared to note my brief absence, he even stared directly at me, unblinkingly and I’m sure unseeingly, as I poured out two Fingers for myself: he registered no reaction whatsoever. Only something pretty close to a state of total shock could have held Otto’s parsimonious nature in check and I wondered what the source of this shock might be. True, the news of the death of anyone you know can come as a shock, but it comes as a numbing shock only when the nearest and dearest are involved, and if Otto had even a measurable amount of affection for any one, far less for the unfortunate Antonio, he concealed it with great skill. Perhaps he was, as many are, superstitious about death at sea, perhaps he was concerned with the adverse effect it might have on cast and crew, maybe he was bleakly wondering where, in the immensity of the Barents Sea, he could lay hands on a make-up artist, hairdresser, and wardrobe man, for Otto, in the sacred name of economy, had combined all three normally separate jobs in the person of one man, the late Antonio. With a visibly conscious effort of will power he looked away from the Hine bottle and focussed his eyes on me.
“How can he be dead?”