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.
DAY THREE
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 had 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 before 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 from 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 had been 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.
