Spotted Hemlock

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 facade 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 saute 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.’