“Oh, sure,” I said. “That’s not your funeral nor mine.”
He gave me a sidelong look.
“Il Signor Chalmers has a lot of influence.”
“He certainly has, but he should have used some of it with his daughter before she got tied up in a situation like this.”
He lit another of his awful cigarettes, sank further down in his seat and went off into a coma of brooding. I went of into one of my own.
I was surprised he hadn’t said more about Douglas Sherrard. This made me a little uneasy. I knew Carlotti. He moved slowly, but he also moved thoroughly.
We reached Naples around noon. There was a police car waiting. Lieutenant Grandi of the Naples Police was standing by the car, waiting for us.
He was a middle-sized bird with a hatchet face, dark solemn eyes and an olive complexion. He shook hands with me, looking just beyond my right shoulder. I had the impression he wasn’t overjoyed to have me in the party. He manoeuvred Carlotti into the back seat and me into the front seat beside the driver. He got in alongside Carlotri. During the long, fast drive to Sorrento, I could just hear his rapid Italian as he talked continuously, his voice barely above a whisper.
. I tried to listen to what he was saying, but the noise of the wind and the roar of the car engine made that impossible. I gave up, lit a cigarette and stared through the wind shield at the unwinding road as it rushed continuously towards us, thinking of the previous night’s ride that had been so much quicker and so much more dangerous.
We reached Sorrento. The police driver took us around the back of the railway station to a small brick building that served at the town’s morgue.
We got out of the car.
Carlotti said to me, “This won’t be pleasant for you, but it is necessary. She has to be identified.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
But it wasn’t all right. I was sweating, and I knew I must have lost colour. I didn’t have to worry about my appearance. Anyone could have looked the same in such circumstances.
I followed him through the door of the building, down a tile-lined corridor and into a small, bare room.
In the middle of the room stood a trestle table on which lay a body, under a sheet.
We moved forward up to the table. My heart was beating sluggishly. There was a sickness inside me that made me feel faint.
I watched Carlotti reach forward and turn back the sheet.
III
It was Helen all right, and, of course, she was dead.
Although someone with a practised hand had cleaned her up, and had made her as presentable as possible, her face still bore the marks of the awful fall she had taken.
It was pretty unnerving to stand there and look down at the dead, shattered face. I turned away, feeling bad. Grandi, who bad come up behind me, put his hand on my arm as Carlotti pulled the sheet back into place.
I jerked away from Grandi and walked out into the corridor. The fresh draught of air coming in through the open doorway did a lot to help me pull myself together.
The two detectives came out silently, and the three of us walked slowly back to the car.
“Yes, if s her,” I said, as we reached the car. “No doubt about it.”
Carlotti lifted his shoulders.
“I have been hoping that there might be a mistake. This is going to be troublesome. There will be a lot of publicity.”
I could see he was still very worried about Chalmers. He knew Chalmers had enough influence to lift him right out of his job if he put a foot wrong.
“Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t sorry for him. I had too much on my mind at that moment to be sorry for anyone except myself. “I’ll have to send him a cable.”
Carlotti lit another of his awful cigarettes. As he flicked away the burning match, he said, “We’ll go to the station now. You can use the telephone there.”
We got in the car: Carlotti and Grandi behind and I with the driver. No one said anything while we drove through the traffic-congested main street to the police station. By the time we got there, I was feeling a little more like my old self, although I was still pretty shaken. They left me in an office while they went off to another office for a conference.
I put a call through to Maxwell.
“There’s no doubt about it,” I said, when he came on the line. “It’s Helen all right.”
“Sweet grief! What do we do now?”
“I’m going to send a cable to Chalmers. I’ll give him three hours to get over the shock, then I’ll call him on long distance.”
I could hear him breathing like an old man with asthma.
“I guess that’s all you can do,” he said after a long pause. “Okay, if there’s anything I can do…”
“Look after the job,” I said. “It doesn’t mean that because Chalmers’s daughter falls off a cliff, the job stands still.”
“I’ll look after it if you’ll look after Chalmers,” he told me. “There’s no need for me to shove my oar into this, Ed. You’re fitted for the job. He likes you. He thinks you’re sharp. He hasn’t much use for me. I’ll take care of the work here: you take care of Chalmers.”
“Okay. Put Miss Valetti on the line, will you?”
“Sure. Hang on a moment.”
The relief in his voice was almost comic.
A moment or so later, Gina’s cool voice came on the line.
“She’s dead then, Ed?”
“Yes. She’s dead all right. Have you got your book? I want you to send a cable to Chalmers.”
“Go ahead.”
That’s something I have always admired about Gina. No matter how big the emergency is, she never got rattled.
I dictated a cable to Chalmers. I told him his daughter had met with an accident I regretted that she was dead. I said I would call him at his house at 16.00 hours European time with the details. That gave me three hours in which to get the details and find out how much the police had discovered. It would also give me time to cook up my end of the tale if it seemed necessary to cook up a tale.
Gina said she would get the cable off right away.
“Do that,” I said. “There’s a chance Chalmers will call before I call him. If he does, you don’t know a thing - understand? Don’t get tangled up in this, Gina. You don’t know a thing. Tell him I’ll call him at four o’clock sharp.”
“All right, Ed.”
It was good to hear her calm, matter-of-fact voice. I dropped the receiver on to its cradle and pushed back my chair. As I did so, Carlotti came in.
“I am going to look at the place where she died,” he said. “Do you want to come?”
I stood up.
“Sure, I’ll come.”
As I followed him out of the office, I saw Grandi was waiting in the corridor. Maybe I was suffering from a guilty conscience, but I had an uneasy idea that the look he gave me was full of suspicion.
