“You didn’t give her those, did you, Sherwin?” she asked.
“Of course not!” he said, poking at the diamond collar with a thick finger. “I wouldn’t give a kid stuff like this.”
She reached over his shoulder and made to pick up the diamond collar, but he roughly pushed her hand away.
“Leave it!” The snap in his voice startled me. “Go and sit down!”
Slightly shrugging her shoulders, she returned to her seat by the window and sat down.
Chalmers scooped the jewels back into the box and shut the lid. He handled the box as if it were made of egg shells.
He sat motionless for a long time, staring at the box. I watched him, wondering what his next
move was to be. I knew he would make a move. He was getting his big-shot atmosphere back.
His wife, staring out of the window, and I staring down at my hands, were pigmies again.
“Get this Giuseppe whatever his name is on the telephone,” Chalmers said, without looking at me. “The coroner fella.”
I turned up Maletti’s number in the book and put through the call. While I was waiting for the connection, Chalmers went on, “Give the news to the press: no details. Tell them Helen, while on vacation, fell off a cliff and was killed.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Be here to-morrow morning at nine o’clock with a car. I want to go to the mortuary.”
A voice said on the line that this was the coroner’s office. I asked to be put through to Maletti. When he came on the line, I said to Chalmers, “The coroner.”
He got up and came over.
“Okay, get busy, Dawson,” he said, as he took the receiver from my hand. “Mind - no details.”
As I went out of the room I heard him say, “This is Sherwin Chalmers talking…”
Somehow he made his name sound more important and more impressive than any other name in the world.
PART FIVE
I
At nine o’clock the following morning I was outside the Vesuvius hotel with the hired Rolls as instructed.
The Italian press had given Helen’s death quite a coverage. Every paper carried her picture: showing her as I had first known her with her horn spectacles, her scraped-back hair-do and wearing her intellectual, serious expression.
As soon as I had left Chalmers the previous evening, I had called Maxwell. I gave him instructions to go ahead and break the story.
“Play it down,” I said. “Make it sound commonplace. The story is she was on vacation in Sorrento, she was using a cine camera, she got absorbed in what she was taking and she fell off the cliff.”
“Who do you imagine is going to swallow a yarn like that?” he demanded, his voice excited. “They’ll want to know what she was doing alone, living in a villa that size.”
“I know,” I said, “but that’s the story, Jack, and you’re stuck with it. We’ll tackle what comes next when it comes. This is the way the old man wants it, and if you want to keep your job, that’s the way it’s got to be.” I hung up before he could argue further.
I handed it to him when I saw the morning’s papers. He had followed out my instructions to the letter. The press carried the story and a photograph, and that was all. No smart alec had an opinion to express. They just stated the facts as known, soberly and without hysterics.
Around nine-ten, Chalmers came out of the hotel and climbed into the back of the Rolls. He had a bunch of newspapers under his arm and a cigar between his teeth. He didn’t even nod good morning to me.
I knew where he wanted to go, so I didn’t waste time asking him. I got in beside the chauffeur, told him to drive to Sorrento and to snap it up.
I was a little surprised that June Chalmers hadn’t come along far the ride. From where I sat I could get a good view of Chalmers in the driving mirror as he read the newspapers. He went through them quickly and searchingly, dropping one after the other on the floor of the car as he finished reading what he wanted to read.
By the time we reached Sorrento he had got through all the papers. He sat smoking his cigar, staring out of the window, communicating with the only god he would ever know — himself. I directed the chauffeur to the mortuary. When the Rolls pulled up outside the small building, Chalmers got out and, motioning me to remain where I was, he went inside.
I lit a cigarette and tried not to think of what he was going to look at, but Helen’s smashed, bruised face was in my mind and had been in my dreams last night, and it haunted me. He was in there for twenty minutes.
When he came out, he walked just as briskly as when he went in. His cigar, now burned down to an inch and a half, was still gripped between his teeth. I decided that to look at your dead daughter with a cigar in your mouth was playing the role of “the iron man” to an ultimate end.
He got into the back seat of the Rolls before I had time to get out and hold the rear door open for him.
“Okay, Dawson, we’ll go up to this villa now.”
Nothing was said during the drive up to the villa. When we got there, and I had got out of the car to open the wrought-iron gates and got back in again, and we had crawled up the drive, I saw the Lincoln convertible was still standing on the tarmac before the front door.
As Chalmers got out of the Rolls, he said, “Is this her car?”
I said it was.
He glanced at it and then went on up the steps and into the villa. I went after him.
The chauffeur watched us without interest. As soon as Chalmers’s back was turned, he reached for a cigarette.
I kept in the background while Chalmers looked the villa over. He left the bedroom to the last and he spent some time in there. Curious to see what be was up to, I edged to the doorway and looked in.
He was sitting on the bed beside one of Helen’s suitcases, his big, fat hands in a mass of her nylon underwear while he stared fixedly out of the window.
There was a look on his face that turned me cold, and I moved silently back until he was out of my sight, then I sat down and lit a cigarette.
The past two days had been the worst I had ever lived through. I felt I was caught in a trap and was waiting for the hunter to come along and finish me off.
The fact that Carlotti had traced me from Sorrento to the villa, that he knew I had been wearing a grey suit, that he knew exactly when Helen had died and that I, as the mysterious man in the grey suit, had been up there at that time, made my flesh creep.
I had lain awake most of the night, worrying and thinking, and as I sat waiting while Chalmers was going through his daughter’s things, I still worried.
He came out eventually and walked slowly across the lounge to the window.
I watched him, wondering what was going on in his mind. He remained like that for several minutes, then he turned and came over to sit in a chair near where I was sitting.
“You didn’t see much of Helen when she was in Rome?” he asked, staring at me with his rain-coloured eyes.
This question was unexpected and I felt myself stiffen.
