Many American soldiers kept their guns after the war. It was bad luck for the woman who found him that one-time Master Sergeant Douglas Reid-Kennedy, U.S. Army Military Police, had been equipped with the M 1911 automatic pistol. Even if you can't take it with you, a.45-inch bullet still makes an expensive way to blow your head apart.
He was a big man, and it was easy to imagine him as a military cop, in white helmet liner, swinging a stick. Now his body was twisted, face up, his arms spread as if to keep himself from falling into the oily bilges between the beautifully maintained twin diesels, where he now lay sprawled. The floral patterned Hawaiian shirt was open to reveal a tanned hairy chest. He wore smart canvas shoes with the yachtsman's grip-sole, and around his tailored shorts there was an ancient leather belt with a sailor's clasp-knife hanging from it.
The back of his skull had exploded, so. that there was blood, brain and bone fragments everywhere, but most of his jaw was still there, complete with enough teeth to get a positive identification from his dental records. He must have been standing in the lounge at the fatal moment, with one hand on the stair-rail and the pistol in his mouth. The force of it had thrown him down the steps into the engine-room. I suppose he'd been taking a last look at the mansion, and the gardens, and perhaps at his wife breakfasting. I looked at the jetty and the lie of the land and tried to stop thinking of the different ways I could have come and killed him unobserved.
I went to the forward end and sorted through the radar and depth-sounding gear. It was all very new and there were screw-holes and paint-lines to show where previous models had once been. Owning the most modern electronics had now become more prestigious for a yachtsman than having a few extra feet of hull or even a uniformed crew, providing of course there was a distinctive aerial for it somewhere in view.
Douglas Reid-Kennedy had left his zipper jacket draped over the throttles. It was blue nylon, with an anchor design and the word 'captain' embroidered on the chest. And it had two special oilskin pockets, in case you were the sort of captain who fell overboard with the caviar in your pocket. In one of the pockets there was a briar pipe, with a metal windguard, and a plastic tobacco pouch with a Playboy bunny on it. In the other pocket there was a wallet containing credit cards, yacht-club membership cards, a weather forecast from the yacht club, dated the same day, a notebook with some scribbled notes, including radio wavelengths, and a bunch of keys.
Keys can be of many different shapes and sizes, from the large ones that wine waiters wear round their necks in pretentious restaurants, to the tiny slivers of serrated tin that are supplied with suitcases. The keys from Douglas Reid-Kennedy's yachting jacket were very serious keys. They were small, circular-sectioned keys, made from hard, bronzed metal, each with a number but without a manufacturer's name, so that only the owner knew where to apply for a replacement. It was one of these keys that fitted into the writing-desk in the boat's large, carpeted lounge.
I sat down at the desk, and went through the contents carefully but he wasn't the sort of man who was likely to leave incriminating evidence in his writing-desk. There was a selection of papers that one might need for a short voyage. There were photostats of the insurance, and several licences and fishing permits. In a small, and rather battered, leather frame there was the sepia-coloured photograph that Mann had remarked upon during our previous visit. It was a glimpse of a world of long ago. Reid-Kennedy's father, dressed in a dark suit, with a gold pin through his tie, sat in front of a photographer's painted backdrop. One wrinkled hand rested upon the shoulder of a smiling child dressed in Lederhosen. I took the photograph from its frame. It was mounted on a stiff card that bore the flamboyant signature and address of a photo studio in New York City. It had the superb definition of a contact print; the sort of quality that disappeared with the coming of miniature cameras and high-speed films.
I looked at the photo for a long time. The informality of the child's clothes could not conceal the care and attention that had preceded this visit to the photographer. Nor could the stern expression on the face of the man conceal an immense pride in his handsome son. And yet the shutter had caught a moment of tension in the boy's face as he stiffened in the embrace of his autocratic father. There was an element of tragedy in the gulf between them and I wondered why this was the picture that the son had carried in his personal baggage for so many years.
There was a book-shelf above the desk. I flipped through the usual array of books about knots and flags, and 'vessels running free giving way to vessels that are close-hauled'. There was a visitors' book, too: a beautiful leather-bound volume, kept in neat handwriting and dutifully signed by the Reid-Kennedys' guests. Some of the pages had been roughly torn from it, and I noted those dates.
Then I replaced everything I'd moved, and wiped the things I'd touched, and walked back to the house where Mrs Reid-Kennedy was nursing a treble brandy, and Mann was pouring himself a soda-water on the rocks.
'I told Douglas,' she said.
'Told him what?' Mann asked.
'Hello,' she said to me. 'Told him not to go to Europe this time.'
'Why'd you tell him that?'
'I want to phone my lawyer. You've got no right to stop me.'
'No sense in phoning your lawyer,' said Mann. While she was looking at the phone, he caught my eye. I gave him the least amount of nod I could manage.
'Did you wipe your feet?' she asked me suddenly.
'Yes,' I said.
'When the sprinklers are on, the grass-marks tread in to the carpet,' she said. It was a tired voice that had explained that problem many times before.
'I know,' I said. I smiled. Perhaps that was a mistake.
'Maybe you could talk to your friend about coming back tomorrow or the next day,' she suggested to me. 'I don't want to offend you but a couple of days to recover would be worth so much to me.' I didn't answer, and Mann didn't say anything either.
'I'll phone my lawyer,' she said. She opened her handbag. It was made from a couple of yards of the Bayeux Tapestry, and had gold handles, and a leather strap that went over the shoulder. She searched through it to find a plastic smile but finally she closed the bag with a lot of sighs and tut-tutting. 'I'll phone the yacht-club, the people there will know a good lawyer.'
'Mrs Reid-Kennedy,' said Mann. 'A real good lawyer might be able to reduce the fifty-year sentence you are liable to get, by ten years. But I have the kind of authority that could leave you out of this investigation altogether…'
She misinterpreted Mann's offer. I suppose rich people have to develop sharp ears for subtle offers of corruption. She said, 'A couple of days to recover from…' she lifted a limp hand '… all this, would be worth anything to me. Let me send you away with some little gift for your wives. I have lovely things in the house — porcelain and gold, and all kinds of little things — your wife would probably love some little treasure like that to add to her collection. Wouldn't she?' She was looking at me now.
'To tell you the truth, Mrs Reid-Kennedy,' I said, 'my complete collection of porcelain and gold is here in my dental work. And right now, I don't have a wife.'
'You mind if I take this jacket off?' said Mann. She didn't answer but he took it off anyway.
'My husband hated air-conditioning. He said he'd rather put up with the heat than have the endless noise of it.'
She went over to the small unit in the window and adjusted the controls.
Mann said, 'You'd better face up to it, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. There's not going to be any yacht-club lawyer who can get you off the hook. And if you don't spill it to us right now, there's not going to be any yacht-club. Not for you, anyway. Even yacht-club secretaries get sticky about espionage.'
She flinched at the word espionage but she didn't argue about it. She took a deep draught of her brandy and when she next spoke her voice was angry. 'Ask this one,' she said, jabbing a thumb at me. 'Ask him — he's been down to the boat, hasn't he. He can see what happened.'
'I wish you'd understand that I'm trying to help you,' Mann told her in his wanting-to-help-you voice. I recognized that voice, because he'd used it on me so often. 'Sure, my colleague can tell me a lot of the answers, because he's been down to the boat. But if you tell me the same thing, I'll be able to write it down as coming from you. I don't have to tell you how much that could help you, do I?'
'You're a couple of schnorrers,' she said bitterly, but it was the last of her resentment. She sighed. 'You ever been to Berlin?' she said.
Probably every life has a moment when it reaches its very lowest: for Mrs Marjorie Dean it was Berlin in the summer of 1955. Physically she had completely recovered from the miscarriage, but psychologically she was far
