Gently Continental Read online

  An odd fellow, this American! What sort of picture can Stody be forming? Probably a confused, quite uncritical picture, because, after all, there’s no accounting for Americans. Didn’t they take these long vacations, spending months at a time in Europe – in England, even, let alone Europe – and so perhaps here, in the Hotel Continental? An American businessman having a break, getting away from it all, letting his mail, if any, pile up elsewhere until he was good and ready to deal with it. Yes, that would be Stody’s picture of the lonely American, if Stody felt a need (as perhaps yet he did not) to form a picture at all. Clooney’s merely being American would blunt Stody’s normal speculation. Also, occupying the foreground in his mind, was the pity he felt for the poor devil. Keep his room locked, he says, we’ll fetch the stuff away later. How about – , Miss Breske says. We’ll fetch him after the doctor’s seen him, Stody says. And taking his grip, and thinking no evil, but still sick inside, Stody climbs into his ’59 Morris Minor and drives away to his brother’s house.

  Fred Stody, Brother Fred, changed now out of his thigh-boots, shakes his head with Brother Jim and gives him his theory of the tragedy. It was this pill-box, he says, that’s what busted his skull in, the one that toppled off the cliff. We found him lying nearly touching it. You mean he fell off the cliff on it, Stody says, and Brother Fred says, Blast, what else? Brother Fred is drinking tea laced with whisky, a cup of which he offers Stody. Anywhere else, Brother Fred says, well, he might have broke his neck. But those cliffs aren’t high nor yet steep, and there’s only sand at the foot of them. Blast, I once took a tumble down there, and never let on to Ma about it – I was a bit stiff for a day or two – you remember, Jim? I never broke nothing. Brother Fred sucks down some tea. It was just his bloody bad luck, he says. Anywhere else and he’d have walked away, but he had to hit that bugger head-on. Ah, you can see the spot, says Balls, skinny Sid Balls, Brother Fred’s mate, blood shot out there a-rummun, like you’d hulled down a ripe tomato. Yes, that’s a fact, Brother Fred says, that’s a bloody fact, Jim, that is. I suppose you didn’t see anything, Stody says, not at the time, when you were out there? Brother Fred scorns this suggestion, for weren’t they fishing half a mile out? And between the moons, what’s more, with a bit of shore-mist coming up later, laying and hauling their long, circling net from the rolling boat with its one hurricane lamp. Oh, they could see the shape of the cliffs (like the shape of their own faces they knew them, so that just by glancing at the shore, as they frequently did, they could fix their position with marvellous accuracy), and they could see the lights of the town, farther along, even the garlanded ribbons of the ‘illuminations’, and, before the last one went out, some while before midnight, the lights of the Hotel Continental. But see something happening on the cliffs? Brother Jim knew better than that. Nor they didn’t hear a cry? Stody persists. No, nor they wouldn’t and couldn’t have heard a cry. Not though that mouth, death-arrested in the act, had split in twain to give the utterance passage. The linear sea, rolling in to the shore, would have captured that cry in its corrugations, may have echoed it down to surprised mermaids, but not to the fishermen lugging their nets. No, Brother Jim, it’s no use pressing them, they have no titbits for the coroner, they cannot illumine that dark moment when the lonely American cried, Truth. So drink Mrs Brother Fred’s tea with its shot of Highland Cream.

  But the ranged cliffs themselves, may they not bear witness? Those soft-lined, honey-coloured cliffs, seventy or eighty feet at their highest? Descending, scramblably, with little pockets of wiry grass and ling, at no precipitous angle, to the fawn sand of the beach? To them, still before breakfast, go the two brothers and Sid Balls, bumping and swerving along a stony track in the shiny black 1000. The track, much used by Brother Fred, winds over the hump of a hill, gives a fine view of the heathy cliff-tops, then settles again towards the beach. Stody parks just short of the beach, just short of Brother Fred’s boat. They climb out. There you are then, says Brother Fred, the showman. He points up the beach. A few yards from the cliff-base is lying a grotesque concrete iceberg, three parts submerged in soft sand, one part: digging at the sky. The concrete is crumbling but defiant, unlike the resigned rock of the cliffs, and from its defiance, resembling hooked fingers, stretch bent rods of rusted steel. I heard it come down, says Brother Fred, blast, I thought it was a bomb. That gale we had two years ago. I was down here seeing to the old girl. And they stand by the car for a moment contemplating this Ozymandian symbol, the pill-box which had stood on the cliff’s brow, which now was buried in the lone, level sands. And that’s where we saw him, Brother Fred says, when we were unloading the nets. ‘Is that a bloke up there?’ Sid says, and I saw him between the cliff and the pill-box. Ah, Sid Balls says, I knew he was a dead ’un, the funny way he was lying. You could see straight away, Brother Fred says, he’d come down the cliff. From the way he laid. He leads on, still the showman, along a line which previous feet have trampled, up to the pill-box, Ozymandian symbol, the precise and reverberating spot. See here, and see here. Stody, poker-faced, sees. The bloody blot with its shooting radii, as yet not quite dried. The bloody sand, kneaded, trampled. The marks where the floor-boards had lain. He sees, stares vulnerably, makes a motion with his hand. Fetch some water, he says, wash that lot off, help me kick some sand over this mess. So they fetch sea-water in a dipper and scrub and scrub the spot clean, the damned spot, they have it clean, and the bloody sand is dispersed. All under a morning sun which has some spite in it already. Now we’ll look up on the cliff, Stody says, and this time Stody leads the way. They climb, perspiring lightly, up a zig-zag path, to the heathery furzy fragrant tops. Here the linnet sings, the goldfinch, flies the red-winged Cinnabar moth, lurks, to be seen suddenly after much not-seeing, and always inaccessible, the bottle-tit’s nest. But these are things of no witness. They are not in Stody’s eye. He looks abroad and sees – yes! directly – a green straw hat with a broad brim. The American’s hat, almost certainly, for the colour is a match with his shirt: and it lies, as though carelessly thrown there, in a furze bush, fifty yards from the cliff edge. They hasten to it. Stody picks it up. It is cold with the dew just going off it. A flamboyant, flaring Italian straw, made limp by exposure. An Italian straw hat. So they look at it, and Brother Fred says, Blast, but what’s it doing over here? – and they look from the hat across to the cliff-edge, and from the cliff edge back to the hat. Do you reckon something frightened him? Sid Balls says, with the sudden urgency of a shallow mind. What could’ve frightened him? Brother Fred says, don’t talk daft, Sid, there’s nothing up here. But he looks around, all the same, and so do Stody and Sid Balls. A bull? A ghost? Old Shuck the phantom – hound of staring eyes, who pads the coast roads? Did one or another of them startle the American, send him leaping, screaming over the cliff? I reckon, Brother Fred says, reaching for firmer ground, I reckon he got himself lost up here. There wasn’t any moon, don’t you forget it. You can easy get lost amongst these old furze bushes. But he’d know where the cliff was, Sid Balls says, he’d hear the sea if he couldn’t see it. If you get panicked enough, Brother Fred says, you’ll just dash around, sea or no sea. But somehow even this doesn’t seem to explain the matter, though it was worth hearing how it sounded, worth putting it up in defence of reason before succumbing to the mystery of the American’s hat. What do you reckon? Brother Fred asks Stody. Stody only shakes his head. He doesn’t know, admits he doesn’t know, supposes that now, nobody ever will. The American, that achingly unknown quantity, unanswerable for any of his peculiarities, leaves his hat some distance from the cliff-edge, here endeth a fact, place a period. I wonder if – Stody says. He moves across to the cliff-edge. There indeed, directly below him, lies the amorphous nugget of steel and concrete. He didn’t just slip, says Brother Fred, coming up, if he’d just slipped he’d have missed it. He walked off, or ran off, or jumped off, but anyway he didn’t just slip. They pause to consider this proposition of a walking, running or jumping American. Sid Balls says, Perhaps he thought he
could fly, but Brother Fred squashes him as usual. And so, another fact, another mystery – the American didn’t slip, apparent and contained in the simple geometry of cliff, beach and concrete. He removed his hat, took a running jump: no other construction is available. With the dark, dark night pressing around him he performed this inexplicable act. He must have done it on purpose, Sid Balls says, and this once Brother Fred forbears to squash him. How is it possible to resist this simple, immaculate, solution? Answering, in Stody’s case, every question raised by this lonely and untypical man, offering a consummate picture of him, according to information received? Ah, that’s it, Brother Fred says, either that or he was balmy. It stands to reason, Sid Balls says, swelling with vanity at his own acuteness. But if it was dark – Stody says, and they watch him, catching at his words. If it was dark, he was going to say, how had the American judged his fall so well? He doesn’t say it, looks instead for any marks at the cliff-edge, but the ground hard, sour and ling-covered, is proof against chance impressions. He has been, has seen – as much as a constable needs to see on these occasions. Enough for a coroner to moralize over, devise a verdict upon, sign, dismiss. Right, Stody says, meaning right by the rules, the customs, the formula, and with the Italian straw hat in his hand he draws off to his Morris 1000.

  Right thus far at all events, and much mystery understood: but another man has visited the American while Stody is taking the air of the cliff-top. He is a man with sharp tools and a sharp mind and a disciplined stomach and a good degree and more experience of police-work than he needs or in fact has time for: by name, John Halliday, f.r.c.p.(Ed.), general practitioner in that district. Halliday is waiting by the Police House when Stody returns from the cliffs. He is outside his car, leaning against it, smoking his pipe with slow puffs. A neat man, with a face that looks as though the skin is too tight for it, showing the structure of the bones; and quick, hypnotic, brown eyes. He comes round to Stody’s car. Hallo, Jim, he says. Good morning, sir, Stody says, climbing, helmetless, out of the Morris. Jim, Halliday says, I’ve seen the body, and in a way I wish I hadn’t. A nasty sight, sir, Stody says. I wish I hadn’t seen it either. Jim, Halliday says. Stody waits. Halliday smokes. Jim, Halliday says, he dropped off the cliff, did he – you’ll have been up there, taken a look? Just this moment, sir, Stody says, I was up there with Brother Fred. Have you any ideas, Jim? Halliday says. Well, sir, Stody says, it might have been either way. I’d say most likely it was intentional, but it could have been an accident. There’s not much to go on. What was on the body? Halliday asks. Stody lifts out the grip, shows Halliday what’s in it. Halliday picks up a tiny penknife, opens it, closes it, drops it back. He says, Have you found anything on the cliff? Only this hat, Stody says, exhibiting it. Nothing else? Some signs perhaps? Stody shakes his head, no, nothing. Halliday smokes for some while, then: Well, Jim, he says, well. The deceased died from head injuries and a broken neck, one or both. The deceased has bruises on the chest and also on the jaw and both wrists, and the deceased has a group of twenty-two shallow incisions, made shortly before death, in the abdomen. That’s the substance of the matter, Jim, leaving out a few minor abrasions. His brown eyes flick at Stody. Stody, without his helmet, stares. Incisions, sir? Cuts, Jim. Twenty-two. Through his shirt. You mean, like stabs, sir? No, not stabs, incisions, not more than half an inch deep. Stody wrestles with this idea. Halliday smokes a little faster. Still, the image of an inscrutable American is present in a corner of Stody’s mind. Could they have been – self-inflicted, sir? Halliday shrugs. Quite easily. With that – penknife? Not very likely. No signs of the blade being used lately. But they could have been. . . Then suddenly it strikes Stody, as though a sea-mist is lifted, leaving naked, no longer inscrutable, no longer essentially American, the dead man: exposing him, for the first time in Stody’s mind, to the full exercise of professional logic, as though it were anyone, says Brother Fred, lying beneath the sacks in the thatched summer-house. You’re thinking, sir – ? Halliday shakes his head. I’m doing no thinking for anyone, Jim. But the bruises – Are where I said they were, don’t come to me for interpretations. But there were other signs, sir? He’d been down on his back. There were bents and bits of ling stuck to his jacket. Did you examine his nails, sir? He used to bite them, nothing useful there. His knuckles? Abraded in the fall. That’s the lot, Jim. I’m off to breakfast. And he gets in his car, Doctor Halliday, having thrown his bomb at poor Stody, in his this-year’s Rover, brightly gleaming, which glides away towards the village. Oh Stody, Jim Stody, now what panic’s in thy breastie? With the coroner’s court fading, changing, into an assize of cross-question? Constable Stody, did you efface, or cause to be effaced, certain bloodstains? Will you, Constable Stody, explain to the court why you saw fit to erase the footprints? Did you remove this hat from the place where you found it? What was your object, Constable Stody? In your opinion, is it not a fact, can you suggest any alternative? These dark thoughts, in simultaneous passage, hold Stody watching the departing Rover, keep him standing some moments longer, the grip, the hat in his hands.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BUT IF THE formula is dead, long live the formula – it is but substituting a different process for one tried and found inadequate. Or rather, it is expanding the first, simple figure, composed of Stody, Halliday and the coroner, into a more complex structure, an inverted pyramid, of which Stody is the base. To be reared how high, how wide? Till its shadow covers the dead American: when it will certainly be overspreading the Hotel Continental, the Breskes, their staff and forty-four guests. For if the American did die by another, and not decently alone, then his pyramid, financed by the tax-payers, will amaze the appetite of pharaohs. Not Cheops, in all his glory, will die as famously as Wilbur Clooney. Stody, first block in that pyramid, and already feeling himself overlaid, sits down in the office in the Police House and puts through a call to H.Q. The call is received and considered. It merits the attention of C.I.D. It relieves a Detective Inspector, Herbert Shelton, from the routine boredom of a breaking-and-entering. Then, shifting smartly up the pyramid, H.Q. inform London, and London inform Grosvenor Square, who request the documents of their dead national. Construction lines rising everywhere! Messages chase back and forth. Clooney’s passport, his single document, departs for London by special messenger. Then a grape-vine, no matter whose, catches a passing echo, no matter which, and alongside the first pyramid rises, in an instant, a second and complementary structure. Headlines flame in the lunchtime editions: Ritual Slaying of American Tourist? Gashed American Found Dead. Dead American – Witchcraft Victim? And the Street hums, for news is slack, and those twenty-two incisions are pennies from heaven. Before Herbert Shelton, not as yet aware of the spotlights training on him, can do more than initiate a preliminary discussion with the Breskes and their staff; cars are beginning to scorch the gravel, the bell of the reception desk rings frantically, and a clutch of determined pressmen, cameras poised, are desiring, requiring and insisting on statements. Shelton, much photographed, is dumb. This thing has not before happened to him. In great alarm he backs into the office, slams the door, rings H.Q. It’ll be the Yard for this one, says the oldest press-man, who has seen more homicides than hot dinners, and in a moment they know, are sure, are certain, and begin furbishing Yard To Be Called? paragraphs. If no news happens, go out and make some.

  News, however, is making itself, beneath the eagle in Grosvenor Square, where a young attaché, Cyrus Fleischer, has been passed the lonely American’s one document. Fleischer is not much interested in the document. Fleischer has lately dated a blonde. All day Cy Fleischer has been in a daydream about this blonde, whose name is Elizabeth. He has seen Elizabeth on a series of documents, in the conference room, in the restaurant, a couple of times in the toilet, and now on the buff pages of the one document. But oddly, while staring at the one document, he finds other images disturbing Elizabeth’s, like a swinging ball that knocks down buildings, bulldozers, trucks, sweating negroes. Then other images still, like himself
when young (not long ago), and a girl called Cecile, Cecile Legrande, who sure as hell had no connection with Elizabeth. But there he goes, through the dust and debris, a callow kid on his first date, Cecile Legrande, a tenement girl; Pop would have tanned his hide if he’d known. But why think of that? What brought it up? Cy wrinkles his still-freckled nose. Elizabeth fades, he sees the one document, calls up a moment of official attention. Then – wow! The ball, the bulldozers, the negroes, the trucks, Cecile Legrande, they whirl again in a startled picture, and Cy whoops, This goddam passport’s phoney! Because there isn’t any East 115a Street, and he, Cy Fleischer, knows there isn’t. Didn’t he hang around, watching them knock it down, when he was running after the girl out of the tenements? Yes sir, it was flattened, wiped out, razed, in the re-zoning project in ’57, became a garden-greenbelt precinct, has never been East 115a Street since. And this goddam passport – look at the date! Stamped January 5 of this year, address 78 East 115a Street, which came down before Cy went to college. Whadya know about that? The goddam passport must be phoney. Under no conceivable set of circumstances or procedure can it be anything else but phoney. And it is phoney – oh yes! Security tears it to small shreds. A nice fake, very nice, but look at that paper, ink, stamp. Good work, Cy, you’ll make the grade, boy. Cy Fleischer. Sweating on a blonde.