Diana Glass
The Help
Apparently Moreau didn’t lower his voice enough.
There are gasps and exclamations from the nearby tables and I hear the word repeated over and over in several different languages, the whispers dancing strangely about the room: dead …
mort … morto … tot. And then: silence. All are apparently waiting to hear what comes next.
I suggest it might be more practical to move into the privacy of the fumoir.
‘I would like to look at the body,’ Miss Marple says, once the door is closed. ‘But I fear it would not be wise.’
‘It is quite a grisly sight, Madame,’ Inspector Moreau says. ‘Not for the faint-hearted. So I think you make the right decision.’
‘But that isn’t my concern at all,’ Miss Marple says.
‘People do like to try and protect the old, as though we really were in a second childhood, with the innocence of infants who have just been born. It really is very odd, because what they forget is that in having lived the longest – and those of my generation have survived two world wars – we have experienced far more than the young. Unless one has lived the most sheltered life, and in an English village that is simply not possible, one has borne witness to most of the depravities and horrors to which human beings may lower themselves. And nothing, really, can be worse than finding the body of a child, can it, Dolly?’
Mrs Bantry shakes her head, sorrowfully.
‘Dolly and I experienced that horror together. So no, it isn’t that.
It is just that I will not make it all the way up there without being a very great hindrance to you.
I am not as fit as I was even a few years ago, and with the altitude— But perhaps Diana can go with you and look at the body?
’ Miss Marple asks Inspector Moreau. ‘And report back to me here.’
He turns to look at me. ‘If you feel up to it, Diana, I am happy to take you.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I too have a strong stomach, these days.’ Is there anyone who lived through the last ten years who hasn’t?
We make our way up on the button lift together and then, once we reach the top, leave our skis and hike up towards the trees to the east of the toboggan run.
The same direction that I spotted Crane walking in just a short while ago.
The mountainside is deserted. The emptiness echoes around us as we approach the site of Bruno Crane’s death, the wind howling down over the peaks and flinging eddies of snow into our faces.
‘I am impressed by your stamina,’ Inspector Moreau says, as we tramp ever upwards through the thick powder. ‘I suspect if you were alone you would be moving even more quickly. I think perhaps I am holding you back?’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I do a lot of hill walking, at home. And I got quite fit when training in Scotland with the FANY – though nothing on this scale.’ I had actually been thinking how unfit I feel.
‘There!’ he says, as we arrive at the copse of pines.
We push through the laden branches of the firs, snow scattering down about us in thick clots.
They open into a small space, within which the temperature seems to drop several degrees further.
I find myself thinking of fairy rings and the strange things that are meant to happen in their enclosures.
There is a strange hush; we are sheltered from the wind.
The only sounds are our breathing and our steps: the sigh and squeak of the snow, the occasional crack of a pine cone breaking underfoot.
And there it is: the long dark shape among all the white.
As we get closer, I can see more detail: the body, lying on its – his – back.
In the fading light the stained snow beneath the head appears a blackish red.
‘Oh.’ The sound’s involuntary. He’s really dead.
The knowledge goes through my body like a charge.
Finally I manage to drag my gaze away, to look about us. There are a few dull impressions in the snow that might once have been footprints.
‘There appears to be one other set of footprints in this area – besides Crane’s, I mean,’ Inspector Moreau says. ‘But of course it does not mean that they walked up at the same time as all of the other guests were about for the competition. Our murderer could have come up before, and waited.’
‘Can these marks tell you anything specific?’ I ask Inspector Moreau, pointing. ‘The tread of the boot, anything like that?’
‘Very little. Footprints when the snow is still falling this heavily are like …’ He tries to think. ‘Oh, trying to decipher who it was that licked an ice cream cone. The impression is vague at first, anyway, and then quickly fades away into nothing.’
A few feet away we stop and stand, just looking, in silence.
I’m glad Inspector Moreau doesn’t seem to require me to say anything, I don’t think I would be able to find the words.
I’d never really understood the expression blue with cold before, but now it is adequately illustrated by the corpse of Bruno Crane.
He is such a strange colour that it is a struggle to remember the figure before us was ever a living man.
He looks like a wax effigy. But the blood that has seeped into the snow, in contrast to the dark clotted mass at the back of his head, is a vital living red, staining the snow all about the brightest crimson.
Inspector Moreau turns to me. ‘Are you all right, Diana?’ The use of my first name is a surprise. He steps a little closer and in contrast to the freezing air I can feel the warmth of his breath upon my cheeks. ‘Here,’ he takes a silver hip flask from his pocket. ‘Brandy. This will help.’
As he passes me the flask our gloved fingers brush, but I feel the contact as though it were skin upon skin.
I take a sip and feel the liquid scorch its way down my throat, lighting a warm fire in my insides.
‘Thank you.’
‘You are welcome,’ he says. Then, ‘This note was found on his person.’ He shows it to me.
MEET AT THE COPSE OF TREES TO THE EAST OF THE TOBOGGAN RUN, DURING THE COMPETITION, AND YOU WILL RECEIVE YOUR DUE. REMEMBER: SILENCE IS GOLDEN.
Inspector Moreau points, ‘It looks as though he was hit on the back of the head with something very heavy. Possibly a sled or even a ski. A sled, it is easy to see how that would be fatal, but a wooden ski could also do a lot of damage. I think he must have been surprised from behind by somebody.
‘The question is how did he – such a powerfully built man – come to be taken by surprise like this? It looks as though there was something of a struggle. Look here—’ He shows me the larger disturbance in the snow around the body.
‘I think perhaps he did not die straight away.
Perhaps he even lashed out at his attacker after he was struck.
‘And how did the killer get away? The snow has been falling all day, definitely thickly enough to cover any tracks, so that helped them. But we will ask around: it is possible someone noticed them returning to the competition from this direction.’
‘It might not have been a tobogganer,’ I say. ‘Look at the couloir. It goes almost all the way down to the hotel itself. Because of the steep sides they’d be almost completely hidden from view and they could be back to the grounds of the hotel in minutes. Isn’t that a ski track – look, there?’
‘Possibly.’ He seems dubious. I think I sense some resistance to the idea.
‘But whoever skied it would have to be a true expert. It was practically a white-out up here and that couloir is very steep and full of rocks.’ He shrugs.
‘Though it is true that there are plenty of excellent skiers here. Yourself included.’ He frowns at me.
‘What is it?’
‘You’re bleeding – here.’ In one sudden movement he reaches up with one gloved hand and smudges his thumb against my lower lip. I close my eyes against the intensity of the sensation: a smart of pain mingled with a strange pleasure.
Over dinner, I relay everything to Miss Marple and Mrs Bantry.
Finally, Miss Marple speaks and when she does her voice rings with an unfamiliar sternness: ‘There is real wickedness at work here.’ Any softness has vanished from her countenance, too; she suddenly seems quite formidable. I watch her, struck by the change.
‘It seems a rather clever way to do it,’ Mrs Bantry says.
‘Oh, I don’t mean the murder itself – that I agree sounds utterly barbaric.
I mean, in the midst of the toboggan competition, all of the chaos and excitement and busyness of that.
People coming and going up on the button lift, coming down the run …
so hard to remember who was actually where,’ Mrs Bantry says.
‘Who was watching, who was up there, or ranged along the run – or indeed back at the hotel. Certainly it seems that everyone was everywhere, for a time. Did you see anything up there, Diana, during the competition?’
‘You took the button lift up after Bruno Crane, I think,’ Miss Marple says, and as I am beginning to realise with Miss Marple, the ‘I think’ usually seems to stand in for: I am absolutely certain and recall with complete clarity.
‘I did,’ I say. And I might as well tell them: ‘I saw Crane make his way towards the trees. He— there is no way to put this delicately … he told me he was, well, going to relieve himself in the snow.’
‘But really he had a rendezvous!’ Mrs Bantry says.
‘Or something that was presented to him as one,’ says Miss Marple.
‘A rendezvous with death!’ Mrs Bantry says, in macabre tones. Miss Marple gives her a very mild look and Mrs Bantry looks slightly abashed.
‘He was such a big strong-looking sort of a man,’ Miss Marple says, ‘that it’s rather hard to imagine anyone getting the better of him.’
‘Not if he were worse for wear,’ I say. ‘He looked as though he could barely hang on to the button going up. He might well have been drinking. Or it’s very likely he hit his head on the train yesterday, and had a mild concussion.’
‘Well, it is all a great shame,’ says Mrs Bantry. ‘Another man’s life … of course, even if he was quite evidently what Arthur would have termed Not a Gentleman. In addition, I don’t know about the two of you, but he was my chief suspect for the first murder.’