Photo Finish

Before Alleyn could answer, the door opened and Signor Beppo Lattienzo entered. His immaculate white shorts and silken “matelot” were in disarray and he sweated copiously.

“My dears!” he said. “Drama! The hunt is up. The Hound of Heaven itself — or should I say Himself? — could not be more diligent.”

He dropped into a chair and fa

“Any luck?” Alleyn asked.

“Not a morsel. The faithful Maria, my dear Monty, is indomitable. Into the underbrush with the best of us. She has left her hairnet as a votary offering on a thorny entanglement known, I am informed, as a Bush Lawyer.”

Signor Lattienzo smiled blandly at Mr. Reece and tipped Alleyn a lewdish wink. “This,” he remarked, “will not please our diva, no? And if we are to speak of hounds and of persistence, how about the intrepid Strix? What zeal! What devotion! Though she flee to the remotest antipodes, though she, as it were, go to earth (in, one must add, the greatest possible comfort) upon an enchanted island, there shall he nose her out. One can only applaud. Admit it, my dear Monty.”

Mr. Reece said: “Beppo, there is no reason to suppose that the man Strix has had any part in this incident. The idea is ridiculous and I am most anxious that Bella should not entertain it. It is a trivial matter involving some local lout and must not be blown up into a ridiculous drama. You know very well, none better, how she can overreact and after last night’s shock — I really must ask you to use the greatest discretion.”

Signor Lattienzo wiped the sweat away from the area round his left eye. He breathed upon his eyeglass, polished it, and with its aid contemplated his host. “But, of course, my dear Monty,” he said quietly, “I understand. Perfectly. I dismiss the photographer. Poof! He is gone. And now—”

The door burst open and. Ben Ruby strode in. He also showed signs of wear and tear.

“Here! Monty!” he shouted. “What the hell’s the idea? These servants of yours are all saying bloody Strix is back and you ought to call in the police. What about it?”

iv

Mr. Reece, white with a

Maria, who had shut her mouth like a trap, glared back at Mr. Reece and muttered incomprehensibly. The household was then dismissed.

“I don’t like your chances,” said Ben Ruby. “They’ll talk.”

“They will behave themselves. With the possible exception of the woman.”

“She certainly didn’t sound cooperative.”

“Jealous.”

“Ah!” said Signor Lattienzo. “The classic situation: mistress and abigail. No doubt Bella confides extensively.”

“No doubt.”

“Well, she can’t do so for the moment. The recitazione is still in full swing.”

Ben Ruby opened the door. From beyond the back of the hall and the wall of the concert chamber but seeming to come from nowhere in particular, there was singing: disembodied as if heard through the wrong end of some auditory telescope. Above three unremarkable voices there soared an incomparable fourth.

“Yes,” said Signor Lattienzo. “It is the recitazione and they are only at the quartet: a third of the way through. They will break for luncheon at one-thirty and it is now twenty minutes past noon. For the time being we are safe.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that one, either,” said Ben Ruby. “She likes to have Maria on tap at rehearsals.”

“If you don’t mind,” Alleyn said, “I think I’ll just take a look at the terrain.”

The three men stared at him and for a moment said nothing. And then Mr. Reece stood up. “You surely ca

“Oh, no, no. But it strikes me that one might find something that would confirm the theory of the naughty boy.”

“Ah.”

“What, for instance?” asked Ben Ruby.

“This or that,” Alleyn said airily. “You never know. The unexpected has a way of turning up. Sometimes. Like you, I wouldn’t bet on it.”

And before any of them had thought of anything else to say, he let himself out and gently closed the door.

He went out of the house by the main entrance, turned left and walked along the graveled front until he came to a path that skirted the western facade. He followed it and as he did so the sound of music and of singing, broken by discussion and the repetition of short passages, grew louder. Presently he came to the windows of the concert chamber and saw that one of them, the first, was still open. It was at the end farthest removed from the stage, which was screened from it by a curtain that operated on a hinged bracket.

He drew nearer. There, quite close, was the spot in the auditorium where the Sommita had stood with her arms folded, directing the singers.

And there, still in her same chair, still crouched over her sketching block, with her short hair tousled and her shoulders hunched, was his wife. She was still hard at work. Her subject was out of sight haranguing the orchestra, but her image leaped up under Troy’s grubby hand. She was using a conté crayon, and the lines she made, sometimes broadly emphatic, sometimes floating into extreme delicacy, made one think of the bowing of an accomplished fiddler.

She put the drawing on the floor, pushed it away with her foot, and stared at it, sucking her knuckles and scowling. Then she looked up and saw her husband. He pulled a face at her, laid a finger across his lips, and ducked out of sight.

He had been careful not to tread on the narrow strip of earth that separated the path from the wall and now, squatting, was able to examine it. It had been recently trampled by a number of persons. To hell with the search party, thought Alleyn.

He moved farther along the path, passing a garden seat and keeping as far away as was possible from the windows. The thicket of fern and underbrush on his right was broken here and there by forays, he supposed, of the hunt, successfully ruining any signs there might have been of an intruder taking cover. Presently the path branched away from the house into the bush to emerge, finally, at the hangar.

Inside the hangar there was ample evidence of Marco’s proceedings. The earthy shortcut he had taken had evidently been damp, and Alleyn could trace his progress on the asphalt floor exactly as he had described it.

Alleyn crossed the landing ground, scorching under the noonday sun. Sounds from the concert chamber had faded. There was no bird song. He found the path through the bush to the lakeside and followed it: dark green closed about him and the now familiar conservatory smell of wet earth and moss.

It was only a short distance to the lake, and soon the bush began to thin out, admitting shafts of sunlight. It must have been about here that Marco said he had spotted the protective cap from the camera. Alleyn came out into the open and there, as he remembered them from his morning walk, were the lake and overhead power lines reaching away to the far shore.

Alleyn stood for a time out there by the lakeside. The sun that beat down on his head spread a kind of blankness over the landscape, draining it of color. He absentmindedly reached into his pocket for his pipe and touched a small hard object. It was the lens cap, wrapped in his handkerchief. He took it out and uncovered it, being careful not to touch the surface: a futile precaution, he thought, after Marco’s handling of the thing.