Tour de Force by Christianna Brand

nothing in it but a bed, standing out from the centre of one side wall, and along the other wall a built-in wardrobe. The balcony wall, as it were, has a central door and a small window on either side, rather high up. Under the window on the bed side, there’s a small dressing-table, under the other window there’s the small square table and a plain wooden chair. The floor’s uncarpeted, bleached white wood: and all the furniture’s in plain bleached wood. The curtains, the bed curtains, the counterpane, are all just white cotton stuff – the whole thing has a sort of monastic effect, presumably to be cool and clean. The back of the room is divided off to make a tiny bathroom, leaving a narrow passage to the corridor door. I take it your rooms are all much the same? – mine is.’
    Double or single, the rooms were all the same: into some a matrimona had been squeezed instead of a single bed, but that was all the difference. ‘Very well. In the bathroom there’s only a wash-basin and a shower: the shower is just an overhead sprinkler surrounded by a curtain, with a rim round the drain underneath.’
    â€˜Whoever peddled those shower things through Italy,’ said Louvaine chattily, ‘did a wonderful job. They’re simply everywhere.’ The only thing was, last night she had forgotten her bath-cap and hair-dye had simply spouted all over her, positively rivers of blood …
    â€˜At any rate they sold one to the Bellomare Hotel for Miss Lane’s bathroom,’ said Helen, pleasantly smiling, pleasantly leading back to the subject on hand. Her husband sketched her a tiny mock bow. ‘Thank you, my dear; your heart is in the right place – whatever they may say.’ But Inspector Cockrill thought that underlying the mockery was a gleam of purest gratitude: of rather astonished gratitude that for his sake, she should protect his love from so signally making a fool of herself at a moment when light-hearted folly was very much out of place: should protect himself from that first sick stab of disillusion and doubt. ‘You were saying, Inspector …?’
    Inspector Cockrill had, as it happened, finished with what he had been saying. ‘We come now to her possessions. They’re as I think you’d expect – very neat, nothing out of place: everything of excellent quality, no discrepancies in that respect. I was only able to have a very cursory glance round; but I could see that the dress she wore this morning was hung up in a wardrobe, there were some underclothes in a corner of the bathroom, presumably for washing. Her bathing dress and the rubber cap and shoes were rolled up in the white towel – a hotel towel – and hung over the edge of the balcony rail outside her door. There were two novels, closed, on a corner of her dressing-table, no sign anywhere of sewing things, manicure things, pens, pencils, paper, and so forth – they were probably in the dressing-table drawers.’ He eyed them with a glint of teasing. ‘You will make what you like of all this as I go along.
    â€˜Now, the body. The body was lying as you saw it. There seem to be no marks of any kind, no scratches or bruises, nothing – except the one stab wound. This was made by the paper knife, as you saw. Several of the tourists bought these knives this morning in the town …’
    Mr Cecil had bought one himself, too divine for one’s desk at Christophe’s with that wrought black and gold handle, so decorative; and Louvaine had bought one, because Leo had admired it; and thought that one day she would give it to him and say, ‘Little did they realize when I bought it flat out in front of them all, that I was buying it for you …’ for on such foolish secrets her secret love of necessity for the time being fed; and Miss Lane had bought one. They were labelled exuberantly, ‘Butifull Toledo steel works, mad only in San Juan’,