Requiem at rogano, p.18
Requiem at Rogano, page 18
Brough read the letter carefully. As he took all the main London papers, including the Gazette, regularly and scanned their columns religiously, he wondered how he had missed it. The letter took the form of a general discussion of the concept of reincarnation followed by the statement that Jessica herself had lived a previous life, and culminating in the prediction upon which the Gazette subeditor had chosen his headline.
“Did she tell you about the previous life she thought she had lived?” he asked.
“Inspector, you sound as if you take it seriously.”
“I am only trying to obtain a clear idea of Jessica’s state of mind, which you so wisely decided to tell us about,” he replied, realizing her trust in him would be irreparably damaged if he even hinted at his true thoughts on the subject.
“Yes, she told me everything about it,” said Miss Brandon, mollified. “She spoke of nothing else for five weeks. She said she had lived in Italy in the Middle Ages in a city called . . . what? . . . Ruffino, Roffano—something like that.”
“Rogano?” asked Brough.
“Yes, Rogano it was!” she exclaimed. “How did you know?”
“Coincidence,” he lied. “I passed through Rogano last year on a trip to Venice.”
“It does exist then,” she said. “I even had my doubts about that.”
“Oh yes, Rogano exists all right.”
“Well, Jessica was convinced she had been the daughter of a merchant of this town. Her name had been Maria Bellini. It really is all so romantic and ridiculous. It’s like some badly written novel.”
“Please go on,” said Brough gently.
With a sigh of impatience, Miss Brandon said, “Jessica believed that in this previous life she had been the mistress of the duke of this place—Rogano—after his wife had fled from the town and returned to her family in Florence.”
Miss Brandon blushed and averted her gaze. “She went into rather intimate detail about her love affair with this nobleman, which it is hardly proper for me to repeat.”
“Of course.”
“She was introduced by this Lorenzo—oh! I never ceased hearing about beautiful, one-eyed Lorenzo—she was introduced by him to a group of his friends, seven in number, some of whom had studied with him at university. Others had accompanied him on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and during that great adventure their friendship had begun. It was always dark when they met, and in the strictest secrecy. They had made a fearful discovery and Lorenzo promised to make her party to it. The trouble was, the dreams were not in any chronological order and Jessica never actually learned what the secret was, except that it was something to do with a cave and a man whose name was Aquilina. Then she dreamed she was abducted by a mad killer who was terrorizing the city, that she was strangled and her body thrown into the basement of an unfinished building.”
She suddenly broke off. “That’s all,” she said, and to conceal her tears she rose and walked to the right of the fireplace, where she tugged the sally of a wire bell pull to sound a tinkling summons in the scullery at the rear of the house. While she awaited the appearance of the maid, Miss Brandon stood by the tall windows and looked at the snow now falling faster than ever upon two slender silver birches in the front garden. From an icicle-hung perch on a low branch a robin sang. Brough’s footprints, deeply imprinted on the garden path when he arrived, were now completely covered. A milkman’s horse had come to grief on the slippery road outside the house and his master, incensed at having his delivery delayed, was laying into him with an empty bottle as the poor horse struggled to stand up.
Unembarrassed by the silence, Brough cast his eye slowly around the room and eagerly awaited the warming cup of tea which he felt sure Miss Brandon would order when the maid responded to the summons. His gaze drifted from the crystal chandelier to the mantelpiece with its silver-framed family photographs and its black-marble clock; from the mantelpiece to the crackling fire; and from the fire across the richly carpeted floor to the low table in front of him. Among the disordered pile of newspapers and letters of condolence his attention was caught by one particular sheet of paper, half obscured by a torn lilac envelope that had been cast carelessly on top of it. It had been many years since he had perfected the art of reading upside down, and now he read with ease the four lines of blue copperplate that were visible:
Deep inside the mind of Man
Beyond the reach of thought
Past untold byways in his brain
In regions still unsought . . .
Oh God, he thought. Nicholas’ poem.
28
As the final, crushing blow was dealt to his feeble hope that Nicholas might, after all, be innocent, the maid entered the room. He hardly noticed her presence, and the dialogue that followed between her and Miss Brandon was a meaningless hum in the background as he stared unblinkingly at the first direct and concrete link between Nicholas and a victim of the strangler. Events had prevented him mentioning to Nicholas the finding of the poem among the pages of his report on the Rogano murders. That copy, he now realized, must have been the first rough draft. The one on the table before him was clearly the finished version, beautifully inscribed.
“. . . or China, Mr. Brough?”
“I’m sorry,” said the detective, stirring from his rumination. “Were you speaking to me?”
“I said would you like India or China tea?” she said softly.
“Oh, India for me please,” he said, still distracted by the poem. He thought China tasted like perfume.
The maid disappeared.
“This poem,” he said, picking it up and deciding to come straight to the point, “whose is it?”
“Why, it’s mine,” she replied, stepping forward and taking it from him. “It is extremely personal. Why do you ask?” There was more than a hint of asperity in her voice.
“Who wrote it?” asked Brough, ignoring her own question.
“Inspector Brough, this is too much!” she said angrily. “Your visit here is to inquire into matters which might in some way bear upon my cousin’s death. That does not give you liberty to pry into my most personal affairs.”
“This might seem hard to understand, but this poem could well have a bearing upon your cousin’s death.”
She glared at him, her cheeks flushed with anger. “This poem, which I have said twice is of the most personal nature, was written to me by the gentleman to whom I am engaged to be married. Does that satisfy your most unwelcome curiosity?”
Was it possible? Was this thing they had decided to call Fate again playing mad tricks with coincidence?
“Forgive me,” said Brough. “The last thing I wish is to add to your misery. But I must know, who is this gentleman?”
“His name,” she said with the sigh of one defeated, “is Nicholas Calvin.”
Was it then, after all, a direct link between Nicholas and the murdered girl? Yes, Nicholas must have known Jessica if he was intimate with Miss Brandon. If so, why had he not said so? Was he, despite everything, fully aware of his guilt and concealing it?
“Miss Brandon,” said Brough, trying to choose his words carefully and in the event blurting it straight out, “Nicholas Calvin is my nephew.”
She stared.
“You are Uncle Reginald?” she said in astonishment.
He nodded.
It took a moment to sink in. “Nicholas has spoken so much about you. I had no idea when you telephoned and introduced yourself that Inspector Brough and Nicholas’ uncle were one and the same.”
“How long have you known each other?”
“Just a year. We are planning to marry next autumn.”
“Until a week ago I had not seen Nicholas for close on two years. I must confess he has been most secretive about you. But then he has had an awful lot on his mind, as doubtless you already know.”
“Indeed I do know how absorbed he has been in his latest research work. So absorbed in fact that what with his travels hither and thither I have not seen him for some weeks. I got a letter from him when he was in Florence in which he promised to tell me all about his work when he got back. He did telephone me once last week a few hours after he reached London, but so far we haven’t seen each other.”
“You obviously don’t know, then, the subject of his present research, or that in fact he is staying with me at the moment?”
“No.”
“Did Nicholas know Jessica?”
“He met her several times.”
She looked at him with a sudden light of understanding in her exquisite eyes.
“Something has just come to me. In the moments I have had to myself in the past week I have been troubled by the fact that Nicholas has not been in touch since Jessica’s death. But do you know, I doubt if he realizes that Jessica my cousin was the Jessica Twomey who was murdered. I don’t think I ever told him her surname. For some reason she was rather embarrassed about it. I introduced her to everyone simply as my cousin Jessica.”
“I am sure that must be the reason for his not contacting you,” said Brough.
A knocking on the front door curtailed the conversation, as did the entrance a second later of the maid with the tea. She set the tray down on a side table and went out to answer the door. When she came back into the room she whispered something to Miss Brandon.
“Why, show him in,” said Miss Brandon. Nicholas appeared a moment later.
The color drained from his face when he saw Brough.
“Uncle!” he said. “What in the name of heaven are you doing here? You were supposed to be out interviewing the relatives today.”
He looked from one to the other of them in perplexity. The maid discreetly withdrew.
“I am,” said Brough.
Nicholas stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then he looked at his fiancée, took in her mourning clothes, her distress, and understood in a moment.
“Jessica,” he whispered, and a chill ran through his entire body.
“Yes, Nicholas, Jessica,” said Miss Brandon, breaking down at last. She ran to him sobbing and threw her arms about his neck.
“I expect I’m right in thinking you’ve come to tell Meg all that’s happened since your return from Florence,” said Brough, “in which case I shall intrude no further on your privacy. Miss Brandon—Meg—please accept my sincerest condolences, and forgive my intrusion into your grief.”
She offered Brough her hand, but said nothing.
“I’ll see you back in Jermyn Street later this afternoon, Nicholas,” said Brough. “Don’t keep me waiting.”
29
“How much did you tell Meg?” asked Brough when Nicholas got back to Jermyn Street about five o’clock. The detective was unusually distracted and seemed hardly to listen to his nephew’s reply.
“Everything,” said Nicholas, collapsing with exhaustion both physical and mental into the armchair opposite Brough’s. He placed his head in his hands and heaved a sigh of misery. Wrapped in his own desperate isolation, he was unaware of Brough’s preoccupation or the fact that the old man sat staring with a glassy, faraway look at his photographs of London murder sites on the wall above his nephew’s head.
This is the final blow, thought Brough. After all my prayers, it is Nicholas after all. . . .
“Needless to say,” said Nicholas, “she was staggered. What I told her about Rogano fitted precisely with what Jessica had been telling her for weeks. Just as I did, she fought with all the logic she could summon against the idea of the Rogano Strangler being reincarnated here in London. When I told her I could be the killer she broke down completely. . . .”
Nicholas after all . . . Brough could hardly grasp the enormity of the thought. It resounded again and again in his mind, compelling his attention, until the real words spoken by Nicholas became little more for him than a muffled sound in the background.
“. . . Later . . .” Nicholas was saying, “we spent hours going over and over every single detail, as I have been doing interminably in my own mind since this horror began. We searched and searched for a natural explanation—something, just a detail—to indicate my innocence. But in the end she had to face the inescapable fact that we are entangled in a web of unnatural events.”
He stopped talking, his face still hidden in the dim refuge of his hands, which shut out the cruelty of the real world as uncertainly as they shut the light from his eyes.
“After everything,” he said, “she still had faith in me. Even though I might be her cousin’s murderer she swore her love for me and repeated her conviction that I was innocent. I fear she is going to be sadly disillusioned.”
He sank deeper into the chair and began to sob, quietly but uncontrollably. Brough, oblivious still, gazed as if mesmerized at the photographs on the wall. Even when he roused himself and stood up, he remained heedless of his nephew’s distress. His thoughts far away, he went to the kitchen to throw together a quick meal. He had not eaten since breakfast but he felt in no condition for imaginative cooking.
When Nicholas had not returned from his mysterious errand by lunchtime, Galen—who had already obtained their travel documents from Cook’s—had left a note on the living-room table and gone alone both to Greenwich and his own lodgings to pick up all the research material they needed. So far he had not reappeared.
Brough found a cold chicken leg in the pantry, and with that and a little wooden bowl of cheese, beetroot and cucumber, he came back to the living room, still looking as if he were in a dream.
By what seemed to him an enormous exertion of will, Nicholas had recovered sufficiently to notice his uncle’s limp.
“What happened?” he asked. His question seemed to break the spell, and Brough, returning in a flash to the present, said, “Peterson pushed me in front of a train.”
“Good God! When?”
“This morning.”
“Peterson,” said Nicholas with awe. Realization quickly dawned. “At British Museum!” he said.
“Yes,” said Brough.
“It must have happened just about the time I got there. I bought my ticket and was just about to make my way down to the platform when the barrier was put across the stairs. A porter told us there had been an accident down below and we’d have to wait for the line to be cleared. But people coming up from the platform soon put it about that a man had been pushed onto the track. Never for a moment did I imagine it could be you. That’s why I was so late arriving at Meg’s. How did you get out alive?”
Brough recounted the story of his survival in much the same way as he had given it to Daubeney on the telephone.
“Did they get him?”
“Peterson? No. I was speaking to Ambrose Daubeney at the Yard just before you came back. By the time they managed to get anyone on the scene he was long gone. Hardly surprising. But at least we know he’s still in London.”
“Think he’ll try again?”
“When he learns this attempt didn’t work he’ll want to, but by then I’ll be out of the country. Let’s hope they’ve managed to nab him by the time I get back.”
“Did you see the relatives of Professor Dakins?”
“He was a bachelor, living alone, with no known family. But I got to see a close colleague of his, another professor from Magdalene College. He said Dakins lived in the country outside Cambridge at a place called Girton, but that he’d been down in London for about five weeks doing research for a massive book he was writing. The subject was the Inquisition. Have you noticed that apart from Jessica and Carew, all the strangler’s victims have been learned men?”
“And each of them was digging into the past.”
“Even Jessica, with her dreams of her previous life, and Carew with his lifelong study of Nostradamus, were doing that.”
“Coincidence again?”
“No,” said Brough, solemnly shaking his head, “the pattern is too strong for coincidence.” He was observing his nephew closely for signs of conscious guilt.
“Pattern?”
“Yes, a pattern of links with Rogano. Antrobus was an expert on Italy in the Middle Ages and was working on a biography of Lorenzo. Professor Dakins was investigating the Inquisition. Sir Patrick Lovell was about to embark upon an expedition to the Holy Land—just as Lorenzo and virtually all the able-bodied men in Rogano had done about a year before the murders. The link between Manders and Rogano seems more tenuous, but it isn’t. He was writing a book on Constantine the Great. Two of the most influential figures in Constantine’s life were the bishops called Eusebius. And according to Nostradamus, Eusebius—whichever one it was—is centrally connected with the Rogano mystery. On top of that, Daubeney has found out that Manders was about to leave for Italy to research his book, and he wasn’t going to Rome as you might expect, but to Rogano. The final two victims, Carew and Jessica, have connections with Rogano we have already discussed. As I have said all along, the answer to the entire mystery lies in Rogano still.”
“I’m still not sure what you’re getting at. We know the present victims are the reincarnations of the first set of victims, so of course they are linked with Rogano.”
“But they didn’t have to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“There didn’t have to be links apparent in their present lives. The big doubt in my mind was whether the four men knew they had lived before, whether they possessed any conscious knowledge about their earlier lives in Rogano or whether it simply lay dormant and unknown inside them.
“From the nature of their work in this life I now think that Antrobus, Manders, Lovell and Dakins did have some knowledge of their past existences. Just how detailed, it’s impossible to say. I don’t know about Carew.”
“The papers and research notes of the four victims actively investigating the past were all stolen by the killer,” said Nicholas.
“Quite so. It seems they had each discovered something, or were on the point of discovering facts crucial to the Rogano case. As far as we know, Jessica was not doing any actual study, but her dreams were providing her with vital, detailed information about Rogano. She knew that as Maria Bellini she had been strangled and thrown into that unfinished building. That means she knew who the Rogano Strangler was. Before she could reveal it, she was silenced by his reincarnation, the Deptford Strangler.”
