Dorothy Fielding - Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries

Cockburn glanced meditatively at his glass.

"The pro-'Italia uber alles' , eh?" he asked quietly. Rossi shrugged his shoulders, with a laugh at the mixture of tongues.

"Perhaps! After all, every country sings that song. 'Britannia Rules the Waves' sounds so very like it to some ears, my friend. But to continue—the mission is a sort of test. Cangrande did splendidly with d'Annunzio's Arditi in Fiume."

Cockburn made a face.

"That is as may be, but he did well. Then came that Corfu incident. He was partly responsible for the way that was carried out. So he got into semi-disgrace. Now, as it happens, the dream of his life has always been our colonies. Tripoli, and then this Oltrajuba. He wants to be sent out with a free hand to organise the latter. He may get it—if there is no trouble, no hint of disgrace. But he will not get it if he is mixed up publicly in this story. And it is being decided in the Inner Council at Rome even now."

"Tell me, Cavaliere, do you think the man capable of murder?"

"Are we not all capable of murder? I am."

"No," Cockburn said with conviction. "That is one of our catch phrases, that 'Every man is capable of murder.' In reality, few people are. And here it's a question of a young and frightfully, lovely girl. Not one man in a million would have been willing to harm her."

"I know. I've seen her more than once. Madonna, she was beautiful!"

"Do you think the Count capable of murdering her?" persisted Cockburn.

Rossi looked uncomfortable.

"Jealousy is a fearful poison," he confessed.. "I think we of the south feel it more than you can. With us it is something that can change us altogether until it is past. How can I say he would not fall, where so many men have fallen?"

"Look here, did you see him yourself at the meeting on Thursday?"

"I did. He took the chair from eleven till twelve."

"Well, then, was he late?" Cockburn felt sure that all was not as it should be with that alibi. He was convinced that di Monti was in the events of Thursday night for something.

"Not to speak of. Perhaps half an hour, more or less. You know with us Italians—" The hands finished the sentence, gracefully.

"Did he seem as usual at the meeting?" Cockburn probed. He had discussed with Pointer the best questions to ask.

Rossi thought a while, running his slender hands through his hair.

"In no way—no. He is never a magnetic speaker, but he is reliable and very much in earnest. Last Thursday I thought he seemed rather duller than usual."

"Duller!" Cockburn had not expected this.

"Well, then, put it that his thoughts were somewhere else. He had a colour in his face, and a red light in his eyes that I had never seen in him before."

Cockburn sipped his Vermouth.

"You don't like di Monti?" he asked.

Rossi shook his head.

"I don't. But I've told you only the truth, none the less," he added with a slight smile.

"May I ask you why you don't like him?"

Rossi shrugged.

"Why don't I like him? There is something—what shall I say—sinister?—in the man that repels me. Then, too, his name has been mixed up at home with some very savage punitive expeditions, and you know what that means, when the Fascisti—"

Rossi checked himself here.

"I've told you all I know of the man," he finished.

"Thanks ever. I wish some of your facts had been more discreditable," Cockburn said in a low voice, and Rossi chuckled. "Now, a last favour. Just let me have the address of the friend who took di Monti to his rooms, will you? The name was del Greco."

Rossi was able to give it him, and Cockburn put in an hour's work learning, by a few, very shrewdly-placed questions, from a couple of maids in the flat below, that the rooms upstairs had been empty till after midnight on Thursday.

He felt quite pleased with himself as he walked away, though Pointer could have told him that servants' testimony against a man of di Monti's position was not a sure move.

Pointer meanwhile was up in town, too. He had decided to pay the count's rooms in the Albany a visit himself. Watts had gone over them in vain, but the Chief Inspector thought that he might find some neglected trifle.

The rooms showed more books than Pointer had expected. Besides the inevitable bust of Dante, the Italian tri-colour, and a well-thumbed Carducci, there were books on agriculture, grammars of Tuareg and Arabic dialects, pamphlets on army training, and a host of similar works The only letters were business letters, except a few from his own family in Italy.

At the back of the boot-cupboard he unearthed a little posy of flowers. Some one had set the boots down on the top of the delicate blossoms. Pointer picked them up with a dim sense of cruelty. The touch told him that they were artificial, but they were beautifully copied from nature. A little bunch of pink and white camellias tied with silver ribbon—the shoulder-knot that Rose had been wearing in Bellairs's portrait of her. They had been flung with such force to the back of the cupboard that their stems were doubled up. The petals were worse yet. It looked to him, it certainly looked to him, as though a boot-heel had crunched on them. Accident or intention?

Pointer thought a trifle grimly of the patent anguish with which Count di Monti had spoken only yesterday, before himself and the two police-officers, of his dead fiancée's feeling of fear.

He closed the door and descended the stairs. He was due at the commissioner's shortly. At the entrance di Monti passed him. The Italian stopped at sight of the detective-officer, and a cold smile flickered across his face. A smile with no suggestion of mirth in it.

"A visit to me?"

"Another time will do as well. I am due now at New Scotland Yard," Pointer replied civilly.

Di Monti stood for a second looking at the other without speaking, and Pointer suddenly smelt danger, and very close beside him.

It was a mad idea that he could be attacked in broad daylight, but he knew it to be a fact. He turned away with a nod, and walked slowly on out of the door past the big gray car. The driver, di Monti's man, watched him sleepily.

Pointer, thought that he, too, resembled a beast of prey with forest laws and forest passions. He drove on to the Yard with a feeling that things were about to take some definite turn. That smile of di Monti's, like a snake it had crossed that hard face, it meant something. He felt certain that the count had taken some decision at that moment. What one?

Back at the police station, he learnt that neither Harris nor Rodman had been able to find any one who had seen either Mrs. Lane or Miss Scarlett at the beginning of the concert last Thursday, though at the very end Sibella had slipped in, and Mrs. Lane had taken her seat about the middle of the entertainment.

"Just so." Pointer handed Harris back the report to file away. "They were off on two different missions. Now, Miss Sibella's evening shoes were pretty well covered with garden mould when I saw them on Friday. I think we may take it that she was the one who helped Miss Rose home from the studio in that little two-seater both use."

"I shouldn't wonder," Harris said with alacrity. "Shows that she realised how nasty the count might be, for, as I say, she bars night driving."

"I shouldn't wonder," Pointer quoted with a smile "And now, here's the latest find."

He laid a sheet of notepaper in front of the superintendent. Harris picked it up.

"Never saw such a fist in all my life! Whose is it?"

"The Professor's. It's the letter that Miss Charteris got on Thursday, the one that accompanied the enclosed black-sealed envelope. It's in Italian. Here's what he says."

He laid down another slip. Harris read in English:

"B0LZANO HOTEL LAURIN