Chapter Seventeen
The hotel had a glass patio, which stretched the length of the dining room. A few guests mingled there now, looking out at the snow fields which rolled off into the distance, like long, unbroken brushstrokes across a vast unspoilt canvas, where they hit a line of trees. The snow was piled up to the height of a normal man’s shoulder, though this would reach over the head of a certified dwarf and only up to, say, the knee of some gangly alien from a planet where giraffes had slaughtered all the primates and assumed in their absence the honour and the ignominy of becoming the matrix for evolution. Overhead, as well, beautiful masses of white had accumulated; a beauty threatening to turn violently against its admirers, as is so often the case, as evidenced by the cracks in the ceiling’s glass and its occasional creaky straining under the weight of such aesthetic purity.
Into this cage of white, then, dazzling in the afternoon sun, walked Pluck and Enid.
“Did you ask me here to inquire as to how I feel the investigation is proceeding?” Pluck asked.
“I want to try to calm you down,” she replied. “It’s so horrible, all the antagonism. Everyone seems to end up on the floor, in a rage or in tears!”
“The nerves of a murder suspect are bound to come under strain. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. And it is through these cracks that the guilt will out.” As if in sympathy with his semantics, a creak was heard overhead.
“I can’t see that we’re any closer to discovering the murderer, for all that,” Enid protested.
“Ah, but Miss Trojczakowski, we’ve already discovered a glut of them! And scores more yet to be proved! Whether in league or as lone assassins, half the guests and three-quarters of the staff of this establishment, I’d hazard, had something to do with Williams’ death.”
“It’s ‘Snede’—now try to remember.”
He looked at her dubiously. “Whatever you’re pleased to call him,” he went on, “I can promise you one thing, if nothing else.”
“And what’s that?”
He looked at her meaningfully (to be distinguished from his usual looks, which were, in truth, rather meaningless): “That Larry Sipp Silliams’ death shall not have been in vain.”
Enid turned and eyed him with what might have been a newfound sense of respect. Then again, it might have been bemused tolerance of someone she deemed to be a moron. Pluck, naturally, looked right back at her. The sun peeped through the thinner tufts of snow melting in streaks down the glass, the crystals in the droplets massaging its rays so that what emanated was a half-light, half-shadowy fluctuation dribbling over her shoulders, arm and fingers. Her hair—done up in some clumsy fashion, the details of which hardly interested him—seemed to shudder in the fluttering shadows that danced upon it. She was surely unaware of this play of forces over her figure, but Pluck was entranced, as are infants at the inexhaustible wonders of light, colour and line all around them.
If only she were prettier, younger and overweight, he thought again. (Concerning Miss Trojczakowski, now, not the hypothetical infant.) And didn’t try to constantly out-think me. Yes: If she could only take as gospel every syllable I said, we might very well have made a great romance. He squinted at her, trying to imagine her free of wrinkle, with a different face, bunches of fat lining her limbs and stomach, and with a look of dumb agreement ever-present over her features. Yes, he thought at the image; yes, that is something I could install in my kitchen with a stove and a washtub and wheel out once a month for forceful erotic relief.
“Have you heard a word I’ve said?” he realised she was asking.
“Ah—yes, of course.”
“So do you agree?”
“That. . .depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you just said.”
“I thought you heard what I just said.”
“I did.”
“So, then.”
“Yes?”
“Do you agree?”
“Look, this conversation clearly isn’t leading anywhere—”
“Do you agree?”
“We. . .we weren’t talking about marriage, were we?”
“What?”
“I accept, with several provisos.”
“What are you talking about?”
“One: a regimen of systematic weight increase, under the supervision of a medical professional—”
“What are you talking about?”
“. . .What you were talking about. Of course.”
“I was talking about being nicer to the interviewees!”
“Oh, that. Yes, I knew that was what you said. I was just testing you, you see; and, you’ll be delighted to learn, you passed. With flying, um. . .”
“Colours?”
“That’s right.”
“So you’re going to?”
“Um. . .marry?”
“Be gentler with the interviewees!”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Say it.”
“I will be gentler with the interviewees.”
“In your own words.”
He sighed. He tugged at his neck collar with a finger. Was it getting hot in here?
“Say it!”
“I. . .will try to treat the suspects as sovereign human beings in possession of an innate dignity, naturally deserving of a fair chance,” he promised.
“The Golden Rule?” she prompted him.
He shrugged with distaste. “I’ve never had much time for that sort of thing,” he admitted, then gestured for her to lead the way out, and followed behind her out of the patio, eyeing her arse and sighing at its inadequacy for his purposes.