Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 11: Photo-Finish, Light Thickens, Black Beech and Honeydew

‘This is right. For the duration. When they pack it in there’ll only be a caretaker and his family on the island. Monty Reece has built a garage and boathouse on the lake shore and his launch takes you over to the Lodge. He’s got his own chopper, mind. No trouble. Ring through when required.’

The conversation died. Troy wondered if the driver called his employer ‘Monty Reece’ to his face and decided that quite possibly he did.

The road across the plains mounted imperceptibly for forty miles and a look backward established their height. Presently they stared down into a wide riverbed laced with milky-turquoise streaks.

At noon they reached the top where they lunched from a hamper with wine in a chiller-kit. Their escort had strong tea from a Thermos flask. ‘Seeing I’m the driver,’ he said, ‘and seeing there’s the Zig-Zag yet to come.’ He was moved to entertain them with stories about fatal accidents in the gorge.

The air up here was wonderfully fresh and smelt aromatically of manuka scrub patching warm tussocky earth. They were closer now to perpetual snow.

‘We better be moving,’ said the driver. ‘You’ll notice a big difference when we go over the head of the Pass. Kind of sudden.’

There was a weathered notice at the top: CORNISHMAN’S PASS. 1000 METRES.

The road ran flat for a short distance and then dived into a new world. As the driver had said: it was sudden. So sudden, so new and so dramatic that for long afterwards Troy would feel there had been a consonance between this moment and the events that were to follow, as if, on crossing over the Pass, they entered a region that was prepared and waiting.

It was a world of very dark rain forest that followed, like velvet, the convolutions of the body it enfolded. Here and there waterfalls glinted. Presiding over the forests, snow-tops caught the sun, but down below the sun never reached and there, thread-like in its gorge, a river thundered. ‘You can just hear ’er,’ said the driver who had stopped the car.

But all they heard at first was birdsong – cool statements, incomparably wild. After a moment Troy said she thought she could hear the river. The driver suggested they go to the edge and look down. Troy suffered horridly from height-vertigo but went, clinging to Alleyn’s arm. She looked down once as if from a gallery in a theatre on an audience of treetops, and saw the river.

The driver, ever-informative, said that you could make out the roof of a car that six years ago went over from where they stood. Alleyn said, ‘So you can,’ put his arm round his wife and returned her to the car.

They embarked upon the Zig-Zag.

The turns in this monstrous descent were so acute that vehicles travelling in the same direction would seem to approach each other and indeed did pass on different levels. They had caught up with such a one and crawled behind it. They met a car coming up from the gorge. Their own driver pulled up on the lip of the road and the other sidled past on the inner running with half an inch to spare. The drivers wagged their heads at each other.

Alleyn’s arm was across Troy’s shoulders. He pulled her ear. ‘First prize for intrepidity, Mrs A.,’ he said. ‘You’re being splendid.’

‘What did you expect me to do? Howl like a banshee?’

Presently the route flattened out and the driver changed into top gear. They reached the floor of the gorge and drove beside the river, roaring in its courses, so that they could scarcely hear each other speak. It was cold down there.

‘Now you’re in Westland,’ shouted the driver.

Evening was well advanced when, after a two-hour passage through the wet loam-scented forest that New Zealanders call ‘bush’ they came out into more open country and stopped at a tiny railway station called Kai-kai. Here they collected the private mailbag for the Lodge and then drove parallel with the railway for twenty miles, rounded the nose of a hill and there lay a great floor of water: Lake Waihoe.

‘There you are,’ said the driver, ‘That’s the Lake for you. And the Island.’

‘Stay me with flagons!’ said Alleyn and rubbed his head.

The prospect was astonishing. At this hour the Lake was perfectly unruffled and held the blazing image of an outrageous sunset. Fingers of land reached out bearing elegant trees that reversed themselves in the water. Framed by these and far beyond them was the Island and on the Island Mr Reece’s Lodge.

It was a house designed by a celebrated architect in the modern idiom but so ordered that one might have said it grew organically out of its primordial setting. Giants that carried their swathy foliage in clusters stood magnificently about a grassy frontage. There was a jetty in the foreground with a launch alongside. Grossly incongruous against the uproarious sunset, like some intrusive bug, a helicopter hovered. As they looked it disappeared behind the house.

‘I don’t believe in all this,’ said Troy. ‘It’s out of somebody’s dream. It can’t be true.’

‘You reckon?’ asked the driver.

‘I reckon,’ said Troy.

They turned into a lane that ran between tree ferns and underbrush down to the lake edge where there was a garage, a landing stage, a boathouse and a bell in a miniature belfry. They left the car and walked out into evening smells of wet earth, fern and moss and the cold waters of the lake.

The driver rang the bell, sending a single echoing note across the lake. He then remarked that they’d been seen from the Island. Sure enough the launch put out. So still was the evening they could hear the putt-putt of the engine. ‘Sound travels a long way over the water,’ said the driver.

The sunset came to its preposterous climax. Everything that could be seen, near and far, was sharpened and gilded. Their faces reddened. The far-off windows of the Lodge turned to fire. In ten minutes it had all faded and the landscape was cold. Troy and Alleyn walked a little way along the water’s edge and Troy looked at the house and wondered about the people inside it. Would Isabella Sommita feel that it was a proper showplace for her brilliance and what would she look like posing in the ‘commodious studio’ against those high windows, herself flamboyant against another such sunset as the one that had gone by?

Troy said: ‘This really is an adventure.’

Alleyn said: ‘Do you know, in a cockeyed sort of way it reminds me of one of those Victorian romances by George Macdonald where the characters find a looking glass and walk out of this world into another one inhabited by strange beings and unaccountable on-goings.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Troy, ‘the entrance to that great house will turn out to be our own front door and we’ll be back in London.’

They talked about the house and the way in which it rose out of its setting in balanced towers. Presently the launch, leaving an arrowhead of rippled silk in its wake, drew in to the landing stage. It was a large, opulent craft. The helmsman came out of his wheelhouse and threw a mooring rope to the car driver.

‘Meet Les Smith,’ said the driver.

‘Gidday,’ said Les Smith. ‘How’s tricks, then, Bert? Good trip?’

‘No trouble, Les.’

‘Good as gold,’ said the helmsman.

Alleyn helped them stow the luggage. Troy was handed on board and they puttered out on the lake.

The driver went into the wheelhouse with Les Smith. Troy and Alleyn sat in the stern.

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Liking it?’

‘It’s a lovely beginning,’ said Troy. ‘It’s so lovely it hurts.’

‘Keep your fingers crossed,’ he said lightly.

II

Perhaps because their day had been so long and had followed so hard on their flight from England, the first night at the Lodge went by rather like a dream for Troy.

They had been met by Mr Reece’s secretary and a dark man dressed like a tarted-up ship’s steward who carried their baggage. They were taken to their room to ‘freshen up’. The secretary, a straw-coloured youngish man with a gushing manner, explained that Mr Reece was on the telephone but would be there to meet them when they came down and that everyone was ‘changing’ but they were not to bother as everybody would ‘quite understand’. Dinner was in a quarter of an hour. There was a drinks tray in the room and he suggested that they should make use of it and said he knew they would be angelic and excuse him as Mr Reece had need of his services. He then, as an apparent afterthought, was lavish in welcome, flashed smiles and withdrew. Troy thought vaguely that he was insufferable.

‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, ‘but I refuse to be quite understood and I’m going to shift my clothes. I require a nice wash and a change. And a drink, by the way.’

She opened her suitcase, scuffled in it and lugged out a jump suit which was luckily made of uncrushable material. She then went into the bathroom which was equipped like a plumber-king’s palace. Alleyn effected a lightning change at which exercise he was a past master and mixed two drinks. They sat side by side on an enormous bed and contemplated their room.

‘It’s all been done by some super American interior decorator, wouldn’t you say?’ said Troy, gulping down her brandy-and-dry.

‘You reckon?’ said Alleyn, imitating the driver.

‘I reckon,’ said Troy. ‘You have to wade through the carpet, don’t you? Not walk on it.’

‘It’s not a carpet: it’s about two hundred sheepskins sewn together. The local touch.’