Miss Benson's Beetle Read online

  The women said they had no idea. Margery did her best to look like someone admiring the flowers.

  “Weren’t you speaking to her earlier, Miss Benson?”

  “Oh!” she said casually, as if it were a small thing she’d just remembered. “Mrs. Pretty is helping me with my research.”

  “You mean you know her?”

  “Only professionally. We are not friends or anything.”

  A waiter arrived with more sandwiches, but Margery was still trying to deal with the remains of the first. Besides, Enid had vanished from the garden.

  Margery found her at the back of the house, smoking with the waiters and stuffing leftover snacks into her bag for Mr. Rawlings.

  “Finished yet?” said Enid, barely able to hide a yawn.

  “Let’s go,” said Margery. “Now.”

  * * *

  —

  The sun had begun to set. In the west, there were great masses of crushed-up rosy clouds, like another mountain range, and everything shone flamingo pink, even Mr. Rawlings and Enid’s hair. They went along the Baie des Citrons where cafés and shops were closing for the night, and the streets were strung with red and green electric lights. Down on the beach, fishermen sat mending their nets. Water slapped gently against the hulls of the boats, and the waves were fluorescent curls. In the distance, lightning quivered in the sky. A storm was coming.

  For a while they walked in silence. Or, rather, Margery marched, while Enid—even though she had hoisted her frock over her knees for ease of movement—mostly hopped. At every step, mosquitoes flew up, glistening like pink dust. Finally, it was too much. Margery said, “There was a break-in last night at the local school. But I imagine you know about that.”

  Enid said nothing.

  “You think I’m an idiot? I have never been so ashamed.”

  “I was trying to help!” Enid swung round so fast Mr. Rawlings went crashing straight into her. “I was doing you a good turn! And how did you think I got all that stuff? Did you think I fucked a doctor?”

  Margery bristled. She had never really heard a woman swear before. She still wasn’t used to Enid’s language. And the truth was, that was exactly what she’d thought, but she had been prepared to let it pass because at least she had her equipment.

  “Anyway,” said Enid, “you stole your boots.”

  For a moment, Margery felt kicked in the shin. She wobbled. But she rallied. “That is not the same. And at least I tried to give them back.”

  “So it’s all right when you do it, but it isn’t for me?”

  “Tomorrow you will have to take everything back to the school. You will have to apologize and explain.”

  “And then what?”

  Margery started to reply, but Enid cut her off. Why were they waiting to get her paperwork stamped? What were they even doing at the British consulate? Margery’s return passage was booked for the middle of February. They had less than three months. “Three months!” she yelled. “That’s all! And we’ve already wasted a whole week!” Margery wasn’t going to find the beetle because she had an official stamp on twenty-three pieces of paper. She wasn’t going to find it because she was hobnobbing with a load of expatriates. And she certainly wasn’t going to find it because she was wearing the right frock. She was going to find the beetle because she was up a mountain, crawling on her hands and knees, lifting every stone, and praying for help. Enid’s voice had risen an octave and turned thin and wiry. And she was so physical with it, putting her whole body into exaggerating each word. Even her hair looked cross.

  And praying? Had she just said praying? Margery had not prayed since she was a child. Her aunts had done so much, she’d felt exempt. Besides, after realizing the truth about her father, she had given up on God. Or, rather, she had turned her back on Him. But this was not the time to contemplate whether she was an atheist or actually agnostic. Enid was still yelling.

  “You know your problem, Marge?”

  “No, but I have a feeling you are about to tell me.”

  “You’re a snob. You’re a complete snob. You’re on a fool’s errand, and you think you can do it by the book. Well, I don’t give a toss about your paperwork. It’s the first of December, and tomorrow I’m heading north.”

  “And how exactly will you do that? The bus doesn’t leave for two days.”

  Enid didn’t enlighten her. She stormed ahead, snapping off hibiscus flowers as she went, even tripping once because of her sandals, while Mr. Rawlings ran behind. At the boardinghouse, she tore off her clothes and got into bed. She didn’t even bother with her mosquito net. She was asleep in seconds, and so was the dog.

  Margery sat in her half of their room, feeling very hot and disliking Enid more intensely by the second. The lightning came more frequently now, but it still wouldn’t rain. Worse, she seemed to be trapped with an insect that sounded like a flying motorbike. The air felt squeezed.

  If it wasn’t for Enid, she would still be at the cocktail party. And how dare Enid? How dare she call Margery a snob? The one with the problem was Enid. At least Margery didn’t dress like a call girl. At least Margery had been taught how to eat with her mouth closed, and use a knife and fork. That wasn’t snobbish. That was just good manners. And what about Enid drinking tea with her little finger poked in the air, like a radar scanner? How snobbish was that? She could barely resist the temptation to wake Enid and point all this out. But she did, she did resist, because despite all her protestations, somewhere deep down it had begun to dawn on Margery that Enid might have a point. She herself had wanted to go to the British consul party’s because she wanted the approval of the establishment, in the same way she wanted all her paperwork properly stamped. She wanted to get everything right. She wanted to please him. But the truth was that the British consul had barely noticed Margery. If anything, he’d treated her as a joke.

  And a fool’s errand? What was Enid doing here, if she really thought that?

  Enid lay on her bed, flat out and snoring, her mouth wide open. Margery took up Enid’s frock and put it on a hanger. It smelled of Enid—her incredibly thick, sweet smell—and there was a dot of pink powder on the collar that she rubbed off. It occurred to her that an item of clothing meant nothing until you knew the person who wore it, and then it became a thing by itself. And Enid’s polka-dot frock struck her suddenly as one of the bravest things she had ever met. She straightened it on the hanger. Then she pulled the mosquito net over Enid, checking for gaps. She even patted Mr. Rawlings.

  Afterward she got into bed but couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the humidity that bothered her now, or the motorbike insect. It wasn’t even the theft from the school. It was the way Mrs. Pope and her friends had stared at Enid, as if slicing her into parts, and the way Margery had said nothing. There she had been, sucking up to Mrs. Pope, when the one person who was true to her was Enid. Yet again, she experienced the dense feeling she had felt outside the camp at Wacol, as if she were always on the other side of a flawed glass wall and seeing the truth way after it was too late.

  Margery had only five stamps on her paperwork. Her suitcase was still missing, and she had no extension for her visa. But Enid was right. It was time to stop doing things by the book, and head north. A peal of thunder banged overhead and here at last came the rain.

  It was only a week since the police appeal for help in The Times, but already there had been more than twenty reported sightings of Nancy Collett. The woman couldn’t have been more helpful if she’d laid a trail.

  The press conference was packed with reporters and police officers, amateurs and local rags, pushing to get a place on the balcony. The case had kicked off. Not just the murder itself, the victim being an old war hero who’d lost his leg, but because the killer was his wife. And then there was the fact that Nancy Collett was a person of dubious reputation, who wore revealing frocks and dyed her hair. Also, though this was not
said in so many words, she was of the lower class. The words “cold, calculated, shrewd” were written on the blackboard at the front, as was “femme fatale.”

  “Before meeting the deceased,” announced the superintendent, “Nancy Collett had a part-time job as a hostess at a local nightclub.”

  Much scribbling. This stuff was good.

  “Her husband was ten years her senior, and before the war he worked as a solicitor. They were married for seven years. They had no children.”

  Only a few jotted down these details.

  “It is now understood that Nancy Collett spent several days with the body of the deceased before she made her escape.”

  The superintendent said no more than that—he knew no more than that—but the pause he left was long enough for people to start filling it with ideas of their own. Pens went wild.

  “She was seen by a neighbor leaving the house she shared with Percival Collett early on October the nineteenth. She was carrying three suitcases, and a red valise.”

  The officer in charge of the chalk now switched on the projector and showed a slide of a red valise, just in case no one was sure what that might look like.

  It was the red valise that was of particular interest to the police, said the super. It was believed the red valise contained vital evidence from the scene of the crime.

  Following this, another slide was shown: a plan of the interior of the house, with a cross to mark the spot—the bed—where the deceased had been discovered.

  “There were signs of suffocation, as well as a prior vicious attack with a sharp implement, such as a scalpel or knife.”

  More intakes of breath. Fortunately, no slides.

  “We believe Mrs. Collett made her way toward Fenchurch Street station, where she was seen waiting by a number of witnesses. At the station she asked for help from a porter but refused to let go of the red valise. It appears she then took a train to Tilbury to board a liner to Australia, but there were problems with her passport and she was delayed for questioning. We know she boarded the ship that same afternoon because she made lewd and inappropriate suggestions to several members of staff, while still holding the red valise.”

  With the news of her escape, there was a jeer from the upper balcony. Men felt they had been outwitted by this woman, and they didn’t like it. But down at the front, some of the older hacks got ready to leave. “It’s over,” one said. “If she’s already in Oz.”

  Then the superintendent said, “What we don’t understand right now is the role of her female accomplice.”

  Those members of the press who had put away their notebooks took them out again.

  Nancy Collett had been seen by witnesses at Fenchurch Street station greeting another woman. From the projector came a slide of a big lady without a head. So far, the superintendent explained, they were having difficulties finding any full images of this suspect. Her flat had been searched by the police and it appeared she was one step ahead. (No pun intended but, nevertheless, he got a laugh.) There was a flash of lights as press cameras went off everywhere.

  “So what you’re saying,” piped up one of the older blokes, “is that you’re looking for a femme fatale and a fat woman with no head.”

  Yes, said the super. That was about the sum of it.

  “Bloody hell,” said a chap in the front row. “This is hotter than the Norman Skinner case.”

  It was all over the morning papers.

  Enid had only gone to buy a watermelon for breakfast, but she came back driving an old U.S. Army jeep. Taking the corner at high speed, she appeared in a tide of red dust, accompanied by a loud screeching noise, and when she cut the engine and leaped out—the jeep appeared to have no roof—she was bright orange and so was the dog. It was even in his teeth and ears. A small crowd gathered to watch, including a woman with a pot on her head, and several toothless fishermen.

  Margery could barely speak. “Enid? How did you get this?”

  “I saw a sign. It was going cheap.”

  “I didn’t know you could drive.”

  “Yeah, well, I drove an ambulance for a while.”

  “You did?”

  “During the war. I used to be on the night shift. I took Pall Mall once at fifty miles an hour.”

  They packed the jeep until the rear end sagged. All the new collecting equipment, plus the tea chest of supplies and camping gear, and other miscellaneous items that Enid kept producing, like her Miss Lovely Legs trophy, the Baby Jesus painting, and her battery radio. She seemed to be in a hurry. She finished with the red valise, which she hid beneath a jack and a shovel, along with a couple of short planks for easing her way out of mudholes.

  “Enid?” said Margery, as she loaded a last few things. “Have you noticed anything different? About me?”

  She waited for Enid to finish ramming whatever she was ramming, and look. When Enid did, she shrugged, and went back to her ramming. “No.”

  “I am dressed in a man’s clothes.” Margery pointed at the Bermuda shorts and flowery shirt she was now wearing, along with her pith helmet and boots. The truth was that once she’d got over the shame of slotting one foot inside a trouser leg, and then the other, once she’d zipped up the fly and secured the button at the waist, and found it was not too loose but not too tight either, once she’d slipped her arms inside the lovely, colorful shirt and felt the generosity of the sleeve, she had given a large sigh, as if she’d just emerged from an underground hole and could finally breathe. She’d dug her hands into the pockets, and they weren’t so small you could barely keep a thimble in them. They were proper places where you could store a compass, a ball of twine. Besides, it wasn’t utterly strange to wear male clothes: it was just like being a girl again, in her brothers’ hand-me-downs. She hadn’t even put on stockings. “Would you say,” she asked, beginning to color, “would you say I look odd?”

  “No.”

  “Will people laugh?”

  “Marge, you’re looking for a gold beetle on the other side of the world. You think people haven’t already laughed? Anyway, half the men in New Caledonia wear skirts. Now, are we going to stand here talking fashion, or can we leave?” She whistled for Mr. Rawlings, and scooped him into her arms.

  Again, Margery balked. “The dog, Enid? The dog?”

  “Of course. He’ll sniff out danger.”

  Margery had never seen Mr. Rawlings sniff out so much as a ham baguette, but she let that pass. “You can’t take a pet on an expedition. It’s not fair.”

  Enid didn’t bat an eyelid. She lowered the dog into the back seat and hopped in through the nonexistent roof. “It’s me and Mr. Rawlings, or you go alone.”

  * * *

  —

  Enid went with terrifying speed for a woman who had once been an ambulance driver. Even if people had felt well when they got into her ambulance, they must have been very sick by the time they got out of it. And it was worse when she talked: she seemed to forget she was driving. Margery tried to object but got a mouthful of grit and dust. Meanwhile, Mr. Rawlings had scrambled from the back seat into her lap, still quite orange and nervous from the first trip, and now trembling uncontrollably.

  “Enid,” she managed to say. “Enid. This is too fast.”

  “You should close your eyes!” yelled Enid. “Get some rest!”

  Margery could not have closed her eyes if she’d been drugged. Parts of the city whirled past at dizzying speed, like objects on a conveyor belt. La Place des Cocotiers—an elegant French square with fountains and flame trees—came and went with a flash of red. Palm trees were no more than a hairy blur. The jeep rattled past the market, kicking up more dust, and skidded over a curb, narrowly missing a street vendor with a selection of hens tied upside down by their legs to a pole. They reached the port, and careered toward the edge-of-town shanties, where banana trees leaned heavily over the road. After that
it climbed upward, and there was nothing but forest. Pine and mangoes and huge banyans tangled with bougainvillea. Above them rose the teeth of the basalt cliffs, like black lace. According to the Reverend Horace Blake, they should take the coastal road that ran west of the island, snaking between ocean and mountains. “It will provide a delightful opportunity for the curious traveler to experience charming native villages, and colorful restaurants and bars.” There were illustrations of women in grass skirts cooking things on the fire, and several chieftains.

  As far as Païta—about twenty miles—the road was in tolerably good condition. But there were no charming villages. No colorful restaurants. Certainly no women cooking things on the fire. And neither was there anywhere to refuel. From Païta to Boulouparis, another thirty miles, the road was broken and haphazard. Sometimes it was just a faint scar, or a spill of rocks indistinguishable from the rest of the mountain’s rubble. At others it disappeared completely. On several occasions it gave up being a road and became a stream.

  At Boulouparis, Enid spotted a makeshift store advertising food and fuel, and jerked to a halt. She leaped from the jeep and picked up Mr. Rawlings. Her hair stuck out in quills, and her mouth—when she opened it—seemed exceptionally pink against the rest of her.

  “Coming?” she said.

  Margery sat in shock. Even though the jeep was finally stationary, parts of her body still appeared to be on the move. She hauled herself out.

  After the glare of the road, the store was very dark. Enid hunted for British newspapers but found none. In the end she bought a French fashion magazine.

  “What kind of food do you sell?” she asked the owner, miming a very hungry person wolfing lunch. She paid for petrol and ordered an omelette and oysters from the menu.

  They ate outside. Across the track there were a few mud huts, and some children came out to wave at Enid and point at her hair. Around them, trees were every color of green—from bright yellowish to one that was almost black, and the sky was hot blue. But there was still no sign of a mountain shaped like a blunt wisdom tooth.