A Fragment of Fear Read Free

which for a period had been both sealed and locked, was now only locked, pending disposal of her belongings. The hotel guests and staff had ceased to mull over the tragedy in low voices. People swam and lay in the sun, and watched newcomers with pale skin rubbing themselves with anti-sunburn lotion. The beach umbrellas looked as gay as ever. The boat called each morning for day-trippers to Capri, and Vesuvius brooded mistily in the distance, seemingly content with the havoc he had wrought in A.D . 79.
    Already, gentle, lonely Mrs. Dawson, photographed, docketed, and cleaned, was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Naples, and in the hotel it was almost as if this elegant old lady had never been there.
    I had naturally read about the crime in the Italian newspapers and was puzzled as the Italian police were.
    Her diamond rings and valuable amethyst pendant had not been stolen. About seven pounds’ worth of Italian lire were untouched in her handbag. A sex assault was clearly out of the question.
    She had been strangled with an Italian silk scarf behind the walls of House No. 27 in Section 12. She had several rather fine Italian scarves in delicate pastel shades of mingled browns and blues and yellows. I do not know which one was used to kill her.
    There are a great many houses in Pompeii which are mere shells, roofless, the ruined walls of varying heights enclosing squares and rectangles of bare earth. I imagined the killer luring this old and frail woman into House No. 27, then leaning forward, perhaps with some pretext of adjusting her scarf, crossing his hands, while each held one side of the scarf, then quickly extending his hands so that the knuckles pressed suddenly into the carotid artery on each side of her neck. The suddenness and shock prevented an outcry. It is a soundless and happily painless method of causing unconsciousness in two or three seconds. Lengthier pressure causes death by continuing to cut off the supply of blood to the brain. Thus I imagined it happening.
    If this method had been used, it indicated that Mrs. Dawson knew her murderer, for I could not imagine that dignified Victorian figure allowing a strange man to adjust her scarf, and for reasons of physical strength it would almost certainly have been a man.
    But maybe it was a stranger, and maybe a clumsier method had been used. I hoped not.
    I drove over to dusty Pompeii, not for ghoulish reasons, but because I write articles as well as books, and if at any time I wished to include this crime, it would be useful to have visited the spot and seen it with one’s own eyes, and taken notes.
    The visits of morbid sightseers had ceased, and I entered House No. 27 alone, though twenty yards up the street I saw a swarthy, stocky figure heave himself off a low wall and move in my direction. He was dressed in the simple uniform of the guards whose duty it is to prevent sightseers making off with such remaining Roman treasures as have not been housed in the local museum or removed to the Naples museum.
    He was a rugged man of about fifty, a member of the Italian Communist Party, with whom I had had long conversations on previous occasions. Outwardly sour and embittered, inwardly, I suspect as soft as butter, he ascribed any and every misfortune he had ever suffered or would suffer to the iniquities of the capitalist system.
    His name was Mario Bartelli. Mario Bartelli always conceded that Vesuvius had done a good job in that it had destroyed the capitalists in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other towns. But the whole thing had been too parochial. What was needed was another kind of eruption, which would destroy the whole rotten decadent system. For four days before the eruption, there had been earthquake rumblings, reminiscent of an earlier disaster, giving warning to the rich spivs, the clever dicks, the idle aristocracy who had time to think and organise, and what had happened? Why were no skeletons of horses found? Because all the horses had been