An Expert in Murder

An Expert in Murder

A New Mystery

Featuring Josephine Tey

nicola upson

To Phyllis and to Irene, for their wisdom and belief, with love from us both

Contents

One

Had she been superstitious, Josephine Tey might have realised the…

3

Two

Detective Inspector Archie Penrose could never travel in the King’s… 17

Three

When Josephine awoke next morning, it had just gone nine…

31

Four

It was turning into the sort of day that made…

49

Five

Penrose sat at his desk on the third floor of…

71

Six

Josephine was already waiting on the pavement when Penrose’s car… 79

Seven

Theatre is a self-obsessed medium at the best of times…

95

Eight

The telephone on the dark oak desk in Bernard Aubrey’s…

105

Nine

Penrose had not intended to use his ticket for the…

123

Ten

Bernard Aubrey’s body lay just inside his office and Penrose…

137

Eleven

Penrose stood at the door to the Green Room, and…

155

Twelve

The early hours of Sunday morning brought nothing but despair…

185

Thirteen

As Penrose left the interview room and walked out to…

203

Fourteen

Peace was an infrequent visitor to 66 St Martin’s Lane…

231

Fifteen

Even late on a Sunday afternoon, Longacre seemed too narrow…

249

Sixteen

In the early hours of Monday morning, St Martin’s Lane…

275

Author’s Note 289

Acknowledgements 291

About the Author

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Night was falling when at last he sat down, ready to write.

Looking out over the garden, he watched as the louring, grey skies were replaced – inch by inch – with a blackness that wrapped itself like a shroud around the bushes at the limits of his view. Winter had played its customary trick, weaving the landscape together in a cloth of muted colours and bringing a spent uniformity to all he could see. The cold had deadened the richness of the world. In the morning, there would be a covering of frost on the window ledge.

Impatient now to hand over his past, he poured the last inch of warmth from the whisky bottle on the desk and drained his glass before reaching for a sheet of notepaper. It was, he thought with satisfaction, an original sort of bequest. As if in deference to the significance of the moment, the house – usually so alive with faint but familiar sounds – fell silent as he picked up the slim, brown volume that lay on the table in front of him. He flicked through its pages until he came to the section he wished to use; the phrase had always struck him as peculiarly apt, and never more so than now.

With a bitter smile, which came half from regret and half from resignation, he picked up the pen and began, his lips forming the words in perfect unison with the ink on the page. ‘To become an expert in murder’, he wrote, ‘cannot be so difficult.’

1

One

Had she been superstitious, Josephine Tey might have realised the odds were against her when she found that her train, the early-morning express from the Highlands, was running an hour and a half late. At six o’clock, when she walked down the steps to the south-bound platform, she expected to find the air of excitement which always accompanies the muddled loading of people and suitcases onto a departing train. Instead, she was met by a testa-ment to the long wait ahead: the carriages were in darkness; the engine itself gravely silent; and a mountain of luggage built steadily along the cold, grey strand of platform. But like most people of her generation, who had lived through war and loss, Josephine had acquired a sense of perspective, and the train’s mechanical failure foretold nothing more sinister to her than a tiresome wait in the station’s buffet. In fact, although this was the day of the first murder, nothing would disturb her peace of mind until the following morning.

By the time she had drained three cups of bland coffee, the train appeared to be ready for its journey. She left the buffet’s crowded warmth and prepared to board, stopping on the way to buy a copy of yesterday’s Times and a bar of Fry’s chocolate from the small news kiosk next to the platform. As she took her seat, she could not help but feel a rush of excitement in spite of the delay: in a matter of hours, she would be in London.

The ornate station clock declared that it was a quarter past eight when the train finally left the mouth of the station and moved slowly out into the countryside. Josephine settled back into her seat and allowed the gentle thrum of the wheels to soothe away 3

any lingering frustrations of the morning. Removing her gloves and taking out a handkerchief, she cleared a small port-hole in the misted window and watched as the strengthening light took some of the tiredness from the cold March day. On the whole, winter had been kind. There had, thank God, been no repeat of the snow wreaths and roaring winds which had brought the Highland railway to a sudden standstill the year before, leaving her and many others stranded in waiting rooms overnight. Engines with snow ploughs attached had been sent to force a passage through, and she would never forget the sight of them charging the drifts at full speed, shooting huge blocks of snow forty feet into the air.

Shivering at the memory of it, she unfolded her newspaper and turned to the review pages, where she was surprised to find that the Crime Book Society’s selection was ‘a hair-raising yarn’ called Mr Munt Carries On. They couldn’t have read the book, she thought, since she had tried it herself and considered Mr Munt to have carried on for far too long to be worth seven and six of anybody’s money. When she arrived at the theatre section, which she had purposely saved until last, she smiled to herself at the news that Richard of Bordeaux – her own play and now London’s longest run – was about to enter its final week.

As the train moved south, effortlessly eating into four hundred miles or so of open fields and closed communities, she noticed that spring had come early to England – as quick to grace the gentle countryside as it had been to enhance the drama of the hills against a Highland sky. There was something very precious about the way that rail travel allowed you to see the landscape, she thought. It had an expansiveness about it that the close confinement of a motor car simply could not match and she had loved it since, as a young woman, she had spent her holidays travelling every inch of the single-track line that shadowed the turf from Inverness to Tain.

Even now, more than twenty years later, she could never leave Scotland by train without remembering the summer of her seven-teenth birthday, when she and her lover – in defiance of the terrible weather – had explored the Highlands by rail, taking a different route from Daviot Station every morning. When war broke out, a 4

year later almost to the day, the world changed forever but – for her at least – that particular bond to a different age had stayed the same, and perhaps always would.

This link with the past was becoming harder to hold on to, though, as she found herself unexpectedly in the public eye. She had had thirteen months and four hundred and sixty performances to get used to being the author of the most popular play in London, but fame still tasted strange to her. Richard of Bordeaux had brought success, but success brought a relinquishing of privacy which, though necessary, was not easily or willingly given.

Every time she journeyed south, she felt torn between the celebrity that awaited her in London and the ties which kept her in Inverness – and knew she was not truly comfortable with either.

But during the miles in between, for a few precious hours, she could still remember how it had felt to be seventeen and sure of what you wanted.

Today, though, anonymity vanished even earlier than expected when a pleasant-looking young woman boarded the train at Berwick-upon-Tweed and slid back the door to Josephine’s carriage. She struggled apologetically with her luggage, but a gentleman quickly stood to help her wrestle a large, beautifully embroidered travelling bag into the overhead luggage rack, and she smiled gratefully at him when he offered up his window seat. As the girl settled herself in, Josephine gazed at her in fascination, but it was not so much her features that drew attention as the remarkable hat that framed them – a cloche, made of fine black straw, which was accentuated on one side by a curled white ostrich feather, flecked with beige and brown and attached by a long, black-tipped hatpin. It was hardly the sort of thing that Josephine would ever wear herself, and it made her own plain velvet seem bland in comparison, but she admired its delicate beauty nonetheless.

The young woman nodded brightly at her and Josephine returned to her paper but, as she scanned the racing pages, she was uncomfortably conscious of being watched. When she looked up, the girl turned hurriedly back to her magazine, acutely embarrassed at having been caught, and began to study its pages with 5

exaggerated interest. Aware that the journey would be more relaxed for both of them if she smoothed the moment over, Josephine broke the ice. ‘You know, I often think that for all the nonsense these racing pundits talk, I could get a job doing it myself,’ she said.

The girl laughed, delighted to have a chance at conversation. ‘As long as it doesn’t take you away from the stage,’ she replied, and –

as she noticed Josephine’s surprise – looked aghast at her own familiarity. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she continued, ‘and I really don’t want to be a nuisance, but I’ve just got to say something. It is you, isn’t it? I recognised you straight away from that lovely art-icle. What a wonderful coincidence!’

Josephine forced a smile and quietly cursed the publicity photograph that had appeared in one of the more obscure theatrical journals, confirming to its handful of readers that Gordon Daviot

– the name she wrote under – was certainly not hers by birth.

‘How observant of you,’ she said, embarrassed to see that the other occupants of the carriage were taking a new interest in their travelling companion. ‘That came out a year ago – I’m surprised you remember it.’

‘That’s the coincidence – I read it again just the other day when I found out I was coming down to see Richard in its final week, and I’ve got it with me now.’ She pointed towards her bag as proof of the happy accident. ‘Listen, I hope you won’t think I’m just saying this because it’s you, but I do love that play. I’ve been so many times already and I will miss it when it’s gone.’ She paused, absent-mindedly curling a lock of brown hair round her finger as she looked out of the window. ‘I suppose most people would think it silly to get as engrossed in theatre as I do, or to put such value on stories that other people make up, but for me it’s much more than a play.’ She looked back at Josephine. ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you like this when we’ve only just met and you want to read your paper, but I must thank you now I’ve got the chance. My father died last year, and it’s all been so miserable for my mother and me, and sometimes your play got me through. It was the only thing I could lose myself in.’

6

Touched, Josephine folded away her newspaper. ‘It’s not silly,’

she said. ‘If you took any notice of people who think it is, there’d be no pleasure in the world. I’m sorry to hear about your father, though. Was his death very sudden?’

‘Oh no, he’d been ill for a long time. He was in the army, you see, and he never recovered from the war.’ She smiled ruefully.

‘And sometimes I think my mother will never recover from my father. She was devastated when we lost him – we both were – but she’s been better lately. And we work together, so at least I’ve been able to keep an eye on her.’

‘What do you do?’ Josephine asked, genuinely curious.

The girl raised her eyes, and this time her smile was warm and conspiratorial. ‘Can’t you guess? We’re in hats.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Elspeth, by the way. Elspeth Simmons.’

‘Call me Josephine. It’s beautiful, you know – your hat.’ Elspeth blushed and started to protest, but Josephine interrupted her. ‘No, honestly – if I’ve got to sit here and take compliments, then you must have your share. You’ve got a real talent – it must run in the family.’

‘Perhaps, but I wouldn’t really know – I’m adopted, you see,’

Elspeth explained candidly. ‘They took me on when I was a baby.

You’re right – my adoptive mother taught me everything, but we’re not very much alike, although we get on tremendously well.

All this play business drives her up the wall – she hates the theatre, apart from a bit of variety at Christmas, so I usually go with my uncle. When I tell her how pleased I am to have met you, she probably won’t even know what I’m talking about. Still,’ she added, a little wistfully, ‘I like to think my original parents had some theatrical blood in them somewhere.’

Looking again at the memorable hat, Josephine guessed that Elspeth’s adoptive mother was not without her own sense of the dramatic. Although by now the girl had lost much of her initial shyness and was talking eagerly about the theatre, Josephine could not resent the loss of her cherished peace and quiet. Rather, she felt a growing admiration for Elspeth’s spirit and lack of self-pity. Her conversation did not entirely mask the series of tough 7

blows that life had dealt her: abandoned as a baby, then claimed again only to have her second chance at happiness destroyed by a conflict which she was of no age to understand – if such an age existed. Thousands like Elspeth there might have been, but the sharing of tragedy – even on such a scale – did not make the personal cost any easier to bear for each individual it touched.

Josephine knew that as well as anyone. Twenty years after it started, the war had reinvented its suffering for a second generation in the form of inescapable confinement with the sick and wounded, and an eventual loss whose pain was the more sharply felt for its delay. After her father’s long illness, then his death, who could blame Elspeth for taking refuge in the less demanding emotions of the stage, or for contemplating another, more glamorous, identity? It was not so different to what she herself had done and – in the face of her own father’s fragile health – what she continued to do.

‘I hope you won’t think it rude of me to ask,’ Elspeth continued,

‘but will you be sad when your play ends?’

Josephine had asked herself the same thing when she saw the press notice earlier. The answer had not required much soul-searching, although it would have been churlish to show the true extent of her relief. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘It’s going on tour, after all, and it’s lovely to think that people all over the country will see it. I do have another play or two on the go, and my publisher wants a second mystery story at some point, so there’s plenty to keep me busy.’ She did not admit it to Elspeth, but there was another reason why her heart was no longer in the play that had made her name: that business last year with Elliott Vintner had soured the whole experience for her. The voice of reason inside her head told her time and time again that she was not to blame for the court case or its repercussions, but the thought that a man had taken his own life because of her success filled her with a coldness that no amount of rational argument could eradicate.

Fortunately, before Josephine could go further down that road, a restaurant attendant passed through the carriages to announce the next sitting for lunch. ‘Let’s go and have something to eat,’ she 8

suggested to Elspeth, conscious that the young woman’s enthusiasm for her work was beginning to wear a little thin with everyone else in the compartment. ‘It’s been a long morning.’

The train’s delay had created a healthy appetite in its passengers.

The dining car was almost full when they arrived, but a waiter showed them to the last vacant table. ‘Gosh – how lovely,’ said Elspeth, looking round at the bronze lamps, plush carpets and walnut veneer panelling, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anywhere as luxurious as this before.’ She removed her hat, then looked round anxiously for somewhere to put it before the waiter came to her rescue and took it from her with a wink. ‘I’m not used to first class,’ she admitted, picking up a silver butter knife to admire the railway crest on the handle. ‘The ticket was a present. Will you order for us – I’m sure it’s all delicious.’

Josephine smiled at her. ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘Inverness isn’t exactly overrun with top restaurants so I think we should just treat it as a posh café and have what we like. I’m going for the sole –

how about you?’ Elspeth studied the menu and, when the waiter arrived, chose a no-nonsense steak and kidney pudding. ‘A glass of wine, miss?’ he asked.

‘I’d love one, but I wouldn’t know where to start,’ Elspeth said, looking at Josephine.

‘The Burgundy would go well with your lunch, so let’s both have that,’ she said and watched, amused, as the waiter unfolded Elspeth’s napkin and slid a silver vase of flowers closer to her with another wink that brought a flush to her cheeks.

‘I’d love to know more about the cast,’ Elspeth said, as their drinks arrived. ‘Tell me – are John Terry and Lydia Beaumont as close off stage as they are on? I won’t tell anyone if it’s a secret, but they make such a good couple as Richard and Anne.’

Josephine smiled to herself, imagining how pleased Terry would be to perpetuate the rumour of a romance with his glamorous leading lady, but she had to crush Elspeth’s hopes. ‘No, they’re both . . . well, they’re just good friends,’ she said. ‘I suppose it would be difficult to work together if they were involved and they’ve got another joint project lined up with my next play.’

9

‘Am I allowed to ask what it is?’

‘Of course you are. It’s a play about Mary Queen of Scots. In fact, I wrote it for Lydia. She’s always wanted to play her.’

‘How special to have a play written for you! She must be so pleased. I can’t wait to see her in it.’

‘You’ll see her sooner than that, actually. She should be meeting me at King’s Cross if this train arrives before she has to be at the theatre,’ Josephine explained, tucking in to her meal and encouraging Elspeth to do the same. ‘I’ll introduce you if you’d like to meet her.’

‘Oh, that would be wonderful. You know, I can’t wait to tell Uncle Frank about all this. He’s seen Richard almost as many times as I have.’

‘Is that who you’re staying with?’

‘Yes, I always do when I’m in London. He and my Aunty Betty have a shop in Hammersmith – shoes and knitwear, that sort of thing.’

‘Do you come down often?’

‘About once a month. I bring the hats and help out in the shop a bit. It’s a family business, so we all chip in. But Uncle Frank’s passionate about theatre. He collects memorabilia and drives Aunty Betty mad because there’s only a small flat above the shop and he packs it with stuff. When I’m down, we spend as much time as we can in the West End. He’ll be so thrilled when I tell him about my journey. I don’t suppose you could sign a copy of the programme for him and leave it at stage door, could you? Would it be too much trouble?’

‘Of course not, and I’ll sign your magazine as well if you like.’

She thought for a moment, then said: ‘Do you have your tickets for the show yet? I’ve got some reserved for the week and you’d be most welcome to join me one evening.’ It was unlike her to encourage intimacy in this way but, for some reason, she felt protective towards the young woman in front of her. Much to her surprise, the response to her question was a pink tide which began at Elspeth’s neck and rose slowly upwards.

‘Actually, I’m going with someone tomorrow night and he’s got us top price seats,’ she explained. ‘We’ve been out a few times and 10

he’s lovely. It’s his first job in theatre and he doesn’t get much time off, so I suppose the last thing he needs is to sit through it all again,’ she added, and instantly looked horrified. ‘Not that he doesn’t love the play, of course, it’s just . . .’

She tailed off, at a loss as to how to redeem herself, and Josephine came to her rescue. ‘Please don’t worry – if I could choose between another night with Richard and a good dinner at the Cowdray Club, there’d really be no contest. You can have too much of a good thing. No matter how entertaining it is for the audience, it’s a bit of a busman’s holiday if you work there – he must be very keen on you to go at all.’

As Elspeth blushed again and excused herself for a moment, Josephine asked for the bill. She looked on, amused, as the waiter transferred his attentions from Elspeth to another table, where he spent more time than was strictly necessary polishing a crystal glass for a young woman dining alone. This girl was more receptive, and she watched while the couple circled round each other, wondering what the outcome would be. When Elspeth reappeared, Josephine shook off her insistence that the bill should be halved and they headed back to their compartment.

At last, the carriages began snaking through the outskirts of the capital. How England’s cities were changing, Josephine thought, looking out at the small, modern houses and giant cine-mas which seemed to have sprung up everywhere. As the train slowed its speed still further and ran into a deep cutting, the dwindling daylight vanished altogether. When it returned, it gave form to the dark bulk of St Pancras and the Midland Grand, an edifice which would have looked more at home in a gothic tale of terror than it did next to the ordinary contours of King’s Cross.

Josephine had heard that engine drivers on this route took a pride in the journey, racing against the timetable and each other to achieve speeds of more than ninety miles an hour, and she was not the only passenger on board to offer up a silent prayer of thanks to the competitive nature which had brought the train to its destination less than an hour behind schedule.

*

11

Stamping her feet against the coldness of the day, Lydia Beaumont was nevertheless in a remarkably good mood. Ever the actress, she always felt an affinity with the transience and variety of somewhere like King’s Cross: the wandering population of travellers and street traders had an anonymity which intrigued her and a colour which appealed to her weakness for showmanship and talent for mimicry.

The other reason for Lydia’s unshakeable good humour was standing beside her. She and Marta Fox were, to paraphrase her character in the play, still at the stage in their relationship where the heavens could collapse without undue damage to either of them. By March, it was not uncommon for the year to have offered Lydia at least three different versions of the love of her life, but Marta had survived to enter victoriously into a fourth month of tenure. By Lydia’s own admission, this was a relationship of some permanence.

From the approaching train, Josephine spotted her friend and felt the same mixture of admiration and apprehension that always accompanied their meetings: admiration for her graceful charm and childlike mischief, for the humour which was always in her eyes and never far from the corners of her mouth; apprehension because, if she were honest, Josephine was almost as uncomfortable with the celebrity of others as she was with her own. With Lydia, though, there had been a mutual appreciation from the out-set – a genuine trust stemming from their shared frankness and hatred of vanity in all its guises – and Josephine had come to value the friendship greatly, whilst marvelling that it should be hers.

From force of habit, she cast an appraising eye over the woman who stood next to Lydia on the platform and was pleased to note that her own first impressions tallied with the description that her friend’s letters had carried to Inverness. Even from a distance, there was an air of calm about her, a quiet containment in the res-olute stance that held its own beauty. If Marta proved as strong as she seemed, she could be just the antidote Lydia needed to the fickleness which was an inevitable part of her life in the theatre.

Elspeth was so excited at the sight of Anne of Bohemia alive and 12

well less than fifty yards away that Josephine’s gentle wave of greeting could hardly be seen from the platform. Keen to leave the train and meet Lydia, the girl reached up to drag her bag down from the luggage rack but, in her haste, forgot that she had opened it earlier to find the magazine for Josephine to sign. When its contents spilled out onto the floor, she looked mortified and Josephine

– whose instinct towards amusement was overcome by her sympathy for Elspeth’s vulnerability – came quickly to her aid. As the two scrabbled on the floor for stray sweets and loose change, they looked at each other through the legs of the other passengers, and laughter soon won out. Standing back against the window to allow everyone else to gather their belongings, they took a minute to compose themselves sufficiently to leave the compartment.

What sort of scene they were creating for those on the platform, Josephine could hardly imagine.

‘Here she is at last,’ said Lydia, pointing towards the carriage window. ‘My God, dear, have you seen that hat?’ Marta took one look and muttered something about getting them a place in the queue for taxis. ‘We’ll be with you in a jiffy,’ Lydia called after her.

When she turned back to the train, Josephine was on her way over with the companion who had made such an impression on the train’s arrival. Had she not known her, Lydia would never have guessed that this quiet Scottish woman, dressed simply in a dark suit and pearls, was the author of the biggest hit in the West End. Nothing about Josephine had changed since Lydia first became aware of her as a shadowy presence in the stalls during rehearsals. She still looked more like a school teacher or one of those solitary women you saw writing letters in the corner of a hotel lounge. It had been hard to get to know her, as she discouraged intimacy and rarely gave her confidence to anyone, but the effort had been worthwhile. Josephine was thoughtful and sensitive, interested in everything and possessed of a puckish, sarcastic wit that was as evident in her conversation as it was in her work.

Greeting Lydia with a hug, Josephine introduced the girl as a friend she had met on the journey down. The actress, always gracious when faced with her public, went through the routine of 13

conversation and autographs that had become second nature to her, whilst managing to make Elspeth feel that she was the first person ever to mention the poignancy of the death scene. After a politely timed exchange of charm and admiration, she remembered Marta and the waiting taxi. ‘Come on, we must get you safely to that madhouse you’re staying in,’ she said to Josephine.

‘I’m sure you could do with a rest after such a long day, and I need to be at the theatre on time or Johnny will be a bag of nerves throughout the entire first act. You’d think he’d be used to it by now.’ She flashed a winning smile at Elspeth, and picked up Josephine’s travelling case. ‘Is the rest of your luggage being sent on?’ she asked.

At the mention of luggage, a look of panic crossed Elspeth’s face. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she cried. ‘After all that fuss, I’ve left my bag on the train. I must go back and get it, then I’d better find my uncle. My mother’s entire new range is in there,’ she explained, gesturing towards the mountain of hat boxes that an unlucky porter had felt obliged to transfer from the luggage car to a platform trolley, ‘and she’ll kill us if we don’t get it safely delivered to Lillibet’s.’ Hugging Josephine tightly and promising to look her up at the theatre, Elspeth vanished back into the carriage from which she had so thoroughly emerged, too concerned about her bag to notice that the feather had become dislodged from her hat and now lay on the platform floor. Josephine bent down to pick it up.

‘Keep it – it’ll suit you,’ teased Lydia, looking half-admiringly, half-sympathetically at her friend. ‘You really do have the patience of Job. I don’t know anyone else who could spend a day with all that enthusiasm and still look sane at the end of it.’

Josephine smiled. ‘Much to my surprise, it’s been a pleasure. I must give it back to her, though,’ she said, turning towards the train.’ She’d be so sad not to have it when she meets her young man.’

Lydia caught her arm. ‘We really must go, Josephine – I can’t be late. Give it to her when she comes to see you at the theatre. My guess is that it won’t be long.’

14

Josephine hesitated. ‘No, you’re right. I’ll probably see her tomorrow. Let’s go and find Marta – I’m dying to meet her.’

‘Yes, and you can tell me whether this novel that she’s writing is any good or not. She’s far too divine for me to have any way of telling. She could jot down the shipping forecast and I’d think it was pure Daviot!’ Laughing, the two women walked out into the street, too engrossed in their conversation to notice the figure now moving towards the train.

Back on board, Elspeth saw with relief that her bag was still on the floor where she had left it. The train seemed almost deserted, the only noise coming from further down the car where staff were presumably preparing for the next journey. Looking down at the magazine, which now held two precious signatures, she smiled to herself and placed it carefully in the bag’s side pocket, thinking with excitement of the pleasure she would get from watching the next performance now that she knew two of the people involved.

As she buttoned the pocket securely and made sure this time that the rest of the bag was fastened, she heard a noise at the door behind her. Turning to explain to the guard that she had forgotten something and was just about to leave, she stared with recognition, then confusion, at a face which she had not expected to see on the train. Instinctively, before she had a chance to consider the strangeness of the moment, she took the gift that was held out to her with a smile and looked down at the doll in her hands, a souvenir of her beloved play and something she had longed to own.

When her companion took the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign from its hook and hung it outside the door, then stepped quickly over to the window to pull down the blind, Elspeth opened her mouth to protest, but the words were too slow to save her.

An arm reached out towards her, drawing her into a deadly embrace which seemed to mock the physical affection she had so recently come to know. There was no time to scream. The hand that gripped the back of her neck, holding her close, was swift and sure, and by now no strength was needed. Surprise had given way to a paralysing horror and she had no more control over her limbs 15

than the doll which fell to the floor and lay staring upwards, an indifferent witness to her final moments. She tried to breathe normally, to stay calm, but her face was pressed into her assailant’s chest and panic welled up in her as she realised that this must surely be death. Please God, no, she thought, not now, not when I’m so happy.

When the lethal point punctured her skin, she felt nothing more than a sharp blow beneath her ribs but there was no chance to be thankful for the lack of pain, nor to wonder that her body should surrender itself with so little ceremony. In that briefest of moments, somewhere between waking and oblivion, between life and death, she was aware of all she would miss but the longing was soon over, replaced as she fell to her knees by a lasting, if pre-mature, peace.

16

Two

Detective Inspector Archie Penrose could never travel in the King’s Cross area without feeling instantly depressed. North London was the city at its most forbidding and, despite the widening of the streets, its most claustrophobic. He drove down an uninspiring thoroughfare bordered with drab houses, few of which had ever been decorated or even cleaned, and past the straggling shabbiness of Euston Station. Then there was King’s Cross itself; he always thought that the station’s facade – two main arches separated by a clock tower of dreadful yellow brick, turned black with the dirt of ages – looked more like the entrance to a gaol than the gateway to a capital. Certainly it did nothing to help a man on his way to a murder investigation.

A sizeable crowd had gathered at the head of Platform Eight, obscuring his view of the train in which the girl’s body had been discovered less than an hour ago by a young railway employee.

According to Penrose’s colleague, Sergeant Fallowfield, the boy was now in a state of shock. Fallowfield, who had been handling an incident round the corner in Judd Street when the call came in and was first on the scene, approached him now, pushing his way through the on-lookers with very little patience for their ghoulish curiosity.

‘You’d think they’d have something better to do on a Friday night, wouldn’t you, Sir? Bloody vultures, the lot of ’em.’

The comment was uncharacteristic of his sergeant, who usually had a more positive view of human nature despite years of experience to the contrary. Whatever he had seen on the train had clearly got to him. ‘Poor kid, she can’t be more than twenty,’ Fallowfield 17

said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Hardly had a chance to start her life, let alone live it.’

‘Do we know who she is?’ Penrose asked.

‘Assuming it’s her bag in the carriage, her name’s Elspeth Simmons and she’s from Berwick-on-Tweed – at least, that’s where she got on the train, and it’s a return ticket. It’s a nasty one, this, Sir – as spiteful as anything I’ve seen. I reckon we’ve got a sick bastard on our hands.’

When he saw what awaited him in the sealed-off carriage, Penrose could only agree. The dead girl sat – or rather seemed to have been composed – on the middle of the three seats to the right of the compartment, an ornate and deadly hatpin protruding from under her breastbone. Her hands had been clasped together in front of her in a mockery of applause at the scene which someone had created for her benefit in the vacant space opposite. There, a pair of dolls – one male and one female – had been carefully arranged on the seat like actors on a stage. They stood together in a half embrace, and he noticed that the woman’s left hand – the one that bore her wedding ring – had been broken off and lay on its own in front of the couple like a sinister prop from a horror film. Close to them on the seat was a hand-written note on expensive-looking paper: ‘Lilies are more fashionable,’ it said, but the flower that lay on the floor was not a lily but an iris.

It was immediately obvious to him that this was not a random or spontaneous killing but a carefully thought-out, and probably deeply personal, act of violence. Not for a second did he think that the murderer wished to be quickly identified, but there could be little doubt that a message could be traced in every object that he – or she – had been so careful to leave on and around the body.

It was a crime that had required considerable nerve.

‘Were the blinds up or down when she was found?’ he asked.

‘Both down, Sir. The boy says he pulled that one up as soon as he came in.’

Even so, Penrose thought, the scene must have taken a few minutes to arrange once the murder had been committed, and that would mean a greater risk of discovery than most people could 18

countenance. That was the point, though: in a symbolic killing such as this, they were not dealing with the fears and doubts of a normal person but with the arrogance and sense of invulnerability that invariably accompanied evil.

‘And is this exactly how she was found?’

‘Yes, or so he says. Forrester’s his name and he’s obviously frightened out of his wits. Maybrick’s had the waiting room cleared and taken him there with a cup of tea. Poor little sod – I’m not surprised he’s scared: I wouldn’t have liked to walk in on something like this at his age. Those dolls are enough to put the wind up anybody, and they gave him a right start – as much as finding the body.’

Penrose turned to look at them. The dolls were each about a foot high and elaborately clothed in fringed cloaks and old-fashioned head-dresses. Intrigued, he moved slightly closer, marvelling at the detail with which the faces had been modelled, appearing perversely life-like in a place of death. ‘They’re not just any dolls, Bill. I wonder if they were hers or if the killer brought them? They’re souvenirs from a play that’s on in the West End at the moment – Richard of Bordeaux; it’s a historical piece about Richard II. Those dolls have been made specially to look like the characters in it. And that piece of paper,’ he continued, pointing to the note on the seat, ‘that’s a quotation from it: “Lilies are more fashionable.” I think it’s the Queen who says it at some point.’

Fallowfield had never heard of the play, but it came as no surprise to him that his superior should know all about it. Apart from policing, theatre was Penrose’s great passion and he had an exhaustive knowledge of the subject as well as a few friends and relatives in the business. ‘I just thought the note was a funny sort of love letter,’ Fallowfield said.

‘I suppose in a way it is,’ Penrose replied. ‘The question is –

who’s it from? And is the sender going to be devastated when we break the news that Miss Simmons is dead?’

‘Or does he know already, you mean?’ Fallowfield finished the line of thought. ‘Bit of an obvious calling card, that, don’t you think, Sir? I mean, we’re going to find out if she was courting and 19

if it really is a boyfriend who did it, he might as well have left his address and saved us some time.’

‘Yes, I suppose so, but I don’t think for a minute it’s going to be as simple as all that. For a start, we’ve no guarantee that it is a love letter and, judging by everything else that’s been put here for a reason, I’d say there’s a much deeper meaning than some kind of clumsy romantic gesture. And apart from all this extra paraphernalia, don’t you think that hatpin’s an odd sort of weapon to choose? Not a very masculine sort of killing. It’s straight out of Agatha Christie: Murder on the Royal Highlander in fifteen easy chapters.’

‘Perhaps they all did it then, Sir. And there’s only nine chapters, by the way,’ Fallowfield said with unconscious irony, betraying an au fait-ness with current detective fiction that always surprised Penrose. He suddenly had an image of his down-to-earth sergeant rushing home from the Yard every night to devour the latest thriller by his fireside. Better still, perhaps he was actually writing one of his own. The thought of Miss Dorothy L. Sayers turning out to be a portly, moustached officer of the law in his early fifties was priceless, and he made a mental note to mention it to Josephine when he saw her tomorrow night.

Except now, of course, he would have to see her earlier than planned and there would be no joy in the meeting. For whatever reason, this girl’s murder was linked to her play and, no matter how innocent the explanation, he could not conceal that fact from her and neither would she want him to. He wished he could dilute the shock by promising the sort of tidy solution with which she had concluded her first detective story, but he couldn’t insult her intelligence in that way and wouldn’t get away with it if he tried.

He might long for the sort of luck that his fictional counterpart, Inspector Alan Grant, had enjoyed on his debut outing, but he and Josephine both knew that the reality of death was different, that murder brought with it a contagious messiness, a stain of grief, horror and disruption which refused to be contained within the pages of a novel.

He realised with embarrassment that Fallowfield had continued 20

the conversation beyond his erudite knowledge of the works of Mrs Christie, but he had no idea what the man had been saying.

The Sergeant, who was used to Penrose’s tendency to allow his mind to wander, patiently repeated himself. ‘I was just saying about the hatpin, Sir. Turns out that millinery was her job. So perhaps it was just convenient to stab her with that.’

Penrose glanced at the hat which lay scuffed and crumpled on the floor close to the body, a casualty of the violence that had taken place. ‘Yes, perhaps.’ He looked at the girl intently, trying to see beyond features which had been dulled by death, to imagine what she had been like just a few hours ago and pinpoint what would have struck him about her had he passed her in the street.

With any murder investigation, he insisted on giving the dead a dignity and individuality which he could not always assume they had been afforded in life. The old adage was true: there were only a few genuine reasons for murder – love, greed and revenge topped the list – but each victim was different, and each had the right to be treated as if theirs were a unique death. He moved over to the body, close enough to notice a bloodstain on her collar. The mark indicated a cut to the neck but it was so small that it would have been easy to miss it. The victim’s head was tipped to one side and slightly forward, and he could see that a small patch of hair had been shaved off at the back. It had been roughly done – obviously the murderer had been in too much of a hurry to worry about breaking the skin – and a few strands of hair still lay on the girl’s left shoulder. Such an odd thing to do, he thought – so insignificant, and yet somehow so humiliating.

The air in the compartment was heavy and oppressive, and Penrose was glad to step outside into the corridor. ‘Where is the luggage, by the way?’ he asked Fallowfield. ‘Was it being sent on or was she planning to take it with her?’

‘I’ve had it locked in one of the guards’ rooms, Sir. There were no instructions for it to be sent anywhere.’

‘Then someone must have been coming to meet her. You’d better go and see who you can find in that crowd, Sergeant. Whoever it is will be worried sick by now – unless they’ve got something to 21

hide, of course. We’ll leave the scene to the boys, but tell them I want photographs of the lot – every small detail, particularly that cut on her neck. And we’ll need to start working through the passenger list, so the sooner you can get hold of that and a list of staff on duty, the better. I’ll go and see if Forrester can tell us anything we don’t already know – I could do with a cup of Maybrick’s tea myself, now you mention it – but if you find that anyone’s been waiting for her, I want to be told straight away. Have you gone through her bag yet?’

‘I’ve had a quick look, Sir. A few papers and a couple of weeklies, and this was in the side pocket with her train ticket,’ said Fallowfield, holding out a magazine. ‘Look at page fourteen.’

Penrose did as he was told. When he saw the dated inscription, his heart sank: ‘To dear Elspeth, with thanks for an unforgettable trip. I hope we’ll meet again! Much love, Josephine (Gordon).’ So she had known her as well, and could have been one of the last people to see her alive. Suddenly he needed something a little stronger than Maybrick’s tea.

When he saw the closest thing he had to a witness sitting in the waiting room clutching a full cup of tea that must have been cold for some time, Penrose realised he was unlikely to hear anything of great use. Fallowfield had been accurate in his assessment of Forrester’s fear, and it was hardly surprising. Most people were fortunate enough to reach a comfortable middle age before an awareness of the transience of life began to weigh heavily on them, but that was a luxury which had been denied to his own generation and he was all too experienced in recognising the moment when someone first came face to face with his own mortality.

For Penrose, that moment had come before he really had a chance to find anything out about himself, to know who he might have become if the world had turned out differently. He could still remember that week in early September – a month or so short of his return to Cambridge for the final year of his medical degree – when the war had begun, but before it had gathered any real momentum.

In Cornwall it had been intensely hot for the time of year, and he 22

was making the most of his last days at home. The village had decided to continue as planned with the Harvest Festival in defiance of the stresses and strains of war, so he had joined the rest of the family in a walk to the cliff-top church on the edge of his grand-father’s estate to listen while his uncle, the rector of the parish, thanked God for a magnificent harvest and the unbroken weather which had allowed it to be gathered in.

As soon as he saw the great Union Jack which had replaced the usual hanging at the front of the pulpit, Penrose realised that God’s representative – a sanctimonious bigot at the best of times, even if he was family – had changed his agenda. After preaching a terrifying sermon on the glories of battle, sanctifying maiming, slaughter and bloodshed with the blessing of a higher authority, the rector had urged all the young men to join the army, to sate the country’s appetite for soldiers who would defend the justice of the war. What he had failed to mention was that it was a cause for which thousands of them would be asked to give their lives, but his harvest sermon had done the trick: by the end of the year, every eligible man in the village had signed up to Kitchener’s new army, an exodus which was replicated all over the country, swelling the ranks by nearly a million in the space of just four months. Some expected garrison service at home while the real soldiers went off to do the real soldiering; most believed the papers when they said it would be a short war, over by Christmas at the outside. All had been wrong, and he was still sickened to the stomach when he thought of that call from the altar for young men to offer themselves for the glory of God and eight shillings and nine pence a week.

In his darker moments, when a connection to life was harder to find, he wondered if that was perhaps what kept him in this job –

not an abstract desire for justice or a belief that he could do anything to stem the evil which ran inherently through some men’s hearts, but a desperate need to contain the sense of guilt which he had carried since those days. Sometimes it worked, and the natural course of an investigation in which the humanity of an individual was paramount dispelled the sense of waste that came from seeing death on such a massive scale – but those moments were rare, and 23

the anger that had been a part of him since the war only seemed to grow deeper with time.

‘Let’s go back to before you found Miss Simmons in the compartment,’ he said to the boy gently.

‘Is that her name, then?’

‘Yes, she was called Elspeth. What were you doing in that carriage?’

‘I was only in there to make sure it was clean and tidy, ready for the next journey.’

‘But that wasn’t your job, was it? You’re a waiter, not a porter.’

Tommy took one look at the Inspector’s face and knew instantly that it would be pointless to string him along by pretending any great diligence in his work. ‘There was this girl, see? In the restaurant car – she kept giving me the eye, so I asked one of the other blokes if I could have a go at checking some carriages because I knew she’d be there somewhere. I thought I could catch her before she got off and see if she fancied a bite to eat later on. There wasn’t any harm in it,’ he finished defiantly.

‘And did you?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Catch her before she left the train.’

‘I did, as it happens. I was supposed to meet her outside the sta -

tion when I knocked off. I expect she’s given up by now,’ Tommy said, with a wistful glance in the direction of the door.

‘Does this girl have a name?’

‘Ivy. I don’t know what her other name is. We hadn’t got that far.’

‘You’re sure you didn’t really go looking for Miss Simmons in that compartment?’

Penrose’s voice had taken on a harder edge and it suddenly dawned on Tommy that his quest for a date might have brought him a little more trouble than he’d bargained for. ‘You don’t think it was me, do you?’ he cried in horror. ‘I know I flirted with her in the restaurant, but I was only being friendly and I’m like that with everyone. I’d never hurt a girl and anyway, I thought she was already off the train – I saw her on the platform while I was talking to Ivy.’

24

‘All right, calm down.’ Penrose sent Maybrick out to see if the elusive Ivy had anything better to do than hang around outside a railway station waiting for her meal ticket, then turned his attention back to Tommy. ‘No, actually I don’t think you had anything to do with it, but I need you to be honest with me about exactly what you saw and when. You say you noticed Miss Simmons on the platform, but surely there were a lot of people milling around?

What made her stand out?’

‘Her hat for a start,’ Tommy replied. ‘You couldn’t miss that.

And her luggage – she had loads of it. I remember being glad that I didn’t have to unload that lot.’ He paused for a moment, then fell back on the criteria that made most sense in his world. ‘She wasn’t a bad-looking girl, either. Not in the same class as Ivy, obviously, but you wouldn’t mind being seen walking out with her.’

‘And how long after seeing Miss Simmons on the platform did you find her body?’

‘I don’t know – about ten or fifteen minutes, I suppose. I caught up with Ivy just as she was about to get off the train – I think she’d been hanging about, hoping I’d come and find her – and we talked just outside the carriage door for a few minutes. That’s when I noticed the girl. She was a bit further down the platform, talking to a couple of other women. Then I saw Mr Folkard – he’s the boss

– coming towards me, so I had to fix something up quick with Ivy and scarper before he asked me what I was doing. It only took me a few minutes to look in on the other compartments to make sure nothing had been left behind – and then I got to that one.’

‘Did you notice anybody hanging about?’

‘I didn’t see anybody, no.’

‘But?’

‘Well, when I got to that compartment, the “Do Not Disturb”

notice was hanging on the door so I just knocked and told them to hurry up, then I went on to the next one.’

‘How did you know there was someone in there? Wasn’t it more likely that the notice had just been left on the door?’

‘I could hear someone moving about.’ Tommy looked down, embarrassed. ‘I thought they were having a bit of . . . well, you 25

know. So I left them to get themselves sorted out and came back a couple of minutes later, after I’d heard someone shut the door and leave.’

‘Exactly what did you hear inside the compartment?’

‘Just a bit of shuffling.’ He looked up at Penrose, suddenly more aggressive. ‘You don’t think I’d have left her if I’d known what was going on, do you? How was I supposed to guess that there was a bleeding psychopath on board?’

So that was why the boy was so defensive. It wasn’t just shock at discovering a body that had so affected him, but the realisation of how close he had come to the murder and a sense of guilt at having failed to stop it. Penrose continued more gently.

‘What did you see when you first went into the compartment?’

‘It was nearly dark because the blinds were down, but I could see someone was still in there. I thought they must be asleep, so I went over and lifted the blind at the window. When I turned round, I saw the girl, and some funny dolls on the other seat.’

‘How long were you in there?’

‘It can only have been a minute or two but it felt like ages. I wouldn’t have stayed that long but I suddenly thought – what if whoever did it was still about? Then that flower fell off the seat and I just legged it. It sounds stupid, I know, but I couldn’t bear it any longer.’

‘Did you touch anything?’

‘Only the blind when I first went in. It was too dark to tidy up, you see.’

‘And the women Miss Simmons was talking to – did you recognise them from the train?’

‘One of them, the taller one with the dark hair and the smart suit. She’d been on since Edinburgh and they had lunch together in the restaurant car. Spent a lot of time talking, they did.’

‘So they seemed to know each other well?’

‘I don’t know about that, but they were definitely getting on like a house on fire.’

‘What about the other woman?’

‘I don’t think I’d seen her before, but there are a lot of meals 26

served on that journey – I might not have noticed. But she certainly wasn’t eating with the other two.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Nice-looking, I suppose, for her age – she must have been in her forties. Long hair, but that’s about all I remember.’

Penrose had heard enough to confirm that Elspeth’s companions matched the signatures in her magazine. ‘Were they still with Miss Simmons when she got back on the train?’ he asked, trying to keep the sinking feeling out of his voice.

‘I told you – I don’t know. They’d all disappeared by the time I looked again and I just assumed they’d left. I didn’t see anybody get back on, but you know what it’s like when there’s people getting off and luggage everywhere – it’s far too busy to keep an eye on everything that’s going on.’

‘All right, we’ll let it go now but it’s vital that you don’t tell anyone what you saw in the train – do you understand?’ he asked sternly, without any real hope of his words being heeded. The boy was bound to talk to someone because, as Penrose knew from his own experience, there was nothing worse than the twisted intimacy of being the first to look upon a dead body. The loneliness of it was unbearable.

Maybrick re-entered the room and gave a brief nod. ‘Well Tommy,’ Penrose said, ‘it looks like your Ivy might be keener than you thought. She’s confirmed what you’ve told us, so tell the Constable where we can get hold of you if we need to and you can be on your way. Better not keep the girl waiting any longer but remember what I said – no details to anyone.’

‘To be honest, I haven’t really got the stomach for courting now,’ Tommy said despondently as Maybrick handed him a pencil to write down his address, ‘but I suppose I shouldn’t disappoint her.’

As Penrose left the waiting room to look for his sergeant, he saw Fallowfield already approaching and knew instantly that the man at his side had come to King’s Cross to meet Elspeth Simmons. Her father, he guessed, or perhaps an uncle – too old, in any case, to be 27

a boyfriend. But whatever connection he had had to the girl, the news of her death seemed to have devastated him: his walk, his shoulders, the constant movement of his hands and the blank expression on his face – all signalled the stubborn disbelief of the violently bereaved.

‘This is Frank Simmons, Sir,’ said Fallowfield. ‘He’s Miss Simmons’s uncle.’

Archie held out his hand, knowing from experience that the habitual formalities of everyday life could, in their very familiarity, act as a small but reassuring prop to those whose world had just been snatched from under them. ‘Detective Inspector Penrose,’ he said, and then simply, ‘I’m so very sorry.’

The man nodded in acknowledgement. ‘It’s all my fault, you see,’ he said, in response to an accusation which came not from the policemen but from a voice inside his head. ‘I was so late to meet her. If only I’d just stayed where I was, she’d be all right now.’

Penrose let him talk, making whatever confession he thought necessary, until he had been led gently to a seat in the waiting room. ‘This is going to be difficult for you, I know, but it’s important that I ask you some questions now about Elspeth and any arrangements that had been made with her for this evening. What did you mean when you said you should have stayed where you were?’

Simmons rubbed his forehead with his fingers, as if the pressure would help him to discipline his thoughts. ‘I came to meet her in the van like I always do,’ he began, ‘but when I got here one of the guards told me that the train was late and wouldn’t get in for an hour and a half or so. I often have to wait and usually I just kick my heels on the platform or have a cup of tea round the corner, but today I hadn’t finished my round and I thought an hour would give me just about enough time to drop off the last order and still be back here to meet Elspeth. That way, we could go straight home and there’d be plenty of room in the back for the new stock she was bringing down. There’s always hell to pay with Betty – that’s my wife – if anything gets squashed.’

28

By now, Penrose was lagging some way behind in the conversation. ‘What were you delivering?’ he asked.

‘Tea mostly, and coffee, but the Coventry Street shop needed some new equipment and that’s what was taking up the room.’ As the Inspector continued to look questioningly at him, he expanded a little on his explanation. ‘I’m a driver for Lyons. I’ve been with them ever since I left the regiment. It’s not the most exciting of jobs, but you get to know your way around. That’s why I was sure that a few short cuts would get me there and back in no time, but something had gone on in Judd Street. I was stuck there for ages before I could get through and make the delivery, and then I couldn’t find anywhere to park at the station. By the time I got back to the platform, you lot were crawling all over the place and I knew something had happened.’

Fallowfield opened his mouth to speak but Penrose, anticipating what he was going to say, shook his head. There would be a time to ask Frank Simmons to prove that he was away from King’s Cross when the train had pulled in, but this was not it; all the life had already been kicked out of him and there was worse still to come. Saving any further questioning for the next day, he concentrated solely on what could not be avoided. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to identify Elspeth’s body,’ he said quietly. ‘Her next of kin must be told, of course. Is that her parents?’

‘Yes. Well, her mother at any rate – that’s my sister-in-law. My brother died last year. Elspeth was adopted, though. They couldn’t have kids of their own so she meant everything to them – to all of us, really. I don’t know how Alice would have got through these last few months if it hadn’t been for her. Elspeth kept her smiling.’

As the reality of his loss came home to him, Simmons finally lost the self-control to which he had been clinging so doggedly. ‘How am I ever going to face Alice knowing that I’ve taken that away from her?’

Acknowledging the question but realising there was no answer he could give, Penrose said nothing. Instead, he led Simmons gently from the waiting room towards his niece’s body, and his worst fears.

29

Three

When Josephine awoke next morning, it had just gone nine and St Martin’s Lane was in full swing. It was Saturday and, even at this early hour, an air of obligatory enjoyment had settled on the weekend inhabitants of the West End. From her window at Number 66, she looked south towards Trafalgar Square, marvelling as she did so at the multitude of human dramas which were unfolding in the street below – far more than could possibly be played out each night in the more artificial realms of London’s theatre-land.

She shifted her gaze across the narrow street to the building opposite, and wondered how long it would be before Elspeth looked her up at stage door as she had promised. The New Theatre, where Richard of Bordeaux was about to enter its last week, sat imposingly between the Salisbury and the Westminster County Court, the daily necessities of ale and justice and make-believe found in companionable proximity to one another. To say it was the finest theatre in London was as pointless as electing a best church – they all served different creeds, and one was as good as another – but it was magnificent, even to an eye less partial than hers. Built only as an afterthought on a leftover plot of land that backed onto Wyndham’s, to which it was still linked by a footbridge, the New was nevertheless a splendid example of clas-sical design, its Portland stone facade, bold ornamentation and giant pilasters giving a dignity and permanence to the elusive trick of entertaining the public.

Number 66 St Martin’s Lane would be Josephine’s home for the next few days, as it often was when she visited London. It had 31

more than its convenience for the theatre to recommend it: once the workshop in which Thomas Chippendale had created understated furniture for an enthusiastic market, it was now home to another name famous for simplicity and restraint. The Motleys were two talented sisters who had revolutionised theatre design and contributed to some of the greatest successes the West End had seen in recent years. Josephine was the first to admit that the appeal of her own play lay as much in the romance of their costumes and sets as it did in her dialogue and, over the last eighteen months, the three women had become firm friends. She was astonished at how naturally she had found herself slipping into the Motleys’ cheerful domestic stage set, and arriving at Number 66

always felt like coming home.

As thoughts of breakfast drew her from her room into the large central studio, she was amused to find that the space was even more chaotic than usual. Exhausted from her journey, she had retired before her hosts arrived home and slept the sleep of the dead, utterly oblivious to the furious burst of activity which had clearly continued long into the night. The walls were now covered in deft costume sketches for a new Hamlet which she knew was due to go into production later in the year and, even at this early stage, it was obvious that the Motleys had surpassed themselves.

The designs were divided into contrasting sections, each extrava-gantly styled in a picture of medieval Denmark which could not have been further from the Depression-worn shapes of the current age, and she was instantly captivated by their ingenuity. On the floor, work had already begun on materials for the costumes: bits of scenery canvas covered in dye and metallic pigments were strewn across the floor, punctuated by squares of thick felt which had been heavily treated with kitchen soap and paint to look uncannily like leather.

She was pleased to see that the architect of this glorious disorder was, as usual, on the telephone and centre-stage in her own cre-ation. Veronique Motley – or Ronnie, as she was more often called

– had inherited her mother’s beauty and her father’s disregard for convention. Reclining on a peacock-blue chaise-longue which the 32

sisters had dyed themselves, and covered by an enormous bearskin cloak as if in deference to the cold Scandinavian climate in which she had spent the night, Ronnie was in full flight.

‘My dear, we’re only just recovering from the shame,’ she purred into the handset. ‘We should have known from the minute they brought the monkey in that the whole production was going to be a fiasco from start to finish. The creature bit everybody at the dress rehearsal and we were all absolutely terrified. Hephzibar threw out her arms in such a fright that her stitching gave up and we had to sew her back in. She still isn’t at all herself. And don’t even ask about the cost – we’d spent four thousand pounds before the curtain went up, and still the whole thing looked more like the Trocadero on a Friday night. Never mind the Dream, it was our bloody nightmare!’

Catching Josephine’s bemused expression, she made a face of studied ennui and hurriedly brought the call to an end. ‘Anyway, dear, I must go. We’re seeing Johnny soon and you know what he’s like – he’ll want to go straight to Ophelia’s death-scene and we haven’t even got a costume for the poor girl to live in yet.’

‘Were the Crummles in town for the gala week, then?’ Josephine asked wryly as Ronnie replaced the receiver and picked her way through mounds of upholstery cloth and calico to wrap her friend in a hug.

‘Something like that,’ Ronnie said, laughing and leading her over to the breakfast table. ‘It is lovely to see you, you know. Lettice and I were saying only the other day that you’ve spent too long up in dry old Inverness this time.’

Smiling, Josephine heaped sugar into her coffee. ‘It’s good to be here,’ she said. ‘At least in London I don’t feel I need to apologise constantly for having a hit. The English are much more generous-minded than the Scots.’

‘Oh, all small towns are the same, dear. It doesn’t really bother you, does it?’

‘Honestly? Yes, I suppose it does a little. It’s all this “grocer’s daughter made good” business, as if I’ve no right to a life down here with different friends and a different outlook. For them, it’ll always be barrow first and pen second.’

33

‘Hang the lot of them, then. Any more trouble and Lettice and I will come and sort them out. They won’t know what’s hit them.’

‘Don’t make rash promises – I haven’t told you about the woman who runs the post office yet.’

‘Talking of formidable women,’ Ronnie said, still laughing, ‘I feel I should warn you that the Snipe is in a foul temper today and not exactly on her best form. We used the advance from Hamlet to treat her to a new gas cooker because she’s always complaining that she misses her old Eagle, but she hasn’t quite taken control of the regulo yet. God knows what we’ll get for breakfast.’

A curse of confirmation emanated from the small back room that the Motleys had transformed into a makeshift kitchen and the door crashed open to reveal a stout woman of indeterminate age who had obviously already used up what little patience she allowed herself each day. Employment in a household which thrived on colour and changing fashions had cut no ice with Mrs Snipe: her uniform

– black alpaca dress, bibbed apron, worsted stockings and house slippers – was as familiar up and down the country as that of a policeman or nurse and, apart from the length of her skirt, she could easily have been serving toast to a Victorian household.

‘If you were hoping for kidneys, you can forget it,’ Mrs Snipe announced in what would, at any normal volume, have been a west country burr. ‘It’s cockled ’em with the heat. I expect you wanted fish, Miss Josephine, but the fact is there isn’t any, so it’ll have to be bacon and eggs, and you’ll be lucky to get those by the time that thing’s finished with ’em.’

Josephine was not easily intimidated, but there was something about Dora Snipe which turned the normal guest and housekeeper relationship on its head, so she smiled and nodded and accepted what was on offer. Her familiarity with Number 66 had not made her any less wary of the Motleys’ cook. The sisters had never known life without her, yet Mrs Snipe had remained an enigma throughout the thirty-odd years that she had been with the family, first in Cornwall and now in London, where she ‘did’ for Ronnie and Lettice and was housekeeper to their cousin, Archie, to whom she was devoted. As she banged a rack of perfectly browned toast 34

down on the table and returned to the kitchen to beat her new arrival into submission, the front door slammed and there was a squeal of joy from the hall. ‘Darling, how absolutely gorgeous to see you! We’ve been so looking forward to your visit, and don’t you look well!’

Josephine smiled as Lettice blew into the room towards her, dragging in her wake her long-suffering fiancé, George, and four large carrier bags. ‘Trust you to bring a mystery with you,’ Lettice said cryptically as she hugged her friend and threw the morning paper onto a chair, where it soon disappeared under a pile of shopping. ‘Life’s always so much more exciting when you’re south of the border. I’m sorry we weren’t here to welcome you properly this morning, but it’s the Selfridges shoe sale today and you have to get there early if you’re to stand any chance of finding a pair.’

‘Don’t they sell them in pairs, then?’ Josephine asked, exchanging an amused and sympathetic wink with George as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

‘Oh no, dear, that would take all the fun out of it,’ said Ronnie, who was born with her tongue in her cheek. ‘It’s a shilling a shoe but you’re not so much paying for footwear as for the chance to spend a morning as some sort of modern-day Cinderella.’

‘Except that this Prince Charming usually ends up having to carry home enough leather for the entire pantomime,’ George chipped in good-naturedly.

As always, Lettice took the teasing with good grace and found refuge in her breakfast. Buttering her toast thickly on both sides but, with uncharacteristic self-denial, confining the Silver Shred to the top, she looked cheerfully at her sister. ‘You’ll be smirking on the other side of that ravishing face of yours when Lydia’s got through her third pair of brogues in the first week. You know how clumsy she can be if she has to dance.’ Turning to Josephine, she added: ‘We called in at the theatre to pick up the mail. A letter each for Ronnie and I, but that whole bag is yours.’

Josephine groaned and walked over to the sack of correspondence that Lettice had jabbed at with her toast. ‘You know, I hardly have to read them these days,’ she said, taking a handful of 35

letters off the top of the pile. ‘I can tell from the handwriting on the envelope which category they’re going to fall into: complimen-tary and undemanding – they’re the ones I always answer; pedantic and smug – usually with suggestions as to how I might strive for greater historical accuracy next time; and worst of all, the invita-tions – they’re what I use to save on coal. God help me when the Mary Stuart brigade springs into action.’

‘How is the casting going for Queen of Scots?’ Ronnie asked.

‘Have they found Lydia her Bothwell yet?’

‘No. Lydia and I both think Lewis Fleming would be perfect, but I gather there’s another pretty face on the horizon whom Johnny would prefer,’ Josephine replied, ‘and we all know what that means. Swinburne, his name is, but the only thing I know about him is that he’s made quite an impression at Wyndham’s recently.

Anyway, that’s one of the things on the agenda this afternoon.

Johnny’s asked Fleming to stand in as Richard for the matinee so we can go over and thrash it all out with Aubrey. After all, it’s his money. They’re hoping to open in June, but now that Johnny’s got it into his head to try for a film of Richard, it’s all a bit up in the air. And I don’t know how he thinks he’s going to direct Queen of Scots, work on a film and tour as well. Even our young meteor can’t be in three places at once.’

‘He told me the other day that he was hoping to get out of the tour by persuading Aubrey to send Fleming instead,’ said George who, as an actor himself and the Motleys’ self-appointed manager, was no stranger to dealing with egos considerably more fragile than his own, and with characters much less placid and kindly.

‘But there isn’t a chance in hell that he’s going to get out of that contract: Bordeaux in the provinces is a licence to print money but, just for once, Johnny’s underestimated the value of his name on the bill. The public recognises only one Richard and it wants the real thing, not the reluctant Pretender.’

‘You’re getting your historical dramas a bit muddled, darling,’

said Lettice. ‘But it sounds like Josephine’s in for a ghastly afternoon. All those boys do when they get together is bitch and squab-ble and talk about money.’

36

‘Trust me – I’m more than a match for them with the bitching and squabbling as long as we get to the money eventually,’

Josephine laughed. ‘By the way, what did you mean about my bringing a mystery with me?’

‘Oh, there was some nasty business at the railway station last night,’ said Lettice, whose grasp of real-life tragedy was never quite as acute as her ability to bring it to the fore on stage. ‘The papers are beautifully melodramatic about it this morning, but we don’t want that to ruin our breakfast. What I’m dying to know,’ she continued, casting a sly glance at Ronnie, ‘is what you thought of Lydia’s new find. You’re always such a marvellous judge of character, and I expect she came to meet you? The two of them are practically inseparable at the moment – we’ve never seen anything like it. I gave it three weeks before Lydia started sniffing round somewhere else and Ronnie said a fortnight. George, bless him, reckoned a couple of months but men have no idea how gloriously fickle we can be when we’re bored. Anyway, as far as we can make out, we’re all wrong: she doesn’t seem to have even thought about anyone else. At times I’d have said she was almost happy!’

Josephine agreed. ‘I wasn’t with them for very long, but Lydia did seem happy. And it wasn’t that sickly new-love happiness, either. I have to admit, coming down on the train I was dreading that – it’s always so embarrassing when you’re stuck in the middle of it. It was contentment as much as happiness and I’ve never seen that in Lydia before – she’s always been too restless.’

‘And Marta?’ Lettice asked again, determined to have her verdict.

‘Well, she’s another beauty, certainly. And she seems very nice,’

she finished, conscious of delivering the sort of anti-climax which would never stand up to the Motleys’ relentless gaze.

‘Nice? What sort of word is that for a writer?’ demanded Ronnie indignantly. ‘We know she’s nice, we can see that for ourselves, but we rely on you for something a little more sophisticated. What do those big dark eyes tell you?’

‘That she’s got big dark eyes,’ Josephine said, with a native 37

matter-of-factness that even the Motleys could not penetrate.

‘You surely don’t believe all that nonsense about reading character in the face, do you? I only ever use that when I’ve got myself into a bit of a hole with the plot and need to move things along.

To be honest, she really didn’t say very much at all and that in itself is a good thing, if you want my opinion. But what she did say seemed awfully – well, nice.’

‘Talking of the strong but silent type, our dear cousin telephoned at the crack of dawn to make sure you were all right and to say he was coming over this morning,’ said Ronnie, realising that any further probing would get her nowhere. ‘He sounded a bit out of sorts, actually. When I told him that Lettice and I hadn’t thought for one moment that he’d be able to wait until dinner to see you, he quite snapped my head off. That’s the trouble with policemen: they’ve got no sense of humour.’

In perfectly timed acknowledgement of Ronnie’s observation, there was an impatient knocking at the front door. ‘I expect that’ll be him now,’ she said, as Mrs Snipe glided past to admit the caller with all the momentum of a galleon in full sail. ‘We’d better stop having such a nice time or he’ll arrest the lot of us.’

When the housekeeper returned, the man who followed her did seem distinctly at odds with merriment. Certainly, he bore scant resemblance to the Archie Penrose who, in spite of his cousin’s unjust reproach, usually left his job firmly behind when he came to call on the Motleys and blended beautifully into the chic eccentric-ity of their studio.

‘Good God, Archie, you look absolutely awful,’ said Ronnie, who excelled at speaking her mind, while Lettice responded with the greatest solace she knew: ‘Is Mrs Snipe getting you something to eat?’ she asked, pushing the toast rack, now a shadow of its former self, towards the empty place at the breakfast table.

Josephine shared the Motleys’ concern at Archie’s mood, but not their surprise. During a friendship that had spanned almost twenty years, she had come to realise that there were two sides to this complex individual: the handsome, gregarious entertainer, whose warmth and intelligence made people from all walks of life 38

instantly comfortable in his company and who was genuinely interested in everyone he met; and the detached, serious observer, whose liking for his fellow man did not blind him to the baser motivations of the human mind or to the pain which underpinned more relationships than most people cared to acknowledge. While she enjoyed and admired the former, Josephine’s emotional affinities were instinctively towards the latter and, although Archie protested that these were qualities which Scotland Yard demanded of him, the truth of the matter was that in his work he found a natural outlet for a view of the world which had already taken root in his soul.

Penrose waved away all offers of food but gratefully accepted a cup of coffee. ‘I need to talk to Josephine,’ he said, looking at her for the first time. ‘In private, if you don’t mind.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about us – we only live here,’ muttered Ronnie as Lettice poked her hard in the shoulder and sent George to gather up the shoes.

‘Just ignore her, darling, we’ve got to go out anyway. Lydia needs a few alterations done in time for this afternoon. In spite of the plague, it would appear that Anne of Bohemia is putting on weight.

Some people just have no self-discipline when it comes to food.’

Right on cue, Mrs Snipe reappeared and, ignoring Archie’s protestations, placed in front of him a plateful of perfectly cooked kidneys and something that looked suspiciously like a kipper. As the Motleys bustled round, fetching coats and scarves and the various bits of costume that they needed for the afternoon, Josephine looked questioningly at Archie. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked quietly.

‘In a minute,’ he said, waiting for the sisters to leave. She carried on opening her mail, glad to have something to do, but her attention kept straying back to Archie. She watched as he ran his fingers idly up and down the handle of his coffee cup, lost in his own thoughts and, for a moment, the gesture took her back to the summer of 1919, when they had met for the first time after the war and his face had expressed the same concentrated sadness as it did now. By that time, the initial bond between them – her lover and Archie’s closest friend – had been dead for almost three years, 39

killed helping another officer at the Somme, and Archie had finally come to see her in Scotland. She would never forget the pain in his voice as he described to her how, in the midst of that senseless slaughter, all for the sake of a few yards of mud, Jack Mackenzie, a young private from the 2nd Gordon Highlanders, had responded to a cry from no man’s land. There, another soldier, who had lain motionless near the German wire for nigh on two days and was believed by the British troops to be beyond all aid, had, in defiance of nature, regained consciousness and called for help. Following all the instincts of his training – which was medical, not military –

Jack had left his trench and walked the short distance to where the man lay. Armed only with a handkerchief, which he waved in the direction of the higher ground held by the enemy, he arrived unscathed and was allowed to dress the wounds as best he could, giving the soldier a drink and reassurance that a stretcher party would be sent to gather him safely in under the cover of darkness.

His mission accomplished, Jack turned to go back to his own trench and was shot in the back by a German sniper before he had taken half a dozen steps.

They said he had died instantly, but of course they always said that and she had no way of knowing if it was the truth or if there were things she had never been told which explained why Archie had avoided her for so long, even though he knew she was desperate to hear about Jack’s death from someone who had cared about him. She didn’t blame Archie, but he had failed her: in dealing with his own grief for Jack, he had been unable to face hers and, although their friendship had lasted, there remained – on both sides – a sense of regret. Now, the girl she had been prior to Jack’s death was almost unrecognisable to her: it was hard to believe herself capable of that kind of love.

After Jack was killed, and having seen such tragedies repeated over and over again, Archie gave up all hope of continuing on the path he had once chosen for himself – medicine was no career for someone who had lost faith in his ability to outplay death. But if he was no longer surprised when death arrived ahead of its time, he never shook off a sense of anger at its indifference – and that 40

had proved an excellent foundation for the career to which he eventually turned.

Now, Archie’s inability to do anything about the inherent cruelty of the world seemed temporarily to exclude everything else from his life, and Josephine was relieved when the girls were finally ready to go out and leave them in peace to talk.

‘You two take as long as you like,’ Lettice reiterated, absent-mindedly picking up the last slice of toast. ‘We’ll be at the theatre all afternoon and dinner’s booked for six-thirty, so don’t be late. I do so hate to have to rush dessert.’

‘And perhaps you’ll have cheered up by then.’ Ronnie’s parting shot was followed by the slamming of the front door, then all was quiet.

‘I love them dearly, but it’s so nice when it stops,’ Josephine said.

‘This isn’t a social call, is it?’

‘I wish it were, but I’m afraid it’s about what happened at King’s Cross last night. Have you seen the papers yet this morning?’

‘No. Lettice mentioned that something had gone on at the station, but she wasn’t very specific. What’s it got to do with me?’

‘You signed an autograph for a young woman yesterday. How well did you know her?’

At his use of the past tense, Josephine’s heart went cold. ‘Hardly at all. She recognised me on the train coming down and we had lunch together. She loves the theatre and wanted to know all about Richard, so we spent most of the time talking about that. I introduced her to Lydia when we got here and invited her to come and find me at the theatre if she wanted to, and that was that. Why?

What’s happened to her?’

Archie saw no point in delivering anything but the simple truth.

‘She’s been killed,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry there’s no gentler way of telling you, but it wasn’t an accident and it seems that you and Lydia were among the last people to see her alive.’

‘You mean she was murdered? Who on earth would want to hurt her?’

‘We don’t know yet, but I have to ask you this: how did you part?’

41

Josephine stared at him in disbelief. ‘We just said goodbye on the platform. She was so excited at meeting Lydia that she’d left her bag on the train and had to go back for it.’

‘You never saw her after that?’

‘No. The train was late getting in, so we were in a hurry. Marta

– that’s Lydia’s lover – was waiting for us outside with a taxi and Lydia had to get to the theatre. I left them at stage door and came straight here.’

‘And you didn’t go out again?’

‘Of course not – I was exhausted. What am I supposed to have done, Archie? Stalked the poor girl and strangled her with my scarf? For God’s sake, I thought I was the one with the vivid imagination.’ Archie remained silent as Josephine got up and walked to the window. ‘How did she die, or as a suspect aren’t I allowed to know?’ she asked sarcastically.

‘She was stabbed in the compartment of the train,’ he replied, ignoring the bait. ‘It must have happened quite soon after you left her.’

‘If only I had gone after her,’ she said, her anger disappearing as suddenly as it had come.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She dropped the feather from her hat on the platform and I wanted to give it back to her, but Lydia was late and there wasn’t time.’

‘You couldn’t have saved her,’ he said, gently. ‘Whoever did this was hell-bent on violence, so thank God you didn’t get in the way.’

Josephine’s face was still turned to the window, but he could tell from her voice that any counsel against self-reproach was futile. ‘You know, just an hour ago I was looking across at the theatre, half expecting to see her in the queue already,’ she said, sadly. ‘And I found myself rather looking forward to it. It’s funny, isn’t it, how quickly some people make an impression on you?

Yesterday was the first time I’d ever set eyes on the girl, but I could probably tell you more about her than people I’ve known for years. The important stuff, anyway – what she was like, what she cared about.’

42

‘And what was she like?’

‘She was that quiet sort which always gets overlooked. I don’t mean quiet in the literal sense, but most people would probably have thought her quite inconsequential. If she were at a party, she’d be the person you spoke to until you found someone more important. I think she’d got so used to people looking past her that she didn’t even notice any more. She certainly didn’t seem to mind, because there wasn’t an ounce of self-pity about her.’

‘Not an obvious murder victim, then. She doesn’t sound the sort to inspire that sort of extreme emotion.’

‘No, not a victim in any sense of the word. It’s a cliché, but she made the best of what life dealt her, and that somehow makes all this even worse. I can’t help feeling that when you’ve worked hard to come to terms with how you entered the world, you ought to have a bit more say over how you leave it – but I don’t have to tell you that. You know she was adopted, I suppose?’

‘Yes, we spoke to her uncle. He came to the station to meet her.’

‘Poor man. From what she said, they were very close.’

‘What else did she tell you about herself?’

‘Well, her adoptive parents are from Berwick-upon-Tweed –

that’s where she got on the train – but her father died quite recently. She worked with her mother – I expect you’ll have found the hats they made by now. It wasn’t unusual for her to be coming to London: her aunt and uncle have a shop here and she always brings the new season’s stock down and helps out a bit. The uncle

– Fred, I think his name is, or Frank?’

‘Frank – he’s a driver for Lyons.’

‘Frank, yes – he loves theatre as well, so when she was here they spent a lot of time together. Although I suppose that must have changed now that she’d met her young man.’

‘So she was definitely seeing someone? Did she mention his name?’

‘No, I don’t think she did. She just blushed a lot. Romance was new to her, you see, and it goes back to what I said about her not being used to attention. She seemed quite astonished that anyone should want to pick her out, almost as if she didn’t deserve it. The 43

only thing I can tell you about him is that he works in theatre. She said he was taking her to see Richard tonight and we laughed about it being a busman’s holiday.’

No matter how hard he tried to keep an open mind, everything kept coming back to that play. ‘Isn’t this all a bit coincidental?’ he asked. He tried to choose his next words carefully so as not to alarm her, but there was a limit to how far he could skirt around the issue. ‘Your biggest fan is on the same train and just happens to recognise you. And then she’s killed.’

‘It was theatre in general she loved, not just me. I know I’m not exactly a household face, but anyone who read as much about the stage as Elspeth did is bound to have seen a picture somewhere,’

said Josephine impatiently, suddenly conscious that this was the first time she had been able to bring herself to use the dead girl’s name. ‘Anyway,’ she continued wryly, ‘the only people who don’t believe in coincidence are the ones who read detective novels – and policemen. These things happen, Archie, even if we’re not supposed to use them in books.’

Archie nodded and conceded defeat as he often did with Josephine, although his mind was still terribly uneasy about the relevance of her play to the murder and her close proximity to what had taken place. He looked at his watch, wondering exactly how much he should tell her about the scene which had been created to mark Elspeth’s death. ‘It’s time I went. I’m seeing the pathologist in twenty minutes, then I’ll have to visit the family to see what else they can tell me. Perhaps they can shed some light on the boyfriend. There’s one last thing before I go, though: those souvenir dolls from the play – did Elspeth have any with her?’

‘There could have been something in her bag without my noticing. I doubt it, though, because most of the contents ended up on the floor at one point. Hideous things – I can’t imagine why anybody would want one, but it’s the sort of thing she might have owned and she had an awful lot of other luggage. Why on earth do you want to know?’ He said nothing, but looked more preoccupied than ever. ‘What’s the matter, Archie?’ asked Josephine, puzzled to see her own sadness reflected in someone who had no 44

personal connection with the events he was now investigating.

‘You’re no stranger to death. You’ve seen what people can do to each other time and again. Of course you can’t let yourself become immune to it, but I’ve never known you to feel like this about a stranger.’

‘That’s the trouble. It’s not a stranger I’m worried about. I can’t tell you the details but, from the way the body was left, I have to assume a connection to Richard of Bordeaux,’ Archie said, deciding that, no matter how unpalatable, honesty was his best option.

‘Now, that could simply be because the victim was obsessed with the play; it could be that the boyfriend did it in a fit of jealousy and

– one of your coincidences – he just happens to work in the theatre. On the other hand, because Elspeth doesn’t seem the type to have enemies, it could be that someone wants to hurt you, either by damaging your reputation or, God forbid, by actually harming you.’

The implications of what Archie was saying were not lost on Josephine, although he might have guessed that she would interpret them differently: the danger which he was trying to warn her against was all but lost in her sorrow for Elspeth. ‘So, one way or another, she died because of me,’ she said.

It was not a question but Archie protested nonetheless. ‘That’s not what I meant. I’m saying that because a girl has been killed, you are bound to suffer – it’s not the same thing. At best, you’ll have your name dragged through the papers again because the association is certain to get out; at worst – and I need you to take this seriously – your life could be in danger. There was nothing spontaneous about Elspeth’s murder and if it turns out that the killer got the wrong person, you can put money on the fact that he or she will try again. Don’t waste your time on feeling guilty about something that’s not your fault. If you must worry, then worry about yourself.’

‘Oh Archie, don’t be so bloody naive. How can I not blame myself when the very last time that you and I stood together in this room was after an inquest into another death that would never have happened had it not been for that wretched play?’

45

‘We’ve been over this a thousand times. Elliott Vintner killed himself because he was a ruined man. He got lucky with one novel and spent the next ten years trying to do it again. When he found he simply didn’t have the talent, he tried to take advantage of yours. Nobody in their right mind would accuse someone of plagiarism over a piece of history – let’s face it, if that were a viable legal argument, Shakespeare would have spent his whole life in the dock. Vintner gambled by taking you to court, and he lost – end of story. If his life was so miserable that he had nothing else worth living for, that can hardly be laid at your door. By all means mourn for a girl you liked who died too young, but don’t waste a minute on that bastard’s memory.’

‘I know you’re right, but it doesn’t alter the fact that this afternoon I’m supposed to be signing a contract to license a tour of Richard, and perhaps even to make a film, when I really feel like putting a stop to the whole thing before anybody else gets hurt. I know it’s making everybody rich and famous, but I’m beginning to believe that the play is cursed and I don’t see why we need to inflict that on theatres all around the country. God, they’d be safer with Macbeth. Perhaps all doomed dramas come out of Scotland. It’s still not too late to pull out and knock this nonsense on the head once and for all. Everyone will be furious, of course, but there are more important things than taking two thousand pounds and half a dozen curtain-calls in Morecambe.’

‘Do whatever you need to about the play – that doesn’t matter.

It’s you I care about.’

‘I know, and I’m grateful – even if it doesn’t always sound like it. But you surely can’t believe – if everything was as carefully planned as you say it was – that the murderer would have overlooked the small matter of getting the right victim?’ Archie said nothing, acknowledging the logic of Josephine’s reasoning but unable to let it overcome his instincts as she continued, more gently this time. ‘You don’t need to waste time worrying about me but I will be careful, I promise. And there is something else you can do to make me feel better.’

‘And that is?’

46

‘I’d like to see Elspeth’s family. Can I come with you this afternoon?’

‘What about your meeting with the boys?’

‘Like I said, there are more important things and I need to decide once and for all what I’m going to do before I see them. I’m sure Ronnie and Lettice would go for me if I asked them to, so at least I’ll know what happens. Look, I know it’s not normal procedure and I don’t want to be in the way, but I’d like to talk about Elspeth to someone who knew her, and it might help her family, too.’

Archie stood up, ready to leave. ‘I’ll pick you up at two.’ He kissed her briefly at the door. ‘It’s nice to see you,’ he said, smiling for the first time that morning.

47

Four

It was turning into the sort of day that made even the most faithful of Londoners question their devotion to the city. An unyielding stretch of cloud settled heavily over the rooftops, draining the colour from everything it touched before dissolving, at street level, into a half-hearted, depressing mist. Even so, as he left the house in Queen Anne’s Gate, Bernard Aubrey savoured the rush of freedom that accompanied any departure from the four walls which were, but rarely felt like, home. This picturesque relic of Georgian London, built in the eighteenth century by the founder of the Bank of England, was an appropriate reflection of the aesthetic taste and sound financial judgement which had made Aubrey one of the West End’s most prosperous and influential theatrical managers.

Like its neighbours, from which it differed only in the pattern of a curtain or the choice of flowers in a vase, the house breathed success. It was a smugness which he shook off like an unwanted chaperone every time he shut the door.

With an amiable nod to the statue that gave the square its name, Aubrey turned his back on her mannered serenity and headed for the more worldly stimulus of St Martin’s Lane. He loved his work and was diligent in its undertaking, spending most of his waking hours in the two theatres which his parents had built and entrusted to him, theatres which he had developed beyond even their wildest hopes through an addiction to the challenge of balancing art with money. It was a business founded on risk and he was not infallible, but his errors of judgement were few and far between, and he had been blessed with a talent for anticipating what the public would look for next, as well as with the financial means to provide it. The 49

considerable fortune which he had amassed along the way had been wisely reinvested and his instincts were underpinned by a tireless energy: he spent as many nights in the theatre as any actor and, on Sundays, when the stage was empty in deference to the pulpit and the family table, he was invariably to be found at his desk, taking advantage of the lull in one achievement to plan for the next. To actors and playwrights unused to such commitment, he was a self-effacing benefactor; privately, he knew that his ability to make or break a career overnight was little more than a by-product in a quest to prove something to himself, a quest which was nothing short of an obsession. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. Looking back, he could not honestly say if his bond with his wife and child had been sacrificed because of it or whether, in sensing that the emotional commitment required for family life was not his to give, he had instinctively thrown his energies into something he was more certain to be good at.

Driven by pride rather than by ambition or greed, Aubrey was not the sort of man who contemplated failure easily, or who liked to be anything other than a few steps ahead.

Today, as usual, he rejected the convenient option of a ten-minute journey to work courtesy of the city’s underground railway and set off on foot. The peculiar atmosphere evoked by London’s tunnels was not for him, and he never failed to wonder at the willingness with which people now accepted darkness and confinement as a natural part of their day-to-day existence. For Aubrey, the lingering, acrid smell of those subterranean passageways brought back ghosts from a past he tried in vain to forget.

Too old at forty-five to take part in the trench war but with a distinguished military record behind him, he had spent those terrible years as a tunneller in the guts of the French earth and had no wish to return to its horrors in his waking hours as well as in his nightmares. A tunneller’s war required a different sort of heroism to the fighting above ground, and if the strength and bravery involved had been psychological rather than physical, the sacrifice was often the same. Thousands of miners had been killed underground in explosions which made the water in the tunnels run 50

with blood, and which rendered the precious air thick with the stench of death.

Four years of battling with earth and suffocation as well as with an unseen enemy played lasting tricks on the mind, and the fear and anxiety of those years had haunted Aubrey ever since. On one occasion, not long after the war had ended, his wife had endeavoured to free him of his crippling claustrophobia by persuading him to try the underground at Piccadilly Circus. Before he was halfway down the steps, he could smell burning hair once again, and the pounding of his heart sounded in his head like the muffled thud of a miner’s pick. Giving in to the panic which he had always managed to suppress when it mattered, he emerged choking and sobbing into a crowd of embarrassed shoppers. A cure had never been spoken of again, and his illness had only worsened with time: to mix with the crush of bodies in a confined space – even in a theatre bar or foyer – demanded from him the strictest self-control. A vast underground city had opened up beneath London’s pavements, expanding further as its open-air counterpart grew, but he was more than happy for it to remain out of bounds.

Pulling his hat further down against the rain which had begun to fall more steadily, and cursing the umbrella that was still in its rack in the hallway, Aubrey strode past the government offices in Great George Street and into Parliament Square, one of the wide open spaces that he blessed the city for preserving. Not even the shabby row of houses to the west of the square could mar the grandeur over which so many of the faces from the past presided. As he walked on, he looked up to see if a regular occupant of one of those dust-dimmed windows was sitting in her usual place. He was not disappointed: there she was, as still and indistinct as ever, but framed this morning in an oblong of yellow light which she had switched on to counteract the gloom of the day. In the last few weeks, this figure had become as much a part of his daily walk as the impassive statues in the square. Every morning, no matter how early the hour, she sat at that window with such reliability that he had begun to question whether she, too, were a statue, until one day he had seen her get up and move back into the room. He won-51

dered at the life she led in that faded building, too near the top to be the lady of the house and not high enough to be the maid –

although this was the sort of house in which a maid’s services were no longer required. There must be thousands of women like her in London now, widowed or single and long past the age at which marriage would be a realistic prospect, living in reduced circumstances in a bed-sitting-room, staring out at life rather than taking part.

He considered waving but decided, on reflection, that a greeting from a stranger, particularly a well-dressed and affluent stranger, might be regarded as impudent or condescending, so he moved on.

A quick glance at his watch confirmed that there was plenty of time to make a detour to Westminster Bridge for a view of which he never tired, no matter what the weather. For once he was in no hurry to reach the New Theatre, where a long and no doubt argu-mentative day awaited him. That afternoon, he was due to make the final arrangements for the provincial tour of one of his longest-running productions and to discuss the West End staging of its author’s new play. He normally looked forward to such meetings, sure of his decisions and confident that those involved would trust his experience, but trouble was brewing with Richard of Bordeaux. Admittedly, none of the problems were insurmount-able: his leading actor, who fancied himself – with some justification – as lord of the London stage, had changed his mind about the lure of the provinces in favour of the silver screen and wanted out of his contract, but Aubrey had no intention of releasing him; he would consider financing the film, perhaps, but only after John Terry had graced the likes of Manchester with his royal presence.

As for Josephine Tey, she was far too principled to be easy to deal with, although he admired and respected her writing and could see its long-term potential. In a reversal of his difficulties with Terry, the issue with Tey was getting her into the public eye, and that wretched trial had not helped. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for allowing it to happen. Knowing Vintner, he should have seen it coming.

In fact, those newer to the taste of success than Aubrey seemed to 52

have been transformed by their sudden notoriety – and not always for the better, in his opinion. The entire cast seemed to think that one hit play was enough to keep them in work for the rest of their professional lives, and all the bickering and tension was beginning to tire him; after all, he could usually find that at home. He knew he was perfectly capable of putting a stop to it, yet he felt uneasy about the confrontations ahead. If he had been a superstitious man, he might have said that to plan the play’s future before its current run was finished was to tempt fate, but he was far too old to start pandering to the more ridiculous notions of his profession. Having said that, perhaps tonight was the wrong time to indulge in a tradition of his own making. Whenever a play under his management entered its final week, it was customary for him to make a cameo appearance on stage, and tonight he was due to walk on as a guard in the final scene. The moment was supposed to be a celebration, the only part of the limelight that he ever allowed himself, and the idea – thought up in a frivolous moment by his favourite St Joan –

had always amused him. Today, it felt more like a curse.

His mood lifted briefly the minute he set foot on Westminster Bridge. He was by no means a fan of Romantic poetry, but he was willing to settle his differences with Wordsworth and concede that the earth had nothing fairer to show than this stretch of the river.

It had, of course, changed considerably since those words were written, but its beauty had not diminished: the view of the Houses of Parliament and Victoria Tower, with the majestic sweep of buildings which now lined Millbank as far as Lambeth Bridge, was truly splendid. Turning to look down-river, he admired in a different way the tall, grey outline of Victoria Embankment, dominated by a startling new clock tower and punctuated by the Savoy’s reassuring civility. His gaze fell on Somerset House in the background, and he was reminded that he really must track down the information he needed. The matter was becoming urgent.

As he stood there, Aubrey noticed how many people slowed their steps to appreciate the view. One young couple in particular drew his attention. They stood close together, holding hands under the cover of their coats and clinging on to an old umbrella as they 53

leaned over the edge to stare intently into the waters below. They spoke little, but when they did it was of hopes for the future; small things, perhaps, but the joy with which they looked forward to a life of intimacy was so unlike anything Aubrey had ever known that he felt the contrast physically, as a rebuke, and wanted that ordinary miracle so badly that he had to look away. His own marriage had never been the shared adventure of discovery that he had hoped for; neither had he and his wife settled into the easy companionship of middle age which often compensated for the boredom of earlier years. Left at home while he went to war or to work, she had had plenty of time to wonder why they were married, although she was far too well mannered ever to have asked the question aloud. Perhaps she hated to be wrong or was simply afraid of having to acknowledge that he was lonely too. Either way, the moment for second chances was gone, and a sense of waste had hovered between them for years. Worst of all, it seemed to have tainted the next generation. As far as he could tell from their sporadic and awkward communications, his son’s marriage was no more fulfilling than his own.

Maybe it was the gloom of the winter months, but he was frequently overwhelmed now by the feeling that his life had finally caught up with him, that the darkness which he had held at bay with the colour of stage artifice had, through that very medium, begun to return. This time, he sensed, the darkness would not be denied. Regret had long been the emotion with which he was best acquainted, but recently he had felt more than that: recently, he had felt afraid. How much of that fear was of his own making he was reluctant to admit but deep down he knew that he had risked too much, that the end could not always justify the means. In those tunnels he had seen damnation too often in the faces of others not to recognise it instantly when it stared back at him from the mirror.

He could stand the cold no longer, so retraced his footsteps along Bridge Street and turned into Parliament Street and Whitehall, where the morning was moving leisurely towards noon.

Before him, in the centre of the road and at the heart of a country’s grief, stood Lutyens’s extraordinary monument to the dead –

54

quiet, dominant and bearing witness to the greatest emotion that England had ever felt. It was fifteen years and more since the last shot was fired – long enough for the memory to become lazy – but cars still slowed as they passed, men on buses continued to bare their heads, and parents brought their children to stand quietly at the monument’s flower-covered foot, transferring a muted sorrow to the next generation. Forgetting for a moment his worries about the future, Aubrey took the deep purple iris from the inside of his raincoat and placed it gently on the steps, removing the dying flower that he had left there a week before. After a minute or two’s reflection, he moved purposefully off towards the thin, dark figure of Nelson’s Column.

London could be hard on the lonely, thought Esme McCracken as she sat at her window and looked down into the square below.

Thank God she had never been susceptible to the pointless melan-choly that a solitary existence so often tried to justify. If she were, she would scarcely have lasted long in this run-down, worn-out hole, where the inhabitants of the other rooms seemed to have given up on life at roughly the same time as the wallpaper. At night, when she eventually climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor and crawled into an uninviting single bed, she lay awake until the early hours, attempting to restore its faded pattern in her mind’s eye as an antidote to the scenes and conversations that raced in her head and warded off sleep. It was the only time she really paid any attention to her surroundings: the sparseness of the room, the deficiencies of the furniture – a sagging armchair, put under further stress by piles of newspapers and books, and an ugly, fourth-hand table, scratched beyond the endeavours of any polish – never bothered her. Why should they? She had her eye and her thoughts trained firmly on the future.

It was the cold that she most resented, bitter and raw at this time of year. The bars on her small electric fire, inadequate at the best of times, had not glowed for many days now, as every spare penny she earned was spent on words rather than heat. Each morning, on her way to work at the New Theatre, she would steal 55

into the second-hand bookshops to pore greedily over the shelves of new arrivals. Sometimes she was lucky, and managed to slide a slim volume of Ibsen or Chekhov under her coat while the shop assistant’s attention was taken by another customer. Reading the book later, as she sat at prompt corner, she felt no remorse over such small acts of theft, knowing herself to be a worthy recipient of the ideas contained in those pages. Better that they should fall into her hands than be wasted on people with full pockets but empty minds, or left, forgotten, to gather dust.

People seemed determined to shelter from life these days, she thought, to resist its joys and its pain in favour of a bland contentment. There was certainly no place in the West End for any play with a soul. She despised the romantic nonsense that everyone seemed so taken with. If she were only given the chance, she knew she could make them understand what they were missing. But, as things stood, Daviot – and others like her – sat smugly in the auditorium, revelling in a success which was undeserved and planning another pointless fairy-tale to sedate the crowds, while she was taken for granted backstage, working long hours just to ensure that fame ran smoothly.

The harsh roar of a motorcycle cut through the air beneath her window as she got up to switch on the light. The gloom of the morning made the bulb’s efforts to illuminate the room less feeble than usual, but there was still precious little cheer to be had.

Shivering, she took the blanket off the bed and draped it round her shoulders before picking her way across a carpet of discarded paper and returning to the battered trunk that functioned as a makeshift desk. Her typewriter – a Good Companion, bought for twelve precious guineas – looked out of place in that tawdry room, but it was more real to her than anything else there and it had served her well: she was finally ready. Looking up from the page, she smiled bitterly at the sight of Bernard Aubrey, strolling into view as if in response to one of her perfectly timed cues. It amused her to think that he should take the trouble to notice her here, in this anonymous room, when at the theatre he passed her every day without even bothering to remember her name. It had always 56

seemed her fate to go through life unnoticed or easily forgotten, but he would recognise her soon enough. She sealed the envelope and picked up her coat, slamming the door on her way out.

Rafe Swinburne slid quickly and silently from tangled sheets with the ease born of long practice, and saw with relief that the slender young redhead whom he left behind – Sybille, he thought she had called herself, or Sylvia – remained fast asleep. In bed and out, she had proved to be more entertaining than most of the young women who hung around Wyndham’s stage door at the end of every performance, waiting for young actors like him to emerge, but he had no wish to continue the relationship into a second day.

There was, he had discovered, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sweet young things who expected him to live up to his stage role as caddish young lover, and he was more than happy to oblige.

Acting had many more advantages than a salary of thirty pounds a week and he had always been the ambitious type, as greedy for adoration off stage as on. Last night, he had been adored until well into the early hours.

He dressed quietly in the bathroom, examining his mirror-image over a shelf crammed with creams and powders. Mercifully, his reflection confirmed that he needed nothing more than a splash of cold water to make himself presentable. He was, as he well knew, a strikingly handsome young man, tall and dark with lean features that were softened to just the right degree by hair worn slightly longer than was considered fashionable. Had his eyes held something warmer than their habitual cynical indifference, Swinburne would have been beautiful; nevertheless, he had about him an unmistakable air of self-possession that caught the eye of both sexes.

Carrying his shoes until it was safe to make a noise, he took a pre-written postcard from the pocket of his coat and left it on the hall table – a nice touch, he always thought, and one guaranteed to ease the disappointment of an early departure. Gently, he opened the front door and, with his exit assured, slipped down the stairs.

Ignoring the rain and kneeling to tie his laces, he glanced around 57

to get his bearings and was surprised to find himself in Hammersmith. The journey from the West End to these rented rooms had not seemed very far last night, but then he had been racing through London with a pretty girl’s arms around his waist and his mind on little else but a craving for sex which did not distinguish between postal districts. In the cold light of day, he wished fate had coupled him with someone a little closer to home.

It was already gone noon and there was nowhere near enough time before the matinee to go back to his own rooms on the south side of the river and change, let alone to drop in on John Terry as he had hoped – no, as he needed – to do before this afternoon’s meeting. Swinburne rather enjoyed the reputation he had for being late, but he was not prepared to push his last-minute appearances to impossible limits and risk missing his first entrance. He would have to make do with a telephone call en route to the theatre.

He had found to his great relief that his prized motorcycle – a 1932 Ariel Square Four – was still at the end of the passage where he had hurriedly left it just after midnight. Long before it became such a fashionable leisure activity, Swinburne had loved motorcycling with a passion. As a child, his father had driven him all over the countryside on the sturdy Scott model that he had kept when he was invalided out of the war, perching his young son on the special stand at the front which once sported a machine gun but which had been cleverly adapted into the most thrilling of vantage points for a tiny boy. His earliest memories were of the excitement he felt as he swung round with the handlebars, confident in his father’s deft handling of the machine. Never again had he felt so close to danger, and yet so safe. By then, it was just the two of them – he had lost his mother during the war and had to rely on his father’s stories for most of what he knew of her – and the bond was unbreakable. Many years later, when his father died, he had ridden the Ariel for hours, not caring where he went but desperate to escape the most powerful grief he had ever known. It proved to be unshakeable, though, and it had travelled with him ever since.

Several kicks were needed to fire the reluctant engine into life in 58

such unpleasant weather, but he felt the pressures of the day lift as soon as he moved out into the traffic, weaving effortlessly between the cars and making better time than he could have hoped. When he reached the King’s Road, he slackened his pace and pulled over by Chelsea Town Hall, leaving the motorcycle where he could keep an eye on it and waiting impatiently outside the telephone box while a lanky man with a ruddy face and an enormous raincoat finished his call. An unpleasant odour of rain mixed with sweat and tobacco bore down on him in the confined space, offending his natural fastidiousness, and he was relieved when a voice at the other end of the line demanded his attention.

‘Yes?’ The musical quality for which Terry’s delivery was so lauded by the critics could not have been more absent from this clipped greeting. It was obviously a bad moment, but beggars could not be choosers and a beggar was essentially what Swinburne was about to become.

‘It’s Swinburne. I wanted to talk to you before this afternoon.

Do you have any idea which way Aubrey’s going to jump?’

Although not yet thirty, John Terry was beginning to wonder if he had already enjoyed the greatest success of his career. He had known as soon as he opened the manuscript of Richard of Bordeaux, with its neat pages carefully typed in blue ink, that he was looking at a gift from heaven. Reading it in his dressing room during a matinee of The Good Companions, he had almost missed his cue, so taken was he with its charm and humour, with the modern dialogue which turned a king into a man of the people. He learned later that the play had been inspired by his performance as Richard II at the Old Vic a number of years ago, but he knew nothing of the author at the time. He had not needed to, because the script spoke for itself. Aubrey had required no persuading to back a commercial run and their instincts had soon been rewarded. A clash with another opening night had meant a sub-dued first performance but, at ten minutes past one on the following day, the telephone began to ring at the box office and had not stopped since. For fourteen months, there had rarely been an 59

empty seat in the house, and some people had seen the play thirty or forty times.

At first, he had been pleased by the adulation. Supper at the Savoy was a novelty which he had never before been able to afford, and he enjoyed being recognised in the street. But pleasure turned to embarrassment, embarrassment to boredom, and now he was utterly sick of Richard. He had been photographed, carica-tured and painted, and had had everything from dolls to bronze sculptures fashioned in his image. White harts – the King’s emblem

– rained upon him in every conceivable form, embroidered on handkerchiefs and stamped on cigarette boxes. Young girls followed him from the theatre to his flat; others turned up unan-nounced in the middle of the night; and he had lost count of the times he answered the telephone only to be greeted by adolescent giggles and the click of the receiver as the callers lost their nerve before speaking.

But worse than all of that was the knowledge that his performances had lost their sincerity, that he was becoming mannered and exaggerated in an attempt to keep alive his interest in the role. A year ago, exhaustion had forced him to take a short holiday but, unable to keep away, he had returned early from the west country for the pleasure of slipping into a box and watching his understudy on stage. Back then, the play had moved him to tears; now, he often asked someone else to stand in simply because he could not face going through it all again himself. He bitterly regretted the early enthusiasm that had contracted him to the role both in London and on tour, but he could see no way out other than to make Aubrey change his mind, and he knew hell would freeze over before that happened.

He looked around the small, unpretentiously furnished flat in the hope that the familiar surroundings might outmanoeuvre a new emotion which he recognised as despair. His gaze rested on the toy theatre that his mother had given him for Christmas when he was just seven years old: its cream and gold pillars had become chipped and scratched over the years, the plush red velvet curtains were now faded and worn, but he still saw in it the endless possi-60

bilities that had absorbed him throughout his childhood. As a boy, he had existed in an intense fantasy world, unaware of all that went on around him, and this miniature stage was at its centre.

When he was introduced to the real thing he knew he was lost completely, less to the carefree attractions of make-believe than to what he revelled in as a complete sensual experience: the colour and the lights, the textures of the spoken word, the physical presence of the crowds, the exhilarating taste of success and, as its understudy, the pungent whiff of failure. He had become the biggest star of his day, but recently he had found himself hanker-ing after that toy theatre and a world which had also seemed to be of a more manageable scale. It had to stop. He needed a new challenge before his ambition and his desire faded away into comfortable certainties. He had to hold his nerve with Aubrey and get out of this rut once and for all.

A tall, gauntly handsome young man appeared at the bedroom door, rubbing his eyes and running his fingers through thinning fair hair. ‘Who was that on the telephone?’ he asked, and the soft, Irish inflection made the question seem more casual than it really was. ‘Let me guess: there’s a problem with a play and only you can sort it out. Am I right or am I right?’

Without much hope of success, Terry attempted to defuse another fruitless round of bickering before it started. ‘It was only Rafe Swinburne adding one more demand to the list for this afternoon. If Aubrey’s not in the right mood, we’ll all find ourselves carrying spears in Morecambe before the month’s out.’ It was a feeble effort at lightness, he knew, and the only response it brought was a wearily raised eyebrow.

‘Would that be such a bad thing? At least you might come home occasionally.’

‘Don’t be so fucking sanctimonious – it doesn’t suit you,’ said Terry, his frustration quickly getting the better of him. ‘I’m not sleeping with him, if that’s what this is about, so you can stop worrying.’

‘You really don’t understand, do you? If it were about sex I’d almost be relieved, but it’s more than that. I might stand a chance 61

against another man, but I can’t take on the whole of the West End. You’re obsessed.’

‘You used to say that was sexy.’

‘That was before I lived with you. Then you had to make an effort to see me; now I’m just an inconvenient interruption to the working day. The actors, the writers, the boy that sweeps the stage

– they always come first, whether you want to sleep with them or not. How do you think that makes me feel?’

There was no answer to that. Acting was his life, his work and his play and, if he were honest, his only love; without it, he cared about nothing. Aware of the sadness his silence was causing but too selfishly honest to lie, Terry walked past his lover to dress for the theatre.

By the time Lewis Fleming arrived, the nursing home was almost always in darkness. He walked quietly down sour-smelling corridors which opened onto uniform rooms, nodding to nurses who tip-toed across polished floors and conscious of sleepless eyes watching him pass, glad of any focus to distract them from the darkness and loneliness to which evening abandoned them. For the ill and the desperate – and this plain red-brick building on Gray’s Inn Road was the last haven of hope for both – night was the hardest time and sleep the most elusive companion, so he went to cushion her from that hell, sitting wide awake by her bed and letting her sleep safely in the knowledge that, for a few hours at least, she was not alone. Resting on the stark white sheets, her hand felt cool in his.

Surrounded by the murmurs and the restlessness which reached him through paper-thin walls, Fleming had plenty of time to worry about what would happen if he could not manage to support his wife through her illness. Acting was a precarious way to make a living; he had been lucky to land a part in a play which had run for over a year, but it was coming to an end now and his future was uncertain. As the clock across the road struck the hour and then the half, he felt as though his life were passing twice as slowly as everybody else’s, while hers threatened to be over so soon. Pain 62

had begun to leave lines around her eyes that even sleep could not entirely smooth away, but she still looked young compared to the home’s other inhabitants, who had at least reached the vulnerable middle-age on which this unforgiving disease fed. Her face still held its beauty and its strength, and the blankets did much to belie the wasting of her body but, as he looked at her arms which were the colour of unbleached wax and tellingly thin, he was overwhelmed by the bitter sense of injustice that had been with him since the day the cancer was diagnosed. He remembered the mixture of courage and terror with which she had told him the news, and the stubborn disbelief with which he had received it. Could that really have been only three months ago?

At the first grey streak of dawn, when the rooms began to stir into life, he would kiss her gently awake as she had made him promise to do and slip away from her bed, past the seared faces and broken lives and down the steps into the street. A twenty-minute walk took him home, where he would fall exhausted into their bed and sleep until early afternoon; by three o’clock, he was back for the more conventional visiting period, and took his place among the ranks of husbands and wives armed with flowers, practised cheerfulness and carefully rehearsed homecoming plans, and with a resolve which crumpled the moment the visitor was out of reach of the searching eyes in the bed. On matinee days, he was spared this collective ritual and dared not go home, either, for fear that he would sleep through the afternoon and on into the night. He knew that his exhaustion was affecting his performance – Aubrey had already made that clear – but he had told no one of his situation, terrified that his livelihood would be taken away from him, and with it that thin sliver of hope that he could get them through this, that money could buy time, perhaps even a cure. The doctors had said it was not out of the question: that small chance and his wife’s constant faith in him were the only things that kept him on his feet.

On Thursdays and Saturdays, he crawled gratefully into an eating-house near the theatre, using its smoky fug to shake off the scent of flowers and drugs and pity that hung perpetually around him. He drank endless mugs of strong, hot coffee in the 63

hope that it would see him through two performances on stage and a third at his wife’s bedside, but ate little, conscious that every penny had to be saved. Today, as usual, the room was full of people for whom every shilling counted, but a woman at the next table stood out from the crowd, not least because she looked as tired and as worried as he felt. She was familiar to him from the theatre, and he had noticed her in particular because she reminded him of his wife. She looked up as the waitress removed an empty cup from her table and glanced in his direction, offering a half-smile of recognition. Embarrassed at having been caught watching her so intently, he returned the greeting in kind and quickly finished his coffee.

It was still raining when he left the eating-house to make his way to the theatre. During the lunch-time period on a Saturday, the area between Charing Cross and St Martin’s Lane was invariably full of itinerant young actors heading towards performances in which they enjoyed varying degrees of success, and he nodded to a few of the usual faces as he passed. Then, across the street, he saw Terry emerge from the saddlery shop which occupied the same building as his flat and walk quickly off in the direction of the New. A few seconds later another man, whom Lewis recognised as the actor’s latest lover, followed in his footsteps, catching him easily with just a few long strides. He grabbed Terry by the arm and the two seemed to argue for a minute before, in a display of affection which was foolhardy in such a public place, the taller man grabbed a flower from a stall and thrust it melodramatically towards Terry, who could not help but laugh. The tension between them fell away instantly, and Terry continued his journey alone, the flower now adorning his buttonhole.

Fleming felt a sudden stab of anger that God should allow these people to parade their filthy, fickle love in the street while seeming to punish him and his wife for their devotion. If he were to lose the only woman he had ever spoken to of love, the only woman he had taken to his bed, he knew he could never replace her with another.

In that instant, he felt vindicated for the decision he had taken during one of those long nocturnal vigils, a decision which went 64

entirely against his character – or at least what his character had once been. Cancer had a habit of eroding morally as well as physically, and everything he loved was under threat. He should not be ashamed of his actions. After all, what had he left to lose?

The dressing room smelt of scent and an electric fire. Outside, a steady stream of traffic passed along the corridor and, whenever the door opened, Lydia could hear the muffled tramp of scene shifters up above and catch a faint whiff of size from the paint dock. Apart from a small chintz sofa, its extent carefully chosen to limit the number of admirers who could be comfortably accommodated at any one sitting, the room contained very little unnecessary furniture but, after fourteen months of occupation, it felt as much like home as her rented lodgings down the road. However perfectly she rehearsed the lines about professional challenges and resisting complacency, no actress was immune to the advantages of a long run: praise and financial security were its obvious accessories, but just as valuable was the sense of belonging. In becoming someone else for more than six weeks at a time, she had discovered that she was also better at being herself.

The layers of familiarity had built up gradually during the many hours spent at the New, manifesting themselves in hundreds of letters and personal items which formed a living scrapbook of the present moment, a flamboyant index of everything that was most precious in her life. One wall was now completely covered in press cuttings, in pages from Theatre World’s photographic celebration of the play and in the hundreds of reviews which had offered virtually every positive adjective in the book to her performance. Along another, a rail held the three attractive costumes and numerous accessories which transformed her simply and elegantly into Richard II’s consort: the gold dress with peaspod collar and garland of lilies – so strange and exotic when she had first put them on, even to an actress used to playing historical roles – now felt as natural a part of her wardrobe as anything she could find in Kensington.

Her dressing table was reserved for more intimate things: pictures of her father at the height of his musical career before it was 65

ruined by illness and depression; long and loving letters from her mother, with whom she corresponded weekly; and a rare photograph of Marta, taken on a bracing Sunday walk through Regent’s Park not long after they had met. Her normally camera-shy lover looked out from the picture through tears of laughter, much to the astonishment of a young man who stood in the background of the photograph, watching as Marta tried and failed not to be amused by the misfortunes of an elderly couple who had taken boldly to the boating lake. She smiled now at the blurred image, remembering how she, too, had been laughing too helplessly to hold the camera steady.

Idly, Lydia removed another chocolate from the box of Prestat which Marta – along with some innuendo about taking sweets from the lap of the Queen – had playfully arranged under the skirts of the lifelike souvenir doll that stood at the back of the dressing table. It was odd, she thought, that the only thing in the room which did not now carry a comfortable sense of the familiar was the face looking back at her from the mirror. She had not yet grown accustomed to the subtle lines of age that were beginning their inevitable dance around her eyes and mouth, nor to the implications that they carried for her career. At forty-three, as Bernard Aubrey had made abundantly clear to her less than a fortnight ago, she was fast approaching the age dreaded by all actresses, those difficult mid-life years which were played out to the tune of too old for Ophelia, too young for Gertrude. She had been lucky with Anne, and was fortunate to have persuaded Josephine to immortalise for her the tiresome, glamorous Queen of Scots but, after that, she was well aware that there could be some lean years ahead, that the cushion of Aubrey’s approval might not always rest with her.

Lost in her thoughts, Lydia did not notice that the dressing-room door had opened until she caught sight of Marta’s reflection in the glass. Such visits were rare, as Marta preferred to keep out of a theatre circle which she regarded as Lydia’s world, and the actress smiled with pleasure, her fears instantly forgotten. ‘How long have you been there?’ she asked.

66

‘Long enough to know you’ve got chocolate on your lips,’ said Marta, laughing as she bent down to kiss the back of Lydia’s neck where it had been authentically shaved to accommodate Anne’s elaborate headwear.

‘I don’t mind if you don’t.’ Lydia turned round in the chair and took Marta’s face in her hands, tasting the coffee on her mouth as she drew her into a long, intense kiss. ‘Do you feel any better?’

‘I think I’ve drunk enough coffee to kill or cure the headache once and for all, but this place is hardly likely to lift a girl’s spirits.

That Lewis chap was in the Corner House looking as miserable as sin, John Terry’s upstairs at the stage door shouting at someone, and that young boy who does all the work while your Chekhovian stage manager scribbles away at her next masterpiece nearly jumped out of his skin when I said hello to him. I can see why I don’t venture down here very often.’

‘Don’t take it personally. Hedley’s in terrible trouble with Bernard over something; he’s been summoned to his office after the matinee for a dressing down. And Lewis has been miserable for weeks now. Rumour has it that his wife’s left him and Johnny says he’s hit the bottle, but he and Lewis have always hated each other so that might just be the bitch in him talking. Who was Johnny shouting at, anyway?’

‘I don’t know – he was on the telephone. Just one of the many unfortunates who are less godlike than him, I suppose. But I didn’t come here to talk about them,’ Marta said, dropping her sarcasm and sliding her hand inside Lydia’s silk robe. ‘How quickly can you get from here to the stage these days?’

Suddenly the door was thrown open and Ronnie appeared, staggering under the weight of an extraordinary horned head-dress.

‘Oh we are interrupting something, I hope,’ she said wickedly.

‘We’ve come to let out your seams, although a little more exercise before each show might save us the trouble.’ The twinkle in her eye brought a deep flush to Marta’s face and a pink tinge to Lydia’s, and elicited a long-suffering smile of apology from Lettice, who followed closely on her heels. ‘Where would you like us to start?’

*

67

Normally, Hedley White would have been looking forward to his night off but, as he placed the furniture for the opening scene and moved to the side of the stage to run through the list of properties for each successive change, his mind was otherwise occupied. He knew he had behaved frightfully, and cursed himself again for such a rash act of stupidity, one that no amount of wishing or hoping could undo. The deed was done; Aubrey knew about it; and later he would face the consequences when he was called to the producer’s office.

Although he had only worked for him for six months, Hedley already looked up to Aubrey as the father he had never known, respecting him as someone who, through sheer hard work, had made a practical success of a profession which liked to make itself as esoteric as possible. Hedley was well aware that working-class boys like himself did not naturally enter the theatre but, in offering him a job as an assistant stage manager, Aubrey had dispelled all notions of Masonic exclusion by showing him that there was an alternative to universities and drama schools and being born into the right family, an alternative which made use of his talents and gave him the experience he craved. Working at both Wyndham’s and the New, he spent his days making tea, painting flats, sweep-ing the stage and walking around sets while electricians focused lamps. It was hard work, physically, which suited his strength and energy, and extra responsibilities built his confidence faster than he would have believed possible. If anybody had told him this time last year that he would be taking walk-on parts in front of hundreds of people and enjoying it, he would have laughed in their face.

Like all outsiders who are suddenly welcomed into a club to which they doubt their right to belong, Hedley was well versed in the peculiar language of theatre and revered its traditions and rituals. Each night, he took great pleasure in carefully preparing the ground for the Ricardians, an exclusive group, established in the early days of the production, whose membership was restricted to the three actors left on stage towards the end of Richard of Bordeaux. The rules of the club were strictly observed after all 68

shows except matinees, and it was Hedley’s job – or McCracken’s in his absence – to place a small table and three chairs in the wings during the final act. Lewis Fleming, as Bolingbroke, was the first of the group to make his final exit, and would open a waiting bottle of claret, the quality of which had improved dramatically as the play’s success grew; the actor who played the King’s loyal servant was next off and would dutifully pour the wine into the waiting glasses while John Terry paused on stage to make the most of the bitterness and regret contained in Richard’s closing lines. As the play finished, Terry joined the other two for a toast to the next performance and, after the cast took its many curtain-calls, all three Ricardians returned to savour the rest of the bottle.

Tonight, when Aubrey took to the stage for his customary cameo appearance as the guard – a role that Hedley often played himself – the club’s membership would be extended to four and, as the producer drank nothing but Scotch, it was the junior stage hand’s task to ensure that a single malt was added to the inventory before he went off duty after the matinee. The sense of having thrown away his place in this little world haunted Hedley even more than the prospect of being handed over to the police, and he was entirely at Aubrey’s mercy. He would kill for a second chance, he thought, as he placed the decanter on the shelf next to the claret, ready for the evening performance.

69

Five

Penrose sat at his desk on the third floor of New Scotland Yard and stared at the collection of bleak photographs laid out in front of him. Fallowfield must have conveyed his instructions to the letter, because the photographer had been relentless in his thoroughness: in stark black and white, the camera’s handiwork offered death from every angle, challenging him to erase the question marks which were all over that small railway carriage, and preserving the scene for those who might need to comment later on whatever answers he came up with. As detailed as the pictures were, his own memory really needed no material reminders of what he was dealing with: it would be a long time before a far more intense image of this particular death was erased from his memory. In his head, he heard his superior’s familiar words of warning: ‘You only see what you look for, and you only look for what is already in your mind.’ The trouble was, his mind was a blank. Rarely had he been so without inspiration in a new case, lacking any instinct other than a sense that things would get worse before they got better.

He turned now to the carefully labelled personal effects which, if he only knew how to read them, told the story of the last few hours in Elspeth Simmons’s life. Taken out of context and placed in uniform evidence bags, her things conveyed little of the warmth and animation which, according to Josephine, had characterised the girl in life. There was a handkerchief, a powder compact and comb, a packet of Symington’s Jelly Crystals and another of Mackintosh Toffees, a purse and a small pile of loose change, made up of two half-crowns, two sixpences, a shilling, four pen-71

nies and a halfpenny, and the magazine that had linked Elspeth to Josephine on the day she died – all the paraphernalia of a young woman on the move and, with hindsight, touching in its normality. What he found more interesting, though, were the note and the flower which hinted at a promise of affection, even love. He looked at the iris, with its striking triad of dark purple petals, and wondered what it had meant to her or to the person who sent it.

How did she feel when she received it? And how would she have felt if it was her lover’s face she had looked into as the life drained out of her? He hoped to put a name to that face when he questioned Frank Simmons and his wife in a couple of hours’ time.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about the bag itself, except that the contents scarcely seemed to justify its outlandish size. Perhaps the dolls were the answer. It certainly made more sense for them to have been hers rather than carried by a killer for whom speed and invisibility were of the essence; the fingerprint report would at least tell him whether or not she had handled them. He looked at the miniature king and queen, less lifelike now in their forensic wrapping, and gave an involuntary shudder. There was something unnerving about the violence with which the female doll’s hand had been broken off and discarded, but perhaps the gesture was nothing more than spite towards the victim, a scorning of Elspeth’s love for the artificial passions of the stage rather than a sinister strike against Josephine herself. As much as he felt for the dead girl, a lovers’ quarrel in which the dolls simply represented a mockery of her relationship would be a welcome explanation for her murder.

A brusque knock at the door interrupted his thoughts and, without waiting for a response, Sir Bernard Spilsbury came into the room. Others might have been surprised to see the celebrated Home Office Pathologist at the Yard on a Saturday but, to all intents and purposes, he was also a member of CID and behaved like any other hard-working member of the team. At fifty-seven, he often spoke of retirement but was actually busier than ever, driven hard by the police at his own insistence. In all the years Penrose had worked alongside Spilsbury, he had never known him 72

to refuse a call. His reports were not quite as prompt as they used to be, and age had made him a little excessive in his thoroughness, but Penrose was always prepared to wait a little longer to hear opinions from a man for whom he held tremendous respect.

Although by no means infallible, Spilsbury had proved to him on countless occasions that medicine had its value even in the face of death, that it was a path to truth even when life had been outwit-ted by evil – and that justice could prevail if someone paved the way for it with diligence and care.

‘Sorry I’m late, Archie, but the traffic down Gower Street was diabolical. Of course, if the Metropolitan Police thought it worthwhile to catch up with the rest of the civilised world and build a laboratory of its own, then you’d have had your report by now and you might even be halfway to getting another killer off the streets. But who am I to criticise?’

Penrose smiled at the rebuke, which was invariably the first thing Spilsbury uttered when he arrived at Scotland Yard. The pathologist’s opinion that Britain lagged behind other countries when it came to a commitment to forensic evidence was well known and, Penrose believed, fully justified. Among many of his colleagues there was still a prejudice against importing too much science into an investigation even though most were coming to rely on such developments as a matter of course; the analysis of dust in a suspect’s pockets or mud on his boots was all very well, they would say if asked, but there was still a preference for direct rather than scientific methods of proving guilt and, even if the force as a whole could be persuaded that forensics were an aid to rather than replacement for observation and patience, the argument that English judges and juries were inclined to be dis-trustful of laboratory evidence had yet to be overcome. If anybody could change that, though, Spilsbury could; no name was more closely associated with violent or mysterious death. He had a quiet authority and a core of steel, yet it would have been hard to imagine a more affable and sympathetic character.

Penrose had never known anyone get the better of him in cross-examination, although privately he wondered whether the 73

unquestioned influence that Spilsbury’s opinion carried always contributed to justice.

The charm and the steel were both evident today as he sat down and took his report out of the vast bag which he took everywhere.

‘It’s a nasty one, this,’ he said, without wasting any more time on social niceties and, as he always did, affording Penrose the respect of a fellow medic. ‘The cause of death is fairly straightforward –

internal haemorrhage as a result of sharp trauma to the heart from a penetrating injury originating just below the breast bone. From the angle of the wound, I’d say that she was standing up when the weapon entered her body and that the injury was made with an upward stab – you don’t often see that – by someone a few inches taller and right-handed.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Could be either, I’m afraid. The victim was only a couple of inches over five feet, so the height issue doesn’t help us. If she’d been wearing something a little more robust, I’d have said quite confidently that the assailant was a man, but her coat was undone and a sharp point would have gone through that dress very easily.

The tissues are quite soft, you know, and a reasonably fit woman, particularly an angry one, could have done it without a problem as long as the weapon was keen enough – which it most certainly was.’

‘Have you ever come across a hatpin used as a murder weapon before?’

‘No, Archie, and I still haven’t; that’s where it gets interesting.

The weapon you found in her body wasn’t the one that killed her

– that much I can be sure of.’

Even with all the possibilities Penrose had been considering, that one had not occurred to him. One of the few things he believed he could take for granted was suddenly removed and he felt the foundations of the case shift again beneath his feet. A feeble ‘How do you know?’ was the best he could come up with.

‘Because of the blood. No hatpin would have caused such massive internal blood loss. It wasn’t obvious immediately because there was virtually no bruising to the puncture point and no obvi-74

ous external haemorrhage, but inside it’s a different story. There was a huge amount of blood in the pleural cavity and in the area around the heart, and some had passed into the abdominal cavity along the line of penetration. Yes, it’s conceivable that a hatpin could cause enough damage to be fatal, but it would be a much slower death than was the case here and you certainly couldn’t rely on it. Once you know you’re looking at two different entries, you can see that the hatpin has taken a slightly different route from the initial thrust with the blade, but it’s only marginal and the swapping of one for the other had very little effect on the external wound itself.’

‘So what sort of weapon are we looking for?’

‘Something narrow – like I said, very little blood found its way out from the entry point – and fairly long; it would need to be at least six inches to reach the heart through the liver and diaphragm.

A nice paper knife would work, for example, if it were sharp enough – and that’s the key: there’s no drag on the tissues at the edges of the wound, so it went in and came out cleanly.’

‘How much did she suffer?’ Penrose asked, conscious that he was soon to see Elspeth’s family.

‘It would have been very quick and it’s doubtful that she knew much about it. From the damage to the wall of the heart, I’d say the assailant moved the knife around in the body once the initial wound was made, and that will have speeded up the process even more. The blood in the pericardium will have prevented the heart from pumping effectively and her blood pressure will have dropped almost instantly, before the impact of a hard and fast stab really registered. It’s likely that the shock of what had happened, together with the rapid loss of blood pressure, would override any behavioural pain response in the victim and I should think she was unconscious within a minute, perhaps less. So, depending on your point of view, this particular weapon did a lovely job. It always amazes me that more of our villains don’t favour the knife, you know. It’s a much better bet than a poker or a piece of lead piping, and so much more imaginative. And that’s something there’s no shortage of here – imagination.’

75

Penrose agreed. Flicking through the post-mortem report, he found the section that dealt with the shaving of the girl’s neck, a seemingly purposeless act of defilement which, bizarrely, he found more disturbing than the fatal injury. For once, Spilsbury’s conclu-sions told him little; the tiny amount of blood indicated that the cut had been made very shortly after death had occurred, but he had already suspected that. It was pointless to ask the pathologist to speculate on its meaning, so he turned his attentions back to more material evidence. ‘Can you tell me anything else about the killer? A name would be nice, but I’ll settle for hair or clothes.’

Spilsbury smiled. ‘Well, he – let’s say he for convenience’s sake –

certainly wasn’t covered in his victim’s blood when he left the train, so you can rule out that appeal to the public. There may have been a little on his hand but not enough to make him stand out from the crowd, and there was no blood or skin under the girl’s fingernails to indicate any injuries that might arouse suspicion. The shock would have stopped her putting up much of a fight, even if he’d given her the chance to struggle. And there were no prints on the hatpin other than hers. On a more positive note,’

he continued as Penrose looked increasingly despondent, ‘there were some fibres under her nails and more in her mouth which don’t appear to match anything she was wearing so, when we’ve done more tests, I might be able to tell you what his coat or jumper was made of. My guess is that the killer pulled her towards him with his left hand – there’s a mark on the back of her neck to support that – and muffled any noises she might have made by holding her face against his chest as the knife went in. There was a lot of dust on the skirt of her dress but that’s consistent with what was on the floor of the carriage, so it tells us very little except that it’s certainly not the cleaning you pay for in first class. She must have fallen forward onto her knees when she lost consciousness, and then been lifted onto the seat where she was found: easier for a man to do that, of course, but again not impossible for a woman.

There are some pulls in her stockings and the dress is slightly torn under one arm, which could suggest that she was shifted without much care or ceremony, but it’s hardly surprising that it was done 76

in a hurry. This is one of the riskiest crimes I’ve seen – you’d need to be in and out in a matter of minutes. Anyway, I’ll let you know as soon as the tests are done on those fibres. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got for you at the moment. Just for once, the time of death is certain almost to the minute, but you know as much about that as I do.’

There was silence for a moment while Penrose thought about the information that Spilsbury had given him. ‘I can think of two reasons for switching the murder weapon,’ he said. ‘Either the blade that he used was so distinctive that to leave it behind would be to give himself away; or there’s something significant in what he chose to substitute it with. What would you put your money on?’

Years in court had taught Spilsbury never to volunteer his views unless asked – and Penrose asked more often than most of his colleagues – but, when he did offer an opinion, his eye for detail, acute gifts of reasoning and a memory which served as an index to death in all its forms meant that he was always worth listening to.

‘This killing is personal – as personal as it gets – but it was also carried out quickly and efficiently, so it’s almost certainly premed-itated. In which case, the killer would hardly plan to use something that was likely to give him away and then be forced to swap it. No, the method of killing here is about the victim; get to know her, and she will lead you to your man.’

Penrose thanked him more perfunctorily than was characteristic of him, but his mind was playing with an imbalance of questions and answers, the most persistent thought being that it was all very well getting to know the victim if you were sure it was her death which had been intended – but his personal jury had yet to deliver its verdict on that one. There was little to be gained from sharing his doubts with the pathologist at this stage: he should be gathering information on the murder which had actually been committed rather than trying to investigate one which existed only in his worst fears.

‘I’ll let you know if I come up with anything else,’ Spilsbury said. ‘And good luck – I think you’ll need it.’

77

Looking at the clock and realising he was late to pick up Josephine, Penrose went to find Fallowfield to give him the glad tidings: firstly, that the murder weapon was devoid of any prints other than the victim’s; secondly, that it was not actually the murder weapon at all. There was really only one way for their luck to turn.

78

Six

Josephine was already waiting on the pavement when Penrose’s car turned into St Martin’s Lane, and he imagined she had been there for some time. Looking at the anxiety etched on her face, he questioned for a moment the wisdom of allowing her to accompany him in what must surely be a painful interview for all concerned but he knew that, had he refused, she would merely have passed a long afternoon alone, grieving for a situation which she believed to be partly her fault, or embroiled unnecessarily in the tangle of raw egos and ruffled feathers that lay in wait at the theatre. Less philanthrop-ically, his instincts told him that Josephine would be a useful string to his bow when it came to questioning the Simmonses. Undoubt-edly, there was important information to be had from the encounter and a mildly spoken woman with a natural curiosity and gentle eyes was likely to get much closer to the heart of the matter than either Fallowfield or himself, particularly if she held a certain celebrity status in the eyes of half her audience. When he had telephoned ahead to make sure there was no objection to Josephine’s inclusion in the appointment, Frank Simmons had implied that, on the contrary, it was the one thing that might just make the ordeal bearable.

In all their years together, Penrose had yet to decide if Fallowfield’s driving was very good or very bad. Down broad streets and across open countryside, he supposed it might be called exhilarating, but breadth and space were rare commodities in London and the Sergeant never allowed his surroundings to intrude upon his style. Within minutes, the car came to a shudder-ing halt in front of Josephine, who managed – with considerable pluck, Penrose thought – to take only two hurried steps back.

79

He kissed her briefly, gave her arm a reassuring squeeze and stood aside to allow her to get in. With a jerk, they moved off and the car was soon proceeding at a terrible rate up Monmouth Street. Resisting the impulse to close her eyes, Josephine smiled at Archie as a fellow passenger on the road to perdition and handed him a solid-looking parcel, wrapped in greaseproof paper. ‘The Snipe insisted I bring this for you,’ she said. ‘It’s cheese and tomato with extra pickle. She thinks you need feeding up because you’ve already left two meals she’s put in front of you today, and she specifically asked me to tell you that this is your last chance. Eat these or she’s giving you her notice.’

‘Three Snipes and you’re out then, Sir,’ chipped in Fallowfield from the front seat as they shot across Hyde Park Corner, oblivious to the set of traffic lights that had just turned red. ‘Mind you, she’ll always be welcome at my house if she does give up on you.

You can tell her that, Miss Tey, when you see her next,’ he continued, winking at Josephine in his rear-view mirror while she watched the road ahead on his behalf. ‘Fine figure of a woman, she is, and wasted on you sparrows.’

‘She speaks very highly of you, too, Bill,’ said Josephine.

‘There’s a sandwich here for you as well.’

‘It’s a queer business, this, Miss Tey,’ he continued with relish, apparently undeterred by having spent a fruitless morning at King’s Cross questioning the station staff and going through a passenger list which threw up nothing whatsoever of interest. One of the many qualities that Penrose admired in his sergeant was an utter immunity to despondency, no matter how many setbacks he came up against. Fallowfield was of that school of policing which had an unshakeable faith in the fact that truth will always out in the end; his optimism, which was no doubt nurtured by the amount of leisure time he spent in the company of fictional detectives for whom luck and inspiration knew no bounds, had been a spur to the more cynical Penrose on more than one occasion, and it lifted his spirits again now. When he had given the Sergeant a succinct account of Spilsbury’s report on their way to the car, he had expected Fallowfield to share his disappointment at the lack of evi-80

dence, in particular the blow of the absent murder weapon, but that had not been the case. There was nothing the Sergeant enjoyed as much as a puzzle, and here he had plenty to occupy his thoughts.

Josephine, keen to hear more about the ‘queer’ nature of the case than she had been able to glean earlier from Archie’s troubled account, and knowing she would get far more out of his sergeant, made an encouraging murmur of agreement. ‘From the start, it reminded me of your book, Miss,’ he expanded out of the blue, referring to Josephine’s detective novel in which a man had been stabbed in a theatre queue. ‘You know, a murder in a busy place and a risky one into the bargain. And then when the Inspector told me that the real weapon was a thin knife and not a hatpin – well, I half expected us to start looking for a Dago with a scar on his left hand, brandishing a stiletto.’

The suggestion was not a serious one, but the similarities had already occurred to Josephine and it struck her as ironic that she of all people should find herself on the periphery of a real murder case, travelling to talk to the victim’s family with the policeman upon whom she had based her popular fictional inspector, Alan Grant. Not to look at, of course: Archie’s height and dark good looks were a million miles from Grant’s slighter build and – for want of a better word – his dapperness; no, a pleasant voice and a well-tailored suit were all they shared physically, but professionally speaking they were a perfect match. She had wanted a hard-working, well-meaning police inspector, a credible detective to stand out among the figures of fantasy and wish-fulfilment found in so many other crime novels, and in Penrose she had the perfect model. He could not quite claim Grant’s perfect record of never an unsolved murder to his name, but he was patient, considerate and intelligent, a sensitive individual who cared about people both as a human being and as a policeman. She had added a few passions of her own – Archie had never been known to pick up a fishing rod, for example, whilst she was an expert with a fly – but the essence of Grant, the egalitarian nature of his view on the world, had been inspired for the most part by what she liked about Penrose. Seeing him now, though, preoccupied by thoughts which were out of kil-81

ter with Fallowfield’s gentle banter, Josephine realised how much he had changed in the five years since the book was written. He had even started to look like a policeman, whereas it was Grant’s greatest asset that he did not.

‘Do you think you might write another one?’ Fallowfield asked as he turned onto the Hammersmith Road, where the smell of chocolate from the enormous Lyons factory on the left-hand side reached them almost immediately, taking Josephine back to her own war years – which she had spent at Cadbury’s, teaching physical education – with a sudden intensity that only an unexpected sensory experience could evoke. ‘Perhaps all this will spur you on?’ he added hopefully.

‘I don’t know about that, Bill. I only wrote the first one for a bet.

A friend of mine swore it would be impossible to murder somebody in a crowd and I begged to differ, but I’m not sure in retro-spect that she wasn’t right. I had to write it in a fortnight and it nearly killed me, up till all hours every day. I swore I’d never do it again, but I have to admit – I do quite like Grant. He may turn up again if Brisena’s willing.’

‘Brisena?’ Fallowfield looked blank.

‘My typewriter. I dedicated the book to her because she worked so hard to finish it. It was all a bit of a joke, really. Making death up does have a knack of taking your mind off the real thing, though, so perhaps you’re right – now might be a good time to start.’

As they drove past Cadby Hall, the vast headquarters of Messrs.

J. Lyons & Company Limited which took up the entire street frontage between Brook Green and Blythe Road, Josephine noted its air of Saturday peace and fell silent, thinking of the one employee who would certainly not be enjoying his day off. As if reading her thoughts, Archie said: ‘I’ll be interested to know what you make of Frank Simmons. He seemed genuinely devastated last night, but I want to get an insight into how the family fits together.’

‘Elspeth certainly spoke about him with affection,’ Josephine said, ‘and I didn’t get the impression that there was any tension there, but there’s no such thing as an uncomplicated family. You and I both know that, and I imagine those complications are even 82

more intense when adoption’s involved.’ She was quiet for a moment, imagining Elspeth’s life at home. ‘The father’s sickness must have taken its toll on the family, even if they managed to shield Elspeth from the worst of it. It would be nothing short of a miracle if they had less than their fair share of doubts and regret, but that doesn’t make the family closet any darker than most, I suppose.’ Even so, she thought to herself, the combination of suspicion and grief was bound to make their visit to the family an uncomfortable one.

Suddenly, she and Archie were jerked from their seat as the car drew to an abrupt halt, taking its place in the long line of traffic waiting to cross Hammersmith Broadway. ‘Bugger,’ said Fallowfield. ‘I’d forgotten it was the bloody Boat Race.’

‘So had I,’ groaned Penrose, who usually took a partisan interest in the event. ‘Why do they have to live in Hammersmith, for God’s sake? The world and his wife will be here this afternoon.’

And indeed they were. From where the Daimler stood, they could see the crowds making their way to Hammersmith Bridge or heading towards the river to get a place on one of the barges that offered the best view as the crews rounded the great bend. It had always been beyond Fallowfield’s comprehension that this purely private affair between two universities could draw tens of thousands of Londoners – more than any horse race or football match

– but today he took it as a personal slight.

‘I don’t see how I’m going to get through this lot in a hurry,’ he said as they crawled along. ‘We’re not far off now, but we could be here for hours. You’ll get there quicker if you walk, Sir. I’ll meet you at the house as soon as I can.’

Penrose turned to Josephine. ‘Is that all right with you?’ She nodded, and he saw her safely onto the pavement, glad to be doing something more positive than sitting in the back of a car. They set off together in the direction of the river, leaving Fallowfield to swear quietly to himself behind the wheel. He glanced at her as they walked along, wondering how others saw them. To a stranger, they probably looked for all the world like a couple out for a weekend jaunt.

83

‘Where are we going?’ shouted Josephine above the bustle of traffic on the Broadway.

‘Verbena Gardens,’ Archie replied, and smiled as Josephine afforded the name the grimace it deserved. ‘Number twenty-six, to be exact. It’s just off the Great West Road, about fifteen minutes away.’

In fact, it took them nearly twice as long to negotiate the crowds gathered under the elms which stretched all the way along the Mall. When they found the road they were looking for, Penrose was relieved that, after all, they had arrived on foot. Verbena Gardens was the sort of curtain-twitching street that monitored its comings and goings with infallible diligence, and two reasonably nondescript pedestrians were much less of an intrusion than an unmarked but not unidentifiable police car. Frank and Betty Simmons would be going through enough at the moment without having the curiosity of their neighbours to contend with.

‘What an odd place to have a shop,’ said Josephine, voicing his own thoughts exactly. ‘I suppose I should have expected that, having seen a sample of the Lillibet lines. They could never be described as conventional.’ Certainly, number twenty-six had been imaginatively if improbably transformed from its unpromising beginnings as a red-brick terraced house, moderate in size and much like the ones that stood either side. The upper storey had managed to maintain an air of residential normality, but that only served to accentuate the enthusiastic attempts to turn the lower living quarters into a temple of fashion. If you knew where to look, London was actually full of little shops known to a special clientele and run by women who designed and made their own wares. Even so, Josephine could not imagine that there was another boutique quite like this anywhere in the city. The lack of passing trade had not deterred its proprietor from making the same efforts with her window-dressing that characterised the more fortunately placed outlets in Kensington and Regent Street. The harmonies of light and colour, the daringly original ideas were bountifully evident and, if her waxen smile was to be trusted, the figure in the window who beckoned the doubtful to step inside 84

seemed to bear no resentment at being asked to market her goods away from the mainstream. The standard wooden front door which was repeated up and down Verbena Gardens had been replaced here by a glass frontage, onto which the name was elaborately painted in gold. But today the closed sign deterred any prospective shoppers and the blinds at the door, still firmly pulled down, contrasted poignantly with the evening frocks and picture hats that spoke of such gaiety on either side.

With a sigh, Penrose stopped outside and, as a discreet card in the window invited him to do, rang for attention. For a minute or two, the bell brought no response then, as he was about to try again, a light came on at the back of the shop and someone shot the bolts back on the door. When it opened, the wretched night that Frank Simmons had spent was written on his face and in the creases of the clothes which he had worn the previous evening.

‘I’m sorry we’re a little late, Mr Simmons,’ Penrose said. ‘We were held up by the Boat Race crowds.’

Simmons looked blankly past him, and Penrose wondered if he expected to see people suddenly thronging into Verbena Gardens.

‘The Boat Race? Ah yes, it’s today isn’t it? Cambridge are favourites, I believe, but they say that both crews are strong this year.’ He paused, still looking off down the road. ‘Normally we’d have gone down to have a look but we just haven’t had time today.

There seems so much to do, what with Betty having to go up to Berwick to fetch Alice down. You did say that would be all right, Inspector? She’s too upset to travel on her own, and Betty’s so good with her. They’ve always got on well.’

‘That’s fine, Mr Simmons,’ said Penrose gently. ‘It’s important that she has someone with her at a time like this. But we’d just like to have a chat with the two of you first. May we come inside for a bit?’

‘Of course. How stupid of me. Please, come in,’ he said and led them into the shop, past the overnight bag which stood packed and waiting by the door and into a tidy, unexpectedly spacious sales area. As they moved towards the back of the shop, where a red velvet curtain was pulled to one side to reveal stairs to the liv-85

ing quarters above, Penrose made the formal introductions. ‘I’m so very sorry for your loss, Mr Simmons,’ said Josephine, and her words carried such genuine warmth and regret that Simmons relaxed immediately, forgetting for a moment the presence of an inspector of Scotland Yard. ‘Elspeth was a lovely girl,’ she continued, ‘and I’m only sorry not to have known her better. We talked a great deal on our way down here, though, and she was very excited about her visit. She obviously enjoyed her time in London with you.’

‘You’ve no idea what a comfort that is, Miss Tey,’ Simmons replied. ‘We had some happy times together at that theatre, Elspeth and me, and many of them were thanks to you. It will have meant a lot to her to have met you at last – she always wanted to.

Alice – that’s my sister-in-law, Elspeth’s mother – she’s not so keen on plays as we are, but she asked me to thank you for your kindness. There’s not much that can console her at the moment, but when I told her what the Inspector said about you making friends with Elspeth so quickly, that helped a bit, I think.’

At the top of the stairs they were met by a small, birdlike woman, dressed immaculately in a sober but well-cut suit.

Comparing her with her husband, Josephine would have considered her to be in her early forties but she had that sort of face which had never been truly young and which had probably changed very little over the years. Never in all her life could she remember seeing anyone quite as neat as Betty Simmons: her clothes, her dark auburn hair, the way she stood were all judged with a careful precision that was reflected in her manner of speech; not a word was out of place in those frugal sentences of welcome.

How Elspeth’s exuberance had fitted into this small house with its tidy containment, Josephine could not imagine.

She could, however, envisage the pleasure that the girl would have found in the eccentric streak which drove Frank Simmons to acquire every bit of theatrical memorabilia he could lay his hands on. When Elspeth had spoken about the collection on the train, Josephine had imagined it to consist of nothing but pile after pile of theatre programmes and magazines gathering dust in a corner. On 86

the contrary, what drew her attention almost as soon as she entered the Simmonses’ sitting room was a vibrant pocket of history which told the story of the stage for the last fifty years or more. All along one wall of the room, in a series of glass-fronted cases originally designed to protect precious books, hundreds of small objects were proudly displayed. While Betty disappeared into a tiny kitchen to make tea, Josephine took advantage of a pause in the formalities to look at them more closely. Each was carefully labelled like an exhibit in a museum, and certainly as valuable to anyone with a passion for theatre: the items were laid out chronologically, beginning with a property book used by Ellen Terry as Portia in 1875

and, next to it, a pair of the invisible spectacles which her leading man, Henry Irving, had worn. On the wall in between the first two cases, the mirror from Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s dressing room reflected a wax figurine of Edith Evans as Millamant in The Way of the World, but so evocative was the setting that the glass still seemed to hold echoes of the extraordinary character make-up that Beerbohm Tree had created for the likes of Fagin and Falstaff. The new stars of the stage were well represented, too; next to a 1925

edition of The Sketch, which showed Noël Coward on the cover breakfasting in bed, there was a flask in the form of a book, one of several which the playwright had given to the cast of his operetta, Bitter Sweet, on its opening night.

It really was an extraordinary display and, in spite of the som-bre nature of the afternoon, Josephine and Archie could not help but be fascinated. Simmons, gratified by their interest and pleased to grasp at any distraction from the real world, joined them by the cases and showed them the intricate workings of a silver plate cruet in the shape of Grimaldi which came to pieces to reveal salt and pepper pots in his pantaloons and a glass bottle for dressing in his chest; as the goose-heads appearing from his pockets were revealed to be the handles of spoons, Archie momentarily forgot his profession and exclaimed in delight. ‘This must have taken you years to build up,’ he said. ‘Where on earth did you get it all from?’

‘It’s a labour of love, Sir,’ Simmons replied. ‘I’ve been lucky in that an old pal of mine got a stage door job when he came out of 87

the army, and he always keeps his eyes open for me. You’d be amazed at what people chuck away – some of this stuff didn’t cost me a penny. And when people start to know you collect something, they get in touch with you if they’ve got something of interest. Come and look at this – it’s too big to keep in here.’

Penrose followed Elspeth’s uncle into another room to view the pride and joy of his collection – the drum which Irving had used to create the sound of many a battle at the Lyceum. Josephine, who had never had the remotest inclination to open herself up to strangers, nevertheless admired the natural way in which Archie found a common ground with everyone.

‘I still can’t believe she’s dead,’ said Betty Simmons, returning with the tea tray and pouring four neat cups without spilling a drop. ‘She just wasn’t the sort of girl that things happen to. When she was little, she’d make up stories about herself. Alice used to say it was because she was adopted – there was always something that she couldn’t know, so she invented it differently every day.

They wondered if they’d done the right thing in telling her, but you can’t keep that sort of thing secret forever, can you? The shock of finding it out later might have destroyed her, and it wasn’t as if she was unhappy with Alice and Walter. She was such a sweet girl to them, so kind and thoughtful. But not knowing who she really came from made her curious about everything.’

‘When was she adopted, Mrs Simmons?’ asked Penrose, as he came back into the room and sat down.

‘It was just before the war ended. Walter had come back in a dreadful state – not physically, you understand, but it had done terrible things to his mind – and Alice was trying to hold everything together for both of them, working all hours of the day and looking after him as well. We did as much as we could, but they were so far away up there. Alice didn’t want to come down to London because all her family were in Berwick and that’s where the business was. We thought she was mad at the time to take on a baby as well, but we were wrong. It was what she’d always wanted and she coped beautifully.’

‘So it was the Berwick authorities that handled the adoption?’

88

The Simmonses looked at each other doubtfully. ‘It wasn’t exactly done through the proper channels, you see,’ said Frank after a pause. ‘Walter arranged it privately when he was in the army. Someone he served with had a child he couldn’t bring up himself – I don’t know why – but it seemed like the answer to all Walter’s prayers. He and Alice couldn’t have any of their own, you see, and being without kids was eating up Alice with grief; she made herself quite ill with it at one stage, and Walter was in despair. They were so in love when they first married; I’ve never seen a man so happy. He would have done anything for her, and a baby was what she wanted most in all the world. When Elspeth came along, it seemed too good to be true. She couldn’t have been more loved if she had been their own.’

‘It changed them, though,’ his wife added. ‘The end of the war and Elspeth’s arrival all happened at the same time, so somehow she seemed to get caught up in what the fighting had done to him.

He was never the same towards Alice when he came back; she said so herself. But the baby transformed her life. Elspeth was the making of Alice, but sometimes I think she destroyed Walter. They might have got through it if it had been just the two of them.’

‘Betty! You can’t say that about an innocent little baby.’

‘It’s true though, Frank, and it’s nobody’s fault. Don’t get me wrong,’ she continued, turning back to Josephine and Archie. ‘I don’t mean that Walter didn’t love Elspeth. Of course he did. It wasn’t that he resented her or that Alice neglected him. It was just that having a child gave Alice an excuse to put all her emotional energy into the little one. She looked after Walter, but she stopped trying to understand him.’

‘It’s hard to care for a man you love but don’t always recognise,’

said Josephine, who knew all too well what sort of psychological props long-term sickness demanded. When her own mother had died suddenly, she had given up her teaching career to return to Inverness and keep house for her father. Her sisters were married by then, and it had seemed the sensible thing to do. For the first few years, she had been happy back in her home town; her father continued to run the grocery store that he owned in the High 89

Street and she had enjoyed the peace and familiarity of Crown Cottage. Alone in the house during the day, she had time to write and was pleased when her early attempts to be published in various journals and magazines were moderately successful. In time, her poems and short stories led to full-length novels, but what began as pure pleasure soon became an essential facet of her own well-being: when her father’s health began to suffer, companionship turned to dependence and she found that she desperately needed another place to lay the emotions which she no longer dare attach to him for fear of how strongly she would feel his death when it eventually came. It took a rare amount of strength to care for someone who was lost to you without putting up those barriers of self-protection, and she refused to judge Alice Simmons harshly for failing to find it. ‘I’m sure Elspeth must have felt the weight of that responsibility, too, as she grew older,’ she said.

‘Yes, she did,’ Frank agreed, ‘although I think it hit her hardest when Walter died and she had to take care of her mother. She was aware of the change in Alice, you see, because she’d always been so capable; she never knew Walter when he was truly himself. It wasn’t all bad. There were times when he tried to pull himself together and be what he’d been before, but it never lasted long.’

Simmons paused, looking down at his hands. ‘Were you over there, Inspector?’ Archie nodded and let him continue. ‘After a while, you forget how senseless it all seemed at the time. The more the years went by, the more Walter looked back to the war as the time when he meant something, when people respected him. He thought it would be a new start, coming home to a wife he loved with a child of their own to bring up, but it never worked out that way for him. I kept telling him – it’s not the war years that were right, it’s the peace years that are wrong, but he never would accept that. None of us really found the land fit for heroes that we were promised but you adjust, don’t you? He couldn’t.’

‘Did he keep in touch with any of his army friends?’

‘Not that I know of. I remember him telling me once about a reunion they were having. He couldn’t afford to go but some of them clubbed together and paid for his ticket. Even then, he hated 90

every minute of it because he didn’t think his clothes were good enough. It’s no wonder he was bitter, is it? He went off with crowds throwing flowers at him, and when he came back he couldn’t even enjoy a drink with the men he’d fought alongside because he was ashamed of the coat on his back.’

Penrose listened, remembering some of the uncomfortable reunions he had been to himself. At times it had felt much easier to drink to the tragedy of the dead than to look the living in the eye, knowing that many of those men came back to the realisation that the world they had fought so hard for no longer wanted them.

‘Did anyone ever make contact with Elspeth’s real parents?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure Alice even knew who they were, and Elspeth certainly didn’t. It was almost as if keeping in touch with them would have been tempting fate: they might have changed their minds and wanted her back.’

‘But Alice did once mention something that she asked me not to tell anyone.’ All eyes turned to Betty Simmons, and her husband looked at her questioningly. ‘Every year, on Elspeth’s birthday, Walter got a letter with some money in it. The letter was never signed and Walter wouldn’t tell her who it was from, although he always denied it was from her parents. One year, when Walter was particularly ill, Alice got to the envelope first and opened it. There were ten five-pound notes inside, and a letter that just said, “You know where I am if you change your mind.” Walter was furious when he found out she’d opened it, but he refused to explain what it meant; he just told Alice not to worry, that if she wanted Elspeth to be happy she should forget all about it. That’s why she begged me not to say anything,’ she added by way of explanation to Frank. ‘She was terrified she might lose the child.’

Penrose was quiet for a moment as he considered the implications of Betty Simmons’s secret. The most obvious explanation for the money was that it had been sent by Elspeth’s real parents to help with the cost of bringing her up, but the message in the note made a nonsense of that: surely if they had wanted her back they could have just taken her, particularly as there was no legal agree-91

ment to protect Walter and Alice. ‘You’re sure the letter said “I”

and not “we”?’ he asked.

‘Yes, at least I’m sure that’s what she told me it said,’ Betty replied with certainty. ‘I remember wondering if one of her parents hadn’t really wanted to give her up and was trying to get her back, but I didn’t say that to Alice. It would have only worried her even more.’

The same thought had occurred to Penrose, who was developing a growing respect for Mrs Simmons’s intelligence. Josephine took advantage of the pause in his questioning. ‘When we were having lunch on the train,’ she began, ‘Elspeth seemed very excited about a young man she’d met quite recently. Do you know who he is?’

‘You must mean Hedley,’ said Frank. ‘Hedley White. He works backstage at Wyndham’s and the New. They met a couple of months ago when Elspeth and I were queuing for an autograph.

He took her programme to get it signed, and when he came back with it he asked her if she’d like to have tea with him. After that, he took her out whenever she was down here. He’s a nice lad, and Elspeth was smitten. Nobody had ever shown much interest in her in that way before, and he always seemed to treat her well. Betty and I never worried when she was out with him.’

‘She was seeing him tonight, wasn’t she?’ Josephine asked.

‘Yes, they were going to the theatre together. He’d got top-price seats as a treat because he knew how much she loved your play.

She was quite upset when she heard it was going to end, and Hedley wanted her to have the chance to see it again once or twice before it finished. In fact, she wasn’t supposed to come down until next week but he got her here early, sent her the train ticket and everything. She was so excited, Alice said. She’d never travelled in first class before. That’s what I mean about him treating her well –

he was thoughtful. It must have cost him a fortune.’

Yes it must, thought Josephine, who – in spite of her reassuring words to Elspeth – had always thought first-class travel a terrible waste of money. The only time she used it herself was when she was invited to London to discuss her work. For some reason, Bernard Aubrey seemed to think that bringing her down in com-92

fort would soften her up a little before each contract negotiation and she had never had the heart to tell him it made no difference to her which part of the train she sat in. But a first-class ticket on a backstage wage must have made quite a hole in Hedley White’s pocket, even if he was in love.

‘You’ll have to tell him, Frank. He’ll be devastated,’ Betty said.

‘He can’t know yet or he’d have been in touch.’

‘If you don’t mind, Sir, I’d like to do that myself,’ Penrose said.

‘Was he coming here to pick her up, or had they arranged to meet somewhere else?’

‘They were meeting in town later on when Hedley finished his afternoon shift. I was going to drop Elspeth off at the theatre, then they were going to the Corner House in Shaftesbury Avenue to have a bite to eat after the show. You’ll tell him gently, Inspector, won’t you? He’ll blame himself when he knows, just like I do. It won’t take him long to realise that if it wasn’t for him Elspeth would never have been on that train at all.’

Quite, thought Penrose, who had no intention of being remotely gentle when he caught up with Hedley White. ‘Do you mind if I use your telephone, Mr Simmons? I’d like to ask one of my colleagues to get over to the theatre and see if they can find the young man before he leaves work. And perhaps you have a home address for him?’

Betty showed Penrose to the telephone and went to get the information he had requested, leaving Josephine alone with Frank Simmons. ‘Try not to blame yourself,’ she said quietly.

‘Even if you’d been waiting on the platform, there was nothing you could have done. I keep wishing that I hadn’t been in such a hurry to get a taxi myself. If I’d kept her talking for longer, perhaps this would never have happened. But we can’t know what fate has waiting for us, Frank. All we can do is make the people we love as happy as possible while we’ve got them, and you did that for Elspeth. She made that clear to me even in the short time I spent with her.’

He smiled at her gratefully. As Penrose returned, the sound of the shop bell reached them from the floor below. ‘That’ll be my 93

Sergeant,’ he said. ‘He’s made it through the traffic at last. We’ll leave you in peace now, but I’ll let you know right away if there’s any news.’

‘You don’t want to speak to me any more?’ asked Simmons, who had been dreading a much tougher round of questioning from the Inspector.

‘No, Sir, not at the moment. We’ve checked with the Coventry Street Lyons and the waitress there has confirmed the details of your delivery. I’ll need to speak to your sister-in-law when she gets here, but that can wait until you’ve had some time to be together.

Have a safe journey, Mrs Simmons. I’ve arranged for a car to pick you up in half an hour now the traffic’s settled down a bit, but if there’s anything else you need just give the Yard a call.’

‘Thank you Inspector, you’ve been very kind,’ said Betty. ‘I’ll tell Alice that I know you’ll catch who did this to us. It won’t give her Elspeth back, but it’ll be some consolation.’

As they took their leave, Penrose wished he shared her confidence. He brought Fallowfield up to date, but the rest of the journey back to St Martin’s Lane was made in silence. For once, Fallowfield’s optimism fell on deaf ears.

94

Seven

Theatre is a self-obsessed medium at the best of times, but this was not the best of times. By the time the curtain fell on another packed matinee, news of the murder and its sinister echoes of the play had broken into the little world of the New Theatre, courtesy of young Tommy Forrester and the crisp five-pound note which a far-sighted reporter had seen fit to slip into his pocket. The story reached the auditorium first, as the audience shuffled the lunchtime edition from row to row with a delicious sense of melodrama and no discrimination between fourpenny and shilling seats.

Gradually it filtered backstage, where certain members of the company experienced the uncomfortable sensation of talking about something other than themselves. They dealt with the novelty in different ways and according to type: Aubrey acknowledged the tragedy whilst considering the logistics of extending the run by a week or two; Esme McCracken – incensed at yet more notoriety for the play she so despised – slammed her notebook down in the prompt corner and scribbled furiously throughout the final act, while her second-in-charge left ashen-faced for his evening off; Lydia was shocked to the core, while Marta – with all the empathy expected of a lover – found herself equally horrified; and Terry, who had crept into a box to watch his understudy at work before going into battle with Aubrey, swore at Fleming for a lacklustre opening and went upstairs with an arrogance unusual even for him. Meanwhile, in the foyer, the kiosk attendant was recovering from an unexpected rush on souvenir dolls.