The Best British Mysteries III

Thoroughly Modern Millinery by Marilyn Todd

The Pink Parrot was buzzing louder than a barrelful of hornets when Fizzy Potter fluttered her fingers at Lennie the barman, tossed her feather boa over her shoulder and shimmied up the sweeping spiral staircase. Down on the dance floor, the exuberance of the Charleston had given way to pencil-thin couples fusing together for the Argentinian tango, a relatively recent import, but one which seemed destined to remain the chief talking point among the middle-aged and middle-classed for years to come. Sensitive to the dance’s stillness and pauses, the conductor of the Pink Parrot Orchestra was milking its suggestiveness for all it was worth.

‘I say, Fizzy!’ A young man with a moustache that looked like an anchovy on his upper lip waved her over. ‘Care to join me with a whisky and soda?’

‘Sorry, darling,’ she quipped back, ‘but with you and me it’ll only ever be gin and platonic!’

With laughter ringing in her ears, she made her way to the corner where her friends had set up their usual Friday night colony. All feathers and beads, cloche hats and silk stockings, Fizzy also happened to own the finest pair of knees this side of the Bosphorus. A point which rarely went unappreciated when she sat down, as now, and crossed her long legs.

‘Jolly glad you made it, old girl,’ Marriott muttered across his martini.

Impeccably turned out as usual, and with a crease in his trousers that could slice bacon, he twiddled the yellow rosebud in his buttonhole. Marriott Stokes was the only member of the group who didn’t need to go out and earn his weekly envelope, his father having left him a packet several years previously.

‘Rather hoping you can do something with old Catspaw,’ he drawled.

‘Yes, I’d noticed he’s sporting a face like a vulture whose carrion has just made a miraculous recovery and is now dancing the fandango instead of providing him with a good supper,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Seems Bubbles gave him the raspberry,’ Foxy Fairfax explained.

Like Fizzy, he was also an illustrator, only instead of working freelance for magazines, Foxy tended to restrict himself to children’s books.

‘Come off it, chaps, every girl gives Catspaw the bird,’ she said, sliding her olive off its cocktail stick. ‘Why should Bubbles be different?’

Anyway, Bubbles was married, and girls like that don’t pass up on rich bankers in favour of a penniless cartoonist.

‘Exactly what I told him,’ Biff said. ‘In fact, I seriously advised the old halibut to go and get stinko and forget all about popsies. Like the Mongol hordes descending from wherever it was they used to descend from, girls only bring grief on a chap.’

Adding, as Marriott ordered another round of drinks, ‘I say, Fizzy. Given any further thought about swanning down the aisle with me?’

As a partner in the family firm of purveyors of quality pickles, Biff Kilgannon had no interest in art like the rest of the gang; in fact the nuances of Impressionism, gouache and the finer points of the Neue Sachlichkeit sailed completely over his head. He only tagged along because his sister, Lulu, was an artist and this way he got to mix with lots of Witty Young Things, something one tends not to do in the gherkin and piccalilli department. It wasn’t that Biff wasn’t a dish, Fuzzy mused, especially since playing prop forward had endowed him with muscles of steel. It was just unfortunate that he had a brain to match.

‘Sorry, Biff.’ Fizzy set to powdering the shiny spot on her nose. ‘The answer’s still no.’

The mirror in her cloisonné compact reflected a heart-shaped face with a much-kissed snub nose and big eyes enlarged further by finely plucked brows and heaps of soot-black mascara. It was only upon closer examination that one realised that one eye was brown, the other blue.

Fizzy’s appointment diary rarely showed a blank spot. Snapping the compact shut, she slotted a cigarette into its holder. Simultaneously, a battery of clicks produced enough light to power up half of southern England and quite possibly a chunk of East Anglia, too. Thanking her gallant knights with an all-encompassing smile, Fizzy struck her own match and thought, funny how the entire male section of the Westlake Set was queuing to slip a diamond cluster on the third finger of her left hand – yet every time she pictured the hatload of kids she so desperately wanted, all the little beezers sported the same ski-slope noses, lopsided smiles and floppy fringes of the only man who’d never once jumped forward in a bid to light her gasper.

Damn you, Squiffy Hardcastle. Damn you to hell.

‘- don’t you think so, Fizzy?’

‘Sorry, Kitty, didn’t catch that.’

‘I was just saying, sweetheart, that his work’s far too Gauguinesque for my taste -’

Fizzy didn’t bother asking whose work. ‘Absolutely,’ she replied, her mind elsewhere. On a certain painting, as it happened, in a gilt frame…

‘- Matisse is living in the south of France, I hear -’

‘- now does Lulu’s stuff reflect Synthetic Cubism with a hint of Purist, d’you think, or pastoralism with a touch of Analytic Cubism?’

Snippets drifted past like ducks on the Thames, while Fizzy contemplated portraits in gilt frames…

‘Sorry we’re late, everyone.’

Her train was interrupted as Orville Templeton, Hon. Member for Knightsbridge & Chelsea, held out a chair for his wife.

‘Traffic was an absolute stinker.’

‘You haven’t missed much,’ Foxy told the newcomers. ‘Chilton and his protégé haven’t arrived yet.’

‘Traffic, probably,’ Orville said, shooting his cuffs.

Poor Orville. Noble, worthy, gallant, dignified – a hundred decent men packed into one – and duller than a miner’s bathwater. Fizzy exchanged smiles with his wife and thought the same couldn’t be said of Gloria Templeton. Fizzy’s best friend was five years older than her and a study in understatement, from the simple wedding band to the pale cream silk she always draped herself in. Not half as modish as Fizzy’s white cloche, Gloria’s broad-rimmed hats were perfect for hot summer evenings like this, flattering her chestnut bob and emphasising her strong patrician features – though nothing could disguise the permanent sadness in her lovely green eyes.

That was the problem, Fizzy sighed, when one’s still in love with one’s first husband.

A husband, moreover, who was handsome and charming, gave one two gorgeous daughters, then betrayed all three of them by getting himself blown to pieces in the very last week of the war. Her blue-brown gaze rested on Orville, looking for all the world like a reject from a second-rate taxidermist’s. Poor Orville. The Hon. Member for K &C worshipped his new family. Adored Gloria. Idolised his adopted girls. Would do anything for them, anything at all. Even to accepting that he would only ever come second best…

Second best, of course, was a concept far beyond the scope of Fizzy Potter and, along the banquette, Bubbles was slipping her Cartier-encrusted wrist through Teddy Hardcastle’s arms.

‘I say, were you really the youngest captain in the Great War, Squiffy?’

Any closer, dammit, and she’d be a tattoo.

‘Too jolly right he was,’ Marriott boomed. ‘Gave him a gong for it, too.’

Hardcastle spiked his rebellious fringe out of his eyes, but made no effort to prise the limpet away.

‘Take no notice of Marriott,’ he told Bubbles, with a flash of lopsided grin. ‘By the time I joined up they were running out of men. Another six months and they’d have made me a machine gun captain.’

‘Don’t be so damned modest, man,’ Marriott snorted. ‘It’s the same with his bookbinding commissions, y’know, Bubbs. All that inlaying of coloured leather, gold fillets, whose wossnames in enamelled porcelain you mount on the covers -’

‘Plaques.’

‘Plaques, thank you, and that’s without him encrusting the whole bloody thing with mother-of-pearl and those other wotnots.’

‘Cabochons.’

‘Cabochons, thank you, so don’t let him tell you different, Bubbs. They’re works of art he churns out.’

But Bubbles wasn’t interested in Hardcastle’s technical aptitude. Rich bankers are dandy when it comes to footing bills at the likes of Chanel or Van Cleef & Arpels, but the trouble is, they will spend so much time at the bank. Having given one beau the old heave-ho tonight, she was looking to plug the vacancy fast.

‘Why “Squiffy”, darling?’

With a glass of champagne permanently welded to one hand, even Biff could work out how she’d acquired her nickname.

‘Not what you think, Bubbles,’ Foxy laughed. ‘It’s from the way Teddy wore his cap at school, and damn if he don’t still wear his hat at that angle.’

On anyone else, Fizzy thought, it would come over rakish. On Teddy Hardcastle, the pitched brim lent a certain equanimity and she quietly damned ski-slope noses to eternal hellfire and sent lopsided smiles down the piste after them.

‘- so this exhibition tomorrow,’ Orville said. ‘Is everyone going?’

‘Are frogs waterproof?’ Foxy Fairfax retorted.

And as though a light had been switched on, the whole group became animated about Chilton Westlake’s new prodigy.

‘What’s the verdict on this, then?’ Kitty asked, unrolling one of the posters she’d designed to publicise the exhibition at their friend’s gallery. ‘Have I captured The Great Man, do you think?’

When Doc Frankenstein shot the first electrical bolt through his monster, it couldn’t have made so much of a jolt.

‘By Jove, Kitty.’ Biff was the first of the group to recover. ‘You’ve got the blighter off to a T.’

And how, Fizzy thought. Lank black hair, olive skin, stubbled chin, the slight sneer on his lips…dammit, this WAS Louis Boucard.

‘Just as well one can’t get scent off a poster,’ Biff added, wrinkling his prop forward’s nose.

‘He’s French, darling!’ Bubbles protested. ‘And an artiste, to boot. Parisians don’t think the way we do.’

What she meant, Fizzy reflected, was that soap and Louis Boucard were strangers, whereas booze and cocaine were blood brothers. She considered all the other attributes of this artistic genius – his gambling, his womanising, his debauching of young girls – and wondered exactly how well Kitty Gardener had known Louis Boucard to be able to produce such an intimate representation.

Indeed, how well every other member of the Set had known him, to recognise what they were seeing…

‘Can’t stand the fellow, as y’know, but I do feel his work has an affinity with Chevaillier,’ Catspaw Gordon remarked, emerging from his doldrums at last.

The Boucard effect, of course, Fizzy mused. The uncombed Parisian touched a nerve with everyone sooner or later, and her thoughts flashed back to that portrait in its gilt frame…

‘- pronounced Symbolist influence, certainly,’ Marriott was saying, ‘with a touch of the new Classicism overlaid with subtle early Cubist House elements and, hmm, maybe the merest smidgen of the draughtsmanship one sees in Migliorini -’

‘Tosh!’ Foxy Fairfax interjected. ‘Boucard’s a bounder and a cad who corrupts everything he touches! He’s a liar, a conman, a thief and a cheat, and by his admission, he trawls the gutters to paint -’ he adopted an exaggerated French whine ‘- prozzitutes et felons.’

‘Yes, darling, but there’s something so utterly exciting about the demi-monde, don’t you think?’ Bubbles shuddered delightedly. ‘I mean, all that naked flesh and loucheness? I find his work riveting. How about you, Squiffy?’

But before Teddy Hardcastle had a chance to venture his opinion on this blight on the moral and artistic landscape, Chilton Westlake, the gallery owner whose name the Set had adopted for their Friday night get-together, arrived wearing a mustard check suit, straw boater and a face like absolute thunder. He was also alone.

‘Have you seen these?’ His chubby fist pounded the newspapers in his hand. ‘Have you?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘The Westlake Gallery is holding a exhibition of exciting new Parisian artist, Louis Boucard,’ he read.

‘Sounds just about top-hole to me.’ Orville explained. ‘You wanted a plug for the old show.’

‘Plug? PLUG?’

Chilton was in danger of testing medical science’s latest advance in cardiac technology.

‘I was supposed to be one doing the plugging here, matey. Instead, what happens? Boucard only gives me some cock-and-bull story about needing to borrow the key to the gallery to make a couple of last minute alterations, don’t he?’

‘Inviting the press for a sneak preview instead, I suppose?’

Trust Gloria to get there before anybody else.

‘Boucard’s bold style pushed the boundaries of art deco to a new dimension, says the London Bulletin’

Chilton tossed the paper on the floor and ground it with his spatted heel.

‘A greater whiff of decadence than a hundred Tamara de Lempickas, according to the Evening ruddy Witness, and I wouldn’t have minded him stealing a march on my show,’ he said, gulping down Marriott’s martini. ‘But get this.’

He hurled the paper at Foxy, who read aloud.

‘- Boucard has promised a work entitled “Revelation “ in addition to the paintings listed in the catalogue. A portrait, the likes of which, he claims, has never before been on public display in this country – a portrait so daring, so scandalous that he’s keeping it under velvet until the official opening. Even the gallery owner… Oh, I say, Chilton, is that right?’ Foxy goggled. ‘That even you have no idea of this picture’s content?’

Westlake glugged down Kitty’s drink and even managed to prise Bubbles’ bubbles out of her grasp.

‘Couldn’t be righter, old man. First I knew about this so-called “Revolution” was when I read about it in the bloody papers.’

His fat little hand lashed out to tip Catspaw’s, Biff’s and Teddy’s drinks down the hatch, his expression brightening only slightly when he noticed a stupendous pair of knees crossed elegantly on the soft leather banquette.

‘But the really galling thing,’ he wailed, ‘was that Boucard had the cheek to tap me for the fare back to the Gallery, and that’s not the first time he’s tapped me for a tenner, either!’

Fizzy’s martini was the last remaining casualty and Chilton Westlake was in no mood for taking prisoners.

‘I’ll kill the little bashtard,’ he said, his boater rolling under the table as he slid down the table. ‘Sho help me, I’ll shlit his dirty French throat and then I’ll pull his bloody gizzards through the hole.’

At that stage, of course, no one actually believed him.

Three p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and the Westlake Gallery resembled more a tin of sardines than a preview of an exhibition by a hitherto unknown artist. No invitation had been refused, placing something of a strain on the nosebags and drink trays, since Chilton invariably considered himself lucky if one third of his invites turned up to these dos, most often only a quarter (and those usually only relatives and friends). Today the place was packed to the gunwales and, despite bloodshot eyes and an aversion to bright lights, he wasn’t looking half as bad as Fizzy expected. That, she supposed, was because the gallery stood to make a mint from the sensational publicity and, to give Boucard his due, the Frenchman knew how to play the press.

‘Not drinking, sweetheart? Splendid!’ Kitty swapped her empty glass for Fizzy’s full one. ‘Stuff’s in perilously short supply. Well, chin-chin.’

Straightening his purple bow tie, Chilton Westlake mounted the podium and launched into a speech about his exciting new protégé and Fizzy noted the care he took to plug the other artists he’d sponsored, clearly intent on shifting as much stock as possible today. Sadly, though, her little plump friend was better at evaluating works of art than talking about them and her attention wandered in the direction of a certain portrait in a gilt frame. Entitled Woman in a Mask, it was typical of Boucard’s style in that-

‘I’m not convinced Bubbles finds the demi-monde half as riveting as she’d supposed,’ a wry baritone murmered in Fizzy’s cloche-covered ear.

She followed Teddy’s gaze to where the banker’s wife was sandwiched between a brace of hard-eyed villains and a group of women in red heels and even redder lips. In another surprise for Chilton, Boucard had mischievously invited several of his ‘prozzitutes et felons’, who were swigging champagne and helping themselves to cigars on an industrial scale. Bubbles’ high colour showed she was finding it hard to reconcile the fact that, any minute, she’d be seeing these same people sprawled naked across the gallery walls.

Chilton cleared his throat.

‘- I now call upon Louis to join us and declare this exhibition open!’

Nothing.

‘I said,’ he repeated, raising his voice, ‘that I now call upon Louis Boucard to come out from the back room and open the exhibition held in his honour.’

Knowing glances rippled round the crowd, as well as one or two giggles. Drink, drugs, you name it, only a relentless optimist like Chilton could have seriously have expected the artist to be sober during the daytime. Louis Boucard Was a creature of the night. In every respect.

‘Haw, haw.’ Chilton tried to cover the gaffe with humour, ‘Not sure I’ll understand you temperamental artistes -’

Bubbles seized the opportunity to detach herself from her underworld sandwich to fetch him, but she wasn’t alone for very long. The shrill scream and the accompanying crash of crystal said it all.

Louis Boucard was dead.

‘And you are, miss?’

‘Phyllis Potter, 62 Northwell Mansions, Bayswater.’ Fizzy’s smile was directed straight at the constable, but her glance was slanted at the man standing beside her. ‘Right between the museum and a gentleman’s club, if you must know.’

‘Thank you, sir?’

‘Edward James Hardcastle, 17b Elton Square, Chelsea.’ He kept his eyes straight. ‘Too many stuffed shirts and old fossils for my taste.’

‘Oh, dear. Elderly residents are they, sir?’

‘Not exactly, constable. Is that all?’

‘For the moment, yes, thank you. But we’re asking people not to venture far from the scene, as there will doubtless be other questions we wish to ask. In fact, I understand there’s a bar down the road -’

‘Jo-Jo’s,’ Fizzy said. ‘We know it well, constable. Regular watering hole,’ she added, tossing her boa over her shoulder, but instead of following Kitty and Marriott out into the afternoon sunshine, she took advantage of the milling confusion to slip into the anteroom.

Ugh. Louis Boucard wasn’t what one would call classically handsome in life. Grey and waxy in death, he was even more unprepossessing! She took care not to tread in the broken glass from Bubbles’ champagne as she approached the desk where he was slumped. Someone, it appeared, had caved the prodigy’s head in with a rather sleek black marble panther. The bloodied statuette lay on the desk among enough cocaine – she tasted the powder with a tentative finger – yes, with enough cocaine to supply a small continent for a decade, possibly two.

So then. Not content to take it himself. Louis had been pushing the stuff.

‘You realise he was dead before he was beaned?’

Fizzy yelped, half of her livid that she hadn’t noticed him leaning against the wall with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. While the other half was too busy picturing her hatful of kids made in this man’s wretched image…

‘If you’re telling me someone frightened him to death,’ she said coolly, ‘I’m not remotely surprised.’

A muscle twitched at the side of Teddy Hardcastle’s mouth. ‘Boucard, I fear, was more tormenter than tormented.’

He feared right. Louis could be facing an army of flesh-eating zombies and he’d con them back to the grave.

‘Look.’

Teddy lifted a hank of dark hair to reveal a puncture wound in Boucard’s dirty neck.

‘The ice pick or whatever severed his spinal cord, paralysing all muscular activity. The lungs stopped functioning, so did the heart, but death, as always I’m afraid, comes slowly.’

Fizzy reeled and was immediately caught in a steel net that smelled of ski slopes and pine.

‘Never fear, Phyllis Potter of 62 Northwell Mansions, Bayswater. Looks like he was unconscious when it happened.’

Fizzy disentangled herself from his arms, slightly surprised that bookbinders had so many muscles.

‘Why aren’t the police swarming all over this room?’ she asked.

‘Ah, well. It would appear our boys in blue haven’t realised that there would be more blood, had Louis been alive when he was brained, and knowing the blunt instrument to be a favourite among the criminal underclass, they rather fancy one of those as the culprit.’

Solicitously, Teddy straightened her hat. Fizzy jerked away, hoping he couldn’t see the furious blush that had suffused her cheeks.

‘What guff,’ she snapped. ‘Those girls aren’t on the game because they enjoy it. They’re dishing out knee-tremblers because they’ve run out of options, and even if one of them had killed Louis Boucard, they’d never leave a fortune in cocaine lying around.’

Not when it would buy them their freedom – and no self-respecting thief would dream of walking away empty-handed, no matter how pushed they had been to commit murder!

‘Precisely the argument I presented to His Majesty’s law enforcers,’ he began. But whatever else he was going to say was overtaken by the door bursting open and Chilton, Orville, Gloria and a uniformed inspector rushing into the room.

‘This is an outrage,’ Chilton was blustering. ‘An absolute bloody outrage! Why should I want to kill him?’

‘You have a persuasive line in arguments, Mr Hardcastle,’ Fizzy muttered under her breath. ‘You get them to abandon the criminal underclass, so they’re pinching Chilton’s collar instead.’

The inspector shot her a venomous glance and continued.

‘You were overheard threatening the deceased in the Pink Parrot nightclub last night,’ he told Chilton, leaving the assembled company in no doubt as to his opinion of such a den of tangoed iniquity. ‘Lewis Buckard had given the press an authorised showing -’

‘For heaven’s sake, man, it’s Louis,’ Chilton protested, ‘pronounced Boo-car.’

‘- and he’d also been holding out on you with regard to a mysterious portrait. To wit, this.’

He indicated the easel in the corner draped in black velvet.

‘Inspector,’ Orville cut in, ‘I have explained how Mr Westlake was in plain view of everyone at all times this afternoon. I don’t see how you can possibly follow this ridiculous line of questioning.’

In true political style, the Hon. Member then rephrased his argument in fifteen different ways. Somewhere between the fourth and the fifth, Gloria came across and took both Fizzy’s hands in hers.

‘Are you all right, darling? You look terribly pale.’

‘Yes, I’m fine, really, I am. Just a shock, that’s all, seeing death at close quarters.’

She glanced at Teddy Hardcastle, who had seen more of it and at far closer quarters, then looked back into Gloria’s permanently sad eyes.

They’d been laughing, that was the terrible part. Celebrating because Fizzy had landed her first job with A la Mode and Gloria had just received confirmation that baby number two, already well advanced, was healthy and ready to hatch out on schedule. Yes, they’d been laughing fit to burst when that telegram came…

Fizzy shivered. ‘The police don’t really suspect Chilton, do they?’

‘Darling, if they had a man standing over the body waving a placard written in Louis’s own blood which read “It was me”, they’d still think the butler did it.’

Gloria glanced at her husband, boring the inspector into submission.

‘Orville will set them right,’ she assured her.

Shouldn’t be hard, either, Fizzy supposed. To compensate for his physical shortcomings, Chilton upholstered himself in the loudest checks he could find. Top that with a purple bow tie and spats, and who could miss him?

‘For goodness sake,’ Chilton snorted. ‘I’m hardly likely to kill the goose that lays my golden eggs, am I, you clod?’

The inspector, who wasn’t entirely won over by being labelled a clod, didn’t take to having his chest prodded either.

‘You’re wasting time,’ Chilton snapped, ‘and anyway, what about the theft of my picture, eh? Eh? Why aren’t you investigating that?’

‘What picture?’ Fizzy asked Gloria.

Patrician eyes rolled. ‘Wouldn’t you just know that while this kerfuffle’s been going on, someone would filch one of the exhibits? Of course, it’ll be worth a fortune on the black market after today. Chilton’s incandescent.’

‘Nonsense,’ Fizzy murmured. ‘He probably snitched it himself, to drive up the price of the others.’

‘So true, darling. No artist is ever worth so much as when he dies.’

Meanwhile, the combination of being branded incompetent, a dim-wit, having a finger poked in his breastbone and being blasted with the notion that theft ranked higher than murder was doing little to enhance the inspector’s opinion of Chilton. Especially since the accusations were being made in front of the Hon. Member for Knightsbridge & Chelsea.

‘What Mr Westlake is forgetting, sir,’ he told Orville, ‘is that apart from Lewis Buckard playing him for a sucker over the publicity, he’d borrowed money from him totalling nearly one hundred pounds, which he apparently had no intention of repaying, and we know he was holding out on him.’

He indicated the velvet-draped easel as he read from the press.

‘…the likes of which has never been on public display before in this country – a portrait so daring, so scandalous that he’s keeping it under velvet until the official opening. “Revelation”, Mr Buckard called it.’

With a flourish that could only be described as smug, he whisked off the velvet.

Revelation indeed. Six pair of eyes gaped at the empty frame.

Teddy Hardcastle let out a soft laugh.

‘B-but -’ Chilton couldn’t find words to express what he felt.

‘Well, I say!’ Orville could.

The inspector rubbed his jaw for what seemed like an hour, pausing only to glower at Chilton in the way a lioness might watch her marked zebra leap the gorge into safety

‘Do you suppose,’ he asked eventually, ‘that it was within Mr Buckard’s character to pull a fast one to drum up publicity? That there never was a scandalous portrait to unveil?’

Five voices responded as one, the verdict unanimous. Such a stunt was well within Boucard’s capabilities, they replied.

Cue more jaw-rubbing by His Majesty’s servant.

‘Whoever killed Mr Buckard did so by holding the weapon in this -’ he held up one of numerous soft cloths used in the gallery to dust the frames ‘- to avoid leaving fingerprints. Unfortunately, we have no witnesses to say they saw anyone go in or come out of this room.’

‘Why would they?’ Orville asked reasonably. ‘We were all facing the podium, inspector, anxiously awaiting the moment when the doors to the exhibition would open and we could be one of the first to see, and hopefully grab a slice of, this new and prodigious young talent.’

‘There were nearly eighty people crammed into my gallery,’ Chilton snapped, ‘and not all of them with gilt-edged invites, I might add. You mark my words, one of those low-lifes killed Louis.’

The inspector turned his scowl on Teddy Hardcastle, making it clear who was responsible for diverting precious resources on this ridiculous wild goose chase when the police had had it sussed all along. With a loud ‘Harrumph’ he stomped back into the gallery, trailed by Chilton and Orville, with Gloria adding poise to the rear and leaving Fizzy alone with Teddy once more. This time, though, the silence between them stretched to infinity.

‘The question,’ he said at last, ‘isn’t who killed Louis Boucard, is it?’

‘No?’ Frogs croak louder, she thought.

‘No.’ He let the wall take his weight at the shoulders. ‘The question is, why should two people want to kill the same man.’

Turning out of the gallery into the glorious midsummer sunshine, a mischievous breeze whisked off Gloria’s hat and carried it halfway down Mayfair. Biff, of course, would have tackled it before it had gone fifteen yards, but Biff was already ensconced in Jo-Jo’s Cellar sinking his second martini and by the time the Hon. Member for K &C had picked up sufficient speed, a Ford with an unnecessarily heavy foot on its accelerator had flattened Gloria’s masterpiece right between the tulle and the rosebuds. Another time and the group would have hooted with laughter. Today, though, a man’s life had been taken and the crushing, in an instant, of something so vibrant and bright stood for all that had happened.

On the other hand, it’s an ill wind. Fizzy couldn’t help but notice the look of gratitude and affection that Gloria shot her husband as he handed the battered titfer back to his wife and her heart gladdened. He was a good egg, the Hon. Member, and whilst he wasn’t – and would never be – the love of her friend’s life, she’d always felt he deserved more than mere recognition.

‘Well?’ A long stride fell into step alongside her, its fedora angled low over one half of his forehead.

‘Any more thoughts?’

In front of them, Orville had offered a chivalrous arm to his wife and although Fizzy had hoped for a similar offer from Teddy, none came. She adjusted her beads, smoothed her drop waistline, tucked her clutch bag under her arm and thought, who cares about floppy hair anyway?

‘I mean,’ he added evenly, ‘you must know it’s one of us.’

‘Don’t you mean two of us?’

Dammit, Pekinese dogs don’t snap that hard, but if Teddy Hardcastle noticed, it didn’t show.

‘Foxy called him a cad and a bounder,’ he said, ‘and not without justification. Did you know Boucard conned him out of five hundred pounds?’

‘How much?’

To an illustrator of children’s books, that was a fortune, and Fizzy calculated that she’d have to work until she was a hundred and twenty-eight to cover that kind of spare cash. Oh, Foxy, Foxy, what have you done…?

‘We’ve already heard the inspector’s case against Chilton,’ Teddy said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

Pity, because they were nice hands, with just the right amount of crisp, dark hairs on the back, and she’d pictured them tooling, stamping, making intricate mosaics of metal and leather. Perhaps, in his painstaking artisan mind, magazine illustrators came in on a level with doodlers?

‘Also, our Parisian friend helped himself to a whole pile of Bubbles’ jewels in, quote, payment for services rendered, unquote. He derided Catspaw’s cartoons in the press, got Marriot to underwrite an enterprise that didn’t exist – this must go no further, please – he also got Kitty Gardener pregnant. That’s the reason she zipped off to Zurich in the spring.’

‘Not a poster designer’s convention, then?’

‘There’s a clinic that deals with these things-’

She didn’t dare ask how he knew.

‘- and it’s common knowledge that Lulu was engaged to friend-Louis until she found him in bed with Bubbles, and you know how passionately Biff feels about his sister’s honour. Damn,’ he added lightly, ‘if the list ain’t just about endless.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting someone else with a grudge against Boucard?’ Fizzy asked as they reached the steps of the Cellar.

‘Someone, for instance, like you?’

Ahead of them, Orville was tipping the doorman and Chilton was checking in his boater, but Teddy remained behind on the steps.

‘You don’t say.’

‘Oh, but I do say.’ Suddenly the sunshine seemed terribly bright. ‘I don’t know where you gathered your gossip from -’

‘Information,’ he corrected mildly. ‘We called it information in the Intelligence.’ Adding, in response to her involuntary raising of eyebrows, ‘There was a lot to sort out after the Armistice.’

The hundreds, no thousands, of atrocities committed after the surrender flashed through her mind as it occurred to her that maybe that’s what inspired soldiers to become bookbinders. Intricate, absorbing, it makes one forget.

She coughed. ‘Anyway, don’t think I don’t know that Louis got your kid brother hooked on a certain white powdery substance.’

And him only sixteen, poor sap.

‘I see,’ Teddy said slowly. ‘So which do you have me pegged for? The puncture wound, the blunt object or both?’

Fizzy took a step back up the stairs to meet him square in the eye.

‘Louis Boucard,’ she said stiffly, ‘was a man with neither scruples nor conscience, but reasons to hate aren’t motives for murder, and even if they were, then the killer would surely choose somewhere more private, wouldn’t they, where they’re more likely to get away with it?’

‘Ah, but they are going to get away with it,’ Teddy replied softly, holding her miscoloured gaze. ‘Aren’t they?’

Down in the Jazz Cellar, it looked like a tornado had swept through the place, with the contents of handbags and pockets spilling over every table and chair as the police searched everyone who’d been in the gallery in an effort to find the missing portrait of a young woman wearing nothing but a painted Venetian mask. The sombre mood quickly gave way to hilarity as photographs fell out of wallets showing girls who were definitely not the title-holders’ wives along with two cream buns discovered in the kitbag of a woman who constantly bored people rigid with tales of her regimented diet. But no paintings of women in masks!

Having been officially declared a Snitched-Portrait-Free Zone, Fizzy found a sudden need to sit down. As shaking hands slotted a cigarette in its holder, she found herself met with the usual click of a dozen offers for light and one noticeable absence.

‘I say, Fizzy, are you free for the opera on Saturday?’ Biff wanted to know. ‘Well, how about the Saturday after?’

‘Tough luck, old man,’ Marriott cut in, ‘because I’ve already got my offer in for a spin down to the seaside in the old jalopy. What d’you say, old girl? Are you up for it?’

‘Excuse me.’

She had to pass Teddy to reach the powder room, but managed to do it without meeting his eye, though suddenly, there seemed to be something wrong with her breathing. Just not enough air in the club. Once inside the pink painted sanctuary, she sank against the door, the feathers on her white silk cloche hat fluttering with each tremble that she gave.

‘Goodness, darling.’

Gloria, a vision in her customary cream silk, stopped abruptly from the business of applying lipstick to her perfect pout.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’

A hundred ghosts, Fizzy thought, recalling laughter, first jobs, second babies. Telegrams.

Her legs felt like they’d been filleted. There was no blood in her veins. None at all.

‘That gust of wind gave it away,’ she said quietly.

The lipstick in Gloria’s hand faltered, but only momentarily.

‘In all the years I’ve known you,’ Fizzy continued, ‘you’ve always worn wide-brimmed hats, Gloria, but the one thing they need that a cloche doesn’t is a hat pin.’

Not an ice pick.

Louis Boucard was killed with a hatpin.

‘And when the wind took yours down the street, I knew.’

As did Teddy Hardcastle.

She drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I presume it was because of your affair?’

Gloria swallowed. ‘I went into that with my eyes wide open, darling, because whatever other faults Louis might have had, he…well, let’s just say he didn’t have them in the bedroom department.’

Fizzy felt it best to let that one pass.

‘But he used you as a subject?’

That was his great ‘Revelation’ – and what greater dynamite for an advertising campaign than the wife of a respected politician on public display?

‘Like the press said, he only ever paints nudes,’ Gloria said ruefully. ‘But the treachery is that he painted me while I slept. I hadn’t an inkling until he started blackmailing me. He was always in arrears with the bookies.’

‘He wanted more, I suppose?’

‘No.’

Gloria fixed her perpetually sad eyes on her friend.

‘Orville’s positively swimming in lolly and quite frankly the amount I was paying Louis, Orville didn’t even notice. Another frock, another hat – he didn’t question it. No, the trouble started once people began to appreciate the genius of Louis’s work. You see, the two things my lover wanted most in life were to be rich and famous, and that’s when he decided to unveil his masterpiece. To propel himself into the limelight.’

She drew herself up to her full height.

‘Me, I could have ridden the storm, I’ve ridden worse, and the girls are too young to understand. But Orville, darling – Orville’s a good man, and to see him publicly humiliated as a cuckold…Well, he’d have stood by me, no question, but the scandal would have destroyed him. I couldn’t let Louis do that.’

‘So you did the only decent thing? Stabbed him with your hat pin?’

What little colour was left drained from Gloria’s face at the sharpness of her friend’s tone.

‘It wasn’t what I intended, believe me. The idea was to sneak in and steal the horrid thing, but when I slipped into the back room, he was collapsed over his precious cocaine and -’ She made a brave attempt at a smile. ‘Typical Louis. Never did know when to stop.’

‘Why kill him, Gloria?’

‘Why not, darling? If you’d only seen Kitty after she got back from Switzerland! The doctors say she’ll never be able to have another baby, did you know that? And then there’s Foxy. Five hundred pounds, can you imagine? He’d ruined poor Lulu, was blackmailing Bubbles, had said terrible things about Catspaw, so I thought, what the hell.’

Gloria pointed to a spot on the back of her elegant swan neck.

‘I read that if you go right between the vertebrae it severs the spinal cord. He was out cold, Fizzy. I swear he never felt a thing, and if you ask me do I regret it, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say it was no worse than putting a rabid dog down.’

Fizzy counted to three.

‘Except you couldn’t bring yourself to pull the pin out?’

Gloria shuddered. ‘Could you?’

Fizzy doubted she could have driven it in in the first place.

But then she wasn’t a widow still deeply in love with a dead husband doing the best for her two tiny daughters by marrying someone who worshipped the ground they all walked on. A rich man, moreover, who would do anything to protect them. Anything at all -

‘Orville saw you, didn’t he? Orville saw you come out of that room, no doubt ashen and shaking -’

‘I didn’t know.’ Gloria collapsed onto the stool and buried her head in her hands. ‘I swear, darling, I had no idea, not until they said he’d been hit over the head with that panther.’

It didn’t take much working out, really. Orville saw his wife come out of the back room and wanted to know why Louis was upsetting his wife. What went through his head when he saw Louis dead and his wife’s hatpin sticking out of his neck? Fizzy swallowed. Not such a dull stick, after all. Quite the hero, in fact, because it was Orville who pulled out the weapon, then disguised the method of murder by bringing the black marble panther down on his head.

‘What did you do with the incriminating canvas?’ Fizzy asked. ‘Everyone’s been searched.’

A hint of colour returned to Gloria’s cheeks. ‘What I planned from the outset.’ She opened her bag to reveal a pair of nail scissors. ‘I cut it into tiny pieces and flushed it back to the sewer where it belongs.’

Congratulations to Chilton Westlake, Fizzy thought. He’d been very insistent about having all mod cons installed at the gallery!

‘What are you going to do now, darling?’ Gloria asked.

This time Fizzy counted to ten. Then ten more.

‘About what?’ she replied steadily. ‘I only came in here to adjust my suspenders. This left one’s digging in like blazes.’

She swallowed two tablets for migraine.

‘Is it my fault we ended up talking for ages about what hats we might be wearing for Ascot?’

It was gone midnight when the Set finally tumbled out of the Cellar, leaving Jo-Jo one very happy proprietor, having trousered twice the usual takings. The moon was full and waxy, inspiring stars to twinkle, cats to yowl and Foxy Fairfax to treat Londoners with a loud rendition of ‘Danny Boy’.

‘Fancy putting on the old nosebag with me, Fizzy?’ Marriott asked, with a hopeful twiddle of the yellow rose in his buttonhole. ‘Only there’s this little French place I know round the corner that serves up some pretty nifty proteins and starch.’

‘We could all go,’ Biff said, elbowing Marriott out of the way.

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll give the roasts and boileds a miss tonight, chaps. I rather fancy an early night is in order.’

And besides. There was a cold, twisted knot deep inside that wouldn’t let her eat if she tried.

‘Don’t be a wet blanket, sweetheart,’ Kitty said, pouring Bubbles into the back of her car. ‘There’s plenty of room with us girls.’

‘I know!’ Biff nodded towards his convertible parked with its usual insouciance half on, half off the kerb whilst managing to completely block a back alley. ‘Let’s all go to the Kitty Kat Klub!’

‘Good idea,’ Bubbles and Kitty chorused together.

‘It won’t be the first time you’ve sat on my knee, Fizzy,’ Catspaw said.

‘No, but it’d be the first time she’s sat on mine, so don’t be greedy, old man,’ Chilton retorted.

‘Actually,’ a voice rumbled beneath a fedora set at a rakish (some might say dignified) angle, ‘the lady’s already accepted a lift.’

‘Dammit, Squiffy, you always get the pretty ones,’ Catspaw wailed, as Biff revved up the engine. ‘See you up there, then, what?’

‘Twenty minutes,’ Teddy promised, as the convertible cranked off the kerb with a splutter. Across the way, Orville was opening the door of his Rolls for Gloria and Teddy watched impassively as the Hon. Member settled himself behind the wheel and purred off.

‘Happy endings all round, then,’ he murmered.

‘Not for Louis Boucard,’ Fizzy said.

Teddy pursed his lips, but only briefly. ‘True, but let’s face it, the world’s one scoundrel lighter and none the worse for it, and what odds the police make six wrong arrests before they stuff the file in the “Unsolved” archive and forget it?’

‘Is that your definition of happy ending?’

‘Ask Chilton. He’ll make four times as much dosh with his prodigy dead and how fortunate there was no scandal to come out, that velvet-covered easel being nothing more than a practical joke and all that.’

‘Oh, that sort of happy ending.’

Teddy leaned against the brickwork and stuffed his hands into his pockets. ‘Actually,’ he said quietly. ‘I was rather thinking of Chilton’s missing exhibit and the matter of true love running smooth.’

‘There was no portrait, remember?’

‘Not under the velvet, no. I meant the one you stole when everyone was crowding into the room when Bubbles found Boucard’s body.’

Fizzy reached into her handbag for a cigarette and attached it to the holder with a surprisingly steady hand.

‘I don’t even like Louis’s work,’ she said. ‘Why would I steal one of his beastly paintings? Cubist mixed with Symbolist -’

‘- and just the merest smidgen of the draughtsmanship one sees in Migliorini. Yes, I know. Ghastly, aren’t they? Especially the portraits of masked nudes with one brown eye and one blue.’

A lighter clicked in the darkness and suddenly Fizzy’s hand was anything but steady.

‘I saw it in his studio when I went round to persuade him to lay off my brother. Unfortunately, our French friend was out, so I never did get chance to exercise my knuckles. Shame, that.’

‘Maybe that was another practical joke,’ she said evenly. ‘I mean, we’ve all been searched. Thoroughly, as I recall.’

A soft laugh echoed into the night. ‘Ah, women! What cunning and devious creatures thou art, is it any wonder we men are in thy thrall? Gloria -’

‘How did you know it was her?’

‘Don’t tell anyone, but His Majesty’s Intelligence Service relies more on guesswork than they’d like people to think. But in this case, Miss Potter, I know Boucard, I know his type and more importantly -’

Before she’d even realised what had happened, she found herself in his arms.

‘- I know how human minds tick. Not to mention,’ he added an eternity later, ‘that there are widgets designed to stop ladies’ hats from bowling down Mayfair that are called, strangely enough, hat pins.’

‘And the panther?’

‘Who else would cover up another person’s murder? I suspect they’ll both view each other differently from now on. A rather more balanced relationship, one would hope.’

‘So that’s what you meant by happy endings and true love running smooth.’

‘Hadn’t quite got to that last bit,’ he said, kissing her again. ‘Only it strikes me that Fizzy Potter is a nice enough name, whereas Fizzy Hardcastle tends to run off the tongue rather more smoothly, don’t you think?’

She couldn’t be hearing this right. ‘Edward James Hardcastle, are you actually asking me to marry you?’

“Not tonight. Far too late to knock up a vicar. But yes. That seems to be the general consensus.’

But…Fizzy pulled away.

‘What about the painting?’

‘What about it?’ he rasped, drawing her back, and when they finally came up for air, he said, ‘I don’t imagine you’ll make a habit of stealing. I mean, the logistics of bringing the kids to visit you in the clink would be an absolute nightmare.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she stuttered.

He gave her nose a little tweak.

‘Like my kid brother, darling, we all have siblings.’

He tilted her chin up to face him.

‘The eyes were the wrong way round, Fizzy. Yours,’ he said kissing them in turn, ‘are blue on the left, brown on the right and trust me, artists of Boucard’s calibre don’t get such details wrong.’

For the first time in her life, Fizzy knew what it was to be floating on air.

‘I suppose I might consider marrying you -’ she began, though her actual thoughts ran more along the lines of wild horses.

‘Very kind.’

‘- but what about money? Neither of us earns very much -’

‘True,’ he agreed, ‘but don’t you think this,’ he whisked off her cloche hat and pulled out Woman in a Mask, ‘should get us off to a good start?’

‘Do you mind!’

Fizzy snatched at her sister’s naked image and stuffed it back under the brim.

‘It’s worth a fortune on the black market,’ he rumbled.

‘Teddy Hardcastle, you aren’t seriously asking me to weigh my sister’s morals against cold hard cash?’

She rammed the cloche back over her bob.

‘Because if you are, you ought to know right now that I won’t use something as tawdry as this to pay my electricity bill!’

She adjusted the cloche and thought, silly cow. Shouldn’t have posed for him in the first place.

‘A honeymoon, on the other hand…’

Teddy’s laughter echoed into the darkness. ‘Which do you fancy, you wicked, wicked child? A fortnight in Antibes? Or would you prefer to see Venice?’

Fizzy snuggled back into his muscular arms. ‘Don’t care,’ she murmured.

Because with that painting they could afford both.