An Expert in Murder (14 page)

As six o’clock approached, Josephine could think of nothing she needed less than food or gossip. Nevertheless, conscious of a 95

guest’s obligations and resigned to a hefty helping of both, she dressed for dinner and set out for the restaurant, never once allowing her thoughts to linger on the performance that lay just the other side of the meal. Still a little unsteady after the drive back from Hammersmith, she decided to brave the rain and walk the half mile or so to Percy Street, taking pleasure in the distractions of Saturday-night London. The city was at its good-humoured best, the pavements growing steadily more crowded with a tangle of umbrellas and laughter as people emerged from buses and underground stations, determined to enjoy themselves. Gladly, she allowed herself the luxury of joining them, if only for the time it took her to reach a small, unassuming restaurant just off the Tottenham Court Road. The Motley sisters were by no means the only members of their profession for whom it was a favourite haunt: in fact, it was often said that a bomb hurled randomly through the doors of the Eiffel Tower would instantly dim the lights at half the theatres in the West End. Full of gaiety and chatter, the Tower admitted no sign of the jazz-age sophistication which had driven artists into public houses all over the city, and consequently remained the ultimate spot in which to see and be seen, even to eat and drink.

Lettice and Ronnie were already seated at a corner table when Josephine arrived, and she was touched by the concern that replaced their banter as soon as they saw her. Ronnie, who possessed the covetable knack of dealing with head waiters together with a firm belief that bubbles could console as well as cheer, wasted no time in ordering a bottle of Moet and Chandon, while Lettice looked solicitously at her friend. ‘This is hardly the celebration we had planned for you,’ she said, as Josephine sat down next to her. ‘You must have had an awful day.’

The table was for four but it was a smaller party than planned.

Reluctantly, Archie had made his apologies and he and Fallowfield had returned to the Yard. His absence was quickly noted by the Tower’s ubiquitous proprietor, Rudolf Stulik, whose expression of desolation was hardly a good advertisement for the Champagne that brought him to the table.

96

‘The Inspector is on his way?’ Stulik asked hopefully in the thick Viennese accent which, along with an impressive moustache and even more impressive waistline, made him a walking cartoon of a restaurant proprietor. With the exception of a scant regard for licensing regulations, Stulik was unswerving in his devotion to this rather handsome embodiment of the law, and had been ever since Penrose had uncovered a gang of extortionists who had targeted his restaurant a couple of years back. The adoration – a source of much mirth and mischief to his cousins – was a huge embarrassment to Archie, so much so that only the prospect of Josephine’s company would have got him to the restaurant at all.

‘No, Rudy, I’m sorry – he can’t get away tonight,’ said Josephine, managing to keep a straight face. ‘But he asked me to apologise and he sends his regards.’

‘And he’d like a table for next Wednesday to make up for missing out on tonight.’ Ronnie’s revenge on Archie’s earlier bad humour was merciless. ‘Can you fit him in?’

Stulik, who was sadly removing the fourth place setting, brightened a little. ‘Of course. I will see to it right away and make sure I’m here to look after him personally.’ He bustled away, satisfied that the world was not as cruel a place as it had briefly seemed.

Josephine raised an eyebrow accusingly from behind the menu.

‘That was positively wicked, even for you.’

‘I know,’ said Ronnie, lighting another cigarette. ‘Sometimes I surprise even myself.’

Josephine laughed in spite of her day and ordered the turbot, bringing forth a culinary invective from Ronnie about a Scottish life being one perpetual Friday. After Lettice had dallied between the noisettes d’agneau and the caneton à l’orange sufficiently long for Stulik to suggest half a plateful of each, Josephine succinctly brought the Motleys up to date with the bare bones of Elspeth’s murder, leaving out the more sensitive points of the investigation but outlining the facts that signalled a connection with
Richard of
Bordeaux
, most of which they had already gleaned from the newspaper. The cocoon of the restaurant, with the constant chink of glass and clatter of knives against forks, went a little way towards 97

anaesthetising her audience against some of the more chilling details, but not against the tragedy of a young girl’s death. As Josephine gave the victim the flesh and blood which had been missing from the lurid but faceless newspaper account, Lettice and Ronnie realised how involved she felt with the crime, and saw through her impatient dismissal of Archie’s concern for her.

‘We all know he’s ridiculously soft on you and always has been,’

said Ronnie with her usual directness, ‘but he’s also a bloody good policeman, much as it shames me to have one in the family. If he’s genuinely worried, then you should take him seriously and be careful. Or, if it suits your pride better, at least humour him until he’s proved wrong.’

‘It’s not a question of pride, just common sense. One afternoon with her relatives gave Archie more than enough time to raise plenty of questions about Elspeth’s life. If he finds the answers to those,’ she counteracted, unconsciously echoing Spilsbury’s advice,

‘I have no doubt he’ll understand why she died, and catch whoever’s responsible. In fact,’ she continued, looking at her watch,

‘he may have already done so. He was off to track down Elspeth’s boyfriend when he left me. You’ll know him, I should think. He works backstage at the theatre.’

‘Surely you don’t mean Hedley?’ asked Lettice, so shocked that her fork was temporarily halted in its relentless ascent from the plate. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a flea – it’s just not in him.’

‘And even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be clever enough to get away with it,’ added Ronnie, for whom kindness was no adequate substitute for wit. ‘If the girl had been walking out with McCracken, I could believe in a
crime passionnel –
the woman just oozes spite, and if she’s got a murderous streak then none of us are safe. But I can’t see Hedley taking up arms, and you know me –

happy to see the bad in anyone.’

Long practised at ignoring her sister’s asides, Lettice pressed on with her questioning. ‘Is it really Hedley’s girlfriend who’s been killed? None of us ever saw her, but he’s blossomed since they met and Lydia says he absolutely worships the ground she walks on.

She was teasing him about it just the other day, daring him to 98

show her off to us. He’ll be devastated: I can’t believe he had anything to do with it.’

‘But he was in a very funny mood this afternoon,’ Ronnie said.

‘And he rushed off like a bat out of hell, although I gather he was due a bollocking from Aubrey over something so you can’t blame him for a hasty exit. Well, well – Hedley White. It just shows, doesn’t it?’ she added inconclusively.

‘Don’t make me regret telling you that by spreading it around,’

said Josephine. ‘If he turns out to be completely innocent, he’ll have enough to cope with without every Tom, Dick and Harry looking at him as though he should have a noose around his neck.

And anyway, I’m not going to start imagining that people are waiting for me in dark corners all over London just to please Archie.

Let’s face it,’ she added caustically, ‘the ones we have to deal with in broad daylight are behaving badly enough at the moment.’

Josephine’s reference to the bickering amongst cast and crew at the theatre was not lost on the Motleys, who had seen her attitude towards those involved in her play go from excitement to admiration to irritation over the last year. With the exception of Lydia, who was the most established of the cast when the run began and who had remained gracious in the face of its unprecedented success, those who had gained fame and fortune through the play had not impressed its author with their tantrums and jealousies and determination to cash in on every opportunity it offered – and she had made that perfectly clear. Not that she had any moral objections to commercial success – she believed wholeheartedly that the purpose of telling a story was to entertain an audience and the money had given her the freedom to do what she most loved – but its trappings bored her and she simply did not need that many complications, or that many people, in her life. All in all, the experience had made her approach the staging of another work in a very different spirit, one that questioned the sense of doing it at all.

The solitary appeal of the novel, which required her to rely on no one but herself and Brisena, grew stronger by the day.

Nothing that the Motleys had to report about the afternoon’s meeting was likely to change her mind. ‘I know your day wasn’t 99

easy,’ said Lettice, ‘but at least it was less fractious than the one you were supposed to have. Bernard kept us waiting for ages while he made some telephone calls and then, when he finally did call us all in, I’ve never seen anybody less in the mood to compromise.

It’ll be a wonder if he has any staff left by curtain-up.’

‘I’ve got better things to do with my life than listen to your childish arrogance,’ boomed Ronnie in a passable impression of Aubrey. ‘Then he stormed out, giving Johnny no chance to have the full tantrum he’d been planning so carefully. He had it anyway, of course, but without the audience it was meant for.’

‘Don’t tell me nothing was agreed,’ Josephine said impatiently.

‘I think it would be more accurate to say decided than agreed,’

said Lettice, wiping the contrasting sauces from her plate with the last piece of bread. ‘Bernard made it quite clear from the start that any changes to the plans for a tour of
Richard
were quite out of the question. He’s insisting that if any money is to be made from it out of London, then it must go now on the back of the momentum it has here and it must go with the cast that people have heard so much about and will pay to see. He said he owed that much to you, if nothing else.’

‘There was a time when I would have appreciated that,’ said Josephine. ‘Now, with everything that’s happened, it can’t be over too soon for me. But he’s right about the timing of a tour, of course. I can see why Johnny needs a change, but this is the moment and Aubrey was never going to let him out of a signed contract. Anyway, it’s only eight weeks, for God’s sake. Surely he can grin and bear it for that long without ruining his career?’

‘You’d think so, although from what he was saying I got the impression that Johnny’s worries at the moment have more to do with money than artistic integrity. He’s usually so choosy about where he wants to go next, but there was a touch of the desperate about him today. He wants this film for the money, pure and simple. If it comes off, he knows how pathetic a stage salary – even his

– will seem by comparison.’

‘In the meantime, he’ll just have to stay strapped like the rest of us because there’s no doubt that your name,
Richard
’s glory and 100

Johnny’s frustration will all be enjoying April in Manchester. The Producer has spoken,’ Ronnie summarised neatly, ‘and that is the script we’ll be using.’

‘And a murder doesn’t affect his plans?’ Josephine asked. ‘No, you’re right, of course,’ she continued, matching Ronnie for sarcasm. ‘I suppose the only inconvenience that death seems to be causing is by coming at the end of the run. As a publicity stunt, it really would have been so much more beneficial for those quiet matinees just after Christmas.’

‘Although to be fair,’ said Lettice, a little more charitably,

‘Aubrey doesn’t realise it was Hedley’s girlfriend. I know we lapped up the drama of it all when we saw the latest account in the paper, but it’s turning out to be a lot closer to home than we could have suspected. He’s really taken that boy under his wing in the last couple of months, and whether he has to deal with Hedley’s guilt or just his grief, it won’t be easy for him.’

There was no telling which it would be at this stage, thought Josephine, although she had found it difficult to reconcile either Lettice’s opinion of Hedley White or Elspeth’s obvious affection for him with the person who possessed enough nerve and malice to carry out the murder which had been described to her. She wondered how Archie and Fallowfield were getting on in their search for the boy: he was all they had to go on at the moment, but she could not believe in her heart that the solution was as simple as a lovers’ quarrel. In just one short meeting, it had seemed evident to her that the Simmonses were a complex family in which relationships existed on very fragile foundations. Secrets – between husband and wife, between mother and daughter, between brothers –

were in plentiful supply, and she could not forget the hurt in Frank Simmons’s eyes when he realised that his wife knew more about Elspeth’s past than he did. How had he really felt at the prospect of losing the cherished company of his niece to another man? And a man who so obviously shared her passions and could open the door for her to a living, breathing theatre rather than to one enclosed in a glass case. As fascinating as it was, she could not help but feel that Simmons’s extraordinary pocket of nostalgia was a lit-101

tle obsessive, to say the least. She thought again about the alibi that he had given to Archie: was a waitress – run off her feet in a busy coffee shop – really able to put reliable timings on anything, particularly something that was part of an established routine?

Dessert arrived, Stulik needing no further prompting to bring three hot, sweet soufflés to his favourite table. ‘It is all in the steel of the nerve and the strength of the hand on the whisk,’ he said modestly, shrugging off their admiration and remaining oblivious to Ronnie’s smirk.

‘I hardly dare ask if the boys got round to discussing
Queen of
Scots
,’ Josephine asked, when the only evidence that remained of Stulik’s mastery with a whisk was a light dusting of icing sugar on Lettice’s top lip.

‘Oh, they certainly did,’ Ronnie replied, passing her napkin across to her sister. ‘But that just dealt another blow to any prospect of negotiation. When he couldn’t get anywhere with the film, Johnny tried to throw his weight about on the casting for your next play. He demanded that Rafe Swinburne play Bothwell and threatened to walk out if he didn’t get his way.’