The Dress Thief (48 page)

*

The receptionist at the
News Monitor
was the one Alix had crossed swords with before. Back then she’d been in shock
and
badly dressed. This time, in high heels, an hourglass suit and a stingingly chic
hat, she was better prepared.

However, the girl made Verrian her focus. Peering at the colourful bruising on his jaw, she fluttered her eyelashes. ‘May I help, sir?’

Verrian peered back at her. ‘I don’t recognise you. Are you new?’

‘I’ve been here for over a year.’

‘Mmm. Well, I’ve been away longer than that … I’m Verrian Haviland and this is Miss Gower. I hope Miss Theakston’s still with
us?’

‘Goodness, yes! She’s in her office. Mr Haviland, did you say?’ The receptionist slowly made the connection. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t realise—’

‘Call Beryl, would you?’ Verrian steered Alix towards the lift. ‘Tell her we’re on our way up.’

In the lift Alix hissed, ‘I still think it was rotten of you not to tell me your father was Lord Calford.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes. I made a fool
of myself by not knowing.’

‘When was that?’

‘When I came here.’

‘You came here?’

‘No. Well, only to check you were all right. When you vanished, I thought you might have had an accident.’

The lift gave a rattling shrug as it reached its floor. Verrian unhitched the door, ushering Alix over the metal sill. ‘When you discovered that instead of the out-at-elbows hack you thought me I was the
boss’s son, did it change anything?’

‘Of course. I’m a republican.’

‘Are you?’ He grinned. ‘You’d sweep away wealth and privilege, and the couture houses with them?’

‘What I mean is, aristocratic titles are a … a … they’re old-fashioned. Americans get by without them.’

‘My title is a courtesy, and I never use it.’

Through the windows of a glass-walled office Alix saw a woman bending over
the open drawer of a filing cabinet. Verrian tapped on the door, pushed it open. ‘Beryl?’

The woman gave a cry and whatever she’d dug out of her drawer flew sideways as she rushed towards them. ‘Mr Haviland,
you’re back! Have you any idea how anxious we were? Goodness, what have you done to your face?’

‘I walked into the protruding foot of an equestrian statue.’

‘Really? Your pilot friend …
what was his name?’

‘Ron Phipps?’

‘Came here, said he’d flown into Le Bourget without you because you’d gone to fight in Spain. We couldn’t trace you and feared the worst. The casualty lists were dreadful in the summer of ’thirty-seven. Then the man who replaced you as Spanish correspondent said he’d seen you near Madrid and you seemed to be in one piece – but that was before last summer’s bloodshed
 … oh, but you’re back. Does Mr Chelsey know?’

‘Not yet. Give him a few more minutes’ untrammelled happiness. Beryl, may I introduce Miss Alix Gower?’ He drew Alix forward. ‘Alix, Miss Theakston runs the Paris edition of the
Monitor
 – Oh, you do, Beryl, and you know it.’

Alix was aware of being closely investigated. Aware, too, of proprietary feelings rising from a well-buttoned-up breast. But
Miss Theakston shook her hand cordially.

Verrian said, ‘Beryl, did Phipps bring a letter for Miss Gower? Because she didn’t receive it.’

‘Yes.’ Miss Theakston drew her brows together. ‘I delivered it next day, as directed.’ She turned to Alix. ‘We met outside the entrance of Javier’s couture house. I introduced myself, asked your name and handed you the letter.’

‘Madame, I’ve never seen you
before in my life.’

Verrian leaned against the desk. ‘Beryl, which door? Tradesman’s or main?’

‘Door?’ Beryl Theakston raided her memory. ‘Erm, the grandiose one. I didn’t know there was a tradesman’s door. Though I suppose there must be. I assure you, I gave you the letter, Miss Gower. I would not mistake you.’ She indicated Alix’s ensemble. ‘I’m rather in awe of you girls. Never a hair out
of place.’

‘Alix wouldn’t have been wearing anything like this suit then. True?’ Verrian consulted Alix.

‘No. Back then I wore a brown smock. Nor did I come or go by the main door.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Alix did. ‘The girl you gave the letter to, Madame, she was very tall? As dark as me?’

‘I’m sure it was you.’

‘Like this –’ Alix lifted her nose as high as it would go.

‘Yes, exactly that.’

‘
Voilà
. You gave it to Solange Antonin.’

‘But I asked her if she was you. She said yes.’

‘She would.’ Alix shrugged. ‘Poor Solange hated me. But, Madame, it’s only a letter.’

Cruelty felt good sometimes, she thought to herself. At the words ‘only a letter’, Verrian had flinched as if acid had been flicked at him. But there – men lied; women flicked acid; the world kept turning.

Verrian told
Miss Theakston he was taking Alix upstairs. ‘Is old Sturridge in?’

‘No, out on assignment.’

‘Even better,’ said Verrian.

*

Alix had no idea why Verrian had asked her to his former workplace, nor why she was to bring along a wartime photograph of her father. She watched suspiciously as he adjusted the wing nuts on a piece of equipment that looked as though it belonged in a science lab.

‘It’s
a magnifier,’ he explained. ‘Put your photo on the plate – here, face up.’ He angled the viewer to her height. ‘Now look through there.’

She did and saw her father in his unremarkable uniform. John Gower looked so very young. For the first time the insignia on his hat and tunic were visible.

‘Tell me again what regiment he served in.’

She didn’t like the terrier note in Verrian’s voice so she
said nothing.

He answered for her; ‘London Rifle Brigade – you told me at our café on the Champs-Elysées.’

‘You have a good memory.’

‘Where you’re concerned I do. Your father served in the same battalion as the Comte de Charembourg, yes?’

‘You make it sound like a crime.’

‘Before I left Paris, I had a friend in London do some research.
He works in the government department dealing with war
widows’ pensions and wrote to tell me what he’d found out. The comte certainly served in the Rifles, 5
^th
battalion, known as the City of London Brigade. Recruits were mainly stockbrokers and bank employees, which makes sense as the he worked at the Banque d’Alsace on Threadneedle Street. Your father doesn’t show up in the brigade’s list, though.’ Verrian nudged her aside so he could inspect the
image of John Gower. ‘Alix, there’s no kind way to say it: Jean-Yves de Charembourg and your father were never comrades in arms. Gower served in the Royal Army Medical Corps.’

‘He was a doctor?’

‘A driver, with a Field Ambulance unit. He was deployed two years into the war, in 1916. I haven’t yet found out where he was sent, but I can tell you he rose to lance corporal and was injured shortly
before Armistice, when his ambulance was struck by shellfire.’ Verrian straightened up. ‘You have every reason to be proud of your father, but de Charembourg lied to you.’ He invited her to look again. ‘See for yourself – the badge on your father’s sleeve bears a red cross and there’s an RAMC insignia on his cap.’

She was crying, so it was pointless to look again. ‘You’re trying to tell me that
my father wasn’t a proper soldier.’

‘What on earth makes you think that? Ambulance crew were as brave as any of the men who fought at the front. Alix, I am not belittling your father.’

But she wouldn’t be comforted. ‘I know what you’re doing. Punishing me for preferring other men to you.’

*

Was he punishing her? He wanted to help Alix clear the fog of her childhood so she could see the present.
He wanted her free of sorrow, free to concentrate on him … so yes, he was being selfish. But enjoying the process? Far from.

And he must see it to the end. When she retired to the ladies’ room to rinse her face, he asked Beryl to find him a Paris telephone number, quickly. The secretary wrote it for him on a card.

He dialled, and when a young man answered he announced, ‘Verrian Haviland, wishing
to speak with the Comte de Charembourg.’

The patterns, drawings, toiles and garments that had been taken away from Rue Jacob by the police that devastating August day were returned as suddenly on 2
^nd
November, the day after Alix’s visit to the
News Monitor
. They arrived in boxes like the turnout of a lost-property cupboard. The silk velvet was ruined and Alix wept over Ma Fuite,
which had cigarette burns on the skirt, then searched in vain for the pieces of coffee-coloured No. 10. Nevertheless, this was the final welcome confirmation that she would not be prosecuted. Once again, she’d escaped through some quick thinking.

Rosa had been good as her word, dropping the keys to Alix’s private wardrobe into the water tank. She’d invited the police to retrieve them and, while
they’d dithered, had climbed another flight of stairs to the atelier and tossed Adèle Charboneau’s cranberry suit out of the window. While every shelf, drawer and rail in the upper workrooms was cleared, the cranberry suit had dangled, unseen, on a hydrangea bush in the courtyard below. That had saved Alix.

She was convinced it was that suit that had triggered the raid. Mme LeVert had fallen
for Adèle Charboneau’s tears and privately agreed to make a suit ‘as near Chanel as possible’ and had then been cajoled into adding a counterfeit Chanel label. Alix had visited the address on Adèle Charboneau’s card and learned that nobody of that name had ever lived in the flat on Avenue Foch. A fake client, a good actress. The real question – who had wheeled in that tearful Trojan horse? Alix was
forming a strong suspicion, but doubted she’d ever be able to prove it.

Though the raid had taken place two-and-a-half months ago, business was still shaky. The clientele she’d begun to build up beforehand, moneyed Parisians intrigued by an ingénue designer, still mostly cold-shouldered her these days. Loyal Una continued to send English customers, and one or two of her old clients had given
her the benefit of the doubt. Orders trickled in still, but never enough to clear the debts arising from her ruined collection. It was a struggle to pay her reduced staff each week. The rent fell due at Christmas, and she didn’t have the cash to buy fabric in for the next season either. If Gregory Kilpin ever guessed how dire her circumstances were, he’d foreclose on her. And a new affliction had
struck: the horror of the blank page. She ought to be working on her spring–summer line for February 1939, but her creative spark had died.

A cry – ‘Aliki, where are you?’– brought her into the salon. Mémé sat by the window, a paraffin stove a safe distance away, a
pool of crochet work at her feet. A skill she’d learned as a child, which her fingers could still perform. ‘I couldn’t hear you.
Will you help me to the lavatory?’

‘Take my arm.’ They walked across the room, Mémé’s stick tapping a slow dirge.

‘At breakfast you were going out to buy silk velvet, but you didn’t come to show me.’

Alix thought,
She’s back in last summer
. ‘Not silk velvet this time, Mémé, plain shantung. I’ll show you when it’s delivered.’

‘How many models have you finished?’

‘Oh, twenty.’
None
.

‘Shall
you parade them to me?’

Alix couldn’t help smiling. Mémé’s mellowing had extended to Alix’s profession. Their arguments on the evils of a seam-stress’s life had slipped from her memory. And she’d totally forgotten about the telephone exchange.

Verrian arrived from his office, and they retired to the flat for lunch. Alix knocked vegetables around her plate and listened to Verrian engaging Mémé
in conversation.
How patient he is
, she thought.
Not angered by human frailty. Except by mine
.

As Mémé settled for her afternoon nap, Verrian said, ‘You can’t run a business and look after your grandmother. You need a companion-nurse.’

‘I can’t afford one.’

He gave her the considering look she was familiar with. Since hustling her out of the Rose Noire, he’d hardly touched her.
He was impeccably
restrained, but she longed for him to take her in his arms and just kiss her, as he had before.

‘Will you let me help?’ he asked.

‘It’s not your business, Verrian.’

‘You are my business, Alix. Get used to it.’

*

He presented his solution the next morning. Alix was in her office. A telephone call from Mr Pusey, Gregory Kilpin’s financial controller who was in Paris overseeing his master’s French
interests, had interrupted an equally tense conversation with Mme LeVert. Banging the receiver down, Alix ran her tongue over her teeth, expecting to find a layer of enamel ground off. Pusey had gone through her quarter’s costs, invoice by invoice, right down to her purchase of tacking thread. God, if this was what Una had put up with, no wonder the woman tried to dig an escape route. Now Mme
LeVert was insisting that the synthetic silk they used to line tailored garments was a false economy.

‘Because it needs a larger needle, Mlle Gower.’