The Riddle of the River (13 page)

Apart from the actors and Mr Manning, I now knew of four people personally acquainted with the dead girl: Mr Archer and Miss Wolcombe, whom I had not yet met, the landlady, and Ernest. In order to obtain information from the landlady, I would have to install myself in her room and work upon her for days, but this did not seem to me to be a priority, as she probably knew very little. Much the greatest chance of learning about the private life of the dead girl lay with Miss Wolcombe, who must have been a very close friend of hers if they had decided to set up house together. I very much wondered what kind of a woman Miss Wolcombe would turn out to be. Two young women living independently in rooms indicated a working-class background, and from what I had learnt of Ivy Elliott, she could be said to be situated on the margins of decent society. Yet what did that reveal? Those margins, as every other class, contain an immense variety of human beings.

Mr Archer was an unknown quantity, and I could only continue hoping that Mrs Burke-Jones would be able to find or create an opportunity for us to meet. There remained Ernest. Ernest could hardly be the murderer, since he had charged me with the solution of the crime. Of course, the occasional murderer has been known to make such a grandiose gesture as a bluff, but such an act would make absolutely no sense in Ernest’s case. He had only to keep silent about his acquaintance with the girl and it was quite unlikely that it would ever have been discovered.

Yet, after all, I reasoned, it was not entirely unimaginable. If the girl had been expecting
Ernest’s
child – I shuddered at the thought – then she might have told her friends, and she may even have threatened to make a scandal. Ernest knew Cambridge well, he came quite often. And in fact, he came regularly to our house, and was familiar with the area…and with the Cam in that part of Cambridge.

But no! Ernest’s behaviour made no sense, if he were the murderer. He talked of the girl constantly – surely he would have kept away from all references to the pretty actress in his conversations with us. Surely he would not have called upon my services – and as much as told me that he loved her.

Of course, people cannot always control their obsessions.

The image of Kathleen suddenly started into my mind.
She
could be said to have a motive, if anyone did. She was aware of her husband’s habits in the matter of love. She was a strong, well-built woman. But on the other hand, how could she have known where Ivy Elliott would be spending her evening off? It was easy to find Ivy when she played at the theatre, but it
might
not be so simple at other times. Still, she might have followed her. All the way to Cambridge? Yet why
not? What better way to deflect suspicion than killing your enemy in a faraway town?

I thought over Kathleen’s behaviour. Had it been in any way incompatible with the idea of her being the murderer, as Ernest’s obviously was? No, it had not. She had woken me in the night to ask about him, but that did not prove that she was unaware of the girl’s death. What had she said when I told her?
Ophelia
…She had known at once to whom I was referring. A creeping horror began to overtake me at the thought that I had meant to spend a second night in her home, before returning to Ivy’s house the next morning in the hopes of catching Miss Wolcombe.

I shook myself impatiently. Kathleen couldn’t be the murderer – she was my friend! It was unfair to even think of her that way. It made me wonder if people would so easily assume that I could be a murderer. In fact, I soon began to ask myself the question. If I discovered that Arthur was in love with an actress, might I…? No, out of the question. I saw myself, rather, living like Mrs Burke-Jones in lonely dignity, bringing up my children, keeping a pleasant home, and holding up my head proudly day after day in front of an entire society aware of the whole sordid story. But Mrs
Burke-Jones’s
husband had left, gone to live in France with the governess of her children. I wondered what I would do if I discovered, or realised, that Arthur was pursuing an affair while continuing to live tranquilly (or nervously) at home. I found it impossible to imagine him behaving thus. I was presented with a vivid mental image of Arthur delicately peeling away the arms of a seductive lady in a black lace corset, with painted lips, and extracting himself from them with a tinge of distaste. I burst out laughing at myself.

Kathleen was not the murderer; she was my friend. But I am a professional, and as such, there was no better way to spend the evening than with her, attempting to detect evidence of any kind. I set my feet firmly in the direction of the Dixons’ flat.

I felt much cooler and more self-possessed by the time I reached the flat and rang the bell. I had entirely prepared what I meant to say to Katherine. My plans, however, were immediately foiled by the fact that it was Ernest who opened the door.

‘Are you staying on?’ he said, in a timbre of voice for which it was obvious that Kathleen was not at home, and that he meant to talk at once about the subject that most interested him. ‘Did you have a fruitful day? Did you find out anything important?’

‘A few things,’ I said, ‘But Ernest, I need to talk to people who
knew
Ivy Elliott. I’ve been to the theatre, but the problem is partly that the people there really didn’t seem to know much at all about her private life. And also, on the night of the murder, they were putting on a play. Ivy didn’t have a role, but everyone who did obviously has an alibi.’

‘Who was in it?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know yet,’ I replied.

‘Well, do you know which play it was?’

‘Ibsen’s
Wild Duck
. Do you happen to have a copy here?’

‘Of course. I’ve got all Ibsen; I’ve got complete works of all of the world’s great playwrights,’ he said. Going over to the bookshelf, he browsed for a moment and then pulled out a volume and opened it. We studied the list of characters together.

‘The young girl, the mother, and the housekeeper,’ I said,
‘that accounts for the three other women in the company. They are definitely excluded. But I am afraid the same holds for the men, because there are quite a number of male characters. They must all have been cast.’

‘I can find that out easily enough,’ he said, throwing down the book.

‘So we may assume, unless you discover something unexpected, that the members of the theatre company are not involved, as they were acting,’ I said. ‘Except for Mr Manning, perhaps? He does not act.’

‘But he must have been there,’ he said at once. ‘The director is there every night, every minute of the play.’

‘Well then, subject to your verification of the cast, that means that the theatre people are out of it. I will need to investigate the people she knew outside of her professional life.’

He winced at my words.

‘What is the matter?’ I said.

‘Vanessa,’ he said, planting both hands on the table and leaning on them heavily. He looked at me hard, turned his head away, and then looked back at me again, with something like aggressiveness. ‘There’s something I have been trying to make you understand,’ he said. ‘I have to tell you this, I have to spell it out, because you don’t seem to understand it, and you must.’ There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘What?’ I said stimulatingly.

‘Ivy was a prostitute, for God’s sake!’ he cried. ‘What do you think she lived on? The shillings and pence she got from that half-cocked director? Find me an actress in this country who doesn’t do it, unless they have the luck to be born in an
acting family. How else do you think they live? Not on their salaries, I can tell you! An unknown actress doesn’t even earn as much as a – as a servant, or a barmaid. There isn’t enough work in it. A barmaid who works twelve or fourteen hours a day may make four or five shillings a week and barely survive – so what do you think a girl can earn if she works only six or seven hours, and not every day, at that? And anyway – what kind of woman do you think gets up on a stage and shows herself half-naked to a hall full of people? What I keep trying to tell you is that it’s no bloody
use
your saying you want to find the people who knew Ivy. She had a hundred – clients – whose names she didn’t even know!’

I remained silent for several moments. Was
this
, then, the true image of the Ivy I had been imagining so differently? Certainly, I had not perceived her as an angel of virtue. Her background was vague, and Mr Manning had described her manners as somewhat immodest. It had seemed clear enough that she was Mr Archer’s mistress, partly kept by him. He invited her to Cambridge, he bought her jewellery, their relations were transparent even to the shopgirl Estelle. But it was one thing to be the occasional mistress of an elderly man, and another to live as Ernest described. This was totally different, beyond my imagination. And it seemed incompatible with the little I knew of her life, her hard work as an actress, her modest, shared little room. Yet I remembered the drawer full of French corsets that no decent woman would wear…

‘Are you sure?’ I said timidly.

‘Of course,’ he snapped.

‘But how – how can you know such a thing?’

‘How do you think?’ he challenged me.

I remained silent, rejecting and then accepting the obvious explanation.

‘Now, don’t start judging me,’ he said, with a raucous edge to his voice that made me feel most disinclined to judge anything. ‘You probably can’t even imagine how it was. I saw her on stage – I admired her, yes, I admired her to obsession. I must have seen her perform fifteen, twenty times, often in the same play, again and again, before I got up the courage to go and speak to her backstage. I had a note delivered: would she meet me? I – I wasn’t thinking of anything particular, you understand? I wasn’t thinking at all. I just wanted to meet her, to be near her. She accepted at once. She was friendly, familiar. Too familiar, really. I wasn’t at all sure whether I really liked it, at first. I thought I didn’t. I thought I would have wanted something different. Yet I kept going back. Finally – I don’t even remember how it happened – but we agreed to meet outside. And we did. I took her to a little restaurant…’

‘And?’

‘Why am I telling you this?’ he said abruptly. ‘I wasn’t going to. I haven’t told a soul, not a single, solitary soul about this.’

‘You are telling me because I need your help to find her murderer,’ I said quietly. ‘I cannot work without knowing anything about her. I need answers to my questions.’

‘I probably can’t answer most of them,’ he said. ‘But you can try asking them. What do you need to know?’

‘Facts first,’ I said. ‘You saw her often?’

‘I – we – a number of times,’ he replied hesitantly. ‘But she stopped seeing me all of a sudden.’

‘Really? When was that?’

‘Two or three weeks ago. She suddenly asked me not to come backstage any more. I went to see her act several times, and I tried to speak to her, but she refused. Don’t ask me why, because I’ve no idea. She wouldn’t tell me.’

‘Did you guess? Did you have some theory?’

‘Well, it occurred to me that she had come into a source of money, somehow,’ he admitted uncomfortably. ‘I thought perhaps she had found a rich man to keep her, something of the kind. She did say something – something about beginning a completely new life. But she wouldn’t say what she meant.’

I thought of Mr Archer, then of the pretty bedroom shared with Miss Wolcombe, and the newly purchased modest white underwear. Beginning a completely new life. I wondered why she had chosen to wear precisely those fresh, new undergarments to visit Mr Archer, rather than the flowered or black silk. I remembered my sharp suspicion, in the train, that after leaving his house, she had simply returned there. I still had to take up that matter with Inspector Doherty. Yet somehow, the petticoats seemed to speak up in denial of this idea. They told me that she had left his house for good.

Not three weeks ago, Ernest was still seeing her. And then suddenly – nothing. It was strange.

‘I visited her lodgings today,’ I told him. ‘Did she – did she ever take you there?’

He hesitated.

‘She took me to a flat,’ he said. ‘I think it might not have been the place where she actually lived. It was rather large and luxurious, but we never went into the drawing room or the other rooms. We – she used to – we only used to go into one room. I think it must have been the servant’s bedroom. It was next to the kitchen.’

‘The servant’s bedroom?’ I said, surprised. ‘Did she work there also?’

‘No, I’m sure she didn’t. In fact, I don’t think the flat was occupied. It was furnished, but there was never anybody there and it was never disarranged. I don’t know why she had a key.’

‘Where is the flat?’ I asked quickly. ‘We need to find out what she was doing there and to whom it belongs.’

‘I don’t know exactly – somewhere in Mayfair. I’m sorry. I would tell you if I could. But – it wasn’t very often. It wasn’t that far from Piccadilly, I think – in a block of rather modern flats. We used to go there in a hansom, just the two of us…and…well, I was paying more attention to her than to the streets. Recently, I wanted to find the flat, but I couldn’t remember how to get there. I hardly even remember what the building looked like, though I suppose I would recognise the entrance hall if I could go in. The trouble is, when I went there with her, my head was spinning so I just wasn’t conscious of anything around me.’

‘What made you suddenly want to find it again?’

‘She – she wouldn’t see me any more at the theatre. I, well, I wanted to stand in front of the house, watching, to see if she was going there with – someone else. I wanted to catch her, to force her to tell me why she didn’t want me any more. I thought I was going mad. The days seemed as long as weeks, months.’ He stopped and closed his eyes.

‘How much did she tell you about herself, about her life, her friends or family?’ I asked him.

‘Very little,’ he said. ‘She was not in the habit of talking about herself at all. I didn’t know where she lived, nothing about her past. I believe she told me she had no family. I don’t
remember anything about friends, either, although – wait a moment. No, she did mention a friend. What did she say? It was nothing – I liked her hat, and she told me she had borrowed it from a friend. It’s not much, I know, but one could build on it. Somewhere out there is a girl who knew Ivy well enough to lend her a hat. She mentioned this girl once or twice. It wasn’t one of the actresses, for I knew them all. I think her name might have been Jenny. But I can’t remember anything more about her.’