Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (17 page)

   For all his dreams and his naiveté, Loring was a perfectly competent officer. He made his mistakes and he was frank about them. At twenty-one he was six feet tall, as thin as he had been at fourteen, and desperately anxious for the day to come when he had finally grown out of his acne. For all that - the spots were far less noticeable than he believed - the girls he asked out usually accepted his invitations and the older women he interviewed patted their hair and smiled when he began his questions. With luck, he sometimes thought, when he put on a bit of weight and got rid of those damned spots, he might one day look rather like John Neville. He was surprised and somewhat chagrined by his reception at the Eastcheap hairdresser’s.

   Carol Pearson was the girl whose disappearance he was investigating and he had already called on her mother in Muswell Hill. A skittish lady of forty with the mental age and taste in dress of eighteen, she had simpered over him and offered him gin. God knew, you were only young once - Mrs Pearson looked as if she intended to be young several times over - and if Carol chose to pop off with her boy friend for a couple of months, she wasn’t one to stand in her way. The boy friend was married, so what else could poor Carol do? The fact was she was sick to death of that job of hers, threatening to leave any time. Did Loring know the miserable wages they paid, the fact that the girls practically had to live on their tips! The boy friend had money. He was a travelling salesman, Mrs Pearson said vaguely. But she couldn’t recall his name, hadn’t been able to tell the police when they asked before. Jack, Carol had called him. She never wrote letters. Easy come, easy go like her mother she was, and Mrs Pearson gave him an ingratiating smile. She’d turn up one of these fine days.

   So Loring had taken the tube to Tower Hill, getting lost a couple of times on the way. He walked up Eastcheap and picked out the office of the late Jerome Fanshawe by the brass plate on its marble doorway. Roma, the hairdresser’s where Carol Pearson had worked, was diagonally opposite. Loring went in.

   Never in his life had he seen anything like that receptionist. She wasn’t the sort of girl you would dare to kiss, supposing you wanted to. Her hair was an artfully and deliberately tangled mass of red curls, the face beneath a miracle of paintwork, an artist’s achievement of cream and amber light and shade with sooty eyes and blanked-out mouth. She wore a near-ankle-length black skirt, backless red boots and a short red caftan embroidered in gold.

   Both her white telephones rang simultaneously as Loring entered. She lifted the receivers one after the other, said into each, ‘Good morning. Roma. Will you hold the line one moment?’ before resting them side by side on her enormous appointments book: ‘Can I help you?’

   Loring said he was a police officer and produced his card. She betrayed no surprise. ‘One moment, please.’ The telephone conversations were consecutively resumed, appointments made in the book. Loring glanced down the salon. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Kingsmarkham where clients still sat isolated in separate cells. Here the walls were lined in what looked like huge slices of pumpernickel. The chandeliers were black and silver mobiles and the floor a seemingly frozen lake of scarlet. Most of the assistants were men, tired worn-looking young men in light-weight suits drifted all over with many-coloured hair.

   ‘If you’ve come about Carol Pearson,’ the receptionist said contemptuously, ‘you’ll want Mr Ponti. One moment, please.’ The left-hand phone had rung again. ‘Good morning. Roma. Will you hold the line a moment, please? He’s in the gentleman’s salon and he’s styling so you can’t . . . Just one moment.’ She lifted the second phone. ‘Good morning. Roma. Just one . . .’

   ‘Thank you for all your help,’ Loring said. He retreated into the street and entered the door to what he would have called the barber’s. It was not very different from its Kingsmarkham equivalent. Things in the world of fashion evolve more slowly for men than for women.

   Mr Ponti looked more like a master at a public school than a hairdresser. He was tall and thin and he wore a perfectly plain, almost ascetic dark Suit. The only indication that he had in fact been ‘styling’ was the handle of a pair of scissors protruding from his breast pocket and which Loring, so overpowering was the pedagogic impression, had at first taken for the rims of spectacles.

   The other stylists leapt aside deferentially as he wove his way along the aisle between the chairs. The daylight from the door showed suntan powder on his cheekbones and now that he was close to, Loring saw him as an actor made up to play some academic part. The stoop was there, the vague though sharp expression, the myopic eyes.

   A very faint trace of an Italian accent came through as he spoke. ‘Carol?’ he said. ‘We have had the police here before and I told them, we cannot help.’ He took the black leather handbag from Loring and fingered it appreciatively. ‘This is very nice quality, very good.’ With a shrug, he swept shut a concertina-style folding door that partly closed off the shop. ‘Listen, she would not have this. I don’t like to be cruel, but she was a cheap little girl. No style, no elegance. Ha!’ From the interior of the bag he took out the Woolworth compact and the lipstick in its grazed metal case. ‘These she might have, this cheap rubbish.’ His long thin nose quivered disdainfully.

   Loring thought him an odious man. ‘Have you ever had a Mr Jerome Fanshawe among your clients?’

   The name was evidently familiar. ‘The stockbroker from across the street? I am told he is dead in a car accident.’ Loring nodded. ‘He has never been here.’

   ‘Sure of that?’

   ‘I never forget a client’s name. All my clients are personally known to me.’ Ponti snapped the bag shut and leant against the counter, looking bored.

   ‘I’m wondering if Miss Pearson knew him,’ Loring said, flinching from the scent of the man’s after-shave. ‘Did she ever mention him or did you ever see her go into his office?’

   ‘I know nothing.’ Ponti slid the door aside an inch and snapped his fingers. ‘Those shots of Carol,’ he called authoritatively, adding to Loring, ‘I showed them to the other police men. You may care to look at them.’ He fixed his pale brown eyes on Loring’s own haircut and studied it reflectively and with faint distaste.

   The photographs were pushed round the edge of the door and Loring took them. ‘I used her once as a model,’ said Ponti. ‘She was no good, no damn’ good at all.’

   They looked all right to Loring. He had a simple taste in feminine beauty, demanding no more than that a girl should be pretty and fresh and smiling. For these shots Carol Pearson’s hair had been dressed in fantastic pyramids of sausage curl, some of which spiralled to her shoulders. She looked ill-at-ease as if she wore instead of her own hair a Britannia helmet and she seemed to be shrinking beneath the weight, peering upwards with a nervous half-smile. Her eyes were painted ridiculously with diagonal lines radiating from the lower lids and her ear lobes dragged down by encrusted pendants. Under the maquillage she was a pretty girl, classically lovely, and Loring recalled sickeningly that it might be she who had come to her death, hideously disfigured, in blood and fire and water.

   ‘No damn’ good at all,’ the hairdresser said again.

Doreen Dacres had turned up.

   It was a curious story Loring heard from her married sister in Finchley. Doreen had gone to take up her club job in Eastbourne, arrived early and been kept waiting in a deserted lounge. There a well-informed cleaner had enlightened her as to what some of her new duties might consist of and Doreen, taking fright, had debunked into the street.

   She had only five pounds in the world. Room and job in London having been abandoned, she took stock of her situation. The married sister had made it clear she wouldn’t be welcome as a lodger with her and her husband, and their parents were in Glasgow, a city to which Doreen had sworn she would never return. Finally she had taken her luggage to a boarding house and, nervous that the club might catch up with her, booked herself in as Doreen Day and taken a shop assistant’s job in the same name.

   It was only when she wanted some clothes sent on that she had contacted her sister, six weeks later, by telephone. Thankfully, Loring crossed her off his list.

   His last port of call was the Princess Louise Clinic in New Cavendish Street and he was directed by its porter to the nurses’ home. This was a pleasant four-storey Regency house with white pillars flanking a bright blue front door liberally decorated with polished brass. A woman who called herself Home Sister came down to him and, before Loring could speak, she placed one pink finger against her lips.

   ‘Quiet as a mouse, please. We mustn’t forget the night staff are all getting their beauty sleep, must we?’

   There was a deep silence in the hail and a sweet scent far removed from the strong antiseptic of the hospital proper. It made Loring think of young girls, bevies of girls, whose freshly bathed bodies, as they passed through this place, left behind a mingled memory of Jasmine and Russian Leather and French Fern and New Mown Hay. He tip-toed after this stout navy-blue woman, who seemed to him half wardress and half mother superior, into a little lounge where there were chintz-covered chairs and flowers and an old television set.

   ‘The girl who had the room next to Nurse Culross will be the best one to help you,’ said Home Sister. ‘Her name is Nurse Lewis, but of course it’s out of the question that she should be disturbed if she’s still sleeping.’ She fixed him with a fierce censorious eye. ‘Out of the question,’ she said again. ‘If you were the Home Secretary himself I wouldn’t do it.’ Apparently she was waiting for some show of defiance, and when Loring merely returned her look meekly, she lost some of her asperity and said, ‘I’ll make enquiries but I can’t promise anything. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d care to look at some books.’

   By this she meant magazines. The Princess Louise Nurses’ Home was less sophisticated then Vigo’s waiting room and it offered instead of Nova and Elle the Nursing Mirror and two copies of Nursery World which Loring saw were fifteen years old. Left alone, he stared out into the street.

   An annexe to the clinic was a maternity hospital, part of it but distinctly separate from the larger building. ‘While he waited, Loring saw a Bentley draw up and a young girl emerged leaning heavily on the arm of her husband. Her body was huge and unwieldy and evidently she was already in labour. Ten minutes passed and a Jaguar appeared. A similar little tableau took place, but in this case the potential mother was older and her maternity dress even more indicative of the couturière from whom it had come. The Princess Louise Clinic was busily fulfilling its function of replenishing the upper classes.

   It was nearly five o’clock before the door opened slowly and Nurse Lewis came to him. Her eyes were heavy and she looked as if she had just wakened. She wore no make-up and she looked spotlessly clean, her blouse stiff and crisp from the launderer, her pale, almost cream-fair hair damp and streaked where a coarse-toothed comb had just passed through it.

   ‘I’m sorry if I’ve kept you. I’m on nights you see.’

   ‘That’s all right,’ Loring said. ‘I work nights myself some times. I know what it’s like.’

Nurse Lewis sat down and her bare legs gleamed. Her pink toes were like a little girl’s in a little girl’s sandals.

   ‘What did you want to know? I talked to the police before.’ She smiled earnestly. ‘I told them all I knew about Bridie Culross, but that wasn’t much, you see. Bridie didn’t make close friends with girls, she was a man’s girl.’

   ‘I’d like to hear anything you can tell me, Miss Lewis.’ Just let them talk. He had learnt that from Wexford. ‘About what sort of girl she was. She had a lot of boy friends?’

   ‘Well, this isn’t a teaching hospital so there aren’t any medical students. She’d been here for a year since she qualified and she’s been out with all the housemen.’

   Loring wrote that down.

   ‘The man she was most keen on - well, I never knew his name. She called him Jay.’

   ‘As if it were an initial, do you mean? Like short for John or James or - Jerome?’

   ‘I suppose so. I told the police all this before, you know. They weren’t very interested.’

   ‘You see, we don’t usually bother very much about missing girls.’

   ‘Why are you bothering now?’

   ‘Let’s leave that for a moment, shall we, Miss Lewis? Tell me more about this Jay.’

   She crossed her long bare legs. ‘I never saw him,’ she said. ‘He was married, I’m afraid. Bridie didn’t worry much about that sort of thing. Oh, and I remember her saying his wife had been a patient here.’

   Charming, Loring thought. He visits his sick wife and picks up one of the nurses on his way out.

   ‘I know what you’re thinking’, said Nurse Lewis, ‘and it wasn’t very nice. He’d got lots of money and a nice car and all that, Bridie . . .‘ She hesitated and blushed. ‘Well, Bridie lived with him actually.’

   ‘Lived with him? In his house?’

   ‘I didn’t quite mean that.’

   ‘Oh, I see.’ Nurses, who ought to be used to the facts of life, were astonishingly prudish, he thought. ‘Er - she went to spend a weekend with this man on Saturday, May 18th? In Brighton, wasn’t it?’

   ‘That’s right, with Jay.’ Nurse Lewis was still blushing at the implications of this weekend. ‘She didn’t come back. I heard Matron say she wouldn’t have her back this time if she came.’

   ‘She’d done it before, you mean?’

   ‘Well, she’d been late a good many times and sometimes she didn’t bother to come in after a late night. She said she wasn’t going to dress operations and cart bedpans around for the rest of her life. She was going to have it soft. That’s what she said. I thought she’d gone away with- Jay to live with him properly. Well, not properly, but you know what I mean.’

   ‘Tell me, did he give her presents? Did she have a very good black handbag with a Mappin and Webb label? This one?’

   ‘Oh, yes! He gave it to her for her birthday. She was twenty-two. Look . . .’ She frowned and leant towards him. ‘What is this? You’ve found her handbag but you haven’t found her?’