by Evelyn James
Chapter Ten
Clara returned to the Pavilion to see how events were unfolding. The official opening was to be later that afternoon and the last minute preparations were well underway. She briefly caught sight of Abigail rushing by with an armful of papers, but there was no time to stop and speak with her. She didn’t even see Clara. Clara decided to do some poking around instead. She wandered about the Pavilion, observing workmen finishing off stalls and advertising boards, and noting a number of well-dressed men and women who were setting the stalls with their respective goods. Bottles of perfume, tubs of make-up, mirrors, beauty kits, health aids and an assortment of devices Clara could only wonder at but which, no doubt, had some purpose in making one look amazing, all were appearing on the stalls and giving the Pavilion a feel of an upscale market. The rooms were already rather crowded and that was before the public was invited in!
Clara observed everything at a discreet distance, trying not to get in anyone’s way. No one seemed unduly concerned that two people had been murdered on the premises. Many were perhaps unaware of what had happened, but others would know and could easily have let slip the information. Clara had to assume that those who were aware simply did not much care about the occurrences.
She found herself standing near the Cushing’s Corsetry stand. A woman with a strained looking face was trying to get a torso dummy to stay upright as she put a corset upon it. She was failing and the dummy kept unerringly falling over as she attempted to pull the strings tight on the corset.
“Might I help?” Clara offered, propping up the dummy without waiting for a reply.
The woman nodded at her thankfully and fixed the corset in place. Clara noted the dummy, which in traditional corset shops would have displayed an hourglass waist, was of a completely tubular form, not requiring assistance from the corset to give it a straight waist. This was clearly a dummy especially made for Cushing’s new line of flatteners.
“Thank you,” the woman said as she propped the dummy on her display table.
“I’m Clara Fitzgerald, one of the Pavilion Committee,” Clara introduced herself promptly.
The woman looked at her stiffly. She seemed reluctant to respond.
“I wasn’t sure what would be happening with the Cushing’s stand, after last night,” Clara lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level.
“Oh, you know about that?” the woman said, looking worried now.
“I was here for the banquet and, rather unfortunately, was among those who made the discovery. Poor Mr Forthclyde.”
“Yes. He was my superior,” the woman took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. She had the look of someone who had cried a lot in the last few hours. “It was a shock to learn that he was dead.”
“Who told you?”
“Miss Sommers,” the woman said. “She came to my hotel to see me. I was distraught at first, couldn’t understand that not only was Mr Forthclyde dead but murdered…” she hissed the word through her teeth. “Then Miss Sommers reminded me that I had a job to do and that I must take over where Mr Forthclyde had left off. So, I am here setting up the stall and trying not to think about things too hard.”
“I do understand,” Clara reassured her. “Could I help you with anything else while I am here? It is no bother, and you appear to have a lot of heavy items to put out compared to the other stall holders?”
The woman looked at her barely begun display table and the boxes of goods, including two more dummies and a large display board, waiting to be put out.
“If… if you wouldn’t mind?”
For the next half an hour Clara and the woman chatted away in fits and starts, as boxes were emptied and the dummies erected. Clara observed that corsets had changed a lot since she was a girl and the woman treated her to a lengthy explanation of the benefits of a Cushing’s corset. It seemed that not only could they give you a very modern figure, but they could cure you of all ills, everything from poor lung capacity to flat feet, as they helped the blood to circulate. Clara took this all with a pinch of salt, as she doubted Cushing’s actually employed doctors to prove the genuineness of these claims. At least, amid the sales spiel, she also learned the woman’s name. She was Penelope Muggins, often called Penny as Miss Muggins sounded awful and Penelope was rather long-winded. She had opened up quite a bit from when Clara had first met her.
“How long have you worked for Cushing’s?”
“Two years last Christmas,” Penny explained. “But I have only worked with Mr Forthclyde for six months, since his last assistant resigned. We travel all about… I mean, we did travel all about…”
Penny fiddled with the lace trim on a corset.
“I can’t fathom it. Why would anyone kill Mr Forthclyde?”
“No one had a grudge against him?” Clara asked.
“Not as far as I know,” Penny shrugged her shoulders. “He was nice, but always very professional. My father was very particular about that, seeing as how I would be travelling all about with a man. He was a bachelor, but I never told my father that or he would have had kittens.”
“Had Mr Forthclyde mentioned that he might stay behind after the meal?”
Penny shook her head.
“We last spoke as he was leaving the hotel. I wished him to have a good time then retired to my room. We had separate rooms, naturally. In fact, they were not even on the same floor,” Penny’s face clouded and her lips twitched downwards. “Mr Forthclyde was the most experienced salesman on the Cushing’s team. He sold more corsets than any of his colleagues. I was proud to work for him. I wanted to be the best like he is… was…”
“I’m sorry, this has been such a shock for you,” Clara placed a hand lightly on her arm. “Would you like me to fetch you a cup of tea, or something?”
“No, thank you, you have been so kind already. I must not detain you any longer.”
Clara would have been happily detained if it meant learning more about Mr Forthclyde, though she rather felt he was a dead end, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Penny had returned to fussing over her corsets and Clara felt she had overstayed her welcome, so she started to prowl the rooms again, glancing at the stalls as she went by. She came across some very morose Albion representatives putting together a complicated display of the new Pearl Pink lipsticks in a prominent place in the main hall. She stopped to admire the construction which involved a pyramid of carefully balanced lipsticks rising up before a shimmering pink curtain. One of the women stopped stacking lipsticks and glanced at her.
“Have you had a sample?” she asked, though it seemed a rather perfunctory question and not made for the sake of politeness, but rather out of a sense of duty.
“No,” Clara admitted. “But please do not deplete your stock on my behalf. I am Clara Fitzgerald from the Brighton Pavilion Preservation Committee.”
This statement did not generate any sort of recognition from the women. They merely nodded and carried on with their work.
“You have had no bother today?” Clara asked carefully.
The women glanced up at her.
“Should we have had?” one retorted sharply.
Clara wondered what she meant to imply, that Clara was behind the trouble?
“No, I was just checking. Things have been difficult the last few days and the committee is naturally concerned.”
“Mr Forthclyde’s blood might have stained the Georgian dining table upstairs,” one of the women sneered to the girl next to her. “That is what the committee worries about, isn’t it? Whether your precious Pavilion will be ruined by our arrival?”
“Actually, I am concerned that someone has been killed on the premises,” Clara said smoothly, ignoring the snide tone the woman had addressed her with. Clearly rumour had circulated that Clara had made a fuss about the damaged plasterwork. So be it, she was not about to let the Pavilion be damaged for the sake of a trade fair.
“Are you not concerned that we might be next?” one of the women snapped.
<
br /> Clara fixed her gaze on her, she was the one that had offered her a Pearl Pink lipstick.
“I didn’t catch your name?”
“Niamh Owen,” the woman answered. “Top Albion Representative for the South-East, excluding Abigail Sommers from the count.”
“She beats you on sales?” Clara asked provocatively.
Niamh glowered. She was a tall woman with dark black hair and intense eyes. She looked like someone with a temper.
“Abigail is in Albion Industries’ pocket when it comes to these things. She can do no wrong, but you can’t compare us to her, not when she has the advantages of knowing all the higher level managers on a first name basis.”
“And, one has to ask, how does she come to know their names so intimately?” one of the other women joined the fray. “Abigail is far too friendly with some important men for my liking.”
“Don’t be fooled into thinking she keeps her top spot in the sales figures by hard work alone,” Niamh added, with a smug sniff of her nose. “At least, not the hard work she makes out she is doing. No one before Abigail has retained the lead in the sales leagues for more than a year. They produce the figures monthly and it is ridiculous to think she is outstripping all us other girls by so much every time. Well, if you do believe that, you must be a naïve fool.”
“Niamh is the best of us,” another woman admitted. “Even so, she only just beats us each month and is always miles behind Abigail. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You think the figures are doctored?” Clara said.
“Think? I know so!” Niamh snorted again with glee at being able to rat out her rival. “I have been doing some digging and I have found evidence that the figures are completely fraudulent and that dear old Abigail is nothing more than a big fat liar!”
Niamh looked very satisfied with herself and Clara was reminded of her school days yet again when the girls would get into silly cat-fights over the most innocuous of subjects. Not that this was innocuous, not when you considered the extra money Abigail was earning each month she was the top sales representative.
“That is such a shame,” Clara said, thinking if it was true then here would be a motive for Abigail to be disgraced and could explain the sabotage, though double-murder was going to the extreme. “Would it be possible to see this evidence?”
“Why should it interest you?” Niamh was altogether too sharp on the uptake, Clara reflected.
“Did I not mention? Along with being on the Pavilion committee, I am also a private detective and I have been asked to keep an eye on the situation here. Anything that could suggest a motive for these crimes is interesting to me.”
The women looked taken aback, but only for a moment.
“Why would evidence for Abigail’s disgraceful behaviour suggest a motive for these horrid murders?” one said, utterly aghast.
“I can’t say for sure,” Clara didn’t want to give them ideas about someone trying to ruin Abigail. “But anything could be important at this stage. The saboteur was intent on leaving messages about betrayal, that seems to suggest a very personal reason for these crimes.”
Niamh flashed her dark, clever eyes at the other girls.
“Betrayal,” she hummed. “Who betraying who?”
“Exactly,” Clara responded.
“Poor little Esther never betrayed anyone,” one of the women said. “She was a sweet thing and such a hard worker. She never deserved to be strangled.”
“And with a pair of those stockings too,” Niamh grimaced. “And after she had had such a triumph increasing the sales of them.”
Clara pricked up her ears. Was this just another coincidence, or was the killer playing games with them?
“The stockings were significant to Esther?” Clara asked.
“Esther had secured a number of sales agreements with department stores and smaller retailers for those very stockings,” Niamh explained. “It was something of a victory for her, seeing as they had been one of Albion’s poorer sellers until then. We all had a little celebratory party over it and Albion Industries published her name in the quarterly newspaper that is sent to each sales representative.”
“Along with the sales figures?” Clara guessed.
“Exactly,” Niamh nodded. “Esther was certainly in the limelight that month. There were high hopes for her. Poor thing.”
“I don’t want to end up like that,” one of the women, the youngest in the group, began to cry. The others flocked around her.
“There, there, Mary. No one is going to hurt you,” Niamh comforted her. “We promised, remember, to always stick together and never go about alone?”
Mary sniffled and leaned her head wearily on Niamh’s shoulder.
“It has been a long day,” Niamh told Clara. “And we still have a long night ahead of us. May I suggest you go investigate this murder business elsewhere and leave us to our work? The sooner this fair is over and we can get away from Brighton the better.”
Clara did not argue over the dismissal. She politely hoped that Mary would feel better soon and then moved away. But her mind was working fast. Esther had been killed using the stockings she had made top sellers, and Mr Forthclyde had been stabbed with a sharpened piece of whalebone from one of his own corsets. Clara had assumed the weapons had simply come to hand, though why anyone would want to sharpen a piece of whalebone for anything other than sinister reasons eluded her. But the stocking had appeared to be something that had sprung to the killer’s hand, as if he or she had acted impulsively. Now here was the information that there seemed to have been nothing impulsive about it. Clara came to a halt and gazed about the Pavilion, at the stalls and the busy people, at the riot of colours in the displays. What was at work here? A madman out for revenge? Or something far more calculated? And was this about Abigail, as she had first feared, or was this a wider attack at Albion Industries? Whichever was the case, it seemed the person behind the attacks was very aware of the internal politics of the company, how else could they have known about Esther’s stocking success? It was all very disturbing and, with barely an hour to go before the trade fair opened, Clara was no closer to naming a suspect.
Chapter Eleven
Clara decided she had spent enough time at the Pavilion of late. She had other things on her mind. As the afternoon drew on, she set out to see Captain O’Harris at the hospital. The trade fair would just have to look after itself for a while longer.
Captain O’Harris had his eyes closed when she gently opened the door to his room, but he opened them the second she lightly called his name. For a moment he didn’t seem to register who she was, then he smiled.
“Clara, back again? Surely I am boring you by now?”
“Never,” Clara assured him happily, taking a seat beside him. “How are you feeling?”
“All right, I suppose,” O’Harris frowned. “Sometimes I don’t feel…”
He hesitated, trying to find the words to explain the strange moods and sensations that came over him at times.
“Sometimes it doesn’t seem real, none of it. This room, this bed, you…” O’Harris’ words caught in his throat. “It feels like I am dreaming and… and it is the most frightening of sensations. To not be sure this is reality…”
“But it is,” Clara took his hand in both of hers. “Don’t you feel my touch? In what dream could you ever feel me squeezing your hand? This is a real place, John, you and I are both real.”
O’Harris’ eyes had looked anxious, now they seemed to lighten. He relaxed a fraction.
“I spend too long alone in this room. Too much time to think. I would rather be on the wards where I could see everyone else, but they won’t move me there because it is too public and they think some newspaperman will try and sneak in during visiting hours,” O’Harris sighed. “They can control who sees me when I am in this private room.”
“How long must you be here?”
“The doctors are cagey on the subject,” O’Harris shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. �
�Aside from being exposed to the elements in the ocean and half-drowned, I contracted a foreign disease on the island and it continues to flare up. They don’t like the idea of me going home to live alone while there is a possibility I could become dangerously ill again.”
“You’re a local hero,” Clara told him with amusement. “They couldn’t face the publicity if you came to any harm because they released you too soon. You are the talk of the town.”
“I wish I wasn’t!” O’Harris frowned. “Anyway, the matter is moot because my house is not fit for me to reside in just yet. Colonel Brandt came to see me and explained he had kept an eye on the house during my absence and because of fear of vandals or thieves breaking in while it stood empty everything was put into secure storage. The house has rather a reputation, you see, because of the deaths that took place there.”
“I suppose the local youths imagine there are ghosts haunting it!” Clara laughed.
“Or it is cursed, or some such nonsense!” O’Harris joined in the humour. “Anyway, Colonel Brandt says that someone did break in and smashed several windows. Could have been a tramp, because they started a fire in the dining room hearth and made such a mess of it they nearly set the whole place alight. Fortunately, a passer-by spotted smoke and the fire brigade were called. The dining room was gutted sadly before they could put it out, but the rest of the house was saved.”
“What a shame!” Clara exclaimed with genuine regret. She had dined at O’Harris’ house and had vivid memories of the old-fashioned dining room which reeked of Victorian luxury, from the red flock wallpaper to the parquet flooring.
