Death at the Wychbourne Follies

by Amy Myers

  ‘Star, News and Standard,’ yelled the paperboy she passed and, ignoring the rain pattering on her umbrella, she stopped to buy the Evening Standard hoping that it would no longer be carrying the Tobias Rocke story. She loved the Strand in particular. This was London to her. It didn’t have the splendour of the wealthy West End, or the commercial appeal of Oxford and Regent Street, or the fun of Soho, but the Strand was the street that linked east and west London. This was the street that had housed the rich and famous of the past with their magnificent mansions and gardens leading down to the River Thames. Now the river had been pushed farther back, the horses and carriages had given way to motor cars and vans and the huge mansions were now hotels, shops and theatres. The Gaiety theatre building that Lady Ansley had known was no more, having been lost when the Aldwych was built. The theatre had resurrected itself further along the Strand but for many it lacked the razzle-dazzle of the earlier years.

  Nell had passed Romano’s many times in her career, and here it was, still proudly presenting its name over the doorway. She had visited its kitchen too on errands from the Carlton. Even Monsieur Escoffier had spoken in awe of its magnificent cellars.

  ‘The Still White Champagne Cramant, Nell, c’est magnifique.’

  She could hear Monsieur’s voice now, as he had nodded with pleasure. Even then the bohemian atmosphere of Romano’s was fast changing, so Monsieur had said. Signor Romano himself had died and excellent though his successor Luigi was, it was never quite the same as with the eccentric Romano. Physically it had changed too. The bar and grill room had replaced the kitchen on the lower floor, and it was there she was to meet Signor Murano today.

  Here we go, Nell thought, shaking the rain from her umbrella. There were no diners remaining as she walked down to the grill room, but she was clearly expected as an elderly short man with a moustache and welcoming beam advanced to meet her with an old-fashioned bow.

  ‘Signora Drury,’ he greeted her. ‘What honour, Signora.’

  ‘The honour is mine, Signor,’ Nell returned graciously.

  ‘A glass of the Château Yquem perhaps?’

  ‘Grazie.’ Monsieur Escoffier would certainly approve of that.

  ‘The pleasure is mine, Signora.’

  The formalities over, Nell was able to take in her surroundings. She immediately felt at home here, since the walls were plentifully adorned with familiar-looking photographs of clients past and present, and even one or two Gaiety posters. If the current Romano’s needed evidence of its glory days, here it was. Lynette Allison, as she then was, the bubbly Katie Barnes, Neville Heydock of course and a wonderful one of Lady Ansley. Nell lifted her glass of Château Yquem to them in tribute and Signor Murano followed suit.

  He sighed. ‘The signor from Scotland Yard say you wish to know about an evening from long ago, which the signora is too young to remember.’

  ‘I’ve heard enough about it to believe I was there,’ she replied. It was true. Here in Romano’s itself, glory days past or not, it was all too easy to think of them as yesterday. ‘Were you here on that day, the day Signorina Darling disappeared?’

  ‘Not all the usual staff were working that evening, but I was, although I did not see the lady. I was at the main restaurant bar, and the police interviewed us all. When you have finished your wine I will show you Romano’s, as the inspector asked me to. Your Gaiety girls and boys would not have known this grill room but they did know the great Romano. The Roman as everyone call him. He was Romano’s; he was the greatest showman of them all. Everyone come here then, not just the theatre people; everyone come to meet everyone else. The Prince of Wales, he loved the place – the old Prince of Wales, not the Bright Young Man we know today. Now we are more respectable, Signora, but we are not fun.’

  She followed as he led her upstairs to the ground floor to show her the entrance hall. ‘Signorina Darling would have come in here, perhaps her gentleman friend would buy flowers at the stand here. Now I will show you our restaurant, Signora.’

  ‘Is that where most of the Gaiety Girls would dine?’ Nell asked, remembering Lady Kencroft’s account.

  ‘Some were in private rooms, but that night many were in the restaurant. I will show you. When Romano’s first open, everyone met in the bar and then walked through to the restaurant, but by the nineties, when Miss Darling come, the door open straight to the restaurant. More à la mode.’

  He paused before the doors and then flung them dramatically open.

  ‘Ecco, Signora.’

  And there it was. The glory of Romano’s. And an odder restaurant Nell had never seen. She felt she was walking straight into the Arabian Nights, with two long side walls composed of Moorish arches with brightly coloured Oriental scenes on them. And yet, unusual though it was, the décor worked, and it was possible to see how exciting a place this had been thirty years ago. The tables were in two long rows, against the side walls, and the floor space in between was used for dancing, Signor Murano told her.

  ‘Your lady, she was not here,’ he said, ‘but other ladies from the Gaiety were here that evening. She dine upstairs.’

  ‘Up there?’ Nell pointed to where a trellised balcony stretched across the far wall.

  ‘No, no. That not there in the nineties. Miss Mary Ann was in a more private room, much more private.’

  ‘And you’re sure that was the night she disappeared?’

  ‘I am. Many people swear to that when the police came the next day after she had not appeared at the theatre. Mr Edwardes, the boss at the Gaiety theatre, took a cab to her home but no one there.’

  ‘Was Darling her real name or a stage name?’ she asked, remembering Alex’s instructions.

  ‘That I do not know. I knew her only as the beautiful Signorina Darling.’

  That line had petered out then. Nell stared at the restaurant, imagining it full of exotically clad ladies sparkling with jewels and dancing the night away. ‘Can you show me the private rooms too, please?’

  ‘Yes, Signora, but they will tell you little about Miss Mary Ann.’

  He led her upstairs and Nell saw his point immediately. All were still furnished with heavy dark tables and dark plush-covered chairs. Mary Ann’s was the first in a row of four but the room spoke only of the past, not of the people who had dined there.

  ‘Were all these rooms occupied that night?’ she asked.

  ‘The room next to this one was booked. I do not know about the others.’

  ‘The diners wouldn’t have seen her leave, would they?’

  ‘No. The doorman would have seen them.’

  ‘Does he still work here?’ she asked hopefully.

  He smiled. ‘No, Signora. He left us many years ago.’

  No luck there then. ‘Who was in the other private room?’ she asked, trying to see some sense in this story.

  ‘Signor Jarrett. He has become very famous since. He was with a signorina from the Gaiety, Miss Constance Wilson.’

  Did that get her any further? Nell wondered. She pushed on. ‘Did Mr Rocke dine here that night?’

  ‘I do not think so. Only rarely did he come, and then he liked to be near Miss Darling, whoever she was with. If she discovered he was coming, she would try not to come herself that night. Perhaps he not like it if she dining with other gentlemen.’

  That sounded creepy, she thought. Tobias Rocke had seemed to her such a pleasant man, but now he sounded like Svengali in the Du Maurier play.

  ‘There were others from the Gaiety here, in the restaurant,’ he continued. ‘Miss Lynette Allison, Miss Katie Barnes, Miss Maxwell, and I believe Miss Wilson joined them later. She had arrived with Mr Jarrett, who had to leave early. All so very long ago. We tell the police all this, and that is how I remember it. Very long ago. Imagine our restaurant, Signora, as it was then. It is changed and now no more are we as grand as the Savoy.’

  ‘I used to work at the Carlton.’

  He beamed. ‘Then you know the hotel world. It has many nations working there. You are a
great chef, Miss Drury. Our chef in the nineties was from the Hapsburg family, one of the young waiters, Louis, was the son of a nobleman in southern France, another was Mario, from a poor village in the south of Italy – the south is not so good as the north of course, where I was born. None of them work here now, nor were they present that evening, but I was, and still I work here, as does the man who look after the cellars, Bendi. He and I, we are maturing like our wine of which we are so proud.’

  ‘You age perfectly, signor.’

  He bowed. ‘I thank you, but there is a story in the Bible of a woman who named her child Ichabod. The glory is departed, she said, after all she loved in life save for him had been taken from her. I am Ichabod, Signora Drury. The glory of Romano’s is departed and soon it will take me with it.’

  Alex Melbray had said nothing about her reporting to him on her visit to Romano’s and an enquiry at the reception desk of Scotland Yard proved fruitless, as he was out that afternoon.

  Time was passing and Nell needed to be back at Wychbourne Court for dinner preparations. She had only just arrived there when Mrs Fielding thumped on her door.

  ‘Gallivanting in London, Miss Drury? I suppose you realize that I had to order more apples for your fancy puddings and Kitty has been trying to get your jellies and junkets ready for dinner. She needed that as much as a toad wants a side pocket. She’ll be glad you’re back.’

  No point in defending herself. Instead, Nell smiled at the Kentish saying. ‘I’ll make up for it. Luckily it’s only the family dining.’

  Mistake. ‘Only the family?’ Mrs Fielding retorted. ‘Mr Beringer has stayed on and Mr Fontenoy’s dining here with Lady Clarice as the dowager is staying home. It all has to be catered for.’

  ‘And Mr Trotter too?’ Nell asked with a straight face. Mrs Fielding had taken exception to Mr Trotter, who had unwisely observed in her hearing that the scones were overcooked.

  Mrs Fielding stiffened. ‘Her ladyship wouldn’t invite the likes of him, but Lady Clarice insisted.’

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here to see all goes well, Mrs Fielding,’ Nell said diplomatically, dumping her bag and turning to leave.

  ‘And his lordship wants to see you now you’ve returned,’ Mrs Fielding added offhandedly, blocking the door. ‘If you’ve the time to spare, of course.’

  ‘Plenty of it,’ Nell tried to say sweetly, squeezing past her to pick up the house telephone. She could make a good guess at what this was about. Crackling crumpets, though, was she going to be cross-examined before she had even disentangled the afternoon in her own mind? Apparently yes. Lord Ansley would like to see her before dinner if at all possible.

  If Lord Ansley asked, anything had to be possible. Why so quickly though? There could only be one answer to that. He would want to know about her visit to Romano’s. Chief Inspector Melbray had told Lord Ansley his plan for Nell’s visit in full awareness that his lordship had been with Mary Ann Darling on the night she disappeared. Did that mean that Lord Ansley really was a suspect either for Mary Ann’s death or Tobias Rocke’s?

  Tread carefully, she thought, then reprimanded herself. Hadn’t she said that there was no way that she could believe Lord Ansley guilty of anything evil, let alone murder?

  She whipped off her apron, hurried up to her bedroom on the first floor to organize her hair and change, then rushed straight to his study, as he had asked. He used the steward’s room for his estate work, but this summons did not fall under that category. The study was on the first floor, and it was here that he wrote private letters and, yes, studied. He kept a formidable array of books there, chiefly on his main interests. Kentish history, farming and archaeology together with a few political memoirs.

  ‘Thank you for coming so quickly, Miss Drury,’ he greeted her formally. He was already dressed for dinner, with dinner jacket and white waistcoat, which made him look far more formidable than his usual Norfolk jacket and trousers. ‘I hope you enjoyed Romano’s. Not what it used to be, but then we can’t turn the clock back.’

  ‘Would you want to?’ she asked boldly.

  He smiled. ‘When you yourself are older, Nell, you will find that giddy youth is not always a joy to look back on.’

  Giddy youth at the Gaiety stage door? she wondered.

  ‘I asked you to come,’ he continued, ‘because the ramifications of this murder case are spreading at such a pace that it’s time I spoke both to you and to Chief Inspector Melbray as he is formally engaged in uprooting the past. I have been under an obligation not to speak of this affair, but as Mary Ann Darling has become an issue in another death, I bow to the necessity of breaking my word.’

  So that was it. Nell breathed a little easier, but still plunged right in. ‘I was told it was you who dined with her that night.’

  ‘It was. At Miss Darling’s request.’

  ‘In a private room, so Signor Murano said.’ This sounded accusatory to her ears and she regretted it.

  ‘And you will understand why, when I explain,’ he said quietly. ‘Mary Ann – I think of her that way and not as Miss Darling because I was very fond of her. Not so fond, I hasten to add, that I suffered the pangs of unrequited love when she told me her heart belonged to another. I was young, but even then knew that I would recover. As indeed I did, since I met Gertrude almost immediately afterwards when she came to take Mary Ann’s role in The Flower Shop Girl. Mary Ann’s understudy had been taken ill and Gertrude had made a name for herself at the Albion in a play that had just closed.

  ‘But I digress,’ he continued. ‘That evening Mary Ann was a very scared young lady. She told me she had had a miserable time, pursued and pestered wherever she went, and she felt in great danger. She did not go into details, but she was sufficiently alarmed to believe that her life might be in danger because she had rejected this man’s advances. She told me therefore that she had a plan to disappear without trace in the company of a gentleman who loved her greatly and whom she wanted to marry.’

  The truth at last. Thank heavens. ‘Did she name him?’

  ‘No. All she said was that she had planned for him to draw up outside Romano’s one evening. She would join him there and he would look after her. She would leave her home for his. She was upset at the thought of letting Mr Edwardes down without notice, but she had confidence in her understudy, who, as I said, was unfortunately then taken ill just as she was needed. I asked Mary Ann if she trusted this man, as I was most concerned, but she was quite sure she could. I had the impression it was not someone with whom she worked at the Gaiety, and that perhaps was an advantage. All she asked of me was that I would escort her through the Gaiety’s front doors on the Strand and not through the stage door in Wellington Street, which was the usual exit for the cast. I would then take her to Romano’s for dinner. She hoped that whoever was dogging her footsteps would assume that she was spending a normal evening with me, as she did from time to time. She asked me then to escort her after dinner out of Romano’s and into a cab that would be waiting for her with her lover.

  ‘This seemed to me a plan full of holes and I told her so,’ Lord Ansley continued. ‘Even if I did as she requested and she was driven away in the cab with her beloved, she ran the risk of being followed and attacked either then or at a later date, whether she was married or not. We therefore concocted a plan to make it seem that she had disappeared for good. It did require the help of another male friend at the Gaiety however. She suggested Neville Heydock.’

  ‘She trusted him?’ Nell was amazed. To her he seemed flippant and unreliable, but perhaps that was just outward show.

  ‘Yes, just as she trusted me. The plan was that Neville would wait until the cab – a growler so that the cabbie could not see what was happening – drew up with her gentleman friend in it towards the middle of the road. Neville would come into Romano’s to alert Mary Ann and myself, then immediately return to summon a second growler, which would wait at the kerbside directly outside Romano’s while Mary Ann and I were coming downstairs. Neville
would get into that cab himself, ostensibly to await Mary Ann’s and my arrival. The first cab would be parallel to the second – which would not draw any attention as the Strand then was even more crowded than it is today with carriages higgledy-piggledy everywhere as they waited for theatres and restaurants to empty.

  ‘The moment I came out of Romano’s with Mary Ann,’ he continued, ‘I would go up to the cabbie to give him directions and pay him, while Neville slipped away on the far side of the growler unnoticed. I could then usher Mary Ann into the growler on the near side, go to the cabbie again to change the directions or some such pretext, then return and bang the door as though I had entered, giving him the shout to leave. Then I’d step smartly back into the milling crowd. Meanwhile, of course, Mary Ann had also left the growler on the far side and jumped straight into the cab with her sweetheart.’

  Nell gulped. Quite a story! ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Amazingly, looking back, it did. I returned to Romano’s. The cabbie duly drove on only to find no passengers when he arrived at the false address. He’d been paid so he had nothing to worry about. Quite a lot might have gone wrong, but we were lucky and nothing did. Except in one particular.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Mary Ann really did disappear,’ he said soberly, ‘and I fear met a terrible death. We had realized that investigations would follow because of her fame and role at the Gaiety, but I had no reason to doubt that she was safe, despite being somewhat baffled by this mysterious lover. Revealing our plan to the police could well have brought more trouble for her, and in any case I had promised to keep silent. Only as the years passed did I wonder whether I was right to do so, especially when I learned that a body had been identified.’ He paused. ‘I concluded that Mary Ann’s love affair had gone seriously awry and that either her lover had killed her or she was so distraught that she ended her own life.’

  ‘That must have been truly dreadful for you,’ Nell sympathized. ‘Did your Gaiety friends who’d been at Romano’s think you were to blame for her disappearance?’