She rang the second bell, conscious of the people in the queue behind her staring at her unapologetically. Too right: her stupidly bright yellow clothes invited stares.
Posie looked up nervously at the Victorian flats above, and saw no encouraging signs of life. The first flat seemed to have the curtains drawn already, despite the light summer evening, and the second-floor windows were too high to be seen properly.
Posie waited.
She had thought there was something familiar about Pamela Hanro’s address when she had first heard it, and she had been right. In fact, Posie knew this street well. She had lived in a bedsit around here, in Nightingale Mews, until a couple of years back. She didn’t miss the bedsit at all, but she did miss the location sometimes.
She rang the bell again and heard it trill out in the hallway.
South Kensington was a sparkly bright jewel in the sometimes dusty grey crown of London. And while it suffered from the same black smog as the rest of town, and its buildings were tarnished in exactly the same way, there was something wonderful about its little streets which boasted dozens of fancy boutiques and cafés, with snappily-dressed waiters on street corners urging you to come in and try one of their strange-coloured drinks.
A magnet for tourists, it was a fashionable, wealthy crowd who ran in this part of town, drawn no doubt to the oasis of the great parks which South Kensington could call its own, and London’s first-class museums and concert halls which were crowded into a row just off the Exhibition Road.
But Bute Street was different again. It was like a seamy little artery running through the pure rich heart of South Kensington, close to the Underground station. This was a road you used; you came here to eat, or to shop, or to drink. And probably you did those things in a hurry. The street was merely functional. It would be fair to say that the smart crowd didn’t run here.
At one end of Bute Street was the Zetland Arms, a pub with wooden tables spilling out onto the streets, frequented by commercial travellers staying in one of the cheaper hotels nearby. It was busy right now. Other shops crowding the street were fruiterers and grocers, and there were a couple of small luncheon restaurants of the middling sort, where secretaries and filing clerks ate hurried plates of ham and eggs for lunch, and drank strong tea from chipped green enamel mugs afterwards. Posie recalled how she had often swung along here when in need of milk, or bisuits, or even for a lonely meal for one, eaten after work with not much attention paid to either her appearance or what it was that was on her plate. How things had changed…
It was certainly a strange choice of place for the famous Silvia Hanro’s sister to live in.
‘Yes? Can I help you?’
Lost in her reverie of the past, Posie hadn’t noticed that the blue front door had swung open. A small beaky-nosed woman in her late forties was peering out. She was wearing an olive-coloured house-coat and had paper rags in her hair, attempting a poor copy of a Marcel wave. Thick half-moon glasses sat on the end of her nose. Posie concluded that this must be Miss Smith from the first-floor flat.
Posie had decided that honesty would be her best policy with a woman like Pamela Hanro. She was about to open her mouth and introduce herself by her real name to the neighbour when she was interrupted.
‘I’m sorry, Madam,’ said beaky Miss Smith, almost dropping a curtsey, ‘I didn’t realise that Miss Hanro was taking clients in the evening now. Normally it’s just the daytime. Please come on in.’
The woman motioned her into the tiny dark entrance hall and Posie hurried in, thankful but completely uncomprehending. She turned to see Miss Smith latching the door behind her and drawing across two chains. Miss Smith stared at Posie in the muddy, dim light of the hallway, but when Posie looked again she saw that the woman’s eyes behind their thick glass were actually taking in her yellow outfit rather than her person, her gaze lingering on the small gold ‘H’ logo on the bottom of Posie’s fashionably short chiffon hemline.
‘That’s a fine outfit you have there, Madam. Miss Hanro’s really quite something, isn’t she? I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but it looks like it could even pass muster as a genuine House of Harlow creation. A fair copy and no mistake!’
Posie gulped and nodded in what she hoped looked like genuine satisfaction. This had all been very easy so far. So Pamela Hanro was obviously a dressmaker, or a tailors’ help, or something else dress-related.
‘Quite. I’m very pleased with it. Is she in, Miss Hanro? Only, I have something which needs altering in my bag. Quite urgently as it happens.’
‘Oh, yes. She’s in all right. You know the way up, I suppose, if you’ve been here before?’
Miss Smith motioned upwards and they began to ascend a very narrow and depressingly brown-painted staircase. The smell of frying fish got stronger and more cloying as they rose higher.
‘Miss Hanro’s just been bathing the little ’un. We share a bathroom between the two flats, and Miss Hanro keeps exactly the same time for the little ’un’s bathtime every day. Probably why she didn’t hear you ring the bell. I only came down when you rang a second time. It’s nearly time for the child’s bedtime of course, but I’m sure Miss Hanro will be glad to see you. There you are, then. You go on up.’
The woman pointed upwards at a door at the top of another steep staircase. ‘I’ll bid you goodnight.’
Standing on the tiny uncarpeted landing in front of Pamela Hanro’s door, with great splashes of what must have been bath water all around her in little pools, Posie heard the sounds of laughing and running about inside, the tweak of old floorboards creaking and a child’s uncontrollable, bubbling laughter. This must be the adopted child Sergeant Binny had told Posie about on the telephone.
Posie’s brain scrambled quickly over the facts again: a child adopted in 1918 from the Foundling Hospital in London. An orphan. So Pamela Hanro was still flying in the face of convention, then. As an unmarried woman it wouldn’t be easy to be raising a child all alone, and it wasn’t an enviable lot.
Posie wondered how Pamela managed, both financially and socially. Perhaps there were lies or disguises involved – an imaginary husband killed in the front line of battle, for example – the same sort of deceptions which were part of many a woman’s life since the war.
Just then Posie heard a voice call out cheerfully:
‘I’m coming, Hilda! Ready or not! I’m coming to get you!’
A game of Hide-and-Seek was obviously in progress. Caught off guard, Posie stood, uncertain, not wanting to disturb. She had that pin-prickly feeling again and turned and saw that Miss Smith was standing watching her from the landing below, from outside her own flat, her eyes bright through the thick lenses.
‘Just knock, Madam,’ called out the woman. ‘They do this every night. Could go on for another ten minutes, yet. You did say it was urgent, didn’t you?’
So Posie knocked and there was an immediate silence on the other side of the front door. Then there was the sound of a banging door, things being thrown around, and then more silence. Just as she was about to raise her hand to knock again, still with Miss Smith watching her every move below, the door swung open.
‘Can I help you?’
Pamela Hanro was tall, like her sister, but there the similarity ended.
This woman was dark, not blonde, and although she had the same china-blue eyes, they peered out from a sharp, foxy face which was full of suspicion. A stubborn little chin was prominently drawn up beneath a small, twitching mouth, painted out of all existence by a crimson slash of lipstick. Pamela Hanro had the outward appearance of someone who was chewing on a poisoned apple. The impression was saved, however, by a razor-sharp short haircut which would not have been out of place on a flapper, and an absolutely sumptuous pink brocade evening gown, cut rather like a kimono, which was quite unlike anything Posie had ever seen before. It was utterly magnificent, and not something you would normally wear to play games in with a child.
‘Miss Hanro?’
‘Yes?’ Pamel
a Hanro said, crossing her arms over her flat chest defensively and checking behind her with a darting motion. Following her gaze, Posie saw a small but light-drenched interior, tidy and entirely child-free.
Posie whispered in an undertone:
‘Please can I come in? I do realise that you don’t know me. But if I tell you what I need to out here, that woman downstairs will know all about it, too, and then so might others, if I’m not much mistaken. And sure as bread is bread you don’t want that. It’s about your sister.’
Pamela Hanro took a sharp intake of breath and for a second Posie thought she might have the door slammed shut in her face. She pressed on, putting considerable top spin on her words:
‘It could be a matter of life or death. Please.’
‘I have no sister,’ the woman whispered. But she held the door open anyway and Posie walked through it before Pamela Hanro could change her mind.
****
Thirteen
The flat was tiny, just this one room really, but there were two closed doors leading off of it.
A dining table and a sofa and a small oak sewing table with a glossy Singer sewing machine in the corner filled it all up. Swatches of fabric were tidily packed under the sewing table and a dressmakers’ dummy with a part-made wedding gown in the old style, hugely elaborate, was tucked right into the nook by the front door where normally a hat stand would sit.
‘Tea?’
‘Please.’
Pamela headed grudgingly over to a miniscule kitchenette on the left, just a gas ring in a cupboard with a kettle on it. She had curtained it off with a piece of thick baize on a string. As she made tea she kept throwing Posie nervous glances over her shoulder, and biting her lips wordlessly. You could have heard one of her dressmakers’ pins drop.
The flat was very neat and clean and sparse, and although the furniture was of surprisingly good quality, it was quite obviously the flat of someone who had to eke out every penny of their income to make ends meet.
A bunch of white shop-bought roses, long past their best, were placed in a vase on the table, and their decaying sweetness jarred with the smell of the fish-fat from below in the street. A beautiful yellow orchid in a white pot was placed on the windowsill, distracting the eye from the smeary outside glass of the window, and the grey greasy air of the street outside. Over in the corner on a small glass bookshelf was a good deal of correspondence stacked up in neat piles. Fresh writing paper and ink sat atop it all. A bottle of green ink.
And there wasn’t a single toy or crayon or scrap of evidence of a child’s existence in the place.
Was the child standing behind one of those two closed doors?
Posie sat on the sofa uncomfortably. She felt terrible that she had disturbed an enjoyable evening for Pamela and her daughter, but more so for the child who even now might be fearful or anxious or wondering just what on earth might be the problem outside in the main room.
As Pamela came over and handed her a cup of tea in a beautiful elaborate blue-and-white cup and saucer, Posie smiled in surprise and took it with thanks. Pamela herself drew up her high-backed sewing chair and sat, her neck arched with tension, waiting for Posie to speak.
‘I’m truly sorry to disturb you, Miss Hanro. To disturb you both.’
Pamela raised a plucked-out-of-existence eyebrow.
‘I had quite forgotten about children’s early bedtimes and such like. I don’t have any children myself. Not yet, anyway. Please accept my apologies.’
Posie was finding it hard to reconcile the laughter she had heard before out on the landing with this anxious silent slash of a woman. She ran over the facts she had received from Sergeant Binny again, flipping them over, looking for something she could use to break the ice.
She resumed in a hushed tone:
‘It’s no concern to me, Miss Hanro, about your being unmarried with a child here. You don’t have to hide her from me. I don’t give two hoots for social stigmas. I understand you adopted your daughter in 1918? So that would make her almost five by now, is that right? That was jolly kind of you.’
Pamela Hanro flashed angry eyes over at the left-hand door of the closed pair ahead of them, and hissed at Posie in a frantic whisper:
‘I don’t know what this is about, but you can jolly well leave my Hilda right out of it. She doesn’t have a clue she’s adopted, and she never will. So you keep your voice down and a civil tongue in your head.’
Pamela Hanro stood up furiously. ‘Who are you, anyhow, and what do you want? You can get out right now if you’ve come here to cause trouble. I only let you in because of your House of Harlow clothes; I thought you really must be a friend of my sister’s in clothes like that. But perhaps I was wrong? Are you an associate of the woman who’s been threatening us?’
The words were desperate, and tears weren’t far away. Posie saw with dismay that she had gone about things entirely the wrong way. She had meant to use her knowledge of the child as a means of establishing a confidence, not as a way of threatening Pamela Hanro. She remained seated and put down her beautiful teacup.
‘Please. My name is Posie Parker, and I’m a Private Detective.’ She splayed her hands apologetically.
‘I really am here about your sister. I don’t know anything about any threats being made against you, and I’m sorry if that’s how it seemed. I only know about your child because I asked for help from New Scotland Yard and you had given them that information yourself back in 1918.’
Pamela gulped and sat down again. She flushed unbecomingly. ‘Okay.’
Pamela nodded. ‘I’ve read about you, I think. Weren’t you in the papers with your engagement snaps earlier this year? That famous explorer chappie is your fella, isn’t he? Boynton-Dale?’
Posie nodded, feeling no joy at the mention of the photos.
‘So why are you here then? What’s all this about Silvia? And are you one of her film cronies?’
Posie pushed one of her real business cards across to the woman.
‘I’ve been asked to investigate death threats made against your sister, Silvia. I’m working my way through any of her family and friends who might know something. Or be able to help. And I’m absolutely nothing to do with the film world, I can assure you. I’m a genuine Private Detective: my work is never usually this glamorous.’
She briefly explained about the threats to Silvia, and the nature of them, and the finger which had arrived that morning. She watched as Pamela Hanro followed every word, wide-eyed, licking her thin lips nervously.
When Posie had finished, Pamela seemed to consider what had just been said, and then seemed to visibly relax, as if satisfied as to Posie’s real identity.
‘Excuse me for a moment,’ she said quickly, rising. Pamela went over to the left-hand door, opened it a fraction for a second and then could be heard speaking in reassuring tones to the child within.
Posie stood and admired an oil painting which was hung above the dining table of two small girls in distinctly Edwardian clothes. Really she was trying to catch a glimpse of Hilda. But she didn’t see the child at all, just gleaned an impression of tall shelves stacked full of dolls and games, and overheard snippets of ‘this will only take a few moments, darling,’ and ‘one of Mummy’s ladies about a dress.’
Pamela Hanro took a small gramophone from the glass shelf, a good, expensive model from around twenty years earlier, placed it near the door to the child’s room, wound it up and placed the needle on the record to begin. A warbling rendition of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ soon filled the room.
‘That’s better,’ said Pamela, sitting down in her chair again. ‘Children are highly perceptive and Hilda found it strange that I insisted on her staying in her room, hidden away. She usually has the run of this place. Apart from when I have customers, and then this is usual practice; she stays in her room until I’m ready again. The music is a treat. And it also means that little ears can’t hear us talking. But let’s speak quietly, anyhow.’
Pamela Hanro
grimaced. ‘I’m sorry about my nervy manner before. As I said, I’ve been receiving some threatening mail lately myself, about Hilda, as it happens. About her parentage. I thought you might be connected to that.’
‘Oh? Do you want to tell me more? Could I help?’
Pamela made a dismissive gesture. ‘It’s nothing that I can’t handle. It’s happened before, last year. Twice, actually. I dealt with it then by paying up. A despicable woman showed up here, and I’m expecting a demand for money again any day now. You can see it’s got the wind up me. I can’t be too cautious about answering the door.’
‘Quite. Very sensible. So coming back to your sister, do you know who could be threatening her?’
Posie didn’t mention that Pamela herself was currently on a list of suspects for the death threats. It wouldn’t help. The girl was thorny as an old red winter rose and only just beginning to accept Posie for who she was.
Pamela sighed. ‘I’m afraid you’re wasting your time here, Miss Parker. I’m surprised that my famous sister didn’t tell you – we haven’t seen each other now for years – and that won’t change. I haven’t got a clue about her life or what makes her happy or sad anymore, or what she might have done to annoy someone so much that they’d do such a gruesome thing as to send her a finger. That’s revolting.’
‘It is. I quite agree.’
A silence fell between the women. From somewhere outside came the tinkling sound of a bell and the hoarse calling of a rag and bone man.
‘Any bones? Any old iron?’
He passed further on down the street.
Posie indicated over to the painting she had been admiring. Two little girls, both in white lace, almost the same age as each other, but one with a helmet of golden hair and a round rosy face, quite captivating, the other with dark, flat wings of hair and a sallow, worried face, looked out at the viewer, their arms forever wrapped around each other protectively.
‘That’s beautiful. A John Singer Sargent, if I’m not mistaken?’
Pamela raised the eyebrow again. ‘You know your artists, then?’
Murder of a Movie Star Page 12
