The Fashion In Shrouds

by Margery Allingham

  He did not kiss the woman but rubbed her solid shoulder affectionately as he passed her and, having said farewell to Amanda, bustled out of the room, taking with him an atmosphere of nervous excitement which was somehow backless and ephemeral, like a methylated spirit flame. As he descended the few steps to the lift they heard his thin voice rising heartily:

  ‘I warn you of one thing; Caroline’s a good deal older than you think.’

  Mrs Fitch stood watching the door for a moment. In the arrested movement she looked shorter and stockier than ever, but with Ferdie’s going her poise increased. The handmaid vanished and the mistress of the house remained.

  ‘He’s in a good mood to-night,’ she remarked. ‘I do hope he has a flat crossing. A bad one takes it out of him so.’

  She hesitated and glanced at Amanda, who was still sitting on the chesterfield, looking a trifle over sixteen and very comfortable and content.

  ‘I’m going to have some tea,’ she said. ‘Would you like some? You haven’t drunk your gin and lime.’

  Her visitor accepted the suggestion with genuine enthusiasm, and when the tray arrived with a small tin of ginger biscuits settled down to enjoy them. They made a funny pair, and Mrs Fitch slid unconsciously into the half-sentimental, half-patronizing frame of mind that the consciously sophisticated keep up their sleeves for extreme youth and foolish innocence.

  ‘You’re getting married,’ she said. ‘That’s going to be exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Staggering, I should think,’ agreed Amanda, swallowing a piece of biscuit. ‘Tolerance is the great secret, don’t you think?’ she added with a graceful effort to keep the ball rolling. ‘Tolerance and three good meals a day.’

  Mrs Fitch did not laugh. Her diamond-shaped eyes narrowed and she looked for a moment almost frightened. She had a curious habit of moving her lips as if she were trying out words and finding them unsuitable, and she sat for a moment holding her teacup and staring over it consideringly.

  ‘You don’t want to be too tolerant,’ she said at last and added feelingly, ‘if you can help it.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘No. Do you know this girl, Caroline Adamson?’

  ‘I’ve seen her once. She’s rather like Lady Ramillies, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Fitch and suddenly laughed. The laugh altered her personality entirely. It was revealing and intimate, and made her less of an unknown quantity, and Amanda, who was one of those optimists who confidently expect every new person to be a delightful surprise, was disappointed once again.

  ‘I shouldn’t be too tolerant where Caroline Adamson is concerned,’ repeated Mrs Fitch. ‘She’s not the type of girl you know much about, I should say.’ She glanced at her visitor dubiously as she spoke, as though she wondered if there was anything on earth of which Amanda knew much. ‘When you asked me if she was like Georgia Wells I laughed because you’re not the first person who’s noticed the likeness. You were in the Tulip, weren’t you, when Ray Ramillies brought her in with those swallows in her hair? When I saw those two women together I laughed until I cried. Gaiogi Laminoff was so cross with me, but I couldn’t stop. There they were, the two of them, with Ramillies in the middle and Georgia with her new man. It was funny.’

  She laughed again at the picture re-created in her mind and Amanda echoed her, since it would have been impolite not to do so. Of all the band of personal traitors the sense of humour is the most dangerous. Mrs Fitch’s sense of humour disarmed her and made her careless.

  ‘Oh lord, that was funny!’ she said. ‘And that wasn’t the only thing. I knew something else, you see. Don’t you ever tell Georgia this because she doesn’t know, only it does make the story. Long ago there was another man who was taken with Caroline because she looked like Georgia. That makes it funnier, doesn’t it?’

  She went off into paroxysms of laughter again and uncertainly Amanda laughed with her.

  ‘I ought not to have told you that,’ said Mrs Fitch, wiping her eyes before she poured herself another cup of tea, ‘but I happened to know Caroline long ago when she was a cloak-room attendant trying to get on the stage, and that night at the Tulip I was the only person who knew the other story. That’s what made me laugh. Two men! Both Georgia’s specials! It is funny.’

  ‘Who was the first man?’

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t know him. He was long before your time. You were in the cradle when all that happened. Besides, he’s dead now. He was a very stuck-up chap. Saw himself as a judge or something. Not at all Georgia’s type, nor Caroline’s either. But she could tell you something about him if she liked. She’s a naughty girl.’

  She laughed again.

  ‘Don’t you repeat this, though. I don’t know why I told you, except that it was so funny. I’ve been dying to tell somebody.’

  ‘Was Ferdie amused?’

  ‘Mr Paul? Oh, I wouldn’t tell him.’ Mrs Fitch looked shocked, but the sight of Amanda’s face seemed to amuse her again. ‘There’s a great difference between the things you tell men and the things you tell another woman. You’ll have to learn that when you get married. Women think the same things are funny while men often don’t see anything in them at all.’

  ‘Don’t you like Georgia?’ inquired Amanda innocently, still in quest of the joke.

  ‘Yes, I do, as much as I like any actress.’ Mrs Fitch was clearly truthful. ‘She’s very clever. Did you see her in The Little Sacrifice? My dear, in that last scene, although it was so far-fetched, she was wonderful. I had to sit in the theatre and wait till everyone else had gone. I couldn’t go out into the foyer with my face. It was in a state. Georgia is an artist. I spotted her as a winner years before I met her up here.’

  She paused and added, as Amanda looked puzzled: ‘I used to buy for the Old Beaulieu at one time. That’s where I met Caroline.’

  ‘“Buy”?’

  ‘Yes. Linen. Silver. Electric-light bulbs. Novelties. It all has to be done, you know. These places have to be looked after, the same as a house.’

  ‘Of course they do. I never realized that.’ Amanda seemed astounded by the discovery and there was a brief pause in the conversation. A chiming clock in the hall struck the half-hour and Mrs Fitch sighed.

  ‘They’ll be just taking off,’ she observed. ‘I do hope they have a good crossing. Your boy will be back by eleven. He looks strong.’

  ‘Oh, very healthy,’ said Amanda-heartily and hesitated, as the conversation seemed to have reached an impasse. ‘That’s very important,’ she added heroically.

  ‘It saves a lot of worry,’ murmured Mrs Fitch. ‘You’re always fidgeting if you feel they’re not well.’

  ‘Ferdie looks disgustingly fit.’ Amanda made the remark sound inconsequential.

  ‘So he may, but all the same he’s not strong.’ There was a new tenderness in the woman’s voice which was unexpected and her lips moved soundlessly. ‘Not really strong,’ she repeated. ‘He’ll see Doctor Peugeot this time, I expect. He usually does. He’s too clever and he works too hard. Think, think, think; that’s all there is in his work. Some people imagine it doesn’t take anything out of one, but it does. The brain uses blood just like the muscles do. It stands to reason.’

  She spoke of Ferdie’s mind as if it were an incomprehensible mystery to her and it occurred to Amanda that it probably was.

  ‘Have you got a clever man?’ Mrs Fitch was still misled by Amanda’s youth and her tone was gently chaffing.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Amanda, who believed in taking a firm line.

  Mrs Fitch chuckled.

  ‘Isn’t that sweet?’ she said to no one in particular. ‘Go on believing that and you’ll always be happy. Never see round your own man, that’s the secret.’ She laughed again a little spitefully. ‘Even if you have to blind yourself.’

  Amanda looked hurt and the other woman handed her the biscuit tin. It was a conciliatory gesture and her stupid eyes were kind.

  ‘Never mind. You won’t have to worry about that sort
of thing for a long time yet,’ she said, ‘if you ever do. But once you’ve met a really clever man he spoils you for everyone else.’

  Amanda said nothing but sat up digesting this piece of dubious information and nibbling her third biscuit.

  ‘Oh, I hope they have a good trip,’ Mrs Fitch repeated.

  There is a clever man for you. Ferdie Paul is in a class by himself. If he told me to jump off the roof I’d know he was right.’

  Amanda looked up.

  ‘Are you sure that’s his brains or is it –?’

  She broke off delicately and the woman stared at her.

  ‘No, my dear,’ she said with sudden sharpness. ‘It’s his brains. There’s no silly love stuff about me. I’m far too old a bird.’ She shook her head, stupidity and pride and a certain doggedness all apparent in her expression.

  ‘I wonder if he’s got to the coast yet,’ she added as she relaxed. ‘The weather report said “fair”.’

  Mr Campion and Amanda spent the last hours of the evening driving slowly round the outskirts of the town, which were fresh after the rain.

  ‘Gaiogi wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘He’s come to Town and isn’t expected back until late. I put Ferdie on the plane. I wondered why he was so pleased when we rang up. He hadn’t much to tell about Miss Adamson except what I already knew. You seem to have been more successful. Suppose you repeat that conversation word for word as far as you can?’

  Amanda lay in the Lagonda, her head resting on the back of the seat, and the street lamps shining on her triangular mouth as she talked. She made a very good job of her report, cutting out only the extraneous matter.

  ‘It was Portland-Smith, of course,’ she said. ‘Georgia simply couldn’t have had two boy friends who wanted to be judges.’

  ‘One would seem to be enough.’

  Amanda stirred.

  ‘Two women, two Georgias,’ she announced. ‘And two men, Ramillies and Portland-Smith, both dead. It’s funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘That depends on your sense of humour, my girl,’ said Mr Campion. ‘It’s frightening me to death. We’ll find Miss Adamson to-morrow.’

  But the following day an Essex constable made a discovery.

  To the police a corpse is a corpse and murder is a hanging matter, and the whole affair slid out of the shrouding mists of the fashionable world and the gossip of the bridge clubs and came under the glare of a thousand bulls’-eyes and the ruthlessly indelicate curiosity of the Press.

  Chapter Sixteen

  SUPERINTENDENT STANISLAUS OATES of the Central Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, was one of those happy people who retain throughout their lives a childlike belief in a sharp dividing line between that which is wrong and that which is right. It is this peculiarity which is common to all the great English policemen and is probably the basis of their reputation both for integrity and for stupidity. In his thirty-five years in the Force he had acquired a vast knowledge of the incredible weaknesses and perversities of his fellow-men, but, while these were all neatly tabulated in his pleasant country mind, his sense of what was black and what was white remained static and inviolate. He was a gentle man, quiet in speech and possessed of a charming yokel sense of fun, but in spite of this he was as hard, as clear-eyed, and therefore often as cruel, as a child of five.

  Mr Campion, who had known him for eleven years and was very fond of him, still paid him that respect which has a modicum of fear in it.

  At a little after five on the day following Amanda’s enlightening interview with Mrs Fitch, Mr Campion came up on the carpet in Oates’s office. Although he was so well known to the superintendent his invitation to ‘step up for a few words’ had been as formal as if he had never set his nose inside the place before, and he was conducted to the visitor’s chair with considerable ceremony. He looked round him with quick interest. There was quite a gathering. Besides Oates himself, whose bony smile was even less expansive than usual, there was present Chief Detective-Inspector Pullen, a great lump of a man with a squat nose and bright eyes who had spent much of his earlier service in the W Division and was one of the Yard’s best bets of the year. He sat, solid and solemn, on the superintendent’s right hand, looking, in his dark clothes and unnatural gravity, like a bearer at a funeral.

  Detective-Sergeant Flood was with him, Campion was relieved to see, but his face, which was kite-shaped, did not lighten as the visitor appeared.

  A police stenographer sat in the background and they all four looked up silently as the lean man in the horn-rimmed spectacles came quietly in.

  Mr Campion surveyed the scene, his face amiably blank and a headmaster’s study feeling gripping the back of his neck.

  ‘Well, who’s been riding a bicycle without a reflector?’ he said in a well-meaning effort to lighten the atmosphere.

  Oates shook his closely cropped head at him.

  ‘It’s not a very nice business, Mr Campion,’ he said. ‘It was good of you to come. Just one or two questions, if you don’t mind.’

  Campion was familiar with the superintendent’s brand of under-statement and his eyebrows rose. ‘Not a very nice business’ was unusually strong.

  ‘Oh,’ he said cautiously. ‘What’s up?’

  Pullen glanced at his chief and cleared his throat.

  ‘Mr Campion,’ he said, ‘a young woman has been found dead in circumstances which suggest violence. In the back of a powder compactum in her handbag we found a slip of paper with some figures on it. The superintendent here recognized them as forming your telephone number, although only the first letter of the exchange was given. I will now read you a description of the deceased. If you think you recognize it I shall be compelled to ask you to come with me to view the body.’

  He had a curious, staccato delivery which was not unlike the rattle of a tape-machine and gave the official words an inhuman quality.

  Mr Campion preserved his famous half-witted expression. It was not quite so misleading as it once had been, since the last ten years had etched lines of character in his face, but it was still serviceable.

  ‘Height five-seven, slender build, eyes grey, hair very dark brown, hands and feet well cared for. Age at present doubtful, between twenty-five and thirty-five. Exceptionally well dressed.’

  Oates leant over the desk.

  ‘That’s tall for a woman,’ he said. ‘A tall dark girl with grey eyes who was very smart. I asked you to come round because I – have a fancy that was your telephone number. Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Campion slowly. ‘Yes, I think I do. Hadn’t she any other papers?’

  ‘None at all. Not a card, not a letter, not a mark on her clothes. This scrap in the powder-box may have been overlooked.’

  He was waiting expectantly and Mr Campion hesitated. He knew from experience that complete openness is the only thing to offer the police once one is convinced that one’s affairs are also their own, but while there is still a chance that things may not be as bad as that it is wisest not to awaken their insatiable curiosity.

  ‘I’d like to see the body before I mention any name,’ he said.

  ‘Naturally.’ Oates looked disappointed. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go along with the inspector now? The identification is holding us up,’ he continued, relapsing into a more natural manner for a moment. ‘We can’t very well turn her over to Sir Henry until we get that done.’

  Mr Campion stirred. Sir Henry Wryothsley, the eminent pathologist, was not called in for the obvious or mediocre.

  Pullen heaved himself out of his chair.

  ‘It’s a little way out of town, I’m afraid, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all. How long is it going to take me?’

  ‘It all depends on how much you know, my boy.’ Oates grinned as he spoke. ‘I think I’ll come down with you if you don’t mind, Pullen. If she does turn out to be a friend of Mr Campion’s I may be able to give you a hand with him. He’s a slippery witness.’

  There was general la
ughter at this, none of it ringing quite true, and Mr Campion found himself checking up on dangerous points, considering Val’s position, Gaiogi’s and his own. He had time to notice that the inspector took his superior officer’s co-operation in very good part. The two men had worked together for some years and were fortunate in possessing different faults and qualities. As he sat jammed in the back of a police car between the two of them he reflected that they made a formidable team and hoped devoutly that he was going to be on their side.

  ‘It’s technically an Essex crime,’ Oates remarked as they swung down the Embankment. ‘The corpse was found on a common at a little place called Coaching Cross. Where is it exactly, Inspector?’

  ‘Half a mile off the Epping and Ongar main road.’

  Pullen rattled the words more cheerfully. In the open air, away from the official atmosphere of the Yard, both policemen seemed to have experienced a humanizing change, a loosening of the belt, as it were, and there was even just a hint of the ‘outing’ spirit in their smiles, but Mr Campion was no more misled by them than they were by him.

  ‘It’s hardly a common. More of a wood,’ the inspector continued more conversationally. ‘A sort of thicket. It’s a bit of the old forest, I should say. It’s full of brambles and hasn’t done my trousers any good. I’m a London cop and my clothes aren’t constructed for a cross-country beat. Still, the Essex Police say it’s a London crime and I think they’re right. They called us in straight away, not but what an hour or so earlier wouldn’t have hurt ’em.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s our body from now on,’ Oates remarked complacently. ‘If they call us in within three days we pay the cost of the inquiry; if not, it’s their County Council’s pigeon.’ He paused. ‘We’re talking lightly and there’s a poor girl lying dead. I hope we’re not hurting you, Mr Campion?’

  The naïveté of the question was disarming and Campion smiled.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. If it turns out to be the girl I think It may be, I know her name and that’s about all. She was a very beautiful person with a terrible voice.’