A Spider in the Cup

by Barbara Cleverly

  Seducing girls for information might be the Sandilands way, all lobster, champagne and oily charm; Armitage had discovered a smack across the chops produced quicker results.

  “Toodle-oo, Billy boy!” Sam shouted after him. “Goin’ on somewhere, are you? Well—have a nice time, me old son! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t!”

  CHAPTER 14

  The butler flung wide the door a second before his mistress came scurrying down the hall to join him. Unperturbed, Pearson launched into his usual speech: “Welcome, sir. Mr. Kingstone. You are expected. I hope you had a good journey down. I’ll get your things and put the motor away in the garage.”

  It was all he had time to say before Joe was enveloped in a Chanel-scented hug. He freed himself from the layers of floating yellow chiffon to perform the introductions.

  “Lydia, may I present Cornelius Kingstone … Senator Kingstone of the United States? Senator—this is my sister, Lydia, Mrs. Dunsford.”

  “Mrs. Dunsford, I’m pleased indeed to be meeting you and sorry it has to be in such difficult circumstances,” Kingstone began courteously.

  He was swiftly interrupted by Joe’s sister. “Senator Kingstone—Cornelius,” she said. “Please call me Lydia. We’re surprised but delighted to meet you. And don’t be concerned—my brother’s guests are usually suffering circumstances. Goodness you’ve made good time! My husband, Marcus, will be down directly—he’s upstairs helping to make up your room. He’s putting out the essentials for an unscheduled weekend in the country—a pair of pyjamas, a toilet bag and a shotgun under the bed.”

  She seized the senator by the arm and led him down the corridor. “You’re looking awfully pale—that’ll be Joe’s driving I expect. Most of the visitors he brings me call weakly for a glass of water the moment they stagger over the threshold. Can I offer you a drink? I find brandy works best.”

  “Ma’am, the journey was just fine and the welcome much appreciated. I would eye a glass of whisky with favour …”

  “Joe will see to it. Come through into the drawing room. There’s a log fire going in there. It can turn quite chilly and these old houses need a bit of cheering up after dark even on a summer evening. When you’ve got your breath back—perhaps you’ll have a bite to eat?” She turned to speak to her brother. “I’ve had supper laid in the small dining room, Joe. We’ve just had the Lord High Sheriff to dinner with his lady wife, which is why you find me still in my glad rags, over-wound and chattering like a magpie. They only left half an hour ago. They talked a lot but didn’t eat much so there’s lots left over. There’s pea soup, half a game pie, a good ripe stilton and a dish of strawberries and cream. I could offer a trout or two that Marcus caught this afternoon but perhaps not for supper—I’ll offer them again at breakfast. Do you fish, Cornelius?”

  “I do indeed, ma’am … Lydia. You have a lake hereabouts?”

  “Yes we have. Teeming with rainbow trout. But better than that—we have a river full of cunning old browns half a mile away. The river’s running with some colour after the rain we had last week but the beats are fishable again. I’m told we’re experiencing an excellent mayfly hatch at the moment and Marcus has a selection of spare rods.”

  Lydia had captured Kingstone’s total attention. Joe left the senator in his sister’s hands and went to pour out two large glasses of scotch.

  “OH, GOOD MORNING, Joe!” Marcus and Lydia looked up in surprise from the breakfast table. “You’re up with the larks. It’s only six o’clock. What will you have? There’s bacon and eggs, kedgeree, porridge, honey and cream off the estate and the first of the season’s strawberry jam. Cook’s standing by with the frying pan for the trout but perhaps you’d like to wait until your friend comes down for that?” Marcus got up and bustled about with a coffee pot to minister to what he knew would be Joe’s first requirement.

  “Your guest is still in bed, fast asleep. Mary went in ten minutes ago with a cup of early morning tea but she left it at the foot of the bed and came away. Snoring like a grampus, she reports,” Lydia told him.

  “Good. That’s what the man needs. He’s been having a rough time of it. I’ll have some of that coffee, thanks, Marcus. In fact, just pass the pot over and rustle up another, will you? This is going to be a two-pot story.”

  They were finishing their second before he’d got to the end.

  “Poor feller!” Marcus said. “I shall take him fishing—he’s quite an expert. He’s more or less the same size as me so I’ll get Pearson to lay out some old corduroy and tweed, fresh linen and a pair of gum boots. That’s my prescription for a touch of mental dyspepsia—comfy old clothes and the tug of a hard-fighting eight-pounder on the end of the line. Take his mind off things. The practicalities are easily dealt with.”

  “Compared with most of the strays you bring us, Joe, this one’s outstanding. He’s a wonderful guest. I’ve quite fallen for him! I’m hoping he can stay on. Good old-fashioned gentleman and what a life he’s led! Do you know—he was telling me he actually knows the president’s wife, Eleanor? And he rather hates J. Edgar Hoover? He’s been on safari with Theodore Roosevelt and flown with Charles Lindbergh!”

  “Ah. But has he danced with Fred Astaire?” Joe asked.

  Lydia opened her mouth and closed it again on hearing her husband’s warning growl: “Lydia! Heel, my love!”

  “Now, let’s have this straight, old man—are you saying he’s in some actual physical danger beyond his mental stress?” Marcus wanted to know.

  Joe nodded. “In London, yes. His life is under threat every moment. Unless I can discover who and what and where the menace is. I think he knows but he’s not telling. I’ve brought him out here for a bit of a break but, above all, to get him away from the hired killers that come so freely to hand in London. No one followed us here and I told no one we were coming. Should be okay.”

  “Mmmm … All the same, I shall stand well clear when we’re out and about in case of snipers.”

  Joe didn’t quite like to see the passing gleam of excitement in Marcus’s eyes.

  “Although …” His brother-in-law sighed. “Early June. The rhododendrons and the azaleas are jungle-thick in places. It’s like Burma out there! Sight lines not good but cover for any malefactor excellent. I’d go for a knife at close quarters rather than rifle. Better prepare for the worst, I always say. I’ll alert the men. They’ll have any intruder into the estate located and immobilised in seconds.”

  “That would be good,” Joe said. He knew “the men.” Gamekeepers and stewards, most were local boys; some reformed poachers, some veterans of the trenches, they were all excellent shots. Hard, practical men who’d graduated to a position of trust under Marcus’s kindly but strict concern.

  Joe’s brother-in-law was a respected and effective Justice of the Peace in his county and his own land tended to be given a wide berth by the local villains. These—such as they were—were well known to him and to the men he employed.

  “They like to know what’s going on. I shall tell them we’re protecting an agent of Uncle Sam from a German death squad.”

  “That should do it,” Joe said.

  Marcus hurried out to plan a day that, for him, was shaping up splendidly.

  Lydia came round the table and pulled up a chair close to Joe. “Joe, before we get started, I think you’d better tell me a little about our guest—Uncle Sam’s agent. You smiled when Marcus said that. One of your annoying smiles. Is that what he is? I like to know these things. How did you ‘break his cover’—isn’t that what your Intelligence friends say? How did you catch him out?”

  “He was caught playing Nine Men’s Morris.” Joe enjoyed Lydia’s disbelieving expression before going on carefully: “My best Branchman observed him playing with a selection of questionable characters in surprising circumstances. In conditions of some secrecy … In fact, there’s something you can do for me to lure our mysterious guest out into the light, perhaps, if you wouldn’t mind …”

  Lydia listened carefully
to his explanation and his suggestion and nodded. “No problem there. I’ll make sure the right moment offers itself. But I can tell you, Joe, that’s no questionable character even though he plays games with them. He’s troubled, one can see that, but I’d say he’s as honest as he looks. I shall be very surprised if he cheats. But for now—I see you’ve brought your work down.” She kicked a foot at the briefcase he’d slipped under the table. “Shall I take a look at your notes with you? I’d especially like to see the pathologist’s report on the girl buried under Thames mud, poor chick.”

  “I haven’t had a moment to see them myself, Lyd.”

  “Then we’ll go through them together. No Dorcas at home at the moment—you’ll have to settle for my female insights.”

  Joe didn’t even pretend to demur. His sister was as silent as the grave when it came to his professional cases and, with her wide experience, had more than once set him on the right road to the solution of a problem. He helped her clear a space at the table and took out his files.

  “RIPPON WRITES WELL, doesn’t he?”

  Joe knew Lydia was saying something—anything—deliberately free of emotion to cover her distress at the content of the stylishly expressed account of the horrors of the pathology.

  “I take it you made sense of all that medical vocabulary?” Joe asked tentatively. Like many women in the southern counties, his sister had served as an auxiliary nurse in wartime and for years after had worked as a volunteer at the local hospital. Mother of two daughters, suffragette and an outspoken woman of the world, she was very free with her opinions. He prepared to hear them delivered—shot out through both barrels, more like—as a result of reading Rippon’s report.

  “Yes, I did. Ask me for an interpretation if you’re struggling.”

  “The preliminaries are perfectly straightforward. Most of these observations I’ve made myself, peering over the doctor’s shoulder. No clues to identity other than her dancing practice clothes and her general physique. Though if Orford can find a ballet company that served its girls shepherd’s pie and rice pudding on Tuesday, we should be getting close. Sounds a bit banal and institutional. No one had treated her to a last meal at the Ritz.”

  “No. Sounds more like school dinners or hospital food. And at odds with that quite extraordinary parting gift of a gold coin. Now that’s lavish! More than I’ll get when I go. Anything more on that?”

  “The fingerprinting is still being worked on. But I’m not hoping for much. Two sets of prints from the two men who handled it at the scene is all I can expect.”

  “The food was well on its way through channels, apparently. Contents barely distinguishable. She died some hours after eating. That speaks for the use of a general anaesthetic,” Lydia commented. “You aren’t allowed food for a few hours before. And if the doc’s got it right about the cause of death—bet he has!—she certainly didn’t die exercising at the barre! She must have been re-clothed in this outfit subsequently. Why?”

  “They had to dress her in something for burial and this strongly indicates ballet dancer. Kingstone got it right—she was meant to be a stand-in for the real star of the show. Natalia. And I think she was meant to be found. The perpetrator’s no Jack the Ripper, carving up the nearest woman at random when the urge strikes. You have to try to understand that whoever’s running this … torture chamber of the mind”—Joe snorted with distaste—“fancies himself some dark, manipulative choreographer with a sadistic streak and a contempt for women.”

  “There—you’ve solved it! I can think of five choreographers answering that description at large in London at the moment,” Lydia commented. “I should have them all arrested. So our girl, our dead girl, is a coryphée or a sujet, more like—a second-string soloist who’s been pushed on stage to dance the prima ballerina’s role in ‘The Dying Swan’? Her last performance. But in real life—or death rather—not on stage. Surely there’s a simpler explanation? It’s a bit mad, Joe.”

  “It is. But calculatedly mad. We’re dealing with a mind-poisoner slithering about in the wings of a stage set, decreeing entrances and exits. But then, when you read the details of how she died, suddenly, the thing takes on the brutal and bloody reality of an abattoir.”

  “I wonder if a man less skilled and thorough than Rippon would have missed it?”

  “I’m certain of that. No visible injuries apart from one needle injection which could easily have been missed. Some opiate, he’s thinking. A preliminary for what was to come. She was definitely drugged, probably anaesthetised. She may not have suffered. The toe will have been cut off after her death at least.”

  “And Cornelius received it in a chocolate box with a quotation? Nasty, but a big toe fades in significance when you think of her primary—her lethal—injury. Shall we stop ducking and weaving and put it on the table? This girl died as a result of incompetent surgery during an abortion. What does Rippon say?… ‘Massive intrauterine haemorrhage suffered in the course of a surgical termination of pregnancy.’ She bled to death. Backstreet abortionist, are we thinking?”

  “No. It’s all in the wording. Rippon wouldn’t have said ‘surgical’ in that case. He’d have said, ‘criminal, unsafe abortion’ … something like that.”

  Lydia made a noise of a hissing kettle, got up and began to walk around the room clattering dishes. “I’m sure I put my gaspers down somewhere. Ah, there they are.” She lit a Players and came back to the table, her equanimity not entirely restored. Joe kept silent, watching her puff angrily. She had been working for years in what they had to call, delicately, a women’s advisory bureau and had had more distress and pain poured into her ear than he wanted to imagine.

  “ ‘Dilatation and curettage,’ they call it. Huh! As though a touch of Latin dignifies the process! ‘Opening up and scraping out,’ they mean. Last year in this so-called civilised country of ours, Joe, there were nearly thirty thousand live births. And ten thousand abortions. One in four babies destroyed by—at best—a surgeon’s scalpel. And the scalpel’s just for the rich! A hundred pounds a time, I understand, is the going rate. At worst, and for the vast majority of victims, you can expect a germ-infected knitting needle on a filthy kitchen table. It has to be stopped at the highest level. The pregnancies must be avoided in the first place and the means to do that made generally available at the local chemist to all who want them.”

  Joe was familiar with and sympathetic to his sister’s radical thoughts but on hearing them delivered with such uncompromising zeal he was always reduced to a state of anxiety. In some quarters they would have been regarded as heretical and subversive. Her name would have been entered on a list. It was probably there already.

  Seeing Joe’s stricken face, Lydia stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer, sniffed defiance and collected herself. “Too shrill? Sorry, Joe. On my high horse again. You’re going to tell me to save it for the soapbox at Speaker’s Corner.”

  “No, I’m not. It’s sickening, I agree. But I’ll tell you something—our poor girl, whoever she may be, is not a victim of murder at least. Manslaughter at the most? It may be reduced to ‘professional misconduct.’ ”

  “But if—as you seem to be implying—there are degrees of death these days, you do have a first class, undeniable murder on your books. Your sailor witness may not have quite the same glamour as your dancer but he didn’t break his own neck.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten him. I won’t let myself be mesmerised by the alluring light of a ballerina’s corpse-candle. Strange, isn’t it, Lyd? You always think of ballerinas as virginal. Young things barely into puberty. Dressed up in diaphanous costumes and dedicated to a life of dance, the only men in their lives the one or two gorgeous—but probably unattainable—Prince Charmings who lift them about the stage. Hard to think of them marrying, let alone conducting clandestine affairs.”

  “They do marry quite frequently. And they usually choose someone solidly respectable—a member of parliament, a banker, someone in the city, or a minor royal personage. Lydia Lo
pokova married her distinguished economist some years ago and became Mrs. John Maynard Keynes.”

  “But until that happy day, I suppose, when I think about it, there must be a succession of upper-class stage-door johnnies. I dare say the girls have to run the gauntlet of drunken old fools who gather about the back door of Covent Garden.”

  “Oh, I don’t think they’d be seen performing such antics, Joe. Discreet notes are sent with extravagant bouquets of red roses. These girls are regarded in some circles as easy pickings, I’m afraid. There was a story about it in my dancing days that at the Mariinsky theatre in St. Petersburg—before the war and the revolution and all that—there was a secret passage leading from the royal box down to the back of the theatre giving direct access to the performers. If some dashing grand duke took a fancy to the latest girl in the chorus line, he could pass a note down and make his exit unobserved by the audience. They could be off in a closed carriage before she’d scrambled out of her tutu.”

  “Good God!”

  “We all thought it very romantic, in our innocence. We gawped at photographs of Mathilde Kschessinska, flaunting her lavish jewellery. Romanov gifts. She even wore them on stage—had them sewn into her costumes. She was mistress to at least two Grand Dukes and the Emperor Nicholas himself. And she no more than a Mariinsky pupil, a ballet dancer like us. Perhaps one day, we would dance our way into the heart of a prince? Now I see it for what it is. Though some of the girls are canny enough to understand the system and play it to their advantage. Mademoiselle Kschessinska became ‘Her Serene Highness Princess Romanov-Krasinskya’ after the war and lives in splendour in the south of France.”