The three men stepped inside the building together, Carter continuing cheerfully, ‘My congratulations, by the way, on your performance last night! Here, we’ll be in my office. Had to leave this morning before you were awake so we haven’t had time to fill you in on what’s been happening. I will just say – all that we suspected about the identity switch is confirmed. Sir George is au courant but back-pedalling, I’m afraid, on arresting our little quick-change artiste. Though quite rightly he thinks – and we agree – that we stand a better chance of flushing out the blackmailer and murderer if Alice is allowed to carry on as if nothing had happened.’
‘Blackmailer?’ said Simpson, bemused. ‘Did you say blackmailer? What’s this?’
‘Such a lot you don’t know yet! We haven’t been holding out on you but things develop at a pace, it seems, in Simla. Better fill him in, Joe!’
Joe gave him the main details of his moonlit interview with Isobel Newton and as the full story unfolded and all his suspicions were confirmed Simpson began to relax and even to smile.
‘Glad I was proved right,’ he said at last. ‘Glad I didn’t put those people at the seance through such misery for no good reason! There was hell to pay when you shot off into the night, Joe, and Carter fled as well leaving me and Minerva Freemantle to deal with the riot that ensued. Quite a riot! Well, just Minerva when it came down to it because, having reduced the company to blank dismay and terror even – as arranged – I faded away into a broom cupboard. The one in the passageway with a false back. Hardly able to move, horrified by what we’d conjured up… I could hear them shouting and screaming and, as far as I could tell, falling over each other for ages and then it all went quiet. In the end Minerva came and got me out. She was in quite a state too! I couldn’t work out whether she was laughing or crying! Even she was a bit hysterical, I think. She’d shipped Miss Trollope off home with friends and spun the story to everyone that it had all been a terrible mix-up. A crossed line from the beyond, if you like… a spiritual not-known-at-this-address. A vengeful entity had turned up at the wrong seance and had to be redirected! Just to make sure it doesn’t happen again she’s promised to strengthen the formula for the prayers she says at the beginning to ward off malevolent spirits.’
‘Oh, dear!’ said Joe, suddenly guilty. ‘Poor old Maisie! Fences to mend there, I’m afraid!’
‘But now,’ said Carter, ‘follow another idea with us.’
Simpson nodded.
‘We want you to go over as fully and as carefully as you can all the events leading up to the crash. Yes, I know you’ve done it once but there was something we missed the first time… Something you missed. Can you start from the moment you arrived at the train and set eyes on Isobel Newton? Tell us everything you remember. Where she was standing, what she was doing, what she said. Everything.’
‘Well, my first impression of Isabelle de Neuville – can I call her that? It’s how I still think of her – was that she was a damned nuisance! I was lame and anxious to get into the first class compartment where my seat was booked and here, right in the doorway, was this Frenchwoman, blocking my way. She was haranguing her maid. In aristocratic French but shouting like a fishwife – I thought it a very odd scene… Odd behaviour.’
‘Tell us about the maid. Was she… um… refined… in any way elegant too?’
‘ ’Good Lord, no!’
‘Is your French good enough to know the difference? I don’t mean to offend you, old man, but I know I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,’ said Carter placatingly.
‘I would. I was convalescent for a time with the Comte and Comtesse de Lausanne during the war. Used to play chess with the old man. Improved my French a lot and, well, yes, I think I’d spot a good accent when I heard it. But the maid, you say? Now she was another type entirely. Oh, pretty good to look at, don’t mistake me, but not the same class as her mistress at all. Her language was coarse and she had a thick accent. A regional accent, I think.’
‘A bit ooh-là-là, would you say?’ said Joe with a quick look at Carter.
‘Oh yes. Very pronounced cadence. Could almost have been Italian. So – swearing like a poilu – but what a beauty! Dark hair and eyes, about twenty-three or so I would guess. Mistress or maid – it was hard to know which one to look at!’
‘And what were they arguing about? Can you remember?’
‘Certainly! I pretended not to listen! But it was fascinating stuff! I couldn’t tear my ears away. Isabelle gave her an envelope and that’s when it all started. The maid tore it open and looked inside. She started yelling about her wages. Claimed she hadn’t been paid for months and she wasn’t going to let Isabelle get away with it any longer. Then she examined the train ticket that was in the envelope. More shrieks and screams! Third class! Isabelle had provided a third class ticket for her and she found this totally unacceptable – way beneath her dignity. And she was right, poor girl. I sympathized with her.’
‘And tell us how they resolved it.’
‘They didn’t! Isabelle obviously was not going to give way and in the end the maid just got fed up and turned on her heel almost in mid-sentence and stormed off down the platform towards the third class carriages. At last I was able to make my way into the compartment and claim my seat.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Poor girl! She can’t have had a very comfortable journey and, of course, it all ended in death and destruction. No one from the third class survived.’
‘Think hard, Simpson. We want you to try to remember whether Isabelle called the girl by her name.’
‘I’m sure she did.’ Simpson frowned in an effort to recall the events of that morning at the Gare de Lyon. ‘She used it several times, sort of barked it at her to bring her to heel… It was a common French name, um… Florence! Yes, that was it – Florence!’
Joe wrote the name in large letters on a pad in front of him. He looked at Carter. Carter got up and fetched the French newspaper. He spread it out on the table in front of them. ‘Can you find her, Joe? Can you find Florence?’
The three of them eagerly scanned the list of third class passengers. There was no casualty by the name of Florence.
‘All bodies eventually accounted for in the third class except for the one thirty-year-old man,’ Joe reminded them.
‘What does this mean?’ Simpson asked. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘Clearly the maid’s name is not listed here for the simple reason that she was never on the train,’ said Joe.
‘Good God! Yes! I’ll bet you’re right! If she’d been in the third class she’d have been killed along with all the other humble citizens. None of them got out. And if she’d been killed she’d be listed – so,’ said Simpson, ‘she walked off down the platform and everyone assumed that she was going to the third class carriages but she must have just kept on walking! Straight out of the station!’
‘But the question is,’ said Carter slowly, ‘where is the maid now?’
Joe looked at the name he had written down. Florence. He picked up his pen and crossed out the last four letters and added an ‘a’. Flora. He drew a little flower next to the name and showed it to the other two.
‘She’s in Simla,’ he said. ‘And she’s been watching us all along.’
* * *
Chapter Twenty-one
« ^ »
Flora took the blue velvet box eagerly in her two hands and carried it to the table in the centre of her sitting room. She returned to the door and locked it behind her. Biting her lower lip in anticipation she opened it and looked inside. Her eyes grew wide with disbelief and with a gasp of irritation she drew out the contents and held the jewel up to the light. Incomprehension was swiftly followed by anger as she tried to understand what she was seeing. She turned it this way and that, her attention caught finally by the exquisite enamelwork on the back of the brooch. If the maker had gone to the immense trouble of so skilfully decorating the back of the piece perhaps her first judgement that this was a gaudy lump of costume jewellery,
a paste gem surrounded by ticky tacky and an incomprehensible joke on the part of Robertson, was wrong.
She took a jeweller’s magnifying glass from a drawer and examined it in detail. She sighed. Her re-evaluation of the gem was even more disturbing than the original. What was going on? Something was going on – that was quite clear. She looked at the ruby in the centre and murmured, ‘You are a messenger. You are here to tell me something of importance. But what? And who has sent you? Not Robertson, I’m thinking.’
She put her head in her hands and thought deeply for a minute or two and then, by degrees, a narrow smile began to creep across her face. She rubbed the cool stone sensuously against her cheek and she made her plans. She got up and went to the adjoining room where her dresses were stored in cupboards. She flung one open and searched through the ranks of silks and velvets. ‘An opulent gem must have an opulent setting,’ she told herself and she chose a simply cut black velvet dress with a low neckline. She put it on and fixed the brooch between her breasts, turning from side to side and admiring the result in her looking glass. That would do well.
Flora took a French novel from a shelf and settled down to wait.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-two
« ^ »
So you’re saying,’ said Simpson, still struggling to understand, ‘not only that I must think of Isabelle de Neuville as a high class tart but that her maid – one assumes long ago initiated into the, er, arts of the profession – is still alive and plying that trade. And has been plying her trade for the past three years here in Simla? I really can’t believe this!’
‘It takes a bit of believing – but it’s true,’ said Carter. ‘And perhaps we could add that a sideline to her activities has been blackmail. Substantial sums of ICTC assets in the form of jewellery have made their way via the blue boxes into Madame Flora’s sticky little hands.’
‘You forget the more serious charges of murder,’ said Joe. ‘Remember, I’m here on George Jardine’s invitation to solve a murder – two murders – and everything else is peripheral and only of urgency if it leads us to the man – the woman – the people who pulled the trigger. Alice is never going to charge Flora with blackmail – how could she? – but there’s nothing she can do to prevent us arresting Flora for murder. Or as an accessory to two killings. She would have realized the significance of Lionel Conyers’ arrival in Simla – would have found out about it from Reggie or Edgar Troop and made her plans to make quite sure that Lionel never caught sight of his sister. Everyone in Simla knew that Korsovsky was coming to appear at the Gaiety but only one person, apart from Alice herself, knew that the Russian could identify her as Isobel Newton. Former lover. He too had to be eliminated before setting eye on Alice.’
‘But who did pull the trigger?’ asked Simpson. ‘I can see that Florence was the instigator but who was the agent?’
‘It hardly matters,’ said Carter thoughtfully. ‘Edgar Troop – if we can ever break his alibi – would be my favourite for trigger-man but what about that Italian youth she keeps running her errands for her? What was his name? Giulio?’
‘Claudio, I think,’ said Joe.
‘Yes, Claudio. But, you know, there’s about twenty other rogues with that kind of skill up here. We’ll probably never know which one was used until we break down Madame Flora.’ He sighed.
Simpson was already rising to his feet. ‘To identify the maid becomes terribly important. You’ll need my help, I think I will be able to identify her.’
‘Steady, Simpson,’ said Carter, laughing. ‘One thing at a time! We must wait a little. We wait until our irregular forces report back.’
Carter wandered out on to the balcony, leaned over the rail and glanced down. ‘Not long to wait!’ he said.
The police havildar joined him on the balcony. ‘There are some boys to see you, sahib,’ he said. ‘Do you want them up here? They’re very excited – do you think it would be better if…’
‘Yes, I think it would be better if,’ said Carter. And to Joe and Simpson, ‘I’ll go down and see what they have to tell us.’
As soon as Carter appeared in the compound, and in spite of the efforts of the havildar, Joe and Simpson watched with amusement to see him instantly surrounded by chattering boys. With difficulty he waved them to silence and, picking out Raghu, he seemed to be inviting him to speak. He did. Joe and Simpson, looking down, couldn’t understand a single one of the many words that came fluting up from below but they hardly needed to. Sometimes one, sometimes two boys speaking together, sometimes all six, mimed their recent adventure. Their account was easy to follow.
Here they had waited in concealment, here they had peered round the corner, here one of them had run ahead and the rest had fallen back. Now, between them they began to play with a ball, now they feared they had been spotted. They were denied admission to the cathedral but had lain in wait at the doors. The story was as plain as print and plainer than speech. Laughing, Charlie seemed to congratulate them and, feeling in his pockets, he produced handfuls of annas and handed these out. He took a mild part in the haggling that ensued, added a few small coins and, still laughing, climbed back up on to the balcony. His irregular forces waved a cheerful and, judging by the indignation of the police havildar, a disrespectful farewell and ran together out of the compound to disappear in the busy Mall.
‘Well?’ said Joe and Simpson together.
‘Well, indeed!’ said Carter. ‘I could give you three guesses as to the destination of our mysterious packet and I think you would not need as many as three! It goes without saying – the package made its way, much to the amusement of the irregular forces, into the local brothel by a back door. Into Madame Flora’s! It now, presumably, lodges in the predatory hands of Flora herself.’
‘What do we do now?’ asked Simpson.
‘We go and have a chat with the seductive Flora, of course,’ said Carter.
‘Would I be totally out of place?’ asked Simpson. ‘Indulge my curiosity! You owe me a turn for the trauma you put me through last night. And don’t forget – I can identify Mademoiselle Florence.’
‘Give me a moment then,’ said Carter, ‘and we’ll go together.’
Once more he descended to the compound and was seen giving orders and they set off all three together. ‘I thought it might be prudent to arrange a little armed support,’ said Carter and, as they walked down through the town, Joe was aware of the discreet presence of policemen in plain clothes. For a moment he contrasted the laborious process that would have ensued had he, in London, tried to arrange a surveillance squad of six or an armed escort in plain clothes. His respect for Charlie Carter was much enhanced.
As they arrived at the flower shop the door opened and Edgar Troop came out, stopping dead with surprise and some hostility at the sight of them.
‘Afternoon, Edgar,’ said Charlie. ‘We haven’t come to see you, we’ve come to see madame but, as you’re here, why don’t you join us?’
Troop seemed for a moment inclined to bar their way. Charlie Carter pushed his way firmly past him. ‘We’ll announce ourselves,’ he said, but Troop was just ahead of him.
‘Flora!’ he called. ‘I’m back – at the head of a posse of policemen.’
They heard Flora’s voice: ‘Admit them. Always so happy to see the police.’
She came to the door. She looked welcoming and confident. Joe’s eyes widened as he took in the almost theatrical elegance of her dress. A shawl of rich Persian colours, deep red and blue and indigo, was draped over her shoulders, glowing against the background of a black velvet gown. Even Charlie Carter seemed impressed.
‘Hello, Flora. Good to see you again so soon: Entertaining again?’
‘Charlie! Always pleased to see you and – as you see – always entertaining! But I never know quite whom I may have the honour of welcoming. Today it is yourself and Mr… Sandilands, I think I’ve got that right? But you?’ She looked Simpson up and down.
Simpson bowed. ‘We have not
been formally introduced,’ he said, ‘but we have met. Once. A long time ago. No reason why you should remember me but I remember you very well.’
‘This is very intriguing!’ Flora smiled and waved a hand. ‘Won’t you come in? If we have business to discuss perhaps we should discuss it in the privacy of my room.’ And to Claudio appearing at that moment, ‘Tea. Tea for the gentlemen.’
‘Now,’ she said when they were settled, looking carefully at Simpson, ‘tell me, where was this so mysterious encounter and when? In our youth?’
‘When?’ said Simpson. ‘Well, it seems another lifetime but – three years ago. Where? At the Gare de Lyon in Paris. I was en route for the Beaune railway crash,’ he pointed to his dark glasses, ‘from which I emerged with a good deal more luck than all but two others.’
‘Flora,’ said Charlie, ‘I want to ask you a few questions about that day’
Edgar Troop, watchful and menacing, intervened. ‘By what right?’ he asked indignantly. ‘It was a long time ago and in another continent. Of what possible interest can it be to you?’
‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Edgar!’ said Flora. ‘Edgar and I are very old friends,’ she explained. ‘He tries to protect me, don’t you? He always has. Like a guard dog. But I don’t think I need protection in the present company. The police can have no official motive for speaking to me.’ There was the slightest emphasis on the word ‘official’. She smiled and added, ‘Though they might gain much, I think, from a friendly and unofficial interview. They need some information about the rail crash, apparently. And as you say, Edgar, far away and long ago and no one to remember what happened. I am surprised that you are aware of it, Charlie. But your questions are easily answered — I have no information! For the good and substantial reason that I was not on the train. I might have been on the train – I was planning to be on the train – but, by God’s mercy, I didn’t get on. All I know about the crash I learned from the newspapers like everyone else, yourself included perhaps. Now what can I tell you?’
Ragtime in Simla Page 23
